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"It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)

On April 16—gosh, it feels like an entire year ago—I made some predictions about where we were going. How do they hold up?

  1. Vaccine development will take a flat minimum of 12 months.

Too soon to tell; it's only been two and a half months. A few people have signed up for testing, but we won't know if the prototype vaccines have provided any protection for months yet. (I haven't seen any reports of them killing the guinea pigs though, so there's that.)

Manufacturing of vaccine adjuvants and the little extras required to turn a raw product into a deliverable medical treatment are in progress, though.

  1. Lockdown can't be sustained more than 1-2 weeks after peak ICU occupancy passes, so it will be lifted in mid-May in the UK and possibly as early as May 1st in the USA.

I am really glad I got this wrong. Lockdown lasted until the end of May in the USA; it began being relaxed in England in mid-June, and here in Scotland non-essential shops are due to lift in July. The English government (that is, the Westminster parliament governing England: Scotland is run by the Holyrood parliament in respect of domestic affairs such as public health and education) tried to convince schools to re-open, but that mostly flopped; Scottish schools are, I believe, staying shut until the next academic year (the Scottish school year ends earlier than the English one by a couple of weeks).

Incidentally, Scotland is broadly coping better than England per this dashboard: there have been no new COVID19 cases confirmed in the past 4-5 days. However, Westminster's desire to dink with the statistics in order to justify a premature re-opening is making it hard to tell just WTF is going on.

  1. Trump is shooting for May 1st because he's been told the economy will take 6 months to recover ... 1-4 weeks later there will be a secondary surge in infections and it'll follow the same exponential growth

Because the US lockdown didn't really begin to lift until June, the USA is hitting this secondary surge right now, and some states are trying to lock down again. Red states with Republican governors who are in complete denial are getting hit badly, though—notably Texas and Florida.

  1. Extra Lulz in the UK

Boris clung on to power and is now visible again, busy pulling levers and waffling in public, Cthulhu help us. His main approach to COVID19 is to treat it as a public relations project, so he's going with patriotic rah-rah rhetoric rather than coolly rational choices. Because he's not a planner he delegates everything to Dominic Cummings, who is in the process of purging the top ranks of the civil service and replacing the current leadership with those willing to swear a loyalty oath to Brexit.

It'd be hilarious if I wasn't trapped in the back of the bus these clowns are driving towards a cliff.

  1. Wildcards: we might conceivably find a simple and effective medical treatment.

Hydroxychloroquine is a bust (snake oil is about what you can expect from a snake oil salesman). Dexamethasone improving the prognosis for ICU patients is a welcome finding, but it's not a magic bullet—it just reduces the death toll by up to 30% among people who require mechanical ventillation. Trump buying up the global supply of remdesivir (even though it's not very effective) is exactly the kind of Milo Minderbinder act you'd expect of the guy. Prediction: it won't work, but it'll make Trump lots of enemies and a little bit of money.




What did I miss?

I missed: the rest of the world, where populist authoritarian leaders everywhere are trying to make Trump and Johnson's handling of COVID19 look magisterial and professional, from Brazil's Bolsonaro to Russia's Putin.

I totally didn't see Black Lives Matter turning into a global protest movement. To be fair, George Floyd was brutally murdered by the Minneapolis police department on May 25th, and the predictive blog entry I'm referring back to was posted more than a month earlier. (I've only posted once since then, prior to this, and that last blog entry was about brainstorming a fiction idea, not current affairs.) In retrospect I should have anticipated that heavy-handed racist policing of lockdown would lead to numerous flashpoints worldwide. There have been other side-effects: illegal raves and parties in the UK, for example. Widespread flouting of social distancing and/or masking guidelines, and the emergence of anti-mask rhetoric among Trump loyalists as a very disturbing kind of political statement.

There's a growing, seemingly global, sense that we can't or shouldn't go back to the status quo ante—in many ways, this sentiment ehoes earlier occasions when pressure for major social change emerged during and after world wars. The long term global economic effects, and possibly the death toll, are clearly in the same order of magnitude as a 20th century global war: it may be that such wars (or in this case a frightening pandemic) provide the trigger for the sort of societal change more normally associated with revolutions. (This certainly happened in 1917-19, and again in 1945-49.)

A new world is being born. I just hope I live to see it, and that there's room in it for someone like me to exist.

2442 Comments

1:

One of the big critical path items for the vaccine is medical-grade glass vials for the doses. Billions of vials are needed, and there really really isn't enough out there. Especially with another H1N1 flu on the horizon, we've got to get production up -- another place Impeached President Donald Trump could be forcing industry to pivot, but of course isn't. So long as the Gulchdwellers get their doses, what does he care?

2:

Billions of vials are needed, and there really really isn't enough out there.

I don't see where you get that from, unless some Milo Minderbinder entrepreneur has just bought up every pharma-certified glass factory on the planet?

We already churn out many billions of vaccine doses a year on a worldwide basis -- vaccines for MMR, polio, scarlet fever, yellow fever, malaria, influenza, tuberculosis, chickenpox -- you name it. Yes, adding enough capacity to vaccinate everyone on the planet who hasn't already been infected by this time next year will be a significant push, but it's not going to break the industry.

Now, Class IV aseptic suites capable of compounding antigen-based or dead-virus-based vaccines with adjuvants, preservatives, and other cofactors, then sterilizing, filling, and sealing the vials, then performing QA testing, are another matter: they're already working close to capacity. But building new vaccine factories is another of Bill Gates' priorities (along with inventing the stuff to put in them). I think scaling up production facilities is do-able in the time frame it'll take to develop a vaccine.

3:

On COVID-19

My sister (a cancer survivor) works in an office at an Orlando area airport in Florida, processing physical paperwork from arriving flights. In her office everyone is now wearing N95 masks, but she had difficulty getting hers on the other day.

So a colleague helped.

Said colleague has now tested positive. Previous tests were negative, but he and his wife and family are now positive.

Sister was understandably rather shaken. Happily she's testing negative right now, but the organisation has suffered multiple positive tests. It doesn't matter how good your PPE is, whether workstations are situated to keep distance, &c., if you're getting infected on the street.

4:

W.r.t. the statistics. They are doing their best to fiddle them, but (so far) the ONS are not playing ball; while I think that the PHE execusuits would like to, I believe they have outsourced everyone who knows excel from incel, and anyone left with any statistical nous is laying low and sayin' nuffin'. Here is a brief summary:

So far, the cases and death rates are falling very slowly, which is why the experts are worried - I have revised my estimate of when we will know more to by late July.

https://imgur.com/ZMvQMMQ https://imgur.com/j19Pmk9

As you know, the test and track mechanism is in complete disarray, as one would expect from any task outsourced to the usual culprits (anyone remember security for the Olympics?) The part that is run by the NHS etc. is apparently working fairly well, but the mass testing and tracing is a disaster, and will remain so until at least October (and, in my view, probably until it is closed down). I haven't seen any evidence of an attempt to test how widespread the virus is, which was said to be essential by several experts (including Whitty).

My guess is that the government's hypocrisy (no, it's NOT just "mixed messages"), its malicious incompetence against many of the less-regarded groups of the population, and the reaction of many of the public, is going to lead to a resurgence. Bozo is quite happy to lock down Leicester, but I suspect that he will baulk when it comes to harder decisions. We shall then see how many of the advisers have spines.

Again, as you know, there is also increasing evidence that this is an anomalous infection in many ways, and that has both good and bad consequences. Scientists are investigating, though.

Interesting times, indeed!

5:

Before the pandemic, I really thought we might be heading for a revolution because the gap between what UK/US leaders were delivering and what polls consistently showed populations wanted was getting so large.

Now, I'm hoping we can peacefully institute the changes needed. But at what a price!

wg

6:

One of the beautiful stories of the pandemic here in the USA is FEMA getting defrauded by a serial telemarketer previously convicted fraudster in Florida. First time Federal contractor (create company Friday, awarded contract Monday sort of setup), they sold FEMA soda bottle blanks as test tubes! These are plastic tubes that resemble test tubes: apply a little heat and high air pressure and you instantly have a 2 liter soda bottle. Except they aren't sterile, and worst yet - they don't fit test tube racks. So they are not fit for purpose. Still, they were distributed nation-wide and state health orgs were told 'find a use for them'. Even though they're not sterile and potentially contaminated with COVID because they were assembled in a non-sterile fashion.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-trump-administration-paid-millions-for-test-tubes-and-got-unusable-mini-soda-bottles

We also have many states have paid millions for big stashes of hydroxychloroquine, which doesn't work, and now have huge stockpiles of pills that will slowly rot.

And don't forget that we have a new H1N1 flu just waiting for its time to enter the world stage!

Insane monkeys are running the show over here. I don't know if the monkeys in the UK are more or less sane, or a different species.

7:

"and now have huge stockpiles of pills that will slowly rot"

And lupus patients having a hard time getting their prescriptions filled because the government bought so much.

