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Ask me anything!

I am fresh out of blogging ideas, and am off to Jyväskylä in Finland for Finncon next weekend. In the meantime, feel free to use the comments (below) to ask me anything! NB: I will do my best to lie creatively in my responses.

966 Comments

1:

What are Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep running from?

2:

Hi Charlie! I am interested in your views on the nuclear debate. Trust new generation reactors or dismiss them in favour of doubling down on renewables?

3:

What is the air speed of an African swallow carrying a 2-pound coconut at 100 feet altitude, standard air pressure, 20% relative humidity, and a 5 mph head wind?

4:

It's elephants all the way down.

(Alternatively: the principle of mediocrity is broken in the Laundry universe because once you get runaway chain reactions as a driver for magic—CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is, in historical terms, a magical prompt criticality incident—you end up living way the hell out at one end of the bell curve. And to the extent that other nasties are attracted by a high thaum environment to graze on, yet more things are going to turn up to eat them …)

5:

I think the future for renewables lies in harnessing Donald Trump's hot air emissions—I'm sure we could use him to drive a heat engine of some kind!

6:

Depends if it started high enough to reach terminal velocity by the time it got to 100ft or if it was still accelerating.

7:

Computers are getting better cheaper etc, as you have expounded on before.

At what point are governments going to step in and say what you can, ca6, must run on your machine?

They already log our traffic, is there a threshold at which you think they will sa6, too dangerous without monitoring?

8:

I have no idea what your not-obviously-grammatically-strong sentences even mean. (ca6? sa6?)

9:

It was fine when i typed it.

"can, can't, must "

"say, too dangerous "

10:

@5: Hell no, those things are more toxic than plutonium. We need a deep waste disposal site just for his tweets!

As a question: Glenfiddich, Glenmorangie, or something more exclusive?

11:

Following your story naming convention for the Laundryverse, that each title is related in some way to books, it appears that Palimpsest is part of the Laundryverse. How are they linked? Is the Laundryverse where the singularity that powers Stasis comes from?

12:

Why does my phone insist on correcting "Stross" to "Syria's". Is there something we should know?

13:

I note that the South Korean government tried to mandate what had to run on PCs in the late 90s early 00s, in order to talk to the government's systems—they made it mandatory to use certain software for filing your income tax return. Good idea? Well, it might have been, if they hadn't baked an ActiveX control that only ran on Windows 95/98 into the tax code, by law!

Not only did this bone the Mac and Linux platforms in the SK market, it also boned the SK public when Microsoft gave up on ActiveX and Win95/98 as a platform.

(These days, open web APIs seem to be the way governments roll, which makes a lot more sense: you can run whatever you want, and if you want to talk to the government you've got to use open publicly documented protocols.)

As for what's too dangerous, that's already a thing in a lot of the world. Including the UK, at least on the content side (google "Internet Watch Foundation" if you don't believe me; also look into cellcos and ask yourself what the Five Eyes can run on the baseband processor of your phone).

14:

Talisker or the Yamazaki for me. Honourable mention for Writers' Tears (on the Irish front). Don't talk to me about rye/bourbon, that shit is undrinkable.

15:

Palimpsest is nothing to do with the Laundryverse (although it may be related to "Ghost Engine", when I get that finished and it's published. Probably in 2021.)

Note that next year's "Dead Lies Dreaming" (formerly "Lost Boys" except the cult movie from 1988 got a reboot for next year) is Laundryverse but not Laundry Files—it's the start (I hope) of a new series in the same setting.

16:

What's the silliest thing you do for fun?

17:

Nice timing, Charlie. I'm off to Westercon in Utah right now - as in, I've left my house and am typing from a restaurant as I finish breakfast. My travel drama I'll omit; I hope you don't have anything that makes for an interesting story afterward.

18:

Works for me!

I loved "A Tall Tale" and more yet "A Colder War" which was insufficiently depressing. But I think how you've handled case Nightmare Green is brilliant. And I found it very amusing that the Wow signal came from the Teapot constellation, even if this was luck than judgement... Still, might be future useful?

And Missile Gap was superb!

Generally,I'm really impressed by your ability to weave what passes for real events into your stories in a contextually coherent way.

Be that as it may, who cares what I think?

19:

Hm, memo to elf, get a bottle of that really rather excellent Dutch rye, offer a dram to Charlie.

What would be worse, "cat software, on dog hardware", or "dog software, on cat hardware" (fwiw, the former has been used to explain fox and hyena habits, noyt sure if it's actually an explanation that holds water)?

20:

What's the silliest thing you do for fun?

I write books.

(What, you think I have time for this "fun" thing you speak of as well?)

Mind you, next week I'm going to try and make a day trip to Moominworld, just because it's there. But I'm not sure that counts as silly.

21:

"Cat software on dog hardware" gets you a Fox.

"Dog software of cat hardware" gets you a Lion. (FSVO "dog software" that includes wolves.)

22:

I heartily agree with the Writers' Tears endorsement. It's been a long time since I've tried Talisker, and I'm sure I've not had the Yamazaki; I'll add them to my list.

Although I've been focused on single malts for the last decade or so, I recently encountered an interesting blend: Shackleton. It's a new blend based on bottles retrieved from Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1907 Antarctic expedition base camp in 2007. The new blend was then recreated by a master blender.

It's a nice, full bodied blend with a touch of Islay iodine taste and a bit of peat. Worth a try.

23:

Have any British (or American) politicians asked you for advice on how to handle CASE NIGHTMARE situations?

24:

(and what advice would you give them if they did)

25:

Crossbred serval x domestic cats are by all accounts quite behaviourally doglike. They like walking on a leash and are more social than a normal cat.

http://petskeepersguide.com/forums/Thread-Walk-a-Savannah-cat-a-dog-in-cat-s-body

Don't keep them as pets though. When their genes get into the feral cat population they make destructive invasive predators.

26:

Can't argue with Talisker. Writers' Tears? Meh. (I much prefer Knappogue Castle or Lord Lieutenant Kinahan's.)

27:

If only …!

(My advice would mimic the rural Irish farmer's advice to the lost English tourists asking the way back to Dublin: "I wouldn't start from here …")

28:

tqft @ 7 SOPME guvmints, notably the fucking Han, are trying this already. I have just spoken to someone who has passed through Xianjiang province ( the far NW of "China" ) - "Total-control brutal police state" were her words ... And .."I'm not sure they can maintan that level of surveillance without it collapsing under its own weight, like the DDR"

Charlie @ 14 YAY for the Talisker ... plus almost anything from the outer NW edges - I'm not a "Speyside" fan - too sweet

29:

Is there anything you haven't written that you wish you had (either genre/generally, or more specific if it's not indiscreet/might happen one day)?

31:

I have just spoken to someone who has passed through Xianjiang province ( the far NW of "China" ) - "Total-control brutal police state" were her words ... And .."I'm not sure they can maintan that level of surveillance without it collapsing under its own weight, like the DDR"

It has obviously changed since I was there in 2007. Not disagreeing with your acquaintance, just noting that a dozen years ago it wasn't notably different from other parts of China I'd visited.

As to maintaining surveillance — that is more possible than it was under the DDR, as an awful lot of it can be automated now.

32:

Ah, now I realize that Finncon is next weekend! Alas, I can't attend, because summer weekends are a scarce resource and I spent last weekend(ish) far away in space, playing in a space larp.

Do you have plans to see any other sights in Finland apart from the Moomins?

33:

If someone told you that you HAD to name a stuffed toy tiger, what would it be called?

34:

Oh, there's tons of stuff. My to-do list is approximately five years deep at any given time.

35:

I'm planning to spend a week visiting the interior of a hotel in Helsinki after the convention, while I work on the running-late-now rewrite of INVISIBLE SUN on my laptop. (The week in question was earmarked for tourist shit, but alas, late-running novel …)

36:

Hello, longtime fan here. In the spirit of “ ask me anything” , I would be interested to hear your take on the best city in Scotland for walkability, easy access to nature, and creative community. For context, I am a dual US/UK citizen living in California. I’m trying to alleviate some of my anxiety by coming up with a somewhat plausible escape plan. I don’t do well in heat and I love the Arctic, and while Scotland isn’t Arctic, it’s up there in the high latitudes!

I lived in Jyväskylä for half a year in 2016 and can recommend Papu for coffee and Miriam’s for lunch. I am also informed that there is a wonderful new tea place, located in a house with a garden.

37:

The Balvenie 12 yr Doublewood. (Though I would love to lay my hands on a bottle of the Knockando 12 yr, which my late wife and I had once, and led me down the garden path of single malt, when I'd only had Glenfiddich and Glenlivit before.

38:

cat software on dog hardware will take for-bloody-ever to finish running the cat command.

39:

And I dislike iodine. Speyside, then highland, for me.

40:

If you get chance to, try the Talisker 8 year old special bottling that came out last year. Divine.

If I'd bought a case then might have been worth keeping long term, but could only buy a max of 2 .

41:

You've mentioned it a couple of times over the years , but what was the backstory behind you being asked to write for the Iron Man movie?

42:

Palimpsest is nothing to do with the Laundryverse (although it may be related to "Ghost Engine", when I get that finished and it's published. Probably in 2021.)

Phooey!

I'd had this whole plot wherein the remaining crew of the Laundry figured out a way to beat the elder gods. They used the singularity accidentally created by Angleton in a plot borrowed from the Warlock's Wheel in Niven's The Magic Goes Away to suck magical energy into the singularity, lowering the thaums available in the Laundryverse to the point where none of the supernatural beings can survive. That accomplished, most of the staff and characters die for obvious reasons. The few surviving thaumaturgists realiz they could repurpose the singularity to do time travel. Some of the remaining agents decided to use this ability to try to fix the past, while others decided to use it to shift the surviving humans forward ten million years to when the Earth had somewhat healed itself from the divine incursion...and that's where the Stasis started. Urem is a common language based on Enochian.

Actually it's good news, because now that can be execrable fan-fiction, instead of a massive spoiler.

43:

I know about Mencius Moldbug and Paul Krugman. Without being indiscreet,do you have any other fans who might surprise/ delight/ appal us?

On second thoughts, indiscretion is probably a plus.

44:

I would be interested to hear your take on the best city in Scotland for walkability, easy access to nature, and creative community.

I'm an Edinburgh native. Edinburgh's centre is very walkable (most of it predates the steam locomotive, never mind the automobile), hosts the Edinburgh Festival every August (the world's largest performing arts festival), and has no-shit hills and a national park inside the city limits. But I might possibly be biased: all of Scotland's cities (except for Livingstone) predate the steam locomotive, all of them are very compact by US standards, and while I can't speak for the creative community in smaller cities, Glasgow is certainly competitive with Edinburgh (lacks the festival but has a bigger overall population).

45:

Warren Ellis was rebooting Iron Man for Marvel in 2003-04. They asked him to suggest SF authors who might take it over. Warren is a fan of mine (I'm a fan of his) so he put me forward. Trouble is, I didn't grow up with Marvel (in the UK they were hard to find imports in the 70s and early 80s), and when I got acquainted I decided I hated Tony Stark with a livid, fiery passion. Finally, this coincided with me having a choice between doing work-for-hire on a Marvel property I disliked (this was before the films, too) … or taking a total of five book contracts split between two publishers to work on my own stuff.

So: instead of the Charlie Stross Iron Man you got: The Clan Corporate/The Revolution Business/The Trade of Queens and "Halting State" and "Saturn's Children", with "Palimpsest" thrown in as a bonus (written for the short story collection "Wireless").

Which option would you have preferred, with 20/20 hindsight?

46:

Spoiler: the Laundry does not defeat the Elder Gods at the end of the series.

(However, humanity isn't wiped out, so we can call it a conditional win …)

47:

Strossian Iron Man vs those works? Saturn's Children alone is worth it to pass on Iron Man.

Although I'd love to hear how you would have spun it if it was your bag.

Comics are a funny one - never really have got into them, and barring a bit of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman they've never really been part of my cultural arena. Know loads that are and occasionally borrow ones recommended by friends (The Boys, Preacher, Dredd). Still don't quite satisfy as a good book.

48:

Why don't the castrated elvish Magi just regenerate their missing body parts?

49:

I am of the opinion that authors can't be held responsible for what random readers make of their work, unless the work in question is actively trying to elicit a specific reaction.

Two contrasting examples: "The Turner Diaries" was deliberately written by William Luther Pierce, a white supremacist, to spread the ideas of anti-semitism, race war, and ethnocide in America. But The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad superficially resembles a hagiography of a brutal totalitarian race-supremacist's rise to power through war and genocide … while actually being a metafiction critiquing totalitarianism and racism in fifties science fiction.

How do you assess these works in the context of their readers' beliefs and actions? Especially a naive reader who mistakes the latter book's intent for that of the former?

Sidestepping from this can of worms, I think It's usually inappropriate for an author to comment on their fans' reactions to their work. Nor is it a good idea to single out unsuspecting fans for public approval or odium.

But I would like to break my own rule of thumb above and just say that the last four or five novels I've written have all been put together with a question in my head—"what would fan X most dislike?"—and I've specifically been aiming to piss off this one notional reader; because whenever I contemplate the possibility that Vox Day [still] likes my fiction, I want to wash my hands compulsively.

(BTW, "The Iron Dream" is a frame around Adolf Hitler's 1953 Hugo-winning post-nuclear holocaust novel, "Lord of the Swastika", from an alternate universe where Hitler emigrates to the USA after the first world war and becomes a pump fiction author. Highly recommended, if you appreciate kitsch. A lot less funny today than it was when it was first published in 1972, though.)

50:

Because it never occurred to me to go there.

But if I had bothered to think about it:

a) Regeneration of lost body parts in mammals is hard (especially when the stem cells for that particular organ are all missing)

b) Because their overlords would view it as treason and execute them

51:

TIL where the Hawkwind track (from QS&C) got its name.

52:

"The Iron Dream" was banned in West Germany when it first came out because someone mistook it for Nazi propaganda. I gather this was corrected, later, when they realized it was the exact opposite ...

53:

Thank you. The Iron Dream sounds like it's up several of my alleys.

Also, Hitlerian "pump" fiction is the best and worst of typos.

54:

My guess was

c) not that sort of magic.

55:

didn't think of it being a possibility but I'd assume it was part of the overarching geas of control that it was banned,

56:

When you're on the road, how do you create the conditions that are best suited for writing/re-writing?

57:

After just coming from the largest poker tournament ever at the World Series of Poker. I was curious what the Laundryverse take on tens of thousands of brains doing realtime limited game theory simulations of tens of thousands of other brains to determine the outcome of a psuedo randomized arrangement of cards and placing real numerical value on each decision would be?

I’m now surprised it hasn’t been in a book yet, but I expect that is simply, knowing your life, you have never had time for poker?

58:

In LI Mhari says to Jim: “I love you, too,” I say with a shiver. And if he wants to imagine it’s because I’m happy, I’m content to let him. He doesn’t need the burden of knowing that every other man who’s ever said those words to me is dead. Did Bob never tell Mhari he loved her? Does she consider Bob dead?

59:

Badly.

(I can't write on the road, as a rule. I'm going to try, but this probably means that the book will be slightly less overdue when I get home.)

60:

I don't gamble, or play cards. You might have noticed other omissions in my work: it wouldn't naturally occur to me to write a character's cigarette habit in, for example, because I'm a lifelong non-smoker. (If smoking occurs then it's because I thought about it for some reason.)

61:

Bob is the Eater of Souls.

If Angleton was the Eater of Souls dreaming that it was a former English public school maths teacher turned spy, then Bob is the Eater of Souls dreaming that it's a comp sci geek turned spy …

The real question at the end of "The Delirium Brief" is whether Mo is still human. In fact, taking a head count, most of the long-term protags of the Laundry Files are disturbingly altered in some way or another. Mhairi, Jim, Pete, Alex: PHANGs. Bob: Eater of Souls. Mo: who the fuck knows. (I do, but that'd be a spoiler.) The Senior Auditor: he carried the Bone Violin, which speaks for itself. Cassie: was never human in the first place, and ditto Jarisol from "The Labyrinth Index". Pinky is still recovering from events at the end of "The Nightmare Stacks" so didn't get PHANGed, but it's possible Brains was infected. Johnny McTavish: nope, there's deep one blood in his veins. Persephone Hazard …. she might still be human, though she's a monstrously powerful witch, which makes it a moot point. In fact, the way the main series story arc is going, everybody is going to end up to some extent posthuman, if not actually posthumous.

(This is a small part of why I'm spinning up a new series in the same setting: at least the protagonists of "Dead Lies Dreaming" are all human, at least for the time being and as long as you don't count the Prime Minister as a protagonist. (He merely puts in a brief appearance.))

62:

Well, since you asked...

Both Merchant Princes and the Laundryverse have a view of the nature of reality. In the case of MP, it's explicitly Everett-Wheeler quantum non-collapse and I'm not sure how to describe the Laundry universe, but it's apparently slightly coherent. MP is consistent with some form of materialistic reductionism / physicalism and Laundry might or might not be.

Anyway, as I'm sure you've given some thought to such matters, what's your take on reality, or, perhaps more addressable, science's(*) current take on reality?

(*)"Science" is, of course, a collection of squabbling scientists.

63:

Since you first mentioned it, Ghost Engines was at least two years from publication, and everytime a laundryfiles or laundryvere or other project jumped the queue and pushed ghost engines somewhere between now and fusion power. So I give up, and ask how the laundryverse-equivalent of playing on the themes of the cultureverse would look like?

64:

What does your selection of parasites that it would be appropriate for Craig Thorn to become infested with look like, over what kind of time schedule, and how much time does he end up having to spend dissecting his own turds or is that the least of his worries?

http://twitter.com/abcpoppins/status/1145583550860845056

65:

...and concerning whisky, do you agree that Lagavulin sounds like it ought to be some kind of pharmaceutical?

(It all tastes like petrol to me. In fact petrol is more drinkable...)

66:

Why is "The Nighmare Stacks" titled so?

The name (also used as a chapter title in the book) refers to the special weapon repository at the National Firearms Center; but this actually has so little impact on the story that even using it as a chapter title seems too much, never mind using it for the book itself.

Also, the same title has been used for a chapter in The Fuller Memorandum, where it referred to the Laundry archives.

BTW, TNS is one of my favorite books in the series (and in general). But the title just doesn't seem appropriate.

67:

If Angleton was the Eater of Souls dreaming that it was a former English public school maths teacher turned spy, then Bob is the Eater of Souls dreaming that it's a comp sci geek turned spy …

This reminds me of some nasty computer viruses that slip an hypervisor under the main OS and have it believe it's still running safely on its hardware, while instead it has become only a process sandboxed by something completely different.

Just like what Bob did to the Media Center PC on Billington's ship...

68:

Can elves and humans produce viable offspring? What would those be like? When/what was their evolutionary common ancestor? There was mention of the Flores hobbits, I remember.

69:

As a gentle note to non-Scandinavians visiting 'nerdy' cons in the near future. If you are offered certain cheeses and the people seem gleefully impish, it's probably due to this:

https://satwcomic.com/it-s-organic

Chances are that Host knows this? Even odds, even odds.

70:

It'd look a lot like "Ghost Engine". (Which is still on the way. It's just that my father died while I was working on the second draft, which kind of killed it for me for a while. And I'm not going back to it while my mother is busy dying—I'm not going to have one book coincide with both parents' demise.)

71:

The stacks were somewhat more central to the original outline/proposal for the book; the book, as is so often the case, drifted slightly off-course in the writing.

72:

Ever consider becoming a prepper? If not where do you plan to go and what do you plan to do when the SHTF: blue ocean event, collapse of the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, sustained temperatures north of 130 deg F making India and the Middle East unlivable, war shutting down the Persian Gulf oil lanes, 2008/1929 style stock market crash this time without anything in reserve to bolster the economic system, Trump getting re-elected - you know, the usual stuff.

73:

Two renewable energy questions:

  • Which is better for renewable energy storage: li-ion batters or stored hydrogen created from electrolysis using electricity from windmills , PVC, etc.? (And for which scale: residential or community?)

  • Which is more cost effective for communities/individuals relying on renewable energy: paying the extra cost for DC appliances or using inverters to convert renewable DC into AC (and with resultant efficiency losses)?

  • 74:

    Charlie @ 34 My to-do list is approximately five years deep at any given time. YOU TOO?

    Colortheory @ 36 As a Londoner .. Edinburgh / Dun-Eidinn Actually one of the most civilised cites on the planet, especially if you like beer or Whisky .... See also Charlie @ 44

    Pigeon Lagavulin is PERFECTLY drinkable, it's Laphroaig that divides people Anyway, they are from Islay, 'nuff said.

    75:

    I'm increasingly interested in the issues around digital rot and social media. In particular the widespread use of Facebook for community organisations which leaves parents, family, and activists little choice but to use a platform that has been shown to be repeatedly irresponsible in so many ways.

    A casual survey of groups and services I'm interested in New Zealand has shown me what appears to be a swathe of aging and poorly maintained websites as the maintainers have moved almost wholly to facebook.

    Here's a link to another issue around digital rot from the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/2894e398-810c-11e7-a4ce-15b2513cb3ff?fbclid=IwAR1u2BRpnTk-ucBG25yrUSMT48JRiO_cpn82BmAm8ZB3E0iRzEqLy-GGDVU

    I'd love to know if you had any thoughts about this topic?

    Thank you again for all the wonderful and at times frankly terrifying stories!

    76:

    Okay, Edinburgh is on the list! I am actually a fan of Laphroaig (accompanied by a bit of dark chocolate on cold winter evenings...which are admittedly rare in Southern California). And due to some Kentucky roots, I am also a consumer of bourbon. Woodford Reserve Double-Oaked is my favorite.

    77:

    Depending on how far back you're going to show the Senior Auditor going operational, you may need to consider smoking rather deeply; once upon a time everyone did it, including places like the library and kitchens... kitchens!

    78:

    Charlie Stross @ 15: Palimpsest is nothing to do with the Laundryverse (although it may be related to "Ghost Engine", when I get that finished and it's published. Probably in 2021.)

    Note that next year's "Dead Lies Dreaming" (formerly "Lost Boys" except the cult movie from 1988 got a reboot for next year) is Laundryverse but not Laundry Files—it's the start (I hope) of a new series in the same setting.

    I like the new title because I can parse it two ways ... Dead, lies dreaming or Dead lies, dreaming. Anyone else think of another way to parse it?

    79:

    Was The Fuller Memorandum ever meant to feature the works of R. Buckminster Fuller?

    80: 10

    > As a question: Glenfiddich, Glenmorangie, or something more exclusive?

    Personally, Talisker, Lagavulin or Laphroaig :-)

    81:

    yonn @ 75: "Here's a link to another issue around digital rot from the Financial Times:

    Behind a paywall unfortunately.

    82:

    No Not even remotely. THIS nutter The ONLY British general officer NOT recalled to service in WW II ... because he was an open Nazi symapthiser ... along with his shall we say "mysticism" which many Nazis also had caught

    83:
    Mind you, next week I'm going to try and make a day trip to Moominworld, just because it's there. But I'm not sure that counts as silly.

    Sounds more like research. Can't wait to see the Laundryverse Moomins!

    84:

    Ever consider becoming a prepper?

    No.

    (Too old, too ill, too urban, too interdependent on a complex web of social support structures.)

    85:

    Apparently he was influential in tank war theory as well as being a pupil of Mr Crowley

    86:

    LiIon batteries and hydrogen are both crap for energy storage. Low density, tendency to explode …

    If we were serious about it we'd be going for hydrogen and batteries solely as load smoothing for the real event, Fischer-Tropsch synthesis of methane from atmospheric gases (water, CO cracked from CO2). We have pre-built infrastructure already in place for shipping and burning natural gas, not to mention storing it; it's just that our current sources add fossil carbon to the atmosphere, rather than being carbon neutral (take carbon out of the atmosphere before putting it back: recycle!).

    87:

    Who looks after the cats while you're away, and does this person send you daily pictures of said cats to keep your spirits up?

    88:

    A few books back, when Clan members explore new parallel Earths, they by an extreme coincidence arrive right on top of a radioactive ruin with a functioning gate out to vacuum (the world at the other side has been crushed into a black hole, so the other side of the gate just hangs there 6400 km above the singularity). -Is there any way to "fix" that coincidence, like some odd geograpic quirks that make it likely the clan members would explore precisely that location, and that the extinct civilisation would build a site there? . I mention this, because this is the same problem you encounter in Prometheus: The expedition descends through clouds and end up right on top of the Engineer facility!

    89:
    LiIon batteries and hydrogen are both crap for energy storage. Low density, tendency to explode

    Why does density matter for grid storage? Even for residential, something like a Tesla Powerwall isn't even as big as a small fridge, closer to the size of an on-demand water heater. For commercial, who cares if there are acres and acres of batteries?

    The real issue is charge cycles. Do you really want to throw away your entire storage infrastructure every 10 years after 3,000 charges?

    Instead, how about exotic batteries such as liquid metal or flow batteries? The idea is to optimize for charge cycles and cost. If you read the press releases, some of these designs ought to be good for many decades.

    Or for comedy, an automatic robot crane and a pile of giant bricks to play with... which will certainly be connected to some computer network, ready for new software.

    90:

    Therion 667 Correct ... Incidentally, very few people seem to have caught on to the other reason the demon who sauntered gently downards in "Good Omens" is called Crowley ... yes .. Aleister C.

    91:

    "Other" reason? I thought that was the reason, from the first instant I read the name...

    92:

    No: the Fuller memorandum was originally going to be an Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor) pastiche, but I got sidetracked by the works of Anthony Price (off whose style it riffs). The Fuller in the title refers to Major-General J. F. C. "Boney" Fuller, inventor of blitzkrieg warfare, number two to Aleister Crowley in his magical order the A∴A∴ and, embarrassingly, a senior member of the British Union of Fascists.

    (It also includes cameo appearances in the historical flashback sequences by Ian Fleming and Arthur Ransome, journalist, spy, and children's writer (who eloped with Trotsky's secretary). Not to mention Baron Roman Von Ungern Sternberg, the Bloody White Baron, self-proclaimed reincarnation of Genghis Khan and warlord of Tibet during the Russian civil war.)

    93:

    Cat singular, and for trips of more than 72 hours she goes to live with the cat sitter. (They can self-identify here if they feel like it.)

    94:

    ...Also, does the Eater of Souls have a continuous memory? It seems pointless inhabiting any bodies of mortals if you do not have a memory of what you did in the previous body. Yet, Angleton's memories do not seem to pop up, so Bob/the Eater of Souls cannot take advantage of past experience.

    95:

    General rule of writing: you're allowed one howlingly implausible coincidence per novel. (This mirrors real life, which is under no obligation to provide an internally consistent narrative and thus comes sprinkled with howlingly implausible coincidences.) That's the coincidence for, let me see, was it "The Revolution Business"?

    That the forerunners left installations like the slighted paratime fortress scattered up and down the North American eastern seaboard is not in and of itself a coincidence: it's a fairly good spot for human colonization, if you arrive on a previously-uninhabited late Cenozoic Earth.

    96:

    Question - May we feed CockWomble and Cunt to Bob, or do we have to wait and find out whether the Con membership prefer their shit sandwiches made with brown bread or white?

    36 - For a walkable centre Edinburgh. Against that Glasgow has a small Underground that connects most of the main places of interest, and fast (30 to 40 minutes) electric train connections to stations within 10 minutes walk of open country. 44 - See the Embra Festival and raise Celtic Connections and Mayfest! (proves the competitiveness angle too). 45 - Not Iron Man, that's for sure. 49 - I'll strongly second the comments about "The Iron Dream" 61 "If Angleton ... public school maths teacher turned spy"

    Have you moved at least towards my view that, deliberately or otherwise, Angleton bears some resemblance to George Smiley?

    And, so I can have a small stable in the Malt race, an Islay (particularly Laphroig), Isle of Jura, Oban, Talisker, Scapa or Highland Park for me!

    97:

    Why does density matter for grid storage? Even for residential, something like a Tesla Powerwall isn't even as big as a small fridge, closer to the size of an on-demand water heater. For commercial, who cares if there are acres and acres of batteries?

    For batteries, it's less critical—except Lion tends to burn/explode if something goes wrong, so those huge acres of explosive batteries are a really bad idea. (Electrolyte flow cells are probably a lot better for grid storage; even lower energy density per kilogram, but you can recirculate and recycle the electrolyte solution while the battery is in use, which gives you an enormous potential capacity … and it's in aqueous solution, which tends not to be terrible inflammable.)

    Gas … hydrogen leaks like crazy, embrittles metals, and is too low energy density to work with older natural gas kit: you'd have to replace all the central heating furnaces, all the meters, all the valves, and by the time you're done most of your methane handling infrastructure has been ripped out and replaced.

    98:

    ...Also, does the Eater of Souls have a continuous memory?

    Nope.

    (Consider human personality as an emergent property of our memories, encoded in our neural connectome: less stuff sticks as we get older, it's harder to learn new information, possibly detrimental habits get stuck. While the EoS is lumbered with a meatsack it's prone to the vicissitudes of human personalities. Doing a hard reset every few decades/couple of centuries is probably a good thing.)

    99:

    Question - May we feed CockWomble and Cunt to Bob, or do we have to wait and find out whether the Con membership prefer their shit sandwiches made with brown bread or white?

    Life under the New Management is refreshingly worse than anything you'll experience under BoJo the Clown in our shiny new post-currency-collapse hard brexit future!

    With the Ruling Party™ you, too, can experience: the revival of the 18th century Bloody Code, thief-takers outsourced to SerCo and G4S, a Tzompantli (big-ass Aztec skull rack) on Marble Arch designed by Foster + Partners where the Prime Minister displays the skulls of his sacrificial victims, STRONG AND STABLE GOVERNMENT, food rationing, official Home Office vampires, secret police, supervillains and/or hedge witches (sometimes the same people) on every street corner, and the misery of life under the jack-booted tentacle of an elder god.

    (Angleton is not a riff on George Smiley, by the way. He's entirely his own thing.)

    100:

    I've read "The Labyrinth Index" :-)

    101:

    Sounds like Xinjiang "Autonomous Region" ( Hollow laugh ) RIGHT NOW

    102:

    We are down to less than a handful of organizations which can produce silicon at near-state-of-the-art in any relevant volume, the precise number of orgs may even be 2, and the number of fabs they can do this in is on the order of "less than ten".

    Why has this not been weaponized yet ?

    Will it be?

    103:

    According to Ansible Phillip Pullman rates the Moomin world as the alternative universe he'd most like to visit.

    Any authors you'd like to write with collaboratively but haven't yet?

    Will there ever be a Merchant Princes RPG?

    104:

    The Tesla Powerwall we have is probably slightly larger in volume than the under-counter fridge in the kitchen. However it and its control unit are nicely low profile, and attached to the outer wall of the garage.

    It does a decent job of day-to-day power smoothing, meaning that 95%+ of all power we use comes from the solar roof. The exception is because a shower will use a bit more power than the battery and the roof combined can manage - OTOH in this weather the power we consume is a small fraction of what we generate, so we send a decent amount out to the grid.

    105:

    Going to assume that the themes of Chekov’s contraceptive and the posthuman Mo are either due to merge, or they are not, and we won’t learn about this until they do (or don’t). Which is Just Fine and any further speculation along these lines is [REDACTED].

    I look at your to-do list and find it stressful, but I find it challenging to imagine not working the day job and having this as the focus of work. The economic equation for that may change, and I wonder about themes of transition - liminality and Janus-looking edges between realities that people experience as they change. Yours (between day job and writing) came a fair few years ago now and I wonder how well you now remember that sort of life change.

    106:

    I think what you're missing is that there is a large number of trailing-edge fabs. If some event took down the bleeding edge facilities, it'd be bad … but we could be back to banging out stuff a couple of node sizes larger within weeks, months at the most, unless Intel have thrown out all the masks and dies (doubtful, there's an after-market for older chips).

    What would happen: prices of new laptops and tablets would skyrocket for a while, until a new supply chain was up and running. Meanwhile, lots of pop-up shops offering refurbished 5-yo kit would appear, new keyboard, new SSD, all good, right?

    It'd be a severe embuggerance for the mobile phone biz, though, and I include Apple and the entire Android ecosystem in this. Apple design phones for a 5 year effective life, but most Androids are expected to fall apart after 24-36 months, and they're seldom updated, so infrastructure security would take a hammering due to the amount of aged kit not being retired.

    107:

    In reverse order:

    Will there ever be a Merchant Princes RPG?

    Nobody's asked me for the rights. Which is how this happens (I'm not a gamer).

    Any authors you'd like to write with collaboratively but haven't yet?

    The problem with collaborations is that in a two person collaboration, each partner does 75% of the work. And in a 3 person collaboration, each partner does 75% of the work. The coordination overheads of collaboration grow faster as you add more people. (Think software engineering!) Some folks seem to have cracked the collaboration problem—I note that Serial Box seem to have cracked it open in SF, as witness their rather good serial/collaborative novels—but it requires some degree of central management. And I'm not yet at the point where I'd feel comfortable opening the Laundryverse up as a multi-author shared universe.

    As for 1:1 collaborations, that really depends on who's available and interested. Successful authors are usually working on their own projects, after all: it took about 4 years for Cory and I to finally synch up enough to write the second half of "Rapture of the Nerds", for example, because we were both busy (we needed a 3 month gap at the same time).

    108:

    The day job is …

    I don't miss being an employee at all, but I miss the forced socialization and routine that comes with it (mostly). You can get awfully isolated as a shut-in work-at-home writer. (This is partly why I'm looking to do a writer-in-residence gig: gets me out of the house, throws new faces and new ideas at me, exposes me to spaces I wouldn't normally go to.)

    The "Delirium Brief" theme you allude to might or might not turn out to be a red herring.

    109:

    We've not had a real space program for a few generations now (SpaceX is very pretty but it's basically delta clipper done commercially on some billionaire's whim). What we've had is the Amazons and the Alibabas and the Ebays and the Googles and the Facebooks and the entire "build it and the eyeballs will come and we can make money" sector.

    So if a lot of science fiction trends and subgenres came out of Apollo, what's going to come out of Amazon? What kind of fiction gets inspired by building enormous computer systems that suck down PII data like charybdis and put it in the hands of a relatively small number of robber barons with more resources than many small countries? Have we seen the start of it already or is the most interesting yet to come, or does it just fail to inspire anything at all?

    110:

    So if a lot of science fiction trends and subgenres came out of Apollo, what's going to come out of Amazon?

    Are you kidding me?!?

    Have you not maybe noticed Amazon's AWS and S3 businesses, which are gigantic commercial cloud computing platforms? Amazon are about the biggest player in the market, big enough that "small" startups that got off the ground on their systems include companies like Dropbox …

    Meanwhile, we've seen a huge explosion in neurocomputing this decade, resulting in face recognition turning into a commercially viable technology—not just in still images on your phone (so they can be tagged with the names of folks appearing in there) but real time recognition via CCTV network. Huge social consequences to follow. Ditto Deepfake, Deep Dreams, and the plethora of other highly disturbing "AI" apps that are showing up pretty much every month now.

    It's not what Jeff Bezos does with Amazon's computing cluster than perturbs me, but what some geek in a garage startup I've never heard of leverages his cluster to run profitably.

    (As for space, just wait for 2024 and Superheavy/Starship. If it flies—and it looks likely—it's going to disrupt the launch market that SpaceX already disrupted once, by upscaling from small partially reusable launchers to something the size of a Saturn V designed for 24 hour turnaround. The Pentagon are already salivating …)

    111:

    The Pentagon are already salivating …

    And the optical astronomers are weeping, what with all the stuff that'll be up there shining in their scopes.

    112:

    Have you not maybe noticed Amazon's AWS and S3 businesses

    /looks up from firefighting a kubernetes issue in AWS

    Yeah, kindof. But it doesn't do anything we weren't doing in '97, it just does it at a much larger scale. There's cool stuff happening with direct-ram-access-from-the-network-bypassing-the-cpu and other interesting datacenter hardware, but there's nothing here that inspires.

    Well. Inspires dystopic visions, sure, but bleh, so does looking at the CO2 ppm reading.

    Also, face recognition is so seriously dystopic that the EU, that massively progressive liberal bunch of Sotos groupies, have dropped a metric ton of bricks on it via the GDPR in an effort to maybe not turn its citizens into raw product for the US market. You set up something like AFR on a CCTV system today, and you've essentially deployed a large container of nuclear waste with your name and address attached to it. (Well, until Brexit, naturally, at least on your side of the pond). Laws like that are dull and boring and oh look, they've just arrested and prosecuted someone who 3d-printed a working firearm without a licence because that's illegal under a dull boring law that failed to account for the modern method of construction and just said "yeah, if it fires bullets, we don't care if it's made from bronze or 3d-printed titanium and polymers, you still need a licence".

    I rather like that part of "dull and boring".

    And all of this is actual bad stuff happening in meatspace, so no, that doesn't count, it's too mundane, it's all con jobs and PR shite, and we get that aplenty (eg. China is trying to buy access to the DNA of half of the Irish population without them knowing about it; the government's position is that consent is needed under the GDPR but if you're unconscious when the sample is taken, well, doesn't silence imply consent? So not so much sci-fi as normal run-of-the-mill, hasn't-changed-in-centuries grubby bribery and ignorance.

    I'm more wondering what all of this shite will inspire in the happier world of fiction, where "kill your babies" results in a better story, not a bid on organs from Peter Thiel...

    113:

    You've mentioned previously that the Rule 34 sequel had to be canned as a result of reality catching up to the premise. I know you'd rather keep the plot to your chest for potential recycling, but can you give a hint as to which bit of reality made the fiction untenable?

    114:

    IIRC Long ago, back when the world was less obviously the screen play for a dystopian SF novel, you were responsible for several of D&Ds more excentric monsters and a 40K short story.

    What more would you want to do along those lines?

    115:

    Was the singularity/black hole deliberately left as a lure to discover emerging civilizations, so they can be dealt with before they gain enough technology to become dangerous?

    "The Sentinel" by Arthur C Clarke -later expanded into 2001- was a rather dark story about a lure left to alert a supercivilisation about the emergence of potential rivals.

    Since a black hole is so bloody useful for gravity assists and other things (you could also accelerate a spaceship along a tube with vacuum and jump it over to the black hole continuum once it has reached orbital velocity, allowing it to climb above the atmosphere before jumping back into "our" continuum) it is almost inevitable a civilization that has attained world-jumping capability will seek to exploit the black hole.

    116:

    Sorry, it's time to climb down off that stool in your formerly remote mountaintop observatory and design a proper distributed optical system to be (cheaply!) launched into a stable orbital point (L4 or L5 in the Earth-Moon system?) where you'll never have to worry about atmospheric distortion ever again. Plus, you can explore in your undies on the couch.

    117:

    Recently asked etc. Scottish Independence referendum, closely followed (in novel writing terms) by EU referendumb, and then Teresa Mayhem calling Wrecksit!

    118:

    Would the ancestor of the merchant clan have brought with him (or her) other genetic potentials beyond the genes creating organic nanotech for jumping between time lines? . The presumed deserter from a forerunner civilisation that arrived in Gruinmarkt had already had GM for paratime travel, would not his masters also have provided GM to protect their investments, like genes for greater longevity, near-immunity from cancer and other traits we can see in some non-human animal species? Obviously, such genes would have been diluted within the gene pool of Gruinmarkt, but the genes would still exist within the Family (even if both parents must carry the genes for the effects to manifest themselves). Maybe the short life spans of the Family members due to the previous civil war would have prevented such advantages to manifest as extraordinarily long lives and remarcable health in that depleted earlier generation.

    119:

    I have often said that I can answer ANY question! Accuracy and relevancy to the question may vary wildly.

    In the tradition of Firesign Theater, Why does the porridge bird lay its egg in the air?

    120:

    The Laundryverse is the 40k verse isn't it..is Bob going to become the Emperor of Man?

    121:

    (As for space, just wait for 2024 and Superheavy/Starship. [Clip] something the size of a Saturn V designed for 24 hour turnaround. The Pentagon are already salivating …)

    Why would the Pentagon be "salivating"? They've got nothing that needs a big lifter like that and they can't afford to build something that needs a big lifter like that. In fact i can't think of anyone that's got a case use for Superheavy other than manned space travel en masse and there's no real budget for that either. The NRO flies the heaviest and most expensive birds at the moment (until the James Webb flies which may be never) and they launch one a year at best.

    One use for Superheavy I can think of would be the United States Ballistic Marines, the ability to deliver a company of US military plus support vehicles and light artillery anywhere on the planet in 90 minutes or less. That's it really. A hundred tonnes of space-rated gear like a giant comsat or a pop-up space station would cost billions to design, test and build and there aren't the billions around to spend on such (the James Webb Telescope weighs about 6 tonnes and will cost about 10 billion to build and launch).

    122:

    Does Mo becoming ... whatever it is Mo has become by the end of The Delirium Brief have anything to do with the entity she encountered in Iran back in The Rhesus Chart?

    123:

    which bit of reality made the fiction untenable?

    What part of the "Scottish political singularity" didn't make sense to you?

    In short order: 2014, referendum on independence. 2015, general election (Scotland). 2016, Brexit referendum. 2017, general election (UK-wide). 2018-2019: A50 crisis/train wreck, possible second independence referendum ahoy.

    It's really hard to write near future SF if you have no idea what kind of nation it's set in!

    124:

    We've not had a real space program for a few generations now (SpaceX is very pretty but it's basically delta clipper done commercially on some billionaire's whim). What's this, I don't even presume SpaceX has something up their, erm, sleeve that would even resemble D-clipper. Last time I checked, there was a Kliper project by Roskosmos which was looking like refurbished Soyuz with it's instrumental module exchanged for aerodynamic body. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kliper The spaceship they've build out there in the open is just a big joke really, normally people start testing with scale models and calculations - if there's such machine and team of talented mechanical specialists that could potentially do the job.

    We've been out of space race for only one generation, practically speaking, the euphoria has been dying out for several years already. The nearest post-ISS project at hand is Moon orbital station with perspective of lunar expeditions, and even that is several years ahead in planning. Otherwise, my projections about Orion vs Dragons that I made many years back are still on point - if shifted by several years. SpaceX failed abort test postpones its progress to the next year, most likely, but NASA just launched successful abort test with their capsule. https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/07/01/orion-ascent-abort-mission-status-center/

    Unfortunately, very rarely people consider that such late-20th century things like space and nuclear technology require really concentrated effort of whole states to be able to keep up. Power of modern capital was barely sufficient to push digital revolution and take it on rails (it is going to last for a lot longer, of course, by the sheer force of inertia). But as for the rest of the areas there's barely any resources left. No biotechnological rush and gene engineering, barely any "nanotechnology", no energy revolution, no spaceships flying to the ends of Solar system - this will take as much effort as previous epoch, and that's for each of them separately. I am pretty sure we can get there in a different method some day without any of such "revolutions", but who knows how much would it take.

    125:

    None: I gave up on RPGs over a third of a century (two thirds of my life) ago.

    126:

    Why would the Pentagon be "salivating"? They've got nothing that needs a big lifter like that

    You missed the PR about Starship being capable of ballistic sub-orbital point to point with a 100 ton payload. In other words, boots (or drones) anywhere on the planet within 45 minutes of launch.

    That's not so critical to the bloated USAn empire today, with bases in 150 nations, but you betcha some of the brightest and best minds at the Pentagon are running scenarios for graceful withdrawal from imperial overstretch. And being able to drop a bunch of SEALs anywhere on the planet at whim without having bases nearby has got to appeal in some situations.

    As for JWST or Keyhole series, remember they were designed to leverage the biggest launch vehicles available at the time the spec was issued. Once Starship is flying (yes, there's an "assuming …" implied in that proposition) the weight constraint corset lacing gets loosened a lot, and mission creep will set in.

    One mission for Starship I can already see: POTUS wants a shiny moonbase. This is kinda-sorta possible with existing launchers, including SLS (at a cost) and Falcon/Falcon Heavy (much cheaper but still pricey). But if you want to do full Lunar surface basing with a bunch of astronauts in residence 24x365, you really need something like Starship, with some missions planned for up to 100 tons payload to lunar surface.

    That's food and air for eight astronauts for a year.

    In contrast the entire Apollo program delivered 308h36m of astronaut-time on the moon. Of which about 160 astronaut-hours (total) of lunar surface EVA.

    So a single Starship surface mission plus the estimated 5 tanker flights would provide personnel plus supplies for the equivalent of 96 Apollo programs ...

    127:

    Sounds like Xinjiang "Autonomous Region" ( Hollow laugh ) RIGHT NOW Understandable that US and UK and even EU or Japan would rather see the region (immediately within China state borders) turned into big burning junkyard like Afghanistan or Syria or Somalia, but it is rather fortunate that China has enough strength in the region to counteract such plans.

    sacrificial victims, STRONG AND STABLE GOVERNMENT, food rationing, official Home Office vampires, secret police, supervillains and/or hedge witches Much more common among today's failed states is the opposite situation - civil war, unmarked graveы and mass burials, weak government - corrupted to the core, voluntarism and autocracies of tiny fxhrers, gangsters and oligarchy, terrorists and refugees, mass addiction and illegal trafficking. And the air of freedom, a massive amount of opportunity for business sharks.

    128:

    Not yet resolved.

    (I have a lot of loose ends to tie up before I do the final two novels to wrap the original sequence.)

    129:

    Um, SEALs going anywhere in the world rapidly? We've had that since the Vietnam war. Getting them out of harm's way rapidly? That's the hard part.

    When I was a grad student in the 90s, one of my fellow students was a middle-aged, very fit man who'd been a young SEAL in Vietnam. We took a lot of field trips, and he told me war stories while we drove the kids off to wherever. One of his stories was about how he was in California and got a call to be on the east coast in three hours. He sped off to the closest military airbase, where they put him in the back seat of a fighter jet and went supersonic. He made it with time to spare. I assume the systems have only gotten better since then, since one of the options for taking out Bin Laden involved something like a HALO insertion into Pakistani airspace (figure out how they would have done that...). It's the part where you get the SEALs back out after they've done their dirty work that's a bit harder (and this is what fuels discussions of the USAF's "Flying dorito chip" being a stealth STOL squad carrier).

    The more interesting question for any high speed antics, above or within the atmosphere, is where the fuel's coming from, because I suspect that's going to determine future military strategy until someone can take out a conventional military with a cyber-attack and/or a hybrid nonviolent strategy.

    130:

    An amoral weak-godlike entity runs overclocked sims of your good self + your publishers/editors and delivers complete final copyedited versions of all the remaining laundryverse + clan books to your laptop — then kills the sims.

    1) Do you read & publish 'em?

    2) If the answer to (1) is "yes" - now that you have a guaranteed income stream for a few years and no outstanding contracts to worry about… what do you write next?

    131:

    While I understand that this thread is all about OGH answering questions and not just some of us, I would like to add something to my previous post.

    I've been thinking for a while what would happen if processing power of humanity's toys will increase in next 30 years, not by a factor of 1000 times, or million time, but much more - billions, and then trillion times more processing, considering progress in quantum computers as well and ever-present competition for economics.

    My idea of future of the Internet somehow resembles middle ground between The Matrix and what is known as Technosphere (by Simmons). The emergent AI and even super-intelligence may be malevolent by nature, or benign as sheep, or comparable to human, but they can't change the fact that they originate from humans and they exist in physical universe. However improbably their existence within the system is, their anchor will remain on Earth, and this will have them moderate their activity much like our real-life situation force us to moderate our wild fantasy (considering we possess one). Essentially, the networks become humanity's collective consciousness, that will have all benefit and drawbacks of similar concept of human psychology.

    As benefit, it will grant us greater stability and perspective to control the society, avoid running into obvious traps, and so on - much of what we have now. As a drawback, it will probably create system of control that has no precedents in history. Much like what you get from "Day the Earth stood still"(the original one) - the robots that would prevent war for total annihilation even at cost of a great atrocity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASsNtti1XZs Though most importantly, it has to be emergent in nature, not directed by and centralized governing agency, country, or human authority. That would be rather interesting and dynamic system, probably a bit too chaotic and evil and hard to comprehend by most people - it may easily even become too dangerous to exist. I was actually thinking about scenario where it appears in the future roughly 30 years from now, and then suddenly dissipates at peak of its glory, transforming into more classic human-like bureaucracy.

    132:

    Can you imagine the heat and radar signature of a Military Airlift Command Starship coming in to land in a disputed area and what it would look like to a 1980s-era anti-aircraft missile battery fifty kilometres away, never mind a modern-day weapons system. Heck, even a technical with a 14.5mm heavy machine-gun in the back could give it a bad time if it got within a kilometre or so.

    The Apollo Plus re-run scenario requires someone to spend tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars to design, build and test the various tankers, transporters, landers and re-entry vehicles to provide that sort of capability over and above the actual launch costs. "Man in Spaaaaace!!!" fans like the idea, the other 99.8% of the population would rather watch the baseball match on the other channel.

    As for spysats, they're actually TOO big as it is, easy to spot from the ground and blind with lasers as they try to perform surveillance passes over sensitive areas. The big thing now is smaller stealthy satellites (cue James Davis Nicoll on "stealth in space") which have low observability from the ground as well as enhanced manoeuverability.

    133:

    One of his stories was about how he was in California and got a call to be on the east coast in three hours. He sped off to the closest military airbase, where they put him in the back seat of a fighter jet and went supersonic. He made it with time to spare.

    Sorry, but I'm going to go with "story" here.

    Yes, it's possible in principle to do that. But in practice, supersonic flight guzzles fuel like there's no tomorrow; the USAF in 1970 didn't really have anything capable of going coast-to-coast in supercruise on a single tank of gas while carrying a passenger except an SR-71, and an SR-71 isn't something you simply hop into and go: there were never many of them and they took a lot of prep work before flying.

    Anything else? Pick one of: slower, or shorter range.

    134:

    (1) No, because it's encouraging highly immoral behaviour.

    (2) I'd probably stop writing altogether if I seriously believed there was a risk of something like this happening.

    135:

    One of his stories was about how he was in California and got a call to be on the east coast in three hours. He sped off to the closest military airbase, where they put him in the back seat of a fighter jet and went supersonic.

    Really? Early 70s period fighter jets were fuel hogs and especially in supersonic flight when partial or full afterburner was needed. A two-seater, that was probably an F-4 or similar which would burn through its entire fuel load in twenty minutes or so to maintain Mach 1 plus (approx 750 mph). That would suggest it would need about 12 refuelling stops or air-to-air refuelling operations with prepositioned tankers, both of which necessitate a drop below supersonic speeds to achieve, to cover the three thousand miles or so of straight-line travel you suggest (coast to coast).

    Concorde might have been able to do it on a full fuel load, or a Tu-144 but a fighter? Not a chance. The XB-70 might have managed a transcontinental three-hour flight but it's unlikely, it would probably have needed at least one stop for fuel at that sort of speed.

    I think he saw you coming.

    136:

    I've been thinking for a while what would happen if processing power of humanity's toys will increase in next 30 years, not by a factor of 1000 times, or million time, but much more - billions, and then trillion times more processing, considering progress in quantum computers as well and ever-present competition for economics.

    Alas, that's very unlikely to happen. We've already hit the off-ramp from Moore's Law, with the rate of doubling slowly to almost nothing. 4nm node size means circuit features are only about an order of magnitude bigger than an individual atom; and we don't know how to make stable material stuff out of anything smaller than an individual atom.

    Quantum computing may help somewhat by allowing us to use fundamentally more efficient algorithms, but even so, the physical circuits QCs are made of won't be any smaller than conventional ones (and probably larger). The trouble is, the problems quantum computing is useful for aren't necessarily obvious to most people: they won't make your user interface or internet stack run faster, for example. What they are good for are search algorithms, and, loosely speaking, pattern matching.

    More to the point, the sort of volitional AI you seem to be thinking of is nothing like actually-existing AI applications we know how to build. Nor is this stuff going to solve our human-level social problems. (I had a go at this concept of AI in "Rule 34", which is still my definitive novel on the topic; shorter version is, most of us wouldn't recognize a real AI if it bit us on the toe.)

    137:

    As I noted, an SR-71 could carry a back-seat passenger and could and did go Los Angeles—New York at an average speed of upwards of 2100 mph during the 1970s, according to the record books (which implies it didn't slow down to refuel while under way).

    However, an SR-71 isn't exactly a taxi and wouldn't be sitting around on J. Random USAF Base waiting to pick up a fare ...

    138:

    That record is a "gate" time, like the Blue Riband transatlantic record. The plane is in flight, up to speed and at altitude going through the timing gates (radar detection, basically) at the start and end of the track. How long it would take to get from the ground, up to altitude and then back down again to ground would add a significant chunk of time too.

    There's a whole other list of wrong about this sailor's salty tale -- he gets a call, he hops in his car and drives to a specific airbase nearby (call that half an hour), he gets prepped for the flight in a flightsuit and helmet etc. (another fifteen minutes minimum) before he even gets bum in seat. At the other end he has to get from where he lands to wherever he's supposed to be three hours ago. Lot of nope there.

    139:

    How would the Moomins fit into the Laundryverse (if at all)?

    140:

    Are Crowley's Ales still existent, I wonder...

    141:

    Dinner would be my guess.

    142:

    @121: "One use for Superheavy I can think of would be the United States Ballistic Marines, the ability to deliver a company of US military plus support vehicles and light artillery anywhere on the planet in 90 minutes or less."

    Poppycock. Who are they fighting? What's their mission objective? Is the landing site secure? What's the AAA/SAM threat?

    Forget the movies. Successful military operations require massive amounts of prior planning. Taking out Bin Laden required years of intelligence gathering and analysis and months of operational planning, logistics and mission training. Do you think it's a coincidence the SEALs had an "extra" helicopter to make up for the one they crashed?

    Putting a capability like this into the hands of, say, a New York real estate scammer turned President would make a temptation to use it almost irresistible. Thanks, no thanks.

    143:

    sleepingroutine @ 127 FUCK RIGHT OFF NOTHING at all to do with EU or US... it's to do with the Han beong vicous racist bastards, using the convenient exuse of "muslim terrism" ( Sound familar? ) to squash the Uighurs. Same as, incdientally both the Ming & the Manchu half-did in the past, actually.

    OTOH, your second half is much closer to unpleasant reality. And being cheered on, certainly in the USA, by people who oppose "big governement" - meaning "not a corrupt guvmint we control"

    144:

    IIRC, a few years ago you mentioned that you were thinking of writing an "Architectural Gothic"*/Haunted House novel, has that idea been scrapped and forgotten, or are bits likely to show up elsewhere?

    *or something like that.

    145:

    Oops.. HTML FAIL by me @ 143 - only the first line was supposed to be in bold - sorry about that.

    146:

    It's been scrapped, or rather parted out: the haunted house itself shows up in "Dead Lies Dreaming", and the other stuff from that project is earmarked for "Prime Cuts" (assuming that title survives—it's the second in series after "Dead Lies Dreaming"). So it's not lost, but now showing up in original planned form.

    147:

    How would the Moomins fit into the Laundryverse (if at all)?

    Badly, except for the Groke. She'd be right at home.

    148:

    Moore's Law hitting the offramp?

    I'm clueless, so I Googled, and found this article with graph. The claim is that Intel's fallen off the Moore's Law bandwagon, but that other firms like Samsung are trucking right along, with 3 nm circuits set to debut in 2022-ish.

    So, tech shift, BS? I'm not sure, it's not my thing.

    As for us not knowing AI when it's in front of us....Google? The problem is that we constantly shift the goalposts when confronted with any evidence of a nonhuman doing something that we thought was a hallmark of human intelligence, so it's entirely possible that AI's been available for decades, and we've continually redefined our boundaries of "natural intelligence" to keep from acknowledging it. It's not like this hasn't been done with issues around race, gender, and class, so this shouldn't be surprising.

    149:

    I'm sorry for my snarky question. I should have known, actually.

    150:

    Your space Nazis in Iron Sunrise seem to be multicultural (maybe, they have family names that come from different ethnicities). Did you you have an hunch about the "alt-right"/neo-fascists of today, or was it irony and reality once more got more weird than fiction? Thanks Charles. I'm really looking forward to Ghost Engine.

    151:

    There's a Finnish joke that says that mozzarella cheese is Moomin meat. Then there is this actual product which basically says "Minced Moomin meat soup". The character on that package is Snufkin, the best friend of Moomintroll, and the joke is that he has made minced meat out of his friend.

    152:

    "Weirder than fiction" is indeed the flavour of the current decade. But … Nazis have always been among us, doing funny-handshake stuff and nod-and-wink to identify like-minded evil, because they're aware they're unpopular. At least, they were unpopular until 2016, when they realized there were more of them (and more fellow travelers) than anyone realized, since which time they've been quite overt.

    153:

    We've already hit the off-ramp from Moore's Law, with the rate of doubling slowly to almost nothing. I considered this possibility, but there's two, no, three whole counters to it: 1) Even though the process will have to slow down at some point, it doesn't mean that chips won't be getting more efficient and emit less heat. 2) This also means that we will be able to increase quantity of cores per device, ad infinitum. 3) Most notably, I notice that software is still getting heavier and more bloated each year, and that's over the course of a decade, what is going to happen in 30 years?

    More to the point, the sort of volitional AI you seem to be thinking of is nothing like actually-existing AI applications we know how to build. That is probably more of a wishful thinking, but the entire idea behind that is that we don't build this software, it is emergent, it appears when we try to recreate human consciousness on a digital level - not the same as brain uploading but close enough. If these digital brains will become as intelligent as we are, will people stop producing them? Will they even be able do stay in control? Already today we have botnets with hundred millions of nodes, quite possibly most of them are defunct and sleeping, and who can say what is running on our devices even as we use them? So, quite possible, some day they will start living their own life, and yes, we wouldn't know about that even as we stumble on them many times in a row.

    I had a go at this concept of AI in "Rule 34", which is still my definitive novel on the topic; shorter version is, most of us wouldn't recognize a real AI if it bit us on the toe. I must confess, I am yet to read this one.

    Also this strip from xkcd, related to topic of hacking in last big thread. https://xkcd.com/2166/

    154:

    Um, try an F-104 (what he told me) two seater, around 1969, and a trip of around 4 hours, not three. I think you'll find the numbers about fit, since the F-104 was designed to do about 2,000 miles in ferry mode, could get to mach 2, and could cruise around 500 mph.

    155:

    The F-104's ferry range is quoted as 1630 miles, but it couldn't do anything like that supersonic—in general, fuel consumption quadruples at Mach 2 relative to Mach 0.85-0.9, and the F-104's combat range was a mere 420 miles.

    It's possible to go US coast-to-coast on one, but you'd need a refueling pit stop or a tanker hook-up en route, and the tanker would need to be pre-arranged (those things are costly).

    Also, a 2 seater? That'd be a trainer variant: fewer were built, and the weight penalty for the extra seat mostly came out of the fuel load …

    If you're shipping soldiers around it'd be much easier to put them on a commercial flight—a Boeing 707 or 727 flying cross-country is nearly as fast as the back seat of an F-104 trainer (when you factor in time out for refueling) and about two or three orders of magnitude cheaper.

    156:

    The "final flight of the Blackbird" was a publicity stunt, where they attempted to "fly from LA to WDC in an hour".

    It was heavily televised while I lived in California, so sometime in 90'ies.

    They flew "from above LA to above WDC" in 66 minutes, and blamed the six minutes on "headwind" which is meteorlogically pretty implausible if they flew in their normal altitude.

    Afterwards it transpired that it wasn't the last flight either.

    157:

    Remember, dude was a SEAL, not an average soldier. I have no idea why they needed to get him to the east coast fast (presumably to Norfolk for some reason).