8:

The difficulties in Nations infected with "Contemporary conservatism" are anything done must reward someone with profit and choosing searching for silver bullets over anything that looks like hard work. I wonder if some Vietnamese and Cubans consider SARS CoV2 as a karmic reward...

9:

In which way(s) does it qualify as anomalous?

10:

Derek Lowe on In The Pipeline is doing a pretty good job on periodic vaccine updates. His latest was on June 29: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/29/coronavirus-vaccine-update-june-29

It's possible an effective vaccine will exist by Christmas. Whether or not anyone who's not super-rich can get it is another matter. To their credit, some of the big pharma companies are already gearing up for huge production runs on their own risk, even though they don't know what the vaccine will be, so they are preparing to crank it out, if an It vaccine appears. I think 12 months to end Phase III is still likely, but a miracle speed-up isn't yet impossible.

Dexamethasone runs have already started, as you might expect.

The hilariously stupid thing is that the best treatments available for Covid19 remain masking, social distance, and washing hands regularly. Too many Americans aren't doing that, they're hoarding marginally effective drugs and screaming about their rights. Nothing says unworthy more than this, I'm afraid. And that's the watershed moment right there.

11:

In the civilized parts of the world, H1N1/the flu in general seems to have been killed in its tracks by the covid protection measures.

12:

Our Influenza subunit immunisations always arrived filled I to syringes with the needle built in. No glass.

13:

Cloudster @ 6: One of the beautiful stories of the pandemic here in the USA is FEMA getting defrauded by a serial telemarketer previously convicted fraudster in Florida.

It's never a beautiful story when the government is defrauded.

Because ultimately it is we the taxpayers who are defrauded, and it is "We the people" who are harmed by the fraud because the fraudsters stole the resources that could have have been used to manage the crisis and alleviate suffering.

And eventually the selfish oligarchs will latch on to that fraud to prove that people in need do not do not deserve help from the government; that the social safety nets must be slashed once again so that their (already non-existent) taxes can be cut.

Not a beautiful story at all. Indeed it is a very, ugly story.

14:

It seems like the business community is waking up and putting pressure on Republicans to actually take commonsense measure like convincing people to wear a mask so that the economy can actually restart in some limited fashion. All Republicans except Trump seem to be falling in line. Governor Kemp here in Georgia is doing a 'wear a mask' tour of Georgia. Pence sat next to Governor Abbot of Texas and said everyone should wear a mask. Even Sean Hannity is advocating this (at the end of the article). They are not making it mandatory yet, but internal Republican polling must be devastating,

15:

Insane monkeys are running the show over here. I don't know if the monkeys in the UK are more or less sane, or a different species.

Did you spot the bit about the Attack Macaque in Downing Street spaffing £500M (about $650M in today's cash) on buying the wrong satellites?

TLDR: the UK Brexited and kicked itself out of the European Galileo navigation satellite project, even though it's not strictly an EU thing. (Adjudication via the ECJ was the deal-breaker, IIRC.) To their horror, they discovered that they could neither supply satellites for the cluster nor use it at full resolution if they flounced. So the Brexiters announced a grandiose plan to build their own GPS cluster. Then someone told them how much it would cost. (Hint: billions.) Then someone pointed out that the OneWeb low-orbit comsat network was going into Chapter 11.

So they bought a 20% stake in an incomplete, bankrupt, US-based broadband internet satellite system that was pushed into bankruptcy because basically it can't compete with Elon Musk's Starweb, because they appear to have mistaken OneWeb for a GPS cluster, because they're a government of second-rate journalists led by marketers.

More on this Trump-level idiocy here.

16:

I would point to the big sea change from a decade ago: the increasing association of fraud with the super rich.

Back around a decade ago, there was this cult of wealth. To be fair, there still is, but the idea was that being a billionaire proved you were brilliant, at least a financial or technical genius. Even here, commenters took that largely for granted.

Now, we've seen the world pummeled by the greed, stupidity, and criminality of the wealthy, and that myth is going bust. Fortunately or unfortunately, we don't have a communism sitting out there as a viable alternative. Instead, we have Black Lives Matter, Social Justice, and the climate change movements. They might be weak tea. Or, because at least some of them are less ideological on social structures, it's conceivable that we might get some real change.

Instead of a technological singularity, we seem to be in the middle of a political one.

17:

Two things bother me about Americans, and I am one. We (not me) scream about Our Rights. I have a right not to wear a mask! You also have a right to get sick and die. But you're also going to get me sick and die, and I'm missing half my immune system as my body no longer produces antibodies.

But people here no longer talk about the fact that along with our rights, we also have responsibilities.

We no longer take responsibility for our actions. If we do something and it goes wrong, well, it was the other guy's fault! He shouldn't have been there! When I worked for a police dept doing IT, there were two idiots shooting at each other on a freeway. There was an open lane between them. A third, uninvolved car, not knowing the deadly situation, drove between them. That driver was hit and killed. That car was in the basement of the building that I worked in for over a week, I walked by it several times a day while it was there.

Idiots. I hope those two shooters got very long prison sentences, I don't know their outcomes. I do know the outcome of the person who was driving that car that I saw. I'll never forget it.

But I shouldn't have to wear a mask, oh no! IT INFRINGES MY RIGHTS!

The best way to stay safe and flatten the curve is to treat EVERYONE, including YOURSELF, as if you have the virus.

Right now, not only do I have a sinus infection, which I get often, it's MRSA for the first time. On top of that, one of my big toes is hurting, and that's a possible indication of COVID. So it's possible that my life is about to get VERY complicated. Yes, I'm on cipro for the sinus infection, leaving to see my immunologist in an hour.

So wear your masks, wash your hands, and stay safe out there!

18:

The difficulties in Nations infected with "Contemporary conservatism" are anything done must reward someone with profit

It's as ideologically bankrupt as Brezhnevism. (The late-Soviet ideology which gave us the management of the Chernobyl B reactor.)

19:

I am not the person to summarise that - but, if you look up the medical papers on it, you will see.

20:

The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) is reporting that the CanSino Biologics proposed vaccine is now approved for human testing here and in China, and that China is making it available and/or requiring its use by their military.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-vaccine-approved-military-use-china-1.5630947

I have my fingers crossed, as that's a prerequisite to a large fraction of my company's staff returning to our offices. Us old farts are the virus' favorite food.

21:

Here in Leeds I only see about 10% mask wearing. Can any natives explain that?

I was listening to a podcast (Guardian, maybe) that said foreign parents considering UK universities for their children were put off by the news photos that showed this lack of masking--"my kids aren't going to be safe in the UK given their lack of seriousness".

22:

Incidentally, I break into your regular scheduled discussion with a news bulletin I just had to share:

Moldova Shuts Down Bootleg Helicopter Factory

The Moldovan Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Organised Crime and Special Cases and investigators from the Police General Inspectorate closed a clandestine factory in the Criuleni area near the Dniester river in the east of the country on Tuesday that was producing copies of Kamov KA-26 Soviet-type helicopters. “Over the past several months, the police documented the illegal activity of a well-organised group of people specialising in the production of helicopters,” the Interior Ministry said in a press release. The secretly-built helicopters were about to be exported illegally to former Soviet countries, it said. Searches carried out on Tuesday found that there were over ten helicopters on the production line, at various stages of completion. Most of the people suspected of being involved in the production and assembly process, including the organisers and heads of the illegal operation, are residents of Moldova’s breakaway Transnistrian region. All the helicopters were produced without the necessary permits and documents of origin for the parts and equipment used. A criminal case for preparing to smuggle aircraft by two or more persons has been initiated by prosecutors. If found guilty, the suspects could face jail sentences ranging from three to ten years, according to Moldovan law.

Ah, those whacky Transnistrians strike again!

23:

Heteromeles @ 16: I would point to the big sea change from a decade ago: the increasing association of fraud with the super rich.

A few more people may have awakened to the truth. They're more blatant and out in the open with their frauds than they were a decade ago, but I don't see much of a change otherwise.

"Behind every great fortune is an equally great crime"
     - Honore de Balzac

True in the 19th century; just as true in the 21st.

24:
Did you spot the bit about the Attack Macaque in Downing Street spaffing £500M (about $650M in today's cash) on buying the wrong satellites?

Discovered that one yesterday as I was watching the GPS launch stream with a friend. When he told me what they "invested" in, I blurted "NO WAY? ONEWEB?"

But then governments get scammed all the time. I remember the GreatOilSniffer_Hoax that then-president Valery Giscard d'Estaing personally approved, or stuff like the purchase of explosive detector wands in Iraq to use against terrorist threats.

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25:
The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) is reporting that the CanSino Biologics proposed vaccine is now approved for human testing here and in China, and that China is making it available and/or requiring its use by their military.

Don't hold too much hopes on it.

A more complete story is on Ars Technica.

TL;DR: Basically, given they are piggybacking the SARS-COV2 characteristic "spike" protein on a classic vaccine targeting AD5, they managed to speed up design, but then, anyone having had a relatively recent exposure to Adenovirus5 tends to have their immune system react to the AD5 component rather than the COV2 protein. Meaning the vaccine renews more the AD5 immunity rather than conferring SARS-COV2 immunity.

Given how widespread AD5 is, the vaccine may end up with extremely low efficiency. The good news is that it won't kill you, but it may not protect you.

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26:

Sad to say, you actually did get the reopening date right for parts of the US -- most notably Texas, where phased reopening started May 1, with all of this in phase 1, including a lot of things that other states left to later phases: "retail stores, malls, restaurants, museums, barber shops, hair salons, nail salons, tanning salons among other businesses at 25%". Nightclubs have been open there, and restaurants at 50% capacity, since May 18th. It's almost a surprise the state took this long to blow up...

https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/timeline-what-led-up-to-pause-in-texas-reopening-plan-surge-in-covid-19-cases/285-598205d0-9b31-4b39-a3ec-a0c32bb7a14f

27:

I can't speak for everyone, but I wouldn't have the first clue where to buy one; they were on sale in a local corner shop at one point, for a ridiculous mark-up, but they're long gone. I was also under the impression that there were barely enough to go around for frontline NHS workers; for an unemployed chronic depressive like me to buy even a single box of them seems rather selfish in the circumstances.

28:

One paranoid thought from a friend last week that might have gotten missed.

Here's the setup: Covid19 vaccine developers are doing Phase II and III testing all over the world. This already caused a kerfuffle in the US, about testing in Africa (I'm not sure how much was "don't hurt those poor people for our benefit" and how much was racism). But it died down a bit, when the companies pointed out that they had to test the vaccine in areas where there were active outbreaks. Therefore, they were going to do vaccine tests wherever Covid19 cases were piling up (South Africa, in this case), because if they did them at home (like South Korea), there were too few cases to see if the vaccine worked.

So the paranoid theory is the El Cheeto has been deliberately mashing down Covid19 control efforts so that there will be lots of exposures any given week. This will allow his Operation Warp Speed to quickly test their vaccines in country. He'll have a working vaccine before Election Day made entirely in the US of A, and this miracle will propel him to a second term.

It's not completely impossible. But this assumes that El Cheeto is capable of such a calculation, and isn't just trying to quash numbers that make him look bad.

The bad part for everyone else, who's carefully trying to do less politicized science and come up with a good vaccine, is that the US is going to be an excellent place to conduct Phase II and Phase III vaccine trials for the foreseeable future, whatever the cause. So, y'all wanna come visit us and do shots? We'll make it worth your time.

On a different note, here's an article from The Atlantic looking at the US coronavirus response so far as if it were an airline crash report. "This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course."

29:

It’s worth calling out extremely negative effects all this is having on the Orange Ones poll numbers and re election chances

While it is a long time till November, it’s not looking good for the Cheeto

30:

Here in Paris and it's Banlieue we've had them in chemists for a month or so, and I've seen them in a supermarket today (box of 50 for 39 EUR). At work we've had them delivered from our office supplies company.

31:

Got some from Sainsbury's via online shopping on Thursday

32:

Charlie Point 4 Scummings (etc) And business as usual with corrupt tory politicos grabbing wadloads as well. What the wankers don't realise is that once you've politicised the Civil Srevice, someone else can do it it you, too. The usual American (USA) mistake, in fact. Whewnever this guvmint goes, I think Starmer will be elected & then some reaming will take place...

"What did I miss?" You didn't mention religious scum Erdogan, tryhing to tuen Haga Sophia into a mosque, the shit. "BLM" - about time too, but WOMEN are still bottom-of-the-heap, as The Boss rants on about, about once a week ... I wish she wouldn't, but who else is she going to rant at?

15: Indeed - a monumental, expensive & utterly unnecessary fuck=up. They are utterly paranoid about the ECJ.

22: Now than Moldove=a is.is_not an Ru puppet, or is that Transnistria? Shit, it's confusing.17:43 01/07/2020

Cloudster Our monkeys are occasionally sane - but the public are much more cynical & people are watching & listening. If it gets too bad, BoZo might actually go _ & he knows this. But he's got to find someone else to blame, like the nasty fascict Patel, for that matter, who always tries to shift blame elsewhere.

Origaku IF I go onto public trnasport, I will wear a mask. If, however, I'm out of doors I will not wear a mask My mask is, however, an industrial metal-mesh screen that folds down from a head band - it's actually meant to protect your face if you are using a strimmer or a band-saw. Light, washable & easily removable, if a little bulky - AND - it does NOT restrict my breathing.

33:

Surgical masks in the US are under $1 each from Amazon. And in the local office supply places for $1 to $2 each.

This is for boxes of 25 or 50.

Various places will sell you them one at a time for stupid prices.

34:

Charlie, about a possible new world....

I'm sort of freaking out. I have a trilogy of three short stories, set in my future universe (of which the novel is with beta readers), set about 60-75 years from now, and the climax, in the third, is where most of the nations of the UN vote to become part of a world-wide confederation (yes, more than the EU). The only impetus that I had in the stories I'd written before March that we haven't seen is billionaires running literal wars, and using genengineered viruses against each other.

But then, we've got pandemic.

35:

Cancer survivor, here. I wish your sister the best of luck.

36:

Ghu, as someone who was in the streets during 'Nam... and here I was, thinking of the jobs moved to 'Nam, but this is really it.

Along with the US GOP-and-Batista-supporters-and-literal-Mafia-led embargo of Cuba, which produces tons and tons of medical professionals....

37:

My late wife and I, when we first got together, were both filkers, and both sang in the same true-fannish key: OFF.

So, care to sing in harmony on this one?

Did they register their GUNZ? Did they serve on a jury? Did they pay all of their taxes? DID THEY FUCKING VOTE, AND PUSH OTHERS OUT TO VOTE??!?!?!?!

No "rights" without DUTIES.

Best of luck on the illness, guy.

38:

[Jaw falls to chest.]

Counterfeit Russian choppers? I, ahhh, er,...

You're sure this isn't the plot of a comedy crime thriller?

39:

Make a cloth one. They're not that complicated, and there are a LOT of patterns and instructions, even for the sewing impaired.

DO NOT FUCKING GO OUT WITHOUT ONE.

40:

Sorry, no. The Hairball would find that vastly too complicated, esp. since it would need at least a month of planning before the numbers hit.

Re the Atlantic article - you didn't mention it was by James Fallows, one of the US senior and most-respected journalists.

41:

Oh, Charlie, Greg, Nojay, et al: for the first time, ever, I'm afraid I have to say I'm happy with something BoJo did: he's just come out saying, in an Israeli newspaper, that the Nut-an-yahoo's annexation of parts of the West Bank is a terrible idea.

42:

This one is pretty easy to make: https://blog.japanesecreations.com/no-sew-face-mask-with-handkerchief-and-hair-tie A couple of safety pins keep it together a bit better than without.

43:

"Did you spot the bit about the Attack Macaque in Downing Street spaffing £500M (about $650M in today's cash) on buying the wrong satellites?"

I think people are a little too fast to rush into the "buying the wrong satellites" narritive here.

Correct: They absolutely cannot implement a Galileo-UK with those satellites.

However, sending weak PRNG's from halfway to geostationary orbit is far from the only way to implement radio-navigation and precision timing (see for instance: Transit satellites)

For all the money EU has drained down in Galileo they have gotten very small tangible benefits, and in particular Galileo is exactly as easy to jam as GPS.

The first draft of the EU-Radionavigation plan, a decade ago, came to the conclusion that pouring a few tens of million euros into LORAN-C would provide 40% of all possible RNAV benefits to EU, whereas pouring a billion euros into Galileo would provide only 12%.

That was not the message EU wanted at the time where they were trying to rationalize spending billions on their failed GPS-blackmail-gamble.

So what can UK('s Military) do with hundred(s) of LEO satellites.

For starters, those satellites have really good GNSS receivers and nobody is going to jam those receivers, certainly not all of them.

That means UK can downlink differential-GPS which is also usable for integrity, and they can downlink it from multiple directions at the same time.

So for starters, they now have the worlds most robust GNSS integrity service, (though nowhere as robust as eLoran would have been).

Second, they can start to use the LEO satellites for primary navigation.

That means using the onboard GNSS receivers and laser-ranging to find precise orbits for the satellites and making some feature of their downlink usable for time measurement.

Given that the LEO satellites can use their GNSS receivers to probe the ionosphere on the limb, and given enough satellites, that suddenly moves the goal-posts to places the existing GNSS services have no way of going.

There are some very smart GNSS people in UK, if they are behind this, or at least involved and funded, then UK didn't buy the wrong satellites.

44:

P H-K Provided of course, that they CAN buy it, or enough of it ... Apparently the US or US companies own a lot of it ... as does, oh dear - Airbus. See today's copy of Private Eye .....

45:

Unfortunately, that is only hot air. The UK's policy for some time has been to say that sort of thing in public and privately support the no permitted term for those shits in Israel. Cameron broke that by openly talking about making support for BDS illegal, but I can witness that there has been a LOT of official pressure along those lines. And it takes the position that any opposition to Israel's oppression and aggression is terrorism. Also witness the witch-hunts of anyone who dares speak up for the Palestinians.