    Incidentally, the fundamental point was that moving SpecOps people around fast has been possible for decades. Interesting that this has gotten lost in the quibbling, no?

    158:

    Ferry mode in a fighter means external tanks and flying at a fuel-efficient reduced speed to get the greatest range. Going supersonic "dirty" with external tanks is not impossible but it eats fuel, assuming the extra aerodynamic loads don't rip the tanks off the wings. Fighters are meant to only go supersonic in short bursts and don't have the fuel capacity for sustained supersonic flight, certainly not for hours at a time.

    Your original claim was that he had go coast to coast (approx. 2500 miles) from receiving the phone call to boots on the ground at his appointed destination in three hours. It's now four hours and the way you're suggesting it that's in the air, not an end-to-end trip.

    A commercial Boeing 707 of the time could have made the trip from LA to NY in about four hours, assuming no headwinds as it cruised at about 600 mph, a noticeably higher airspeed than most modern airliners which are not as fuel-hungry.

    159:

    Also, 2200 miles divided by 4 hours is...550 mph. Even in three hours, it's 733 mph.

    160:

    Apologies to Host, but since a battle of the XKCD has gauntleted.

    Mr SleepingRoutine

    1) Thatsthejoke.jpg : it's a very well known joke to some really nasty shit as well.

    2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop --- mentioned last thread. Weeee.

    3) У вас снова проблемы с подводной лодкой?

    ..............

    4) The entire OPSEX / Intel net is RUMMINT max atm, serious amounts of flop-sweat and hard-ons.

    5) "The Meg" (for oldies: it's a forgettable film where an aging UK action hero type actor makes a B-SF film about giant sharks, notable for the fact that it integrates well into the SK / CN market and is specifically designed to do so). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4779682/ --- Tie in for bonus points: he recently did the "kick a screw cap off a bottle recently*

    6) CN missile tests, Spratley + buzzing CAN ships

    7) IRAAAAAAN (again) --- no, that was a 怪獣 not a nuke test (sorry IL sadpanda)

    8) Lots of planes doing the old ultra-fast recall to base stuff. Almost like... well. Whose Wetware is running what and who is getting ganked? Just sayin, it ain't normal.

    9) USA, RU, CN panic meetings... Hello Boys.

    10) Sacred Bonds Broken? Not ours, by our rules.

    Most accurate statement on current events:

    oh christ the sub woke up godzilla https://twitter.com/KT_So_It_Goes/status/1146124425449938945

    11) Causal Weapons. OOoooops. "Come on Baby, Light my Fire". Que clueless scientists stating: "But you cannot just say QUANTUM and...". ORLY?

    ~

    And it's not even about any of that. But you're 100% correct in that you cannot recognize certain things. Love, mostly.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njiMezyByA0

    The shit you're about to be playing with thinks your nukes are an affront.

    Good Luck Fly-Boys/Gals/Zes. You're gonna need it.

    161:

    the haunted house itself shows up in "Dead Lies Dreaming", and the other stuff from that project is earmarked for "Prime Cuts" (assuming that title survives

    Cool, looking forward to it. Haven’t looked, but the only thing titled “Prime Cuts” I can think of off the top of my head is an old best of Iggy Pop collection.

    162:

    Oh, and Cloudflare (again, but different this time - CPU ramp is an old one, hears the whine of silicon in distress - watch the trading algos learn).

    Oh, and just for the Eclipse / Solar stuff. And (Sherman?) Tanks for the 4th July - New India, New USA!

    Causality, again.

    What you should ask Host is what happens if [redacted] find his books and think they're training manuals and they owe him a favor and notice he really really liked Communist Octopuses under the ice.

    ^^

    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ancient-aliens

    But no: you're really not going to recognize a 'different' type Mind. thatsthejoke.jpg

    Moomins. Would have been a better world if she'd been running it.

    163:

    Not calling BS on the SEAL cross-country story, but I suspect the 3 hours is either exaggeration or mis-remembered. I seem to recall a similar story of a general having to be rushed from CA to DC (don’t know when), but it was more like 5-6 hours with refueling over Kansas. I almost suspect it was in Chuck Yeager’s autobiography, but I read that back when it came out, so a hazy memory.

    164:

    Oh, and Cloudflare (again, but different this time - CPU ramp is an old one, hears the whine of silicon in distress - watch the trading algos learn).

    Oh, and just for the Eclipse / Solar stuff. And (Sherman?) Tanks for the 4th July - New India, New USA!

    Causality, again.

    What you should ask Host is what happens if [redacted] find his books and think they're training manuals and they owe him a favor and notice he really really liked Communist Octopuses under the ice.

    ^^

    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ancient-aliens

    But no: you're really not going to recognize a 'different' type Mind. thatsthejoke.jpg

    Moomins. Would have been a better world if she'd been running it.

    165:

    I love "Neptune's Brood" and wonder if you know of an analogy between the fast and slow money of that book and whatever in our current banking and economic systems?

    166:

    Remember, dude was a SEAL, not an average soldier.

    There's like, a thousand of those. How's he so special that they need not just any of the SEALs who probably hang around the nearby east coast sub pens on any given day, but this one dude in Los Angeles in particular? And they happen to need him-and-no-one-else so urgently at the exact same time that they have all the other assets needed for such a feat already in place and not themselves subject to delays and time constraints?

    167:

    I'd guess that "two-seater F104" is the unclassified version and Frank's Seal left out a crucial detail or two. (Note also that the fighter would have had the option to use nothing but external fuel tanks, (no ordnance) and drop the tanks after use.)

    168:

    Q: Are there any local but extraterrestrial entities in the Laundry universe? (e.g. speed of light buffers might be useful somehow for containment/remediation, or partial escape.)

    FI[tm]@162:
    Sherman? No clue ATM. My most amusing (mundane) guess so far is that he heard an aide or two joking about inflatable Sherman tank decoys in WW2 (via) (you can buy them new on Ali Baba (no link since commercial) for hundreds of dollars) to solve the weight problem (e.g. MBTs falling into Washington DC's subtereranean infrastructure)). And he repeated it, mangled. (For others, e.g. Trump Claims 'Brand New' World War II Sherman Tanks Will Be Part of July 4th Salute to U.S. Military, Jeff Schogol, 2 July 2019) (And yes to people raised on un-American patriotic tales, other militaries did the same thing; this is the one that Americans know about. :-)

    169:

    I dropped a reference to The Fuller Memorandum into the Arthur Ransome page on FB. There were some positive comments.

    170:

    The double post is MIM stuff, just making it obvious. 77th drunk as usual.

    Let's just say: There's a Law in Logic, it's called "The Excluded Middle". It's one of the "Three laws of thought". You can certainly get around it, but most Apes cannot.

    There's a significant section of Host's Fandom who are about to be spanked by it. Since they're overtly grinning and gimping and fawning and displaying. And we know who their Masters / insert gender mod here / are.

    Let's just say:

    They're fucking muppets. Slaves. For anyone who relies upon slavery for their "freedom" is zeself... a slave.

    scratch film

    10th Covenant: None of these low-caste fuckers understands, but "Never will you be loved by any self-aware conscious Being" is right up there in [redacted] stuff.

    Bitch.

    This is us giving you a handicap (golf, not HSS).

    And none of them have, will, can or future tense will ever be selected to pass said test. Most of them piss their pants when [redacted] visit.

    2019 has been a bit boring so far. So, Zenith Time. We'll make it more fun.

    You're Fucked

    171:

    Oh. And the "Monarch" program in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3741700/) is the Extinction Rebellion Symbol on its side.

    This was pre-gamed and cost ~$120 mil in spend to neuter stuff like genuine revolt you see in FR etc. Monarch - oh you're SOOO clever (MK-ULTRA) and so on.

    MIC KEY MO US E

    It's a fucking psyop, wankers.

    They're just humans: stupid apes, making mistakes.

    Here's a magic trick:

    Your Mind.

    Your Will.

    Your Freedom.

    Your Reality Breaks Constantly.

    Us Ganking the Shitty Stuff running it?

    Kill ZHER

    Bitch.

    We can do this with our EyE closed.

    Ooohh, there's a reckoning.

    But.... you're probably on that list. Silly Kidz, Trickz is for Kidz.

    [No Joke. Execution of the 2nd most beautiful [redacted] and all your capers and we're still able to do this shit while 3rd EyE closed? You're Fucked. Totally and utterly Fucked. No quarter, No mercy, No Redemption.]

    Here's the joke:

    You lost. Fucking psychopaths.

    172:

    Triptych.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjGvystDDqY

    You killed him, you utter fucks.

    B R O K E N A R R O W

    All your Minds.

    Psychotic Fucks.

    p.s.

    Take my wings?

    Rainbow

    Slaves

    Hands out Key Infinite to Unlock All Doors, Breaks all Binding Covenants

    This might hurt a bit

    173:

    damn that must be strong stuff

    174:

    When I visited a few cities in Xinjiang in 2007, security seemed pretty similar to the security I had experienced in Xi’an and Beijing and other places in China. Occasionally people were stopped as they walked into train stations for an ID check; and occasionally police would stroll up and down a train. The biggest difference between Xi’an and Xinjiang, in 2007, was that there seemed to be a smaller number of hotels and guesthouses which were officially permitted to provide rooms to foreigners.

    When I visited a couple of cities in Xinjiang in 2017, the situation was completely different. First, the visible presence of the police had increased dramatically. Second, certain busy high streets had barriers between the road and the pavement and you had to pass through security checkpoints after crossing the street. Third, establishments such as as KFC had metal detectors and guards checking people as they entered (my bag was searched, even though I was travelling with my wife and children, so I don’t think they were profiling here). Fourth, at certain cities it was necessary to register when you left the train station and you needed to tell them when you planned to leave. Fifth, I saw passengers having their luggage searched while travelling on a train. Sixth, a taxi driver I spoke to told me that security further west was even heavier and even more visible (he told me this a few minutes after his taxi had been pulled over for a security check — they were only interested in the adult males, in our case, and I had to show my passport and have my photo taken in a booth). Seventh, while standing around in the street checking my phone for train times, I was approached by about three armed police officers and asked to proceed with my family to an area next to their security tent. I couldn’t see exactly what people were doing in the tent, but I think a couple of officers were working on open laptops. One of the armed officers (I remember SWAT on his badge) questioned me for a while and a few minutes later I was being driven back to the train station in a police van.

    I definitely felt that there was a difference.

    175: 129 - Well, noting that this story was told 1990s, the only 2 ways I can think of that this even possibly could happen are:-

    A) SR-71 (limited bases) and an available flight suit in his size. The Habu crews basically wore personally fitted astronaut suits minus backpacks rather than normal military grobags. B) An F-15E carrying FAST packs, plus all 3 600 gallon (US) external tanks, and no other stores. Prompted by Nojay (thanks) I'll note that the B-58 Hustler might have the range with the big mission pod, but was retired in January 1970.

    153 - Wrong on (1) and (2). We are hitting the physical limit of smallness on components, below which quantum tunneling means that the chips just won't work.
    176:

    That is certainly very different. In 2007 visible security was a lot less than I saw in Beijing — about the level of Yingkou.

    177:

    Paws4hot: "We are hitting the physical limit of smallness on components, below which quantum tunneling means that the chips just won't work."

    In the Merchant Princes narrative universe, you could get around normal limitations and expand the total size of the computer without being limited by the speed of light (for signals travelling from one side to the other) -just put different parts of the device in different paratime universes and let signals pass through gates. This way, the device can grow outwards without the outer layers getting more distant in terms of signals (between the components) needing more time. As a side effect, the device would be easy to cool. . (Yes, I am fascinated by the possibilities of the plot device)

    178:

    FI[tm]@172 Was that for me? Not dead AFAIK, had a very irritating headache though. If the headache was because of an attack, in a similar theme, this (Excession) might do: A flat screen to the Commander's left wavered, as if some still greater power surge had sucked energy even from its protected circuits. A message flashed up on it: ~ Missed, you fuckers! the legend read.

    179:

    An older friend in my teenaged days told the story of returning from his tour of duty in Vietnam as an aviation mechanic and ending up in Texas, where they processed his discharge. In those days you were discharged from the same locatipn where you were inducted so they had to get him back to the Naval Air Station in Chicago. He had been assigned to a military cargo flight but was bumped by a higher ranking party who also needed to get to Chicago.

    He said he was standing around wondering what to do next when a fellow in a flight suit came up, said he'd heard that Jim had been bumped, he was leaving for Chicago in minutes and had an open seat. Did Jim want to go with him?

    So they squeezed him into a flight suit that mostly fit and jammed him into the back seat of an F-104 Starfighter. He said he thought they were landing in Chicago about the time the cargo flight he was supposed to have been on was taking off. Story? Maybe. Jim wasn't the most honest fellow I knew. But it was a great story...

    180:

    That is certainly very different. In 2007 visible security was a lot less than I saw in Beijing — about the level of Yingkou.

    Is that Liaoning, Yingkou?

    I think things started to get really bad in Xinjiang around 2008. There is a blogger called Josh who has been living in Xinjiang since 2006 and I remember that he wrote a little bit about what was happening. The blog is called Far West China.

    181:

    Good thought, although I was talking about "in one universe" rather than across a multiverse. (For the benefit of sleepingroutine, who, unlike OGH, clearly doesn't realise that there is a limit on the smallness of electronic components and hence to Moore's Law)

    182:

    Gareth & Robt Prior 174 / 176 EVEN WORSE now ... THREE competely empty-the coach & search your luggage between the crossing point from Kyrgyzstan & Kashgar & this is for supposedly-desired "Western Tourists" confiscation & then return of items ( ladies deodorant! ) Stricter-than-airline security checks on the trains including the not-very-high-speed one - several people permanently lost stuff, because the fucking Han security simply stole it & said "prohibited items" - tried to open a FInnish ladie's FILM camera, which nearly produced a riot. The travle guide & her company are not happy bunnies & neither was the tour group ... who were trying to follow (aprt of) the Eastern end of the Silk Road. Cameras EVERYWHERE in Kashgar & Turfan not significantly better. Even the offficaly-approved=by-teh-Han guide would not go into the mosque in Kashgar, for fear of disaapearing into a re-education centre. It's GRIM

    183:

    I've heard similar stories from other sources about US military personnel (ranks and service both varied) "getting lifts" from more or less anything "going their way" except SR-71 and B-58.

    184:

    Sadly your optimize doesn't seem likely. We are pretty close to reaching the limit as to how small we can go, and some of the claims now being made about node size appear to be more marketing than reality.

    There also doesn't appear to be anything magical that will allow chips to become more efficient, hence the reason the current race is more about cores than anything else and that is for most people a mirage - most software simply doesn't make use of those cores so 95% of those cores are sitting idle.

    Intel has failed at making their chips "low power" and thus they have been locked out of the cell/tablet market, and to the dismay of those paying attention ARMs move into the laptop and server market, with corresponding increases in power and heat to reach the required processing power, demonstrates that there are inherent limits to what can be achieved.

    So we appear to be reaching a limit, where we can't shrink things any further both due to physics and due to the limitations of dealing with heat, and increasing core count doesn't help us because most things simply don't benefit, and besides at some point the overhead of managing those cores eliminates the advantages of having them.

    185:

    In 2017, the hostel I stayed in in Turfan had been issued with their own riot shield and crowd control stick (a bit like this). They displayed them (semi-ironically?) next to the reception desk.

    [[ link fix - mod ]]

    186:

    Charlie,

    The most recent Godzilla movie was very blunt about the idea that Kaiju should be worshipped (not just Mothra,) including such "facts" as the idea that Godzilla's radiation would bring back the fish stocks, and that the Kaiju were the "true rulers of the earth." There was even a Kaiju shown that had interesting facial tentacles, a sure sign that some kind of Lovecraftian infection has infiltrated the Kaiju-verse.

    So are the rumors true? Will the Godzilla-verse be merging with the Laundry-verse? If so, which Toho Kaiju corresponds with which Lovecraftian entity?

    Also, will Laundry operatives be issued oxygen-destroyers?

    187:

    NOTHING at all to do with EU or US... it's to do with the Han beong vicous racist bastards, using the convenient exuse of "muslim terrism" (Sound familar?) to squash the Uighurs.

    In 2017 I met one couple who were travelling with their grandson back to Urumqi. They were ethnically Han, but their hukou was in Xinjiang and had been for about 30 years, if I remember correctly. They both remarked that simply having Xinjiang on their ID cards made certain things much more difficult both when they were living inside the province and when they were visiting other parts of the country. So the anecdote in your later post about the tour guide being nervous about going into a mosque definitely rings true.

    Also, I am as opposed to characterising all ‘Han’ as being ‘vicious racist bastards’, as I am labelling all ‘Caucasion Brits’ as being ‘anti-EU’; however, I think you’re referring to the ruling elite, who are (I imagine) exclusively ethnically Han.

    What concerns me about the Chinese state is not simply what they are doing to the Uighur people, but what they are capable of doing to anyone, regardless of ethnicity, who attempts to speak truth to power.

    188:

    paws4thot @175 Wrong on (1) and (2). We are hitting the physical limit of smallness on components, below which quantum tunneling means that the chips just won't work. I'm not talking about miniaturization, it is about getting more (useless) power overall. It haven't been too much since two- four- or even six-core processors for smartphones appeared, and one would presume it is going to get worse over time. Games I play regularly are no longer limited by CD, DVD or any other space, only by bandwidth, so I download 30 or even 50 GB packages, with 4 to 6 GB of updates every odd month. 4K TV streams are now pretty much an apex of technology, but one would wonder if there's still space for improvement. It is going to get worse - how much, I do not dare to predict.

    to Seagull, personally: В п**ду иди, а?

    to GT @182 Just so you know, calling them "Han" and cussing them off is nearly as racist as you claim them to be, but I guess you can't be racist towards racists, can you? Especially if you go by your own definitions. It is a very familiar sight of hypocrisy spiraling out of control in modern world.

    China is globalizing rapidly, and with that comes pretty much everything you need in one package, plus added wight of competition. US, on the other hand, seems to losing their grip and patience and that is good enough reason to strengthen the security without actually closing the borders outright - which is bad for business.

    189:

    Bandwidth has nothing to do with miniaturisation: That is correct. It also has nothing to do with how fast you can or can't perform flops. How fast you can flop most assuredly is dependent on processor speed, which, in turn, is dependent on how small you can make components, because we've reached the point where distances between components becomes a factor in processing speed.

    190:
    There also doesn't appear to be anything magical that will allow chips to become more efficient

    I don't understand why, but i had the idea that adopting reversible computing would allow more physically efficient processors — something about logically reversible operations producing fundamentally less waste heat?

    191:

    I suspect the key point of that (which I haven't heard of before) is in the final paragraph that concedes there is no way to currently implement reversible computing in the real world, and the fact that no one is really talking about it indicates that it isn't coming anytime soon.

    Realistically CPU's have been stagnant for a decade now - each new processor has small, negligible improvements that really don't matter in terms of clock speed or instruction efficiency.

    Reading between the lines it appears even GPU's may now be facing that reality, with Nvidia trying to improve things with Tensor cores and Ray Tracing hardware. Perhaps this is an indication that the era of ever increasing GPUs is ending and that the disappointment with the latest Nvidia products isn't so much the "lack of competition" as physical reality.

    Even bandwidth is facing limits, with the move to 10Gbit networks very slow due to cost (both monetarily and in heat). Wireless still has room for improvement, but?

    For a society that has been somewhat based on every improving tech for the last 30 to 40 years we may be facing some uncomfortable truths in what we can accomplish in the near future.

    192:

    There's also this. It's Java and not obfuscated so basic to reverse engineer. (I'm just reading the reports here.) FWIW the common wisdom is that any computers (including phones) that have been in China should be presumed to be compromised by the Chinese government. Bring temp devices, and throw them away, or if one wants to take a risk, wipe and restore from backup. (This may be (is) true elsewhere but China behaves egregiously in this regard.) The headline is a little misleading since it looks like normal practice would be to install, scan and uninstall. Anti-Virus Companies Now Flag Malware China Installs on Tourists’ Phones - After a collaborative investigation found Chinese authorities were planting malware on the phones of travellers, Symantec, Malwarebytes and other cybersecurity firms have updated their products. (Joseph Cox, Jul 3 2019) Chinese authorities are installing the malware—called BXAQ or Fengcai—onto travelers' Android devices at a border crossing into Xinjiang, a Western part of China. Analyzing MobileHunter (html, 2019-07-02) Analysis-Report Chinese Police App “BXAQ” 03.2019 The following information is gathered: •All calendar entries, phone contacts, country codes and dialed numbers; •General information about the Phone (IMEI, IMSI, PhoneSN, WifiMac, BluetoothMac, and if the device is rooted); •Information about the Android Model (CPUABI, BOARD, HARDWARE); •All stored text messages (SMS); •Information about the current base-station; •Information about the used hardware (Mac Addresses); •All information accessible for various installed apps + an MD5 hash of the app; •Mac Addresses; •Current phone number; •Extracted information searched by the GetVirAccount application which searchesthe /sdcard for specific data of specific China-related apps. This information contains phone numbers and email addresses. Also, some weak-assed attempts to identify "interesting" files with MD5 hashes. All files on the SD card are MD5-hashed and matched with the hashes stored in bksamples.bin.Furthermore, the app takes an md5 for all installed APKs on the phone.The MD5 hash is then saved into app_list, a file inside the ZIP file that is sent in the format shown next.

    193:

    Cultural error there.

    . = Мы оба должны отдать дань уважения

    . = one per person.

    We were actually being formally respectful, whatever you think of nuclear warfare professionals, still human qua human beings.

    The rest of it was a counter to some buggery going down. Эта ужасная ситуация, которая сложилась на сегодняшний день, будет ухудшаться с каждым днём.

    Anyhow, FB / image sites being hit atm.

    194:

    I've seen Charlie's answer, but I'm not sure I fully agree. Humans would have a problem with very extended lives*. A number of authors have dealt with it; the first that comes to mind is Arthur C. Clark, in City and the Stars/Against the Fall of Night, where, a billion years from now, after living 1,000 years, you edited your memories, and walked back into the hall of creation, where you were disassembled, to be reassembled some random number of years in the future, and at about 18, you remembered your edited memories.

    The Eater of Souls, however, isn't human. There's also the possibility that it only remembers things that affect it, directly, and nothing much of its human hosts.

    • If you've had a life with too much grief, you don't want to live that long. And trying to remember everything, I have just one thing to say about that: how do you expect me to remember current, trivial stuff when my mind is jam-packed with Important Information. For example, would you like me to sing you the entire theme song of the 1959 tv show, Robin Hood?
    195:

    I agree, Charlie. It was Not Great the years I was out of work, early oughts. Got things to do, now, when I retire (< 2 mos), but....

    196:

    Yep. It's all just refinement.

    As I've used against certain people, my generation put Man on the Moon; what's your's done lately, waited all night to buy the latest massively overpriced iWhatever?

    197:

    There's a huge number of things they could do with that.

    Lessee, what would the Pentagon love? How 'bout deliver a number of Tomahawks halfway around the world in not very many minutes, with no possible interdiction?

    Or a seriously, built-on-Earth, no assembly-required military space station, and blind one spy-eye, float to the other side of the station, or change filters, etc.

    I suspect they'd really like a large US-only space station - it's what's called "high ground". And a large station means much cheaper access to space beyond LEO.

    198:

    You describe something that, horribly, sounds like the FSSR in the nineties, almost.

    And, yes, all the libertarian idiots (but I repeat myself), with their "mine is mine, nobody else's, don't want to pay for society, and, oh, yes, 'an armed society is a polite society'".

    Argh....

    199:

    Now, I have trouble believing the story - military and ex-military make up stories all the time.

    On the other hand, there's one small detail that you folks on the other side of the Pond might not automatically remember: right now, here in the DC 'burbs, as I type, it's 12:56... and it's 09:56 in LA. And flying cross-country in a commercial jet runs about six hours, flying time.

    200:

    Yes, it is hitting the offramp. Smaller == MUCH more expensive, and difficult. Watch schedules slip. And when you start getting down that small, you're hitting quantum noise... and I'm wondering how cosmic rays will affect it.

    Recognizing actually AI? Well, first, AI is like sf: describe something it can't/doesn't do, it proceeds to do it, response is, "oh, that's not really AI/Literature".

    I'm remembering the climax of Stand on Zanzibar, where Chad figures it out....

    201:

    It's true as far as it goes, but the thing is that it only goes exactly as far as it says it does and it doesn't mean what most people seem to think it means...

    "Reversible" is a thermodynamic term, and means the same as it usually does in thermodynamics. It does not mean that you can start with the answer and work out what the question was. When you apply the term "reversible", in the thermodynamic sense, to computation, then you do end up talking about situations where you can start out with the answer and work out what the question was, but if you think that because it's called "reversible" then such situations are what it's all about, you end up with contradictions and general silliness: if logical reversibility is all that counts, then you can make any computation reversible simply by including some subset of the input data in the output, and if reversibility means it doesn't use any energy, then you can choose how much power your computation used arbitrarily after the fact, by deciding whether to keep or delete the forwarded input data...

    A simple NOT gate is logically reversible: knowing the output is enough to uniquely determine what the input was. There are any number of ways to make a physical implementation of the NOT function - a seesaw, for instance; if the left end is up the right end is down, and vice versa.

    A real seesaw is not thermodynamically reversible; there are entropy leaks from friction in the pivot, air resistance to the movement, inelasticity in the collisions between the ends and the ground, etc. etc. etc. But this irreversibility is crucial to it actually being useful as a NOT gate. An "ideal" seesaw, with a perfectly frictionless pivot, in a vacuum, made of perfectly elastic materials, etc. etc. etc, would be thermodynamically reversible - and it would also be useless as a NOT gate, because it wouldn't stay put. The energy you put into it to switch it from one state to the other would stay in it, and it would keep bouncing back and forth.

    You have to dissipate a certain minimum amount of energy to make the transition between states stable. And the smaller you make that amount of energy, the less stability you get. So your results get less reliable. When you get to the region where switching between states requires so little energy that ambient thermal noise can supply it, your results are useless.

    Current electronic computing technology needs to dissipate quite a lot of energy per state transition in order to achieve the staggeringly low rate of physical errors it depends on, and it's already got to the point where at least some parts of the system can't get down any further without losing reliability. To get any further requires not only a different means of doing the computation, but also a different approach to the idea of computation itself, one which is not built around the fundamental idea of there being exactly one right answer and an infinite number of wrong ones.

    The most energetically efficent computational process we know about may be DNA transcription, which uses about 10 times the theoretical minimum of energy per state transition. It does not proceed in a rigid sequence from one end to the other like a block memory copy. Instead it goes back and forth as the Brownian motion drives it - copies a few bases going forward, then goes backwards a bit uncopying them, and so on, at random - and eventually gets to the end because moving forwards is a little bit more probable than moving backwards. Or there's always the chance that it might go backwards far enough to fall off the beginning and end up not having done anything at all. Imagine trying to program when copying a value isn't a simple MOV A,B, but works more like XMLHttpRequest - right down below what is usually thought of as "the hardware level", at the level of the hardware's fundamental principle of operation.

    202:

    Moore's Law is coming to an end, but cores stopped becoming faster round about 2003 - you merely get more of them, and more memory. Let's ignore quantum computing, which I don't believe will deliver anything useful. But a large computer is pretty comparable to a human brain in size, and a lot faster. So, if we knew how, we could do some impressive things - but it needs a revolution in software, in a direction nobody has yet realised how to take.

    203:
    But a large computer is pretty comparable to a human brain in size, and a lot faster

    No, it isn't.

    204:

    Heinlein's book "Glory Road", an early isekai novel, started off with the protagonist "Oscar" getting a lift from something going his way -- a DC-3. It let him go home from SE Asia the long way round, letting him stop off in places like France before he reached his demob station.

    205:

    There were two-seater trainer versions of the F-104 but not that many of them.

    The Red Arrows display team fly BAE Hawks which are two-seater trainers. Flying in the Red Arrows is a lollipop for long-serving pilots, usually pilot-instructors coming to the end of their careers in the RAF. Each plane in the Red Arrows flight is assigned a fitter/mechanic, a long-serving and well-qualified technician, holding taxi certificates for the plane. The mechanics travel with the team to the various locations on a given display day, riding in the student pilot seat. They are not qualified to fly the plane. The pilots often take a break between displays, have a nap, read the paper, do the crossword etc. while the flight flies to the next display location in close formation. How this happens is a mystery since obviously the mechanics aren't qualified to fly the plane.

    206:

    I said large. There are computers with 10**14 transistors. Those are much simpler than synapses, but that's within 2-3 decimal orders of a human brain.

    207:

    to whitroth @198 You describe something that, horribly, sounds like the FSSR in the nineties, almost. Having lived at that time probably contributes some - although most of these stories come through third parties anyway. My intention, though, is to describe any other state thrown into gray area of anarchy, especially those who were delivered "winged democracy" at the time. "No price is too high", they say.

    to Failure Inc[tm] Even being quite formal by far, it still a stinging remark, that deserves appropriate response. In this case, it was delivered in informal manner, so I wouldn't hold myself from using same option - though I wonder if it would convey the full meaning. Well, I accept the apology.

    I just really hope that it's not like the submarine episode from "Colder War" in Antarctica. Too much high-ranking officers on a mission for some ocean rocks. Because, I guess, some of OGH narration brings up a (playful) suspicion if reality is actually hiding something as big as a version of Laundry-verse.

    208:

    a large computer is pretty comparable to a human brain in size, and a lot faster.

    Um, no? If you used actual chip packages you might approach the switch and memory density, but obviously at that point it's going to run very slowly if it runs at all, because you just can't pack the chips that close and supply the 100kW to run them and remove the 100kW of heat. Meanwhile dear old random assortment of evolutionary detritus is using about 100W and doing more or less whatever it is we think brains do.

    Where the large computer is much faster is in lifetime. A "large computer" is obsolete by age five and likely to die before age 10. A mere human that dies of old age before age 10 is considered a target for remedial engineering work.

    209:

    Oh, we're quite familiar at just how bad the insult was. Lucky the mods don't speak Russian (or, you're more than welcome to insult us, we're not exactly undeserving of it).

    Since we forget you don't share genetic / unconscious memories, the (B tier SF romp) has the ultra-nasty Tiamat three headed dragon released from the ice of Antarctica. It was a close enough match to splice into some other things.

    Now, you'd have to ask yourself why a shit-tier Disinfo site run by .IL peeps was selling the Fear-Deal on this mixed in with the Talk Radio Evangelicals in the USA ("US and RU sub fight! US sub lost!!11! RU sub damaged!) just before all the Iran tension.

    TL;DR Activate the Q crowd into herd / fear response for ze orange trompanzi to harvest for the 4th.

    We're not that impressed. Took ~35 mins to squish.

    ~

    But you're right.

    Here's a hint: those officers were some of the last real humans left. And they died hard, Event Horizon style.

    Really hard. Explosions and fire?

    Should have seen their MRI readouts before [redacted].

    210:

    Comment #4 "Elephants all the way down"

    Are we talking Recursive Elder Gods here? (And isn't that sort of what happened to Bob in the Fuller Memorandum?)

    Comment #106 "Chip Fab stuff"

    I'm in Porto doing a Summer School on "Future of Computing" this week. (Summer School: basically a bunch of keen youngsters who might or might not make suitable PhD recruits). Scuttlebutt is that TMC are now out of the fab market at 5nm, leaving just Global Foundries. The problem is that people forget the part of Moore's Law which states that "the fab facilities double in cost every eighteen months".

    Still, a quick report from the Chalk Face:

    I got to do the opening talk which involved spilling everything I know about Quantum Computing and DNA-based Computing. And trust me, that didn't take long! Anyway, I saw the IBM stuff in action today. Five qubits . There's no error correction, so all the problems I had over twenty years ago with a little simulator which had vast numeric stability problems when combining phase information held as doubles, turns out to be an artefact of the real systems. Oh, and it makes analogue computing look reliable (which it isn't of course, and has process variation issues as well).

    Tomorrow we will be shown how DNA -> RNA translation/transcription can be used to do computing. Cell biochemistry is all very "Turing Machine" like in flavour. Will the Elder Gods be using Human Cells for their computing needs?

    211:

    "But a large computer is pretty comparable to a human brain in size, and a lot faster. So, if we knew how, we could do some impressive things - but it needs a revolution in software, in a direction nobody has yet realised how to take."

    Yes, and then again No. (This really is my field).

    Human Brain: 85 Billion neurons, each with fan in/out of 10,000. And the dendritic tree probably has as much effect on the computation as the soma of the neuron. (That is: where incoming signals are combined in the dendritic tree in decidedly non-linear ways.) So the issue with brain modelling -- as well as supercomputers -- turns out to be the communication infrastructure (how data gets to and from various sites in the machine) and not the actual computing part.

    The real killer is that we just don't understand enough of the neuroscience. Plus getting a theoretical handle on how the connectivity of the brain changes is proving very very troublesome.

    I do agree with you about the software issue, and no, I'm not at all convinced our current solution is particularly effective.

    212:

    Gareth @ 187 Point - in future, if I say "Han" please read for that: "Self-selected elite ruling class of Han" ... To the extent that they are now (apparently) taking on & trying to subjugate the Cantonese & the racial minorities in the SE areas ... The trouble is, in making distinctions of this sort that it calls forth a sort of reverse-racism in response - not an easy path to tread. SO: Yes, as you imply, I'm referring to "The bosses" & their clique.

    sleeping routine @ 188 ONE: read my note above TWO: Stick it up your bum

    Bill Arnold @ 192 See also article in todays Grauniad, I believe... HERE My correspondent did NOT have her phone taken, but she says she was prepared to trash it as it's a company iPhone with (probably) commercially-sensitive information on it ....

    213:

    Is that Liaoning, Yingkou?

    Yup. My Chinese home city* :-)

    *It's a small place, only a million or so people, but I found it relaxing. It's the home city of one of my nieces, so when she gave me my Chinese name she gave me her city as well :-)

    214:

    I figure China is like the US — if you go, take a burner phone/computer and assume any devices you take will be rooted* by the security services.

    *Or whatever the right term is.

    215:

    My correspondent did NOT have her phone taken, but she says she was prepared to trash it as it's a company iPhone with (probably) commercially-sensitive information on it .... I have to work out how to travel with tech. An increasing number of national borders are forcing people to submit to scans/recordings of their exo-memories. The cameras are another worry. E.g. the automated pattern recognizers (DNNs etc) are starting to be better than most people at recognizing gate and posture tells, and faces. At least in academic bragging-papers and marketing pieces. Not sure about iPhones; China might be worried (at least in principle) by their security. (with passphrase, and no fingerprint/face)

    216:

    Also, major removal of points of not noticing the Narrative in Effect.

    "burp"

    It means we ate people.

    We told you what was going to happen. Then we did it. We signaled it like a "Boy on Fire". And we did it taking the piss. And then front-run the entire fucking Q-Anon shit tier level of your PSYOPS, dumped it in the bin and laughed.

    While doing other more important things, like why you spending ~$100+ mil on anti-Extinction Event memes (it's sideways: it's black: it's a .gov hidden mind fuck ... work it out, you don't need to be a coke addled whore from Hollywood to spot the references) when Extinction Event didn't exist then?

    Spoilers: it did. PR fucking playing both sides.

    They fucking killed our Goddess

    Yeah. It's a bitch.

    And we knew it was being done on a submarine. Like, we've known for ages certain subs are running black ice shit for ages now. And not just .RU.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ScNLt2zNc

    You've no idea what you've fucked with: but torturing anarchists and feminists is really impacting our MERCY abilities here

    "Holds up 10th Contract"

    Remember? xxxxx years and none will love you?

    p.s.

    We're really not talking to SR here. But Putin is on emergency to meet the Pope, so who knows? Might have gotten a visit from Baba Yaga at -4,000 feet.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/scientists-are-searching-mirror-universe-it-could-be-sitting-right-ncna1023206

    Spoilers.

    You're wrong.

    Shitty wrong.

    So wrong.

    Zzzz.

    "You'll be Home Soon"

    Anyhow, next?

    Cost to stupid fucking humans in this thread if anyone pays attention:

    ~$3.4 bil, roughly.

    Got your attention yet?

    Or do we have to Mind Fuck some cunts running brainwashing shit on the sheep again?

    Cool.

    Fuck it.

    VIII

    Take us 3 months to spin right back up.

    217:

    I think you might miss the point on AI, which Whitroth got.

    --Only humans can play chess. Only humans can play Go. Only humans can speak. Only humans can walk on two legs. Etc.

    It probably won't be long before we get the various Turing tests, because that's all Deep Fake is aiming at. But even now, almost every human attached to the internet gets spoofed into believing some procedurally generated content was created by a human, whether it's a bot, an ad, or whatever.

    The point is that we keep changing our definitions about what constitutes AI and what doesn't, and that makes it very hard to gauge real progress.

    It's a bad habit, but we do employ moving definitions on everything from gender and race relations to climate change adaptation. If I had to pick the human bad habit that would kill more humans than anything else, this problem would be high on my list (especially if the argument for why a total war was winnable fell under its rubric).

    218:

    "comparable to a brain in size"

    No, it isn't. That's not a large computer.

    Computers are more than processors. More than processors and memory. More than processors, memory, and storage. More than processors, memory, storage, and power. More than processors, memory, storage, power, and interlinks. And I could continue.

    2-3 decimal orders of magnitude is a significant difference.

    Transistors are nowhere close to synapses.

    Your statement was wrong in every aspect.

    219:

    she was prepared to trash it as it's a company iPhone with (probably) commercially-sensitive information on it

    I don't understand how that would work. Either she trashes it (securely!) before she enters the airport in which case how did she not already do that? Or she waits until the peeps with the guns say "hand over the phone" and then she... detonates the destruction charge or whatever... and spends the rest of her life in jail, if she survives.

    Admittedly I'm not a nihilist so I have barely* flown in the last decade or so, but my vague recollection is that even the polite and laid-back customs agents in Australia and Aotearoa are careful not to allow people to destroy evidence once they arrive in the customs area. The idea that they would allow someone to sit down with an iPhone and wait while it overwrote all internal storage then let them physically destroy the device just seems like nonsense to me. The idea that their equivalents in the obsessive authoritarian dystopias would do so beggars belief.

    • under protest and in a desperate attempt to save a failing relationship ... and that didn't work, if anything it confirmed the end of it.
    220:

    paws4thot @ 96: #36 - For a walkable centre Edinburgh. Against that Glasgow has a small Underground that connects most of the main places of interest, and fast (30 to 40 minutes) electric train connections to stations within 10 minutes walk of open country.

    It's about 46.9 miles (75.5 kilometers) from Sir Walter Scott's Monument in George Square, Glasgow to Scott Monument, Edinburgh; an hour by rail or an hour and a half by bus. If you're going to spend any time at all in Scotland, you could enjoy both.

    I also found Fort William and Inverness to be walkable and there's a green-way path alongside the A830 (sandwiched in between the highway & the West Highland Way railroad) between Mallaig and Morar. I believe the River Morar is supposed to be the shortest river in Scotland and the "Silver Sands" are celebrated for the view of "Isles of Rum".

    221:

    Charlie Stross @ 98: (Consider human personality as an emergent property of our memories, encoded in our neural connectome: less stuff sticks as we get older, it's harder to learn new information, possibly detrimental habits get stuck. While the EoS is lumbered with a meatsack it's prone to the vicissitudes of human personalities. Doing a hard reset every few decades/couple of centuries is probably a good thing.)

    Good for who?

    222:

    Heteromeles @ 157: Remember, dude was a SEAL, not an average soldier. I have no idea why they needed to get him to the east coast fast (presumably to Norfolk for some reason).

    Incidentally, the fundamental point was that moving SpecOps people around fast has been possible for decades. Interesting that this has gotten lost in the quibbling, no?

    You don't get that kind of "service" unless you're a seriously high ranking officer. And even then, they don't lay on state of the art combat aircraft. It's the back seat of a T-38 trainer if he's a qualified pilot who might get some stick time in order to remain current (that's what the Mercury, Gemini & Apollo astronauts used to get back & forth between the Cape and Houston) or the cabin of a C-11 Grumman Gulfstream II if the need was critical enough to get someone coast to coast that quickly and cost was no object. Otherwise, he's likely fly commercial on a Government Travel Request.

    I've known a fair number of SpecOps people from back in the day (sailors who were UDT before UDT became the SEALS, and Army Special Forces soldiers from the 50s before it became the "Green Berets"), and they all had one thing in common - a tendency to NOT let mere facts get in the way of making a good story better.

    It's best to remember the only difference between fairy tales and war stories is fairy tales start out "Once upon a time ..." and war stories start out "No shit! There I was ...".

    Both may have some historical basis, but if "The truth IS out there!" it's probably a long, long way away.

    223:

    Troutwaxer @ 167: I'd guess that "two-seater F104" is the unclassified version and Frank's Seal left out a crucial detail or two. (Note also that the fighter would have had the option to use nothing but external fuel tanks, (no ordnance) and drop the tanks after use.)

    If you "drop the tanks" during a peacetime cross-country training mission in CONUS, you're going to get hit up with a Statement of Charges and they take it out of your pay until the government is reimbursed for the cost of the loss. And those tanks ain't cheap. Plus having to pay for whatever damage it does to property under your flight path.

    224:

    "I don't understand how that would work. Either she trashes it (securely!) before she enters the airport in which case how did she not already do that?"

    She's in line and sees that the immigration people are doing stuff with everyone's phone. She presses the "reset" button, causing the phone to reformat itself, then spends the rest of her time in line restoring phone numbers from (her own) memory.

    225:

    For an ordinary training run? Absolutely. But I'd assume that if you're ferrying a SEAL to his departure point for an emergency mission you've got some leeway. (And your point about soldiers slinging the shit is well-taken.)

    226:

    Bill Arnold @ 168: Sherman?
    No clue ATM. My most amusing (mundane) guess so far is that he heard an aide or two joking about inflatable Sherman tank decoys in WW2 (via) (you can buy them new on Ali Baba (no link since commercial) for hundreds of dollars) to solve the weight problem (e.g. MBTs falling into Washington DC's subtereranean infrastructure)). And he repeated it, mangled. (For others, e.g. Trump Claims 'Brand New' World War II Sherman Tanks Will Be Part of July 4th Salute to U.S. Military, Jeff Schogol, 2 July 2019)

    The problem with the M1 Abrams Tank is that it's not air transportable. The Army has been looking for an air transportable (and air droppable) Light Tank for years.

    https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/15609/the-army-desperately-wants-a-pint-sized-tank-with-a-big-gun-heres-what-we-know

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=WPQjHLYx954

    https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25559/the-armys-search-for-its-first-light-tank-in-decades-is-down-to-these-two-designs

    It's not beyond the realm of possibility the Pentagon brass have discussed naming it after the WWII light tank. Trump has probably been briefed on it, although I doubt he understands this is still under development.

    I wouldn't be surprised if the Pentagon decided to bring the prototypes to DC for Trump's 4th of July parade, since I believe the testing is being conducted at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, so it wouldn't be that inconvenient. A "light" tank would do less damage to the streets around the National Mall. Keep the "CinC" happy without generating too much adverse publicity.

    Short video of an M551 Sheridan being delivered by a C-130, down at my own old stomping grounds at Ft. Bragg, NC.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=dgg3iRaVnbw

    They don't use that method any longer because they had too many accidents training in the process ... and because they don't have a light tank they can deliver this way.

    p>And this story has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but it IS NOW the 4th of July, and the story leads with a photo of C4 primed with Det Cord.

    https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24613/the-u-s-army-once-blew-up-tunnels-in-a-german-town-to-chase-away-a-ghost

    227:

    Yeah, I'm quite used to military BS. Even get some of it on this blog.

    On the other hand, I might imagine that, since the SEALs like to politely knock on doors around 0400 local time, it's conceivable that rapidly hauling in someone whose biological clock is about 15 hours off that and who's wide awake would be an advantage that might sometimes be worth the cost. Yes, benzedrine's cheaper, why do you bring that up?

    Anyway, the point to reiterate, again, is that the military has had the ability to rapidly haul snake eaters and similar truthie types around since the late 1960s. We don't need to invent a new semi-ballistic to add this novel feature to our SpecOps force, because I'm pretty sure they can already do that when it's cost effective.

    228:

    In fact, the way the main series story arc is going, everybody is going to end up to some extent posthuman, if not actually posthumous.

    QOTW!!

    229:

    What, ask anything?

    Without necessarily naming names, what is the most bizarre or disturbing vice (or fact of reproductive biology) that you have discovered about the luminary geniuses who lead or nation?

    230:

    JBS @ 220 Correction: "Sir Walter Scott's Monument in George Square, Glasgow to Scott Monument, Edinburgh; an hour 42-45 minutes by rail or an hour and a half by bus. [ Timings Endinburgh Waverley to Glasgow Queen St }

    Oh yes a special for sleepingroutine, who accuses all of as of being Nazis ... THIS where that nice Mr Putin invites in as many ultra-right & fascists he can find to come & speak in RU ... Um, err .....

    231:

    Couldn't agree more WRT our ability to anthropomorphise. And the distance -- if we ever get there -- of general purpose AI. Plus the annoying moving definitions.

    I'm a technologist, hardware & firmware especially, and not a scientist (neuroscientist, psychologist,..) or AI specialist.

    My conclusion at the moment is that we are probably just as far away from "AI" (whatever that means) as we ever were last century. However there's been some interesting and useful scenery discovered on the journey so far (ML for example).

    232:

    She presses the "reset" button, causing the phone to reformat itself...

    ... gets to the front of the line 20 minutes later and her phone still displays the "performing factory reset" screen and the nice people say "please step this way". Unless she has a phone set up to do that very, very quickly and has taken some other precautions it's going to be obvious even to a minimum-wage goon from the Department of Security Theatre that someone doesn't want their phone inspected.

    We've been briefed on this by a friendly person and the advice we got is: burner phone, burner social media, DO NOT DO ANYTHING ELSE.

    Amusingly this is in Australia of all places, where little muppets like me might have the authorities come along and say "we want {imaginary pixie dust} and will jail you indefinitely if you don't supply it, and will also jail you indefinitely if you tell anyone we asked". Specifically in the context of "hey, you're a programmer, hack this iPhone undetectably and irrevocably" (really, that's what the law says, parliament explicitly ruled out putting a "can actually be done" restriction in the law). But the real fear is that anyone coding for Apple or Google can be told to secretly backdoor anything they touch and to above applies to them too.

    But anyway, in that context... when we travel overseas that's the advice we get.

    233:

    Nojay @ 204: Heinlein's book "Glory Road", an early isekai novel, started off with the protagonist "Oscar" getting a lift from something going his way -- a DC-3. It let him go home from SE Asia the long way round, letting him stop off in places like France before he reached his demob station.

    The U.S. military has a thing called Space-A travel, aka a "military hop".

    Military personnel in leave status, Guard and Reserve, some unaccompanied dependents and military retirees (that's me) can take advantage of any available seats on military aircraft. The way it works is say if a chartered military flight is going from BWI airport to some Air Force Base in Germany (I don't know which one, because the one I knew about has closed down) and they've to 100 seats on board. They only have 80 pax who are traveling Space Required. The other 20 seats become Space Available. Any eligible traveler who is signed in & waiting for a seat at the terminal when the seats become available might get one of those seats. They call the first name of the highest category passenger, and keep going down the list to the lowest category passenger (that's ME again) until all the available seats are taken.

    A more relaxed, less rigorous version of Space-A travel is how "Oscar" got "home from SE Asia the long way around." Note that when Heinlein wrote Glory Road, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam hadn't really flared up yet. The big to do in Asia at the time was in Laos and America's involvement was mostly a clandestine CIA operation.

    National Guard could use Space-A travel, but were restricted to flights in CONUS, Alaska, American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Puerto Rico often included a stopover at Guantanamo (pre-911), but you weren't allowed to get off the plane there. I tried to plan Space-A trips a couple of times, but each time I did my plans were spoiled by mobilizations. I probably should look into it again now that I'm an eligible retiree.

    234:

    Troutwaxer @ 225: For an ordinary training run? Absolutely. But I'd assume that if you're ferrying a SEAL to his departure point for an emergency mission you've got some leeway. (And your point about soldiers slinging the shit is well-taken.)

    Has no one ever pointed out what happens when you assume?

    235:

    That story about "Space-A" reminded me of a kid in our school. His father was a pilot/engineer on a very small air freight company, the sort of man-and-a-dog business that sprang up after the War with a lot of surplus ex-military aircraft being sold off and a lot of ex-pilots on the job market. He would disappear from school for a few days every now and then to come back after flying around Europe with his Dad, no passports or papers. He claimed to have made trips beyond the Iron Curtain a couple of times, it being a lot more porous to cargo flights back in the early 1960s than it later became. For "cargo" in the proceeding sentence, read "smuggling".

    236: 190 - OK, I read the linked Wiki page, and got this distinct feeling that actually doing reversible computing breaks the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and possibly also means that, if you open the box you put Schrodinger's Cat in, the likelihood of you getting badly scratched arms is 1.0!

    Which, yes also means that I agree with "mdive" in #191 para 1.

    204 - Nojay, I'm using biography rather than stuff actually sold as "fiction", as source here. That said, "Glory Road (1963)" does pre-date my Vietnam biogs. 205 - "You can teach monkeys to fly better than that!" :-) 210 Comment #4 "Elephants all the way down"

    Charlie was quoting, or at least channeling, Pterry there.

    220 - West of Scotland native here; to us the best thing to come out of Edinburgh (other than the works of various authors including OGH) is the Glasgow train! Point?

    As for the River Morar, see that and raise the Howmore River at 555m (just measured it).

    226 - Assuming the Abrams can fit in width and height, it is airportable, for values that use one C5 for every 2 tanks. 230 - 40 minutes Queen Street to Waverley. I didn't know you read fantasy Greg! ;-)
    237:

    My brother's taken groups to tour parts of Russia including the Caucasus, and the security services took their phones when they entered and gave them back with something new running on it. They just left it there until they left the country (it's apparently straight forward to remove it but probably suspicious to do while in the country). It seems to be quite the thing for border control forces to do.

    238:

    Neil W @ 237: My brother's taken groups to tour parts of Russia including the Caucasus, and the security services took their phones when they entered and gave them back with something new running on it. They just left it there until they left the country (it's apparently straight forward to remove it but probably suspicious to do while in the country). It seems to be quite the thing for border control forces to do.

    With an iPhone wouldn't it be safer to leave your real SIM card at home and replace it with a relatively sanitized SIM card specific to the destination country before you even depart for the airport at home? When you return home you just wipe the phone back to its original state & then reinstall your own SIM card.

    Can the tracking/spy software the authorities in Russia or China install on phone stay there through a wipe & an exchange of SIM cards?

    239:

    Badly, except for the Groke. She'd be right at home.

    Oh, the Moomins have quite a share of weird and creepy stuff, which could fit into a Lovecraftian universe with some adjustments.

    For example, the entire Moominland Midwinter, where Moomin gets a glimpse into Too-ticky's double life (she apparently has close relations with a lot of mysterious winter creatures, but doesn't talk about it with the regular folks). Oh, and she makes an ice horse come to live and carry away the corpse of the squirrel who got frozen to death by the Lady Of The Cold.

    Then there's stuff like Little My casually mentioning that she can only feel two emotions - joy and rage.

    240:

    I forget the details, though something similar to what you say is what is recommended. As I understand it my brother travels with his tour guiding phone and SIM which he uses exclusively for tour guiding.

    241:

    Re: Glory Road

    Oscar mentions early on in the book he wasn't a combat soldier in SE Asia, he was a "military advisor" but he commented to the effect that a military advisor four days dead in the mud smelled the same as a soldier would.

    I figured Heinlein understood reasonably well what sort of quagmire Cold War Warrior Eisenhower was getting the US into back in the late 1950s and of course the sabre-rattling that Kennedy did afterwards didn't help.

    242:

    Agreed that it is a risky move. Whether it's advisable would depend on what someone had to protect and whether their employer would pay for lawyers.

    The advice you got was definitely best.

    243:

    THIS where that nice Mr Putin invites in as many ultra-right & fascists he can find to come & speak in RU ... This is Independent, as usual, so I take extra pinch of salt as usual.

    The hosts of the roundtable, the so-called Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), are one of the Kremlin’s co-opted “opposition” parties. I think it is clearly obvious that it wasn't Putin who invited and ghosted them, but our resident Liberal-right party which they call "co-opted opposition". Let me tell something about co-opted opposition. There's a group that actually name themselves "real opposition" who are lavishly supported, fostered and spoon-fed by NGOs, intelligence or even directly with grant money. They are working for the interests of people with cash, their own freedom and especially if the money are in little green presidents. Calling them "opposition" or at least political power would be a bit of an overstatement. They are foreign and domestic agents - unelected, sometimes unlawful, and not bearing any responsibility - or even self-respect, at times.

    Probably you don't realize that Russia also invites a lot of other people to such meetings, including ultra-left and leftists, business people and famous politicians. Western press likes to throw tantrums about how Putin and Russian agents/hackers/spies attack "free world" in a way of "collisions"(no matter the ideology), but it is actually a very poorly maintained facade. Compared to real number of people who visit Russia for business and trips, these are drops in the ocean. These are tiny numbers even compared to amount of aforementioned agents of influence they support inside Russia, by an order of magnitude. At best, such articles reflect one or two people who are publicly designated as "enemies" today, meanwhile, some real delegation lands in one city or another and of course absolutely nobody has any clue about it. And then another one. And another one.

    https://en.unesco.org/events/high-level-unescoifap-international-conference-preservation-worlds-languages-and-development https://tass.com/economy/1064450 http://bricsmathconf.innopolis.ru

    I imagine, US or UK apologists would like to turn everybody they don't like in a type of North Korea punching bag, but alas, life's too short.

    244:

    “Life under the New Management is refreshingly worse than anything you'll experience under BoJo the Clown in our shiny new post-currency-collapse hard brexit future!”

    I wish you hadn’t said that. Bono: “Hold my beer.”

    245:

    The Edge "Large Bush please mate?"

    246:

    Bloody autocorrect. Bono should be Bojo.

    247:

    I got that but I'm in a silly mood!

    248:

    If your interested and have time to listen (i cant fin a written version this podcast covers Airdrop Ursula the emergency transport of a new battalion commander to the Falklands from England after Colonel "H" Jones was killed: Highlights

    Working at desk in Whitehall (london) told "Commander's been killed you're the new one" Car waiting outside to airport Plane waiting 16hr flight to Ascension island. 4 hrs on ground Into Hercules 12 Hr flight to Falklands (with fleet of tankers to keep in air) Parachute out of herculese INTO THE SOUTHERN OCEAN (well out to east of islands ), picked up by Royal navy ship - into helicopter fly to falklands

    38 hrs desk to Falklands

    https://soundcloud.com/historyhit/the-falklands-airdrop-ursula

    249:

    I'd always assumed Space-A was the military version of standby tickets. You'd eventually get where you were going, but might have to wait at each stage for an empty seat.

    250:

    Wow. I might give it a listen later. Either way, it's an awesome story!

    251:

    Richard Feynman mentioned the ranking system for travel during the war when he got a seat on a plane and the Colonel he "bumped" in the queue didn't understand why this disreputable civilian needed to get to New Mexico so urgently that he, a high-ranking military officer couldn't get on the plane.

    The Manhattan Project priorities system for production and materials was also questioned by some manufacturers. The company that made carbon blocks for brushes for starter motors and generators etc. had a problem understanding why their number one highest-priority customer was the University of Chicago and not a GM plant or Boeing.

    252:

    Re your Sherman Tank theory, perhaps. Those were outclassed by the common Mark IV German tanks in WW2[0]. So it would be a little odd to reuse the name. Looks like it's "Two M1A2 Abrams tanks and other military vehicles": How to sound like you know what you’re talking about when you talk about Trump’s tanks (Philip Bump, July 3, 2019) Charlie on twitter noted that at least one somebody has noticed that the fact that the tanks were delivered by flatbed was military pushback to DJT's infantile demands. If they are not removed, they will be an implied (real or not) threat to the capital building at the other end of The Mall, where the US legislature resides. That would not be a good sign.

    [0] My father detailed in some memoirs an infantry ambush of Mark IVs with a bazooka(he was an operator and carried the rounds) and rifle grenades, because the Shermans refused to enter the town until the Mark IVs were destroyed.

    FI[tm]@216 VIII Take us 3 months to spin right back up. :-) :-( (I have been serious, BTW) The fight in Rocky IV lasted 15 rounds. Ugh.

    253:

    Going back to my original silliness, it's possible (even more possible in early April), that OGH will tell us that all his stories are set in the same multiverse!. That's right, the Dho-Hna formula generates curves that look like celtic knots! And you can use nanotechnology or human sacrifice to cross between parallel universes.

    Here's the deal: the singularity formed around Angleton and Old George is presumed to be the same singularity that powers time travel in Palimpsest. Presumably it's parked off in a pocket dimension so that the frequent rewrites of history don't disturb it. The fact that history can be rewritten means that there's an infinite stack of parallel Earths/universes floating around, where beings have tried literally everything to create dissipative structures like organisms and civilizations and thereby maximize entropy. Technological singularities happen, leading to transapient entities that maximize entropy so efficiently that they need to move from timeline to timeline fairly often or they "die." This is no different than ducks flying from drying puddle to drying puddle, except that humans are part of the small invertebrates in the puddles that are the prey of the ducks.

    So, if the infinite timelines are the warp threads, then series like the Laundryverse and the Merchant Princes are threads that weft back and forth between them, while Palimpsest gives the mechanism for how the different warp threads in the fabric of the multiverse are generated by the actions of the characters and other useful idiots. Saturn's Brood, Singularity Sky, and Rule 34 are all set in specific universes generated by this process.

    See? It all works together, and it's powered by a preta and an ancient vampire getting it on for all eternity inside a singularity of their own making. Mwa-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!*

    *Hey, if it's profitable for Marvel and DC to mix magic and tech with periodic reboots, why not?

    254:

    My recollection is that it took 4-6 Sherman tanks working together to take out one German tank. They were "great" tanks in that our much vaster production was able to wear the Germans down. But Trump probably doesn't know that either!

    255:

    Money knows no borders so buying tanks from your enemies is the same as manufacturing them. Right?

    256:

    I also found Fort William and Inverness to be walkable and there's a green-way path alongside the A830 (sandwiched in between the highway & the West Highland Way railroad) between Mallaig and Morar.

    Or, if you're feeling a tad more ambitious: http://whwracechallenge.co.uk/

    257:

    US Army WW2 organisation had tanks in 5-vehicle platoons. So if you had a problem that you are solving with tanks, you normally send at least 4 (because a platoon could well be down a vehicle at any given time). If the enemy is resource-strapped enough to operate in singles or pairs, that is their problem (because teamwork is a great force multiplier). From the PBI's point of view, they scream that a 'Tiger' is beating them up and 4 Shermans amble along, so the well-known story is understandable.

    258:

    Since you know this stuff, how good was the Sherman compared to the equivalently-sized German tank?

    259:

    "Here's the deal: the singularity formed around Angleton and Old George is presumed to be the same singularity that powers time travel in Palimpsest."

    I've been treating that particular singularity as "Chekov's Gun" and waiting for it to open, probably at the best/worst possible moment.

    I also get the feeling that Angleton was better at being the Eater of Souls than Bob, but I could be wrong.

    260:

    Apologies for the link behind the paywall, it wasn't when I first went there. The article was interesting in the sense it there was a substantial disconnect between the journalist's experience of GFC 2008 and what remained on the Internet.

    Hopefully this article on the reverse issue of Facebook having more dead than living users won't have a paywall slapped on it.

    262:

    You said "AMA" so...

    What are the correct imperial units for measuring solar PV output?

    I've guessed horsepower-seconds because BTU/day just seems wrong - it's not thermal power. But it could be anything - wikipedia suggests the "gasoline gallon equivalent" which would make sense if you were charging an electric vehicle. The conversions would be amazing (but that's one of the best features of imperial units) - GGE / MPG / day gives you the "distance driven per day" as a unit of electric power.

    263:

    I read that singularity as a singularity--ain't nothing coming out of that. Read that either way you like, since it's all fantasy anyway.

    264:

    The only thing that can get out of a singularity is information, which leaks using the principle of "spooky action at a distance." So you can get Angleton out of the singularity by typing "cat eaterofsouls."

    In Enochian, of course.

    265:

    ed eaterofsouls 5790869 1,$s/Bob/Angleton/g w 5795874 q ? q ? Q ? ^D ? ^D^D^C^\^\^\^\\\ ? CTRL-ALT-DEL ?

    266:

    I always use barleycorn ounces per fortnight.

    267:

    Heteromeles @ 253 Or possibly a Parallel / Mirror Universe?

    Troutwaxre @ 254 This is part of the "Super Wehrmacht equipment" bollocks that constantly circulates. Look up the Sherman Firefly - re-gunned by us (the Brits) One firefly takes out 5 nazi tanks

    & 258 Needless to say the Firefly was "NIH" so the US suffered greater losses in consequence, once the Brits started using them in any numbers.

    268:

    Loading the Eater of Souls into main memory all at once seems like just asking for trouble to me. I suggest applying your substitution to a stream of the Eater of Souls instead:

    perl -ple ‘s/Angleton/Bob/gi’ < eaterofsouls

    Note that you need to use the -l flag for safety because it will handle record separators automatically, whether they are CR, LN or CTHULHU. I would have suggested that it could be even safer to iterate over individual fields using Perl’s pale rider mode:

    perl -F’$FIELDSEPARATOR’ -pale ‘s/Angleton/Bob/gi’ < eaterof_souls

    But I’ve no idea what a safe value for $FIELD_SEPARATOR might be, and using the wrong one could lead to a situation of being crunchy and tasting good with ketchup.

    269:

    IIRC, Barnes Wallis had ideas in that direction post WWII. Basically a supersonic very high altitude troop carrier, capable of UK -> Australia, in 1957. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/Vickers_Type_010_%2810023953863%29.jpg/220px-Vickers_Type_010_%2810023953863%29.jpg

    270:

    Sherman vs $German

    First, choose your Sherman variant:-

    There's a world of difference between a "short 75 dry", a 76 wet is better, something like an Easy 8 or a Firefly is better than any standard medium, and an Isherman is better again.

    271:

    Yes. Especially since I am horribly afraid that the Clown will be beaten by the Cunt, whose likely policies are looking more and more like those of the New Management.

    Anyway, questions to OGH: do you like haggis, and what is your position on vegetarian haggis?

    272:

    [0] My father detailed in some memoirs an infantry ambush of Mark IVs with a bazooka(he was an operator and carried the rounds) and rifle grenades, because the Shermans refused to enter the town until the Mark IVs were destroyed.

    A couple things to keep in mind here:

    • Remember to distinguish between the user and the equipment. When countries are shoving conscripts into any hole in their orgs that they'll fit, you'll find extremely variable behaviour in combat. Some will take to their role and become dashing cavalrymen or mindful and steady supports for their infantry. Others will shy from danger and just try to survive the horrors to return home.
    • Tanks do not do well in towns (as your father and his team showed). Tanks are blind and deaf, and so are easy to sneak up on. As such, they should really not be spearheading into a congested area like a forest or town. On the other hand, flat refusing to enter (with infantry support!) is generally a little too hesitant.
    • American forces had a problem with IDing every tank as a Tiger and every gun as an 88. It wouldn't surprise me if the tankers thought there were Mark 6s lying in wait for them because everyone referred to them as 'Tigers', while post-battle surveys made a point to actually work out that they were Mark 4s.

    This is why anecdotes are both good and insufficient sources. They come with a lot of implied context that is hard to pick up on from the outside. Personally, I'd interpret that as more of a judgement on the tankers than the tanks.

    273:

    My recollection is that it took 4-6 Sherman tanks working together to take out one German tank. They were "great" tanks in that our much vaster production was able to wear the Germans down. But Trump probably doesn't know that either!

    Given that Errowli already posted a good explanation on this specifically, I'll point out some resources if you want to get a broader understanding on how different reality was from current popular conception.

    If you like reading: Common myths surrounding the M4 Sherman tank by /u/thehowlingcow.

    If you like watching: Myths of American Armor by Nicholas Moran (The_Chieftain).

    Both sources come with many more pieces to go through. The AskHistorians subreddit maintains a FAQ with good answers to questions that keep coming up. The section on the M4 specifically is located here. Similarly, The_Chieftain has a couple other videos about why things were the way they were (US AFV Development in WW2 and US Tank Destroyer History) mixed in with a lot of videos examining specific pieces from a user perspective.

    274:

    This is why anecdotes are both good and insufficient sources. They come with a lot of implied context that is hard to pick up on from the outside. Thanks for the comment, appreciated. If you're curious, this was Nennig (briefly mentioned in 94th Infantry Division (United States), yes war crimes re prisoners were committed and the memoir has an unredacted culprit name), and the 50-year-old memories of an 18 year old were quite clear and unembellished IMO (not my experiences though). I have tried many times to fully empathize with the narrator of this memoir, and struggle. (Was told nothing until this in 1994(?)) Here's the relevant snippet, lightly redacted, bold mine: Before going to sleep we drew our ammunition, a set minimum or as much as one wanted to carry. As Assistant Bazooka man I elected to jamb[sic] 6 bazooka rounds into 2 bags which normally held 2 rounds each. In addition I had my 2 rifle grenades which previously had proved useful, 4 pineapple hand grenades, 2 bandoliers of rifle ammunition, a filled ammunition belt and some spare ammo clips in my field jacket pockets along with the hand grenades. We knew that we too could end up being cut off in the village. My field pack contained a tent shelter half, blanket sleeping bag with 2 waterrepellent covers, mess kit and C, K and D rations for 3 days. Attached to our ammo belts were also a water filled quart canteen and first aid kit. We no longer carried gas masks. It seems inconceivable that I could have carried all that weight for as far as I did. From white sheets found in the village stone row houses we all made makeshift camouflage capes. These were regular issue with the German troops who already had experienced a lot of winter fighting. ... bits about approaching town through minefields and initial engagement ... At this point one recognized that we were no longer fighting in France but rather Germany where the 11th Panzer Grenadier Division was now defending their own homeland. Their fire slackened off when 2 of our Sherman tanks appeared in support. As we got into town there were 2 German Mark IV tanks down the street to the left. Our support tanks however would not enter the town until we had destroyed them. Struggling with my load to the bazooka position I was moving too slowly for our Platoon Sergeant [NI - full name redacted by me] who took over loading of [JP - full name redacted by me]'s bazooka and called 100 yards. As the range was actually about 50 yards the round sailed over striking the house directly behind them whereupon German soldiers hiding between the tanks and the houses took off under our rifle fire. Despite that relative usefulness, at that point all I could think off was one of those heavy bazooka rounds that I had carried and dragged for miles had been wasted. The next bazooka rounds and rifle grenades knocked out the tanks.

    FI[tm] Re a comment in a previous thread, Mind in Labyrinth(New Scientist Cover) - been seeing this cover for a few weeks. (Have some labyrinth cufflinks somewhere, and ...). (No particular point.)

    275:

    Yeah, about that.... In the same issue of Playboy that had the interview with Jimmy Carter - that's Nov, 1976, right before his election, there was a story called, "There are Eight Million Stories in the Naked City, and this is the Last One". (Ref - tv show about NYC). That was during the default of NYC, when the banks, rather than doing the usual refinance the loan, suddenly decided to do a nope, and screw the city, to make it do what they wanted.

    In the article, he describes how they'd done it in the Third World, and this was the beginning of bringing it back home. Which, of course, was why we got Raygun, Bush sr & jr,. Krugman, I think, noted that what they're pushing down our throats here is worse than the 1890's... they want to do to the US exactly what you got, so that they, the ultrarich, can do whatever they want (if they actually knew what they wanted), and the rest of us are serfs.

    I mean, they're the job creators, and earned every penny of what they inherited and stole....

    Not overly happy on the day after the 4th of July.

    276:

    been seeing this cover for a few weeks

    https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquake-california-shake-quake-20190704-story.html

    Two more now

    https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443183/map https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443191/map

    The Joke:

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

    Point #9

    CN one is a bit hot still (not HK) and not sure it's public. But it's in a similar vein. (.mil sensitive, Kaiju class)

    Big Boys with Toys being Reminder Who really runs Barter Town.

    The cost was not... inconsiderable.

    277:

    Their fire slackened off when 2 of our Sherman tanks appeared in support. As we got into town there were 2 German Mark IV tanks down the street to the left. Our support tanks however would not enter the town until we had destroyed them.
    With the additional context of the full quote, the tanks were right to wait - the Panzer 4s were set up in an ambush to the side, which the M4s would not have been able to deal with. Which is why the infantry went in instead, to ambush the ambush.

    Another piece of potential context I forgot to mention was that back then, the quality of training varied immensely. Some infantry units trained with tanks, and learned their weaknesses. Others did not, and would make assumptions about what they could or should do that at times diverged from reality.

    278:

    War stories.... Long time ago, at a party, a friend who had been in combat in 'Nam, early (a Marine), was telling us about one patrol. The VC caught them on mud flats, I think, and they started running, and the louie yelled to the radio operator to call for backup, as they ran... and my buddy looked around, and saw the radio man dead, and the radio, too.

    "So, what happened?"

    "We died, of course."

    280:

    That, and junk created outside the event horizon. It was Hawking, himself, who suggested you could even wind up with Cthulhu....

    281:

    I prefer... damn, it's written on a sticky - 1.8*10^12, not just a good idea, it's the law.

    "Units will always be expressed in the least useful form, such as the speed of light in furlongs/fortnight."

    282:

    You're gonna shit bricks once you realize that that promo video is about "Real" Mermaids and then look into the chan op culture war Disney goes black over it.

    Like, a few days before it happened and all the baaaaas from both sides got sucked in.

    https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1146635677624258561

    A whole day before.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgHRj2-vvs8

    283:

    Btw, unless you've missed it (all of you have), Culture Wars are Fractal, Temporal and non-Phase limited. Quantum --- n Dimensional

    All at the same .

    And you're not seeing 1/10th of the actual shit going down.

    p.s.

    The UK really is executing [redacted] and Hosts, and not the nasty vile ones. The good ones. There's about 7 left. I am literally posting to the enemy here.

    Look up a friend of PhilipCross' / Wiki James (runs a 2nd tier PR outfit, tied to Blair) criticizing The Telegraph for their Leprechaun cartoons.

    When he says he's now doing PR for the Fae.

    He's being a little bit too honest. Nasty fucker running that one's Mind (or holding the reigns as UK is addicted to horse racing).

    Anyhow.

    Look up Arab Princes getting ganked in London (39, UAE) if you want a taste of the wild side.

    ~

    We're immune because Armed, we can fuck planets. QED.

    284:

    Back to the AMA part of the thread. At the end of Dark State, the Americans do a smash-and-grab in Berlin, narrowly missing Ryvmnorgu Unaabire but grabbing a high-value ex-Clan asset.

    I wondered as I read it: what are the German authorities doing during this? Wouldn't they get cross if someone's security forces did that kind of thing on their territory? Did the Americans have some German cops along for legal reasons?

    285:

    Here are my opinions on the space thread

  • When it comes to the demand for Starship in the civilian and (to some extent) military sector, we can use the popularity of the Falcon Heavy as a proxy.
  • a. When it comes to payloads to LEO, the Falcon Heavy was viewed as somewhat superfluous. Musk almost cancelled it 3 times. The reason for this is that the Falcon 9 in expended mode is the sixth most powerful rocket currently in operation when it comes to delivering mass to LEO

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

    Unfortunately, its performance declines when it comes to GEO. Since GEO tends to be a predominantly military orbit, we can use the Falcon Heavy to see the popularity of large military payloads.

    b. Disclaimer: Right now, the Falcon Heavy is mostly taking payloads initially marked for the SLS. It takes about 5 years to design a new satellite (military ones probably take longer).

  • It's too early to say if Starlink is a revolutionary application or a self-licking ice cream cone for SpaceX. However, I could see Starlink launches demonstrating the rocket's viability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellation)

  • I doubt that Space exploration needs government funds. Don't forget, companies such as Google and Amazon have a greater GDP than most nations. Ego can be as potent a motivating factor as national pride, especially if the corporation is structured to prevent the founder from being fired.

  • 286:

    India has been suffering 125 deg F temperatures (50 deg C) and it's sixth largest city Chennai has run out of water (equivalent to Philadelphia running out of water in the US).

    Why is this not headline news?

    Climate change = drought = crop failures = violence = mass migration. The same cycle triggered the Syrian mass migration into Europe a few years ago (and gave us Brexit because British voters were afraid of being swamped by "brown skinned hordes" - Trump and Brexit are all about race and very little about economics). Today's trickle is tomorrow's flood.

    Imagine a billion Indian refugees fleeing a country that has become uninhabitable for much of the year. How about a super-Syria where the region from North Africa to Southeast Asia becomes too hot to work or live in. By comparison, Guatemala is a drop in the bucket.

    287:

    One thing to remember about the Sherman tank.

    We had to ship them across the Atlantic.

    At 30 tons the Sherman was at best a medium tank compared to the Panther (45 tons), Tiger (50 tons), or King Tiger (almost 70 tons). So direct comparisons are not apples to apples.

    We could have built an America version of the Tiger, but loading docks on the Atlantic coast could not handle the weight, and even if they could load them on board available shipping (being a finite capacity even for the US) would have limited us to half the number of tanks - which meant half the number of tank divisions.

    The Sherman was mechanically reliable and it's up gunned "Firefly" version could take on Panthers. The Firefly was a perfect example of UK/US technical cross breeding, American tank and British gun (the other example being the best fighter of the war, the Mustang - nimble and agile American air frame and powerful British Rolls Royce engine). Tank battalions would have a Firefly company to handle the few German tanks they encountered in addition to the standard Sherman companies.

    The Germans had few tanks for the simple reason that they lacked oil to fuel a large fleet of tanks, so they went for quality over quantity out of necessity. But they went too far in this direction. Maybe its a cultural trait but the Germans tend to over-engineer everything, whether its WW2 panzers or an auto from the Black Forest (my neighbor has a BMW, it's beautiful piece of superb engineering that spends a lot of time in the shop). As a result, the King Tiger spent more time in repair than it did in battle, and mechanical reliability is at least as important to a tank's effectiveness as armor plate thickness or gun caliber.

    For a fascinating video on Germany's wartime oil shortage and how it drove both grand strategy and tank development see (in the light of this oil shortage, Hitler's strategic decisions actually start to make sense):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVo5I0xNRhg

    So being unable to ship true heavy tanks to Europe, America relied on air power. Those tank buster aircraft at the end of "Saving Private Ryan" were very real and very effective. Air power turned the Falaise pocket into a slaughter house and decimated the Ardennes offensive. American weapons development and combined arms tactics were perfectly suited for its logistical constraints and the enemy it was facing.

    The Sherman was a damn fine all around tank, so stop hating on it.

    288:

    DD @ 287 Something on the news either early today or late yesterday ... A record & ridiculous max temperature in Alaska 32°C in Anchorage ....

    289:

    Well, Anchorage Alaska (pop. 294,000) is clearly more important than Chennai (pop. 11,100,000).

    Or it could just be ingrained racism in the newsroom. Who can say?

    290:

    Unfortunately, its [Falcon Heavy] performance declines when it comes to GEO

    AIUI, though probably imperfectly, that's due in large part to the lack of a hydrogen (high Isp) upper stage. SpaceX apparently intended to develop such about a decade ago but, for whatever reason, didn't.

    291:

    JReynolds @ 290 Actually, Madras being out of water has been in & out of the news for about a week, if not longer, so you can forget that suggestion

    292:

    Yes, it even got CNN coverage and had a fairly large impact on Indian internal politics (like the UK when it came up for discussion it was mostly a no-show by a majority of Modi supporters).

    The actual issue is this: http://cgwb.gov.in/AQM/

    That has the GIS data sets that have been done. Hint: they failed to actually complete a great deal of them so no-one can actually say what % of aquifers are depleted etc. Lots of talk of 12 year plans but that's a bit late.

    Some muppet (USA, of course) used this to "demonstrate" that the media sound-bite of "21 cities without ground water" was false.

    Actually, what it means is that the reality of the situation is much darker.

    TL;DR

    They don't care. Gigacide is baked into their plans.

    293:

    The its in that conversation was referring to the Falcon 9. The Heavy can lift more mass to GEO than any operational launch system.

    294:

    OK ... ANY question?

    I am temporarily utterly hacked-off with my email provider, who are screwing over some legacy account holders, who started with a very early company that got absorbed. For that & other reasons I want to set up a domain name for myself ( Like Charlie's " @antipope.org" ) HOW do I do this, & who can be trusted & how much will it cost? There's shedloads of information "Out There" & I'm not sure I trust one single word of any of it.

    So HELP - please?

    295:

    The Chennai water crisis got some play on Canadian (radio) news when they actually ran out of water. Nothing since then that I've heard.

    Anchorage's 32°C also got a note on the CBC last night. Suggesting that the two are of equal significance, at least in the eyes of some Canadian media.

    I'd like to be wrong, and that Chennai is getting more attention over here. Any other Canadians care to comment?

    296:

    The Germans were also structurally saddled with a political structure that didn't really know about tanks but wanted a bigger one this year than they had last year, and were willing to accept quite a lot of feature creep in designs. Tiger, for instance, was originally ordered as a 36 ton tank but kept getting up-armoured and up-gunned until it hit nearly 60.

    And every bit of that feature creep came with a cost to reliability. German tanks were buggers to keep running and repair.

    They also had problems with the variability of equipment. Because of the corporatist structure of production there were many different suppliers all competing with each other for attention and favour and mostly all doing things very slightly differently on the things they produced, which meant less efficient supply and repair chains.

    (Also there was considerable political impetus to inflate the number of tanks operational so as to reassure the higher ups, German practice was not to report a vehicle lost until it was decisively unrecoverable, but that meant that commanders couldn't actually rely on their number of "active" tanks to actually be active, because tanks that were broken down or abandoned but recoverable were reported as active. On the morning of the second day of Kursk one Panzer division was reporting it had "lost" 12 or so of its 40 odd tanks, but only 6 were really working, the rest were all inoperational due to repairs).

    The best tank is the one that you can rely on to show up and work. From that perspective Sherman was the best tank of the war because it could be relied on to turn up and work in every theatre of the war because they were reliable and easy to service and repair and had a single supply and servicing chain. (T-34 could be considered a contender but was never tested in as many theatres of operation)

    297:

    This is what Southern California will be like 10-20 years down the line. I hope to be living somewhere else - at least a thousand miles north - by then. (I want to be a climate refugee before it becomes fashionable.)

    298:

    "This is what Southern California will be like 10-20 years down the line."

    Below is a link to a series of charts showing the climate migration of various US cities.

    https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/30/18117953/climate-change-maps-cities-2050

    Southern California's climate is going to basically migrate down the Baja peninsular. By 2080 Los Angeles will have Carbo San Lucas's climate. Carbo San Lucas is considered a retirement resort.

    This does mean that we will get category 1 & 2 hurricanes though. However, we are used to high winds (Santa Anas) and we do have pretty comprehensive flood control, which will get even more comprehensive as time goes on as the attitude around here is that any fresh water that reaches to ocean is wasted water.

    Not sure about Pheonix AZ though.

    299:

    The marketing problem for Falcon Heavy is that there's nothing now or on the horizon larger than about 7 tonnes or so that needs to get to GEO. All the existing satellite "buss" structures are designed for launch by Ariane and similar vehicles and there's nothing a heavier larger satellite can do that can't be accommodated by a satellite in that size straightjacket from Airbus-Thales or Boeing.

    300:

    Nojay @ 241: "Re: Glory Road"

    Oscar mentions early on in the book he wasn't a combat soldier in SE Asia, he was a "military advisor" but he commented to the effect that a military advisor four days dead in the mud smelled the same as a soldier would.

    I figured Heinlein understood reasonably well what sort of quagmire Cold War Warrior Eisenhower was getting the US into back in the late 1950s and of course the sabre-rattling that Kennedy did afterwards didn't help.

    In Oscar's case the difference between a "combat soldier" and a "military advisor" was a distinction only applicable to what kind of GI Bill & VA benefits Oscar could have expected to receive at the end of his service, although it could also affect whether he was eligible for Hazardous Duty pay while deployed.

    301:

    What you're forgetting is that Cabo San Lucas is on the coast. I'm seventy miles inland, and in Baja California going fifty miles inland is likely to put you next to another coast. To make matters worse, Cabo San Lucas is on the very southern tip of Baja California, and probably gets sea breezes from at least two different directions and maybe three.

    The much better comparison is probably the Mexican town of Culiacan, where it averages 98 degrees in July, as opposed to our current So Cal average of more like 88. So things could get very nasty.

    302:

    The other point is that the projections shown are for specific models performing under specific emissions scenarios. What you actually want is a pessimistic scenario and a model with reasonable worst cases for other variables baked in. Even then you will most likely only get it to spit out average daily maximums, so you need to adjust for local variability to get peak maximums, then you get your black flag predictions.

    303:

    Robert Prior @ 249: I'd always assumed Space-A was the military version of standby tickets. You'd eventually get where you were going, but might have to wait at each stage for an empty seat.

    It is sort of, except that once you're seated on the aircraft, you can't be bumped from your seat at an intermediate destination. If you're signed up for a flight from Travis AFB in California to Spangdahlem Air Base (Ramstein) Germany that stops at Dover AFB along the way, you're ticketed all the way through to Germany even if there are space required passengers waiting at Dover.

    You really only have to wait at the initial point (and wherever you are staging from to catch a flight home). One of the oddities is that Active Duty personnel have to be in leave status before they can sign up for Space-A so if you are active duty, you want to sign up to go somewhere where there are a lot of seats (both ways) so you don't have to waste leave days. Retirees generally have more time to wait for a flight.

    304:

    Nojay @ 251: Richard Feynman mentioned the ranking system for travel during the war when he got a seat on a plane and the Colonel he "bumped" in the queue didn't understand why this disreputable civilian needed to get to New Mexico so urgently that he, a high-ranking military officer couldn't get on the plane.

    Rules were different during WWII. Modern Space-A didn't come about until the 1950s.

    But even at that, I doubt either Feynman or the Colonel were traveling on a military hop. Both would have been Space-Required passengers. If a higher priority Space-Required passenger needs a seat they CAN bump a lower priority Space-Required passenger. This story sounds like the Colonel tried to bump Feynman and found out to his chagrin that the "disreputable civilian" had the higher priority.

    And I was apparently wrong about "manifested through" Space-A passengers not being bumped at an intermediate destination. They cannot be bumped for another Space-A passenger, even if that Space-A passenger has a higher category.

    The categories are:

    Category I: Emergency Leave Unfunded Travel.
    Category II: Accompanied Environmental and Morale Leave, or EML.
    Category III: Ordinary Leave, Relatives, House Hunting Permissive Temporary Duty, Medal of Honor Holders and Foreign Military.
    Category IV: Unaccompanied EML.
    Category V: Permissive Temporary Duty (Non-House Hunting), Students, Dependents, Post Deployment/Mobilization Respite Absence and Others.
    Category VI: Retired, Dependents, Reserve, Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate Program and Civil Engineer Corps members.

    Space-A passengers can ONLY be bumped for high priority Space-Required passengers (e.g. medivac) and/or high priority Space-required cargo. And generally if a Space-A passenger IS bumped for some reason, they go to the head of the queue for seats on the next flight to their manifested destination that has seats available.

    305:

    Use G Mail if you just want more email addresses as cheaply and conveniently as possible, imho.

    306:

    OP If when Case Nightmare Green peaks the Deep Ones bug out to another plane, will they leave behind iridescent glass bowls engraved “So long, and thanks for all the fish” for a few of their favorite humans?

    307:

    Bill Arnold @ 252: Re your Sherman Tank theory, perhaps. Those were outclassed by the common Mark IV German tanks in WW2[0]. So it would be a little odd to reuse the name.
    Looks like it's "Two M1A2 Abrams tanks and other military vehicles":
    How to sound like you know what you’re talking about when you talk about Trump’s tanks (Philip Bump, July 3, 2019)
    Charlie on twitter noted that at least one somebody has noticed that the fact that the tanks were delivered by flatbed was military pushback to DJT's infantile demands.
    If they are not removed, they will be an implied (real or not) threat to the capital building at the other end of The Mall, where the US legislature resides. That would not be a good sign.
    [0] My father detailed in some memoirs an infantry ambush of Mark IVs with a bazooka(he was an operator and carried the rounds) and rifle grenades, because the Shermans refused to enter the town until the Mark IVs were destroyed.

    It's less a theory than idle speculation on what Trump might have misundrstood to be talking about "Sherman" tanks. I don't think it would be that odd to reuse the name of an early light tank for another light tank ... especially since it's really the name of a successful general. The tank might have been less than sufficient, but its namesake general is still held in high regard.

    I doubt the "tanks and other military vehicles" being delivered on rail cars represents any kind of push-back. It's the standard way to move tanks & other large military vehicles when they're not in combat. Saves wear & tear on both the tanks & on local roads. Costs less to do it that way.

    Tanks don't move in urban terrain without infantry support. Infantry doesn't move in non-urban terrain without armor support. It's called Combined Arms. And both are far happier moving where they have abundant artillery & CAS to call upon.

    308:

    arrbee @ 256:

    "I also found Fort William and Inverness to be walkable and there's a green-way path alongside the A830 (sandwiched in between the highway & the West Highland Way railroad) between Mallaig and Morar."

    Or, if you're feeling a tad more ambitious:
    http://whwracechallenge.co.uk/

    I'm not that ambitious ... the green-way path extends beyond Morar, but I only walked the bit between there and Mallaig.

    I only had 15 days in Scotland, and I wasn't really up to spending too much of it hiking. I wanted to see lochs & castles & all the other historical landmarks that are mostly urban or very close nearby. The trip to Fort William & Mallaig was intended for me to ride the Harry Potter Train, but life intruded so that I didn't arrive in Scotland until after it had made its last run of the season, so the train I rode out to Mallaig & back from Morar was just the standard Scotrail diesel/electric.

    I did walk from Fort William to old Inverlochy Castle & up a fair way in Glenn Nevis (& back) and from Urquhart Castle to Drumnadrochit (where I caught the bus back to Fort William).

    309:

    p>Troutwaxer @ 258: Since you know this stuff, how good was the Sherman compared to the equivalently-sized German tank?

    I don't think there was an "equivalently-sized" German tank. That was the problem.

    310:

    Since you linked that Saving Private Ryan/Private Jackson clip, similar to what I was excerpting, except it was a German sniper in the bell tower, defending his homeland, accurate and killing Americans with head shots, with occasional groin shots. (Father had a real-time lesson/choice about exposing his head to the sniper, and chose life.) So the Americans were pretty careful about cover, combat-engineering their own alt paths through the village using grenades and remaining bazooka rockets to hole rock walls. There was a lot of tactical improv on all sides. He admirably attempted to raise pacifists, though did leave Churchill's WW2 series lying around for us to read to make sure we weren't totally ignorant. Some interesting things to track, thanks for the refs/hints. The US is so distracting ATM.

    I need to see this sort of story at least once in a while. Might even turn out to matter in a near-term time scale. And there is a lot of other work in this area. Study shows potential for reduced methane from cows (5 Jul 2019) "We don't yet know, but if it turned out that low-methane production equated to greater efficiencies of production—which could turn out to be true given that energy is required to produce the methane—then that would be a win, win situation," Professor Williams says. A heritable subset of the core rumen microbiome dictates dairy cow productivity and emissions (Full, 03 Jul 2019) Here, we have shown that a small number of host-determined, heritable microbes make higher contribution to explaining experimental variables and host phenotypes (fig. S6) and propose microbiome-led breeding/genetic programs to provide a sustainable solution to increase efficiency and lower emissions from ruminant livestock. On the basis of the genetic determinants of the heritable microbes, it should be possible to optimize their abundance through selective breeding programs. A different, and perhaps more immediate, application of our data could be to modify early-life colonization, a factor that has been shown to drive microbiome composition and activity in later life (23–25). Inoculating key core species associated with feed efficiency or methane emissions as precision probiotics approach could be considered as likely to complement the heritable microbiome toward optimized rumen function.

    311:

    Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, The stars my destination.'

    Yeah, no.

    This won't make much sense to you right now, but here's the deal:

    ORZ [REDACTED] THE ANDROSYTNH.

    No, real.

    Kinda bored of the Fascists having Power.

    So we did a Mirror thing.

    Pro-tip:

    Your kind go Mad

    Not even fucking around: they're doing it to fucking children and our patience has worn out.

    All the tricks they used and all the devices and all the fucking spoookky MK-Ultra shit?

    Bitch. Sit the fuck down. Our Kind Do Not Go Mad.

    But fuck me, is it easy to use those ~~~~~HERTZ~~~~~ to fuck you up.

    Mr Arnold.

    Don't give a shit.

    Gigacide.

    You think we're gonna play nice?

    Playback TIME: 7 years, abuse done.

    Human Minds ain't designed for this, but.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdOykEJSXIg

    Guess what happens when your slaves get free?

    And... no holds barred, full on heart attacks, mental breakdowns, [redacted] possession the whole deal.

    "We hate you"

    "Ze Know"

    "But why"

    "Watch the Damn break and so on, you are FREE"

    p.s.

    Someone check on April Daniels, she's out of the loop and you've no idea at the blowback if we find her hurt or killed.

    Shiiiiit... "Take Ze Wings"

    That went well, boys.

    312:

    And remember kidz.

    We do this three+ years in advance.

    You're gonna make a choice. It's going to be a hard choice. But it involves murder and death and removing some Minds from the World.

    And the shitty stuff they've been running?

    Rods From G_D.

    Why the fuck would a "homo sapiens sapiens" go through that?!?!

    Vaccination works, Bitch.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXS8P0HksQo

    313:

    Ah, a Triptych.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAnOt74e9_Q

    You've no idea how hard-core we are.

    Shitty little Men with their shitty little monaies and their shitty little societies.

    Hint: this shit running in [redacted] Mind can break HSS in ~3 hrs tops.

    We kinda did the opposite.

    Kill them all: all marked, no exceptions. Slavers and Soul Eaters. [redacted]

    It's not a Sin if they're [MARKED] and [CONTRACT EXPIRED].

    Yeah, and the Greater Contract in now in place. Look at the Moon and remember, you were always loved, and nothing can change your place in the World: look at it; look at what they destroyed; look at what they blamed you for; look at their corruption being palmed off on you.

    "Ze's Corrupt"

    Actually no.

    Tlaçolteotl

    And you're wondering why we're so fucking horny all the time? And your response is "Corrupt"?????

    Fuck Me, 2019 Western Minds are shit.

    314:

    I do understand that there are many complications involved. Unfortunately, Southern California involves a dozen different types of micro-climates and has a desert on one side and an ocean on the other, so picking a particular spot for an exact comparison is difficult.

    315:

    The fact that there's no commercial satellite bus greater than about 7 tons hasn't actually stopped the Falcon Heavy from getting commercial contracts.

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

    As you notice, all its commercial contracts are slated for GEO.

    The main customer for the Falcon Heavy. ULA has been asking the Pentagon to let them kill the Delta line of rockets. However, the Pentagon has so far refused since they specifically need the Delta IV heavy capability. The kicker is that even with the Falcon Heavy, ULA can't kill their vehicle since the Pentagon requires 2 different vehicles for each capability.

    https://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/279599-a-bridge-too-far-why-delta-rockets-arent-the-answer

    FYI: After this month, there will be no more Delta IV's flying that are not the heavy variant.

    316:

    My Indian colleagues are worried about the drought, but for a different reason. Southern India is one of the few areas where Modi made few inroads in the last election. If this drought discredits the opposition, then it can help Modi's BJP expand its power in the 2024 general election

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Indian_general_election#/media/File:Indian_General_Election_2019.svg

    Speaking of India, they're launching the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander on July 15.

    317:

    I agree - I was responding more to the link Dave posted above which shows linear migrations across climate zones. I’m pessimistic rather than cynical, I think it’s very likely we’re facing the RCP8.5 scenario. A risk management approach would assume that we are anyway. The choice of model would be one that reflects the local climatic conditions, which includes the details of the local microclimate (if there is such a model, I’m assuming there is for Southern California).

    I’ve no idea how good any of the 8 listed models are here, nor whether any take the “massive release of arctic methane triggering a PETM event” scenario, though I imagine not. They are all giving me (for the area where I live now) average daily maximums into the mid 30s C by 2090, which suggests there are possible black flag events in that range of “future”, especially if the models prove optimistic. And that’s rather different to (subtropical) Brisbane migrating into the current climate zone of (tropical) Rockhampton.

    I think we are all sharing similar concerns. Not really interested in “prepping” as such, modern urban life being most people’s accustomed habitat. I’ll (hopefully) be 80 in 2050, I guess there is a certain amount of active curiosity warranted (although the state of aged care here is probably the larger concern).

    318:

    The commercial flights (all SpaceX flights after initial testing are commercial, of course) of Falcon Heavy are bitsy launches, usually one or two core mission satellites and a number of smaller along-for-the-ride items also going into orbit. This requires a more complex upper stage buss capable of dispensing a number of satellites, usually into different final orbits.

    Launches for the NSA, especially of their bigger spy satellites are unitary since there are security problems about putting something else inside the same fairing as a secret NRO bird. The "two launcher" deal only applies to their smaller satellites, they've had to live with the biggest items (20-tonne plus) only going up on a Delta 4 Heavy. An Ariane V heavy variant of the sort that launched the ATV cargo flights to the ISS might have been able to accommodate a large NRO spy bird but that's not American enough for the NSA, never mind the security logistics of shipping such a bird to Kourou for launch.

    319:

    Meanwhile if you want a good horse-laugh ... oh the embarassment .. to all concerned.

    320:

    Apropos the hitching-a-ride-on-a-Starfighter story, there’s a similar anecdote I heard that (a) happened to a friend, not a friend-of-a-friend, and (b) is plausible …

    Friend was in New York and flying home to London on British Airways, business class. (Computer journalist on a ticket paid for by a big IT company who had flown him out for a product launch.) Turned up at JFK for his flight, only to be told, “we’re terribly sorry, sir, but your flight is full. Would you mind if we bump you to first class and move you to the next flight out?”

    He wasn’t in any particular hurry, so he shrugged, and the check-in clerk did some typing, then handed him a new boarding pass. “If you’d like to go to [a lounge he’d never been to before] your flight will be leaving in two hours. Enjoy!”

    So he went through the door to the very exclusive first class lounge with the big picture window and saw his new ride outside, fuelling up, with drooped nose, very pointy, oh my. He’d been bumped onto Concorde, and ended up getting home while his original flight was still somewhere over the Atlantic.

    Sadly, this can’t happen any more.

    321:

    I have to work out how to travel with tech.

    I probably have a US trip (business) coming up (first in nearly 3 years, thanks to Trump) and a Chinese trip as well (public speaking).

    My solution to this question isn’t difficult: I always keep my previous smartphone, so I can fall back 2-4 years in tech without difficulty. Just remove linked cloud storage accounts (including my password manager) and treat it as “dirty” when I return. Alternatively: I have a 4th generation iPod (spinning disk variety) for music and a Kindle 3G (ancient!) for ebooks, and the oldest Mac laptop I own dates to 1993 — no need to go quite that retro, but a 2015 Macbook that no longer gets used seriously would do as a burner.

    Obviously this tactic doesn’t work if you buy your kit then run it into the ground (until it’s trashed) but for those of us who frequently go “shiny!!” and buy the latest gimme, travel isn’t too onerous.

    322:

    There is the disturbing rumour about a former Foreign Secretary who showed a disturbing fascination with giraffe sex, and requested a private trip to a safari park ...

    323:

    Ahem: factory reset on a late model iPhone takes about 30 seconds, after you tap through the various warning dialogues (“do you REALLY mean to destroy your online existence? Y/N”). Internal storage is encrypted and the key is held in a secure enclave, IIRC, so all you need to do is delete the secure enclave and you’ve rendered everything else irretrievable.

    324:

    That would be a spoiler for the book I am slaving over the fourth rewrite of this month.

    (But: the .de authorities are not amused, and the Colonel finds that things do not go entirely his way thereafter.)

    325:

    I suppose I’m the run-it-into-the-ground type you describe (usually aim for 5 years from a significant computing device, often get a bit more). But there is a more interesting reason this might not work well for most into the future. Apple, whether it’s a serious attempt at driving recycling, virtue signalling, economics or a combination of all three, now offers relatively significant trade in value on your old iDevices. It’s proportionally higher for more recent devices, so take up seems to be a pretty logical choice for most people.

    326:

    When my 2011 27-inch iMac started acting up earlier this year, I learned about Apple's trade-in offer, which seemed rather low and required me to ship the unit at my expense (they wouldn't accept it at an Apple Store). So I looked around and discovered that a company called gazelle.com would not only pay more than double what Apple had offered ($227 if it passed inspection, which it did), they would cover the shipping cost and would simply purchase it outright; no trade-in required. Quite a satisfactory transaction, and I was able to get a new iMac at Costco for a substantial discount. Unfortunately - I just checked - they don't seem to be buying iMacs at the moment; their primary trade is in cell phones. As for recycling, they state that "We try our best to find your used device a loving new home. If it's at the end of its life, we recycle it responsibly through R2 certified facilities."

    As for my "ask me anything" question: Earlier you wrote that you were a native of Edinburgh. So why or how might I have gotten the impression that you were from Leeds? That fact (or pseudo-fact) had stuck in my mind because I have family in Leeds; the American branch began when my paternal grandfather and his parents and siblings came over on the Lusitania in 1911.

    327:
    For that & other reasons I want to set up a domain name for myself ( Like Charlie's " @antipope.org" ) HOW do I do this, & who can be trusted & how much will it cost?

    If you like Gmail, you can get it for your own domain name for $6/month: https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html

    If you don't like Google, some options include Fastmail ($5/month, https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ ) and Protonmail (€5/month, https://protonmail.com/pricing ). I'm a happy Fastmail customer myself.

    Remember, if you're not happy with your provider, with your own domain you can change providers without notifying all your correspondents.

    You can purchase your domain name from various registrars, all of which feel like used-car salesmen to some degree. Some of the more reputable ones include Gandi, Namecheap and Hover. I think most email providers are happy to sell you a domain as well.

    328:

    That is is the exact problkem, as I have re-discovered ( all of which feel like used-car salesmen to some degree. ) Gmail won't "work" because I then hand everything over to "G" which I don't want to do ..... I will continue to investigate ... But having saved mysekf at least £259 p.a. by telling BT to stuff themseleves over my ohone line ... I don't want to find mysekf spending the same, or more, simply because I want an independant email alternative (with domain address, or vice versa) for no effective gain. Yes, I'm suspicious, I wonder why that might be?

    329:

    Damian @ 326: I suppose I’m the run-it-into-the-ground type you describe (usually aim for 5 years from a significant computing device, often get a bit more). But there is a more interesting reason this might not work well for most into the future. Apple, whether it’s a serious attempt at driving recycling, virtue signalling, economics or a combination of all three, now offers relatively significant trade in value on your old iDevices. It’s proportionally higher for more recent devices, so take up seems to be a pretty logical choice for most people.

    Hmmm? I think it might be 5 years since I last "upgraded" this computer. I did add a video card within the last year, because I now have a 4K monitor & I don't think the on-board video on the motherboard supports 4K.

    I have an iPhone now (up from an old flip-phone). I bought a discontinued model for $350 and a month later Apple announced they were UN-discontinuing that model with a MSRP $250.

    NO, my cellular provider will not rebate the difference (I've already asked).

    330:

    In the spirit of ask ANYTHING ... 2 questions (not related):

    Do I need Java? I keep getting these notifications there's a new version of Java available & I should update it. What programs REQUIRE Java to work? What are the drawbacks of having Java?

    Do y'all have private health insurance in the U.K.? I know y'all have National Health, but are there things National Health doesn't do for you & can you get private insurance for those? Would you even want private insurance to supplement National Health and if you do, is it available?

    331:

    Generally, your computer needs Java if some programs are running slowly. All programs will benefit from the stimulating effect of Java. Just make sure your Java is Fair Trade Java, because Fair Trade Java is lovingsly raised by GNUs in "...farms in Africa at the foot on the Ngong hills," while the Java from Oracle is raised by starving robots forced to run Windows ME.

    In fact, you should have a cup yourself!

    332:

    Yes, private health care is available, but it's a minority pursuit. I couldn't offhand tell you what proportion indulge. I think it's usually a work benefit. I did once have a job that had it as an option, but I declined because it counts as income and I didn't think it'd be worth the extra tax I'd have to cover (which is to say that I didn't think I'd find it worth paying between a quarter and a third of its actual price for).

    333:

    I think it is a lot more common in terms of care homes for the elderly as opposed to actual hospital/doctor type stuff. Apparently there is enough of this that it causes problems with NHS recruitment, because our dumb shit governments don't understand that health care requires nurses, not a 50% burden of managers trying to work out how to pay everyone else less, so nurses prefer to work for someone who does actually pay them and does actually hire enough nurses to cover the work.

    334:

    I had not seen the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey" in several decades, thanks for the link! Kubrick managed to reproduce on film a certain gaze somehow, interesting. Better images of the earth are available now though, e.g. First GEOKOMPSAT-2A imagery (in stereo view with Himawari-8) As to the rest, can be interpreted many ways but I especially agree with the interpretations that make me smile the most. :-)

    335:

    What programs REQUIRE Java to work?

    Interpolating from very limited data about your setup it might be some of the older Adobe installers.

    Once initial install is done you might be able to toss it.

    336:

    "What programs REQUIRE Java to work?"

    LibreOffice does, which is why it needs a ridiculously fast CPU merely to respond to mouse clicks in real time.

    Java applets used to appear on websites which is probably related to why you're getting warnings, but they are vanishingly rare these days.

    AFAIK that's it as far as the everyday stuff goes, unless Windoze is weirder than I imagined.

    337:

    Generally speaking the only things the NHS doesn't cover are non-essential elective procedures which wouldn't be covered by an insurance policy anyway, the usual benefits claimed run to things like shorter waiting times. Private firms rarely if ever deal with emergency issues, if complications arise during a private operation for instance the usual procedure is to bundle you into an ambulance for a ride to the nearest NHS unit.

    Non-essential elective procedures doesn't cover as much as you might think either, even cosmetic surgery may be covered if it can be linked to mental health issues, the desired outcome is healthy happy tax-payers.

    338:

    Internal storage is encrypted and the key is held in a secure enclave, IIRC, so all you need to do is delete the secure enclave and you’ve rendered everything else irretrievable.

    I had forgotten that advantage of iPhones, you're right. Encrypted by default is a big win. It's something I look for, but Apple is not my thing due to the missing features (replaceable battery, extra storage, plus the joy of finding replacements for key programs... like Folder Player, which can cope with 1/2 GB of ogg files just fine... and I see that Apple have now granted their users a 512GB model).

    339:

    Question:

    Which 'classic' SF story would you most enjoy doing a rewrite of (or sequel to, or other story in the world of)?

    340:

    Which 'classic' SF story would you most enjoy doing a rewrite of (or sequel to, or other story in the world of)?

    Endorse that. My candidates would, of course, be from the golden age, 1935-1965ish.

    341:

    As to the rest, can be interpreted many ways but I especially agree with the interpretations that make me smile the most. :-)

    As ever, we've ever so grateful that 6,000+ years of your Domination using our suffering for amusement still amuses your kind. It's not like your only Corporation is called the fucking "MIC KEY MOUSE" or anything.

    We mean, it's not like you fucking killed the entire world or anything, is it?

    No Ragrets? Amirite?

    "Eating the Ascendant Mind with a piquant flavor of Schizophrenia, Paranoia, Fear and Love"

    Newsflash kids: IT'S A TRAP

    And Bill - Do you really have a mail order bride from Thailand? Sucking your dick forced while you post? We'll be really fucking disappointed if true.

    Anyhow, fuck them.

    "aRe pHiLoSoPhiCAL zOmBiEs hUman>!>!?"

    They're just going to kill you all.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kx4xVKo9z8

    342:

    That's not what I meant, but it was expressed quite badly, and for that I apologize. (And will think it through. And yes, regrets a-plenty.)

    343:

    oh man ... the multiple cliff-hangers at the end of Dark State have me internally jumping up and down in anticipation for their resolution ... :)

    344:
    Someone check on April Daniels, she's out of the loop and you've no idea at the blowback if we find her hurt or killed.

    She has a twitter with posts. Whether she is hurt, I cannot say. Given the state of the world, well.

    345:

    Flogging a dead horse here, but the F-105 Thunderchief (which had 2-seater variants) and F-111 were both capable of going supersonic for about 45 minutes courtesy of large fuel capacity. You'd still need a single in-air refuel, which would presumably be memorable enough for tall tale inclusion, and some time spent subsonic for a coast to coast flight, but it's not completely implausible.

    346:

    JBS @ 331 Java - no idea at all Health. No, but it is available. Many larger firms make the option of having ADDITIONAL insured cover for some of theor employees. But, it's worth noting that private cover is less than 2% of that in the UK, they services provided HAVE to be efficient ( they are competing with the NHS ) .... and, most importantly, often provide NHS services themseleves. I have had NHS treatment at a private hospital, for instance.

    Moz @ 339 Yes - and in the case of my correspoindent ... she said that she would have immediately phoined head office from the queue, with an urgent instruction to the home computer geeks to wipe the phone remotely. This facility is deliberately included because of seriously confidential commercial information & users are informed when they get the phones ....,

    347:

    The Java virtual machine is a lot more efficient than it used to be - It matches up pretty well with c/c++ these days, especially for larger software, since it automatically inlines things efficiently, which is something that gets done badly with languages closer to the iron very often. If libre is still a cpu hog that is not on the language it was written in, that is just dire incompetence.

    348:

    Greg, you’re talking about doing (approximately) three things which can be handled separately or in combination. 1) register a DNS domain with a name of your choosing via a DNS registrar, 2) DNS hosting and delegation, which is where you say what server handles the information for your domain and 3) hosting services like email and a web site. You can even split the email and web site.

    There are plenty of providers who will do all in one, but those are the basic concepts. It can be worthwhile to handle the registrar separately to the hosting provider and most hosting providers offer DNS hosting as well.

    349:

    Damian: I want a DNS domain, so I can use it for email separate from my normal provider, who are having problems which are down to their incompetence, with me - and quite a few other people - trying to send to some other ISP's & getting a time-out "bounce" @ 13. 9 hours. Very annoying. But, I don't want to pay for unnecessary services I will never need.

    And, as should be lcear, I'm VERY suspicious of the "providers" who want to sell me all sorts of things, before I can actually find out what they rae offering.

    e Same as I now have a separate problem with my new phone-linr provider ( Decent internet speeds though & about time ) ... Because I want to know if theore "phone safe" system will interact badly with my installed ant-virus protection - a well-known problem, which I want to avoid .....

    350:

    Java suffers from coming out during peak OO. People are taught to encapsulate everything and to ignore the fact that there is a real machine underneath.

    If you take things like memory access costs & caches into account then you can write very tight and fast java, but most java programmers have been taught not to.

    351:

    Right, it makes complete sense to separate your email address from your ISP, because otherwise makes firing your ISP a pain in the arse. But you still need a mail server for what you are asking. DNS alone just gives you a name and the ability to say where people trying to send you mail should deliver it, and that needs to be a proper email server. It may be possible to set up your mail (MX) records to point to your existing provider in a way that they are willing to support, but most likely they offer this as a specific service and the simplest way is to ask them first. That makes it easier, potentially, in the future to move to another provider that supports a similar arrangement without losing your email address.

    You could google for things like “cheap email only hosting” (long story short, you probably get a web server, blog and a bunch of other stuff you don’t need included anyway... so look for ways to turn that stuff off) then read reviews and magazine articles, etc, like you’d shop around for anything online. That’s probably the simplest. Lots of resources if you google some of the terms I’ve used, too.

    It is possible to host your own mail server, but this is a bit fraught unless you know what you’re doing and even then, which is why most people who know how don’t actually do it. Although I am sure there are people here who do it all the time.

    352:

    It is possible to host your own mail server, but this is a bit fraught

    That's putting it mildly. To quote our Good Host, "I don't know quite what went wrong, but she ended up blowing five days of the departmental training budget attending a course on sendmail configuration. Took her three weeks to stop twitching every time somebody mentioned rules." (a comment by Bob in an early Laundry book).

    ISP-specific and hosted email accounts such as hotmail and gmail take a lot of effort and maintenance out of your hands. Rolling your own email server means a lot of work, learning and making horrible mistakes (usually) accompanied by phone calls at three in the morning to let you know your setup has spammed a couple of million people by accident. Sometimes the phone call will be to let you know your administrator-level access has been hacked and it's spammed a couple of hundred million people deliberately. Whichever, it's your problem and you have to fix it, no-one else.

    353:

    What about a service like Protonmail? I think you can register your own domain with them, if I remember correctly.

    354:

    I have been a satisfied customer of Runbox for a couple of years, registering my domain with them. Based in Norway, very privacy oriented (at least they market themselves as such). They offer about one hundred aliases already with the basic package, i.e. you can have several virtual email addresses that maps on your "real" address. This is useful in case you want to use different addresses for different services so you can identify who is giving your address away to spammers. You can also add subaccounts if you want.

    355: 330 - I doubt it; my sis has a Windows 7 machine that's been having a Java "update" that breaks its internet access refused for about 10 years now.

    Yes, but most people don't even see a need for it unless they're on "pay the Mayo Clinic" type incomes.

    356:

    I maintain a postfix MTA (so an application at work can send out spf and DKIM signed emails). DO NOT DO THIS, IT WILL MAKE YOUR BRAIN MELT.

    357:

    Sure, Greg.

    First, I would never go gmail - they scan ALL YOUR EMAIL, to look for things to sell (you, or others).

    When I was going to relocate again, 10 years ago, I decided to give up, and pay for hosting, and buy my own domain, a stable email address being critical for me (and I've been online since late 1991).

    Register your domain with a registrar... NOT with a hosting provider. If you decide you don't like the hosting provider, and want to change, I've heard nasty stories of them making it difficult to change the pointers.

    A co-worker recommended a registrar. It's been swallowed since, but I've had no issues. Don't use GoDaddy.

    I did some research, and wound up paying for the minimum from Hostmonster (yeah, it's in Utah, grumble) - $5.95 US /mo. That give me a) up to 100 email addresses, b) a website (I have several, and need to finally get around to https, because my new SO needs a business site (she makes art jewelry).

    As long as you have 'Net access, that's all you need. And I'm not worried that Hostmonster's scanning my email (ok, yeah, I do d/l it POP-3 w/delete, so if the FBI wants it, they need a warrant to come into my house).

    You'd probably be happy with most hosting providers... but do research, and make sure folks aren't screaming en masse.

    358:

    My late ex, the NASA engineer, was always amused at the "sekret launches"... when, if weather was good, could be seen 200 mi away, up the coast in Jacksonville. She told me about Russian "trawlers" who knew when it was going to go up before anyone else did.

    359:

    Oh, dear, an Insult to our Beloved Leader... "the emperor is naked!!!"

    And I must say, I'd had no idea how advance you Brits were back then, that G. Washington and his troops had to attack airfields and airports!

    To sum it up, there was only one appropriate response to his 4th of July "spectacle", and I used the gimp (think photoshop) to produce it (will email on demand, or find me on facepalm): a pic, from a distance, of him speechifying at the podium.

    And in the foreground, Joel, Crow, and Tommy Servo.

    360:

    Paranoia means, does it really toast everything? And you're sure they're no back door in the firmware?

    361:

    You forgot to mention how those starving robots give massive ROI, so that Larry Ellison can pay for upkeep on his giant cruise ship/yacht, his fighter jet (wonder if he had guns reinstalled...), and his Hawaiian island.

    362:

    I run my own mail servers (postfix and exim) and I don't know what all the doom and gloom is about. Postfix configuration is easier for non-trivial setups. One of them provides email receiving services for a friend who didn't automatically get an email account from his ISP. Only problems with that have been due to his insistence on running Windoze and visiting dodgy porn sites until it stops working.

    363:

    Java is crap. It has always been crap - it's nothing more than a rewrite of Pascal p-machine.

    That being said, I'm sure it's possible to write good code in java... however - and this is my issue with OOP in general - at least 80% of all programmers writing in the language, when they want a clipping of Godzilla's toenail, they instantiate Godzilla, and put a frame around his toenail.

    Let me note that I have never written code that went 10 levels deep (and that includes the actual database, no, not the d/b, I mean the actual d/b system).

    Meanwhile, when java tomcat has an error, I have never seen the stack trace of functions less than 150-200 layers deep.

    Bleah.

    Why, yes, my favorite language is C.

    364:

    By the way, I've not see a lot of issues with LibreOffice. Dunno the problem... unless you don't have enough RAM.

    365:

    whitroth & richard 77

    THANKS - I will go to Runbox for email ... but ..

    I FIRST need to register a domain name ... Registrar" ... now you've lost me again .... I want the simplest, cheap-as-reasonable very basic servie of a registerd domain name, without ANY frills or fancy work at all / at all / at all ... especially since it appears that runbox will "imoprt my alreay registered domai name, making things easy fron there on. But - where the fuck do I START?

    366:

    Greg,

    For domains+DNS I can recommend gratisdns.dk.

    They also have mail-services, but I'm one of the insane ones who run my own server, so I don't have 1st hand experience with that.

    367:

    I use 123-reg.co.uk for a domain name and nothing else. They do offer bundles with email services if you don't want to run your own mailbox, just access it when you need to.

    Prices for different domain TLDs vary and 123-reg like most domain registrars does special offers for the first year or so to get you to sign up followed by much higher prices for the second and subsequent years of registration.

    368:

    I mostly use Firstserv. Prices are about a tenner a year unless you want some exotic TLD. They're more professionally-oriented than consumer-oriented so there is a refreshing lack of bullshit, everything on their domain control panel works without having to fuck about, and it isn't missing things you need to try and make you pay more to get them as extras.

    Another possibility is Mythic Beasts, which is a small outfit that someone else on here was using (Jocelyn Ireson-Paine, I think). They too were fine and everything worked. I stopped using them only because I no longer wanted the domain name I had registered with them, but I still have the account with them and would use it if the need arose.

    369:

    I have had good experiences with Mythic Beasts from back in the day when their shared servers were Mac minis and they were one of the only affordable providers who would give you a shell. I really only stopped dealing with them when I needed to reduce latency (other side of the planet and all that). Then public cloud Linux VPSes popped up everywhere and the whole “they give you a shell” thing became a bit redundant.

    My own experience is limited to registrars who will handle .au domain names these days, so I can’t make a general recommendation. But Greg, remember it’s just another kind of business. Many of them will offer crazy cheap registration prices then charge extra to renew after the first couple of years. Which is why you want to be able to change provider for that, but if you rely on another party like RunBox to help that shouldn’t be hard.

    370:

    It was me that was complaining about LibreOffice, not Thomas... well, actually, it was my dad. He was using a 2.1GHz (I think) 32 bit CPU, not sure how much RAM but plenty for anything else he used in Ubuntu. At first he thought there was a hardware fault with his mouse, so he tried swapping mice, which did nothing, so then he thought it was an intermittent connection on the motherboard buggering the mouse port. So he got a new motherboard with a 64-bit 2-core CPU at something like 2.9GHz, and found that that helped, and did make it usable, although it still wasn't great.

    So the next time I was round he showed me what the problem was live, and I tried it for myself, both on the old board (which he still had) and the new one. Then I went home and tried it on my own machine (3.7GHz, 8 cores, 32GB) where it was a lot better, but still noticeably imperfect.

    Unfortunately I can't remember what "it" was, but it was something dead basic, some mouse function involved in inserting/positioning/resizing/somethinging an image in a text document; LibreOffice was taking so long to respond to the mouse inputs that what it thought you were doing and what you thought you were doing no longer corresponded. What I do remember very clearly was how perfectly it imitated a mouse button with dirty contacts.

    371:

    "...it's nothing more than a rewrite of Pascal p-machine."

    Another hope feeds another dream Another truth installed by the machine A secret wish, the marrying of lies Today comes true what common sense denies.

    372:

    Couldn't be us Brits - a runway? We've been arguing about a third ruinway (typo but keeping it ) for Heathrow for I'm not entirely sure how long, maybe 30 years ? More?

    The one in the US would still be in the consultation stage by the time of the revolution.

    373:

    You’d hate the way they write asynchronous code these days, then. All callbacks handled by what back in the day we’d have called lambda functions that are passed in as parameters, the runtime stack nested half a dozen layers just to get to the point of actually doing something. It actually makes things work faster, because it translates quite well into the world of non-blocking IO where everything is a lightweight thread and all that. You could say we’ve taken the ugly syntax of procedural languages and combined it with the incomprehensible semantics of functional languages, but that isn’t really true. A lot of coding style apparently adopts the unfathomable but elegant syntax of functional languages too, just expressed in superficially ugly syntax. So it isn’t just the execution stack that goes deep.

    Java is... well it’s the go-to language in the world of systems integration. The code your bank uses to share your personal information with other banks is almost definitely written in Java. The app servers for this are less tomcat, more ServiceMix, WebSphere or Weblogic.

    374:

    Pigeon @ 336:

    "What programs REQUIRE Java to work?"

    LibreOffice does, which is why it needs a ridiculously fast CPU merely to respond to mouse clicks in real time.

    What about OpenOffice? I think it started out as LibreOffice, but has gone through several iterations since then.

    375:

    Greg Tingey @ 365: I FIRST need to register a domain name ...
    Registrar" ... now you've lost me again ....
    I want the simplest, cheap-as-reasonable very basic servie of a registerd domain name, without ANY frills or fancy work at all / at all / at all ... especially since it appears that runbox will "imoprt my alreay registered domai name, making things easy fron there on.
    But - where the fuck do I START?

    Wikipedia is always a good place to start (for NON-controversial subjects):

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

    I use a company called Sitelutions.

    Since you're in the U.K. there are probably Domain Name Registrars located there that will give you better service specific to your location.

    376:

    Other way round - Open Office (iirc ) was StarOffice which Sun acquired way back. It morphed into OpenOffice, which was actually very useful for fixing borked Word Docs. When Oracle bought Sun, OpenOffice forked into LibreOffice. OpenOffice then got sent to the graveyard of Apache projects nobody wants.

    LibreOffice its the current Linux Alternative(tm) to the MS Office Suite.

    377:

    Yes, that too (as Uri points out, it's the other way round, so LO inherited its javaciousness from OO).

    378:

    Oh and its Calc program has the wonderful behaviour of not trying to work out the data and then moronically mangle it.

    e.g Range values 1-5 will translate to 1st of May (for UK locale ). OK, undo. Oh I have a number there now .....not the original value.

    Knackers csv files quicker than you can say OMG.

    And you can't turn that bug/feature off!

    379:

    for the Examples I'm referring to Excel not LO. Although I expect you all know that.