46:

I've been making bandana/hankerchief masks for months. Here are my notes:

If you've got a large head like mine, a hair tie won't go around your ears. I had some elastic cord lying around, so I used lengths of that tied in loops with fisherman's knots to change the length.

I sandwich half a coffee basket filter in each cotton mask for added protection

When thin cotton bandanas come out of the wash (and they should be washed after extended uses around people, they really need to be ironed back into shape for optimal mask work.

That said, I've been watching what's going on in Korea, where masks are necessary to protect against the dust blowing out of northern China every winter. Over there, masks are becoming fashion accessories as well as functional. Once every clued-in person over here was wearing fitted masks and giving me odd looks when I wore a bandana, I bought a bunch of fitted masks and switched over. I don't think this particular fashion item's going to go away even if Covid19 does, for the same reason they've been popular in China, Japan, and Korea for years: they're useful.

Still, you can get bags of Indian made bandana for dirt cheap on BigRiver, so if you're desperate, it's certainly a way to go.

47:

This has been a year. I am fairly sure that a part of the vast collective groan I am hearing is emanating from the souls of authors across the genres as they realize that whatever book they are writing will need some pandemic revisions.

Optimistic view: The global pandemic is doing a masterful job of underlining in bold face just how morally and functionally bankrupt the recent wave of populist strongman types actually are when it comes to the operation of government. It is also highlighting the fundamental awfulness of 'free market' fundamentalism, and the naked hostility and brutality of much of so-called conservative politics on the anglosphere (and some otherspheres as well).

Pessimistic view: The pandemic combined with rolling economic collapse are perfectly times with the mounting climate crisis to obliterate many of the long neglected foundations of civil society. The triple threat of collapsing democratic systems, failing governments and massively corrupt oligarchs are fundamentally unprepared and unable to deal with one of these problems and utterly unable to even begin grasping several at once.

The next couple of years are going to be the very definition of 'interesting times'. I don't think anything is off the table, up to and including super (or at least very large) power shooting wars. No matter how ill advised or suicidal, 'the fox when cornered will turn to face the hounds'.

48:

This is an "update" from my long hiatus due to being tied to bed and recovering, and also a rant, and of course I don't even expect anyone to challenge me with questions on this blog anymore. So there.

I missed: the rest of the world, where populist authoritarian leaders everywhere are trying to make Trump and Johnson's handling of COVID19 look magisterial and professional, from Brazil's Bolsonaro to Russia's Putin. A typical mistake - you did not see anything but what the news show you. I have seen this from the ground. I have walked through everything and I know first hand how bad situation is. More than that, while (it turned out that) I live in one of the most depressive and corrupted regions (we are in last 10 out of 85 on recent internal ministry report, from those people who actually care to fight corruption and not the government), but also from my experience I am assuming that in the rest of the world isn't faring much better, despite all the populous bravado. Epidemic has become new normality, so people are now more resilient to disasters and don't see that it is useful anymore to report anything. Ignoramuses, OTOH, remain ignorant, for this is their job.

Long story short, this is what happens - local administration and health organizations receive money from federal government, sometimes from local governments, but instead of giving it as help to people as ordered, these organizations invent new reasons to not do it and instead steal these money for themselves. It is now an emergency, so apparently it is impossible to track what is really happening. People are not receiving proper diagnosis for COVID, because proper diagnosis requires proper medication and proper payout to the medical staff - as ordered by Presidential decree, no less. In other news, I cannot finish my sick leave payout because the hospital made a mistake in documents, and is not responding to my queries, and half of the staff are either ill, missing, or on vacation.

I can name at least 8 people I know (including myself) who went through COVID with 100% confidence (and now recovered), but because tests are irregular and require stupid conditions, it was tested positive only for about two of them. One of my relatives died in the process due to old age, and hospital did not sign off his as a victim of epidemic, and apparently the keys from his apartment are missing too. I can say, people are surviving only because they have strong connection between each other, they understand the situation among themselves, and do not rely only official and social services. A lot of them still don't believe that there's anything serious about this epidemic - but they wear masks and uphold order. I imagine, most citizens from "civilized world" would not tell such stories about their country, this is embarrassing, it is bad for reputation, it is antisocial. I don't give a damn, I have the right for free speech, I don't care about reputation - it is non-existing anyway, by the nature of it, so you can fully experience the world we live in. I already told this story to every person I care about.

What our government should do to prevent this, expand it's useless bureaucratic machine even more to deal with the corruption? Oh wait, it will only lead to even more corruption and probably to complete dysfunction. What else can federal government do, send death squads? Oh wait, it is not allowed, it is "totalitarianism" and "human rights violation". Certainly, there are people who cannot be touched, no matter what they've done, because they belong to a special cohort, selected by special characteristics. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/renowned-russian-director-convicted-of-embezzlement-in-what-critics-call-a-show-trial/2020/06/26/ee8031d6-b776-11ea-a510-55bf26485c93_story.html They call this shitter "leading", "progressive", "supportive to". I don't give a crap. I never heard of of him before trial. I want his ass working out his debt for the next 10 years in the Siberian woods, but no, it is not corruption to send him home with suspended sentence. Turns out, it is corruption to even have a trial against him. These "human rights activists" want to take the rest of our future from us. I want them dead to the rights and working out their damages.

I totally didn't see Black Lives Matter turning into a global protest movement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztVMib1T4T4 I don't think it is going to be same for countries that did not have afro-american slavery. Also, global protest movement, ofc, is not a populist authoritarian movement, no-no-no. If you yell every day that you are for freedom and human rights, and everybody gets cookies, then you cannot be designated as a bad actor. Though I actually think that global movement for gay rights is more global than BLM riots, considering the US embassies are ready to place the rainbow flag above their national flag. https://time.com/5603545/embassies-pride-flag-trump-denials/ https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/us-embassy-seoul-blm-banner/index.html

A new world is being born. I just hope I live to see it, and that there's room in it for someone like me to exist. That is a very big question, but I am fairly certain that previous world we lived in was totally unsuitable for people like me and I am hating it with passion like the rest of the people on the streets. It's just most of us over here in this country know what "revolution" really means, and those who are rioting and protesting don't really know what they are asking for. But I really hope they will receive that in full.

49:

One minorly hopeful thing we've not mentioned in this blog entry is that, at least in the U.S., knowledge-based work does NOT need to take place in a physical office; at least not all the time. I've spent the last three months working from my easy chair and my only real lacks have been no access to the paper historical files at my office, and no ability to go to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Library of Congress (LOC) to access hard copy historical records there.

I very much doubt I'll ever go back to a 9 to 5 work schedule at the office. More likely I'll do 1-2 days a week for hands-on research and spend the rest of the time writing it up.

My experience is probably far from unique. I expect many government organizations and private companies will lean much more heavily on remote work in the future, if for no other reason than to save money on office space and equipment.

That sucks if you're an extrovert, but happy times for me.

50:

Long story short, this is what happens - local administration and health organizations receive money from federal government, sometimes from local governments, but instead of giving it as help to people as ordered, these organizations invent new reasons to not do it and instead steal these money for themselves.

That's not what's happening in Scotland. England (different government) is more prone to cronyism, and a lot more inept at channeling funds to sick people: there's cronyism and corruption there, but typically b/c incompetent politicians demand action then commission companies owned by people they know to do the work. (They then fail, and there's a scandal. But we're in a political gridlock due to Brexiters having a choke-hold on government, so ...)

The USA, at least the Republican-led central government, has a really bad case of corrupt dealing in how funds are being disbursed. Lower levels appear to handle it differently depending on the partisan alignment of the local government.

I totally didn't see Black Lives Matter turning into a global protest movement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztVMib1T4T4 I don't think it is going to be same for countries that did not have afro-american slavery. Also, global protest movement, ofc, is not a populist authoritarian movement, no-no-no.

It went viral all over Europe. There are BLM demos in the UK, in France, in Spain ... and there's a growing scandal in London over how the Metropolitan police have been going backward over addressing institutional racism in the past 30 years (and similar issues in other forces). And I will note that most of these countries abolished slavery a considerable time before the US, and without having to fight a civil war to suppress the slave-owners.

Where it's going? I don't know.

51:

Examples of reporting on medical glass shortage, sieved from the first page of google.

Reuters: Schott AG won't let suppliers reserve production until they know it works - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-schott-exclusive/exclusive-bottlenecks-glass-vial-makers-prepare-for-covid-19-vaccine-idUSKBN23J0SN

ABC News: A bunch of supply-chain anecdotes, also alleging the US govt is working on production (not holding my breath) https://abcnews.go.com/Health/strained-supply-chain-glass-vials-delay-coronavirus-vaccine/story?id=71349287

fivethirtyeight: Reports that medical glass has had shortages for the last 5 years, and this isn't helping https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-covid-19-is-wreaking-havoc-on-our-ability-to-make-things-including-vaccines/

52:

Hi, guy.

Geez, I don't know what to say, other than I'm very glad you made it through. Are you still in bed a lot of the time, or walking and doing stuff?

Your situation, oh, shit. I don't know the answer, other than to have a team walk into each office, have an all-hands, shoot the one in charge, promote the assistant, and tell them that they will meet an audit in one week.

Of course, I'd like to do that to the GOP... and then tell the Pentagon, no successful audit, 10% cut this years in budgets. No successful audit next year, your budget's down 20% from today....

Best of luck. Maybe someday, we'll all get together, and I can buy you a beer.

53:

I'd have hated that. Work is set up for work, my study is not.

At least now, retired, I can write as the story tells itself to me - I just finished night before last a short story that took well over a month until it told me how it was going to go.

Oh, and all of this gave me the final word to shove down capitalists and libertarians mouths to choke on: if the Invisible Hand of the market's so great, within a couple of weeks of, say, mid-March, there were no shortages of PPE, right?

Right?

54:

Jake @ 27: I can't speak for everyone, but I wouldn't have the first clue where to buy one; they were on sale in a local corner shop at one point, for a ridiculous mark-up, but they're long gone. I was also under the impression that there were barely enough to go around for frontline NHS workers; for an unemployed chronic depressive like me to buy even a single box of them seems rather selfish in the circumstances.

Since you mention NHS, I'm presuming you're somewhere in the U.K. There shouldn't be any shortages now. I mean if masks are readily available in the U.S. despite everything Trumpolini's boy blunder Covid-19 Czar Jared Where’s our Mideast peace deal, dude? Kushner could do to fuck it up, they should be available over there (on the assumption that whoever was in charge over there was slightly less incompetent than boy blunder ... if not, disregard).

I'd check Staples or Office Depot, since businesses are going to need them to reopen. Plus the local supermarkets seem to have them in stock.

I made my own the first week or so of the lock-down. Found a pattern on-line that I could follow & sacrificed an old Magnum PI shirt & a fine linen dinner napkin for the material.

55:

David L @ 33: Surgical masks in the US are under $1 each from Amazon. And in the local office supply places for $1 to $2 each.

This is for boxes of 25 or 50.

Various places will sell you them one at a time for stupid prices.

Amazon also has the filter-holder type cloth masks that take charcoal filters for around $20 and packages of 50 filters for about $11. I haven't seen anyone local carrying those, but I haven't been out that much.

Wegman's has the washable cloth masks that really hug your face for $5.

I found a cool mask on-line that's supposed to look like the business end of an A-10 Warthog, so that's what I've been wearing every day when I take the dog out. I am wearing the mask on these little outings even though I'm unlikely to meet anyone where I can't stay at least 10 feet away (or more), so "social distancing" would be all I need, but I like to set a good example.

56:

Maybe the pandemic will lead to socialism becoming more popular? It has done a good job of revealing the flaws in the capitalist "work hard and you'll be fine" philosophy. Their poster children, the small business owner who built up from nothing, are going to the wall, no matter how many long hours they pull. Whereas everyone has now had a good demonstration of when the state should be stepping in, both in public health and the furlough scheme. We are all benefits claimants now

Talking of which, and also regarding the track and trace disaster in the UK-in the front of Private Eye was a paragraph on how the furlough and small business payments system has, much to everyones surprise, been a complete success. It was built in house, very quickly and very cheaply. You don't get that with outsourcing.

57:

Ongaku @ 42: This one is pretty easy to make:
https://blog.japanesecreations.com/no-sew-face-mask-with-handkerchief-and-hair-tie
A couple of safety pins keep it together a bit better than without.

I made a variation on the Hong Kong mask because it had a You Tube video that showed how to sew every seam. Variation because I didn't have the bendable nose wire or the charcoal filters. I substituted a length of of rebar tying "tie-wire" & a couple of folded up 12 cup Mr. coffee filters. I'll rebuild it once the nose wires I ordered from Amazon get here in August.

In the meantime, I've got my A-10 Warthog mask (already got the T-shirt last year).

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33569/support-first-responders-and-look-brrrrtttiful-with-this-a-10-warthog-mask-and-t-shirt

I'll probably pick up a spare mask from Wegman's when I do my grocery shopping on Saturday.

58:

Bernie, the DSA, and the tax cuts for the rich, and how badly everyone but the 1% has been doing since '08 set it up. This is crunch time.

This idiot real estate agent comes by every year, and puts out plastic American flags on a stick (presumably made in China) every year before the 4th of July.

Ellen went out, got it, unstapled it, turned the flag upside down, restapled it and put it out there again.

At least this year, we've got it right.

59:

Sleepingroutine & Charlie - Not to mention the ex-KGB corrupt agent now in charge of the Russian Empire, of course ...

Moderators #59 from "Sommypan" appears to be self-promoting SPAM ...

[[ Removed - mod ]]

60:

It is odd that there hasn't been any noticable spike yet due to the protests and huge beach gatherings we've seen in the UK. And due to the rugby-scrums developing outside some shops when they re-opened. And, except in countries like New Zealand which kept the virus out almost entirely, everywhere that the virus gained a foothold has seen death tolls similar (per million) within a factor of 2 (varying from 350 per 100K to 700 per 100K) almost regardless of what level of measures were taken. Some of the "epidemiological dark matter" theories might actually fit the data, there have been recent reports from Sweden that immunity has been found in far more of the population than have been infected, and a careful analysis by the WHO of worldwide case tracing data found very few incidences where anyone asymptomatic passed the virus on (despite this not correlating with the models of what had ben expected). Logically we should not be able to get herd immunity at the maybe as high as 25% of people who've caught the virus in a lot of european countries, but this virus might be behaving in ways which the models could not predict. I don't think there's any chance of a big rise of cases in summer, the real test will come when air conditioning gets turned back on in the autumn, if the virus doesn't spread much at that time then perhaps there is some sort of herd immunity already at a sufficient level to stop it. With luck there might be a chance that it'll be over by christmas.

61:

Horse hockey.

Excerpt: Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, told MPs too many assumptions had already been made during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There has been a week-on-week rise in UK deaths with 176 recorded in the previous 24 hours, comparing with 154 seven days ago.

The UK total is now 43,906. --- end excerpt ---

Not that the Mirror is a great source of news....

It is clear from a LOT of evidence that mask-wearing DOES make a difference - did you see the news of the two hairdressers?

Or are you just a drive-by right-wing conspiricist?

62:

Flu will be back, flu always comes back. The lockdowns don't seem to have done that much to stop covid-19, in many places the peak seemed to have started declinging when people took the less intrusive hygiene precautions, in a lot of places the infection rates were dropping several days before the lockdown was introduced. The death tolls, being some three weeks behind the initial infections, didn't peak until two and a bit weeks after the lockdown began. They couldn't have known it at the time, but it might be pretty plausible to suggest that good hygiene and cutting down on long distance travel, large events, and close contact in some aspects of the hospitality sector, might have ben enough to stop covid on their own without lockdowns. So I think flu could well be, as it does every year, hiding under the radar waiting for a winter return. And flu, unlike covid-19, mutates a lot, that's why it keeps coming back. We've been very lucky that covid-19 doesn't seem to mutate much, so once it is gone maybe it won't return, although we'd need to have mass use of a vaccine to fully guarantee that covid, however much it may appear to decline, is fully gone FOREVER(just look at how measles has been able to return in places due to lack of vaccinations, and just worry how many people have had measles jabs cancelled because of the lockdowns).

63:

Crispin Odey to sue German regulator over Wirecard short selling ban

Crispin Odey is preparing to sue Germany’s financial regulator for millions of pounds worth of lost profit after it banned the short selling of Wirecard shares for two months last year.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/crispin-odey-to-sue-german-regulator-over-wirecard-short-selling-ban-388cwdpb0

Note the Time, Date, Location and So on. The question you probably should ask is why he's concerned about last year (E190 - 100 rather than.... 100 - 0).

Plus, kinda depressing. You missed the actual fun points. Aww, little US Americans can't handle their OPs being spread out for all to see :sadpanda:.

https://twitter.com/BondHack/status/1278313888191320065

~

Old Men, cannot handle the heat: You Love to See it.

64:

As measures go masks look like they could be some of the most effective, I try to remember to wear one whenever I'm anywhere that's crowded.

65:

Three things:

1 No, It's not the "mystical Benjumain" (hat-tip April) out there, it's other stuff, far more spikey. Little Bears have been learning ALGO style how to do it. Hey, kids: field test exists, stop all being so fucking predictable. 2 HackerNews: DAX DOWN. Oh.. thread deleted. Anyhow, T7 architecture stuff: tee-hee. 3 Like: delete shit if you want, it was all true. Don't give a shit if your feelings were hurt, +600,000 humans just died 'cause of your fucking inability to deal with shit.

~

Natch.