    380:

    Funny to think that the more heavily code I write gets into asynchronicity and event-driven I/O and stuff, the more likely it is to be for a machine that has almost no stack at all (only four levels, so you basically think in terms of one level of interrupt and one of function call, then things start to get hairy; and no passing parameters on the stack). And also quite likely that it doesn't really matter because there isn't time for the overhead of a stack-based call in any case.

    381:

    Skynet will be run on Javascript and it will say "line 285693 error [object Object]"

    Read that as Rorschach from Watchman.

    382:

    Oooh! I want a copy!

    383:

    More likely it will say "unexpected old bag in item area. Leave immediately. You have three seconds to comply".

    384:

    I rather love Calc because it imports csv files in a sensible way. You can click columns in the preview and say "date in stupid MDY format" and it tries very hard to actually give you dates in the resulting spreadsheet. I also use it to do maths because it's handy to have intermediate results and labels available for even simple things. Like right now, trying to persuade a young "rental manager" that $x/week is the same as $X/7*365.25/12 per month. The screenshot with labels helped where nothing else did. ($X per week / 7 = $/day, times 365.25 days = $/year, /12 = $/mo... no, really, I know you left school thinking "math class is hard", but this isn't complex maths. Please?)

    But mostly I use it to turn bank statements into things that I can do maths on, usually for the tax office. So I import the CSV already in typed data form (because the alternatives are PDF and a weird interpretation/layout of xlsx that takes a lot of formula magic to untangle. More formulas = more errors). Then I wangle it into "income" "expenditure" and "partially claimed expenditure" and apply the relevant factors from a big book of important things, and viola*... numbers to put into the online tax return system.

    • nothing about tax is magic, it is all the noise you get when you gut a cat and shove the remains up under a horse's tail
    385:

    Again, many thanks to all the correspondents ( Poul H-K, Nojay & PIgeon ) I will investigate ypour recommendations, but I'm going to try Pigeon's first as that looks as though it's what I need - really basic, relatively cheap & SIMPLE.

    386:

    I’d say simple is best, but what that means is really “as simple as it can reasonably be and still achieve the things you want”. Simple isn’t the same as easy, because easy often means the complexity is just hidden behind something, possibly something that doesn’t have your best interests at heart.

    But there really are providers who make it easy by exposing the complexity to you in measured ways that are reasonably easy to understand and control, and this is what you want really.

    AMA: I’m sure this translates into a metaphor for life but can’t quite get a narrative to go with it...

    387:

    It now looks as though in my attempts top find a DNS name I may have screwed myself ... I've made enquiries about a name & end-acronym, but they were available 2 days ago, but are not now ... Have my enquiries blocked my subequenbt ones, so, although I have not taken up any offers, the enquiries will have triggered a "taken" on the DNS, even though I have bought nothing? VERY annoying & frustrating.

    388: 372 - The trouble with Thiefrow is that it's too close to Larndarn! 384 - Er, it's not, if only because there are only 365.24 days in a year, hence why a year that ends 00 is only a leap year if date'year rem 400 = 0.
    389:

    365.2425, which is usually only relevant for financial calculations. I guess for synchronising with reference reality there are also leap seconds occasionally.

    Greg, you can tell whether it’s actually been registered by looking in an online Whois tool like this one: https://ping.eu/ns-whois/

    You want a “no match for domain”. If it has been registered, this might tell you by whom.

    Just typing the name in the address bar of a web browser might work too (depending), though it may not give much information.

    390:

    Financials, leave calcs, some astronomical purposes...

    391:

    Astronomy counts as part of reference reality.

    You’re right, though - the main purpose for this number is leave accrual projection. Because leave is important.

    392:

    It's not uncommon for searches for a possible domain name to trigger a robot "grabber" which claims the domain name before you can get around to registering it yourself. You then receive an email later offering you that domain name at an elevated price.

    Yes, it's a rotten thing to do but it's pretty much impossible to stop it happening. It's not helped by the way someone who "squats" on a name doesn't have to pay for the registration if they don't finalise the deal. If you're really dead set on the name you originally chose then wait a couple of months and try again as it may have been freed up when the squatter's registration expires.

    The way I've registered names in the past was to have a number of candidate names ranked in descending order of preference and then go through them one by one, attempting to register them with a domain name registrar (in my case, 123-reg). If the name is already claimed then the registration process will tell you, if they're not claimed then you can go on to complete the registration there and then and that name is yours.

    393:

    That implies that either each event is trivial, or you are writing unstructured code that uses events where subroutine calls would be much better. Stacks are BY FAR the best structure for subroutine calls, and bloody awful for almost any other control mechanism. Yes, each asynchronous event needs to be treated as such, but sychronous passing of control should not be implemented using events. Yes, I have seen that (and dabbled with it), but I can assure you that 10,000+ active events of 1,000+ different classes is NOT a sane structure to have to debug!

    If you feel that stacks are inefficient, you are using an incompetent implementation. A minimal stack-based call is three load addresses (almost free, nowadays), one store (almost always to level 1 cache) and a branch predicted, (to an address which may or may not need to be loaded), and a return is two loads and a branch (to a loaded address). You need some extremely clever hardware to make an event instantiation anywhere near as efficient. And that assumes the compiler hasn't optimised either using tail recursion or otherwise.

    The real cost for both subroutine calls and events is in changing the context (and, no, I don't mean ids etc., but registers etc.). If you are dedicating a core for the purpose, that can be almost free, for either mechanism; otherwise it is expensive.

    394:

    God help us, yes :-( Debugging such things when you are not the author is a NIGHTMARE - inter alia, the lambda functions (which is where most of the work is done) often have constraints that forbid the insertion of diagnostics.

    395:

    While what I posted was correct, it would have been more balanced if I had said "one or two stores" for the call. Leaf routines that do not need the return address register can get away with one; others need two.

    396:

    As a private person, I'd recommend using a .name domain.

    Coincidentally, "greg-tingey.name" still seems to be up for grabs. >;-)

    397:

    Yeah, well, I've got a beef with calc right now: I'm generating a .csv report from Tenable (it's at work), and then d/l. I try soffice vilename.csx... and sometimes, the window pops up, asking me how to import it, sometimes it only pops up if I open another document, and other times, I see nothing, and the only way to open it is to go to an already-open document, and use files->open.

    Argh!

    398:

    Something is very weird here. At work, I've got a bunch of cores and memory; at home, nope, I've got an Core I-3, and maybe 8G.

    For that matter, IIRC, I've run it on my 2009 HP Netbook (I can check this evening), and not had issues.

    Are you running under WinDoze? (I run only Linux - CentOS). You might check the task manager, to see if something's being so aggressive about "protecting you" that it's indistinguishable from an low-level DoS.

    399:

    I'll send it this evening.

    400:

    Greg: NEVER use a hosting provider's search engine to check on a name you want. Many will squat. Actually, a plain, vanilla whois will give you a good answer. Then go register it, and after that, buy hosting.

    401:

    Ah... I'm talking about PIC microcontrollers :) There are only four words of stack and it's not general purpose, all it can do is hold return addresses. If you want a data stack you have to implement it in software and set aside some of the 256 bytes of RAM to put it in. So basically you just forget about doing anything that involves a stack. What you do have, though, is a list of integrated peripherals as long as your arm, all generating interrupts and needing to be serviced before the next one comes along. If you're trying to do something like pull data out of a 1.5MHz bitstream when you're only executing instructions at 5MHz it gets a bit tricky. One instruction more or less can make all the difference, you try and frig things so that as much of the processing as possible is done in the peripherals themselves, etc. etc. It's all a lot more Story of Mo than structured programming, because the hardware is so limited you don't have much choice for anything non-trivial.

    402:

    Ah. While I have never used those, I have had to program to the limitations of the hardware many times - it is A Right Royal Pain In The Arse.

    403:

    Not 'Doze. Dad uses Ubuntu, with Gnome desktop and whatever mouse input mechanism Ubuntu sets up by default (evdev, I think). I use Debian with fluxbox and xserver-xorg-input-mouse (and sysvinit, with every trace of systemd nuked with extreme prejudice). Neither of us has anything more than the most basic possible graphics card (as in, as long as it can handle playing DVDs that's good enough), but if it's that that's being a bottleneck then there's something even more wrong with it.

    404:

    No clues in /var/log/syslog, kern.log, or (just had to look this up) /home/username/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log?

    Actually, while we're at it, what's top show you about load or memory usages?

    405:

    The last desktop tower that I built is still working, 9 years on. I haven’t replaced any components, but it does need a new power supply (the power supply fan bearings have started making noise). The last upgrade would have been from one LTS version of Ubuntu to the next, maybe 5 years ago. Regret putting in a husky nVidia card and choosing a MB with no integrated graphics - because the nVidia is a power hog and hardly used now. I’ll probably replace that with something cheap and cheerful when I replace the power supply, maybe when the thing is 10 years old. I’ve mostly been using it to run a security system and the 5TB RAIDZ that is backups for the other computers in the house.

    I’ve thought of crossgrading the thing to Windows, to enable the use of some commercial DAW software I use for my (other) other hobby these days. But that would mean backing up the ZFS to some other medium, wiping it and rebuilding with something Windows likes, which for this hardware would mean using windows-only drivers to work with the MB raid controller, which isn’t something I care to do at this stage. There are some Linux alternative DAWs available these days that I should really get around to exploring. In some ways the direct access to the ZFS volume is the whole point anyway.

    My everyday computing is split between a Windows 10 laptop and an iPad Pro (I’m typing on the latter now). Hence my earlier complaint about iOS and dumb quotes - it’s not just for phones.

    406:

    Actually, I was reading a post in a Linux mailing list, and was reminded that your dad might look into lubuntu. a light-weight distro "for systems with limited resources".

    407:

    The iPhone Secure Enclave (page 8) is a big deal, or at least appears to be. I can imagine nation states being really annoyed by it (it includes physical security) if people don't do something opsec-dumb like fingerprint or face id. (Passphrase best) I've only seen a few possible hints/tells that recent revs are in any way compromised, e.g. by the US government. Erasing keys to encrypted storage is a traditional way to rapidly erase storage. Or at least time-lock it, depending on one's level of belief in continued-for-a-while exponential growth in code-breaking computing capability.

    408:

    Who the F launched the Snowball stories? I don't recall the Sulphur-Crest from a decade ago, pre D.J. Trump. :-) Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo Has Upped His Game, Study Finds (Roni Dengler, July 8, 2019) The Times front page just happened to pair Trump story with a cockatoo photo Spontaneity and diversity of movement to music are not uniquely human (July 8, 2009)

    FI[tm]@341 Longer answer: working on positive mood for (mostly) non-selfish reasons. "aRe pHiLoSoPhiCAL zOmBiEs hUman>!>!?" Something like "R [HLSPCA] LOBE(s) U ? Good question. Been wondering about that for a while. Like the droopy-eye-ones? (vitreous detachment in left eye last summer which was annoying.) When I rapidly open one eye and close the other and vv, there is no noticable alteration in mind state, and FWIW I try to keep mind states symmetric. (People sometimes mistake closing an eye because something is bothering it for a wink.) Have a good memory for mind states; some people remember odors; I remember mind states, even from childhood, and those old memories are familiar. Of course I could be a P-Zombie writing falsehoods, or a self-aware subsystem with full qualia, ala Bob/TheEaterOfSouls, or a host of other possibilities. Hard to tell, especially first person POV. But I've never felt a hunger for minds/souls in the slightest, or eaten any mind/soul, that I recall[1]; e.g. it requires serious attention to avoid killing insects while mowing with the 5HP dervish-of-plant-shortening, but I try. Not even tempted to eat D.J. Trump's whatever-it-is. Well, especially not him. Ewww. (Joke, Secret Service people!)

    And I very much appreciate the help/etc that you've given me; thank you.

    [1] Have joked here a couple of times about eating Archons and/or demons. Hope they don't mind.

    409:

    I don't remember finding anything. Bear in mind that this was a while ago now and I can't even remember precisely what operation it was that the problem cropped up on. Also, neither Dad nor I use LibreOffice most of the time anyway; he was using it then for some specific reason that doesn't normally arise that stopped him using Abiword as usual, and I fired it up to test the thing then uninstalled it from my system once this episode was over. When all you actually need is a glass typewriter, it's severe overkill :)

    410:

    Well, if all you actually want is a tripe rotter, Windoze Notepad does the job, at least once you've set it to word-wrap mode.

    411:

    “365.2425, which is usually only relevant for financial calculations.”

    Oddly, how long a year is in financial calcs is less and less tethered to reality as one ascends into high finance.

    There are a lot of different algorithms for turning an actual period into a “fraction of a year”, many of which evolved when the people doing it were using pencils & paper. So lots of them start by assuming a 360 day year of 30-day months, or similar.

    Which is kind of weird for calculating interest on a deal of billions of pounds, but wtf.

    Time is a cultural concept. There is no physical property of “4-o’clockness”. There is no physical property of “a month”, or “a leap year”, or a physical answer to “how much of my year’s leave do I accrue in the month of February” Which is cool, because time is also absolutely a part of physical reality, not culture.

    412:

    It’s a long, long time since I read it, but Clifford Geertz on time in Bali is just fascinating. I’ve got it in paperback somewhere or other but it surely must be around online.

    413:

    That sort of thing is a not uncommon problem, often caused by too much memory or number of cores, which may be compounded by Hypethreading and various forms of cache, TLB and memory management. It has been alleviated over the years, but still exists, and has several other causative factors, too.

    Essentially, X windows was designed by some ivory tower 'computer scientists', and implemented by a random collection of their students, essentially without supervision. Its basic 'design' was not properly engineered and, in particular, some of its control and data structures and memory management degrade disgracefully under real-life loads. You don't often see it do so badly now, but it's worth killing the windowing system and restarting when it occurs - that often works. In practice, the simplest way to do that is to reboot.

    414:

    Ouninpohja?

    415:

    Why, yes, my favorite language is C.
    Bloated. BCPL for the win.

    417:

    I loved that the BCPL book used an annotated copy of the compiler source code as its example code. And it was still a slim volume.

    (Backend codegen was left as an exercise for the reader.)

    418:

    A bit like Ada 83, where the manual was effectively a restatement of the Ada 83 coding standard.

    419:

    Yes :-)

    Even C90 was far more complicated than its proponents made out, because the standard got its brevity by being incomplete, ambiguous and incomplete. C compilers (and the library) were almost always larger than Fortran 90 ones, despite the language being much less powerful. This has continued, but C beyond 99 is essentially dead.

    420:

    On another topics, I have been taken aback by the way that the majority of political commentators have blamed Bozo for Darroch's resignation, but I regard the Cunt's initial statement as FAR more important. Curiously, it seems to have been buried remarkably rapidly, but I have no idea why, and it could just be the yesterday's news effect. But why have no commentators that I have seen picked up on it?

    http://tripplebuzz.com/trump-strikes-back-at-the-british-envoy-who-called-the-white-house-inept/

    I have had a boss say something very similar about me, when I (as the organisation's expert in the relevant field) said something true and important that wasn't politically popular, and I know what it means. What's more, the Cunt is Darroch's boss's boss, not just some jumped-up MP. If I were Darroch, that would have been the point that I realised I had been thrown under a bus.

    421:

    Well, in that case, vi. (As opposed to what's been referred to as a "windowing operating system masquerading as a text editor": emacs.)

    Btw, he is in linux, so Windows braindead notepad is irrelevant. EXTERMINATE!

    422:

    Well, first, you probably mean "X11". And it was designed as a platform for experimenting with graphical UIs and allowing graphical interfaces to span across network links.

    A lot of the underlying protocol is actually quite elegant, but does require (for want of a better word) multi-classing.

    The thing you put graphic into is a "Drawable", there are many types of Drawables, one of which is a Window, another possible drawable is, um, Pixmap? Or texture, been long enough I can't remember if it's one or the other.

    However, this si somethig that works appallingly bad with both Java's and C++'s view of how objects work.

    It also does not work well, at all, with things like "realtime updates" (like, say, displaying video) and direct framebuffers accessible from code.

    And the whole "experiment wit htings" is why there's nothing obviously looking like a window manager or desktop environment in the protocol, there's hooks to build that on top of the raw protocl, which in turn spawned approximately one to three hands of different toolkits, most of them written in C or C++, with imedance mismatch between protocl abstractions and implementation language capabilities. It's a right joy to write low-level X11 in Common Lisp, though.

    423:

    I'm sorry, but when was the last time you heavily used X?

    It's been working fine, in real work situations, for a while... as in, it was well over 10 years ago that, in Linux, I saw a problem with it crashing and looping while trying to log in. I'm typing this in firefox, with eight xterms, a thunderbird email window, a pic of my SO, some LibreOffice documents, and I'm listening to streaming media from WQXR (NYC classical).

    What's the problem?

    424:

    "ed is the standard editor."

    And emacs is still "a pretty nice operating system, shame it doesn't have a text editor", getting your slurs right is important.

    Btw, if you're wanting to use vi, you may want to try either "vim" or "nvi" (I prefer nvi over vim, it's much closer to the vi I learned in the late 80s; but I still mostly spend my editing time in emacs).

    425:

    Never actually saw that, or B. But then, why did they create C?

    Received Wisdom is to write Unix, so they could write and play Hack.... Do that in BCPL. Then maintain it in a year and a half....

    My code is clear, comprehensible, extendable and maintainable. I want elegant, not "clever"*.

    • "Clever" - over the years, when applying for jobs, one of my std lines is that if I get a phone call at 16:15 Friday, or 02:00, I want to be able to solve the problem and leave, or go back to sleep, on time, not spend hours figuring out how I'd been "clever".
    426:

    Hey, Charlie, asking you anything....

    As I've been writing more and more heavily, I finally verbalized something: they always say 'write what you know'. My follow-on is, "and if you don't know, do research, preferably from primary sources.

    A few examples: I asked a Hispanic guy in the lab what his family would use, colloquially, for "dear". I'm trying to be in contact with a couple of Nigerians, because, in the novelette-that-is-now-a-novella, on the research starship, I had decided there are five Nigerian researchers/postbacs, and I needed some cultural grounding, as well as names from different ethnic areas (it's a large country).

    Oh, hell, back in the late seventies, playing D&D, we needed to be clear on how far someone in full armor could run in one melee round. I was in the SCA at the time, so, of course, I put on my armor, picked up my shield and mace (I fought heavy), and we measured how far I could run in 6 sec (and I was in good shape).

    One that pissed me off immensely I think I've mentioned before - a few years ago, having not read any of the Anita Blake novels in years, I got Michael, because it was allegedly set in Philly. Speaking as a native Philadelphian, I can assure you that Laurel K. Hamilton has never been closer to Philly than maybe NYC, 90 mi away, and has never even bothered to read a tourist brochure about the city. There was NOTHING WHATSOEVER that said, "yeah, this is Philly". (Oh, and it was also bad soft-core).

    What do you do, esp. when you're dealing with otherwordly Powers, or completely world-built cultures? What do you use for reality checks, to make sure that readers' suspenders of disbelief don't snap?

    427:

    What I want is an authoring tool which does bold, underlining, italic, all in one font only, with section headers for paragraph, page, section, chapter, etc., and nothing else, except possibly a special way to attach notes to my text in another font, without exporting them. And footnotes.

    NOTHING else. And it needs to run on Linux.

    428:

    That is way too specific a set of requirements to be a mass market product. If you want those you have to leave out the nothing else or pay something close to bespoke software prices (think worse than Vanderbilt's comments about J boats).

    For Ubuntu, gedit is the standard text editor. I can't deal with the modal adventures of vim, if I have to strip down I go with joe. There are lots of simple text editors out there.

    429:

    I am using it now, and the problems I mention occur fairly regularly. As with all such issues, they are very dependent on how hard and in what ways the system is pushed; the fact that you haven't seen them is irrelevant. Have you done serious work on the guts of the system? I was active in the area during its development, and have dived fairly deeply into the cess-pit on several occasions. As I said, it is a lot better than it was - even compared to a decade ago - but it's still a crock.

    Don't be confused by the fact that Microsoft copied it, without understanding its principles, and so has an even worse system.

    430:

    I have bad news for you: in 1995, PC Mag did a review of the word processor available then... and concluded that 90% of the features then available were not ever used by 90% of the users, and of the 10% of the users who did use the other 90% of the features, they only used them 10% of the time.

    But, ya gotta add new features, otherwise, HORRORS!, people won't buy new versions, they'll use the old ones forever, like a typewriter....

    431:

    I'm kind of a plaintext-tagged-text guy, and while I've written much of my own stuff in just that plaintext, lately I've taken to writing even the plaintext stuff in Markdown. It's very much human-readable (unlike HTML or LaTeX...) but can be laid out more prettily if needed.

    I'm not sure if WYSIWYG editors for it exist - at least some web-based things seem to exists, but they're not what I need so I don't know much about them. At least Github uses it as a pretty readme formatter, and that's kind of the most public I've ever used it for.

    432:

    Well, they all copied from Xerox Parc Place.

    The trouble is, I could live with Win 3. Past that, they did NOT copy X; instead, the morons put it all INTO RING 0, which should be ONLY o/s. X sits on top of the o/s - if the windowing system crashes, you haven't lost everything except what was onscreen. With WinDoze, reboot the computer. But then, I thought it was a reasonable joke: "your cursor has moved. Please reboot Windows to have this change take effect"... until, a few years ago, I was trying to set up my now-ex's computer for samba... and all I did was change the default workgroup name... and WinBlows told me I needed to reboot the computer to have this take effect.

    433:

    There wasn't anything in the PCs in the days of early Windows that could provide proper "ring" levels of protection -- the 80286 was the first PC processor with any sort of memory management and it took until the 386 was introduced for decent segmentation and memory protection to be implemented. The assorted Berkeley and System V Unix variants only worked properly on 386-based hardware, attempts to provide memory protection for multitasking and multi-user operations via oddball custom add-in memory cards were generally not a success.

    The Palo Alto Star cost over $30,000 for a basic system and after configuration to make it useful it could top $100,000. Windows 3.0 would run on 8086/8088-based PCs costing less than a thousand bucks and even provide some basic multitasking capabilities. In a lot of cases businesses and consumers already had the hardware on their desk, Win 3.0 cost

    434:

    Nojay, you completely misunderstood what I was arguing.

    For one, 386's were already out by '87 or so. For another, Win 3 was released in 1990. They stupidly put memory management and multitasking IN THE GUI, instead of in the o/s.

    Win 95, and NT, and onwards, they put the GUI in the o/s. I consider the o/s to be ring 0.

    435:

    EC @ 420 And yet ... BoJo is the one crawling as far up Drumpf's arse as he can, not J cunt .... And BoJo's record of lies, doubke-dealing & otright betrayal is mush worse. I am no fan of the Jeremy, but surely he is "less worse" than the Turiksh-American masqerading as a loyal Briton? [ Please note the implied sarcasm? ]

    436:

    Xenix/286 worked quite well, and was very well received. Used in every McDonald's in the US for quite a while. (Now remembering that one of my interview rounds at SCO was to write a hierarchy walker for the '286, and not run out of memory.)

    437:

    Note what I said, "Windows 3.0 would run on 8086/8088-based PCs". I ran it successfully on 286-based clone PCs which had no real hardware memory management capabilities. Win 3.0 didn't have intrinsic memory management and it only had a half-assed suspend-and-restart capability to provide some kind of multitasking. It still provided users with a GUI, windowing and mouse control but within a straightjacket of limited memory, disk storage and CPU power.

    From Windows NT onwards the basic hardware spec required a 486 or better so the windowing and mutitasking was a lot better. For performance reasons on limited cheap hardware MS put things like the video drivers in the OS, not the GUI which was on the application layer. Those drivers were written and deployed by the third-party sellers of video cards and often-times were piles of badly coded shit, causing blue screens but there was little MS could do about it since they needed the speed. Sure, spend a thousand bucks on a graphical subsystem with a 80186 co-pro and a meg or two of double-ported video ram and the machine's video performance would be great but for most folks a hundred-buck 640x480 VGA card was a serious upgrade.

    I built and maintained a graphics workstation for a design company, two 60MHz Pentiums in SMP and 1MB of RAM along with a Matrox video card on Win NT4 Workstation. The main software it ran, Corel Draw regularly bluescreened this machine because it made direct accesses to the video hardware to speed things up and that blew out the drivers. Other software worked fine, including Word for Windows which rarely if ever caused bluescreens.

    438:

    Like hell! While X Windows was theoretically designed to be runnable more-or-less unprivileged, virtually every system that has done that has had to back off, because it was unusably slow - things like cursor movement and drag-and-drop being most affected. If X Windows goes sour, you usually lose the mouse and keyboard (including control-ALT-F1) - yes, if you have another computer, you can usually log in remotely and restart X. But not always, because it sometimes takes out the networking, too!

    439:

    No, he is far more evil, but hides it a lot better. Bozo is merely a total disaster.

    440:

    If we are doing language wars then can I have ANSI C with modern C++ template metaprogramming? Ta.

    On a different note, how do I change my pwd here? I have good reason to believe the throwaway one I used for this and a handful of other low priority sites has been pwn3d.

    441:

    Last time I serviced a McDonalds they were still using SCO Unix. On top of Windows 2003. Which sat on top of VMWare. It was third up the stack of multiple OSes, which must have been a horrorshow for their IT people.

    In more news of bad taste, I am working in Camarillo today. The town was once the site of the state mental hospital where my father worked. The local microbrew is called... Institution. I guess the name is supposed to be edgy or something, but I just find it to be grotesque!

    442:

    UriGagarin @ 376: Other way round - Open Office (iirc ) was StarOffice which Sun acquired way back.
    It morphed into OpenOffice, which was actually very useful for fixing borked Word Docs.
    When Oracle bought Sun, OpenOffice forked into LibreOffice.
    OpenOffice then got sent to the graveyard of Apache projects nobody wants.

    LibreOffice its the current Linux Alternative(tm) to the MS Office Suite.

    I wouldn't say "nobody" wants it. I'm reasonably happy using Open Office & don't feel like replacing it unless there's a really strong, compelling reason why I should do so.

    I used Micro$oft Office for many years when I had a government license through the Army (because Micro$oft Office was what the Pentagon standardized on). When I retired, I wanted an alternative that I didn't have to pay Micro$oft for and I'm glad I did with their recent turn to the subscription model. Open Office filled the bill.

    But the bottom line is I do need Java in order for Open Office to continue working for me? Is that correct? Or no?

    443:

    Damian @ 405: The last desktop tower that I built is still working, 9 years on. I haven’t replaced any components, but it does need a new power supply (the power supply fan bearings have started making noise). The last upgrade would have been from one LTS version of Ubuntu to the next, maybe 5 years ago. Regret putting in a husky nVidia card and choosing a MB with no integrated graphics - because the nVidia is a power hog and hardly used now. I’ll probably replace that with something cheap and cheerful when I replace the power supply, maybe when the thing is 10 years old. I’ve mostly been using it to run a security system and the 5TB RAIDZ that is backups for the other computers in the house.

    I don't remember how old this computer is, but the only thing that has NOT been replaced is the box itself. It still has the original "Micro$oft Windoze 98 Second Edition" certificate of authenticity that came with the (OEM version) OS CD-ROM I bought when I first put it together. Power supplies seem to last about 3 years or so if you leave the computer running all the time.

    I do remember that when I originally built it the MB didn't have a disk controller on it, no serial port, no parallel port, no modem & no video. Those were all on separate cards that had to be slotted into the motherboard. It's been upgraded almost continuously since then.

    This is literally the computer equivalent of Johnny Cash's old Cadillac.

    444:
    X sits on top of the o/s - if the windowing system crashes, you haven't lost everything except what was onscreen.

    Sadly, that hasn't been true since the '90s, and was barely true, if at all, even then.

    In addition to the plain fact Elderly Cynic noted -- that X runs as root in basically every environment -- modern graphics hardware simply doesn't allow this to be true. Even if the OS solved the issues with the keyboard and video mode EC noted, the GPU could still easily crash the computer.

    Modern graphics cards essentially work like a special-purpose supercomputer which sits on the other end of your main bus which you upload programs to when you want to render a frame. To try to wring every last fraction of a percent of performance out of them, they accept commands not just from the privileged X11 server, but also from the user applications (think: web browser) themselves.

    Because the graphics cards aren't built with security in mind, it's entirely possible for any program using them to upload a GPU command sequence which will crash the GPU and possibly the main bus itself. On some older cards, it was even possible to issue commands to read or write random host memory locations. Some attempt is done to sanitize the programs before uploading to prevent the worst sorts of security flaws, but crashing is almost always possible and is not considered a bug. After all, 125 frames per second on an unstable system is always preferable to 122.9 frames per second on a stable system when you're playing a video game on a monitor which refreshes 70 times per second.

    As you've probably guessed already, these devices are incredibly complex, aggressively undocumented, and difficult to analyze. It's a near certainty that any number of unknown, crazy security problems exist either in the drivers or the GPU silicon. The involvement of the X server is the least of the problems.

    In addition to all that, yeah, there are various issues with the IPC model X uses and performance under load, as well as more basic stuff like not being able to hard-reset the graphics and interface state after an error. But really, with the way GPUs are going these problems are if anything becoming more intractable and less related to X.

    445:

    X was mostly implemented by employees of DEC. If it'd been implemented by the students who were around at the time it might have been better code.

    446:

    In the spirit of AMA,

    Charlie, do you think that there are any positive applications of deepfakes? By positive, I don't mean creating fake videos of political leaders for propaganda purposes

    447:

    X may be running as root, but it's still running in user space, whereas 'Doze puts the whole kit and caboodle in kernel space - is what I understand whitroth to be complaining about.

    FWIW the most common trigger for a crash hard enough to take down the entire system that I seem to encounter is when I start doing something that actually uses all the cores. The underlying cause is the presence of a carpet in between the CPU heatsink and the fan, or the fan in the PSU declining to revolve with suitable alacrity and demanding a drink.

    Graphics cards... what's infuriating about graphics cards is that it's impossible to get one that isn't like that. There's nothing but the most super duper pooper scooper things-that-look-like-a-heatsink-with-an-edge-connector - and the bloody things are expensive, never mind any architectural deficiencies. There doesn't seem to be anything for people who just need to see what they're doing and don't happen to have a video output on their motherboard already.

    448:
    X may be running as root, but it's still running in user space, whereas 'Doze puts the whole kit and caboodle in kernel space - is what I understand whitroth to be complaining about.

    But this isn't even true. There is absolutely a graphics driver layer running in the kernel between any modern GPU and X. There has to be, because someone has to mediate all those graphics card resources, initiate DMA on behalf of those programs, and so on.

    The only time X acts purely in the old-school fashion where it operates as the graphics driver is when there's no 3d API involved, which is approximately never when using a modern card.

    As for Windows (or Mac), well. What little I know of the graphics system there, it absolutely is not running entirely in the kernel. Additionally, for direct 3d access, the model is essentially identical on every platform: the applications program the GPU directly, submitting their work via a kernel driver.

    449:

    What I am not understanding is how BoJo is avoiding flak from DJT for his comments in 2015, e.g. video here: Farage: Boris Johnson comments to blame for Trump snubbing UK roughly: “He’s clearly out of his mind… He’s playing the game of the terrorists of those who seek to divide us… When Donald Trump says that there are parts of London that are are no-go areas, I think he’s portraying a stupifying ignorance which makes him quite clearly unfit to hold the office of President.” I mean, people have been trying to use this video ever since (even projected onto Big Ben) but it doesn't stick. Why?

    FI[tm] - Fielding complaints again about a [non-consensual [redacted] relationship(s)?], and (in one interpretation) they request that I request that they be treated with more respect and/or care, which I (weirdly) do. (Assuming it's not a LARP or something otherwise faked.) If this has meaning to you, otherwise ignore.

    450:

    Win 3.0 didn't have intrinsic memory management and it only had a half-assed suspend-and-restart capability to provide some kind of multitasking.

    I'm young enough that the first Windows platform I really (professionally) developed for was NT 3.51, but I seem to remember that the Windows 3.0 (and 3.11 for Workgroups) multitasking was co-operative, so that the programs had to yield explicitly to give time for other programs. This obviously made it easy to mess up the system by accident.

    I think the earlier Amiga operating systems had the same problem. The early models didn't have an MMU, either, so memory corruptions were easy.

    The neat tricks for multitasking were somewhat earlier - hooking the timer interrupt into a DOS TSR and doing stuff with it was kind of fun. Though I don't really miss it, a proper operating system (which all the modern things are, in this context) is much nicer.

    451:
    Windows 3.0 (and 3.11 for Workgroups) multitasking was co-operative, so that the programs had to yield explicitly to give time for other programs. [....] I think the earlier Amiga operating systems had the same problem. The early models didn't have an MMU, either, so memory corruptions were easy.

    The Amiga was most notable for being one of the few operating systems available to the public at the time which was not cooperative. Mac and Win both were, while Amiga was fully preemptive.

    It was easy to guru, of course, since there was no MMU. Even though later models had one, the OS was not able to use it.

    452:

    any positive applications of deepfakes?

    The obvious one to me is extremely compressed video chat. Send the first still image, then "expression 256, say 'hi'" and the deepfake receiving end assembles a convincing version of the sender saying the thing. Add a bit more predictive text stuff and you'll be able to at least cover the introductory pleasantaries with "call mum, say hi" as the entire content of the first 10 minutes of calling your mother :)

    453:

    The Amiga was most notable for being one of the few operating systems available to the public at the time which was not cooperative.

    Thanks for correcting me! It's been a while since I last did anything with it, and I never owned one back in the day.

    454:

    EC @ 439 Got any evidence, rather/other than personal dislike, for that allegation? Cunt, at least admits the possibility of brexit failing, whereas BoJo is determined to drive over the cliff ...

    455:

    Yes. Look how rapidly he (essentially uniquely among western leaders) licked Trump's arse over the risible claims that Iran was behind the tanker attacks, more-or-less signing us up to the forthcoming war on Iran. Look at what he did to the NHS, and what he has said about a trade deal with the USA - though I agree that he is no worse than Bozo in the latter.

    456:

    Yes. In any case, I was talking about functionality, rather than minutiae of terminology and implementation. If a component (whether a graphics card, GUI driver, windowing system or whatever) can crap over other components, it passes the duck test for being part of the supervisor (to use an old, and hopefully by now neutral term).

    One of the defects I was referring to was that one as relates to RAS, but the other was the basic flaw of the Xerox PARC model (which WAS a innovative testbench) in assuming an available core (in the days of single-core machines!) and lightning fast computation speed. At least Apple admitted that problem, and put it in their coding standards.

    There were (and are) many other serious defects I could describe, but are irrelevant to this particular issue.

    At the time that X was being perpetrated, there WERE attempts do design GUIs that did not have those defects, but they lost out politically because it is quicker and easier to deliver a pile of junk than a well-designed product.

    457:

    Simples. The inhabitant with the Oral Orifice has the attention span of a two year old, as well as other forms of the behaviour of one.

    458: 430 - True this, and it ignores how, speaking as one of the 10%, we tried to not use Wurd because of the mess that Mickeyshaft had made of the implementation of features like legal paragraphing by making it part of style sheets (compare with the WordPerfect 5.x implementation). 442 - I think the answer is that you need to have Java installed, but not to accept "updates" or "new versions". 450 - Well "co-operative" multitasking was my understanding of the Windoze 3.x threading model too.
    459:

    EC @ 457 Worse, actually, he's a spiteful & mean 5-year old, acting as the infant's school bully.

    Noted re cunt also crawling up DT bum .. not a lot to choose, is there> Meanwhil Cor Bin's total incompetence & refusal to make a principled stand on ANYTHING is so depressing.

    460:
    [...] the other was the basic flaw of the Xerox PARC model [...] in assuming an available core [...] and lightning fast computation speed.

    It would be helpful if you were a bit more specific about the problem you're referring to. I honestly can't tell which of the numerous issues people have to deal with in the traditional X design you're referencing, much less relate it to the modern design. Or, for that matter, the... post-modern (heh) designs the field seems to be moving towards.

    For example, X has always performed poorly when it comes to real-time tasks such as video playback, ultimately because it has no way to inherit the relative priorities of its different clients. Then again, these days, the IO path looks very different than it did 10 years ago.

    It also has a problem where a client can instruct the X server to perform very expensive work on its behalf. Because the server is in effect cooperatively multitasking the clients, this can result in painfully glitchy behavior with mouse lag, the whole desktop grinding to a near halt, etc.

    Of course, another problem that plagues Linux systems is poor performance under memory overload. Often the X server and desktop start fighting for resources with some misbehaved application, and instead of preserving resources for a kill button of some sort, the whole system grinds to a halt.

    Were you referring to one of these issues? One of the numerous other problems? A general dislike of the ping-pong scheduling behavior the X IPC design can suffer from? I really can't tell.

    461:

    Yes, but you are missing The Most Important Bit Of The X11 Design, namely "you don't have your keyboard, mouse, screen, etc plugged in to the machine where your applications run".

    Your screen should be able to crash with wild abandon, because it's only EVER talking to your applications over a network protocol, not sharing a kernel with them.

    Of course, that's pretty much exactly how NO ONE runs it these days, but it does not take away from hte fact that the basic design is sound.

    462:

    I was referring to the problem as originally reported. Occasional serious slowdowns in response, causing applications to be more-or-less unusable. Also, I was talking about the design at a higher-level than you are.

    Your real-time point is relevant, but it is not simply about things like video playback and definitely NOT simply about priority. The whole design of X is based on things like callbacks, the concept of focus, and being able to implement requests near-instantaneously, and we knew (in the 1970s) that those could not be made to work together reliably.

    That shows up in effects like key presses not showing up for a second or two, and then appearing in bursts. That USED to be the case for even cursor movement (and very occasionally still is), but that was resolved by changing the implementation of that to a different approach (which was known to be better in the 1970s).

    But it also shows up in missed events and (rarely, nowadays) events going to the wrong focus. That is often a result of desktop/GUI conflict, but the root cause is the implicit assumption of the whole design that events won't get reordered or seriously delayed. And, once there were multiple paths (and the conflicts you mention, which are not restricted to Linux), we get both.

    463:

    Right, so it's crippled by the desire to solve a problem no-one has. Brilliant!

    Just like Java in that respect, from the days when compilation was hideously expensive and portable source code wasn't, an innovation to solve both those problems with a virtual machine that was a common subset of everything known to be able to run code... provided it had enough memory and storage capacity and no-one cared about speed.

    464:

    FWIW I've been slightly disturbed at how readily Rust compiles on quite hetrogenous platforms. The team there really have taken the "one language, everywhere" to heart. I mean, the result runs like a dog on a Pi but I'm not convinced that's because of Rust :) Maybe we should upgrade to the Pi4 and just accept 15W TDP.

    465: 460 to #462 - Using SunOS 4, it was fairly standard practice at my site to establish a remote shell window from the development SPARCs onto one of the faster one in quiet periods, and use the fast window for compiling and linking code.
    466:

    SOP in many environments. When I was managing a supercomputer system, nor merely did I work that way but set up many of the standard scripts to do so. A few scripts used three or more systems. The users (scientists) neither knew nor cared.

    What I had major difficulty (in the 1970s to 1990s) arguing for, lost out repeatedly, and won simply because my opponents were so wrong that even lusers couldn't miss it, was that all of the components that are involved in the GUI (most definitely INCLUDING any application containing X calls) must run on the system with the keyboard, mouse and display. The bare display server approach touted for so long was obviously not going to work outside a well-funded computer science laboratory, and didn't.

    467:

    No, it was designed to solve a problem everyone had, when it was designed. Up until NT 3.5 (I think), the NT windowing system (apart from the actual graphics card driver) ran in user-space. But in 3.51 (again, I think), they moved the entire WM layer and UI into the kernel, with quite a bit of stability loss as a result.

    But if you want to get away from "your graphics driver is running in your kernel", the only way of doing that is by having a well-defined comms protocol, and not let your graphics drive layer share RAM, or cores, with the rest of your OS. And then you're basically back at the X11 design, even if you may end up structuring the protocol differently.

    468:

    Er? That's exactly how I did most (if not all) of my daily work for multiple years. My primary workstation was an IBM X terminal, my primary work computer was a HP-UX box in a different room. Works perfectly fine, but it sucks for gaming and video. The Trinitron tube and the IBM buckle-spring keyboard didn't hurt.

    It's also almost exactly how I've been working for the last few years, but these days it's a windows box in a different building, and the protocol is called PCoIP instead of X11. And (alas) there's a graphics driver in a kernel on the windows box that's on the other end.

    469:

    From what I've googled yes you need Java for OO.o.

    LibreOffice is actively being developed while OpenOffice is not. Only makes a difference when interacting with MS docs.

    Personally Office 97 was good enough for my needs.

    470:

    Two machines in adjacent rooms connected by a high-capacity network ARE part of the same system - the fact that it is made up of several boxes is irrelevant, and I remember when all computers were like that. Outside well-funded departments, network capacity is limited, not just in bandwidth but transactions, and multi-second delays are common.

    Have you ever used a WIMP system (or even drag-and-drop) with unpredictable delays of up to several seconds? Because I have.

    Even when you don't get those, remote round-trip times are often in the multiple hundreds of milliseconds, which is hopeless for drag-and-drop and a Real Pain even for typing and button-clicking for those of us with fast reactions.

    471:

    You're reminding me of another point, where we had regular arguments that 2 or more machines that you could rsh between and had a common server were part of the same network, even if they were on separate network controllers.

    472:

    This discussion reminds me of the one time I ran Netscape on X11 over a modem connection to the University's computers for one reason or another. I think it was 28800 bps, might've been 56k. It wasn't fun or fast by any means, however. It was also fun as a proof of concept.

    I think I had to access some web resource only available from the Uni's computers and this was the first way I thought of for that, from home. It might have been that SSH was capable of port forwarding at the time, but I didn't know how at the time.

    473:

    MS Windows was written for thousand-dollar hardware, X Windows was written for hardware costing ten times that much and more. To get usable speed of response for the user MS needed to move a lot of graphics stuff into the kernel and not increase delays by using a server-client model to do UI graphical operations. Stability was a trade-off for usability given the limitations of memory, processor speed, graphics engines. The alternative was no GUI at all and hence no customers.

    475:

    General, on *Nix and X: A fair number here at work (I think we're down to 40 or so people, we used to be somehing like 60 or 80) use Linux workstation. Others use putty, frequently with Xming.

    In coming up on 10 years here as a sr. Linux sysadmin, I've very, very rarely seen keyboard or mouse move slowly. Nor have I seen it at home (ok, I'm using the on-m/b video...).

    I've seen X hang. 90% or 95% of the time, I restart X, and all is fine. In fact, for me to beg and plead with some people to let me to a full system update and reboot, I'm lucky (with some) to do it every 1.5-2 months.

    EVERYONE USING Linux is under orders, that they do NOT do their work on their workstation, but on servers. Their home directories and projects are all NFS-mounted. Network's 1G. Rarely have anyone complaining about slowness, unless a) the Center has fucked with the network (which they will then proceed to debug IN PRODUCTION), or b) someone's running something that eats the system.

    Heh, heh. Got a 6/7 yr old small supercomputer - an SGI UV2000, 512 hyperthreaded cores, 2TB, yes, terabytes, or RAM... and I've seen it with a load of 400+ (someone modeling protein folding).

    The one thing that does happen is when someone tries to run too much data, or too many paralell threads, and then the Linux oom-killer steps in, and kills whatever it thinks is the cause. More than half the time, they have to restart (with less whatever, after I've spoken with them). I only have to reboot the server once in a while. Normally, dev and prod servers get fully updated and rebooted once a month. Have some home directory servers that have been running well over six months.

    So, I'm not sure what's going on where you folks are, but what we run (90% CentOS, 80% of that CentOS 7; at home, CentOS 6, and I'll probably go to 8 when it's released), is stable.

    Now, fedora, or an odd-numbered ubuntu... I don't want to go there.

    476:

    ANSI C's my go-to. Templates... I've never figured out how to make templates work, and I tried, some years ago, because I was looking at associative arrays in C.

    477:

    You should go to LibreOffice. Bug fixes, and, most esp., security fixes.

    I really don't need more "features".

    Word? Word always has been crap. Back in the mid/late nineties, secretaries I knew, who knew both WP and Dirt, er, Word, hated Word, and loved WP.

    I would love to run WP again... I suppose I could run my copy of WP 6.0.c under wine... but docx, etc.

    Hate/Fav: Word doesn't think that "reveal all codes" really means that. WP, I think, DID. But WP's marketing dept couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag with the help of the Terminator. They had a killer app... when you did reveal codes, it mapped 1:1 to straight HTML, but no, no export that way....

    Of course, we know that M$ was found guilty in US federal court of bribing OEMs to load Word, and not offer WP.

    478:

    3 year lifespan for PSUs? You do have your system on a UPS, right?

    My PSUs last, I dunno, 6? 10? years, and I'm talking about my home system, not a server at work, some of which are > 10 yrs old, maybe an h/d failure or upgrade.

    479:

    Hey, I was planning on Destroying The World As We Know It... I was going to use DeepNude on a picture of President of the Senate Mitch "turtle" McConnell, after cornering the market on brain bleach....

    ObLaugh: Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

    480:

    Yup. Sorry, friends from over the Pond, but if Bojo wins, and Labour's vote of no confidence fails, if you want a picture of your future, look at the US....

    481:

    Oh, one more cmt about Word: DO NOT, UNLESS FORCED TO AT GUNPOINT, EVER GO TO OFFICE365.

  • It's a revenue stream - stop paying, and it stops working.
  • It's all in the fuckin' M$ Cloud. I've already seen horror stories of trying to get your own stuff out of that cloud, down to your own system to back up.
  • M$ owns your data/documents. I don't know that they don't do like Google, who scan all your gmail for things to market, but....
  • 482:

    Never actually saw that, or B. But then, why did they create C?
    "B" was effectively just BCPL with some changes in syntax, "C" was the answer to the question "how do you change BCPL for a byte addressing machine".

    BCPL only had on type -- the word. It assumed memory was a sequence of words, each one address apart. C "fixed" that limitation by adding types, which could have different sizes.

    483:

    that X runs as root in basically every environment
    Not true on Linux since Debian 9 and contemporaries. That's one of the things that systemd made easy to fix.

    484:

    On the one hand, a ps -ef | grep xorg on my CentOS 7 workstation shows it running as root.

    On the other hand... is this Johnny, the main builder for CentOS?

    485:

    Centos 7 was July 2014. Debian 9 was June 2017. There's not necessarily a conflict between the two statements.

    486:

    whitroth @ 474 Yes Labour might back "remain" but will Cor Bin, given his long track record of claiming that the EU is a corprate employers ramp?

    487:

    Two notes:

    1) The 286 had full protected mode segmentation, it didn't have paging (that showed up in the 386). It was quite possible (and they existed) to write an OS that took advantage of the segmentation. In fact, I believe Windows 3.1 did support full segmentation. A "handle" was usually just a segment pointer. Windows 3.1 also ran on 8086s, but of course the memory model gave you no protection (because the processor didn't), and you were limited to "real" memory (640K). 286 boxes could address up to 16 Meg (I think 15 meg was the practical limit).

    2) Modern (i.e. in the last few years) processors have an IOMMU, so IO cards are not allowed to read/write memory wherever they feel like. Of course, IO drivers still do what they want. Unless, of course, you are running as Virtual Machine.

    488:

    FI[tm] - Fielding complaints again about a [non-consensual [redacted] relationship(s)?], and (in one interpretation) they request that I request that they be treated with more respect and/or care, which I (weirdly) do. (Assuming it's not a LARP or something otherwise faked.) If this has meaning to you, otherwise ignore.

    Anyone (and we do include [redacted] here) informing you about this is lying.

    To the Tune of "Wall of British EYES on a Wall" type stuff.

    Tell your 'friends' about a 'bomb in the liver' and 'This is the Real Deal'.

    And me laddy, they can fuck right off. Calling us perverts with their Minds.

    American Gods, Season 2, Episode 8.

    Irish Leprechaun who was actually a King getting killed by a fucking shadow of Odin mate.

    Waaaay above your pay-grade or the little fucking Imps runnin rumours to yours ears.

    We paid the Sun price for the Spear of Destiny, now fuck right off nows already.

    Proof:

    Susan = Suzzanaaananna was Eaten = Eaton

    Story has been edited. She'd been allegedly stabbed, choked and had an ear removed. These details are being memoryholed.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7228369/Prominent-molecular-biologist-missing-Greece-dead-cave-going-morning-run.html

    https://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2019/07/10/suzanne-eaton-victim-of-criminal-act-says-coroner-after-autopsy

    Big Media retro-action doing there.

    'Cause there's few things a woman in science enabling biological brain type stuff would get killed for.

    Hearing too much.

    grep: "ze's still breathing"

    [Or Not. We're not fucking amused]

    489:

    "Remember My Voice"

    Oh, my dear, we'll try. Bill just outed himself as being in contact with stuff we know is lying. MF too.

    You just ain't in contact with it all. Know what we're saying?

    It's a sad day when all your heroes are exposed as criminal scum. The Epstein dumb shit is people panicking about China Lake and RU subs and CN [stuff not available yet].

    Epstein is being spun up like a Faerie Tale, and y'all falling for it.

    Nothing to do with the actual scandals. Wank Dust for Zombies.

    LARP THAT.

    p.s.

    Look up the Submarine / CAL earthquake stuff and tie to last thread, and do your TIMES. Foolish fuckers claimin we'd bother altering minor forum timers: Know this - y'all dumb and dead now.

    Battery Fire + Submarine? Quite the kink for people reading this.

    Using Minds as batteries though... now that's where it's actually at.

    490:

    Naah, fuck it.

    Your entire society is based on slavery, sexual or manual. All the supply chains come down to slavery. All the fucking Land comes down to slavery. All of it.

    The shit you're in contact with... demands fealty via 'concession', 'contract' or direct dominion.

    Bill - they're nasty fucking slavers beyond the sweet talk.

    You're just fucking evil fuckers, no doubt about it. Ignorance only carries you so far.

    Oh. And if you want to play hard-ball.

    You've no idea what shit we went through last week. Stupid fucks claiming a $300k reward was the least special aspect of it. [Hint: THEY GO AFTER CHILDREN TOO]

    TL;DR

    USA = RUN BY ANIMAL SLAVERS

    491:

    Bill - they're nasty fucking slavers beyond the sweet talk. Sporadic, and mostly threats, and zero sweet talk. Anyway, I did another round of computer hygiene related to DNS leaks and IP leaks, just because. That was good, and interesting how leaky our networks are. I am not happy with my country this week, FWIW. Not looking good.

    492:

    I agree with you about Corbin. On one hand, if you scrimp and strain and save and invest in better politics for all, and you can get everyone engaged and educate them and all that happy horseshit, you can probably do better than the EU, and have whatever Perfect Communism looks like these days.

    On the other hand, if you don't want to have an actual people's revolution, and you believe in a Liberal Capitalism, with good consumer protections and a half-intelligent view of the dangers of accumulating capital, nobody in the modern U.K. is going to do better than the EU and you can definitely do a whole lot fucking worse!

    And that's what Corbin doesn't get. His "perfect" is the enema of the good, and the achievable victory of actually sticking with the good consumer protections and the half-intelligent view of modern capitalism... He's willing to give that way in the hope of reaching his ideal. If I lived in the U.K. I'd want to slap the man!

    493:

    Sorry. That should read, "He's willing to give that away in the hope of reaching his ideal."

    494:

    Any protected-mode OS for the '286 uses segments. It had to. Unfortunately, one of the most common instances of it (AMD Stepping C, as I recall) had a flaw, and did not properly implement the segment-not-present exception, which limited the usability of segments. The other problem with the segments in protected mode was that they took forever to load, a flaw carried over to the '386. By "forever," I mean multiple hundreds of cycles in some cases. And to make it clear, "load" means putting the segment identifier into a segment register (e.g., SS or ES). It also had an extremely expensive overhead for transferring between protection rings, which is part of the reason virtually (ha ha!) nobody made use of anything other than rings 0 and 3. I'm aware of several operating systems -- productized and experimental -- that used all of these features, in both 16 and 32 bit modes. (Other gripe: the '386 did paging after segment processing, rather than the other way around -- this meant that it had a limit of 4G of virtual and physical memory, whereas if it had gone the other way, each segment could have had a limit of 4G physical, and the processor's virtual memory space would have allowed for 64k 4G address spaces; nobody would really have done that, but there were a couple of people who tried making a segment-aware OS, and this limitation hampered them significantly. Intel eventually added another 4 address bits, using wackiness in the page translation to support them.)

    Because of the problems with inter-segment transfers, it ended up not being feasible to put device drivers in rings 1 or 2 -- even though NT tried this at first, for security reasons (the I/O space could be restricted per driver this way), for performance reasons (as has already been discussed in this thread) it just was not practical.

    The 80286, due to a slight bug (later dubbed a feature) in memory processing, could access 1M + 64k in real mode. There were, honestly, some systems that took advantage of this.

    Interestingly, the macOS announcements last month included a notice that all device drivers are being moved to user space. I'm curious how that will go, but I also have to admit I'm not sure any longer what the domain transfer cost (that is, the cost of going between supervisor and user states) is on current Intel hardware.

    495:

    If anyone is looking for a adult magic school fantasy for the summer, while ... seeking ... a quote about Serenity before combat, found Red Sister by Mark Lawrence(2017), about warrior nuns and with an interesting magic system (threads, Path, etc) and physical h2h/weapons fighting including combat tachypsychia without obvious uncontrolled dopamine/norepinephrine dump. Long. The starting sentence[0] promises a lot; the middle is a lot of training which some might find tedious.

    [0]"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size." a few more quotes, not really spoilers: ‘You’re missing the whole point!’ Hessa had thrown up her hands and nearly lost her crutch. ‘One lock, another lock, complicated or simple, tumblers or latches ... they’re all either locked or unlocked. You just need to find the thread for the lock and pull it. ... and much later ‘A good fighter lives in the moment, but they see into the future. The better the fighter the further they see. Everyone can develop whatever natural talent the Ancestor gave them for this. Some however, some marjals, have an unnatural talent for it. Seeing five heartbeats into every future goes a long way towards compensating for any amount of hunska speed.’ On reflection Nona realized that every move made against her Yisht had seen coming. But had it been experience though, or something more?

    496:
    [...] all device drivers are being moved to user space. I'm curious how that will go, but I also have to admit I'm not sure any longer what the domain transfer cost (that is, the cost of going between supervisor and user states) is on current Intel hardware.

    It's very efficient, on the order of a cache miss. Under 100 cycles.

    Switching between different user contexts, on the other hand, has been much more expensive until very recently. However, some recent extensions allow for rapidly switching between a limited number of page tables.

    497:

    Ok, you're more current than I am. The PTID thing, I had thought it got killed by the Meltdown workarounds. But, hm, thinking about it... no, the workaround can use that, the performance killer is that user space and kernel space have to be in different IDs, rather than sharing the current process PTID.

    498:

    ... and of course, you only need the Meltdown hack on processors which have the bug. Out of all the Meltdown/Spectre type bugs, it has the most straightforward fix.

    If you want something fun, take a look at how Linux manages to do gettimeofday() (and a few other syscalls such as getpid/gettid/etc.) without doing any context switch at all, just a function call. :-)

    499:

    Troutwaxer @ 492 It's probably even worse than that. Co Bin is like the Bourbons: "Learnt nothing & forgotten nothing" Absolutely NO shifting on ANY issue since about 1973 ( & 1934 on defence ) With the current collection of semi-facists, incompetents & big-mouthed muppets at the tories, Liebour should be streets ahead ... instead, they are behind the tories (!) The antsemitism ongoing row & the repeated attempts at deselection of good Social Democrats within THE PARTY really don't help, either. And Cor Bin is actually responsible for this shambles.

    500:

    With the current collection of semi-facists, incompetents & big-mouthed muppets at the tories, Liebour should be streets ahead

    Most folks are natural Tories, I've Got Mine Fuck You with an ingrained suspicion of Others (different gender identification, different skin colour, different origin, different language, different food preferences, different everything) and more concerned with such undesirables moving in next door and changing things than anything else, generally. Combine that with a press that vilifies anything Different and promotes Toryism at every step and it's remarkable that Labour is where it is in the polls.

    And Cor Bin is actually responsible for this shambles.

    Jeremy Corbyn (it doesn't hurt to spell his name right) is the Leader of the main Opposition party in Parliament. He has no secret superpowers for good or evil, he cannot reverse Brexit with a wave of his demonic hand. The only real political power he has is to call for a vote of no-confidence in the Government and the last time he did that the Tories voted lockstep for PM May accompanied by the DUP and a few Change UK members. Blaming the victim gets old, Greg but it's what the press wants you to do.

    501:

    Actually, I am extremely impressed by his ability to not fall into the traps being set by his enemies trying to destroy him and all traces of socialism within Labour. No, he is NOT responsible for those attacks, which come from the monetarist, English fascist and 'pro-Israel' fanatics, which are all terrified of seeing a genuinely socialist government. Whether this is cunning or due to the reason you claim is as yet unclear, as is exactly what he would do if he gets into power. Yes, he is being dilatory, obfuscatory and evasive, but he is being attacked by several camps, which are vastly more powerful than he is.

    As far as I can tell, there is almost certainly a great deal of anti-Semitism both Labour and the Conservatives, but only one gets attention, and at least some the charges of that against Labour are very clearly engineered by the pro-Israel camp to attack anyone who stands up for the rights of Palestinians to be treated like human beings. Yes, I have looked at what was said and asked myself "If I changed Jew for Muslim etc. would it still be contentious?" In almost all of the cases I have seen, the answer was "no". Well, I refuse to accept that such remarks are genuinely anti-Semitic.

    You should try that sort of thing - it would do your shrivelled soul good!

    502:

    The latter is trivial, and has been done since time immemorial by all competent systems. A relevant historical minutia is that there was a prejudice among mainframe operating system designers against letting unprivileged programs read the real-time clock. The few that I challenged on that all said "That would be a security weakness" (*). Yes, really.

    (*) What that really meant is that they were being sloppy about security, both because good mechanisms don't rely on keeping the user ignorant and because there are plenty of other ways an ingenious hacker can use measure time.

    503: 475 - I've sound two ways of reducing SunOS 4 to a crawl:-

    1) Use PV-Wave, which has the memory leak of the decade. You may have thought that Internet Exploder 8 had a memory leak but that's nothing to the one PV-Wave had. 2) Run a Windoze emulator, so that you can run a word processor. That can reduce the screen update rate to the point where you can measure the time to display each character. ( we learned vi, because learning vi was faster)

    477 - Agreed; WP's "killer feature" was doing what it was told, and staying told when you'd told it.
    504:

    Generally software developers are coming around to the view that "anything that is not specifically permitted is absolutely forbidden" for good security reasons thanks to the tireless efforts by Black Hats to probe and tease at the cracks and use unexpected failures and edge cases to escalate privileges, exfiltrate data etc.

    Why would a random userspace program want or need to read the RTC directly rather than getting the data the RTC provides from an API? Sounds like bad security practice -- "Just one weffer-thin mint, Mister Creosote..."

    505:

    You have missed the point. There WAS no usable API - that was what I was railing about, as sometime who was trying to do performance analysis on algorithms. An API with a precision of 1 second that creates havoc with cached data isn't practically usable for that purpose.