66:

"I can't speak for everyone, but I wouldn't have the first clue where to buy one; they were on sale in a local corner shop at one point, for a ridiculous mark-up, but they're long gone. I was also under the impression that there were barely enough to go around for frontline NHS workers; for an unemployed chronic depressive like me to buy even a single box of them seems rather selfish in the circumstances."

In the USA (Michigan) ordinary masks (not N95) are in lavish supply and sold everywhere, in a wide variety of styles and colors.

67:

176 versus 154 is statistical noise, there's massive periodicity to the daily announced death tolls just because of how deaths don't get registered so easily at the weekend, overall the rates have got pretty stable at the moment. I'm no right-winger, I just think that the harm of the lockdown was too great to have been worth it, and I have some real doubts about the assumptions made in the models which lead to lockdown being declared. But I'm all for masks, hygiene, keeping several metres apart whenever feasible, and other non-intrusive measures. Public health is something that needs to be done by the public, give everyone a sense that they are dong their bit by going about life but keeping up practical infection control measures.

68:

We're not in a second wave, particularly the states (outside of California) that currently are wildfiring with new cases, the RED states -- they never shut down at all. This is all the first wave. And because of the way it is NOT handled here, deliberately not handled, these aren't even going to be waves, or curves flattened or not, but loops. NYC gets its contagion under control -- those who ran to hide from Covid-19 there are now coming here, dragging the infection along with them.

Plus the Young are utterly regardless of any safety behaviors. Masks, what are those? The restaurant-bars 6", what is that?

We have gone through 4 months of hell, wondering how we'll survive. And now we begin all over again, with month 5. That's right, I've already been isolated for FOUR STRAIGHT MONTHS.

It's so depressing so hopeless. What am I doing all this FOR? We work very hard at safety. Not to mention just the constant cleaning to keep the starved aggressive vermin from showing up. We manage a good 8 - 9 hours of exercise a week, including even light weights and cardio -- in our very tiny, cramped apartment. We keep to schedules, we keep productive. But why? when there is no end to this shyte in sight because the US and the UK can't be arsed to behave in any remotely decent, socially conscious, caring way for its citizens?

The world as we knew it is really over. The US alone is so big, with so many people, this stuff is here to stay. And the news about vaccines isn't, let's face it, terribly inspirational, especially when the idjiots think if there is one it's just a license to going back the way we've always been, which is the reason we're in this catastrophe in the first place. (Plus all the other catastrophes on going and waiting in line.)

69:

I think the concern is more about "laboratory" glass vessels in which to run the vaccine production cultures, as opposed to distribution. I don't think you'd want glass for distribution, if it got smashed that would be a lot of valuable vaccine gone to waster. Actually, as distribution goes, a covid-19 vaccine, hoping one can be developed (plenty of candidates on the way so the chances are good), would be good to try with patch based "injection" rather than needles. One of the big difficulties for vaccination huge populations is keeping the injectable liquid chileld during transport, and this makes use in the developing world really tough. Several american universities have been doing work on skin patch vaccines with micro-needles in them, these can be sent through regular postal services and don't ned specialist needle training to administer them. Covid-19 would be a great proving ground for patch vaccine technology, they'd be such an effective way to get the vaccine distributed, and encourage anyone wih a fear of needles not to shy away from it.

70:

In the UK they're even being marketed, at marked up prices, in the classified adverts in the back of newspapers, where discount clothing brands and shoes sized for the elderly are often marketed. For better prices most corner shops and suprmarkets are selling them now.

71:

What we will say is this: Doxxing shells and summoning the forces of banality (Law, Economy etc) against us has a large cost. Apparently a multi-trillion dollar and personal loss but we don't work the Cosmic Numbers. Meh.

Especially if you then cry and weep when you've been proven wrong and demand deletion, against the Declarations of Your Own People. Jericho. Might want to re-read what G_D said about it. Hint: look for the bits about "if non-hostile". Horn breaks, curses, undying enmity blah blah.

~

1000% loving the fact certain people got busted and cried. It's only a Film / Book.

"I CAN'T BREATH"

shrug

Humans: can never tell when breaking the rules is fine, and getting diseases is compassionate after they broke three border control rules or when just being fucking melanin challenged is enough for the full knee-head / chest compression death march.

Hey - David. We do know it is done deliberately. Yeah. Just like dem Walls.

72:

Moderators: RalphB writes

...The lockdowns don't seem to have done that much to stop covid-19,----

Which is demonstrably false.

...176 versus 154 is statistical noise, there's massive periodicity to the daily announced death tolls....

Which is the first time I've ever heard 12.5% being referred to as "statistical noise". That's usually 4% or so.

I think this is a paid, trolling poster, mods.

73:

Plus the Young are utterly regardless of any safety behaviors. Masks, what are those? The restaurant-bars 6", what is that? Young people think they're immortal.Some might even think its a one-time chance to get rid of the boomers and not to be wasted.

75:

Similarly the sort of corruption described doesn’t appear to be prevalent in Australia. We’ve had various sorts of political and especially police corruption in living memory, but not this sort of difficult-to-hide direct impact on service delivery (much as, frankly, the conservative side of politics tries to implement such things on the same privatisation and cronyist trajectory as in other places). Healthcare is mostly a state issue here, with the feds providing a co-ordinating role mostly. At the moment there has been a spike of community transmission in Victoria, while other states are starting to relax restrictions.

We have had BLM protests too and for the same reasons as the USA: indigenous people are far more likely to find themselves in the watch house, and far more likely to exit it in a body bag. Police perpetrators are just as unlikely to face real consequences as in the USA, although there are instances where this does happen. There is a tendency for some police forces to escalate peaceful protests with violence, but it is far more usual for such protests to conclude with no violence. Claims that protestors here are “authoritarian” are a bit preposterous (though some commentators will certainly make them).

76:

I once thought that the worst that could happen under a Trump presidency would be him being the leader who would greet the arriving aliens. Trump in charge of an epidemic is even worse!

That being said, you seem to be a little grimmer than the situation demands - if you're lucky enough that your situation allows you to stay inside you're in much better shape than the rest of us. Meanwhile, do you have a back yard or patio space you can spend time in? Maybe a back yard or patio space? I've found great solace in gardening these days, and I'm almost done with my novel. (The elevator pitch is "Orcish noble with PTSD comes town not long after a war, and hijinks ensue.")

77:

Ey oop.

Wirecard has just had the use of its services banned (temporarily, for a week or so, now lifted) in the UK. I discovered this when the card I use for paying wankers who don't accept actual money stopped working without warning. I'd never heard of them before that. It appears they were lurking unsuspected behind the scenes of quite a lot of things which also stopped working. So one can hope that the judge will have been one of those affected...

78:

I thought the crisis would bring the revolution on, but people are too stupid to notice the really obvious.

Governments whose policy is "you can all fuck off and die because we don't want to spend any money and we can't be arsed anyway". But nobody has strung them from the lamp posts. Instead we get people blathering about "herd immunity" as if it had any meaning beyond a euphemism for that policy, and holding massive "fuck you" events in opposition to what little the government has actually done to help.

Lots of stuff about "people need to get back to work" but none of it is "because society is suffering from the lack of [whatever it is that they normally produce when they're at work]" (after all, the people doing that kind of work are mostly still doing it), it's all "because I need the money". That is, people who have fallen through the holes in the eligibility for being paid to lie fallow, etc. The people who haven't are basically OK. Nobody cares about the stuff they're not doing. But also nobody has noticed that that means it makes just as much sense to just give them the money anyway without making them do stuff nobody cares about as a precondition, and it continues to make sense whether there's a disease around or not.

Lots of complaint about the consequences of anathematising stock and capability, of trying to operate every function of an entire country like a bunch of recursive Chinese hitmen, etc, but not about the practices themselves. It blames all the disruption on the inadequacy of reactive measures taken after the event (and without considering whether that's an adequate explanation or not, either), and never bothers to attack the practices which made those measures necessary in the first place.

And now people have stopped believing they're going to die because it hasn't happened yet so they think it isn't going to. Maybe we should be putting all the people who have died of it out on open-air display to stink up the High Street and make sure people don't forget it's real.

79:

@ Really? (comment 80)

Your username is apt, because that was my response when I read your post.

I don't know where you're getting that from, but this might have some numbers for you: https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/indigenous-deaths-custody-chapter-3-comparison-indigenous-and-non-indigenous-deaths

A summary says: The death rate for indigenous people was 5.65 per 100,000 of the general Aboriginal population. The rate for non-Aboriginal people was 0.3. The ratio of these rates indicates that Aboriginal people were 16.5 times more likely to die in custody.

Anecdotally, two or three deaths seem to make the news every year or so... my wife has worked with indigenous students and colleagues, and they have many stories of how their people are treated by the law here which are pretty terrible. I'd say the real number doesn't make the Murdoch press over here for some reason.

80:

Dude... I don't know what you're smoking, but I really want some... Whooaaah... You know, there could be an entire universe under your fingernail?

81:

"We no longer take responsibility for our actions. If we do something and it goes wrong, well, it was the other guy's fault! "

Oh, we have that here, too. It's all:

  • Everything is someone else's fault.
  • That means they have to give you money.
  • Nobody is allowed to point out that in fact you brought it all on yourself by being too stupid to walk in the same direction your feet are pointing.

On the other side, if you are "someone else", insurance becomes a substitute for competence.

82:

In 2019 there were 9 unarmed African Americans and 20 unarmed Caucasians killed by police action in the US.

That's a very definite statement, do you have a link?

As far as I know those statistics are not collected at a national level, and generally also not at a state level. So I'm tempted to read that as "I personally know of these cases, so I am certain that the numbers cannot be less than this". Which I can very easily believe.

83:

Wirecard

You do understand they are likely to vanish soon due to severe accounting issues. Like a missing 1.9€ on the books that likely never existed.

84:

"There's a growing, seemingly global, sense that we can't or shouldn't go back to the status quo ante"

You reckon? On here perhaps, but all I can see is "when this is over we can all go back to normal again". It's disappointed the crap out of me that all the really obvious lessons about what we were doing wrong are being ignored, resisted, deflected or blamed on something else, or just still aren't obvious enough in relation to the average endemic cluelessness level. They say every cloud has a silver lining, but this one seems to be full of hydrogen sulphide, as if someone's trumped in it.

Wars are different because the killing is a lot more concentrated and selective, so it makes a much more conspicuous difference. See WW1 and Kansas flu overlapping but compared to the war the disease hardly being noticed beyond a few generals saying what a nuisance it was their troops going sick with it.

85:

What about that chap who made his own fake currency and ripped off something like a third of all the money in the whole of Portugal with it? Or was it Spain? Now that's how you really do it.

86:

RalpB CORRECTION ( possibly ) ... ....that immunity has been found in far more of the population than have been knwon to be infected ... I suspect the actual exposure rate is much higher. I know of two people, in my quite limited circle, who have actually had the virus, to the point of being ill - neither has appeared in the official statistics. And so on ... Oh yes, there was a nasty wave of "Something" over the Xmas/New Year period - was that C-19 or something else? WHat we can be certain of - is that we don't know enoough.

BUT this statement: The lockdowns don't seem to have done that much to stop covid-19 is definitely wrong

Really? Your history is so utterly wrong as to be complete fiction. There was never, ever a chance of Britain even recognising the S, never mind sending troops. [ Yes, certain greedy commercial interests lobbied for it ... big hairy deal ]

@ 81 You are a troll & I claim my $500!

As Aunty Jack @ 83 has noted - THANK YOU. And Really? @ 90 The risk of an unarmed African American dying at the hands of police is extremely low in the US. Calling you out on that one. Are you deluded, or are you deliberately lying? Query to moderators of something this anti-factual, actually.

87:

Well, I know I don't have the knowledge required to sort in medical papers what's really anomalous and what's the normal level of hype found in pretty much every scientific paper. I was hoping you did :-)

88:

The lack of scientific research on coronavirus can be directly linked to the lack of funding. Roughly two years after sars-cov funding for vaccine research in particular was essentially stopped because there were more important things to work on, according to the politically-set research targets. The scientific community didn't have much of a say in there.

Fundamental research is considered very important as long as it's done by other countries.

89:

I am afraid not. I have enough relevant experience to ignore the majority of the crap, as well as realise when the authors are reporting something they don't expect, but not a huge amount more than that. Virology and immunology are very complicated and poorly understood areas of medicine.

I do know enough about epidemiology to recognise that it is behaving somewhat unusually, and to follow the experts' statements about the same aspects. In particular, it appears to be spread primarily by a very small proportion of the people infected, but it's unclear why.

90:

You can't even type my three letter name correctly, but that seems to match the general accuracy of what you write here.

I note that you count people like this 14 year old with a toy gun as "armed":

4386 Antonio Arce 2019-01-15 shot toy weapon 14 M H

Not to mention all the people "armed with a vehicle"... is "bicycle used as weapon" a common cause of death where you live?

race unarmed vehicle toy weapon undetermined TOTAL B 250 14 18 4 1 37 W 402 25 25 13 10 73

Note that about 13% of the USA identify as black, but somehow 35% of the police killings listed by the Washington Post are of blacks. And the WaPo are very clear that they don't hear about all the shootings, and don't count all the Police killings. If you want to compare that to Australia you have to account for the Australian Police shooting relatively few people, they prefer a more hands-on approach.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

The Post is documenting only those shootings in which a police officer, in the line of duty, shoots and kills a civilian — the circumstances that most closely parallel the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which began the protest movement culminating in Black Lives Matter and an increased focus on police accountability nationwide. The Post is not tracking deaths of people in police custody, fatal shootings by off-duty officers or non-shooting deaths.

The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete. Since 2015, The Post has documented more than twice as many fatal shootings by police as recorded on average annually.

91:

Sorry, I forgot that "tt" just sets the font and ignores the spacing.

   race   unarmed vehicle toy weapon  undetermined     TOTAL B   250      14      18      4             1              37 W   402      25      25     13            10              73

swapped in   for every second space and away we go.

92:

Is there any chance you could argue in good faith, even just once? Posting trivially wrong or easily refuted nonsense just makes you annoying. Right now I think you're in the assumption of charity area for a those responding to you. Viz, we're thinking that surely you can't be as stupid as your posts suggest. Or so naive as to think we're stupid enough to believe you despite the references you post.

Although in the case of your police shooting numbers you seem to think that only murdering unarmed black people at twice the rate of unarmed whites is somehow a defence of the police.

Viz, 9:20 (1:2.2) when the population is roughly 13:76 (1:5.8) so proportionately you'd expect about 3.4 black americans killed for every 20 white ones.

93:

my conclusion is this type of event is not prevalent in the US and doing a simple per capita correction for Australia would suggest very very unlikely in Australia.

I don't think you quite get the concept of per capita adjustments (hint: in the situation you discuss, they don't do what you seem to think here) and I'm not convinced you grasp "prevalence" (and it's relevance) either.

But those are both special cases of basic innumeracy, which I think is the underlying reason. You say you liked Neptune's Brood, so you may be one who takes an interest in macroeconomics and the concept of currency in the abstract. I'd hazard a guess that you quite liked Neal Stephenson's Reamde and Necronomicon partly because you think a gold standard would be pretty nifty and solve everything or something.So thinking about currency as inherently being a kind of debt might not work for you?

94:

RalphB wrote:

And, except in countries like New Zealand which kept the virus out almost entirely, everywhere that the virus gained a foothold has seen death tolls similar (per million) within a factor of 2 (varying from 350 per 100K to 700 per 100K) almost regardless of what level of measures were taken.

I'm not clear what number you're referring to with the 100K.

Do you mean 'per 100K of total population'? Then your numbers are clearly totally wrong. Examples (rounded): South Korea: ca. 300 deaths in a population of ca. 50,000,000 = ca. 0.6 deaths per 100K. Germany: ca. 9000 deaths in a population of ca. 80,000,000 = ca. 11.25 deaths per 100K. US: ca. 128,000 deaths in a population of ca. 300,000,000 = ca. 42.66 deaths per 100K. UK: ca. 44,000 deaths in a population of ca. 60,000,000 = ca. 73.33 deaths per 100K.

None of these are close to 350, much less to 700, but the range is much bigger (the largest is not double the smallest, but a hundredfold).

Or do you mean 'per 100K of known infections'? Same examples: South Korea: ca. 300 deaths in ca. 13,000 cases = ca. 2,308 deaths per 100K. Germany: ca. 9,000 deaths in ca. 195,000 cases = ca. 4,615 deaths per 100K. US: ca. 128,000 deaths in ca. 2,700,000 cases = ca. 4,740 deaths per 100K. UK: ca. 44,000 deaths in ca. 315,000 cases = ca. 13,968 deaths per 100K.

Again, none of these are close to 350 or 700, and the range is much bigger than twofold.

(All numbers of deaths and infections are taken from the Johns-Hopkins-dashboard at the time of writing.)

So what are your numbers referring to? I honestly have no idea.

95:

Personal addition: I wasn't really aware—before I just looked up all those numbers—that the UK is doing so much worse than even the US. It's a bit frightening…

96:

Yes. Those are the massaged figures, but are almost certainly of the right order. The UK is more like 55,000 and 65,000 excess deaths - the 44,000 is only the fatalities that actually got tested. As Bozo was crowing on about, we are currently a world leader in coronavirus :-(

'Really?' is at best deluded, and at worst a spammer.

97:

Latest Brexit stuff-up is that trucks will need copious paperwork and certificates from an as-yet undefined computer system before they can cross the UK borders (including the internal border to Northern Ireland)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CiSbSddw0E

98:

Administrative note

Commenter "Really?" never posted before this thread, has posted nearly 10% of the comments so far, takes a contrarian view on climate change, epidemiology, and a bunch of other issues, and appears to be a racial violence denialist as well (citing questionable statistics to back up an assertion that police violence against ethnic communities is rare).

I don't have time for this kind of shit so "Really?" is now banned and unpublished.