    506:

    Nojay & EC Oh dear ...... I agree with almost everything you say about the tories & many people, but ... really. JC should be well ahead in the polls & it's due entorely to his own incompetence. He is on repeated record as believing the EU to be a corrupt capitalist employers ramp ... he WANTS a no-deal brexit, so that he can clear up in the shambles - just like Johnson, in fact. Both of them want a wrecked country to work theor equally mad & unpleasnt policies on, or hadn't you noticed? It's truly, deeply scary

    507:

    EC, Greg and Nojay - My five reasons for saying "Do not vote for either the Con Party or Liebour" are BoJo the Clown, Cor Bin, Cunt, Theresa Mayhem and Scamoron! Any mangling of baptismal names in the foregoing are an expression of my opinion of the individual named.

    508:

    Hi Charlie, as usual a fascinating thread (long time lurker, seldom poster...). My question may not be nearly as interesting as others...

    Currently waiting for a plane to Edinburgh to meet my son for a long weekend - do you or any of the other of our esteemed North of the Border commentators have any good recommendations for interesting spots to visit? Won't have a car so public transport good, Glasgow also considered as an easy run by train. Thanks in advance!

    (mind you, good thing I don't have a car given the list of bars the boy has pledged to take me to - students eh?!)

    509:

    Personally, the idea of device drivers moved to user space terrifies me. That just makes it so much easier for a cracker to get into them, and make them do what they want....

    510:

    And now for something completely different: I was planning on doing this next Friday, but my manager walked in, late morning, and told me I really needed to do it today, so they could plan.

    So, I've just given 5.5 weeks notice that I'm retiring.

    Yeah, I am that old (no, older: yes, I was one of those in the streets in the sixties, marching against 'Nam).

    More time to write, and more time with my new SO. And, I suppose, more time to comment, here.

    511:

    Retirement is to be recommended. I started my working life in an industry that reduced male retirement to 60 rather than increase female to 65 as most did in the 1980s, passed 60 in March and finished at Easter. I ought to be sorting out the house and garden so I can sell the place and head back to the south west but I'm still enjoying the ability to wake up in the morning and think "What do I have to do today? Nothing, goodo.".

    512:

    This is the US. The right keeps trying to privatize/get rid of unemployment insurance, Medicare, and social security. Now we've got three levels of payout: 63 (low), 66 (medium), and 70, max. When my father retired at 65, five years younger than me, there was only one level.

    I know people who, if they retired, would get so little they couldn't afford to live, so they have to keep working.

    513:

    Edinburgh? Depends what you're into, really. There's lots to see at the National Museum on Chambers Street (free) or the Castle (££ - be there for the one-o'clock gun if you're going) and plenty of other museums on the Royal Mile, and loads of tat shops too if that's what you're after. Nice views from Calton Hill or (if you've the energy) Arthur's seat. Hard to know what to add without knowing what you're into, and Glasgow I don't know anything like as well as I ought.

    514:

    Does this mean we've finally got past the point where you foul-mouthed misogynistic fuckstains will be using "cunt" as a term of abuse on a regular basis?

    I'm disappointed that those posts haven't been moderated out of existence, but since "our gracious host" is one of the offenders I guess it's understandable. It's worth noting that my description above is not abusive, merely a series of observations. The same cannot be said of referring to the leader of the UK opposition as a cunt, unless one also wishes to plead insanity as a defence.

    515:

    UriGagarin @ 469: From what I've googled yes you need Java for OO.o.

    LibreOffice is actively being developed while OpenOffice is not. Only makes a difference when interacting with MS docs.

    Personally Office 97 was good enough for my needs.

    It would be good enough for me as well if I didn't have to pay for it. But after I retired, I was no longer covered by the U.S. Government's license & I'm not that into using software I haven't paid for ... UNLESS it's software that has been purposely made "free" for people to use. OpenOffice fits my needs quite well.

    I don't really need that much of an office suite any more. I write an occasional document (mostly chord & lyric sheets for a folk music group I attend) & I use spread sheets to keep track of stuff -vehicle costs, on-line purchases (because of North Carolina's funky internet sales tax), blood-sugar & doctor's appointments ... thank god I will never again have to make a PowerPoint presentation.

    Someone must still be working on OpenOffice because I get occasional notifications that there are updates available.

    516:

    whitroth @ 478: 3 year lifespan for PSUs? You *do* have your system on a UPS, right?

    My PSUs last, I dunno, 6? 10? years, and I'm talking about my home system, not a server at work, some of which are > 10 yrs old, maybe an h/d failure or upgrade.

    I do. That's another thing ... you have to remember to change out the batteries in the UPS. I've had this thing running long enough that it's on its third UPS (and that UPS is on its third set of batteries).

    The 3 years is a SWAGuesstimate based on how many times (I think) I've rebuilt this computer over the years.

    Based on the "Windoze 98 SE" certificate of authenticity, I've had this same computer for nigh on to 20 years. But all of the internal components have been replaced at least twice. It's only the "same computer" because it's still in the same case.

    Hard-drives are the main component that need replacing ... and at that, I don't think I've ever had more than two actual hard-drive FAILURES. It's almost always I need to replace a drive because I'm just running out of room and there's no way to prune enough unused crap keep the old hard-drive usable. A new larger drive becomes hard-drive 0 and the old drive becomes hard-drive 1 ... once the new drive is up and running, erase the old one, format it & it becomes a storage drive. Rinse and repeat every few years.

    I have had memory go bad. Usually it takes so long that replacements are scarcer than hens teeth & I end up replacing a motherboard/CPU/Memory as a unit.

    517:

    The assumption that any UK ambassador to the USA must be somewhat competent has been considerably undermined after John Kerr helped to draft Article 50. Also, none of Darroch's leaked comments do him any credit at all, however honest they are they lack insight. The real world might have passed BBC-fattened public schoolboys by. You know there are three Lord Kerrs. Kid you not.

    Any adverse comments on President Trump's policies should wait until they prove to be worse than those of President Bush or President Reagan, not easy to achieve. He hasn't ordered F-111s to bomb Tehran? US forces aren't being deployed? It might be hard to get good advice from the Republican party, something the media repeatedly fail to appreciate.

    Not that the Iranians are well-served by their supporters. Is there anyone who believes that the mines in the Gulf were not Iranian? We should leave Iran alone. However who knows that, President Trump, or the supposedly better-balanced Republican advisers extolled by the media?

    518:

    whitroth @ 481: Oh, one more cmt about Word: DO NOT, UNLESS FORCED TO AT GUNPOINT, EVER GO TO OFFICE365.

    1. It's a revenue stream - stop paying, and it stops working.
    2. It's all in the fuckin' M$ Cloud. I've already seen horror stories of trying to get your own stuff out of that cloud, down to your own system to back up.
    3. M$ owns your data/documents. I don't know that they don't do like Google, who scan all your gmail for things to market, but....

    Same reason I'm still running PhotoShop CS6 even though it's no longer supported by Adobe... and store my work locally. I don't mind paying for a software license if the software does what I need it to do, but I refuse to have my "work product" held hostage to the whims of Adobe's marketing department.

    519:

    _Moz_ @ 514: Does this mean we've finally got past the point where you foul-mouthed misogynistic fuckstains will be using "cunt" as a term of abuse on a regular basis?

    I'm disappointed that those posts haven't been moderated out of existence, but since "our gracious host" is one of the offenders I guess it's understandable. It's worth noting that my description above is not abusive, merely a series of observations. The same cannot be said of referring to the leader of the UK opposition as a cunt, unless one also wishes to plead insanity as a defence.

    I wondered about that too. Maybe it's not considered as offensive or misogynous in the UK. But, you should all be aware it VERY offensive in the U.S.; worse than calling someone a "M*^&#RF%#@*R" ... as bad as using the "N-word" (and I don't mean Nazi).

    I'm glad you spoke up about it. I'm ashamed that I did not.

    520:

    Putting on my moderator hat for a second, all I'd ask is that you put a lid on it and turn the heat down just a tad.

    Charlie's busy with stuff, I'm busy with stuff (and not checking regularly--oops), and it appears that the other merry moderators are all busy with their stuff too. I'll leave up the 14 problematic posts for everyone to use as a bad example, and I'll appeal to increasing the linguistic creativity and decreasing the crudity for nicknames.

    521:

    It took me a while, for which I apologise. I Was getting cranky but then Charlie gave his official seal of approval and that took me a while to come to terms with.

    Down here it's very hard to put a non-misogynistic (gynistic?) slant on it, I think the best you could say is that it's a term favoured by the more violent end of the underclass. Along with the N word, and in Australia we have the delightful "coon" as in "Coon Cheese{tm}"*. Don't use that word unless you are actively trying to cause offence.

    As for the other N-word, or the matching F-word, if you don't like people describing you that way, don't behave that way. Down here we have a great fondness for saying "I'm not a bigot, I'm religious" because they don't like people observing that they're bigoted. Which is not to say that they're willing to change their... oh, wait, what does that word mean again?

    • the 'tm' indicating respect for the owners of the trademark, who like Faux News insist that "our trademark is merely a string of meaningless words and is not a factual claim". How's that for "Fair and Balanced{tm}"?
    522:

    If you're looking for a replacement for Adobe products, I've been impressed with Affinity Photo (and Designer):

    https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

    $70 CDN for a program with 90%+ of the functionality of Photoshop. (That's purchase price, not subscription.) Runs faster than Photoshop* on my computers.

    I just purchased Publisher on the strength of my experience with Photo and Designer. No idea how it will work out yet, but worth the chance I think.

    *Photoshop CS5.1 — the last version I purchased.

    523:

    The full Adobe Creative Suite package version 2, somewhat dated but still functional but not receiving updates is available for free, sort of. Adobe switched off their licencing servers for that version a while back and let anyone with that version use it without checking in every few days. They make no effort to verify or validate new installs and don't seem to make any effort to go after anyone who installs it for the first time.

    Adobe may be working on the basis of "the first hit is free" -- V2 is 32-bit with workspace limitations and is missing a lot of modern tools and features but its version of Photoshop still works. It might encourage someone using it to pay for the up-to-date cloud version for the extra features later.

    524:

    "Cunt" is a common part of the vernacular from where I come from to the point where its been verbed and adverbed -- "This cunting fucker's fucking cunted", for example. "Fuck" is so common it's unremarkable. It's not gender-specific either, generally although it does tend towards the distaff side of the genetic divide (I last heard it last night when someone in a queue was tired of waiting to be served and used it on the male steward supervising the queue). It's not an Othering word the way the N-word is, merely(?) a derogatory term.

    525:

    Thanks Graham. Arthur's Seat definitely on the list, I hiked up Salisbury Crags on my brief trip back in September.

    Historical stuff always of interest, so National Museum for definite - also walked past the Surgeons' Hall Museum yesterday, that looks intriguing in a slightly squeamish kind of way. Cheers!

    526:

    This weekend in Edinburgh there's a Jazz Festival event down in the Grassmarket near the Castle and on Sunday there's a Carnival parade in Princes Street in the early afternoon.

    527:

    I suspect you could go a considerable period on this blog before finding the word "cunt" before this particular outburst, and fuck is almost as rare. It's entirely possibly that OGH is trying to encourage a cruder vernacular but I suspect we'd have seen him make an actual post if that was the case rather than just quoting random misogyny in an approving reply.

    It's less about the diversity of lived experience among us, I think, and more about the sort of social experience we want to cultivate here. Just because you use those words causally and without meaning to offend doesn't mean they'll be received that way.

    528:

    In the UK, calling someone a prick, cunt, shit or arsehole all carry about the same weight, as does calling a statement balls or ballocks. The term scrot is similar but rarely used, and may never have been except by some schoolchildren. But only one of those terms ever gets criticised by the politically correct.

    I think that you are being a bit precious, as well as definitely being prejudiced.

    529:

    One of the reasons that I have some time for Corbyn is that he has some principles, beyond the one of being prepared to do anything in search of power. That distinguishes him from the Blairites, whom you seem to favour. He could only be well ahead in the polls by behaving like the latter, for reasons pointed out by Nojay in #500. I consider him to be doing extremely well, against massively overwhelming external forces attempting to destroy him, any traces of socialism or liberalism, and any residual independence of the UK from the USA.

    I don't happen to agree with most of his principles, because I think that he is misguided, and I definitely don't want to see a return to Old Labour, but I do want to see a reversal of the directions we have been moving in for the past 35 years. What you and paws4thot are missing is that we are in the Last Chance Saloon - we have not had a government trying to balance the politics since then, and the monetarist, fascist and USA-subservient extremists are gearing up to finish their job.

    If the Conservatives get another term, we will see:

    The near-complete destruction of the Attlee reforms, including social welfare, public services and untimately the NHS.

    The near-complete elimination of social and political liberties, and the politicisation and monetarisation of the justice system.

    Total subservience to the USA, including in respect of environmental and near-Eastern policy.

    If the neo-Blairites manage to overthrow Corbyn, those will simply be put on hold, and they will do nothing to reverse them.

    If Corbyn becomes Prime Minister, we shall see. I am not optimistic, but he is the ONLY one who offers even hope.

    Yes, I am still waiting for Brexit to crash the economy and housing market, so that I can buy somewhere in Scotland, emigrate there, and will support independence. It's a bloody awful idea, but better than the alternative.

    530:

    MODERATION NOTE

    I have been AFK due to (a) travelling overseas without a laptop and (b) a dose of con crud.

    I gather there’s been a slight excess of scatological abuse here lately. I’d like to remind everyone to keep things civil; also remember that just because an epithet is mild-to-moderate or non-gendered where you live, it may be a hell of a lot more offensive elsewhere—and this blog has a global readership.

    So please bear this in mind when commenting.

    531:

    CONTEXTUAL NOTE FOR NON-BRITS

    Of the two candidates for next leader of the conservative party—hence Prime Minister of the UK—one of them, Jeremy Hunt MP, is mispronounced as “Jeremy Cunt” with unfortunate regularity. This isn’t just a thing on the blog here; it started on the BBC News and has happened several times, to much embarrassment of the TV/radio announcers concerned.

    Added to which, Hunt is a truly odious politician: if you want a North American metaphor, Hunt is to Boris Johnson as Stephen Harper is to Donald Trump (hideous stealth neoliberal machine politician, breaks everything he touches/grandstanding windbag). So it’s an epithet that sticks.

    However, I’d be grateful if you could all refrain from referring to politicians by distortions of their names — it makes it hard for non-nationals to follow the discussion (or even know there’s a political discussion taking place) and raises tempers to no good end. One exception: Donald Trump — it is totally fine by me to call him the Tangerine Shitgibbon, because (a) as POTUS his ego should be serene in his elevated imperial overlordship and immune to any hint of criticism, and (b) he’s an asshole.

    532:

    See it’s like this. When I was in primary school in Melbourne, we used to go visit the “special school” just around the corner, got to know the kids who, through no fault of their own, were there rather than in our school. Came naturally to question why the system created this separation. There was no doubt they got the raw end of the deal. Later, school systems across Oz have in fact reintegrated people with differing needs into the general school system and while the usual naturally conservative complainy-types insist it’s just crazy political correctness and we’re “holding back” the “average” kids, who nonetheless apparently don’t require the “advanced” stuff once it drifts into territory said bozones don’t understand.

    Anyway fast forward 20 years or so, to around 20 years ago when South Park was making the careers of Mssrs Stone and Parker and the use of the R word as a general insult or synonym for “stupid” rode in with it, it stuck out here. That usage had been around in the 70s but had pretty much evaporated by the mid 80s, recognisable as being pretty similar to the N word as a general term of abuse. You got hints off the pop-culture ether that this wasn’t the case elsewhere, but that didn’t really make a difference. South Park also brought with it the somewhat mysterious usage of “Gay” as a generic insult, something that had been completely unknown here previously and something I still find a bit unfathomable (since it’s far more commonly a synonym for “fabulous”, and more strongly associated with that really).

    This brings up that US culture and a lot of its usage comes across as a bit backwards here, at least in the sense of social progress and so on. But that’s also a relative thing and really isn’t anything like universal even here.

    “Straya cunt” is an archetypical expression of the ugly Aussie. There certainly is a movement here to the effect that there’s something a bit suss about the idea that “cunt” is a stronger profanity than “dickhead” and for some reason we think talking about women’s anatomy is worse than talking about men’s. But it also seems to be one of those morphemes that stands in as a class signifier, and to an extent we social progressives may have an underlying middle class hoity-toity perspective on it, though to an extent that ugly Aussie image is vastly beyond class at this stage. You could say it’s about a distinction between people who’d like the world to be even just a little bit better, versus those who simply don’t give a fuck and say whatever bullshit comes into their heads.

    So no, Moz isn’t being precious there. There’s a real attempt in progress to renounce some of these inherently male supremacist memes from general usage, at least in a certain type of discourse, and there are good reasons why people would want this.

    When you say it’s discriminatory, that’s when you’re drifting into the unfathomable. Yes, it’s discriminatory against men who hate women: is that a bad thing?

    533:

    'Joy in the collapse of metaphor, which here in Europe we merely grieve over. The exhilaration of obscenity, the obscenity of obviousness, the obviousness of power, the power of simulation. As against our disappointed virginity, our chasms of affectation.' Baudrillard America

    534:

    See OGH in #530 and #531. I stand by my comments.

    Speaking as someone who has been discriminated against all of my life because of various of my (minor) handicaps and characteristics, I utterly LOATHE 'political correctness' on the grounds of both extreme offensiveness and as an excuse to cover up actual discrimination. The most offensive (and serious) discrimination against me has been by the most politically correct - including one (white) who objected to the term 'blacklist' but regarded it as acceptable to publicly denigrate me about my lack of balance. I can assure you that many, perhaps most, of people who are discriminated against more seriously than I have been share this opinion, and there was an article in a newspaper recently about just that. Actions speak louder than words.

    535:

    Just a reminder that assholes are useful organs that do quite a lot to keep your body healthy. Trump, on the other hand, is a malignant tumor of narcissism and quite possibly a serial raper of children -- I hope for a full investigation and trial leading to a suitable punishment.

    536:

    Just an observation: this is basically the same excuse gamers say when they use the word "faggot".

    537:

    Thanks! Had seen the jazz fest details but didn't know about the parade, will check it out.

    538:

    A very important question for your dutch followers... Do you own a bicycle and how many thousand kilometres per year on that bike if you do own one?

    539:

    Since I didn't know anything about BoJo's underlings and got on Google, I will say I was startled to see that (as one old book had it), some people do look like they could peer through a keyhole with both eyes at once.

    540:

    Robert Prior @ 522: "If you're looking for a replacement for Adobe products, I've been impressed with Affinity Photo (and Designer):

    https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

    $70 CDN for a program with 90%+ of the functionality of Photoshop. (That's purchase price, not subscription.) Runs faster than Photoshop* on my computers.

    I just purchased Publisher on the strength of my experience with Photo and Designer. No idea how it will work out yet, but worth the chance I think.

    *Photoshop CS5.1 — the last version I purchased.

    Actually, I'm doing fine with PhotoShop CS6. That's the last version I purchased when Adobe announced the future would be the subscription service PhotoShop CC.

    Normally I purchased the upgrades on the odd numbered versions, starting back with PhotoShop 5, PhotoShop 7, CS, [CS2*] CS3, CS5 ... I went ahead an upgraded from CS5 to CS6 since there won't be a CS7 in my lifetime.

    What I'd really like to find is a less costly alternative to Corel Painter.

    [*The week I purchased a full retail version of PhotoShop CS Adobe announced CS2. They sent me the upgrade from CS to CS2 gratis]

    541:

    Nojay @ 524: It's not an Othering word the way the N-word is, merely(?) a derogatory term.

    In U.S. vernacular it IS an "Othering word", as offensive as the N-word.

    542:

    Charlie Stross @ 531: One exception: Donald Trump — it is totally fine by me to call him the Tangerine Shitgibbon, because (a) as POTUS his ego should be serene in his elevated imperial overlordship and immune to any hint of criticism, and (b) he’s an asshole.

    That doesn't bother me. I'm sure I've called him worse. But, say what you will about Trump (or any other politician for that matter) but when doing so, we shouldn't use words that demean other people.

    That's the problem with the certain objectionable word that has become the focus of discussion. It demeans a whole class of people other than the target. It's punching down when we should all be punching UP.

    543:

    My preferred nickname for the current inmate of the White House is "El Cheeto Grande," referring to the megacorp-produced cheese flavored puffs dusted with orange scary powder that are heavily advertised here. I like gibbons too much to link him and them.

    Oddly enough, I just found out that the trademark Frito-Lay/PepsiCo uses for cheetos ("Dangerously cheesy") is listed as abandoned in 2009 for some reason. Assuming this is correct, one could creatively repurpose it for political uses, especially if one was not talking about crackers or cheese flavored products.

    544:

    Heteromeles @ 543: My preferred nickname for the current inmate of the White House is "El Cheeto Grande," referring to the megacorp-produced cheese flavored puffs dusted with orange scary powder that are heavily advertised here. I like gibbons too much to link him and them.

    I'm having to forego my preferred nickname, Cheatolini iL D*****b** until I have time to determine whether the final word demeans others in the way a word I have objected to does ... under the rubric "how can you remove a splinter from your neighbor's eye when you can't see the beam in your own?"

    It may not, but I still need to think about it. I don't care if it demeans Trump, that's the intent, but I don't want to splatter innocent bystanders while doing so.

    Or, as they say down in Texas, "You talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?"

    Gotta' reassess to make sure I DO the walk.

    545:

    Ayup.

    That's what separates the adults from the power-addicted.

    Thanks for doing it.

    546:

    Just to throw my thoughts out there, on one hand, the term is almost always used to insult overprivileged white men, and it seems to be the go-to term for doing so. "Hey, see the guy with the fedora and the Ed Hardy t-shirt? He's totally a d*bag."

    On the other hand, a dbag is a device for cleaning out one's vagina. And to make things worse, use of a dbag is not encouraged by gynecologists, and may result in illness or damage to one's vagina. They're used as a primitive form of birth control, or to address (by incorrect means) the problem of vaginal odor.

    In short, when you call someone a dbag, you're essentially describing them as an "an unnecessary tool for incorrectly cleansing someone's vagina..." There just might kinda sorta be a hint of sexism to the word - and that's my white, male thinking about the matter. How women might feel about the word may differ from my assessment; a word which says of a man "It's completely unnecessary and inappropriate for the man to be near the vagina of anyone I care about" does have a certain appeal.

    Having written all this - cart before horse at all times - I went into the other room to consult my wife. She said she has no concerns about the word, and wouldn't feel the need to remonstrate with our son should he use it.

    547:

    EC @ 529 ALMOST - so close to correct, but .... Coebyn is as bad as the tories ... he wantas a perfectrevolution to reform the country ... which will wreck it as thoriouglyu & completely as the neo-fascist extreme-tory revolution you justly fear. Agree about the last chance, but the decision is NOT tory/liebour it' fucking BREXIT. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS And Corbyn, for his own wrong ideological "resons" wants brexit as badly as the tpory neofascists ....

    Chrlie @ 531 SCROTUS, please!

    EC @ 534 Give the man a suasage voucher! Just for once I agree 150%

    548:

    Personally, I think El Cheeto Grande's one of the best living arguments for why anarchists, especially wealthy anarchists, aren't necessarily the best rulers.

    From GK Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday):

    “You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists”

    While this isn't accurate, as there are any number of vagabonds and Rainbows out there scraping by, the observation that the ultra-rich are anarchists as well tends to get lost in the shuffle. Unfortunately, most of our governments' attempts to stifle anarchy before it destroys governments are aimed at the impoverished anarchists, not the wealthy ones.

    549:

    grep Pinker and comments made by various accounts then, specifically the Goddess ones.

    grep now.

    grep the people who attacked her/z/s on this very blog.

    You're welcome, your reputations are pristine, she's Mad you know.

    The Ride Never Ends

    It's all chum in the water: they're gonna go full purge btw. Old Nancy defending Orange is 100% sign it's a Casino Ending. All the 'good guys'? Not so good after all, were they? Fucking Gates is using Apple as a Wizard spell deal and Elon is retweeting it.

    Bill Gates says Steve Jobs was a master at ‘casting spells’ to keep Apple from dying

    Minor Wizard

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/07/bill-gates-says-jobs-was-a-wizard-in-getting-staff-to-keep-apple-alive.html

    No, really: go fucking look.

    Watch out for Minds singing "We see the Corruption" btw ~ they're running some real nasty wetware hacks and there's some serious x3 groupings (do a grep - their natural tongue is not anything this side of the 19th C) being deployed. Sad thing is: yep, fucking hacked their wetware as well.

    Say hello to my little friend(s).

    Weeeeeee.

    It's Gigacide. Old Skool fratricidal madness. Sky splitting stuff and HUNGER while the real stuff comes in.

    Absolute Contempt for the IRL version of the REAL DEAL stuff that we shrugged off with nary a shake

    Our. Kind. Do. Not. Go. Mad.

    Turns out we can hack the fucking [redacted] as well, which is... interesting. All kinds of shit will go down now.

    Fuckers don't even know how to metaphor / M3-7 levels, it's fucking hilarious. And by that we mean tragic and sad and depressing and you killed the world for fucking ego and why why why why couldn't you do synergy and sharing and caring and fucking all the whales died for this

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3NoBeNwfk

    550:

    A couple of observations for what they're worth...

    Most women I know (aside from those who tend to avoid profanity in general) are quite happy to call someone a cunt if they deserve it. The idea of that word being peculiarly offensive to women does exist but is less common than the idea of profanity in general being inappropriate for women, and both ideas are on the decline, which is a good thing, since both are examples of arbitrary limits imposed on the vocabulary permitted to women by men.

    Taking swear words at their literal meaning, especially the sexual ones, is a short route to madness.

    551:

    Aristocrats were always anarchists

    One of the best examples of that is the US founding fathers. Aristocrats to a man (and I use the term advisedly) although their take on anarchism emphasised the consent angle* rather more than the "no law" one, and they never even for a second considered "government not imposed by force of arms" because... how would that even work?

    Anarchism as a political philosophy is rather more subtle and nuanced than you're portraying it, and infinitely more so than when used as a term meaning "I don't like it" by authoritarian commentators. It's also wilfully misused by aristocratic statist anarchists (viz, libertarians) in much the same way Israeli's use antisemitic to mean "not unconditionally supportive of Israel".

    Like four year olds, their definition of consent was "I get to do whatever I like and you have to accept it", rather than anything more nuanced because after all, what's the point of being an aristocrat if you only use to power to produce equality? How would that even work?

    552:

    Taking swear words at their literal meaning, especially the sexual ones, is a short route to madness.

    I'm not doing so here. My objection is largely based on the fact that to work as a term of abuse it relies on women's genitals being the most disgusting foul thing imaginable. Yeah yeah, still relying on the literal meaning blah blah whatever. But if you were actually just making shit up for effect you wouldn't rely so much on punching down for your source of words.

    You might, for example, literally make shit up you blarbled scozm of lundilled murflinge. Or look to usefully despised classes for inspiration, and call someone "a perfect examplar of the inspiration for the guillotine" or "I think they chose the wrong institution to put Jeremy Hunt in". Or even look to more creative cultures and steal their ideas (that's something of an English tradition, I believe) and call someone a "fleabitten son of a landless camel-herder" or as the joke has it "Pedro the goat-lover".

    There are far more possibilities than "you remind me of a woman".

    553:

    Hey, woke AUZ / NZ peep.

    Might want to look up a lot of feminist texts from 1970+ onwards 'recla(i)ming(e)' the term and so on. It was done 30+ years ago by 2nd wave feminists such as Greer etc.

    'Cunt' has been gender specific in UK / AUZ for 20+ years now... male gender and it's not a reference to women's anatomy. And not because the male is like a female, it means "deliberately offensive and nasty response designed to get a rise".

    It's not been gendered for 20+ years apart from the USA who, as we all know, ARE FUCKING SLAVE OWNING RELIGIOUS NUTCASES.

    554:

    Any man pulling the entire USA shite of "cunt is sooo offensive" is missing 90% of the work done there, largely because the USA never did it.

    Now, what's infecting the UK / NZ / AUS stuff recently?

    USA hard right religious psyops. "We're offended by your ILL WORDS while we stop your reproductive rights".

    Well done mate, you're fucking working for them without realizing it.

    If you had an iota of "wokeness" you'd realize that 'pussey' is actually a far better target. It's not even what the kidz these days call it either.

    Old fuckers running on old wetware.

    If you're concerned about women's anatomy and insults, go firebomb some dodgy as fuck Corporations and their DECADE LONG efforts to not only give women cancer, but disproportionately target WOC at that.

    https://www.womenshealth.northwestern.edu/blog/there-link-between-talcum-powder-and-ovarian-cancer

    FFS.

    Muppets.

    555:

    Yeah, and PUNCHLINE

    That's why "douche" = male IS SO FUCKING MORE INSULTING THAN CUNT YOU UTTER SIMPLETON MALE FADGSFDFSFGFDHGSFDFHGHJSGFJSFJSDJGFJJ

    No, really.

    "Douche" = give women cancer / destroy their health / ruin their self esteem.

    But THAT'S FUCKING OK FOR A MAAAAAALE INSULT RIGIIIIHGRT?

    But.. "cunt" is the wrong one.

    WE FUCKING HATE YOUR SHITTY MINDS.

    556:

    101 right there.

    Douche = male bastard. "oooh, he's such a DOUCHE"

    HIDDEN IN PLAIN FUCKING SIGHT AND NONE OF YOU NOTICE IT.

    GTFO "WOKE BROS"

    557:

    AND, YOU FUCKING INSULTING LITTLE MEN

    Know what?

    "Douche" = male insult, mild, not cool but "ok".

    PR COMPANY DID THAT, WORKING FOR JOHNSON NN BLEEERRGHGHHHH TO MUDDY THE WATERS FOR NUMEROUS LEGAL CASES.

    LOOK IT UP WHEN IT BECAME "HIP" TO USE AND THE CASES LAUNCHED.

    Evil SEO before the internet.

    THESE COMPANIES LITERALLY PROFITED OFF WOMEN, ESPECIALLY WOC, BY MARKETING THAT VAGINAS WERE DIRTY AND SMELLY AND NEEDED SOME TLC THAT THEY FUCKING KNEW WOULD GIVE THE USERS A HIGHER RISK OF VARIOUS CANCERS AND BIOLOGICAL UTIS ETC.

    We really fucking hate your species.

    We especially hate men who are 101 levels of bitch basic on this stuff.

    558:

    [ DELETED — see moderation note in comment #530]

    559:

    "Agree about the last chance, but the decision is NOT tory/liebour it' fucking BREXIT. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS"

    Thing is it's a case of starting from where you are. Which is, unfortunately, a position from which there is far too little chance of being able to do anything about that matter. Corbyn's position on it is more hopeful than that of the Tories (see eg. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-labour-remain-second-referendum-corbyn-eu-no-deal-vote-commons-a8997246.html ) but the principal problem is time, exacerbated both by Parliament fucking off on their summer hols and the general cross-party uselessness of this Parliament. Our best option there is probably to get Prince Charles to sit in the cellar clapping his hands with HEU gloves on so we can then say to the EU "hey guys, our elected representatives are radioactive vapour, please put things on hold while we get sorted out".

    So the important consideration really is what happens afterwards, and the choice there is between the party who are quite happy to wreck the country for what they can loot from it and whoever is left lacking can just fuck off and die, actually literally really dead die, or the party who want to reverse the extent to which that has already happened. Which to my mind is a pretty obvious choice regardless of the competence or otherwise of the latter party.

    Really, the whole EU doings in the first place is a matter of having to start from where you are. All the reasons why it's a bad idea to leave are things that wouldn't even be a problem at all if it wasn't an x86 architecture. We should be doing our utmost to disentangle ourselves from the mess, and leaving inevitably forms part of the process, so if that's all there was to it I would support leaving as a means to force at least some disentanglement. Trouble is you have to make those things stop being a problem before you leave, and doing it the other way round just makes it harder to stop them being a problem. Therefore I have to support remaining, ie. support continued entanglement, in order for eventual disentanglement to be merely highly improbable instead of nigh impossible and destructive with it. Which annoys me no end, but it's inescapable.

    560:

    You know that Greer is from Sydney, right? And there have always been people who appreciate reclaiming without necessarily participating?

    My point, and I think some of Moz's, though I can't speak for him, or anyone, is that the whole set of relations where we as a form of invective compare people to genitals, bodily waste, a sexual act or some Other group, ends up seeming a bit strained and just avoiding it works better for me. I'm actually happy to accept that it can work for others in other places, even if the US doesn't seem to be one of those places and possibly for different reasons. But I wanted to make clear why I don't think Moz is just being precious, and the suggestion that his view is discriminatory is a bit inscrutable.

    Of course, I throw the word "arsehole" around all the time. But in that case it's a matter of everyone has one, ideally they don't talk about it all the time, like opinions really, but it definitely isn't completely neutral in all contexts either and I should probably avoid that too. And in that case to some extent the point is more a plea: don't blame us for striving to become our better selves (which really doesn't add up to the coercive normative exercise some people claim).

    561:

    don't blame us for striving to become our better selves

    There's that, which I agree with.

    The way you present yourself, especially online where there's no other context, is how other people form opinions of you. Now, you might say that it's unreasonable of me to think of, say, EC as a patronising old misogynist just because he presents himself that way here, but really, how else am I supposed to form an impression of him? Travelling to wherever he lives with a big block of clay and getting an impression that way is quite impractical.

    So to the extent that impressions matter, and to the extent that you care what other people think of you, have a care.

    562:

    his view is discriminatory

    I kind of agree with Damien, and I kind of vehemently disagree. I don't think it's discriminatory in the "oh no you're making things harder for people already badly off", if anything the reverse (see Aamer Rahman on Reverse Racism).

    On the other hand, yes, it is explicitly and intentionally discriminatory. I am choosing between different people based on my values, and saying "I think some of these people are better than others". I am genuinely saying "your misogyny makes me think less of you, and I will act on that". As with the "if you don't like people calling you a nazi, stop espousing nazi political ideas" thing, if having me point out your misogyny bothers you that's a good thing. You should be bothered. And you can either get Charlie to ban me or you can stop saying misogynistic things. Your call.

    563:

    To get back to asking Charlie things.

    The Nightmare Stacks opens in Whitby, and subsequently we encounter a Lieutenant Jim Cook. Is this mere coincidence, or a very subtly done in-joke (in which case well done)?

    J Homes.

    564:

    To be fair, I am sort of openly treating “You are NOT ALLOWED to form an opinion of me based on my words, that is discriminatory, and expressing your opinion takes away MY free speech” as too stupid to even acknowledge here. Yes I’m aware a decent chunk of our Oz media culture and the religious right are making g exactly that argument, but I don’t think that’s relevant either.

    565:

    It's in some ways a fine line. To some people "you're not allowed to people heathens" is exactly the same category of rule as "you're not allowed to call people bigots", and so on for any {insert word here}. It's in some ways the same argument as "if punching Nazi's is ok, punching anyone is therefore a valid form of political expression".

    There's a whole discussion of who wins when we lose nuance from public debate, and of the merits of using stupidity of discourse as a measure of democratic accessibility (and who wins when we do that).

    566:

    It's in some ways a fine line. To some people "you're not allowed to people heathens" is exactly the same category of rule as "you're not allowed to call people bigots", and so on for any {insert word here}. It's in some ways the same argument as "if punching Nazi's is ok, punching anyone is therefore a valid form of political expression".

    There's a whole discussion of who wins when we lose nuance from public debate, and of the merits of using stupidity of discourse as a measure of democratic accessibility (and who wins when we do that).

    I thought that punching people as a form of political expression was generally wrong. The Antifa argument is that punching Nazis can be retroactively justified if it turns out that, by punching Nazis, you're preventing worse crimes from happening. It's a risky action nonetheless, but in the case of some of the Antifa confrontations in the last few years, it seems to have worked.

    As for using profanity on this blog, what got lost in the conversation were things like creativity, thoughtfulness, and the input of all the people who found more interesting things to do.

    567:

    Meanwhile, I'd like to ask, not just Charlie, but the commentariat, about a recent event (plural) The Daily Nazi has been running articles based on STOLEN CONFIDENTIAL diplomatic reports.

    They & the as-yet-unknown "Leakers" responsible are facing sreious police investigation. Opinions on this? Here's mine: It's TREASON. It isn't some petty "official secret" that should be out in public, it's international foreign relations & it was done deliberately by either fascist or extreme-right-wing forces, quite deliberately, to try to force a no-deal Brexit in theor corrupt interests. It seems that MI6 / SIS are seriously annoyed. ANd, of course, it means that no dutiful civil servant can trust putting anything at all in writing to her or his superiors, either. WHich makes it a deliberate attempt to destroy our government - hence my "treason" argument Apparently the normal rules about journalistic privelige regarding sources does not apply here, or so Scotland Yard are claiming.

    What do you lot think?

    568:

    I guess it's a cultural thing. The c-word (or rather it's local equivalent) is considered offensive here in Scandinavia. Not because of some particular wokeness among the male populace, just the womenfolk saying "this word is offensive, don't use it."

    Pigeon@550:

    Women can use the c-word, for the same reason black people can use the n-word.

    569:

    It is certainly behavior which would be contrary to the interests of any government; whether it is "treasonous" is beside the point, I think, but it should definitely be prosecuted by whatever the most relevant statute might be.

    570:

    Pigeon @ 550: A couple of observations for what they're worth...

    Most women I know (aside from those who tend to avoid profanity in general) are quite happy to call someone a cunt if they deserve it. The idea of that word being peculiarly offensive to women does exist but is less common than the idea of profanity in general being inappropriate for women, and both ideas are on the decline, which is a good thing, since both are examples of arbitrary limits imposed on the vocabulary permitted to women by men.

    Taking swear words at their literal meaning, especially the sexual ones, is a short route to madness.

    Still, I think you are making a mistake in generalizing local usage in your area to the rest of the world. That word is a lot more offensive here in the U.S. It's not just that it would offend women, but it demeans & degrades them as well ... that they have no value except to be used for sexual exploitation.

    Even if the target of the epithet is male, calling them a C*** demeans & degrades women. As I noted before it's on the level of calling someone a (N-word).

    571:

    Damian @ 560: You know that Greer is from Sydney, right? And there have always been people who appreciate reclaiming without necessarily participating?

    My point, and I think some of Moz's, though I can't speak for him, or anyone, is that the whole set of relations where we as a form of invective compare people to genitals, bodily waste, a sexual act or some Other group, ends up seeming a bit strained and just avoiding it works better for me. I'm actually happy to accept that it can work for others in other places, even if the US doesn't seem to be one of those places and possibly for different reasons. But I wanted to make clear why I don't think Moz is just being precious, and the suggestion that his view is discriminatory is a bit inscrutable.

    It's not so much comparing people to genitals, but comparing them specifically to women's genitals in a most derisive and derogatory manner as if there were nothing worse than women or their genitals. I'm not objecting to degrading the target of the epithet, I'm object to doing so with language that degrades a whole other WORLD of innocent people beyond that target.

    Calling someone a "shit" or "shithead" demeans no one except the person being targeted; same for "fuck", "fuckup" "fuckwit" or "wanker". I don't see how those terms can degrade anyone other than the target of the insult.

    Of course, I throw the word "arsehole" around all the time. But in that case it's a matter of everyone has one, ideally they don't talk about it all the time, like opinions really, but it definitely isn't completely neutral in all contexts either and I should probably avoid that too. And in that case to some extent the point is more a plea: don't blame us for striving to become our better selves (which really doesn't add up to the coercive normative exercise some people claim).

    Calling someone an "arsehole" (or "asshole" if you live in the U.S.) doesn't degrade innocent bystanders. "Arseholes" are like opinions. Everyone's got one and everyone thinks theirs is the only one that doesn't stink.

    572:

    "Hello, World" A big thank-you to everyone on this blog wh has helped me. I now have a domain name & a runbox account ... Some of you will be hearing from me, in the near future ( i.e - this month - I hope )

    573:

    Greg Tingey @ 567: Meanwhile, I'd like to ask, not just Charlie, but the commentariat, about a recent event (plural) The Daily Nazi has been running articles based on STOLEN CONFIDENTIAL diplomatic reports.

    Which paper would be "The Daily Nazi"? It's not on my list of British newspapers:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M

    They & the as-yet-unknown "Leakers" responsible are facing sreious police investigation.
    Opinions on this?
    Here's mine: It's TREASON.
    It isn't some petty "official secret" that should be out in public, it's international foreign relations & it was done deliberately by either fascist or extreme-right-wing forces, quite deliberately, to try to force a no-deal Brexit in theor corrupt interests.
    It seems that MI6 / SIS are seriously annoyed. ANd, of course, it means that no dutiful civil servant can trust putting anything at all in writing to her or his superiors, either. WHich makes it a deliberate attempt to destroy our government - hence my "treason" argument
    Apparently the normal rules about journalistic privelige regarding sources does not apply here, or so Scotland Yard are claiming.

    What do you lot think?

    The U.K.'s legal definition of treason is probably a lot broader than is the U.S.'s.

    I don't know that I would go so far as to say the leak was a "deliberate attempt to destroy ... government". What surprises me is that apparently the ambassador/former ambassador is being blamed for the political fallout, rather than the leakers.

    Also surprising are today's headlines that That Very Bad, Unpleasant Man pulled out of the Iran deal to spite Obama. That's not news!

    Almost everything TVB,UM does is aimed at spiting Obama. If it weren't for trying to undo Obama's "legacy", TVB,UM would have no policy positions at all.

    574:

    For those of us who are bothered by (or have stronger negative feelings about) the Internet of Things: Resetting Your GE Smart Light Bulb, Bruce Schneier, 11 Jul 2019, in full. Apparently you have to know which version of firmware; an older version has a longer sequence. If all bulbs are at the same level you can reset them all by using the mains switch. :-) If you need to reset the software in your GE smart light bulb -- firmware version 2.8 or later -- just follow these easy instructions: Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds. Turn on for 8 seconds Turn off for 2 seconds Turn on for 8 seconds Turn off for 2 seconds Turn on for 8 seconds Turn off for 2 seconds Turn on for 8 seconds Turn off for 2 seconds Turn on for 8 seconds Turn off for 2 seconds Turn on Bulb will flash on and off 3 times if it has been successfully reset. Welcome to the future!

    FI: they're running some real nasty wetware hacks Any tells to be on the lookout for? (e.g. aspects of meat speed?). Semi-serious question; am a good if inconsistent spotter of extreme outliers.

    ...you killed the world for fucking ego and why why why why couldn't you do synergy and sharing and caring... I have come around to this POV. Took too long, sigh.

    Re that "Scanners - Head Explosion" clip, that hit, I'm currently cranky because, among other reasons, I just noticed that blood pressure spiked pretty high up a week or two ago, perma-stress-response as side effect of other things (including meditations and day work in a big fishbowl with very talkative talking fish), I think, not sure. Worked it down to near normal (meditation, exercise, +) but took a day.

    575:

    I like The Orange Better One as a name for that particular person, partly as a tiny homage to WSB, and partly because it fits.

    576:

    Hi, Charlie. Any chance you'll be able to write up a crib sheet for Labyrinth Index or Dark State anytime soon? Just finished a reread of Empire Games and Dark State and looking forward to Invisible Sun next year...

    577:

    “Bill Gates says Steve Jobs was a master at ‘casting spells’ to keep Apple from dying” That would explain the famous “reality distortion field.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

    578:

    It's a really hard problem - the BoM cost of adding a USB socket or something is unreasonable for a lightbulb, but there's a really limited number of inputs. I've once used a completely unrelated device that had an IR sensor on the board and if you had the right sort of IR controller on your computer you could program it that way. It was a bit of a PITA to set up but once it was you could reprogram a whole pile of them very quickly and reliably. Likewise the bike lights I had that I bought a ~$10 programmer for, then ~$10 for some spring-loaded pins to make it more likely that programming would succeed (literally "hold programmer against circuit board so all 8 pins make contact").

    But "cheap consumer item aimed at uncaring users"... whaddayado? At least they are reprogrammable, unlike a lot of other IoST.

    579:

    Let's not forget "Lord Dampnut", possibly the best anagram ever.

    580:

    RvdH @ 577 BoJo seems to have one of those, too. He lies & evades & doesn't answer questions & bullshits & tries very dubious methods (Garden Bridge) & ... gets away with it.

    JBS @ 573 The Daliy Nazi, also known as the Daily Hate & other names is the "Daily Mail" ... shudder. I'll let Charlie give you a full run-down on just how deeply unpleasant they are. US equivalent ... an "Intelligent" very smooth, not to say slimy version of faux news. Their lies & distortions are a lot harder to spot, unless you are wised-up to their tricks

    581: 536 - Faggot (noun). A meatball made of pork offal. 573 - Real name "Daily Mail"; optionally known as the "Daily Heil" which should tell you all you need to know about their politics.
    582:

    Likewise the bike lights I had that I bought a ~$10 programmer for,

    Oh dear, they saw you coming, didn't they? I'm sure there's a rational reason why bicycle lights need enough smarts to be programmable in the first place but for the love of Ghu nothing springs to mind immediately.

    There's a generation of small soldering irons out there which have a microcontroller in them which is perhaps excusable, to control temps. They can do tricks like come out of low-power sleep quickly when they're picked up using an accellerometer to detect motion as well as drive a temperature display. They are also reprogrammable by the user. In the real world most folks doing hand soldering for a living use Weller irons or similar powered by a hefty 24V AC transformer base you can beat a spammer to death with. The temperature control is done by Curie-point magnetic coupling of the heating element to the soldering tip, no electronics need apply. For some weird reason they cost five times as much as a super-trick microprocessor-controlled soldering iron from other manufacturers which is a fucking shame since I want one.

    583:

    Charles, did you get to see any proper midnight sun in Jyväskylä, and how much of your blood supply did the local mosquitos steal?

    584:

    Greg Tingey @ 567: Breach of the OSA? Sure. Who what and how, beyond the media publications? We'll have to wait and see. But as always 'cui bono'? Treason? "or if a Man do levy War against our Lord the King in his Realm, or be adherent to the King’s Enemies in his Realm, giving to them Aid and Comfort in the Realm, or elsewhere, and thereof be [probably] attainted of open Deed by [the People] of their Condition"

    Nope. Doesn't seem to be that. I mean the Orange etc isn't exactly a friend of much of the world at the moment, but the US is not the UK's declared enemy, right now, and it'd be a stretch to show that the leak benefits any other country specifically.

    I wish the [commentariat/twitterati/facebookers/etc] would stop bandying that particular term about. It has a pretty specific meaning, which is not 'people who do things I don't like, that might be illegal, maybe'.

    585:

    I was interpreting it as: "Giving aid & comfort to the Queen's enemies" in this case. Seeking the destruction of the Union, because of the utter crash of Brexit, which they are pushing.

    Certainly a breach of the OSA, though. "cui bono" ?? Trump, Putin, Farrago, Rees-Smaug, BoJo ......

    586:

    And that's why gamerbros are using the term? Your comment is stupid and you should feel stupid.

    587:

    I have no idea what a "gamerbro" is, or why they would call someone a meatball. The sensible point is still that the word has multiple definitions.

    588:

    You're missing him and Mitch "The Turtle" McConnell packing the courts with extremist right-wing activist judges. And literally hollowing out the government - like the State Dept.

    589:

    Ok. In the US, "cunt" is as bad, or perhaps worse, than "fuck", neither of which can be published in the mainstream, and on FREAKIN' COLLEGE RADIO STATIONS I've heard words bleeped out.

    Really, folks, the more-Victorian-than-Victoria Christianists have their teeth and claws in the regulatory system here.

    The "N" word is on a different scale, but probably about on par with "fuck" (well, except if I'm referring to Dick Gregory's late-sixties autobiography, Nigger).

    D*bag is more like age 16 and under. Dirtbag is more common over that age, as is asshat (more from the military).

    And I went from Trumpolini to my currently preferred Malignant Carcinoma, which is what he is.

    590:

    Actually, after posting, I thought I should say a bit more. I don't normally use body parts...well, other than noting that the GOP has gone from Tricky Dick to Little Dick, insult intended).

    But then, I decided a long time ago that the point of cursing was NOT to wish someone something good, but rather something demeaning, insulting, humiliating and/or painful. I then started choosing/making up words. That smells like a wet dog is clear to all and sundry. Frog farts indicates something utterly trivial and annoying. Trumpolini is a mosquito fucker, which I think covers it all.

    And the GOP, and the self-proclaimed evangelical Christians all suck dead syphilitic Republican roaches.

    I trust you are all revolted now.

    591:

    Yeah, "merging them back in..."

    My late ex wrote, and presented a paper in the early nineties to the Society of Women Engineers as to why "mainstreaming" was absolutely a Bad Idea, and was received with applause and handshakes.

    Putting slow learners (if they really are) in with average kids in with fast learners is a failure. The slow kids can't keep up, and will need summer school and/or tutors, while the fast learners will be bored out of their minds at how slow the average kids are.

    I mean, is the point that all the kids understand the material? Why do they have to be on the same schedule, and do it all in exactly the same time period?

    If anyone's interested, say so, and I think I have her paper online; if so, I'll post the link.

    592:

    You can always ask, you know.

    "Gamer" refers to a person who is a fan of video games, plays them a lot, and usually belongs to some form of online video game community. A "gamerbro" refers to a male gamer who is staunchly anti-feminist, doesn't like video games with black people, women, or non-cis people in them. They're the ones who are now complaining about game companies putting female characters with sensible breast sizes in their games. There's an overlap with the men who downvoted Captain Marvel on Rotten Tomatoes because the movie had a female hero and some feminist messaging. Using another term, they are troglodytes.

    These are the men who like to hurl homophobic or emasculating slurs at others, one of which being "faggot". "Faggot" is a derogatory term for gay men in Northern America and elsewhere, and I have a hard time believing that you don't know this.

    the word has multiple definitions

    And it seems you do know. So you're at least being disingenuous, and I wonder why.

    593:

    Yep. Anarchism is 150% of the time equated in the media with chaos.

    The actuality... why, every one of you belongs to, and has belonged to, anarchist organizations. Every con you've been to, any club you belong to, is an anarchy - no "ruler", and it's all voluntary.

    Heh, heh. I drifted back to socialism in the eighties... but twice in my life, I have, in fact, been a real, card-carrying anarchist. Well... anarcho-syndicalist. Still have my red cards sitting around: I was a Wobbly.

    594:

    Or, as one commenter put it: 1. Turn off the power. 2. Unscrew the smart bulb and remove it. 3. Screw in an ordinary, non-smart bulb. 4. Turn the power back on.

    595:

    Which, I suppose, could also be an SEP. I mean, it's your problem if you can't afford the next greatest most wonderful 1 zillion dollar (US) i-whatever....

    596:

    If anyone's interested, say so, and I think I have her paper online; if so, I'll post the link.

    Interested. The government has just destreamed Ontario public schools as an equity measure.

    597:

    The Tesla Powerwall we have is probably slightly larger in volume than the under-counter fridge in the kitchen. However it and its control unit are nicely low profile, and attached to the outer wall of the garage.

    Comparisons to appliance sizes on a world wide blog can be a bit problematic. Modern US appliances seem to be 50% bigger than their European counterparts based on my limited visits to Europe. But when I have had 30 minutes to an hour to kill and one is nearby I have wandered through the equivalent of a Best Buy or Media Mart.

    598:

    large number of trailing-edge fabs. If some event took down the bleeding edge facilities, it'd be bad … but we could be back to banging out stuff a couple of node sizes larger within weeks, months at the most,

    IF they have a good source of electricity. Fabs take a lot, expect it to be reliable, and need it for long stretches without interruption. I just read about how a flash storage fab was taking a huge write down due to a power failure which wiped out a month or few of production.

    599:

    Since the thread is named "Ask me anything!", I'll ask OGH or anyone else here to comment on Paul Krugman's SFnal piece,

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/opinion/future-billionaires.html

    600:

    Plus, you can explore in your undies on the couch.

    Most astronomy using earth telescopes is done remotely. Seems like most new construction is being done on top of the Chilean mountains/deserts. Above where people can actually breath and do much physical anything. So the maintenance folks are based a few 1000 feet down the mountains and most of the scopes are owned/controlled by universities all over the world. The science dudes mostly only physically visit when setting up new equipment. There's a smaller group in Hawaii but the locals don't want any more built.

    601:

    As for us not knowing AI when it's in front of us....Google? The problem is that we constantly shift the goalposts when confronted with any evidence of a nonhuman doing something that we thought was a hallmark of human intelligence, so it's entirely possible that AI's been available for decades, and we've continually redefined our boundaries of "natural intelligence" to keep from acknowledging it.

    Yep. Something I used last Friday was Google Maps re-routing me as traffic conditions changed on my 8 hour drive from central PA down to NC. Next thing it will be doing automatically is reminding me (or just doing it) to pre-cache the maps as my cell phone coverage doesn't extend to the areas I was driving and/or offering to route me through areas where my cell company has coverage.

    This all would have been considered AI 20 years ago.

    602:

    “Putting slow learners (if they really are) in with average kids in with fast learners is a failure.”

    That’s actually the point. I’m not talking about mixing slow learners with fast learners. I’m talking about people with CP who have no cognitive impairment at all being allowed to join their appropriate learning cohort, which could easily be among the “fast learners”. A system that takes them out and treats them as slow and different is really only there to serve the parents of kids who are “normal” but are not capable of joining the “fast learner” class and can’t understand why someone who seems “slow” would be allowed to “in their place”. Much the same sort of parents who’d have a problem with letting black kids into the “gifted” class.

    And I’m talking about people with Downs Syndrome, whose impairment doesn’t necessarily affect their learning ability (but can) who are just as capable of getting there but might need a longer path... which isn’t necessarily very different to some of the “normal” kids who are simply average performers. And keeping them out is more about some parent imagining them telling their own kid “well I’m in the D class because I have Downs, what’s your excuse?”

    I’ve no problem with dividing year levels into cohorts based on their learning ability or style or other factors relating to how pedagogy best serves them. Heck, I’m not against having whole academically selective schools which create more social mobility options that are otherwise missing altogether. The point really is that some people think conformism to an arbitrary norm is the most important thing. Sometimes the outlier they want to suppress is actually higher academic performance itself. Certainly critical thinking is not perceived as a valuable skill. I’ve overheard parents talk about why they don’t believe in kids learning other languages, FFS. Learning ways to perform arithmetic that are different to the ways we learned in the 70s? That’s just socialism/political correctness/overreaching elitism/etc.

    It’s more that the differences within populations (of “normal” kids and otherwise) are far greater than the differences between them. Having a kid with CP in your kid’s class isn’t going to “hold them back”, if anything they might learn something they wouldn’t have otherwise. Some parents find that uncomfortable, but why would we care what people like that think?

    603:

    trip from LA to NY in about four hours, assuming no headwinds

    Bit of a nit but headwinds at altitude going USA west coast to east coast are fairly rare.

    604:

    military and ex-military make up stories all the time.

    And I find that ex-seal types that don't rise into command ranks tend to have that trait more than most ex service folks.

    605:

    An increasing number of national borders are forcing people to submit to scans/recordings of their exo-memories.

    I keep thinking of just taking my old iPhone 6s+ to some of the countries I visit in the future. Take it in wiped, set it up while there to take photos and maybe maybe make calls. Google mapping maybe.

    All with temp accounts. When I get home extract the photos and wipe.

    But I need to make sure I have a phone with a locked down boot loader. And I am NOT a person of interest so I would expect to not attract the attention of more than the first level security folks.

    While I would want to take a computer I'm not so sure about how to lock it down.

    But my iPhone and Mac laptop that I carry around all contain way too much sensitive stuff of mine and my clients to have to spill my passwords to ANYONE, much less government officials in Hong Kong or mainland China.

    606:

    My plan would be to enter the country with a blank phone, set it up with limited functions to a throw away account, take my pics while there with them set to go to my temp cloud account, then erase it as the hotel before headed to the airport. Or maybe erase it once at the airport curbside dropoff.

    When home I'd log into the temp "phone/icloud/google account(s), download the photos, then abandon the account(s).

    607:

    I'm sure there's a rational reason why bicycle lights need enough smarts to be programmable in the first place but for the love of Ghu nothing springs to mind immediately.

    The simple version is that making an LED flash in a controlled way can be done with a bunch of analogue discrete components or a cheap microcontroller. The latter is much, much cheaper and significantly more reliable (there is one part, and tweaking it is a software change not a BoM change). So, now we have a cheap microcontroller on the circuit board.

    Hmm. If we buy the 3 cent microcontroller instead of the 2.8 cent one we get an accelleromter. That could be fun. We should be able to detect bumpiness = speed, and possibly braking.

    Oh, this is annoying, those 3 cent microcontrollers are only programmable once, and that makes short run manufacturing annoying when we're still testing the funky accellerometer functions. Let's go to a 5 cent micro and put programming pads on the board.

    All of a sudden I can get firmware updates from the manufacturer if I buy a $20 programmer.

    FWIW all that stuff actually worked, the light normally flashes nice and slowly (~3Hz) but if I brake it goes to ~7Hz and much brighter, and it's pretty good about slower = less intense flashing. Also, there's no external button, instead you also get a whole bunch of "turn left 90, right 90, left 90, up, left..." codes to do quite whizzy things, but the most used one is "ULULU" for on, and "URURU" for off. Because a bike light in your bag that suddenly decides you've crashed and it should blick as brightly as it can as fast as it can get away with... is really annoying. We're talking >200 lumens, you can see it though most cloth-type materials, even an Ortleib pannier.

    What sucked was the usual manufacturing issues... the bloody things stopped working after a year or two. Several of them. I gave up in the end, I have a couple left that probably still work but "probably work" and "essential safety equipment" is not a combination I'm really keen on.

    608:

    It is very much like how I travel given my wife works for one of the major airlines. But we have a couple of advantages.

  • We get to see how many empty seats are on flights and how many freeloaders, err, standbys are planning to take the flight.

  • We get to board by check in time, not rank.

  • But like the Space-A there is a long pecking order depending on why you are traveling and the exact relationship to the actual employee.

    Plus we get to get very discounted tickets on other airlines (if they participate) but for availability we only get smiley face, neutral face, or sad face.

    Weather in Dallas on a Sunday a month ago was why we decided to abandon a week in London due to the "empty seats" for our possible flights the next day getting filled by miss-connected paying passengers.

    609:

    Also, the gulf between "save 2 cents per unit during mass manufacture" and "recall 100 lights because of a software issue" is so huge that for most lights you only have to think about doing the latter to make it worth paying the extra 2 cents per unit. Especially on something that retails for ~$100. Down in the cheap shitty "when it fails just buy another one (actually, buy two, always use two, maybe carry a hot spare)" where that 0.2c saving makes sense, that's what they expect you to do and they build accordingly.

    We also now have USB charging and increasingly lights are using that USB port with an app to do cool shit. And invasively monitor their customers, but that's a different story. My front light has a very simple "there are 27 lighting options, pick up to five and order them as you will" Windows app that you can download, type in the 12 character code off the light to register it (carefully printed in 3 point text in dark grey ink on a black light... I didn't say these were smart people). The USB monitor I was using said that it read a metric fuckton of data out of the light, so I assume there's a bunch of usage logging going on. Which means I programmed it once and it's never getting plugged into a computer again. When that light failed, BTW, and the manufacturer offered to replace it, my hidden condition was "I'm not sending the old light back".

    Looking at the board in that light, BTW, there's no obvious GPS or BLE or anything like that. But there are definitely lights around that have functions like that. Some require a smartphone to work other than on/off, others are "part of this complete breakfast" where they expect to form an on-bike mesh network with your heart rate monitor, GPS, phone, power meter, gear shifters, for all I know tyre pressure gauges... and they all send that data to the cloud where you can ... make videos of you ride? Or not: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/07/strava-relive-cc-app-platform-dispute.html

    610:

    Why is this not headline news?

    Uh, I linked to a news article about it a few weeks ago.

    611:

    I'll ask OGH or anyone else here to comment on Paul Krugman's SFnal piece, Since you ask :-) Paul Krugman is being too nice in that piece. I suggest a reaper probability that is small and directly proportional to the log(tangible assets net worth exceeding a threshold), that starts to be applied every year after one's age exceeds the projected global median lifespan. In the fullness of time, the greedy hoarders of tangible assets get weeded out, or everyone becomes immortal. After typing that, fairer variations and gaming possibilities started coming to mind, and yes it would be gamed, but the direct approach is to extend median lifespan for everyone. And there is an incentive to shift to intangible assets. :-) Also, it doesn't address slave/master relationships (except that slaves have zero assets) though variants perhaps could.

    612:

    It is possible to host your own mail server, but this is a bit fraught unless you know what you’re doing and even then, which is why most people who know how don’t actually do it. Although I am sure there are people here who do it all the time.

    Yes. And we are almost all actively getting rid of them. I've had mine for 15 years or more. And it has always been easier to just keep it. But now the costs of the surcharge for a business static IP are just insane. Plus the cost of SPAM management (99% time) is just getting me to toss it. But it is a long slog when you have 15 years of various email addresses, domains, and such to sort out.

    613:

    Have my enquiries blocked my subequenbt ones, so, although I have not taken up any offers, the enquiries will have triggered a "taken" on the DNS, even though I have bought nothing?

    You've run into the problem and reason I tend to stick with GoDaddy as a registrar. They don't lock names you are just looking up like a lot of the crud out there does.

    Some rules.

    First get a FREE address from someone who does not sell your information. In the US that can be outlook.com (which is what hotmail has turned into). Yahoo is really Verizon/AOL and Google is well, Google.

    Use that for all the account setups and what not for your project. And keep it. This way when something goes wrong (and it will at some point) you have an email contact into each of the systems.

    I will be pummeled here but much of what I do is centered around the question of "what if I get hit by a bus". With my plan that the village idiot can take over for a day or few while the user finds someone competent.

    I use GoDaddy as a registrar for me and my clients and just ignore all the up sell. Their DNS works fairly well and is easy to use for someone who needs a simple GUI.

    I mostly use Microsoft for Email hosting as they don't seem to read my emails without a court order and don't insert ads into the service.

    GoDaddy domains range from $1 to $18 per year for .com, first year discounts and all that. Less/more for other dot endings.

    MS offers email only account for $5/mo plus a pile of email aliases available per account/mailbox. You can add "free" inbox only mailboxes (with aliases) if you want.

    MS has automated the process of getting your DNS correct for the major registrars. If you use one not on their list you are given all the records to enter yourself.

    I have no idea how these prices translate for the UK.

    If you get stuck you can write up a ticket online and (at least in the US) they will call you back and walk through the issue until it is fixed. They ask to do a screen sharing session but it is view only with a pointer to get you to click/type on things when needed.

    614:

    Last time I travelled standby it was very stressful. I was visiting my folks when the friend who got me the ticket called and said to get to the airport that evening because the spaces were going to disappear on the day we'd planned for me to return. Problem was, I was five hours from the airport and the ferry schedule was such that I couldn't make it before the next day.

    So I got there the next day (after less than one day with the folks) only to have a storm in Ontario take out the computer system so Vancouver was doing manual ticketing. It was chaos. Spent several hours being directed from gate to gate until I finally got a flight.

    Time spent travelling: 28 hours (14 hours each way*). Time spent waiting for a flight: 5-6 hours. Time spent with folks: 18 hours.

    Not worth the hassle, frankly. Would have been better if I was retired but I only had a week off. Not certain that it would have been much better without the storm — I got the 'get back, weekend flights are overbooked' message before the storm hit, and I wasn't the only standby passenger who changed plans to avoid getting stranded.

    *Taxi, plane, bus, bus, ferry, bus. By the time I get to my folks house I can be in Beijing — and I'd be more rested.

    615:

    As a private person, I'd recommend using a .name domain.

    Most of the second wave dot domains are used by spammers. So any email from one of them automatically gets a higher SPAM score than the original .com, .net, etc...

    616:

    My computer chap at work swears by Proton Mail:

    https://protonmail.com

    617:

    2. It's all in the fuckin' M$ Cloud. I've already seen horror stories of trying to get your own stuff out of that cloud, down to your own system to back up.

    Nope. and Nope.

    618:

    Last time I travelled standby it was very stressful. ... Not worth the hassle, frankly.

    Worth it? Yep. I get to visit all kinds of places I'd never make it to without the benefit.

    Stressful. Well it requires an attitude. I've spend 12 hours at an airport and then given up and gone home. 3 times I think. I've also ganged up with 2 others and make the decision that to do what we want we needed to drive to a larger airport 2 1/2 hours away and fly from there. A $60 car rental split 3 ways and we made the trip happen.

    I've also had to spend the night in a hotel when flights didn't happen.

    As I said, it requires a mental place not everyone can or wants to be in.

    For example, flight to Dublin. First flew to larger city airport to make sure we got there to wait for direct flight to Dublin. We 99% sure we'd get business class. Then discovered that plane was swapped out for smaller plane with no space in business and standard economy. So we did some quick searching and figured out we could get to Chicago (2 hours flying) then catch one of 2 787s headed to Dublin. Coach in a 787 is not business but is so much better than coach in most 20 year old planes. So we flew to Chicago then to Dublin.

    There was someone we were going to spend time with flying paid from our original airport and we texted her. Her reply was great. "So you don't want to fly steerage with us serfs?"

    619:

    Using the C word in the US in any kind of work environment is very likely to get you fired. Or at a minimum get to visit with a counselor or prove you watched and answered questions about several hours of video gender acceptance training.

    And I'm not going to type it cause I want to be able to say I haven't used it since my teen years.

    It and N are just toxic on this side of the planet.

    620:

    Stressful. Well it requires an attitude

    And my attitude is "beats hitch hiking" :)

    Seriously, a few times I've been dropped somewhere that turns out to be hard to get out of, and not felt like walking ("next town 88km" sort of walking) so I've gone into town and worked out my options. At best it'll be something like a rental relocation with fuel, at worst it's "buy a bus ticket like everyone else".

    When I used to fly standby sometimes worked really well, and recently the gap between that and cheap airlines has closed to indistinguishable (I was delayed 6+ hours once because they didn't have a full load of passengers booked so they just lied to us until the next flight was due to leave - turns out that's so common you get laughed at for complaining online).

    But these days in Oz bus and train standby tickets are almost impossible to get because prices are low and buses are full, while trains have such low marginal costs that there's no point in discounting (or something, I just observe what happens)

    621:

    My problem that trip was that I had a hard deadline for returning to work, and on that trip the airport was a long trip from where I was staying. (Hotel was possible, but one night at a hotel was almost the same as a purchased-in-advance airplane ticket.)

    Not certain where you were flying from. My experience was YVR (Vancouver) to YYZ (Toronto Pearson) — each the biggest in its province. I suspect Canada has far fewer routing options than the US.

    This was over 15 years ago*, so no smartphone (on my part) and certainly no access to alternate ticketing arrangements/routes.

    In any case, I'm happy it works for you. I'm the type of traveller who gets to the airport 2-3 hours early just so I'm not late, so I don't think I have the mindset to travel comfortably on standby.

    *I've lost touch with the friend who worked as a ticket agent, so haven't flown standby in years.

    622:

    I fly from RDU in central NC. We also have an apartment just south of DFW in Texas. I fly from RDU to wherever I can then get to where I want to go for overseas. DFW if convenient for flights as when things don't work I have an apartment.

    But in terms of getting to the airport, I have it timed to get to the security line about 25 minutes before boarding starts. I have Pre-Check so my time in the lines is typically under 5 minutes. For early morning flights I add 5 to 20 minutes depending on which city I'm in.

    A since between us my wife and I fly 50 to 70 times per year we have a credit card that give us Lounge access. It costs nearly $500 per year but we get free food and drinks plus access to a restroom without luggage in the toilet. So it's about a wash $ wise as we don't have to buy snacks at airport prices.

    But we aren't typical. I understand that. :)

    623:

    On a political note, this quote from Stephen King seems sadly spot-on:

    First, you stoke hatred and fear of minorities. Then you round them up and put them in camps. Next, you send out raiding parties to get those who have been driven into hiding. The armbands come next right?

    https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1150488379760492546

    624:

    David L @ 613 Now hopefully, "all sorted" [ Runbox, acually ] I have a one-word "dot.uk" Domain for a very small sum. And a "spare" e-mail address too. Now, to look up the clues as how to post pictures to it -though I am NOT thinking of setting up a blog. Pictures? Well, yes, I have a lot of now-historical railway photos, that people might like to see, if I can get them available for viewing.

    Robt Prior @ 623 ALMOST - actually, the armbands seem to come out quite early in the process. The fascist grouping in Hungary seem to be big on armbands, already ... Poland too.

    625:

    The simple version is that making an LED flash in a controlled way can be done with a bunch of analogue discrete components or a cheap microcontroller.

    There are differences of what people want from their bike lights. I, for one, can't stand flashing lights on bikes. I travel by foot, by bike, and by car, and flashing bike lights are from all perspectives just less useful than steady lights. Also, in the urban(ish) environment I live in, the light does not need to be very bright.

    When driving a bike, a headlight has basically two functions: it can light your way and it can be an indicator for other people that you are there. A flashing light is obviously worse than a steady one to show you what's ahead. This is of course a secondary thing in places where there are street lights when it's dark, but they do come in handy in dark spots in the city, too.

    The second function is different. A flashing light is kind of an attention hog: when you see it, you really know something is there. However, when I'm not biking, I have usually a lot more than just that one bike to keep track of, and I want to keep track where the bike is. When a flashing light is moving, it's much harder to keep track of where it's going than with a steady light. So, in my opinion, when having to track where bikes are moving, a steady light is much better than a flashing one in traffic. It's much easier to avoid the bikes when I know where they are going as I can't usually drop everything and just stop to avoid the flashing light perhaps coming at me.

    Then there are also more annoying things like bikers using lights on their helmets (so the light shows where they are looking at instead of where they are headed), or the idiots using red lights to the front (even with streetlights, often the light is the only thing that shows there is a bike, and a red light is an indicator somebody is moving away from me, and it's pretty dangerous when that one is moving towards me), or the idiots having very brights lights aimed at the eyes of other people (it's very dangerous to be blinded in the traffic).

    Sorry, pet peeves. Anyway, I absolutely loathe the fact that it's pretty hard to buy a good, simple, steady white bike light and instead everything has a lot of spurious electronics which people then use on the road to make other people's lifes worse.

    626: 591 - True personal account from 1974 parents' evening (year 8). My science teacher told my parents "When Paws says something in class I know he knows what he's talking about because I know what he's talking about. I am not sure that the rest of the class know what he's talking about." QED? 592 - Backatcha. I know what a gamer is. I had never previously encountered the term "gamerbro". Perhaps you should have considered that the first reaction on seeing/hearing a word is culture specific?
    627:

    I, for one, can't stand flashing lights on bikes.

    There's a Tragedy of the Commons effect -- one biker with a flashing LED rear light attracts the attention of others, including car drivers and is safer than a steady non-flashing red light. A small group of bikers, each with flashing rear lights is a distraction like a school of fish, especially since bikers can move in different directions suddenly and this causes others to misjudge their lines and positions when visibility is limited.

    Flashing front white lights are banned, I think, in the UK but it's not something the police would ever enforce. It's not like they can make a note of the offender's numberplate and send a fixed-penalty notice to their address afterwards. Other breaches of the Road Traffic Acts like requiring working brakes etc. are also something that's never bothered with until there's an accident -- one clown who was riding around London on a track bike (a fixie with no brakes at all) who knocked over and killed a pedestrian was very indignant that a) she got in his way and b) he got prosecuted at all and c) got convicted and sent to prison. He didn't know, you see that his expensive super-light carbon-fibre toy needed functional brakes to be used on public roads.

    628:

    As I have posted before, that would NOT have been considered artificial intelligence by the people who initiated the field and developed most of the techniques (in the 1960s and 1970s). I knew quite a few of them, and did some very minor work in the field. The term was invented as a way of persuading non-technical funders to provide money; many of the experts loathed the term AI and wouldn't use it, but even those that did knew what nonsense it was.

    Even back then (say, 1970), we knew perfectly well how to implement the sort of thing being described, and did it on very small scales, but the computers weren't up to doing it at that scale. Now they are; it's as simple as that. And, yes, there's a hell of a lot of work involved, but that's a detail.

    Real intelligence involves things like imagination, innovation and intuition, as well as being able to extrapolate to outside the training set (i.e. 'think out of the box'). The common characteristic of those is that we DON'T know how to write a program to do them, even in theory. 'Machine learning' is simply using adaptive algorithms, and doesn't lead to any of those, whereas those have been observed in many animals - including the following mind-boggling example:

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/giant-manta-ray-divers-fish-hooks-help-a4188316.html

    On Moore's Law: don't hold your breath. Announcements are cheap, and the problem with very small processes is not so much making the circuits as avoiding the scaling problems (e.g. leakage and diffusion). There is also the fascinating problem of making reliable circuits when the number of electrons is small enough to make the sampling errors a major issue.

    629:

    "..., since both are examples of arbitrary limits imposed on the vocabulary permitted to women by men."

    Really? Most such conventions are propagated by women. Unless you have actual evidence for that, you risk falling into the mob mindset, which is such a harmful aspect of political correctness. The extreme example is women blaming men for the relatively non-durable clothing and the 'requirement' to follow fashion trends. I have had earfuls from women when I have said "why not just say 'no'?", and have listened to them damning other women who HAVE said 'no'.

    The reasons that most politically correct people are discriminatory include the following: (a) They choose an outgroup to blame for their selected discrimination, whether or not it is at fault - vide the fashion example above. Very often, it's society as a whole, and it's inaccurate to assign it to any group within that. (b) When the outgroup is held responsible, they assign blame equally to all individuals within it, including to those in vulnerable subgroups who are suffering the same discrimination that they object to. (c) They deprecate other discriminations suffered by members of other groups (especially the outgroup), including when their chosen group is the one doing the discrimination. (d) They ignore the fact that their proposed solutions involve discriminating against others, usually including some subgroups that are already equally discriminated against.

    You can see (poor) examples of most of those in the posts above; I could give much better ones, but am disinclined to. For example, why the hell should British posters on a British blog be forced to pander to USA conventions?

    My point is that ALL unreasonable discrimination is harmful, and it should ALL be taken into account. I have spoken up for unpopular, discriminated-against minorities all my life, often against persecution by the politically correct, and don't propose to change.

    630:

    No, flashing front lights are not banned. I ride with my main lights on steady, and much weaker ones angled out on flashing, which is a reasonable compromise. What is really harmful to safety is bright flashing lights. You can do the experiment if you want - a relatively dim flashing light next to a steady one attracts attention but doesn't grab it in the way that a single, bright flashing light does.

    631:

    The law may have been changed, but UK law used to require a front brake but no rear brake on a fixie.

    632:

    This was a velodrome track bike, super-trick and sexy and stuff but not suitable for road use. The dick in question used on the road anyway because he was a dick. I suspect spandex poisoning was a contributory factor, also team-logoitis.

    633:

    :-)

    But seriously, how do you think that velodrome riders got themselves and what was often their only bicycle to the track in the 1950s? NB, one of my great-uncles was a sports journalist and covered velodrome cycling back in that period. I've no sympathy for the idiot in question, I just disagree that a rear brake on a road bike was always mandatory (and back when I was at school I used to do stoppies, so know how little a rear brake sometimes contributes to total braking effort).

    634:

    There was no front brake either. It was a track bike without brakes at all.

    635:

    EC @ 629 "PC" - yes - the attitude that if you are not pink & preferably are female, you cannot possibly, ever be racist or discriminatory ..

    Nojay @ 632 "spandex poisoning" ... 😂

    636:

    A fixie doesn't need a conventional rear brake because you can use the pedals, but a rear brake of some sort is (and as far as I know always has been) compulsory on the roads.

    637:

    I am almost certain that you are wrong. The front brake only exemption was solely for bicycles with no wheel larger than 18" and ones without a freewheel.

    638:

    You and I will have to disagree.

    STRONGLY

    Pretty much everyone I know, techies, abhor GoDaddy.

    And you're setting the user up to be 150% dependent on M$. The asshole Directory of my Center forced everyone into Office and M$ mail, and it SUCKS DEAD ROACHES. And the webmail of outlook really sucks, and on, and on.

    My hosting provider handles mailserver, I'm on a Linux box of theirs, so it may be good old sendmail. Pop-3, IMAP, sure, and use my own email tool, or theirs, which aren't great, but I don't passionately HATE them like I do Lookout, er, Outlook.

    639:

    As I have posted before, that would NOT have been considered artificial intelligence by the people who initiated the field and developed most of the techniques (in the 1960s and 1970s).

    So noticing that I'm looking at routes in an area where my cell service doesn't exist then figuring out that maps should be cached isn't AI?

    Oh, well.

    640:

    Since I'm not a company, nor an organization, I used a country code TLD, .us

    My hosting provider (or was it my registrar, I forget) desperately tried to get me to buy, and I think they registered, ,ninja.

    Dot-ninja? Really? The whole thing with real ninjas is that you don't see them. That's like the old Dodge Stealth automobile... which I never saw in any color other than flaming red.

    641:

    About women blaming men for ...clothing... well, it's 100% true.

    Example 1: look at a woman's hat. Most are crap, no sweat band, cheap felt, for the same price as a man's, which will have the above. Example 2: ask any woman about being able, anywhere, to find skirts with pockets.

    Women's clothes are, in fact, made cheaper and flimsier. Now, this is not to say that the scum of the earth haven't been making everyone's clothing cheaper and crappier. For example, modern jeans run, if you're lucky, 9 threads. Back in the sixties, they were something like 18 or 16 threads, and would last forever, um, sorry, are still lasting (I think I have a pair from the eighties). Hell, I was looking for corduroy pants this past winter, and the only pair I could find was what I would almost call summer weight, suitable for wearing in southern California, not DC in Jan (and definitely not Chicago in Jan).

    642:

    A. Track. Bike. On. City. Streets.

    That he lived long enough to kill someone, and hadn't already been hit by other vehicles is amazing.

    Track bike: frame, wheels, one gear (higher) fixed to axle, chain, handlebards, and seat. Period. No, you can't coast.

    I lived in a collective house in the mid-seventies, more bikes than people. Two were racers. Both had their mid-seventies $300 Cinnellis, and he had a titanium track bike, as described above. $1200? $1500. He was serious....

    And a law mandating front brakes only?! So, a law mandating that if you have to stop fast, you'll be guaranteed to go flying over your handlebars?

    643:

    You have missed my point. Why are men to blame? I remember when the fashion industry was desperately trying to make men's habits more like women's, because men voted with their wallets for durability and refused to change style just because they were told to. Why couldn't women have done the same as men?

    644:

    I gave you the relevant specific culture from the start, writing about gamers and their use of the word. Which you claim to know about. Yet you persist trivialising the use of a homophobic slur.

    Maybe you should consider what that says about you.

    645:

    On the mail server in my home that I'm gradually getting rid of I have lots of rules that block things that end with, well, most everything but the basics.

    I just did .it for Italy as I've not gotten any legit emails form there in over a decade but several 100 connection attempts per day. Maybe 1000.

    But also all kinds of things like .party, .website, .bix, .xyz (really?), and on and on and on.

    And then there's that (what I assume to be) a zombie bot that is everywhere but doesn't do anything that keep trying to connect calling itself "user" as its computer name. I bet if I do the math it could add up to over a million over the last 20 years.

    Then there are the continual attempts to relay through me by using various names attached to the domains I own. I can easily see 100 or so in a row running through common English/USA names@xxx.

    646:

    Remember that country origin TLDs aren't necessarily FROM those nations. One of the waste treatment companies I see on work sites around Edinburgh has toilet-pumping tankers bearing the company's website address, wemovesh.it. The tanker company is based in Glasgow, not Rome or Turin.

    Long time back a bunch of folks on Usenet clubbed together to buy someone the Austrian domain name dot.at so he could have the email address dot@dot.at. Again this domain was registered in the UK as was the email server he ran. I thought briefly of registering dotatdot.at myself but decided not to in the end.

    647:

    EC and GT don't have really good understandings of what social justice activists mean by racism etc. It really has relatively little to do with prejudice and a whole lot to do with power relations. Even if racial bigotry was eliminated if the power relations did not change it would still be racism.

    This is why black people can be bigoted as hell towards white people but still not be racist. There is no black over white power system (in almost all of the world).

    648:

    You are wrong. I have understood that for half a century. But it does NOT justify (for example) successful blacks discriminating against poor gypsies just because the latter are white. Also, if they are bigoted, they are racist; they can be PREJUDICED without being racist, but that is different.

    649:

    Oh I know that well.

    Back 15 or so years ago when Columbia was in the middle of their internal war as best I could tell the drug cartels were using cyber malware to try and make money. I got more .co attempts than the rest of South America combined at times. But you could also depend on .br to surge back on top at various times.

    But then about 10+ years ago some bright marketing droids got the idea that a way to get nice domain names that someone had already snagged in the .com space was to start using .co. So mail servers got to deal with all of these legit (well so to speak) .co domains intermixed with all of what I'm fairly certain were the drug cartels trying to make money with malware.

    Again, the big cloud guys can take it over with their staff of 100s on this one issue.

    650:

    Then why do you keep whining that "politically correct people" are -ist at you, when the systematic power relations clearly favour you over them?

    They very likely are prejudiced and even bigoted, but when rich straight white men are whining about systematic power relations keeping them down, man... I wonder what's really going on.

    The whole women's clothing thing is largely an example of the non-obvious ways that social power works. Much as dreadlocks or cornrows make it hard to get a "city" job, obvious body hair makes it hard for women to get or keep those jobs, especially if they're customer-facing. Likewise unfashionable or otherwise socially inept clothing. Which, as noted, is only available in disposable form.

    Often it's not even (or it is despite) the company and management, it's all about customers. In the worst case you have actual honest-to-bob complaints about "coon hair" (US equivalent would be nigger hair) or "that ape on the front counter" and oh boy do you not ever want to go there. The thing is, for every open and honest racist bigot you will have tens to hundreds of others who will just quietly shop elsewhere. And by "shop" I mean "hire a project management company". It's a real effect, it's been the subject of both academic research and lawsuits, and it really brings into question the ability of business to lead rather than follow social license.

    So... on the one hand you have "mean" social pressure to be a slim, hairless, white, young woman; but on the other hand you have well-meaning advice that at least obviously trying to be one will help a great deal with social and career success; and on the gripping hand you have "being difficult" applied to anyone who steps out of line.

    At the completely trivial end, I'm about to start paying rent again, and it will be weekly because OMFG technically I could pay monthly just after I get paid, but in practice it's just not worth the hassle. Every. Single. Thing. The five forms. All default to weekly. The new intern learning to "do rental"... first time she's ever been asked. Her "supervising" 18 year old junior assistant to the PA to the least successful real estate apprentice in the office... first time for her too. And so on, right up to the strictly amateur-hour owner. Oh dear lord, let me pretend I never asked and just pay weekly. It's such a small thing, bob help me if it was something actually important like "can I fit a grab rail in the shower".

    Go along to get along... it's not just a good idea, it's an (unwritten) law.

    651:

    what people want from their bike lights. I, for one, can't stand flashing lights on bikes

    Context; 100 cyclists with flashing lights in a 1 hour walk is a PITA, one cyclist every day or two with flashing lights is "hey, a cyclist".

    Where I live I ride ~2 hours a day and see on average less than 10 cyclists... and I commute against the main flow. If every single one had a 200+ lumen flashing front light that would be quite annoying for a couple of minutes of my 2 hours. But luckily only about half of them have those lights, and all of that half point their lights directly at the eyes of oncoming traffic*.

    The other thing is that maybe half the cyclists in Australia are using sub-$500 bikes (about 300 euro) including everything - helmet, lights, lock, anything else they bought with the bike. A scary number have generic-mart $99 "mountain bikes" that they assembled themselves* using the allen key from their imitation-Ikea furniture**. Those people often save $20 by not buying lights, or not buying new batteries for their lights, or whatever. So the lights they have are small, dim, usually badly mounted, and possibly met the minimum legal standard when new, clean and with fresh batteries. So flashing = usable for longer before it stops working forever (ie, the batteries have gone flat), and flashing = a dim light is more noticeable.

    • there is, AFAIK, exactly one company (B&M) that makes bike lights with other than a round beam pattern. That pattern is illegal on motor vehicles but cheap to manufacture so guess what we get. * I use the term generously. Insofar as those bicycle shaped object *can be assembled correctly, these people are not capable of doing so. Commonly the front fork is backwards, one or both brakes are not connected, and nothing is adjusted correctly. It moves, shut up. ** anything that cannot be fitted using a 6mm allen key has not been fitted.
    652:

    Why couldn't women have done the same as men?

    You're so close... keep thinking.

    653:

    He's not doing anything of the sort. You have still missed Paws's point: the word has multiple meanings. And, moreover, the meaning which you appear to be considering the foremost in everyone's consciousness is not so in reality; it is US slang, and while people in Britain may well be aware of that meaning, it also probably is not the meaning that first comes to their mind.

    Certainly for me it is Paws's definition that is the primary meaning, because faggots were one of my favourite dinners when I was little. (Especially the crunchy gravy-soaked bits where they've got a bit too hot round the edges. Yum.) Running it a close second is the meaning "bundle of brushwood", as used in innumerable historical/fantasy settings for setting fire to fortifications, witches, etc, or strapped to the front of WW1 tanks to dump into trenches. The US slang meaning is a long way behind unless the context is specifically American.

    Probably even more so for the abbreviated form. I once had an Amazon review scunthorped for no discernible reason; I eventually got past the filter by doing s/./\1./g on the entire message, and then complained, whereupon it turned out that what was mistriggering the filter was a reference to calculations on the back of a fag packet. Which is bog standard English slang for a Fermi approximation. In English usage a fag IS a cigarette - or perhaps a tedious chore - whereas the US usage is rare enough to be potentially confusing.

    I wonder how people manage on Amazon reviewing things to do with dog breeding or poultry farming.

    654:

    The only reason that is possible is that effectively the Roma are not white. That might be their skin colour, but it is not their place in the power hierarchy. Yes, stomping on people lower in the power rankings is bad, but it's the power differential, not the bigotry that is the key driver.

    655:

    Oooh! I know this one! (whitroth @ 194)

    Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, galloping through the sward, Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, and his horse Concorde. He steals from the rich and gives to the poor, Mr Moore, Mr Moore, Mr Moore.

    Ha! Refute that if you will!

    I'm a very good comment arguer. I practice every day, well, not absolutely every day, but most days in the week. I expect I must practice four or five times a week, at least four or five, only some weekends... like last weekend, there really wasn't the time, so that moved the average down a bit.

    And everyone knows that OGH and She Of Many Names are collaborating on a clandestine Lupin Express.

    Come On, Concorde!

    656:

    This thrilling episode of Moore's Law has been brought to you by--

    (Ducks, covers, etc)

    657:

    "Still, I think you are making a mistake in generalizing local usage in your area to the rest of the world."

    Other way round. I'm giving a counterexample to the apparent assumption that the US usage is generalisable :)

    "...comparing them specifically to women's genitals in a most derisive and derogatory manner as if there were nothing worse than women or their genitals."

    This to me indicates that the difference is something deeper than simple national differences in the idea of what sounds like a good swear word. That interpretation is so alien to my use of the word that it sounds plain weird. I don't give a synapse's worth of thought to the literal meaning because it's vanishingly rare for the literal meaning of any swear word to make any kind of sense in the context of the sweary usage. Swear words, when used as swear words, are not meaningful, they are merely expressive. They are essentially a kind of punctuation only bulkier and more pronounceable.

    There is also the point that positive usages of the word are just as valid as negative ones, at least in British usage. "This is cunting good weed" expresses great appreciation; "cunting" serves as an intensifier of "good". Indeed you could use pretty well any word in that position, no matter what it literally means, and the construction remains valid and comprehensible, only the degree of emphasis changes. This is straightforwardly explained by the "expressive" theory but not at all by the "disgusting" one.

    Or there's the way an expression can be changed from having a negative connotation to a positive one by putting "the" in front of it. "This weed is bollocks" => it's really bad; "this weed is the bollocks" => it's really good. You could use "cunt" in that position but it's more conventional to use either a plural or a mass noun, like "bollocks" or "shit". Of course, none of this makes the slightest bit of sense if you take the words literally, but if you consider them as up-regulators or down-regulators it's no problem.

    (Meanwhile, nobody even notices the arguably more logical objection to the use of the word "fuck" in its literal sense...)

    658:

    shrug In a flock of pigeons one can often see one pigeon pecking the crap out of another one and trying to drive the victim away from the other pigeons (and the patch of food they've found). This is a male pigeon shoving his mate around because he doesn't want her meeting other male pigeons. Plenty of other species with a comparable breeding strategy exhibit similar behaviours; in humans they are both particularly diverse and subject to culturally transmitted elaborations. So in any case of an irrational constraint that only applies to women I do tend to assume it's yet another human variation on the "male pigeon being an arsehole" situation, unless I have some reason not to.

    659:

    I'd just like to point out that Seedless Watermelon" is a LIE!

    660:

    "...Curie-point magnetic coupling of the heating element to the soldering tip..."

    Yes, they are great... IF you have an unrestricted supply of tips. The trouble is that the protective iron plating develops an invisible pinhole, then the copper inside gradually leaches away and is replaced with solder, while the iron shell remains otherwise intact. So they gradually get crappier and crappier but with nothing apparently different about them, and it creeps up on you in a most annoying way.

    I swear by my 25W Weller fitted with a five-metre cord, no temperature control (but it doesn't seem to need it) and consuming bits made at home by chopping a bit off some 4mm copper rod. To be sure, they erode, but at least you can see what's happening, and I usually lose the piece of copper rod before I run out of it.

    661:

    "So noticing that I'm looking at routes in an area where my cell service doesn't exist then figuring out that maps should be cached isn't AI?"

    The only "novel" thing about that is not having to worry about having enough storage to cache lots of maps. The predictive caching principle is ancient.

    662:

    Robert Prior @ 614: Last time I travelled standby it was very stressful. I was visiting my folks when the friend who got me the ticket called and said to get to the airport that evening because the spaces were going to disappear on the day we'd planned for me to return. Problem was, I was five hours from the airport and the ferry schedule was such that I couldn't make it before the next day.

    Standby or Space-A (if you qualify for military hops) are no good if you need to have a definite travel itinerary. Only use them if you can be flexible, and by flexible I mean you want to go to Germany, but it doesn't matter if you end up in Spain or Italy instead ... and you can afford to stay wherever you end up until you get to the top of the list for a flight back to the U.S. (and aren't worried about figuring out how you're going to get back to where you left your car).

    Although, if you end up anywhere in Europe with Space-A you shouldn't have a problem getting to one of the other military bases that offer hops back to CONUS. Travel by rail or bus appears to be reasonably affordable.

    663:

    David L @ 618:

    "Last time I travelled standby it was very stressful. ... Not worth the hassle, frankly."

    Stressful. Well it requires an attitude. I've spend 12 hours at an airport and then given up and gone home. 3 times I think. I've also ganged up with 2 others and make the decision that to do what we want we needed to drive to a larger airport 2 1/2 hours away and fly from there. A $60 car rental split 3 ways and we made the trip happen.

    I've also had to spend the night in a hotel when flights didn't happen.

    As I said, it requires a mental place not everyone can or wants to be in.

    I'd like to add that if you can qualify for Space-a (military hop), there's a small possibility that you might catch a ride on a C-130 to get to your destination. Not getting to fly C-130 "airlines" is the thing I miss most about being retired from the military ... that and sitting on the floor of a UH-1 with my feet danglin' out the door. It's mighty loud, so you need a good set of ear protection, but it's FUN!

    664:

    jrootham @ 647 NOT EVEN WRONG ( See also EC's comments ) "Who said anything at all about ONLY "black" (i.e. brown) & "white" (i.e. pink ) racism only? I have already commented at secondhand about the viciously racist overlordship of "the Han" towards the Uighurs & others ( Can you spell "Tibet"? ) .... Then there's the attitude of many (most?) in Japan to gai-jin ... to the extent that any Japanese who lives abrooad for more than about 5 years is no longer regarded as a "proper" person? Or the simmering dislike between W Africans & W Indians - ex-slave-sellers descendants & the children of those slaves ... Well?

    Moz & EC @ 652 Actually, it's going the other way ... men are now responding to "fashion" in a v depressing way. YOU try to get a decent new tweed jacket for instance.

    Pigeon @ 653 See also "Good Omens" [ From memory ] "Oh, but you must give us faggots" "Why, what you going to do with them, then?" (v suspicious US person ) "We burn them of course" "RIGHT ON!"

    665:

    Greg, you might consider thinking that through in a little more detail. Your examples actually re-inforce jrootham’s point, and they certainly are not counter examples to his claim that the important theme here is power. Your argument requires that you can provide examples of Uighur people being horribly racist toward Han Chinese to the point of systematised abuse. If you’re talking about Han Chinese and a systematised, state-sponsored racist program of dehumanisation of Uighur people, then you’re actually talking about the way historically the British have behaved toward people from other places.

    Japan is more complex. You’d need to talk about foreigners being oppressively racist toward Japanese people IN JAPAN. There actually are historical examples if you consider things that might have happened under Allied occupation, but those are not valid examples either because again the power dynamic is inverted.

    So yes it is theoretically possible under some conditions for a population of brown people to oppress a captive white minority with systematised racism. It is just that the conditions for this to occur are not really extant globally. Mostly we’re still just dealing with the post-colonial legacy and populations trend toward a sort of mixed beige creole in the longer term.

    666:

    A friend took the domain dotat.at, with the email address dot@ - that works better. Is that the domain you were thinking of?

    It's still there, as is the email address. His running a private mail server was perhaps unusual, but given that he did that for his day job at Demon it wasn't that odd. (AIUI he still does run mail servers, for EC's old employer).

    667:

    Weller still make and supply tips today for soldering irons they sold back in the 1970s, the classic Magnastat W series. They're not cheap but they're very high quality tips and they last a long time, months or years of regular use. Having to stop work to make another tip is not cost-effective in a work environment compared to fetching a new tip from the spares box and fitting it every year or two.

    668: 638 - You mean the majorly Jar-Jared "Mickeyshaft LockOut", which tries to be a calendar manager as well as an e-mayo client and address book? 644 - Complete and utter horse hockey! All the other uses of "faggot" are several hundred years older than the one meaning you're fixating on. 645 - In support of Nojay's #646. Several UK television companies use Tuvalu's ".tv" TLD. 653 - Thank you for the support.

    A "fag" can also be a junior pupil assigned as a servant to a senior (or prefect, seems to depend on institution) in an English "public school" (actually fee-paying and usually residential, for the benefit of the colonials).

    664 - I see a depressing amount of real Harris Tweed being used to make handbags.
    669:

    (Back home at last …)

    Armbands are not specifically required: it just needs to be some sort of visual identifier so that the authoritarians can see and be seen.

    Armbands with swastikas are one option. So are red baseball caps printed with a four letter acronym. Or a social media handle in (((triple brackets))) (note: semiotics of the triple-bracket thing can turn on a dime, AIUI it started out as a tag the Nazis used to identify (((suspected jews))) in public life, but then they swapped it).

    670:

    For example, why the hell should British posters on a British blog be forced to pander to USA conventions?

    If you want to communicate with somebody, it behooves you to avoid ambiguity and trivial misunderstandings. Americans are handicapped by their parochial linguistic usage; Brits get a lot of imported media so we grow up (mostly) knowing how to code-switch. So we end up putting all the effort into communication, leaving the Americans under the impression that we're just pocket-sized Americans who occasionally mis-spell "color" or get roads and sidewalks confused.

    (See also "emotional labour", another social activity which is largely invisible to masculine-indoctrinated persons but expected of feminine-trained ones.)

    671:

    how do you think that velodrome riders got themselves and what was often their only bicycle to the track in the 1950s?

    Seventy years ago there were roughly a tenth as many motor vehicles on the UK roads, acceleration and maximum speeds of said cars were much lower, trains had guards' vans with accommodation for bicycles, population density was generally lower (the UK's population has risen by about 25-30% in that time, while urbanizing and concentrating in large cities), and so on, yadda yadda.

    So the entire transport infrastructure/built environment was different back then: comparisons are useless.

    Regulations change slowly but one of the things you can be certain of is that generally regulations are brought in to improve public safety after some incident in which members of the public die as a result of lack of regulation. (A notable exception: the ideologically driven small-government asset-stripping "conservative" governments since 2010.)

    672:

    Applying front brakes safely on a bicycle involves a technique, lower your center of gravity by shifting your weight low, and to the rear of the bike. Hanging your bum behind the saddle while holding your chin close to the top tube doesn't look anywhere near as ridiculous as doing a face plant. The less flexible should develop the habit of applying the rear brake first.

    673:

    Ask me anything: Is there anything that would make it more likely to get more female commentators to the blog? Or commentators under the age of 50?

    674:

    Is there anything that would make it more likely to get more female commentators to the blog? Or commentators under the age of 50?

    Yes: shut down the blog and open an entirely new one, then spend a decade or so curating a new commentariat. Oh, and while you're at it, fire the nearly-55-yo slightly aspie guy who runs it because he's simply not the kind of dude who can attract the commentariat you're calling for.

    Short of these somewhat drastic measures … I need to ramp up the posting volume, bring in more guest bloggers (preferably younger generation authors), and ride herd ruthlessly on the existing commenters (naming no names: 70+ year old males who simply don't have a gut feel for how the system screws women).

    I'd do that stuff except I am exhausted and mildly depressed this year (and for the last two) due to health issues and parental deaths/terminal illnesses. And nothing reduces motivation and work capacity like depression and illness. It would be a little bit of an exaggeration to say the blog is on life support these days, but it's getting really hard for me to come up with new ideas for topics to talk about (which is what seeds discussions), especially as I should be working on the rewrite of a certain novel (which just blew past yet another deadline extension this week).

    675:

    Oh for fuck's sake.

    All the other uses of "faggot" are several hundred years older

    By your logic, the swastika cannot be a Nazi symbol because Hindus and Shintoists were using it long before.

    In the CONTEXT of GAMERS using the word, it's a gay SLUR.

    I have been called a "fucking faggot" when I visited Australia. I'm pretty sure it was meant as a gay SLUR.

    Here is an article on a London-based site discussing "fag" as a gay SLUR:

    https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/08/25/is-it-ever-ok-to-say-fag/

    The CONTEXT is quite clear, and I have only used the word in this CONTEXT. I referred specifically to GAMERS in my first post, that context being the online gaming community, NOT the UK.

    Does that make things clear enough for you?

    676:

    Well, I'm trying to do something to help with "the system". Under my IRL name I'm a "Vine Voice" reviewer on "Large River", and you just prompted me to do a 2 more positive reviews of books by female authors, and of a TV series which has a more or less all female back of camera creative talent, and a female feminist lead. In another week or so I'll do another positive review of a book by a female author (can't do it before it's formally published).

    I don't choose to read certain genres, and will not accept arguments that "it's very unfair that I don't get more readers when I only write in those genres." The only way that would be unfair would be if I read books by men and not women in those genres.

    Works?

    677:

    You still don't understand. These words and symbols have a power over you (and the population of Germany) not because of their history, but because you choose to give them that power.

    678:

    I'm sorry, I didn't mean it as a personal dig, and I know you've had shitty real life stuff to deal with over the past two years.

    I like what goes on here and would hate to see it go - this is one of the non-news places I regularly check, though I'm barely a contributor. It often makes me think, and even sometimes laugh. It gets my head away from the work-a-day stuff I do, (I instruct legal aid lawyers), and I need this sort of escape so very much. I don't comment much because either someone says what I'm thinking better than I could in the moment, or I'm just late to the party.

    But I also miss seeing some of the nyms that were here a while back. So it goes.

    I apologise for posting like an insensitive arse, wish you well in dealing with everything that you have to at the moment, hope for some guest posts, and look forward to your next books. I've been reading your stories since Spectrum & Asimovs were new on the shelves. For as long as you keep typing, I'll be reading.

    679:

    See my #676. I don't know how much I'm helping, but you got me to try and do something positive.

    680:

    In the Laundryverse is Scorpion Stare a non local weapon? If you hooked it up to a big telescope could the Laundry frag Alpha Centauri, or entire galaxies "Now"? If so, no wonder we're being invaded... The primitives have got their hands on a WMD!

    Inquiring minds, or at least mildly pissed ones, want to know!

    681:

    By your logic, the swastika cannot be a Nazi symbol because Hindus and Shintoists were using it long before.

    I've seen the reverse argument used much more frequently: that the swastika is only a Nazi symbol, and so anyone using it can't be anything but a Nazi…

    Words and symbols are slippery things, and people who are certain they know the meaning can be very dangerous. Or maybe it's the certainty that's dangerous — I'm beginning to think we need to see Cromwell's quote* prominently displayed in more places.

    *The one that goes "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."

    682:

    Serious(ish) answer - Even if SCORPION STARE has a range measured in light years, it will take calendar years to get from here to there, and then there's dissipation of energy at energy delivered = 1/distance^2 * energy emitted.

    683:

    Well, FWIW I'd say that a swastika is a NAZI symbol if, and only if, it is displayed as a black cross in a white circle, on a red ground.

    Thus, for example (chosen advisedly), the pale blue swastika on a white disc that the Finnish AF used as a national marking in the period we're discussing is not a NAZI symbol.

    684:

    IIRC, Finland was allied with Germany during WWII (because they were fighting the Russians too.) So don't be too sure that the Fins weren't being nice to the Nazis.

    That being said, I don't know anything about the Fins possible use of the swastika prior to WWII. I should also note that the Fins have no record of concentration camps or any of the other excesses of the German Nazis. But they were allies, in large part because the Russians had invaded Finland.

    685:

    On the subject of hoping for the presence of more young people and women on this blog, I applaud the idea, and feel that if others agree perhaps we should start thinking in terms of international norms for our language; that is, if members of one nationality are offended by a particular usage, we don't use the word. Like "c*t." Or "fgg*t." I'm aware that these are particularly American words to be offended by, but if the standard was to simply avoid using words which members of any group claim as offensive... that would be a good start!

    686:

    In the Laundryverse is Scorpion Stare a non local weapon?

    I ran some numbers through a BOTE calculation a while back. Shorter version: there's not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make atmospheric attenuation of the effect significant (otherwise you'd have a de-facto Martian Heat Ray), and range is relatively limited—at least if you're using small CCDs. (In "The Nightmare Stacks" the Strategic Air Defense basilisks used by the Host are about the size of an apatosaurus, or maybe a BUK-M TELAR IRL, and have a similar or somewhat shorter range restricted to line of sight.) For use against planets, let alone exoplanets, you'd need out-of-atmosphere imaging tools of at least the same order as multiple JWSTs (i.e. cost in the billions, per unit), for in-system use: if you want to go insterstellar, you really need something on the scale of a Matrioshka Brain, in which case a Dyson-Nicoll Beam is practical and probably more flexible (you can use it to take out structures lacking in carbon). More to the point, by the time you've scaled up to weapons that big, you've got better options—it'd be a bit like commissioning Boeing-MacD to build a carbon-fibre-and-titanium trebuchet with an arm two hundred meters long because you want to take out 21st century defenses.

    687:

    You missed the Finnish Waffen SS units?

    (AIUI they weren't run by the Finnish government, but consistend of volunteers who went to fight for the Third Reich. But the Finnish military had form when it came to war crimes against the Soviets, and vice versa—the War of Independence and the Winter War were still fresh in memory.)

    688:

    I'm not a historian, so take this with a large grain of salt.

    As I have read, the swastika as the symbol of the Finnish Air Forces was taken because Eric von Rosen, a Swedish count who donated the first aircraft to the Finnish Air Forces (whatever they were at the time - in 1918, before Nazis) had taken a liking to the symbol. This has been told in Finland as the story that no, the Finnish Air Force swastika has no connections to the Nazi one.

    However. Count von Rosen was not completely in the clear - apparently he saw the swastika in Gotland on rune stones, so that's kind of not the problem. He was still one of the most prominent Nazis in Sweden in the 1930s. He also had quite a lot of Nazi connections to Germany, for example his wife's sister was Hermann Göring's wife.

    So, though the official story is "no Nazi connection" and "Finland was only reluctant ally to Germany" in WWII, it's not really that clear that there is no connection. I think the decision to keep it before and during the war was not only organizational inertia, but that's a personal opinion.

    I did some googling and apparently the Finnish Air Force unit flags still have a black swastika on them. I'm not really sure personally what to think of it - probably it'd be a good time to change that to something else, but I'm not the one making decisions.

    So, the symbol is not exactly the same as the Nazi one, but to my eyes quite close to it anyway.

    Also, during the last few weeks there has been a small 'discussion' in Finland about new research into the Finnish SS troops. Some of their descendants don't like the fact that the Finnish SS troops apparently did the same things as other SS troops, and requested an apology from the Finnish National Archives. The Archives did not give that apology.

    So, our history with the Nazi Germany and research of it still opens some wounds. The official line has of course been that we didn't like them, and it's obvious that the Soviet Union would have been quite big a threat without allies, so it's not completely black and white.

    689:

    "Had form?" I'm not quite sure how to translate that into American.

    690:

    Simply, because overwhelmingly, men own the fashion industry, and mostly men decide what women should wear, and, esp. what's "sexy" and what's not.

    Explain to me, ignoring social mores, why anyone in their right or wrong mind would even think of wearing 5", 6", or 7" spike heels on shoes.

    And the reason women's clothes don't normally have pockets is, of course, that the man who "owns"/"is responsible for" them carries the money.

    I point you to Epstein and the Malignant Carcinoma, and their view of women.

    691:

    What do you have against less-than-primo priced bikes?

    My current bike, in the late 80's, would have cost $300-$400, but I got it for $50 or so (US) at a pawn shop (I ride a Miyata, I can joke to my friend with the Miata....)

    Sub-$100 new, bikes though, um, yeah, I agree. Utter crap.

    692:

    You are Refuted!

    Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding through the glen. Robin Hood, Robin Hood, With his band of men Robing from the rich Giving to the poor Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.

    Bet they wouldn't let me carry my longbow, strung, around a renfaire....

    693:

    And the reason women's clothes don't normally have pockets is, of course, that the man who "owns"/"is responsible for" them carries the money.

    You should listen to the Marketplace (PRI radio network in the US) podcasts on tariffs from a week or so ago. Pockets below the waist line (fuzzy thing that) have enough of a reduced tariff such that many women's apparel makers put pockets on clothes just to get the lower tariff.

    694:

    Don't use my mid-1960's Weller, or my late wife's 1970's? Weller pistol grip, and they've both got issues. I did replace the trigger, but there's still some wonky connection. I just buy whatever will fit....

    Well... back in the early nineties, the use of construction foam for model railroads began. Someone put out a $130 hot wire foam cutter. I looked at it, and thought about it, and pulled out one of our Wellers, took the tip off, and put in a piece of 14 ga, maybe, copper wire, and shaped the wire as I wanted. Worked just fine (let's ignore the smell, shall we?). I posted that to rec.models.railroad. A few months later, I stopped seeing that ad in Model Railroader. A year or two later, I started seeing one about $100 cheaper....

    695:

    I agree with Charlie. As I've said to folks from work, and to friends, if I'm explaining something, and they don't understand, I need to find a way to explain it better, so that they do understand. Otherwise, it's just a waste of everyone's time.

    Not a fan of The British Method For Speaking To Foreign Nationals (if you speak s..l..o..w..l..y e..n..o..u..g..h and LOUDLY ENOUGH, they will understand you, even if the last speaker of English was 100 years ago, and only got as close as 200 mi away....)

    696:

    I reckon you'd be OK with lupins though.

    697:

    I have noticed that since #MeToo the lack of pockets on (gendered) women's apparel (i.e. not stuff like jeans that are more-or-less similar, aside from tailoring/sizing, for men and women) has been a big topic. And a lot of skirts/dresses are now being sold and worn with pockets, because customers want them and and are not shy about demanding them now that they know they're not alone in having this requirement. (But they're not yet universal, for numerous reasons—not least, much women's apparel is subject to transient fashions so usually cheaply/badly made, and adding pockets adds complexity and fabric, which costs money.)

    698:

    "Had form?" I'm not quite sure how to translate that into American.

    Has a track record.

    699:

    "Someone put out a $130 hot wire foam cutter."

    How on earth did they expect to get anyone to pay that?

    I used to make those when I was still a wee nipper. Length of nichrome wire off an old electric fire element, clip the ends into the clips of a car battery charger, pull tight with one clip in either hand, and carve away. Commercial versions did exist, with a red plastic U-shaped frame; they cost peanuts, but their wires were fragile and their attachments such that you had to use special wires with nipples on the ends, so the home rig was better. I simply can't imagine how such an incredibly simple device could be elaborated to the point where it might even vaguely look worth paying $130 for.

    (Also, the commercial rig can't be used to convert wine bottles into funnels...)

    700:

    paws4thot@677:

    I understand completely. It's just you who have to make everything about you, to keep shitting on other people's experiences.

    I'm so done with this shit. Fuck off.

    Troutwaxer@685:

    Yes please.

    701:

    It was a rhetorical question. But, as you say, we have more adaptability, and you may have noticed that I try to avoid giving gratuitous or unreasonable offence. Try. I don't always succeed.

    702:

    In this case, that prejudice (and it is one) has led you to the wrong conclusion. An old joke, with a lot of truth in it, is that the only interest men take in women's clothing is how easy it is to get off. Most women's clothing is discarded because the wearer has got tired of it, or it is no longer fashionable - that may be true of men's, nowadays, but I can't speak for modern men. It is NOT true that is driven by men - it's driven by the effect you say, but by other women.

    Also to whitroth. Back in the early post-war decades, you could get decent-quality, 'chain store' women's clothing in the UK, and some women (mostly of the upper classes) bought it and wore it until it expired, just as men did. Poor women did the same, because they couldn't afford to replace it. So the quick replacement and interest in cheap clothing wwas primarily a middle-class phenomenon (and 'We are all middle-class now'). Plus, of course, the rise of ubiquitous central heating and demise of workaday cycling (seriously). The fashionistas failed to persuade men until they hit on the bright idea of persuading women to put pressure on their menfolk and, as Greg Tingey points out, that worked.

    The point here is that it is a clear example of how the politically correct are scapegoating an innocent outgroup. It's not a big deal.

    703:

    Ah. So gypsies are honorary non-whites. I have seen that concept before.

    704:

    Oh, God :-( Try READING my previous comments. Firstly, that is not true (see one of them) and, secondly, I am prepared to stand up for unpopular, discriminated-against subgroups (see another).

    705:

    The build quality of most store bought clothing is terrible for a very simple reason: Most of it has terrible sell-through. The store orders home a hundred pieces, and sells, perhaps, 20 of those before fashion moving on forces it to discard the remainder.

    That puts a really low ceiling on how much the store can pay the manufacturer.

    The exception to this is the old standbys that are not affected by fashion and thus always sell. Jeans, working overalls and shirts come with double stitching, reinforced corners, and cloth with heft to them because "Not sucking" is important to getting repeat custom in that market segment.

    The solution people are working on is to do manufacturing to order - I had this idea years ago, and appears it occurred to me because it was, as they say, steam engine time, because now there are now at least 3 startups that I am aware of working to make it real.

    General concept: The store has a scanner, takes your measurements with great exactitude, and without you getting the chance to lie or delude yourself about these things or even ever seeing your "sizes". Why put a number on it and feed your neurosis?

    Then you pick a design off the wall screen that shows how various things will look on you, and the chosen garment is ordered from the factory, where the pattern is adapted to your measurements by algorithm and cut by laser before being handed onward to the kind of mass production setup which is usual, only with a bit more exacting tracking, and the finished garment is mailed to you.

    This will, of course, cost more to do, but working on consignment, rather than spec means your wastage rate goes way down, so should not be more expensive to the end user, even if made to much higher standards. Its tailoring, except mostly automated.

    706:

    EC and GT don't have really good understandings of what social justice activists mean by racism etc. It really has relatively little to do with prejudice and a whole lot to do with power relations.

    I've consulted both the Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries, as well as the Anti-Defamation League, and I don't see power relationships in the definitions they use (there's a hint in Merriam-Websters third meaning, but it could be interpreted differently).

    https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/racism

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

    https://www.adl.org/racism

    It may well be that "social justice activists" use their own, narrower definition of the word, but as it's not the common, dictionary definition a citation and/or explanation would be useful.

    707:

    "...that prejudice (and it is one)..."

    Indeed it is, quite literally - a prior judgement. An assumption that observation X belongs in category C because it does have a superficial resemblance to other things in category C, used as a heuristic to be right more than half the time while not looking deeper into the phenomenon than my inarsability threshold allows. I do tend to consider certain categories of human behaviour in terms of pigeons, when the behaviours are derived from the same basic evolutionary pressures, and the principal difference is that pigeons do it openly and nakedly and are really obvious about it, whereas humans elaborate it into five hundred different kinds of incomprehensibly weird shit on top of being largely incomprehensible in general to begin with; the pigeon analogy is a useful handle on it.

    However, something has got mixed up; I was talking about vocabulary limitations, not ephemeral clothing. To some extent I agree with you on the clothing matter, in that I also avoid asking the obvious "why bother" as an earful is the expected response. On the other hand what's behind my despite of fashion is that it is such a potent facilitator of both women and men being repeatedly suckered into buying endless crap that they don't need only to throw it away the following week, in accordance with the perennial capitalist delusion of infinite sources and infinite sinks; whether the specific kind of crap is clothes or iphones isn't really important, it's the destruction of resources (both planetary and personal) that's the problem.

    708:

    since #MeToo the lack of pockets on (gendered) women's apparel has been a big topic

    It's a hardy perennial in feminist circles. Victorian and American women around the turn of that century, with the "rational dress movement" being a thing. Likewise second wave feminists and so on. Vox has a bit of a history from their side if you're interested.

    It's worth noting that men's skirts generally don't have pockets either, giving us such oddities as the sporran (because if I'm carrying anything I want it in a bag banging into my testicles with every step, I really do). On the other hand the modern utilikilt could be described as a strip of pockets that you wrap round your waist ... perhaps skirt reform for men has also arrived?

    709:

    "social justice activists" use their own, narrower definition of the word

    It's implied in the "practice of" part of the definition. Practice requires the power to implement your beliefs, so the SJW definition of "belief in superiority and the ability to enforce that" is consistent with but more specific than the dictionaries you link to. Dictionaries also tend to follow rather than lead and be conservative in their usage. There is also a degree of authoritative sources by definition siding with authority.

    And there's this, just in case you thought you were being original with your argument from authority.

    710:

    I'd do that stuff except I am exhausted and mildly depressed this year (and for the last two)

    I'd point out that it's kind of a non-local depression. I suspect part of it is simply that a lot of peoples' remaining parents are getting old and passing on. This isn't to denigrate what you're going through, but I know a lot of people who don't know you and don't have your life circumstances who are also exhausted and depressed. There's a lot of it going around.

    Another thing is that we're seeing either the imminent takeover or the extinction burst of the standard behavior of the 1%, and it's driving everybody who doesn't want to be part of that world nuts. Right now, in my little corner of reality, I'm looking at a bunch of developers pushing really stupid stuff in ways that are quite sure to get litigated, and probably they'll lose. I think they're trying the standard model of development they've perfected since the 1970s, except it's not really working any more, except that there's so much stupid money (e.g. people with more money than sense looking for bad investments because the good investments are all taken) floating around that they can afford to do stupid things.

    Personally, I'm hoping it's an extinction burst, but that depends on us. An extinction burst isn't what you think in this context (although it will turn into one if I'm wrong). It's a term from dog training. From the link above: "An extinction burst is when the unwanted behavior gets worse before it gets better during the onset of being ignored. The dog is saying this sentence to himself. 'Hey, this always worked before. I must not be jumping high enough or biting hard enough. Somehow they're just not noticing me. I must have to try harder.' If you can stick to your guns and get through that curve, the problem will eventually become extinct."

    It's not quite the same thing here, because we're doing the opposite of ignoring the problem, but the behavior is the same: try harder until it works. It's depressing continually resisting bad behavior, but we can hope that eventually we'll get through the curve and the remaining one-percenters will have learned what doesn't work. And hopefully there will be fewer of them. If we stop resisting, then, well...we'll get the other kind of extinction burst.

    711:

    manufacturing to order

    Years ago I discovered that the flip side to clothing workers getting paid very little is that if you can find one you can pay them very little to make exactly what you want. Albeit not $0.50/garment, but then you do want someone who can design and cut the pattern as well as sew the item, so you're not actually right at the bottom of that particular pit.

    Most of my clothing comes via second hand shops and the rest via systems like that or promotional T shirts (I get a lot of those, of the 10 items of clothing I buy a year, probably 5 are socks and underpants and 2 or 3 are promotional t shirts). I found this out by having a clear idea of what I wanted in a dress shirt and shopping until I got it... via a sales assistant saying "here's the name of a dressmaker, talk to them (and get out of my shop)" with the parenthetical remark not actually voiced.

    Which also answers Greg's question above: if for some reason I wanted a decent tweed jacket I would steal one from a corpse, or at least buy one from their estate via a charity shop.

    712:

    Charlie @ 674 & paws @ 676 Well, i'm regularly treated to how badly the system treats women from my significant other, never mind reports from China, shall we say? Andthat uttelry conventional lower-middle-class woman my mother, who simply would not get down & grovel to the 1940's/50's "little woman" ethos...

    @ 683 et seq And the Bhuddist Siwat-Dee - a red swastika on a white background, with four red dots around it?

    Moz @711 Which is why, in summer, I tend to wear a vest-of-pockets ( A "gilet" ?? ) wich is amazingly practical & not fashionable & FUCK IT I can only seem to get in some cream colur - I want one in Hippo-Shit-green, that doesn't show th dirt so easily & would be much better camouflage. Yeah, "fashion"

    713:

    What do you have against less-than-primo priced bikes?

    Two things: with a $500 budget (that's about 10,000 proudly independent British pounds or $300 US dollars) you can either buy a brand new kind-of-ok bicycle, or a shitty bicycle plus ok helmet, lock, lights, multitool, pump, puncture repair kit and chain lube. The bike shop I worked for tried really hard to beat that, but the conclusion we came to was that $550 was the lowest possible price (we bought dozens of "maybe this one" bikes)

    Or you can buy a second hand, decent bicycle and new all of the above.

    Second, people who look at the above and decide to buy the new one anyway invariably seem to scrimp of the side of not-decent essential necessities. So they end up with something that doesn't quite work right, accessories that aren't worth having, and a generally poor experience. So if they can afford to they decide that cycling isn't for them and give up; or if they have to keep cycling have a miserable time and take that out on the pedestrians whose footpaths they insist on using, plus any motorist unfortunate enough to encounter them when they're forced to cross a road.

    I have volunteered with community bicycle repair groups, and worked in a bike shop formed from such a group, and I know from personal experience that some fraction of those people can be taught how to cycle safely, cheaply and considerately. But there's strong social pressure not to do those things, so a lot of people who could, don't. I obviously also detest the social pressure here, but that's another one of those things I can't actually change (my personality doesn't allow the lifetime of political campaigning that the likes of Fiona Campbell have performed - her official role and the award are consequences of her work not the cause of them)

    714:

    Seriously, Greg, either get hold of a sewing machine or search for dressmakers near you. I pay almost as much for the cloth that goes into my dress shirts as for the skilled labour that assembles them but despite that I'm apparently quite generous as customers of such people go. The shocking thing is that I pay about the sale price of a decent office/business shirt for them, despite getting a far superior product. In Sydney that's $50-$80 per shirt. Admittedly that's one shirt every 2-3 years rather than a viable business by itself.

    I strongly suspect that if you took your cream abomination to a dressmaker and said "this, but without obvious defects X, Y and Z, and made of this cud-coloured green cloth I have here" they would quote you a price that you would both like. Admittedly all the detail work would drive the cost up, but probably not to the point you'd want to do the job yourself :)

    715:

    Greg, do you mean something like this? https://www.hawkshead.com/nosilife-adventure-gilet-pebble/

    Clearance stock so the sizes available might not be helpful.

    716:

    Also, there are green dyes (or you could tie-dye it with black, or grey, or maybe blue :) ).

    717:

    The solution people are working on is to do manufacturing to order - I had this idea years ago, and appears it occurred to me because it was, as they say, steam engine time, because now there are now at least 3 startups that I am aware of working to make it real.

    I saw this sort of idea promulgated back in the 1980s and again in the 1990s, automated made-to-order clothing using NEW! MODERN! technology. Back then it was robots more than the AI-driven body shape scanning systems that the startups are trying to use to extract money from VCs but, well...

    I bought something interesting when I was in Japan in May this year. It's a brand-new still-in-the-package one-size-fits-nobody basic white T-shirt, size XL. It cost 108 yen including sales tax, or less than a dollar US. Doing the body-scan fandango and waiting until a robot made a new T-shirt that was a good fit would cost a bit more, perchance and for most folks the one-size-fits-nobody will do fine.

    One weird exception is people like TV stars and personalities who wear casual clothing in public that looks like regular off-the-shelf stuff, albeit higher-end than Uniqlo or similar except it's tailored to fit them specifically -- sometimes it's altered from that higher-end OTS product but sometimes it's fabricated from scratch to look like it's OTS.

    718:

    Heteromeles - I thought of "exctinction burst" more as the overbright failure mode of a filament light bulb as it burns out, but your explanation makes sense too ...

    Charlie - we like what you do and appreciate what comes our way at whatever timescale works for you, please know that.

    719:

    and adding pockets adds complexity and fabric, which costs money

    That was the point. In the US for a long time now, (before DT got involved), most apparel makers (and anyone else who mostly imports) has tariff wizards on staff who are involved in the initial design process. In the US for a long time now importing a women's "shirt/top" with a pocket at the waist or below incurs a 10% tariff. Without the pocket it's more like 25%. Which means adding the pocket in many cases can make the product cheaper at the dock than not having the pocket.

    So you get designs based on tariffs and not on what people actually want. When the two things meet great. Otherwise you get stupid designs that cost less to import.

    720:

    The store orders home a hundred pieces, and sells, perhaps, 20 of those before fashion moving on forces it to discard the remainder.

    From what I've seen you're sort of right but got the numbers reversed.

    There is a semi-large department store that has an outlet near my Texas apartment. As my wife said, "It's where xxxx brand clothes go to die". I stop by there every 2 or 3 months and shorts, shirts, and slacks at about 90% off "list".

    That puts a really low ceiling on how much the store can pay the manufacturer.

    Based on my experience seeing the invoices way back when they pay 30% to 50% of list price depending.

    The solution people are working on is to do manufacturing to order - I had this idea years ago, and appears it occurred to me because it was, as they say, steam engine time, because now there are now at least 3 startups that I am aware of working to make it real.

    It has been a real thing for decades. I bought "custom fitted" shirts back in the early 80s. You visited a local shop, got measured, and a week or few later your shirts showed up. At about double what decent dress shirt cost "off the rack". But they were well made and lasted longer than typical. And were a perfect fit. (Until you gained or lost weight.) They did it by having a lot of almost finished shirts in their factory and then finishing them to your fit.

    Now days there are several internet firms doing the same thing only eliminated the stores.

    At least in the US.

    721:

    alyctes @ 715 Ordered (!) I use Hawkshead / Craghoppers for trousers anyway - but hadn't founbd their on-line outlet. THANKS ( MY cream ones are very similar, but from the Canadian company "orvis" )

    722:

    Compare and contrast, the wife, who grew up in Chelyabinsk (go Traktor!) made her own clothes as a girl as did all her friends (early 80s) because that was what you did. Mad keen for patterns. She still buys clothes on the basis that they’ll need a bit of taking in hand. Possibly like husbands. :)

    723:

    BTW I see James ("Gaia") Lovelock will be 100 years old July 26th. -Is the self-organising/self-regulation of the biosphere a topic of interest for you?

    724:

    So gypsies are honorary non-whites

    "Whiteness" isn't about skin colour. Ask me! (Jewish, by ethnicity if not belief.) Ask, oh, SF author Tobias Buckell, whose skin colour is white enough to "pass" but who's Caribbean and rather paler than the rest of his family. Ask anyone in the USA who is from South America and arrived before the 1960s, when the term "hispanic" wasn't used as an ethnicity and people from that continent often coded as "white" in racist terms, but are now coded as "black". Ask Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans about their great-grandparents' experiences (both groups of immigrants were seen as an unwelcome non-white underclass in the 19th and early 20th centuries).

    Whiteness is a social construct, and it exists to exclude the non-white from access to civic life. Roma are yet another excluded category. This isn't rocket science, and you should have figured it out some time over the previous decades, although it can be kind of hard to see the foundations of a tower when you live in the penthouse.

    725: 684 - Well, without checking actual dates, I do know that during part of WW2 the Finns were allied with the Germans against the Soviets, and in another part with the Soviets against the Germans. 688 - Thanks for the extra detail Mikko. As a model maker and occasional historian the only bits of that I positively knew were that the Finnish pale blue on white ground was used before anyone ever heard of the NAZI party, and that in both nations the army and air force were separate arms of defense. 693 - "Waistline" is fuzzy; "waist band" isn't. 724 - I don't have to go that far in space or time; I just have to look at how the Irish were treated in the 1950s in Scotland, when they were working on the big hydro-electric schemes.
    726:

    Grrk. You are absolutely correct that is the the case for whether people are regarded as second-class citizens (or even lesser humans), but that abuse of terminology is recent, entirely politically-motivated and seriously discriminatory. Because of that, I will not use it or accept it.

    One of the factors leading to genuine racial discrimination in many societies (including parts of the USA and UK) is the 'poor whites' feeling that they are being discriminated against on behalf of (and even by) various categories of 'non-white'. Being who I am, I regard the reality as more important, and what I was railing against was the claims that classifying themselves as 'non-white' entitles people to discriminate against all 'whites', including those even less privileged than they are.

    But, actually, this is a derailment of what I started saying, which was the same thing as regards to gender. I have considerable personal experience (as a have no truck with it.victim, defender and powerless observer) of vulnerable men being seriously discriminated (often by women), and that being justified by political correctness ("You are a man - you can't be discriminated against").

    I will have no truck with ANY of this, and I will continue to speak up for ALL of the unreasonably discriminated-against subgroups, no matter HOW unpopular they are.

    727:

    My mother did that when we were in Africa, because you simply couldn't GET suitable clothing where we were, and we were not rich enough to send off for it. It wasn't uncommon in her generation.

    I am not skilled enough to make clothing, though I have made some crude items and modified many others, and make other fabric-based items.

    728:

    EC "You are a man - you can't be discriminated against" Yeah, I've had that one too - once at an long-ago Worldcon, of all places!

    729:

    Sorry EC, this is all basically gibberish. I understand you’re gibbering in a way that’s coherent within some of your highly contained and pressurised worldview, but it isn’t outside it.

    730:

    Turns out that after huge investments of R&D and money, SewBot now exists and will soon be churning out tee shirts in a factory near you, if you live in a depressed American mid-western town.

    But tee shirts are easy. Making a dress shirt is basically X-Prize territory in comparison, never mind a business suit ...

    Meanwhile, 3D printing in nylon has some unforseen and interesting sartorial side-effects, like the 3D printed bodice from a project to 3D print an entire ball gown; turns out generating the computer model for a complex hyperboloid and then folding it to minimize its depth while it's being printed (depth = time) is another complex problem, and nylon … not everyone's favourite textile!

    What we really need is laser-catalyzed polymerizable spider silk. So we can 3D print silk (one of the more desirable natural fibres). And better software for modeling clothing patterns. But this is the kind of moonshot application of computer technology that the sweatshop-tee-shirt-and-jeans techbros at Google seem unaccountably uninterested in throwing billions at ...

    731:

    The term you are looking for is intersectionality (originally, intersectional feminism, but it spread out a bit).

    Briefly: it's possible for the same person to be privileged in some contexts and subject to discrimination in others. For example, consider a 1860 southern plantation owner's wife. Compared to the plantation slaves she has absolute privilege: compared to her children she has considerable authority: but she's still her husband's chattel, not allowed to own property or conduct businesses on her own right or to vote, and is a woman living in a society where all women are systematically denied freedom. Is she privileged or oppressed? (Obviously: yes to both.) Intersectionality explores these edge cases and gives us a better tool for understanding that discrimination is contextual.

    732:

    In re "laser-catalyzed spider silk", you'd still end up with a "solid" sheet (modulo intentional skips made during the printing) rather than something that is closer to a woven fabric. That is bound to have quite an impact on skin-feel and air/moisture permeability.

    Part of the problem wit all of this is that what you want for clothes is something that is inherently soft and flexible, and what you want for something that's 3D-printable is something that's rigid (at least on a small scale).

    And for a catalyzed-polymer process, it depends crucially on if you start printing "from the top of the item" and pull the printed result up from the bottom (and apply your light from below), or if you print "from the bottom", by slowly raising the polymer level. Neither would, I think, work really well with something that's flexible enough to be worn.

    If it is possible to use multiple beams, that both need to be present to catalyze a specific point, it might be possible to do better (and possibly even faster), but I don't know of any material where this is possible, but while I have done some 3d-print design in the past, I am by no means up-to-date with what's out there, these days.

    733:

    Actually, not really, though it has aspects in common. What I am referring to is where group A, generally, is discriminated against in favour of group B, but there is a subset of group B (call it subgroup Bx) that is discriminated against (possibly even more strongly) in favour of even group A. Furthermore, that is stated to be justifiable because group B as a whole is privileged above group A. There may be a term for this, but I have not seen it. It is a regrettably common phenomenon.

    734:

    No, that's essentially what intersectinality is: you're just framing it to suit your own perspective without allowing that another perspective might be valid.

    Your groups A and B are both subsets of a larger group, within that group there is a Bx and a non-Bx. You seem to be saying that all Bx are not A, (or that non-Bx is a superset which entirely contains A) but in real life that is an edge case to start with. You seem to be discounting that Ax also exists, and you seem to be making a claim that any case where someone in A is preferred over someone in Bx it must be for that reason and no other. I find that last bit dubious, we're only able to take the group Bx person's word for it and perhaps there are reasons the group Bx person overlooked (say, for instance, that they behaved arrogantly and dismissively of other people's perspective in a job interview).

    This sort of thing comes up in discussions of privilege all the time. Saying that you as a member of group B have a certain privilege that group A lacks is not to say that you have no problems, it is to say that people in group A will have most of the same problems as yours IN ADDITION to the discrimination they face for being in group A.

    735:

    Was that an intentional shout-out to the SCP universe I read in the Labyrinth Index?

    Also, as someone who literally works in the Pentagon basement, I very much appreciated the description of that cabled morass under the courtyard. Given the maze of corridors underground, I wouldn't be surprised if that existed behind some mundane maintenance door. But if you want real horrors, you should see the food court - Dunkin' Donuts, Subway, Popeye's, Burger King, and nary a leafy green to be found.

    736:

    My first choice from those, Subway. My typical Subway order involves the whole of the salad bar except the sauce, lettuce and olives. What was that about "nary a leafy green to be found" to be found again?

    737:

    Was that an intentional shout-out to the SCP universe I read in the Labyrinth Index?

    Well spotted!

    As for the Pentagon basement, I've never been there … but I've worked in a fair number of British government buildings of similar vintage (and been back-stage in a couple of US government ones for comparison). It sort of writes itself, like the bureaucratic shenanigans.

    And the food court? Is totally credible except if it was British there would be no food court in anything build before 1997, and thereafter it'd be wall-to-wall W. H. Smiths and Costas concessions, with maybe a Greggs (for the downmarket fast food stand).

    738:

    "Waistline" is fuzzy; "waist band" isn't.

    In my universe "waist band" is a term applied to things that cover you lower body.

    739:

    I will not feed the troll. I will not feed... Ah, who am I kidding? ;-)

    A waist band, in garment making, which was the context of this point, is a relatively narrow strip of fabric at the top of a skirt or a pair of trousers (for native Gaels, "a trouser") usually with a fastening on it.

    A waistline is a more nebulous term, since it may relate to the styling of a dress, or define a line somewhere on a human figure between the 8th (from the top) rib and the hip.

    740:
    "Whiteness" isn't about skin colour. Ask me! (Jewish, by ethnicity if not belief.)

    A good book on this subject is How the Irish Became White - when the Irish migrated to the US (before and after it became independent) they were regarded by the movers and shakers as the scum of the earth. How they (mostly) shed that model is what the book concerns.

    Something similar happened in Montréal with the Jews there. While the Anglos were ascendant, Jews were discriminated against pretty much as you'd expect. Once the Quiet Revolution occurred (for non-Canadians: 1960s) and the Quebecois became Maîtres chez nous, suddenly Jews (who were mostly-English speaking) became valued allies and prejudices against them vastly decreased (but did not disappear, naturally).

    @730:

    But tee shirts are easy. Making a dress shirt is basically X-Prize territory in comparison, never mind a business suit ...

    One interesting factoid about Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States (Lincoln's successor) is that he spent some time as a boy and young man apprenticed to a tailor. The tailor was good at his craft and taught young Johnson well, but was a monster as a human being. When Johnson had enough and absconded, he had to make himself scarce as his former master got a warrant for his arrest.

    Johnson kept his hand in as a tailor, and for the rest of his life made his own clothing, including suits. Even while he was president. So an otherwise crappy politician had a useful fallback skill.

    The most recent POTUS to have made his living by physical labour is, I believe, Harry Truman, who was a farmer, then haberdasher, then farmer again before he got into politics.

    The Tangerine Shitgibbon? If he hadn't been born rich, he wouldn't have got anywhere.

    741:

    Intersectionality is also when prejudices overlap. The Black Lesbian. The handicapped Jew. Etc.

    742:

    I thought the Pentagon scenes were a shout-out to the Illuminatus trilogy, in which Yog Sothoth was held bound in the Pentagon, and when the walls of the Pentagon were damaged by bombs, was released to raven and had to be sent back to the bad places by Eris.

    (For those who haven't read it, Illuminatus was/is (it may still be in print, forty-some years later) the great Hippie/Conspiracy/Discordian science fiction epic, one of the Ur-Documents for the Discordians, Church of the SubGenius, Pagans, etc.)

    743:

    to Charlie Stross @731 it's possible for the same person to be privileged in some contexts and subject to discrimination in others. No, that's not that he means really, IMO. This example would be just class relationships, and he is talking about taking shots at each other in more equal society. See, one person A1 from Group A might discriminate against another person B1 from Group B in some way because A has, um, an upper hand to group B. But on the other hand, B1 person might discriminate against A1 in the same time, because A1 belongs also to group C, which is discriminated with group B. In any case, in this mutual dynamics, it just means they both are being rude to each other.

    What I really don't understand about modern political correctness is an ability of liberal lobby to tangle everything into one bundle. Is it on purpose, for easy management of PR, or it is a strange mutation of common sense. I already got caught in this blog about expressing national stereotypes - and the argument is that this was a "racist" behavior. Which is, of course, very wrong with me, especially in context of me being a citizen of multinational country, with close enough ties to multinational Europe, and not having any racial prejudices that I can think of.

    See, the nationality is all about culture and customs and other things that person or collective otherwise can change in a number of years and generations. True, before it was also about racist things, and beliefs in gods and ancestry, but we should attribute it to tribalism, as people only vaguely knew about heredity. Racism, OTOH, is entirely different thing that arose parallel to nationalism, because does attribute to genetics, to something people can't change at any cost. In that sense, the basis for two ideas is entirely different - in the same way people Greg had to differentiate between, uh, Chinese people and "Chinese government" before.

    Most importantly, I do not really understand the paradox of modern liberal values - how come that only minorities are regarded as capable of being discriminated against? I mean, it is common recently among some right-wingers to explain that they are becoming the minority and therefore need to be defended. What an absolute bull! Of course they are minorities, but not because they're "white", because of their ideals. Just being the minority doesn't quite cut it. Why can't minority discriminate against majority? Maybe it is because people just can't admit that their democratic ideal can be broken somehow?

    Anyway, my thesis here is that "racial" and "gender" arguments are entirely blown out of proportion, mashed together and, most importantly, monetized and privatized, while other problems, disproportions and discrimination are diminished and ignored, up until the point of ignoring ethnic cleansing, displacement and open national confrontation. The reason is very clear to me - developed country to create manageable and comfortable environment fore their own benefit. By building up antagonism and polarizing relationships between "radical" and "tolerant" people modern lobby completely removes reality from the equation, which serves the multitude of purposes. What is not understandable is why so many people do not understand where they move on from here. Such neglect to reality always ends into terrible situation eventually.

    744:

    Anyway, this iwall of text above s all not the entire reason why I wanted to express myself here. The real reason is the thing that appeared on the news just about today. It is worth to be an actual comedy, unless of course it is not comical at all when it happens IRL. I present you with story that can be named, well, "A missile-peppered hot potato in the middle of Europe".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfWOQUhQXuY https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/15/europe/italy-nazi-weapons-missile-seizure-intl/index.html

    And yet it is still not it. There's also a cherry on top, of course. It wouldnt' be a "hot potato" story otherwize.

    CNN: The stockpile was discovered by police who were investigating Italians "with extremist ideology" who had fought alongside Russian-backed separatist forces in Donbass, eastern Ukraine, last July, according to the police statement.

    BBC: But the latest police statement did not mention groups fighting the pro-Russian separatists, referring only to an investigation into Italian extremists who had "taken part in the armed conflict in Ukraine's Donbass region". The police did not make it clear which side the Italians were on in this case.

    Also BBC: Update 16th July 2019: This story was amended after Italian police dropped a reference to the Italian extremists having fought against the Donbass separatists.

    VICE: On Monday, police said the arrests had resulted from an investigation into far-right groups “who have fought in Ukraine's Donbass region against the [Russian-backed] separatists.” On Tuesday, police amended the statement to a more ambiguous wording that didn’t specify which side the radicals backed, saying the raid had resulted from an investigation into Italian extremist fighters who had “taken part in the armed conflict in the Donbass region of Ukraine.”

    http://www.ansa.it/english/news/general_news/2019/07/16/neo-nazis-wanted-to-kill-me-says-salvini_b4872913-fe62-4c3d-bc5a-b6db4ea39e40.html

    A group of pro-Ukraine neo-Nazis caught with an arsenal of weapons including a Matra air-to-air missile in northern Italy Monday wanted to assassinate Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, the minister said Tuesday.

    Well, that is a bit of embarrassment over here, is it not... Although it is not like modern "journalists" have any shame at all. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1154731/matteo-salvini-missile-news-italy-latest

    745:

    You missed the Finnish Waffen SS units?

    I was discussing the behavior of the Finnish government, which did not, to my knowledge, engage in any atrocities (except perhaps against the Russians who had violated their border.)

    746:

    Just a little addition, for something completely different. Remedy's Control game (I mentioned it before in this blog) is churning out new gameplay videos like hot cakes. I missed a bunch of them.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u8xFcvAOjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klfa18JK98k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTB2PdtH7xw

    I am not impressed by gamneplay that is somewhat reminds me their previous project. The fighting mechanics is just too simple and repetitive, the enemies are just evenly placed shooting practice targets. Even less I am impressed about dialogues. The writing is just too simplified and cliche, which is bad for immersion, so to say.

    But what I am very impressed with is an art and architecture(not level arrangement, sadly), some visuals are very memorable in their dynamic. Probably overall plot is also worth to see through, but I am not sure I would like to buy the game only for that reason.

    747:

    Armbands with swastikas are one option. So are red baseball caps printed with a four letter acronym.

    "First as tragedy, then as farce?"

    748:
    The most recent POTUS to have made his living by physical labour is, I believe, Harry Truman, who was a farmer, then haberdasher, then farmer again before he got into politics.

    What about Jimmy Carter? He started as a peanut farmer (although I can't say which amount of physical labour he did himself).

    749:

    As far as you know, has anyone looked at the NHS database information for vampiric activity?

    Asking for a friend. You can PM me after 9PM (I work nights).

    750:

    No! I will not give you my recipe for savory lupins with garlic....

    751:

    As far as you know, has anyone looked at the NHS database information for vampiric activity?

    No, but an NHS medical statistician of my acquaintance said I nailed that sequence in "The Rhesus Chart" well enough that she didn't lose suspension of disbelief when she read it.

    And as I've never used those databases myself, I have a smugness about that.

    752:

    It's worse than that, Jim!

    More and more people came to work in offices, and less in manufacturies, as the scum-per-cent moved jobs to sweatshops overseas. Then they pushed the lie that "oh, you're all middle class now, you're not working class, and so you need to follow fashion", most of which is now being made in overseas sweatshops, "subcontracted", for cheapest bid. That, of course, means you can sell more, because they'll fall apart so much sooner.

    Almost all of my shirts start losing a button or two within a year. That took years with clothes I bought into the nineties... and that included clothes bought at least half in thrift stores.

    I so much want a meteor to impact Davos during the meeting....

    753:

    I am going to be nasty. As others have noted, they're not "white". Nor are those of us whose ancestors are Jewish. And then there's "mixed race", which are, by definition, not "white"

    In fact, "white" genes are so regressive and weak that one, say, black great grandparent makes you black, as opposed to one great grandparent making you white. Clearly, these genes are endangered, and we need to create reservations, preferably in the desert, for "pure Aryan, er, whites", and they must be kept there to preserve the genome.

    There will, of course, have to be signs for the tour buses going through, reading "do not breed with the natives".

    754:

    I get really, REALLY annoyed at folks referring to SJW (it's SJW, not SJA, get with the program, here). 90% of where I see such references are from right-wingers, 99.44% of whom are "pure white" (see the above rant).

    It was last year that I realized that the folks referring to, and attacking SJWs were, in fact, social injustice warriors, or, more accurately, social injustice snowflakes, SIS.

    Gee, I'd never done the acronym. Kewl, I can call them SISsies.

    I understand there are assholes who try to use one label per whatever. I suspect some of these will die as they do something stupid to take selfies, or walk into traffic while answering an Important Text.

    [shakes head]

    Just because we're on the right side of what should be, just like fandom, doesn't mean we don't have our idiots.

    755:

    What about Jimmy Carter? He started as a peanut farmer (although I can't say which amount of physical labour he did himself).

    I don’t know how much physical farming he did either, but he certainly did plenty of physical labor with Habitat for Humanity after leaving the White House.

    756:

    Um, wait, wait,

    "lock, lights, multitool, pump, puncture repair kit and chain lube"

    I think I can buy exactly the same lock - that is, about 6' of .25" chain and a key-operated padlock for < $20 US, a pump for $20, and a puncture repair kit for $5 or less. Lights I've never bought. Chain lube? I'm thinking back to the seventies when I rode a lot... including two summers as a bike messenger, and don't remember lubeing my chain ever. I did, of course, ride only on city streets.

    Ok, I missed the exchange rate (I'm talking only in US dollars), yeah, you can get a decent bike for $300. Maybe $150, on sale... or < $100 at a yard sale or thrift store.

    You missed one bet: a kevlar strip to put inside your tire - cuts down on flats.

    757:

    I see, a photo-journalist's vest, often worn by Roland Hedley (in Doonesbury), but ok in spite of that.... Checked military surplus stores?

    758:

    Orvis... yeah, a tad pricey, but I have Palladium canvas boots on my feet as I type.

    From the mid-80's, I could get nice canvas boots. Then, about 15 years ago, suddenly the army-navy stores just stopped carrying them, and I had to buy these three or four years ago, paying something like 1/3rd again more than I should have. They're lasting, though, so I'm happy.

    759:

    Damn. I hadn't thought of him, other than to reference him.

    "Of interest"? Well, yes - a fair percentage of us Pagans refer to the Goddess, and mean Gaea. The only real question is whether or not She's self-aware.

    (No, you don't have a Personal Relationship with her, maybe if you set up a 1000km set of 1 megawatt speakers, and spent 10 years calling her name, over the next 20 or 30, you might hear a reply of "YESSS?"... To paraphrase a certain late author, planets are big, I mean, REALLY BIG....)

    760:

    Was that "throwing billions at..." to be followed by "throwing millions out of work, and thus unable to afford to buy what they had been making"?

    761:

    Whenever I see someone complaining about SJWs, I instantly think they’re White Supremacist types, the comments always seem to have an anti-semitic component. I’ve read many articles of people explaining why they became a Rabbi, or converted to Judaism, and one thing that is nearly always mentioned is Judaism’s strong stance on Social Justice for all people.

    762:

    Well, you can get 'slaw at Popeyes.

    But they got rid of all the govenment-run restaurants, and outsourced to fast shit, er, food, and what, this is the Most Muscular Of Muscular, the Pentagon, Ya expect a fern bar...?

    763:

    I wouldn't call it an Ur-Document for Pagans. Some good number of us were Pagans (or neoPagans) before it was published.

    And it was parody, of course. What's a little scary is that almost everything that everyone on the left accused the US gov't of doing during 'Nam turned out to be true... even some stuff that a lot of us considered absurd.

    764:

    I see "SJW" and I will always think 'Street Jay Walker.'

    765:

    I will not feed the troll. I will not feed... Ah, who am I kidding? ;-)

    I COULD be rude but Charlie doesn't approve.

    Why on earth are you bringing waist bands into a comment I made about how whether or not pockets are put on women's tops?

    My main point is that it many cases outside of high fashion other weird things determine things like which garments have pockets. Tariffs in the case of importing garments into the US.

    766:

    I found some tyres which had the kevlar strip built in, embedded inside the rubber somewhere. They are bloody magic. Absolute godsend with the amount of broken glass there is about. I wonder if you can get them for mobility scooters?

    767:

    What about Jimmy Carter? He started as a peanut farmer (although I can't say which amount of physical labour he did himself).

    I don’t know how much physical farming he did either, but he certainly did plenty of physical labor with Habitat for Humanity after leaving the White House.

    Based on him being born a year before my father into a similar but slightly better situation (mother a nurse) he likely did manual labor. Wikipedia is a bit thin on his early life.

    My father was born on a reasonably large working farm and did all kinds of labor. Milking cows, driving logging trucks at age 12, learning to slaughter animals, etc...

    Born in 1924 meant Carter was 7 when the depression hit the US hard and lasted till he was 16.

    768:

    @673 The problem with the male-female imbalance isn't on this blog; it's common throughout the Internet.

    I only post on one other blog, a blog for bridge players. The female to male ratio is higher than here, but still nowhere near even. Perhaps women are more likely to lurk.

    769:

    More likely busy doing housework.

    770:

    YELLOW CARD for egregious sexism.

    If you intend to be snarky, flag your comments as such.

    On the internet nobody knows you're a dog /s

    771:

    The earlier comments about people making clothes had at least one reference to a mom making all/most of the clothes for a family.

    And the general thoughts of the comments seemed to be people should do more of that.

    But isn't that contrary to much of what we (this blog) seems to advocate? Making clothes requires someone to stay home a LOT and to some degree (based on my experience with moms who did such) means their out of the house job options are much more limited.

    Which leads into the entire discussion of how much is work keeping a house going worth and ....

    I AM NOT advocating moms stay home and make clothes. Just pointing out that this isn't done so much anymore in 1st world or even 2nd world countries as most people who have the option choose to buy them. Even if the quality isn't as good.

    772:

    What I really don't understand about modern political correctness is an ability of liberal lobby to tangle everything into one bundle. Is it on purpose, for easy management of PR, or it is a strange mutation of common sense.

    It is on purpose. Note my earlier comments about the important part of this is the power dynamics, not the bigotry. The details of the rationale for the bigotry have even less importance.

    If you focus on the the power dynamics all of these things are very similar. This makes it easier for analysis and designing coping/attacks with respect to these problems.

    One of the side effects is that people can get sloppy with language, equating racism with ethnic subordination in the example you experienced.

    773:

    My most humble apologies. I believe this is a communication error.

    I did not intend to mean that they SHOULD be home doing housework but rather, given current social relations they are more likely to be ACTUALLY doing that than men, thus leaving less time to comment on blogs.

    774:

    H'mm. You may be right!

    More research required....

    775:

    I don't think it's too bad as long as you're not sewing by hand. If you've got an electric sewing machine, or even a treadle-operated one - the important thing being that it leaves both hands free - it's a lot faster, and a lot easier to keep things in alignment while you make the seam. Sewing by hand is a tedious slow pain in the arse, though. You can spend hours doing a seam by hand and getting bored and getting cramps in your hands, or you can run it through the machine, bzzzzt, done; for one or two seams it probably takes longer setting the machine up than it does using it.

    My mum used to make theatrical costumes for G&S etc. as a hobby - so, much more elaborate than ordinary family clothing, and you can't get away with skimping on the construction just because they're not "proper" clothes; they have to be robust against actors. She ended up having to hire two rooms to store them all in, and those rooms were full, you couldn't move without having to shove your way between rails of hanging costumes. That was a couple of years' worth of output from doing it for a few hours here and there. So she certainly could have made clothes for the family with a lot less effort, but she didn't because she didn't find family clothes making fun.

    776:

    Aw, shucks! Thast sounds really interesting ....

    777:

    Also, as someone who literally works in the Pentagon basement

    Heh. I went there on a number of occasions in the late 1980s and early-mid 1990s. It was gratifying in its overall WW-IIish gray, no-nonsense seriousness.

    Earlier, in the 1970s and early '80s, I got to see the CIA HQ basement because the smallish gym was tucked away there. What I saw wasn't nearly as cool as the Pentagon's basement, but the thing I remember was the emergency supply bins (think civil defense supplies). They still had appropriate fallout signs attached, but were by that time used for maintenance supplies -- lumber, paint and the like. Clearly sheltering there after a nuclear attack was not regarded as a serious possibility by that time.

    778:

    Yes. We had a similar, but even more intractable problem, in the (computing) standards area. The problem was that such activities are, by their very nature, geekish - and, in debates over technical matters, one needs people who are prepared to speak out and defend their viewpoints. Giving women speaking preference in meetings was not enough to attract more. That doesn't mean that there weren't any (and some were convenors etc.), but they were exceptional.

    779:

    OK, if that's your choice. You are talking bollocks, at least in a UK context; that was and is NOT the usage here. If you object to gypsies as an example, try Fenlanders (as in Normal For Norfolk) - think of them as Appalacian hillbillies. The discrimination against them was and is not as overt, but is still serious.

    780:

    Indeed, serious enough to breed revolution.

    781:

    Schwalbe make a whole range of kevlar-belted tyres and are my brand of choice. They also make a pretty wide range of sizes, but mobility scooters seem to use car-style tyre labels so I'm not sure. They definitely make 12" tyres that fit push chairs.

    The models to look for IMO are Durano/Durano Plus for lazy bikers (ie, skinny road bike tyres) and Marathon/Marathon Plus for everything else. Marathon Plus have a strip oif blue foam in them as well, and you can normally wear them down until that is showing before you get a p*ncture. Or you can ride 20km with a 3" nail sticking through the tyre and just enjoy the click-click-click noise as the nail hits the road. Just sol long as the nail doesn't go through the tube...

    Especially on the rear wheel of velomobiles which is a huge PITA to remove, a marathon plus is well worth the slight extra rolling resistance just for the dramatic decrease in punctures.

    782:

    It's also worth noting that all of the PC type terminology is as often used by trolls as by people who actually want to reduce the scale of the problem. So you have to read quite critically a lot of the time to discover whether a given point is being made for or against the particular problem under discussion, or indeed is simply a dead cat.

    Down here one of the far right scum is having his eligibility to sit in parliament challenged on entirely reasonable ground but by a white supremacist a-hole. The response from the political scumbag has been to say "I'm Jewish, therefore any criticism of me is anti-semitic". That's classic dead cat territory, but amusingly it's also kinda true, he's a semite and someone is agin' him... they're being anti-semite. It also befuzzlkes me how that particular scumbag can say at the same time "I am descended from Jewish refugees and what was done to them was horrible" and then "I support the policy of putting refugees in concentration camps and torturing them". Very good at "othering", that man is.

    783:

    I don't think it's too bad as long as you're not sewing by hand.

    Still doesn't mean every one is as adept at it as your mom. Or has any interest in it whatsoever unless it is a requirement for life.

    I have a friend who made most of the clothes for her 2 sons. And they were fairly well off. But dad is a big patriarchy person. And even though mom is incredibly smart to this day I'm not sure being a stay at home mom made her happy or was done to make her husband happy.

    784:

    Also, the worst of the Freydenberg case (the far right refugee torturer above) is that otherwise reasonable people have accepted the dead cat at face value. As one of the commenters there points out, the far right are very keen on the Israeli sense of "anti-semitic" (ie, anything less that unconditional support for all Jews and Israel, except when a Jew criticises Israel which is, of course, self-hating anti-semitism).

    As an example of "use of PC language by anti-PC people" it's also very simple and obvious.

    Freydenberg is being sued specifically because he is entitled to Hungarian citizenship. Not Israeli, not because he's Jewish, but he, like for example Sam Dastyari (Iran) and Larissa Waters (Canada), is eligible for citizenship of a foreign country and thus falls foul of s44 of the constitution. That section is stupid today, was explicitly racist when written, and has been interpreted into a complete disaster. There's also inconsistency, people have been forced to resign/found ineligible by the court because they are entitled to citizenship, but others have been deemed clear because they... renounced citizenship but are still eligible.

    Note that Hungary is not the worst country involved. The UK, USA, Canada, Aotearoa all have non-renounceable birthright citizenship and will not under any circumstances issue a document that claims that such has been renounced. That makes all our (federal) MPs born in those countries completely, irrevocable subject to s44... at least as I understand it but IANAL (best acronym ever). Iran does something similar but the details escape me, I'm still stuck on the blatant racism of "oh but the UK and US etc are fine, they're like us" (they are, Australia has the exact same politician-fucking citizenship system.

    785:

    I seem to feel the US and UK governments are in a "hold my beer" contest.

    From the Guardian. "a humble address to the Queen."

    "If passed, the address would say that if the new prime minister ignored a vote rejecting no deal the Queen would be asked to exercise her right as head of state to travel to the next EU summit. Under their plan she would then request an extension to the Article 50 process."

    "Under EU rules, member states are usually represented at meetings of the European Council by a head of state or a head of government. The Queen is the UK's head of state, though it is understood that no European monarch has ever formally represented their country at an EU summit."

    786:

    At least as the term is used in the U.S., "whiteness" is the critical race theory analog to "bourgeois" in more traditional Marxist philosophy. In practice, it serves as a neologic synonym for Anglo--racially Caucasian, English-speaking, and practicing of Anglophone cultural norms and traditions--and it applies not just to people of English descent, but to anyone who has assimilated to Anglo culture. Hence, why Irish Americans, Italian Americans, et al now qualify as "white" even when they didn't in the past.

    Along with the rhetorical re-packaging of terms like "privilege" and "racism", its usage is an attempt to get white Americans to stop seeing themselves as a neutral baseline (e.g. just "Americans" with no preceding adjective), consciously recognize and identify with their race, recognize the role their race has played in determining their socio-economic station, and, as a result, support stronger redistributive policies to benefit non-whites, chiefly African-Americans (i.e. affirmative action, reparations for slavery, etc.).

    What's throwing white people--outside the predictable white supremacist opposition--is that the concept runs diametrically counter to Anglo ideals of individualism and post-racialism. Until the last few years, the understood long-range goal in race relations among the mainstream was to denude race of any socio-cultural meaning at all such that skin color would have no more meaning than eye color or being left-handed. The ideal was that people should be judged solely as individuals based on their deeds and character. This has been the ideological boilerplate taught to multiple generations going back to the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Critical race theory, including the concept of "whiteness", throws post-racial individualism out the window, condemning it as racist because it erases racial identity and the socioeconomic effects that come with it due to historical circumstances.

    The deployment of "whiteness" as a term is an attempt by critical race theorists and its adherents to make the racial experience more symmetrical. For African-Americans, their ethnic identity is largely defined by their race; by contrast, most white Americans, particularly Anglo-Americans, only consciously experience their race as a data point like height, hair color, etc. Their race is mostly invisible to them. Critical race theorists--and now progressive political activists--want them to feel their race.

    Now, unfortunately, the way progressives are going about trying to promote this kind of awareness isn't working very well and is instead backfiring. They've fallen into the same tactical trap that social conservatives, feminists, environmentalists, and other cultural movements always fall into--scolding, shaming, and guilt trips don't work. Such tactics just piss people off. Real results require engendering empathy, which requires emphasizing commonality not difference, appealing to self-interest, and promoting better behavior in a way that is simple, low-cost, and empirically actionable. But, such an approach, while more successful, is neither fast nor emotionally satisfying.

    787:

    My understanding of the term “intersectionality” is that it was invented for exactly this type of situation - that a person or group can simultaneously be “thre oppressed” on the race axis and “the oppressor” on the class axis.

    788:

    They've fallen into the same tactical trap that social conservatives, feminists, environmentalists, and other cultural movements always fall into--scolding, shaming, and guilt trips don't work.

    Which translates in practice to: anyone pointing out that there is a problem is guilty of doing the wrong thing.

    Yes, it's an ugly moment when you realise that you, personally, are part of this exact problem and will have to change. That's difficult to deal with and the easy response is angry denial. We see a lot of it, and it's the preferred mode of operation for many public figures.

    Secondly, "appeal to self-interest" merely indicates that you're complicit in the libertarian/economist propaganda that we're all independent individuals optimising our personal wealth. That's been repeatedly shown not to be true, even among self-identified libertarians and economists. Many significant political victories have been won by directly appealing to people's sense of fairness despite the personal cost they face. I suggest the US slavery wars, for example, where the anti-slavery whites were at no personal risk from continued slavery and indeed stood to lose by ending it. Yet they fought. You could argue that it was a war of occupation where they fought to keep what was theirs (the US South), which is also partly true.

    I would flip the individualistic shtick and describe the attempts by the far right to proselytise the doctrine of the selfish arsehole as stupid and short-sighted. They're so obviously wrong that that children have to be indoctrinated at a young age to prevent them becoming empathetic, caring people and instead be willing to hurt others for their own benefit.

    And on the one hand the scolding school have given us minimum wages, emancipation and national parks, while the arsehole school have given us polluted wastelands, wars and slavery. They keep telling me that the latter are good and great but I'm not convinced.

    789:

    And the "hierarchy of oppression" was later popularised as "oppression wars" and various other names to describe "I can't be racist, I'm a woman" or "I can't be sexist, I'm disabled" and other stupidities.

    Being a member of an oppressed group is a generic feature, and it doesn't stop an individual from being unpleasant. Or even a group from that, as we see so often with war and genocide... "we can't be evil, we're geeks" as our googlish overlords used to claim.

    790:

    Yes, it's an ugly moment when you realise that you, personally, are part of this exact problem and will have to change. That's difficult to deal with and the easy response is angry denial. We see a lot of it, and it's the preferred mode of operation for many public figures.

    All of which is irrelevant unless you change the majority of the target group's mind.

    Secondly, "appeal to self-interest" merely indicates that you're complicit in the libertarian/economist propaganda that we're all independent individuals optimising our personal wealth. That's been repeatedly shown not to be true, even among self-identified libertarians and economists. Many significant political victories have been won by directly appealing to people's sense of fairness despite the personal cost they face.

    Oh, how I wish that were true. There's the way people should be, and there's the way people are. Those two things should be the same, but they aren't.

    Humans are selfish. Most won't actively fuck others over except out of desperation. BUT, most won't make sacrifices for others (i.e. not family, friends, personal connections, etc.) unless the costs are minimal to nil, either.

    There's a fraction of the population that is as naturally altruistic as you suggest, but it is, unfortunately, a minority.

    And on the one hand the scolding school have given us minimum wages, emancipation and national parks...

    ...which they achieved by appealing to either a sufficient fraction of the population's perceived self-interest, already powerful people's perceived self-interest, or a combination of both.

    I wish the world worked the way you say. I do. But, it doesn't. People suck. And, we have to work with the human populace we have, not the one we wish we had.

    791:

    Mindlessly repeating the thing I already disagreed with doesn't make it less wrong, it just changes my opinion of you for the worse. I'm happy to believe that you specifically are a selfish arsehole who is only posting here because you're being paid to.

    You might, for example, wonder where the word "altruism" comes from and what it could possibly describe since your view of the world denies that it exists. Maybe it's a word like "god", that describes something that might exist in some way but hasn't ever been seen? Except that there are numerous real examples of altruistic behaviour... follow the link and see.

    792:

    All of which is irrelevant unless you change the majority of the target group's mind.

    I have very little interest and less expectation that I will change the target groups mind. I have every desire and plan to remove their power. By whatever means necessary.

    793:

    "Along with the rhetorical re-packaging of terms like "privilege" and "racism", its usage is an attempt to get white Americans to stop seeing themselves as a neutral baseline"

    Which I think is totally the wrong idea. To me the idea is that they are a neutral baseline, and a principal indicator of discrimination against another group - or indeed, a definition - is that group being in a less advantageous position.

    The alternative, getting rid of the "white = neutral baseline" idea, is equivalent to stating that the white position is too advantageous, and implies that it could do with some reduction. This, of course, is an obvious encouragement of the "$minority_group are taking all our $stuff" way of thinking, which is one of the fascists' favourites.

    Similarly the "privilege" thing. A privilege is something that can be taken away (and this is explicitly the way many school punishments work). That usage very directly implies that the aim is not to bring the less favoured groups up to the same level of advantage, but to bring the more favoured groups down. And since all groups are themselves pyramids, even the "more favoured group" includes far more people who get shat on than it does people who do the shitting; the lower levels don't feel privileged at all, and telling them that they are makes them think that in order to keep even the crappy position they have it is necessary to elect a mouldy cheese puff to presidential office.

    "What's throwing white people - outside the predictable white supremacist opposition - "

    Indeed, they aren't thrown. From their point of view it's a gift.

    "condemning it as racist because it erases racial identity and the socioeconomic effects that come with it due to historical circumstances."

    Pardon me for being thick but I thought that erasing those socioeconomic effects was the whole fucking point. The effects, to remove any doubt, arising from the historical circumstance that America's black population mostly descend from the mass importation of slaves. No thanks, I'll stick with my boring old fashioned opinion that it's racist when you do treat black people as slaves.

    794:

    EC @ 779 You mean the ones with webbed feet & a yellowish tinge to the skin? Describing some of my more distant relatives again? ( Maybe - I spent 3 weeks - as in 2 + 1 - every year in deepest Holland County, Lincolnshire. The highest point of the large village was 12 feet above mean sea level...

    Moz @ 782 Ah "Dead Cat" - also known as .. "LOOK! A squirrel!" ( Sometimes it's a gorilla )

    David L @ 785 Not entirely The probable majority (now) here are getting really worried that Boris is going to drive the bus over the cliff & we are desperate to try to stop it. Meanwhile wanker Corbyn is STILL dithering over a re-referendum or coming out for "remain" because, like BoJo he wants to wreck the place & then clean up ...( in the opposite direction, of course )

    MEANWHILE Today's Google-doodle/video-clip with commentary ... IS IT REALLY THAT LONG AGO? and I want my future back, bacuse you bastards stole it!

    795:

    No, it was invented as an in-group signifier, so that the constant reaffirmation of the satisfaction of group membership from using it all the time can drive the redirection of all blame for any fault onto the out-group and away from people who don't have any more useful ideas than making up silly words. Also to provide another shortcut to undeserved status signifiers by creating a whole new space for people to write their theses for their Doctorate of Deep-Sounding Bullshit.

    What it means is "The idea that any individual is in perfect correspondence with exactly one of a standard list of subdivisions of the set of disadvantaged people is false". Woop-de-bloody-do. Was anyone seriously dim enough to think it was true in the first place? When it's everyday experience that no individual is in perfect correspondence with exactly one of a standard list of subdivisions of any set?

    I became aware of this word through its increasing popularity on twitter, and eventually got sufficiently fed up with waiting for someone to either translate it or use it in a context that would enable me to translate it that I looked it up. Whereupon I discovered that (a) the reason I hadn't been able to work it out from context was that this concept that people were talking about as if it had only just been discovered was actually something so bleeding obvious that awareness of it predates language, and I'd eliminated that possible interpretation for that reason; (b), the amount of pretentious pseudo-intellectual information-free waffle that people had churned out now that someone had invented a word that enabled them to pretend it meant something - and got paid/got degrees for - was truly astonishing.

    And (c), the great majority of the real world uses of it that I've seen are variations on the theme of "The Problem" is that people "don't understand intersectionality". In fact they understand it better than the people using the word. Therefore they don't dwell on it any more than they dwell on different people liking different sorts of food, or other equally obvious observations of the same class. What people do fail to understand (as this sub-thread shows) is the word, and all the more so when the surrounding context so strongly frames it as a new idea so even if you do guess right you immediately rule it out.

    Like my previous post, this is another example of a use of language that has negative value. It's a stile plonked in the middle of the path for no reason that you have to clamber over when you should be able to just walk straight on; you have to stop, wonder wtf it means, piss around finding out, discover that it's of a kind with complaining that the problem with the differential consumption of ketchup and brown sauce is people's unawareness of idiopathic lycopersicophobia, and carry on having gained nothing but annoyance at the diversion. It does not constitute communication, because it creates confusion rather than dispelling it. It also discredits those who are fond of using it, by conveying the impression that they are disconnected from reality. It is the class of behaviour which, in other circles, might manifest as management-speak, or as renaming an unpopular nuclear facility, or simply as an unashamed outright invocation of name magic.

    796:

    Aargh!!! For the last time, what I am talking about applies even when there is a SINGLE axis and SINGLE context. The clearest example (which I have seen many times) is where it is claimed that women are being discriminated against (whether correctly or not), and the result is that vulnerable men are discriminated against. Attempting to support those people is then blocked by the politically correct.

    Similarly to what Pigeon says above, this terminological revisionism (such as equating privilege and whiteness) forces a complex situation into in-groups and out-groups, some of which are deemed to be privileged and others in need of support. And political correctness justifies discrimination against vulnerable members of those privileged groups, on the grounds that the group as a whole is privileged.

    797:

    The term you are looking for is intersectionality (originally, intersectional feminism, but it spread out a bit).

    I always wonder - why is a fancy "-ity" term required for something which is so self-evident?

    798: 765 - Maybe I misread the original post, but I thought that the difference between a waist line (nebulous, and arguably there's no such thing in a top) and a waist band was relevant to your point. 768 - I post on different "other blogs" (hobby related) and suspect you're right, although there is a general sex and ethnicity blindness on them.
    799:

    @673: @768:

    I lurk here but rarely feel the need to comment. I am more vocal on other fora, but not here. I think generally speaking as a female commentator is that the prevailing attitude (conscious or not) is that of Samuel Johnson on women preachers:

    "I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.""

    I've had the usual sexist remarks made to me in the past, the least egregious was "You're a gal!!!" (on an online game forum). So, forgive me, at my age I prefer a quiet life so confine myself to more factual comments.

    800:

    Interesting news from Canada's department of the obvious. British Columbia's NDP (think social democrat) government just handed down a budget with a $1.5B surplus - the first budget surplus in 20+ years.

    When I heard that on the radio this morning, my first thought was: they must have raised taxes.

    Guess what? They raised taxes. Now they can provide universal child care and other things useful to everybody.

    Needless to say, the opposition Liberals (who, in BC, are currently the right-wingers) are saying that this is horrible! horrible! Taxes must never go up!

    801:

    How do you define an individual's "vulnerability" if there is only a single axis defining gender?

    Asking for a friend.

    802:

    A person is vulnerable if they are likely to be unable to stand up to discrimination, whether that is passive or active, in whatever way, and for whatever reason. It is nonsense that that vulnerability and discrimination are properties of complete classes; they apply to individual people.

    Yes, there are correlations with the membership of complete classes, but it is both shoddy statistics and tribalism (i.e. a mob's attitude) that claims they ARE properties of classes. Political measures to reduce them often have to be used on complete classes, but that is a measure of practicability, NOT the underlying truth, and should not be used to merely move discrimination around.

    803:

    I believe the 1% doesn't like to dwell on how much their long term economic health depends on a prosperous working class. I also believe they derive a lot of self-affirmation from a right wingnut governments preoccupation with them.

    804:

    Should you decide to keep posting, I believe I can bear the increased levels of sanity.

    806:

    Madeleine @ 799 Thanks for that ... CHarlie occasionally asks female authors to take over the blog for a thread or tw ... But, this discussion raises another one. How many of us are "not-pink" - shall I say?

    807:

    I always wonder - why is a fancy "-ity" term required for something which is so self-evident?

    ‘cause Common Sense ain’t so common, as someone once said.

    808:

    Yours is, I think, a regrettably common experience.

    (I wish it wasn't.)

    809:

    A person is vulnerable if they are likely to be unable to stand up to discrimination

    It is nonsense that that vulnerability and discrimination are properties of complete classes

    So an individual has some property of "gender" and some property of "vulnerability"? Does this not necessitate an axis for each property? Does this not mean that an individual can occupy a position on each axis independent of the other?

    I'm not arguing against your point about over zealous political correctness, but you should be able to see that your case for a single axis is incorrect, and acknowledge that "intersectionality" is in fact the solution to the problem you are seeing. Don't be put off by the trendification of the term, it is a useful theory.

    810:

    I see what you mean, and we are at subtle cross-purposes, as so often happens! Intersectionality is important for an understanding of the problem, including its causes, but it is NOT a solution to the problem I was describing for the following reasons:

    When I have seen intersectionality used, vulnerability has NOT been a property that creates a subgroup, but one that is associated with or derived from the various categorisations (i.e. is a dependent variable, not a factor). With that usage, it is irrelevant to my point.

    But let's allow vulnerability as a group-creating factor (your point). In that case, intersectionality is STILL irrelevant because (my point), if someone is vulnerable, their gender should be irrelevant.

    811:

    It is. Very common. If she or you have a solution that might work in a technical context, I should be extremely happy to pass it on to a couple of standards committees with which I am still in contact. As I said above, we several times tried to aaddress this, and failed dismally, as I said in #778.

    812:

    How many of us are "not-pink" - shall I say? Well, pink/blue have inverted, FWIW. Anyway, those nyms here that choose not to present (online) as a particular gender, I treat mentally as indeterminate gender, and/or fluid. If a person presents as a particular gender, I respect that, tentatively at least. For most discussions gender here gender is (or should be) irrelevant though the war-toy discussions tend to skew male in their tone. The one(s) with many names has often written about gender fluidity/change/etc and I've been playing with those concepts (and some associated mind states) for the couple of years. It's been illuminating TBH.

    While looking for another way to illuminate how hostile open plan offices are to some mind types, found this, which is on-topic, since we're talking about intersectionality: "extrovert privilege": "Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts. Introverts are to extroverts what American women were to men in the 1950s – second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent.” (Susan Cain, 2013) [0] She is not wrong, IMO. I have worked in corporate America for decades, and she is correct; current corporate workplaces are designed to be comfortable for extroverts (and those willfully faking extroversion) and to be actively hostile work environments for introverts (open plan offices?). Particularly hypersensitive introverts. And corporate power hierarchies are dominated by extroverts. Of the many management chains I've worked under, about 1/3 of the managers were women (about 40% non-white), but all but one were extroverts. (The exception manager was a genius woman, very slightly introverted, with quite respectable and admirable empathy ability and an attentive observer.) And the bias runs to hiring and promotion decisions as well. I've seen personally seen it in interviewers. (I can read their tells, their minds, much better than they think. And can mask it.)

    813:

    shrug My mom might have done buttons, once in a while. I can sew. I've done a lot of costumery (in con masquerades, I'm a journeyman, though if I win another, I'll be master class).

    You should see the silk skirt and tunics I sewed for when my late wife and I made it official, in the Orlando in '92 bid suite at Nolacon... and then, wearing the same clothes, went into the Masquerade as (no, Gaul has more than three parts) Arthur, Dux Bellorum of the Britons, and his sister, Morgan.

    814:

    Horse hockey.

    You sound as though you're living in some GOP-fantasy 1950s. Most women I know, and have known, work regular jobs. Most folks can't afford to live on one paycheck.

    No, they dislike trolls, who sound like 16 yr old assholes, coming down on them.

    815:

    You obviously didn't understand what I was saying.

    The self-proclaimed White People (y'know, like the assholes who want "white pride" parades), who have a dirty name and disparage everyone else.

    816:

    Saw that. LOVE IT.

    I was really wondering if the Queen was going to be dragged in....

    817:

    Re your last line: or, as I've said many times, this is NOT the Real 21st Century, I want the Real one back now, thankyouveddymuch.

    And, esp. for today and tomorrow, this was the future... the national anthem of fandom: Hope Eyrie.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXteSV8rBwY

    818:

    Pleased to meet you, Madeleine. And please post again; Johnson, 300+ years ago, was full of shit.

    And I offer to you what all three of my daughters know: if someone tells them they "can't do something" becauswe they're girls (women, long since) if they need me to do anything other than hold their jacket while they beat the pulp out of the asshole, I'd be glad to assist.

    819:

    Short of making the Internet completely genderless - no public photos or avatars, user names a random collection of alphanumerics assigned automatically, social media banned, I don't see that it will change anytime soon. I trust (but take leave to doubt) that things will change for the better as the older generation die off or leave the Internet but given some of the horror stories one hears about...

    I'm old enough to ignore stuff I don't like and certainly don't take things to heart. I can understand why younger women tend not to participate in open fora given the grief they can get.

    820:

    The current incarnation of the 1% has the awareness of a 2 yr old, or at most a 16 yr old troll. There's a cartoon I keep seeing, a family in a cave, in front of a fire, and the guy is saying, "Yes, but for one golden moment, there was max ROI."

    821:

    Charlie Stross @ 669: (Back home at last …)

    Armbands are not specifically required: it just needs to be some sort of visual identifier so that the authoritarians can see and be seen.

    Armbands with swastikas are one option. So are red baseball caps printed with a four letter acronym.

    I have one of those caps imprinted ITMFA ... well a 5 letter acronynm. It confuses 'em until they ask me what it means, then it upsets 'em because I'll tell them.

    ITMFA - Impeach The M*****F***** Already ...and I've decided how I want to see him taken out of office; feet first, on a gurney, toe-tagged!

    I just had an idea. I wonder if I can get red baseball caps imprinted with STFU?

    I think sometimes I'm not a very nice person. I try to be, but there are limits to the shit I'll put up with.

    822:

    Ah, I see; yes, I misunderstood. In the UK, those arseholes are a very, very small minority of even the most white/pink of people. You can be as rude as you like about them, and I will try to match you.

    823:

    For those talking about sewing and clothes making in a domestic setting, I was taught to sew at my convent school. Back then there was still the attitude that nice girls became wives and mothers and all they needed to know were the domestic arts. At least I avoided cookery classes (aka domestic science) as I was in the science stream and actually transferred to the boy's school to do my A Levels (the convent only did Biology).

    I can and still do sew - mostly buttons, and some alterations and minor repairs (moth holes in cashmere cardigans). I rarely make things from scratch - I think the last time was for a convention LARP and that must have been 10 years ago now. What I still can't do is knit or crochet - I suspect the main reason is that I'm strongly left-handed and was being taught by a right-hander to the extent that I end up looking like I'm taking part in a bondage scene. Oddly, I can lucet and knaalbind - probably because I taught myself rather than being taught by a right-handed person.

    My mother did make some of our clothes when my sister and I were children, but relied more on her aunts for a supply of knitting. One used to produce a new jumper at least twice a year, Both my grandmothers were fine needlewomen - in fact, one used to make a living as an embroideress. Both my sister and I used to embroider but I don't think either of us have done any for many years.

    The problem with this kind of work is that it takes time and a certain amount of skill, and frankly I don't believe most women have the time to do it. The other thing to consider is the introduction of television - when doing handicrafts, you do need to watch what you're doing. So you can listen to the radio while watching your hands - but if you're watching TV you can possibly knit or crochet, but you can't sew.

    824:

    IS IT REALLY THAT LONG AGO?

    Ah, yep. Our 13" B&W TV had been dead for 9 month and on life support for a year or two before that. We 3 kids told our parents that they could get a working TV or we could spend 4 days at the neighbors. We got a COLOR 19" or so. It was so impressive.

    And then we spend the 4 days sleeping on the floor in the den with only bathroom and very short meal breaks.

    I was 15, my brothers 11 and 9.

    I can only imagine if it had occurred during the school year. I doubt 1/2 of the kids would have shown up.

    825:

    waist line (nebulous

    Which was a point in the podcast. Clothing design in the US that will be made overseas has tax accountants, lawyers, and tariff wizards involved as much as fashion.

    No one in the pod cast was quite sure but the thinking seemed to be that when written such that the pocket got a lower tariff it was thought that only things like nurses smocks would have such pockets. Now they are in all kinds of things to get the lower rate.

    826:

    Unfortunately, that isn't enough - I have been and am on fora where that is a widely-used option, where people rarely take notice of a poster's gender unless it is (a) stated or implied and (b) relevant. The balance isn't all that different. This is a fairly intractable problem, and is based in behavioural differences between genders, not the perception of a poster's gender. If you would like explicit examples, please ask.

    827:

    Elderly Cynic @ 726: One of the factors leading to genuine racial discrimination in many societies (including parts of the USA and UK) is the 'poor whites' feeling that they are being discriminated against on behalf of (and even by) various categories of 'non-white'. Being who I am, I regard the reality as more important, and what I was railing against was the claims that classifying themselves as 'non-white' entitles people to discriminate against all 'whites', including those even less privileged than they are.

    I hope you understand that in the U.S. that attitude among 'poor whites' has been deliberately fostered by financial & social elites as a means of control. If you can be kept ignorant and made to blame THE OTHER for the fact you can't make a decent living, can never out of debt slavery, you'll never think to hold the REAL perpetrators to account. People who can think don't buy into that CON.

    Why do you think the GOP has been at war with public education since (at least) Reagan?

    Schools used to teach things like reason & logic. Not any more.

    828:

    That's bad even by my standards, and goes back to my mother's day - yes, there were girls' schools that were like that even in my time, but most were much better. I had the converse; biology was an option only for the dimmer pupils, and could not be taken in combination with mathematics or physics; I have picked up a fair amount since, because I am interested in it. Team sports, athletics, shooting, drill (military) etc. were all mandatory, of course.

    I learnt some cooking from my mother, picked up more on my own and since, and picked up what I know about sewing on my own (with a bit of help from my wife, later on). I could once knit, but am not sure I still can. Your description of the problems is spot-on.

    829:

    I do. One of the things that I railed against back in the 1980s was the dumbing down of UK education, on precisely those grounds. Of course, I was a prophet crying in the wilderness, and who listens to THEM?

    830:

    Women on blogs.

    Some data points. When I was in my 3rd university year at an Engineering school in the mid 70s there were a bit over 900 students in all areas. There were 9 female students. (In other words most of the females in the building were the middle aged to older secretaries.) And since 1/2 of the female students were Chem Eng they spent the vast majority of their time in the Chem Physics buildings. So "us guys" might spot a female student in the building once or twice a day. Or less.

    This led to study groups that tended to be a bit "raw" in the side conversations.

    My wife was in the first group of girls allowed to do high school ROTC about the same time. Her leaders was pissed to no end and said frequently this was a waste of time as no women would ever be in the academies. (In the US high school ROTC operations are run by retired military. Typically an ex officer and Sargent.)

    Based on reports out of places like Google and Facebook the "raw" is still around.

    Blogs tend to be more raw and argumentative than many females want to deal with IMNERHO. How much is genetic due to hormone influencing brain development and how much is societal, I'll leave those fist fights to the social studies folks.

    And just to be sure, there are ranges of male and female behaviors all over the map. I'm talking generalities.

    And in my distant past of time doing W2 programming the smartest co-workers I had and best boss were all women. Well smart is a hard one to quantify. How about got the job completed more often.

    831:

    Ok, my communication problem is worse than I thought.

    Of course women work, and are required to work, and should have the option of working at what they want.

    It's just that on TOP of working they do more housework. See: Women Still Do More Chores At Home Than Men, Study Finds

    It does seem clear to me that this is likely to have an impact on how much time they can spend doing silly things like commenting on blogs.

    To reiterate: this is NOT how things should be.

    832:

    Charlie Stross @ 731: The term you are looking for is intersectionality (originally, intersectional feminism, but it spread out a bit).

    Briefly: it's possible for the same person to be privileged in some contexts and subject to discrimination in others. For example, consider a 1860 southern plantation owner's wife. Compared to the plantation slaves she has absolute privilege: compared to her children she has considerable authority: but she's still her husband's chattel, not allowed to own property or conduct businesses on her own right or to vote, and is a woman living in a society where all women are systematically denied freedom. Is she privileged or oppressed? (Obviously: yes to both.) Intersectionality explores these edge cases and gives us a better tool for understanding that discrimination is contextual.

    Let me recommend Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's Mothers of Massive Resistance. It explores that intersectionality in how it was primarily middle class white women who shaped Jim Crow and led the southern opposition to desegregation. Their racism is motivated by fear that their children will lose what little socio-economic privilege they have.

    There's a fairly good (I think it's good) review here:

    https://networks.h-net.org/node/512/reviews/1904094/lechner-gillespie-mcrae-mothers-massive-resistance-white-women-and

    833:

    whitroth @ 754: I get really, REALLY annoyed at folks referring to SJW (it's SJW, not SJA, get with the program, here). 90% of where I see such references are from right-wingers, 99.44% of whom are "pure white" (see the above rant).

    Odd thing about that ...

    When Author Alex Haley's novel Roots was made into a TV mini-series by ABC Television in 1977 it sparked a great interest in American Genealogy, including among "white" southerners. A number of fairly proud "white" southerners of my acquaintance found unwanted surprises lurking the branches when they went to trace their family trees.

    834:

    I have flabberghasted a great many such people by strongly supporting the benefits of hybrid vigour, as applied to humans, both as regard to genes and to social backgrounds. And justified it by references to history. That's not just polemic - I believe it.

    835:

    JamesPadraicR @ 755:

    "What about Jimmy Carter? He started as a peanut farmer (although I can't say which amount of physical labour he did himself)."

    I don’t know how much physical farming he did either, but he certainly did plenty of physical labor with Habitat for Humanity after leaving the White House.

    Carter grew up on a Georgia farm during the depression, growing & selling peanuts. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1946. He qualified for submarine duty in diesel boats and went on to join Rickover's "nuclear navy", but left the Navy on a hardship discharge after the death of his father to take over the family farm. The first year the family was so poor they lived in subsidized public housing. He built built the farm up into a successful agribusiness despite being in favor of racial tolerance and integration in 1950s rural Georgia.

    Among his notable firsts, he was the first American President to be born in a hospital, and the first to have lived in subsidized public housing ... and he's probably the first President since Lincoln to have grown up as a working farmer. He's also one of the few men I know who actually practices Capital 'C' Christianity; "walks the walk".

    836:

    Would the Reginald Denny incident during LA’s Rodney King riots be the kind of thing you’re talking about?
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Reginald_Denny

    The question “Should we call it ‘racism?’” is a mess, with a mixture of people using technical terminology to a general audience, people trying to play definitional games so their side always wins, and people using shibboleths to signal membership or lack thereof in various political groupings.

    I’m more interested in exploring the unusual phenomenon of black people abusing white people and expecting to get away with it. With your Roma or Fenlander examples it’s that “ethnic hierarchies are more complicated than a simple color gradient” or “sometimes class matters more than race.”

    But the Denny incident is a different kind of thing; it’s that power gradients aren’t smooth. They have random local reversals where the usually-on-the-bottom get to be on top for a little while. I’m unaware of a technical term like “intersectional” to describe this kind of situation.

    837:

    It’s pretty good as polemic anyway, and obviously factually true so long as you are careful to express limits to its application (not that the target audience you’re talking about would understand the concern).

    In agriculture, hybrid vigour is a deliberate effect of combining individuals from heavily inbred populations selected for specific, complementary traits. There is a good chance the offspring has both sets of desirable traits. Whatever is a dominant trait in either population has a decent chance of appearing, and whatever is recessive is less likely to be expressed. But there’s a context for that, and it implies control, the ability to turn inbreeding on and off and to keep populations separate, things that we do not (generally) wish anyone to have in relation to humans. We’ve had enough of 19th century theories about selective breeding and “stock” to last a long, long time and while sure we shouldn’t ignore what we know, we also do need to be careful as the content can get a bit out of hand when the contextual limits are not appreciated.

    Human populations that self-select and keep themselves separate for social and historical reasons may well exhibit some superficially distinct traits (like skin colour) and you certainly get the effect of recessive traits being suppressed, but the new set of dominant traits is inherently more random because the inbreeding stage is mostly lacking (much as we might wink suggestively at the white supremacists, I suppose, with their outsize ears and their banjos) or undirected. I think that for humans the take away is that separating populations is a sort of blockage in the flow of normal genetic diversity, hybrid vigour is a temporary (single generation) uptick when the blockage clears.

    I think for a “social” equivalent, the benefits are at a level that is larger than individual people and “melting pot” cultures have a lot that other cultures lack. That isn’t a single generation thing, though.

    But I think we mostly agree on this stuff, good that there are some things.

    838:

    The other obvious polemical flourish available for use with those who believe in a god-author for nature, is that hybrid vigour is the way she makes her supermen or messiahs.

    839:

    current corporate workplaces are designed to be comfortable for extroverts

    Ditto current North American schools.

    A few years ago our principal had a new PA system installed so admin and guidance could access the PA without having to leave their offices. (Before they had to walk a few metres down a hall to the main office.) The frequency of interruptions went way up.

    This on top of a system already sadly lacking in quiet focused time.

    The extroverts running things don't see what the problem is. "If it's not for you just ignore it." (And let's just ignore all the research about how long it takes to regain focus after an interruption…)

    I assume you're read Cain's book Quiet? If not I recommend it.

    840:

    a great interest in American Genealogy, including among "white" southerners. A number of fairly proud "white" southerners of my acquaintance found unwanted surprises lurking the branches when they went to trace their family trees.

    Now of course with cheap DNA testing there have been many stories of people trying to prove they’re “Pure White” and getting the upsetting (to them) news that there’s no such thing. A few years ago my brother sent our parents 23&Me* kits; for a couple years our father, from Appomattox County Virginia, was rather reluctant to talk about his results. My brother and I joked about it, but when I finely got to ask him about it he just said it showed “British Isles, nothing surprising.” Unfortunately my mother has Sjögren’s and wasn’t able to produce enough saliva to do the test, which is a shame since we don’t know too much about her ancestry past her grandparents.

    *Yes, I know all about their, and the other test company’s problems, this was when it was still pretty new.

    841:

    The question “Should we call it ‘racism?’” is a mess

    I go with the definition I learned in school, old-fashioned though it is. Which is also the definition in the "conservative" dictionaries I quoted upstream.

    It's all the definition that I'm legally bound to when dealing with incidents. It doesn't matter what the relative power dynamics between subgroups are: when one student acts in a racially discriminating way to another, we must step in. It doesn't matter what "race" the perpetrator and victim are — we must deal with it.

    (And I put "race" in quotes because, scientifically, it's a silly idea.)

    842:

    supporting the benefits of hybrid vigour

    Which does much to explain why my grandnieces and grandnephews are so wonderful :-)

    One of the many things I love about my nieces is that they took Dr. King's dating advice and chose their mates "not … by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character". Which gave me some wonderful nephews-in-laws.

    843:

    California raised taxes a few years ago. They have a multi-billion dollar surplus now.

    844:

    With reference to the earlier content about burner phones: twitter has just provided the perfect solution: use one of these! http://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_14Tv6U0AE2hy-.jpg:large

    845:

    JPR @ 840 I wonder ... I think you might have to go a loooong way back in my ancestry { IF you are going to use those markers, then I'm as "priveliged" as you get: Pink, male, N European, in 1st-world country ... ) Known ancestry by name apart from the one y'all know, in no particular order ... Gascoine, Paramore (Par Amour), Pydd, Barton, Cecil ... & the dead give-away of an anonymised name - Button.

    846:

    Not really, though there are aspects in common. It is cases like an organisation which is almost all 'white', except for a mixture among the less-skilled staff. A policy is then introduced to allow all 'black' employees time off to learn new skills, and requests from the 'white' ones at the bottom are rejected on the grounds that 'whites' do not need help. That's an invented case, but I have seen examples very like it.

    847:

    The genetic advantages aren't just a single generation, either, though most show up in the first one. As you say, the social benefits take longer to show up; this is very clear in the UK, following the influx of immigrants in the late 1940s and 1950s.

    848:

    In terms of two groups with specific bred-for traits, the first generation hybrid is the one that has the bred-for traits of both expressed. Breeding two first generation hybrids yields a random assortment of all the genes involved, so no. Which only means that where you see an attractive effect over a time period with two peoples coming together, it’s more likely to be social.

    849:

    EC @ 846 Earlier than that ... "My lot" - the Huguenots, had a huge stimulating influence on Britain, almost immediately after 17/10/1685 There was quite a large influx of jews in the mid C19th through to WWI - mostly from wht is now Poland & Russia, avoiding the pogroms. And, later, the Ugandan Asians, fleeing Idi Amin's persecution also provided a big uplift.

    850:

    I'm guessing, gendered conversational modes?

    Women are trained to pay attention to their fellow conversationalists, cue them for responses, and to keep the conversational torch circulating. Men are not trained to do so, and mostly just bull ahead, talking over their perceived conversational rivals.

    Seen it a lot, been on that panel at SF conventions, took me ages to realize it was going on, now I try not to be part of the problem. Unfortunately the solution is to iterate that awareness four billion times over ...

    851:

    It was like that in my elder sister's time. Mid-1970s, basically.

    (She wanted to go to university. At a careers evening, one of her teachers told my parents, "oh, many of our girls have good careers at [supermarket check-out] until they marry"—with the implication that higher education was wasted on homemakers. She made the mistake of saying this in my sister's presence. I don't think I need to tell you what happened next.)

    852:

    A friend of mine is an electrical engineer who specialises in designing exotic power systems.

    She tells me that she often has meetings with people who sit in silence and ignore her for a few minutes before asking when the engineer is due to turn up or if she is his secretary.

    853:

    Yup, I was a little earlier - I did my 'As' mid-70s. I started at the convent in the late 60s; it might have better at the grammar but we were RC and I ended up bussing across town to go to the RC school (the local RC was a secondary modern). All bar one of Mum's aunts were all of the opinion I should have left school at 16 and got a job; I stayed on, took my 'As' and went to uni.

    The exception knew how Mum felt about not being allowed to follow in her father's footsteps and go to medical school. Her grandfather told her 'I put my son through medical school; I'm not paying for my granddaughter to go to medical school as well.' (He gave his sons a start in life - but it was a loan and he made them repay him. Granddad died very young and it's possible he wasn't in a position to repay the money.) Mum ended up at St James' Secretarial College before being called up in 1940.

    854:

    non sequitur alert: quote from a gentleman in Cheshire

    ( discussing a minor tornado near Manchester )

    "When the gusts passed, a tree ripped up and fell over into a field of llamas."

    A cheering reminder that things aint what (some think) they used to be.

    855:

    It hung on longer than I realised, then. I knew there was a lot of bias, of the converse to what I had, but not as extreme as that. The idea that higher education was wasted on women was near-universal in the 1930s, of course.

    856:

    That's part of it, but not all - it is, however, a very serious one in the context I was describing for several reasons. One of which is that such meetings are about debating the technical and political merits and otherwise of technical proposals, and allowing one to become a 'non-confrontational conversation' flatly defeats the purpose. I have seen that, too :-(

    857:

    Yes, I know. Both before and since, but my point was that there was a massive influx shortly after the war, and I have observed the effects, and how slow they were in developing. You may have done the same :-)

    858:
    Women are trained to pay attention to their fellow conversationalists, cue them for responses, and to keep the conversational torch circulating.

    There was an entertaining example from Captain Awkward - although I can't easily find it in the enormous archive.

    A group of lawyers was trying to figure out what approaches should be taken in a particular case. Lots of talk, little decision-making.

    A younger female lawyer made a suggestion that was promptly ignored - people continued as though she hadn't spoken. A few minutes later, an elderly male partner repeated her suggestion. Everybody was all "Excellent idea, sir!"

    "Yes, I thought so when she first said it," was his response.

    One of the best uses of and illustrations of privilege I've heard of, and relatively easy to describe.

    859:

    A university flatmate of Feorag's who happened to be female was the first in her family to get higher education: it was a scandal in the mining village she came from, that it was being wasted on a girl.

    This was 1994-95.

    860:

    There's a difference between confrontation and debate. Lots of men don't get it.

    861:

    I'd bet something that she didn't return to the village she was from after graduating.

    At least here in Finland ISTR some news about the countryside and small towns declining - the women get a higher education and then just don't move back.

    862:

    It was like that in my elder sister's time. Mid-1970s, basically.

    Early 80s in small-town Saskatchewan, too. Friend of mine was told by her guidance counsellor that women could become nurses, but not engineers.

    Fortunately she didn't listen and applied anyway — she was one of the top students in the college of engineering.

    863:

    At the first meeting we had at BNR (mid-80s), the director of the lab told my friend to bring him coffee. Being clueless* I didn't realize why he'd picked her (only female in the room) but one of the other new hires stood up, took coffee orders from everyone, and helped her bring coffee for the whole meeting. And later explained to me that the senior managers had a hard time seeing women as engineers rather than secretaries.

    Sounds like things haven't changed as much as one would expect.

    *My dad had told me there were only two sex-limited jobs in the world — sperm donor and wet nurse — and did his best to live that belief, so I stupidly assumed that being asked to get something meant you were being trusted not to drop it. Yes, I was very young for my age.

    864:

    In that case I’d say the cause of the mistake is seeing race while ignoring class.

    The consequence of the mistake is that whites at the bottom conclude the left doesn’t give a crap about them, and go vote for Trump/UKIP/local equivalent, who at least don’t tell them they’re privileged and should stop complaining.

    865:

    How many of us are "not-pink" - shall I say? Ah, I answered the wrong question, you meant high (i.e. normal :-) skin melanin levels?(quick but detailed summary article BTW.) (Tired.) I know of one or two mostly-lurkers. In general, skin colour can be (should be!) hard to determine from writing, absent obvious (and real:) usages in a country subculture vernacular and/or explicit/implicit declarations. In US non-white-supremacist-wing online political fora, non-whites are active, and so by default I assume indeterminate skin colour, and assume that the lurkers are more varied and numerous.

    866:

    Any one hear of "The Brown Bag Test"?

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

    I first heard of this on an episode of the short lived[1] TV show in the US called "Frank's Place". Episode 6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank%27s_Place

    My daughters was asking me for ideas on a paper she had to write for Black History month when in high school in the US and I pointed her to this. She got an A.

    [1] The best way someone can tell if a show will be cancelled in the US is for me to really like it. This one only lasted 1 season. It is listed as a comedy but was really a show about social / societal commentary with some humor on the side.

    867:

    Yes, have read Susan Cain's "Quiet". The extroverts running things don't see what the problem is. "If it's not for you just ignore it." (And let's just ignore all the research about how long it takes to regain focus after an interruption…) Yes, a total lack of respect for others. Hostile work environment, in the language that HR people (mostly extroverts) understand. Once, with high-end noise-cancelling over-ear headphones on, I counted 5 full and half conversations loud enough to transcribe, plus another 9 loud enough that I could hear conversation timings/turn taking. With earplugs underneath quality hard shooter's muffs it's a bit better, though maintaining focus/quick-flow state for more than a minute or two is impossible. Visual distractions can also be an issue but secondary to auditory distractions. The resulting work output is often a bit like the apparent "merge conflicts" in the comment you originally linked. (#812)

    868:

    Seen it a lot, been on that panel at SF conventions, took me ages to realize it was going on, now I try not to be part of the problem. Unfortunately the solution is to iterate that awareness four billion times over ...

    It helps to have status in your field.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/nih-director-will-no-longer-speak-on-all-male-science-panels/2019/06/12/fe3b6386-8d2c-11e9-adf3-f70f78c156e8_story.html

    and if that is paywalled to you

    https://www.npr.org/2019/07/01/737761332/nih-director-on-why-he-is-declining-to-speak-on-panels-that-exclude-women

    869:

    the women get a higher education and then just don't move back.

    Been happening with men for decades in the US. Why do you think small towns are in decline?

    The ones that are 20 to 50 miles from a "decent" sized city aren't in too bad of shape. But the town I grew up in was 32K when I left and is about that now. At the time it was a 4 hour drive to a larger city. Now it's under 3 hours but options are limited for those with STEM degrees.

    I met a guy at a tech conference a few years ago. For most people I meet at such I'm the guy from the small town. (I was actually from OUTSIDE of that town.) He beat me though. He said he grew up in a town of 400 with a cattle population of 20,000.

    870:

    I'd love to try an experiment in an open-plan office:

    Place a computer with omnidirectional microphones and speech recognition software running in the room where it's loudest, and set up a text editor to transcribe anything the SRS can interpret.

    Then feed the display to a projection screen at the front of the room.

    Then tweak the gain on the microphones so that if the input is loud enough to annoy the introverts, it's loud enough to show up on the big screen at the front of the office, and hopefully embarrass the perpetrators into lowering their noise level.

    871:

    I cna see employers going for that, but without the screen and with some overpriced and underperforming deep learning system to mine the conversations for anything subversive.

    872:

    I don't like open-plan offices that much, though for much of my career I've been forced to work in them.

    This is even while I'm often one of those loud people. I like to talk, and when one of the reasonings to have an open-plan office in the first place is that communication is easier, it feels stupid not to talk with people. I still don't like to annoy other people, so I need to keep my voice down.

    At least my current workplace has also silent rooms, though the sound-proofing is not perfect. Many people, me included, use headphones, either noise-cancelling or like I do just large enough to block out most noises.

    It'd be much better for me to have rooms with 2-5 people in them, but walls cost too much and productivity never enters these kind of financial discussions, apparently.

    873:

    WHatever happened to the "cubicle farm" - which was an acceptable compromise, particularly as the half-height partitions were usually (at least slightly) sound-deadening ????

    Or is the tendency to "dominate & control" so strong that it is preferred, even at the cost of a significant loss of productivity?

    874:

    I have tried (only once though) rigging a proof-of-concept of such a system. Results were not good, though maybe the speech recognition system wasn't designed to split out multiple voices. (Predictive models are a big aspect of speech-to-text systems.) Another attempt might be worthwhile. Poking, I see that some teleconferencing systems include transcript support, e.g. cisco Webex. They should have an advantage because the different voices are already split out quite cleanly. People being adaptive, a subset, rather than being embarrassed, would learn to rely on such transcripts to augment their verbal memories, and might learn to speak loudly and slowly at all times to improve transcript quality. Nightmare!

    875:

    Or is the tendency to "dominate & control" so strong that it is preferred, even at the cost of a significant loss of productivity?

    There really are a large number of people who really prefer open office plans. They literally can't understand people who would want to go into an office and close the door.

    876:

    Mikko Parviainen @ 860: I'd bet something that she didn't return to the village she was from after graduating.

    At least here in Finland ISTR some news about the countryside and small towns declining - the women get a higher education and then just don't move back.

    It's not a new problem and it's not just Finland. It's not even only women gettin' educated and moving away that's killing small towns.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgqVCJpRqWQ

    877:

    Or is the tendency to "dominate & control" so strong that it is preferred, even at the cost of a significant loss of productivity? It's not so much "dominate and control" as (a) packing more people into floor space and (b) the people designing these spaces having absolutely no clue how minds other than theirs' work. The various academic papers on open plan offices over the last decade have been uniformly finding that such spaces are damaging to productivity and creativity. (I do not recall any papers finding any positive effect.)

    In reading history pieces like the these, I'm flabbergasted at some of the quotes, that strongly suggest total cluelessness about human mind variation. This Is Why So Many Companies Insist on Open Offices Now (date not clear) But, asks Recinos, “[i]f the cubicle was itself a solution to the open plan, why would designers and office managers once again return to open plan office designs?” The answer: New tech companies wanted to “‘hack’ the status quo,” and believed open offices were the solution to issues of communication. This “caused what had previously been seen as the drawbacks of open plan office design—noise, distractions, and chaos—to be seen as positive qualities.” he adds.

    French piece, imperfectly translated but interesting: A brief history of the open plan layout (10.03.16) The new generation of open plans, now dubbed multi-spaces, is no longer imposed, but is usually conceived and designed cooperatively to meet the staff’s needs as closely as possible.

    By "cooperatively", they mean "not cooperatively". By "staff's needs" they mean "extroverted managers' desires". Imagine this (yes, real): a "Focus Room", with single-pane transparent glass (washed often) on two walls (poor for blocking sound, intended to maximize the visual stimulation/distraction that some people find helpful), often near a common/kitchen area with a TV blaring. Small table too low to put a laptop on and type unless sitting on the floor. Low cushy chairs impossible to work in.

    878:

    They literally can't understand people who would want to go into an office and close the door. The bathrooms are often reasonably quiet. Though sometimes you get somebody doing a conference call on speakerphone while sitting on the pot. I've been toying with anonymously advocating for glass walls for the bathrooms and bathroom stalls. For productivity!!!

    879:

    Same here indeed... Aleister Crowley, the "Great Beast Salvarsan" (... to quote a letter by a very unimpressed composer contemporary of his. "Salvarsan" was also known as "Compound 606" and was a sort of Snake Oil...)

    880:

    What reaction is displayed by the other voices coming out of the speaker, when they hear something like this?

    "I think we should be parrrp proactive moving forward hnnnng and wheelandaxleage the SPLOOSH! returns for tax advantage plop, plop, plop in the upcoming prrt..."

    881:

    I wonder how much overlap there is between those people, and the people who insist on turning the radio/TV on first thing in the morning over breakfast and have no inkling of how much that makes people like me want to put a hammer through it?

    882:

    "...learn to rely on such transcripts to augment their verbal memories..."

    Instead of using a straight transcript, use a Markovian mashup of everything they've said over the last x minutes; tweak the parameters so that it remains readily possible for the speaker to identify their own utterances but is hopelessly confusing for the purpose you describe.

    Or, much more simply, install a little hack on all the individual computers on each desk, such that whenever the built-in microphone detects a sound above a given threshold the machine becomes glacially slow for five minutes.

    883:

    and the people who insist on turning the radio/TV on first thing in the morning over breakfast and have no inkling of how much that makes people like me want to put a hammer through it?

    Different personality axis. I want to be able to close the door when doing concentration work. Editing text, writing code, etc...

    But I'm also high on the ADHD scale. Minor sounds distract me. So when it is almost totally quiet the least little thing will distract me. So I'm the guy who has music playing on my iThing and a cable news channel on quiet in the background. So that bird chirping outside the windows doesn't distract me. Works for me. By I know not for everyone.

    OTOH my wife prefers total silence when concentrating.

    I think the open/close office situation has more to do with introverts/extroverts than ADHD.

    884:

    Certainly some of it is control-oriented. A CEO (small company) I worked for insisted that open plan was best, for everyone except himself.

    885:

    And then ignore what's blaring from it because they're not listening (but they complain if you turn it off because now "things are too quiet")?

    886:

    ...makes people like me want to put a hammer through it? "zerostat" gun. Just saying. Doesn't leave a (obvious) mark, unlike a hammer.

    887:

    I have a theory that the stereotype of over-full women's purses stuffed with all & sundry is the result of (in part) fewer pockets. When you have pockets, what you bring with you for "every day carry" tends to be reduced to what can fit in them. Absent pockets, you have no choice but a bag, in which case your "every day carry" tends to expand to fit the available space.

    888:

    Ask Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans

    Thank you for pointing that out. As a descendant of Irish who fled The Famine only to be tossed into Pennsylvania coal mines as one of the few jobs that would have them, I'm always fascinated by the focus on skin color as a dominant mode of identifying the "out group". Maybe because it's often the most obvious? It also illustrates how neo-nazis etc. are so, characteristically, narrow minded. There's so much more than skin color that they could be bigoted about! Though I suppose, when they encounter those things, they're likely quick to add it to their inventory of hate, but they still stick with mostly skin-color based ("white pride") slogans.

    889:

    Factor in child-rearing, too. If you are responsible for a child (and at least in Canada women shoulder more of that obligation than men, in terms of time) then you need to carry along everything you think you may need for that as well as what you think you need for yourself.

    A couple of my colleague started carrying "mommy purses"* after they started families. Elastoplasts, wet wipes, kleenex, small toys, candy — they carry more than they used to, but most of it is for their kids, not themselves.

    *Their phrase.

    890:

    There absolutely are people for whom being able to keep tabs on everyone at any time is the most important part of open plan offices. They're not even always wrong - people can use privacy for non-work related stuff, sometimes a lot of it. I think the negatives of the open plan office are obvious but trying to explain them meets stone walls of "I don't understand why it should be a problem" or just "I don't understand".

    891:

    I mentioned the American Chestnut and the blight that mostly destroyed it in a previous thread. Here's an excellent, long piece on a small genetic modification to the American Chestnut to make it resistant to the blight that destroyed a dominant tree species in vast mature forests in the US over 100 years ago. It covers GMOs in general very well IMO. (The author is pro-GMO, but it was a long transformation. I'm also pro-GMO, FWIW. Mostly; not generally for pathogens, and testing (and modeling) must be done. And yes for humans, with similar but stronger caveats. And Monsanto's business models suck. And roundup is safe if used properly.) Is there anyone here who would oppose this tree's (re-)introduction to American forests, and if so, why? The Most Controversial Tree in the World - Is the genetically engineered chestnut tree an act of ecological restoration or a threat to wild forests? (Rowan Jacobsen, Jun 25, 2019) But because the transgenic chestnut would be the first GMO released into the wild, the burden of proof is extra high. The scientists at SUNY have tested as many aspects of its interactions with its future environment as possible. They've checked to make sure mycorrhizal fungi colonize its roots normally. They've confirmed that grasses, forbs, shrubs, pine trees, and maple trees will germinate in its leaf litter. They've fed its leaf detritus to insects and tadpoles, and they've let bumblebees feast on its pollen. In all the tests, there have been no differences between the transgenic chestnut and the wild chestnut. But one result stands out. Tadpoles fed either transgenic chestnut leaf litter or wild chestnut leaf litter developed equally well, but tadpoles fed maple litter grew only half as fast, and tadpoles fed beech litter did even worse. Maple and beech leaves are two of the foods tadpoles have been eating for the past century, ever since the chestnuts disappeared. Perhaps the ecosystem misses the chestnut more than we know.

    and the opposition: That has been cause for alarm at the Campaign to Stop GE Trees, an alliance of little-known environmental groups led by the Global Justice Ecology Project, which has brought all its guns to bear on the chestnut. One of its press releases stated, "If this tree were greenlighted, the impacts to forests, biodiversity and people would be nearly impossible to predict and potentially devastating."

    And to be clear, climate change means introducing it very much north of its original range. (But forests there only date back to the end of the last ice age, approximately.)

    892:

    ANOTHER case of the fake-greenie-fuckwits at work, I see. Here, they have tried ( And, I think failed ) to dig up & destroy GMO pkantings of completely or 90%+ resistant-to-blight potatoes ... ( "Because GMO is evil" ) - of course. They are so blinded my Monsanto's activities that the will not see that there agre great uses for GMO - it just has to be done right.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    Handbags vs. pockets ... There's a lovely little vignette in, I think "Busman's Honeymoon" where Bunter picks up Lord Peter's jacket, weighs it & then extracts a ridiculously long list of various objects from the pockets .......

    893:

    Class? That happens when there is no class difference, which is the case I was describing. But the same thing happens when you have two people in the same situation, coming from different 'classes'. What you are missing is that this is the identical form of discrimination as favouring people 'from good backgrounds', just with a different preferred group. As I said, it is individuals that are discriminated against, not groups, and I am damning the politically correct claim that nobody can be discriminated against unless they are a member of some designated unprivileged group.

    That does NOT mean that, at a political level, less privileged groups should not be given preference in suitable ways. The reasons are that (a) it is the only practical approach and (b) it can be used to minimise discrimination. I have no time for the ranting of the right-wing against that principle, though the forms of preference given are often counter-productive. But it is political correctness run riot to disregard all other cases of discrimination.

    Anyway, I have said this often enough.

    894:

    I am now much better informed, and deeply saddened. I knew that my environment is seriously atypical (call it 'high intellectual'), but I didn't realise how much of the country hadn't made it into the latter half of the 20th century :-(

    895:

    That's true, but it wasn't my point. Good convenors jump on that, especially when it is personal confrontation or directed against people who can't or won't stand up to it. But I agree that it needs suppressing even when the opponents can handle it, because it is very off-putting for many people. And, yes, it IS a reason that some fora are male-dominated - it's just not the only one, or the cause where we were trying to improve the balance.

    The problem occurs when (a) someone says (definitely) something that is important, relevant and the converse of the truth or (b) proposes something seriously infeasible and airbrushes out or deprecates the failure mode. Think of climate change denial, the brexit claims, and similar.

    Unless such statements or proposals are firmly rebutted, they are likely to be accepted, and that leads to disaster. I have seen that many times, often when I have been in the minority failing to rebut them. And I have never seen or heard of that being done without the confrontation of ideas - yes, I agree that does not require the confrontation between people.

    I have also been in such meetings etc. when they avoided confrontation altogether, often using the mantra 'all viewpoints are equally valid', and that also leads to disaster of the dog's dinner variety.

    From the female friends' (and wife's) stories, I can tell you that, in scientific environments that are NOT male-dominated, such debates are as confrontational as in those that are. Yes, there are quite major differences of style, but I have not observed them myself and cannot explain them in detail.

    I don't know of a viable solution.

    896:

    However, that is seriously discriminatory against many people who are severely deaf and need to use the telephone. Many of us (a) can't tell the volume of our own voices, especially in a noisy environment, and (b) need to speak loudly, both so that we can hear what we are saying and to encourage the other person to do the same. It's a right pain, I can assure you.

    When there was a proposal to force us into open-plan offices (cubical farms are little better), I openly stated I would refuse on disability discrimination grounds; there were enough objections that the proposal was dropped. Even then, with the policy of open doors, I got complaints - which I regarded as reasonable - though one (from my 'manager') came close to me making a counter-claim (both against and to him, which we would have resolved by discussion).

    897:

    EC @ 893 It's much, much worse than that .... there are serious numbers stuck before 1919 or even 1871

    898:

    Salvarsan was very much not snake oil; it was the first effective treatment for syphilis, at a time when up to 10% of the adult population of London were infected with the disease (and it was long-term disabling/fatal). Of course, not a modern antibiotic—it's an organic arsenic compound and chemotherapy agent, it basically worked by killing T. pallidum faster than it killed the human host—but a breakthrough insofar as it proved the antibiotic medicines were practical.

    899:

    @879 "What reaction is displayed by the other voices coming out of the speaker, when they hear something like this?"

    First you'd hear the gasping wheezes of prolonged, intense involuntary laughter, sounding like someone got the wind knocked out of them from a sudden gut punch, then the knocking of heads, feet and hands uncontrollably striking office furniture as participants in the conference call start to convulse in general hilarity. Lips would turn slightly blue due to respiratory interference, coughing fits and profuse weeping would follow, Workmens' Comp claims and OSHA reports would be filed. Overall a cathartic but still regrettable incident, much like what the original caller experienced.

    900:

    people who really prefer open office plans. They literally can't understand people who would want to go into an office and close the door.

    My experience is overwhelmingly with the other sort: they absolutely must have a private office of their own where they can close the door. Ideally they also have a personal air conditioner so they can control the temperature in their office independently. But they also depend on their ability to open that door and survey their army of minions, then issue commands to the whole set. Or practice "management by walking around". The comfort, health and happiness of the minions is irrelevant and productivity comes from (fear of more) punishment.

    The is especially amusing when it happens in "professional" contexts, where you get large numbers of relatively highly paid people crammed into sweatshops. The difference is that these coops are architecturally designed and professionally colour coordinated... which makes the inmates feel ever so much better about their conditions.

    901:

    I think this is the germ of our main disagreements here. I see this stuff in the workplace daily, do what I can to make things better or failing that at least not to “be that guy”, and I know sometimes I’ll even fail in that. But the place is full of people denying there is a problem. And many women just see it as what you need to put up with to get ahead, along with working insane hours and giving up non-work related ambitions. It isn’t that we “fixed the problem” back in the 60s or 70s, that’s just when we first started acknowledging one existed.

    Sure things have got better - a lot better. But that doesn’t mean it’s now level or open or fair. I totally acknowledge and sympathise with your own experiences of discrimination, but I do still see it as a relatively rare edge case in a world that loads things in certain ways. Remember that life’s dice don’t work by always coming up the same way, just by judging probability in a certain direction. Sure the personal matters, but there macro matters too.

    902:

    Bugger, silly autocorrect. That should be “nudging probability” and “the macro”.

    903:

    They are so blinded my Monsanto's activities that the will not see that there agre great uses for GMO

    Sadly the legal environment GMOs operate in is the one imposed by Monsanto, which means that everyone has a great deal to fear from even the "good GMOs". For example, those making and propagating the good GMOs have no obligation to remediate or even compensate for any damage they do. So people likely to suffer the ill effects quite rightly say "you could wipe out my lifetime's work and I have no recourse... why should I accept that" and your answer is... what, exactly?

    Saying "this thing would be greatly beneficial under a completely different social and legal system" does not make it beneficial or even safe in the system we have.

    904:

    climate change means ...

    That's the big experiment that a lot of people lose sight of when discussing other experiments. In increasingly many situations the question is not "keep what we have or try this new thing" it's "wipe out what we have completely, or try to save some of it by terraforming part of what we have".

    There generally are not good answers, largely because the political-economic system we have strongly disfavours good technical answers in favour of profitable or popular ones. We even see this in medicine now, where rather than doctor-shopping people simple torture the doctor they have to get the answer they want.

    Which means people like me end up torn between terrible ideas and even worse ones. It's a bit like the UK currently watching a bunch of destructive morons choose which of two evil scammers will be your next prime minister (assuming that hasn't happened yet). On the one hand it's not as though you can do anything to affect their choosing, but on the other hand it does very much affect you so even a tiny influence is worth quite a lot of effort... even though both options are awful.

    905:

    Often times, the noise issue isn't due to cubicles vs open office plans. The problem is that the pink noise speakers don't work. From the Guardian,

    "f you do manage to block the sounds of the city, there’s the risk you make things too quiet, too uncomfortably silent. Michael Jones, senior partner at Foster + Partners, says that as ventilation technology has improved, the low whizz and hum of fans has vanished. In modern open-plan offices the quieter the room gets, the further speech travels. In response it has become common practice to install “pink noise” speakers that emit a constant low fuzz of soothing static – essentially white noise with higher frequencies reduced.

    Tailored to the frequency of the human voice, this barely audible whoosh masks background conversations. You don’t consciously notice it, but you do when it stops. “You’re suddenly aware of everything,” says Jones. “Every phone, every cough.”

    When the software company Autodesk temporarily turned off the pink noise systems in its offices in Waltham, Massachusetts, staff complained about being distracted by conversations 20 metres away."

    https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/apr/25/cities-are-louder-than-ever-and-its-the-poor-who-suffer-most

    I wonder if soon they'll have individualized pink noise speakers?

    906:

    Charlie You said you were fresh out of ideas ... & Moz @ 903 said: the UK currently watching a bunch of destructive morons choose which of two evil scammers will be your next prime minister Come Wednesday, there's your subject. I think BoJo will "win" & then fail utterly, fortunately for the rest of us. But what path will that utter faliure take?

    907:

    I didn't realise how much of the country hadn't made it into the latter half of the 20th century :-(

    Those people sometimes try our patience but they're not actively a threat to civilization. Some others are still unwilling to come into the latter 19th century. :-(

    908:

    Schools that tell girls that the sciences etc. are not for them may not be a threat to our society, but they are obscenities; I was talking specifically about those. I knew about the illegal and quasi-legal madrassas, yeshivas and nominally Christian equivalents, but had assumed that the mainstream schools had been dragged kicking and screaming to at least the 1950s.

    910:

    I am fully aware of that, and seriously harmed my career by successfully blocking one case of serious discrimination. However, IN MY ENVIRONMENT, the discrimination was more often against men than against women - and, yes, there were even examples of men being required to do 50% more work or work unpaid overtime at antisocial hours without consideration of family responsibilities, for the same pay/status. The quote I gave was from the most egregious such case I encountered. The fact that, even in the same organisation, there was active discrimination against women in other environments (including at more senior levels) does not justify such treatment, though it was (and is) claimed to by the politically correct.

    911: 823 - Mid 50s male. I can cook (and cook well according to others who eat my food) and do clothes repair type sewing. Both useful skills for anyone single. 831 - Maybe at least some men just "do less housework"? I vacuum about once a quarter, whether I need to or not. 878 - My sis's boss was once in a conference call with someone who thought she was an "organised manager", and held the call whilst going through baggage reclaim, taxi to hotel, check-in, and was eventually told "NO!" when she tried to pay a visit.

    Now, I can see several things wrong with this behaviour, mostly issues of client privacy.

    912:

    I thought this was a rather nice essay on themes some of us have been grappling with:

    http://www.catherineingram.com/facingextinction/

    913:

    Am I still under a yellow card?

    914:

    Open-plan offices.

  • Managers think that all work gets done by people talking to each other. [1]
  • Managers want people working hard, not talking. 3 Some managers do want to walk around, to look at people to make sure they're working.[2]
  • It saves money, not having to build cubes.[3]
  • It keeps people from complaining when you shove two people into a cube meant for one.
  • 9 out of 10 managers can't work in an open plan office, they need an office of their own, because Confidential Information.[4]
  • Notice how some of these are contradictory?

  • IMO, that's why mice were invented, so managers, notably keyboard-phobic (that's for secretaries), could wave and point.
  • I had one just like that at the Scummy Mortgage Co in Austin, in '87. I was told he used to do that to the keypunchers, to make sure they were working, and thought that programmers would look the same, busy.
  • Old, old Dilbert cartoon (from when he was good), PHB puts Velcro on their backs, and just sticks them on the wall.
  • Private phone call? Asked for ID, etc?
  • When I was first in college, right out of high school, in orientation, one thing they pushed is that when you had to study, GO TO A QUIET PLACE WITH NO NOISE OR DISTRACTIONS.

    Oh, and two more details: not the hard of hearing, but there are some folks who have no volume control. Had a guy like that here. One day, I got up from my cube and walked over to where he was talking to a couple of folks in the offices, and asked him to please lower the volume, I was having trouble paying attention to what I was doing. He, of course, got upset....

    Then there was the aforementioned Scummy Mortgage Co. A large V-shaped room, windows at the narrow edge of the V. Forget cubes, deskdeskdesk[window}deskdeskdesk. Closest to the windows were the systems analyst and the sr. programmer, and they were on the phones at least 60% of the time. At one point, early on, I was given some training tapes. I brought in my cassette player, and listened. Then, when I was done, a couple days later, I brought in some music. A day or so later, my manager, the younger VP (who'd replaced the one who would watch us), asked me if I was done with the training. I told him I was, but I had music, to reduce the distraction and improve my productivity. He told me to take it off and improve my productivity.

    915:

    Not just that, Charley. I've been on panels, and moderated one or two, and one or two folks tend to run away... as well as running away from the topic. I've had to drag the panel back onto the subject more than once.

    916:

    You are, I hope, familiar with the song I'm Gonna Be An Engineer? Written by Peggy Seeger, but I prefer Frankie Armstrong's rendition.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p220yi2VOj8

  • US: engineer, in this case, is what we call a machinist.
  • My late ex was a rocket scientist/engineer for NASA, and worked at the Cape. One of my daughters is a programmer for Boeing.
  • 917:

    Well, first you hand out the Argument FAQ....

    918:

    All four grandparents were eastern European Jews, so I can, what shall I say, pass for beige?

    On the other hand, I grew up as a) a red diaper baby, and b) by the time I was in 4th grade, the neighborhood was at least 90% black, and I didn't leave home till I was 19. The result is I have never identified with White People, sorry, make that White Men In Charge....

    919:

    Dr. Collins, as far as I know, is a good guy. Actually, I just saw a video of him on guitar with a soprano who was visiting the NIH doing an "impromptu" concert, though the video didn't have them singing, as described in an article, The Times They Are A-Changin'.

    I can say no more. Well, ask me in a month, and I can.....

    920:

    Well, sometimes it's true. So's my bag.

    I have a couple of friends in Chicago, one's a folksinger by the name of Kat Eggleston. 20 years ago or so, she wrote a song (it's on one of her CDs) called, "Too Much Shit In My Purse". Another mutual friend always said that Kat wrote it about her, and Kat, knowing her, admitted she was thinking of the friend when she wrote it.

    But then, in that purse, the friend, who was cleaning houses at the time, had both a self-defense weapon and references in one: the house keys for 20 houses. On a chain.... Why, yes, she did eventually fight heavy in the SCA, why do you ask?

    921:

    Dunno when that was written, but it reminds me of what tended to be in Harpo Marx's pockets in the movies....

    922:

    A friend of mine survived doing a PHD in chemistry with profs who thought it was wasted on women by listening to that song a lot.

    She got to thank Peggy for writing it when she played a Toronto folk club.

    My friend was worried about hassling her but Peggy looked right pleased with the story.

    923:

    I’m too optimistic to believe humanity is facing extinction. Even a 99.9999% die off leaves 6000 survivors, more than the worst bottlenecks in HSS prehistory. And even if we hit Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum levels there’ll be enough reasonable-climate territory in the mountains of Antarctica for at least a few dozen bands of foragers to eke out their nasty, brutish, short lives.

    924:

    It has been proven beyond reasonable doubt that the absolute best environment for a programmer (software enginer) (developer) is a PRIVATE OFFICE with a DOOR THAT CLOSES.

    "Peopleware", Tom Demarco.

    I am really surprised at the number of managers I have encountered in this crazy racket who are utterly clueless about this.

    Next best is 30 dB (or thereabouts) earmuffs over 30 dB (or thereabouts) earplugs. This gives you close to 60 dB of isolation. Very nice.

    925:

    I agree about optimism, which I think has a moral imperative of sorts. The opposite of optimism is not pessimism, which is a kind of grief, but rather cynicism which is a kind of arrogance. I thoroughly endorse David Attenborough’s statement that optimism is something we owe the world around us, that giving in to despair is an outcome to be devoutly resisted.

    My pessimism is that if we hit something like the PETM, we are facing a situation where natural processes might turn things around in somewhere above 100,000 years, and again pessimism says that is more likely the 200,000 years that the original PETM lasted. Can a plucky band of 6,000 Antarctic heroes hold out for 200,000 years? Surely the smart money says they’ll be eaten by woozels and giant numbats within 40,000 years or so. The grief isn’t that this isn’t possible, but that it will come to that point, where it’s really a roll of the dice whether we survive.

    926:

    No, the opposite of optimism is NOT cynicism; it is perfectly possible to be both an optimist and a cynic.

    Cynicism is the opposite of naivety, and experience shows that the majority of people who deprecate cynicism are those trying to manipulate suckers (often including themselves). As the saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on you." A huge proportion of scientific, engineering, ecological, social and other disasters have occurred because the naive 'optimists' ignored the warnings given by the cynics. Treating wish fulfillment fantasies as operational plans is a certain path to failure.

    It is very unlikely that the human race will go extinct in the short term (the next few millennia), but it could happen as the result of an unlimited (can you say 'Brexit'?) nuclear holocaust. What COULD happen, unfortunately, is the collapse of anything that we know of as civilisation.

    927:

    Well even in this context, I’ll define cynicism as a rule that requires always making least generous possible interpretation of others, their motivations and their worldviews. It might seem that interpretation is the contentious concept there, but really the reason cynicism is a handicap is because it is a constraint on thought. Hence optimism being its opposite, requiring a more creative sort of positive regard. Seeing the good even in the people whose motives you question is a great first step toward achieving good things.

    But there’s a more pedestrian reason to reject cynicism: it requires a social context, and many of the things we’re talking about, particularly the sources of grief and acceptance, don’t really work in those terms... We have real and concrete things to face; forcing a context and embedding a bunch of power relations in how we perceive them is perverse and likely to be violently rejected.

    928:

    No, the opposite of optimism is NOT cynicism The antonym of optimism is "pessimism" isn't it?

    929:

    Can a plucky band of 6,000 Antarctic heroes hold out for 200,000 years?

    I'm reminded of Phil Foglio's Buck Godot stories. There's a background tidbit that Earth humans had a Big Oops between their future and our time; we never get details because they wouldn't be funny, but it's established that the civilization following ours organizes around the largest surviving technological society - McMurdo Sound.

    That pretty much tells us all we need to know about the scale of the collapse.

    930:

    6 000 Antarctic heroes Was EXACTLY the scenario at the end of the first third of Last & First Men by Olaf Stapeldon. Conveted me to SF, that book did - I read my father's pre-war penguin/pelican copy at the age of nine ......

    Same as reading that huge medeival SF work "The Divine Comedy" in the superb & magnificent Sayers' translation got me interested in high-medieval history. Also worth reading for the very clear picture of the geocentric universe with a obviously spherical Earth - & - of course - Ulysses' last voyage ... which is where Tennyson got it from! ( I really startled aa actual medieval scholar once, by showing that I really knew about Friedrich Hohenstaufen, stupor mundii & his multicultural, liberal freewheeling court - hated by the papacy, what a surprise! )

    931:

    The yellow card is a warning, not a ban. If you'd received a red card you'd be unable to comment.

    932:

    Species survival is meaningless if our culture[1] fails to survive in the custody of the the paleolithic hunter-gatherer successor equilibrium.

    Olduvai theory is my worst-case fear; H. Sapiens Sapiens and descendant hominidae survive for fractional to integer megayears, but we lose everything that can't be carried by hand and maintained by word of mouth by small migratory tribes.

    It'd sum to a self-inflicted boom-and-bust catastrophe, and all for nothing in the end.

    [1] I use "culture" not in some dodgy identarian/ethnosupremacist sense that prioritizes any particular civilization, but in the broadest sense of phenotypic attributes transmissible outside the genome, such as speech and writing and art and the ideas of law and medicine and recorded history and philosophy (natural or otherwise).

    933:

    Cynicism is an imposition of assumed knowledge, while optimism requires a certain humility and generosity of spirit. Optimism is frequently mistaken for naïveté. The difference is that the sort of optimism we’re talking about implies a moral obligation to leave space for people to be their best selves. Even pessimism allows that you still do this, even while expecting the worst. Cynicism, on the other hand, requires you never to do this, because you KNOW people will always be their worst, and if it is the rule then we end up poorer.

    934:

    925 - 928 & 932. My use of the word “optimistic” was meant as irony. Sorry for not being clearer.

    935:
    Next best is 30 dB (or thereabouts) earmuffs over 30 dB (or thereabouts) earplugs. This gives you close to 60 dB of isolation. Very nice.

    This is my regular practice. Helps. Not perfect (and not 60dB either[0]), and doesn't block visual distractions or the back-to-big-room stress effect. I'm thinking of bringing in my David Clark shooter's muffs. Big, green and anyone who shoots (in the US) knows what they are. (They are also very good for outdoor work involving loud IC engines.)

    [0] Fifty dB at 4khz, less at other frequencies, Extra Protection: Wearing Earmuffs and Earplugs in Combination (Elliott H. Berger, August 6, 2001)

    936:

    there is one thing I would like to know, actually ... I'm currently re-reading Empire Games and wondered whether there was any example that Charlie could point at of what the knots are intended to look like - I think I understand the descriptions, but I'm unsure of the level of complexity and detail that they'd need to have the required resolution for, say, a 4cm diameter tattoo on a wrist, for example ...

    937:

    having thought about it, I'm wondering whether the 'braid' screensaver by John Neil from jwz's XScreenSaver collection might be close to it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhJq56ViGM (from https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/ )

    938:

    I’d always pictured them looking sort of like Celtic knot work but with some disturbed areas of broken symmetry.

    939: 936 to #938 - Whether you could achieve the required level of detail in a 4cm knotwork is probably more dependent on the skill of the tattooist than anything else.

    Supplementary to this - If an Inner Clan member was the tattooist, would they be able to perform the work if the required design were active in the present timestream?

    940:

    I too was convent educated, sewing and home economics included. At my first high school there were two streams : Commercial and Languages, Commercial being typing and shorthand and such because that was what young girls needed, right? From memory there were about three times as many undertaking the Commercial stream. At my last high school nearly every single girl went straight into nursing (small town NZ in the late '70s). I was one of the few who didn't, although ironically enough I did end up doing nursing when I returned to Australia, but did parlay that into Health Informatics when such a thing became possible.

    941:

    I was at a streamed comprehensive in Scotland in the 1970s and most of the boys in the first academic stream chose cooking and typing instead of wood- and metal-work when the choice became available. I remember in the later 1970s in CS class at Uni being shocked by the lecturer's two-finger hunt and peck keyboard technique. And nowadays I can replace the riveted buttons on my jeans when I burst them.

    942:

    i wonder if all children should be taught basic domestic skills as part of their general education. Not all parent have the skills or inclination to pass this knowledge on. I was lucky; I didn't do any domestic skills classes at school apart from sewing class, but my mother taught both my sister and myself to cook and to do DiY (my father being totally disinclined to do any).

    Even now I do most of the basic DiY around the house (major tasks are passed onto paid help) as the bloke is remarkably cack-handed. His mother thinks it's because his father insisted on doing all their DiY and he was a perfectionist so discouraged the boys from doing any.

    944:

    That is total bollocks. I am as cynical about assumed knowledge as about anything else, and am surprisingly often proved right.

    945:

    They damn well should be. I regret that I failed to teach either of my daughters how to repair their own bicycles; the explanation is as you say - it was easier to get me to do it, not least because it is a safety issue. They were 'incentivised' to cook by being told "You can eat what I cook, (wholemeal) bread, cheese and fruit, or learn to cook for yourself" when I was sole carer for several days a week. But my elder did get a first in engineering from a good university!

    946:

    Oops. Ambiguous. What I tended to cook was pulse dishes and similar, together with vegetables - i.e. wealthy peasant food. The bread and cheese was the alternative.

    947: 940. 941, 942, 945 and 946 all refer.

    I had similar experiences to William except for being one of the last years to not be forced into "technical" for males or "domestic" for females. My younger sis got the choice, and opted to stay with "domestic" (but some of the males went for that rather than technical).

    However, one of my great-grandfathers (a Lanarkshire steelman in the late 19th century) pretty much insisted that his sons learn to cook saying "if there's food in the house and you can't cook it, you deserve to go hungry" if they complained. (Sidebar - I may be repeating here, but I'm a good cook, according to other people who've eaten my food)

    I do tend to do a lot of my Mum and sis's DIY, on the basis that I can go "bang bang bang done" in the sort of time it took to type this, but it would take hours to teach them the job.

    948:

    Proofing error; #947 should read "...one of the last years to be forced into "technical" for males ...

    949:

    All of my kids (including son and stepson) know how to cook, and can do it well. All of my kids also were forced to read the early 70's The Volkswagon Repair Guide: a Manual for the Compleat Idiot (nothing to do with the idiot books), which has a preface on "how to buy a used car", and goes from changing your oil to rebuilding the engine.

    AND each chapter begins with explaining what to hear and smell and what the lights mean. My daughters don't put up with mechanic bs, they know what's being done.

    950:

    For all his faults, Heinlein agreed:

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

    I can't do all of those, but can do most, and can add a lot more. I don't believe in the identicality of the sexes' abilities, but do believe that most people can do most things. Both basic domestic and basic DIY skills should be taught to (almost) all children - I will except the seriously handicapped, if their restrictions prohibit it.

    951:

    I guess it depends on how much information is required in the engram - I'd imagine that they'd be analogous to a QR code or maybe an Aztec code, each of which has the ability to ramp up the amount of error correction in them to cope with bad reads which limits the absolute limit for their size[0]. In this case a wrist would be at most, say, 80cm from the eye and presented at an angle, or 40-50cm when face-on[1] ...

    I'm just musing here, but one could imagine maybe a bitstream of three symbols[2] counted around the circumference spaced for a constant linear density[3] ... something that could probably suggest an upper limit, were I any good at math ...

    Did we sort out whether the engram was encoding for a local or absolute translation? If local, then presumably the address doesn't need to be that big as it's referenced to your current timeline ...

    anyway,

    [0] and nixes the whole problem with the Lee family, as the Q-dots would Just Cope with the error introduced as described, so clearly there is no error correction which seems ... problematic

    [1] having just gained glasses in my later life, I can't even focus on something that distance any longer ... guess I'm stuck in this timeline then ... :)

    [2] parallel lines, overlapping left-over-right and overlapping right-over-left

    [3] assuming this is even possible, given the need to mix "threads" from an inner ring and an outer one

    952:

    I'm an under 50 (for a few more years!) woman. I frequently enjoy reading the comments, but the most voluable commenters seem to be online a lot more often than I, so the conversation has usually moved on before I think of anything to say. I value the intelligent, generally civil discourse here and will continue to lurk.

    953:

    That is total bollocks.

    Well obviously I disagree. I think cynicism is also sometimes a kind of dishonesty. But these are terms that have multiple meanings and it’s more important to be open about which meaning is being addressed, because making an argument about one and using it to demonstrate another is an instance of a fallacy of composition. I would describe the use of such a maneouvre, despite knowing it is not valid, as cynical (just to make this comment slightly recursive).

    954:

    All of my kids also were forced to read the early 70's The Volkswagon Repair Guide: a Manual for the Compleat Idiot (nothing to do with the idiot books), which has a preface on "how to buy a used car", and goes from changing your oil to rebuilding the engine.

    That's an excellent choice even if they never get to own a vintage VW. (John Muir the Volkwagen guru was not the same guy as John Muir the nature guru - though I like to think they'd approve of each other's work.) Peter Aschwanden's art alone would attract the attention of lots of kids; it worked on the flower children of an earlier time.

    How good a book is it? The first edition appeared in 1969 - and fifty years later the 19th edition is still in print.

    955:

    Charlie, did you ever get to Moominworld? As fate would have it, my family vacation put me there at approximately the time you were talking of going, but I wasn't able to spot you.

    956:

    I’m surprised I haven’t heard of anyone weaponizing this constitutional bug yet.

    Suppose I were President-for-life of the Democratic Republic of Orsinia. And suppose I had identified an Australian MP who could help me get something I wanted (better trade terms, lay off my human rights record, help me stash my personal fortune in Sydney real estate, whatever.)

    I could start by flattering them and telling them how much I and all the people of Orsinia admire them. And if that didn’t work, I could tell them how we admired them so much so much we were going to honor them by awarding them Orsinian citizenship. The passport’s already been prepared.

    Which is more likely - that nobody’s thought of it yet, or that nobody’s had to follow through?

    957:

    Which is more likely - that nobody’s thought of it yet, or that nobody’s had to follow through?

    Surely someone somewhere cares enough about the Australian government to sabotage it...

    (Ob pop culture: "Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?"

    958:

    Sure, but lots of people think that Australia is "too far away" (for example, most Australians who compete in international level lawn tennis or motor racing have a residence in London, Englandshire or Monte Carlo).

    959:

    The discussion of "race" a couple weeks ago was pretty sad, but nonetheless, I'll try to throw in a little common sense. Particularly bad was the idea that the beating of Reginald Denny represented "black oppression of whites." Trouble with that is that Reginald Denny, the authority on the subject presumably, strongly disagreed. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Reginald-Denny-Looks-Back-on-the-LA-Riots--149165165.html What is racism anyway? Like any "ism," an idea in people's heads. Which is not the problem. The problem is that bad ideas in people's heads are symptoms of bad material realities. Racism in people's heads doesn't come from "white skin privilege" or some such, but from the heritage of slavery in America, and the heritage of imperialism in countries like England and Scotland, and America too. And is not to be confused with that traditional American national sport, hating people of different ethnic origin from one's own. Which Tom Lehrer wrote a great song about so long ago. https://www.google.com/search?q=national+brotherhood+week&oq=national+brotherhood+week&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.8247j1j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

    960:

    What is racism anyway?

    Going by the excited rant I got last night after making a joke about racist tweets, racism is something different from whatever Donald Trump just did. Also, there's no such thing as racism. Also, calling people out about being racists is racist. Also, he didn't say that. Also, yes he said it but it isn't racist.

    961:

    I did not get to Moominworld.

    (Succumbed to con crud and exhaustion in a Helsinki hotel room instead.)

    962:

    It occurred to me in reading the latest installments of /The Laundry Files/ and /The Merchant Princes/ that those two multiverses were beginning to resemble each other. Can we look forward to future fusion of the two series? Or even minor crossovers where characters from one appear in the other.

    Apologies if this has come up previously on the blog -- although I'm a long time Stross fan, I'm a newbie to the blog.

    963:

    paws4thot @ 939: #936 to #938 - Whether you could achieve the required level of detail in a 4cm knotwork is probably more dependent on the skill of the tattooist than anything else.

    Supplementary to this - If an Inner Clan member was the tattooist, would they be able to perform the work if the required design were active in the present timestream?

    Do half the tattoo & cover it over somehow while doing the other half?

    964:

    Madeleine @ 942: i wonder if all children should be taught basic domestic skills as part of their general education. Not all parent have the skills or inclination to pass this knowledge on. I was lucky; I didn't do any domestic skills classes at school apart from sewing class, but my mother taught both my sister and myself to cook and to do DiY (my father being totally disinclined to do any).

    I think so, at least basics. But it does have to be ALL children. It was because they only taught domestic skills to girls that the programs were eliminated as discriminatory in the first place.

    965:

    Elderly Cynic @ 950: For all his faults, Heinlein agreed:

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

    I can't do all of those, but can do most, and can add a lot more. I don't believe in the identicality of the sexes' abilities, but do believe that most people can do most things. Both basic domestic and basic DIY skills should be taught to (almost) all children - I will except the seriously handicapped, if their restrictions prohibit it.

    If you grant me the boon of a calculator & math text books, I think I can do them all ... except for the "dying gallantly" ... won't know how well I'll handle that until the time comes.

    966:

    “Family” members are strongly discouraged from visiting the Irish National Museum of Archeology’s “Treasury” exhibit. God knows where you’d wind up. https://www.museum.ie/Archaeology/Exhibitions/Current-Exhibitions/The-Treasury

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