(I'm keeping an eye on new poster "RalphB" as well, at least until I can rule out an orchestrated astroturf campaign.)

99:

Really? @ 107 Well, your casual & not-even-wrong attitude to US police killings & British & international history do give one pause, at the very least.

100:

Oh of course flu will be back, it's just gone for this year without really having existed. We'll transcend to energy beings before we get rid of the flu it seems.

In France at least the confinment seems to have made it possible to apply the necessary hygiene/distancing measures in the first place. Otherwise work conditions just made it impossible. Plus it allowed to tide over the period where masks were in practice unavailable, and they seem to be the #1 prophylactic method, up there with no touching and no high human density workplaces.

101:

Moz ANOTHER showing that "brexit means less paperwork & bureaucracy" was quite simply a deliberate lie. Why am I not suprised?

102:

I was in the middle of posting this link in reply to the odious "Really"'s claim that the British supported the slavers in the civil war. The rich may have wanted to but the cotton mill workers put a stop to it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-21057494

103:

Oops

1.9€ x 10e9

104:

Mike Collins I've posted this link before - a YouTube of about 20 minutes, about the Anti_Slavery patrols of the RN. Worth a listen & look, if you have not seen it before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiSekII0sjw

105:
in a lot of places the infection rates were dropping several days before the lockdown was introduced.

Really? Where?

France started "confinement" (lockdown) on 17/3, peak infections was around 16/4 UK started lockdown on 23/3, peak infections was around 14/4

106:

Personal addition: I wasn't really aware—before I just looked up all those numbers—that the UK is doing so much worse than even the US. It's a bit frightening…"

It was a challenged to 'surpass' (undersurpass?) Trump, but the Tories managed it with Boris.

I'm convinced that the subtitle for the chapter on UK history for these years will be '(or How Britain lost its Great)'.

107:

Personal addition: I wasn't really aware—before I just looked up all those numbers—that the UK is doing so much worse than even the US. It's a bit frightening
The UK has a higher death rate (among largeish countries) than everywhere except Belgium.

Belgium: 846/million UK: 661/million Spain: 602/million Italy: 577/million Sweden: 520/million France: 444/million USA: 389/million

If break the US into individual states you get some frightening numbers:

New Jersey; 1698/million New York: 1647/million

108:

RalphB: "in a lot of places the infection rates were dropping several days before the lockdown was introduced. "

Michigan cases peaked on April 3; the lock down started on March 16. From my personal observation, the lockdown behavior started in the previous week.

Charles, at this point RalphB has been so clearly wrong that perhaps he needs a card.

109:

JBS @57: [Note - numbering has changed with removal of "Really?" troll]

Thanks for the 'Hog mask and t-shirt link! Will order today.

Mods - I greatly appreciate the diligence you apply to the blog comments; it makes this a very convivial space.

110:

I know a dentist in Wales.

Her PPE has not changed since last year.

She has one N95 mask. She's keeping it for emergencies where she has no choice but to intervene directly.

In case anyone has missed it, dentists' drills generate aerosols. From the mouth of the patient.

111:

John Hughes I think, as time progresses, the US rate will end up being the worst - certainly judging on present form.

113:

I don't know how the Tories' blundering is affecting political opinions in the (kinda) United Kingdom, but here in the U.S., El Cheeto Grande's criminally negligent mismanagement of the response to COVID-19 and his blatantly racist posturing with respect to the Black Lives Matter movement are making it increasingly likely that he'll be kicked out of office this November in a landslide for Joe Biden.

Just as important, the Jonestown suicide pact the Rethuglican Party has signed by supporting the Orange One gives the Democrats a real opportunity to take back the Senate and keep their House majority. And I'm really hoping that Amy McGrath (LtCol, USMC, ret.) will surprise Moscow Mitch McConnell and kick his ass right out of Kentucky.

114:

So what are your numbers referring to? I honestly have no idea.

The quality of right-wing trolls is definitely declining. Sad. Fake news.

115:

I don't know how the Tories' blundering is affecting political opinions in the (kinda) United Kingdom,

Johnson doesn't face re-election until late 2024, so we're fucked (at a UK level). However, his own party might well replace him as leader within the next few months to years.

In NI, his party are not part of the government or, really, the opposition: political alignment is Different, and there's a growing risk of a complete rupture with the UK, and a referendum on unification of Ireland, in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit transition.

Scotland faces a Scottish parliamentary election next May, and while the Tories look likely to be the largest opposition party, they're on course to be steamrollered by Nicola Sturgeon's SNP, who look likely to get more votes than the Conservatives and Labour combined. Johnson is personally disliked and distrusted by a majority of the Scottish population and is a positive driver of voters towards independence.

It is very hard to see this disconnect -- the Tories are solidly bedded in and have a big majority in England, but aren't even in the game in other parts of the UK -- getting better any time soon, especially during COVID19.

116:

If I found a mask that looked like the "business end" of a real warthog I might buy it. Tusks would be required.

117:

Wellllll....maybe. The reporting of cases has a systematic noise. I don't know if it's 12%, but that sounds about right. If the cases that die on Sunday don't get reported until Monday (the paperwork is important, but not urgent), then you'd expect a large oscillation. 1/7 is about a 14% oscillation, so it's clearly dampened.

Yeah, I could easily see a 12% variation in daily COVID deaths as statistical noise. It's systematic noise rather than random, but it's still noise.

118:

Re: Homemade masks

I've already mentioned this article before and will continue to repost it because a folded napkin or kerchief is NOT going to do the job.

If you're making your own mask, make it a 3-ply, 2-fabric (cotton & silk/chiffon) layered mask that covers snugly.

The rationale for these specific fabrics is that each does a different job - mechanical and electrical. The middle (silk/chiffon) layer typically develops/carries an electric charge which both attracts and traps very small particles (i.e., viruses).

Because of the electric charge aspect of this construction: NEVER use fabric softener when laundering multiple-ply masks - you'll be removing one of the working bits.

Also: air-dry your masks because the typical dryer temp is often too high and is likely to damage the fibers/fabric.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200424081648.htm

'In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people wear masks in public. Because N95 and surgical masks are scarce and should be reserved for health care workers, many people are making their own coverings. Now, researchers report in ACS Nano that a combination of cotton with natural silk or chiffon can effectively filter out aerosol particles -- if the fit is good.'

Here's the actual paper:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.0c03252

119:

The thing is, while the protestors aren't authoritarian, many of the "officially selected spokesmen" are. That the spokesmen are selected by the media for being "newsworthy" doesn't mean that they represent the values of those they are "speaking for". It means more that they're likely to say something to shock or offend.

That said, most of the protestors don't have a clearly enunciatable agenda. Generally what they're really saying is "conditions are intolerable", with a bit of specificity as to what those conditions are, e.g. suspects being killed without recourse or penalty. That isn't enough to make a 2 minute sound bite, though, so someone with a clear and moving position is selected to represent everyone else, without much regard as to whether that person does represent the general opinion.

120:

Pigeon @ 78: I thought the crisis would bring the revolution on, but people are too stupid to notice the really obvious.

Be careful what you wish for. Revolutions frequently don't know when to say "Enough is enough."

They start out all "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" and end up all Napoleon, Joseph Stalin or Pol Pott. And then comes the counter-revolution and that rarely has a good outcome either.

121:

And I'm really hoping that Amy McGrath (LtCol, USMC, ret.) will surprise Moscow Mitch McConnell and kick his ass right out of Kentucky.

That's about the hardest of the races listed as a possible R to D flip. But the money it will siphon off from other races is making lots of other D candidates happy.

In other words, she is likely (based on polling at this time) to loose but the cost of the R win by Mitch may allow other Ds to win.

122:

It also depends on the accuracy of the initial stage of reporting. This is quite dubious given that there are many cases where the death was not acknowledged until some external source reported it.

Police camera videos should not be entrusted to the police. They also should not be entrusted to the prosecution. They should be public records, subject to being purged if not requested after a reasonable period of time, say a few months. If ANY action is based on them, they should be permanently retained. And police acting without working cameras should be considered as "acting under color of law" and not as actual police officers.

123:

Hey, but give it 200 years or so and things can be running a bit more smoothly...

124:

Pigeon @ 85: What about that chap who made his own fake currency and ripped off something like a third of all the money in the whole of Portugal with it? Or was it Spain? Now that's how you really do it.

I don't think Wirecard originally was intended to be a fraud. They just hired the wrong guy as CEO and he took 'em down the path of Enron Accounting to pump up the value of his stock.

125:

There actually is ongoing work on a "universal influenza vaccine", and it may eventually pay off. It hypothesizes that sensitizing the immune system to one of the flu's invariant components would work. My guess is that the difficulty is that those pieces are hidden behind a net of other pieces, so the immune system won't be able to reach them, even if it tried, but I could well be wrong. And it's certainly worth trying.

126:

_Moz_ @ 92: Is there any chance you could argue in good faith, even just once?

Just out of curiosity, who were your addressing this to?

127:

According to US history, the British did support the South in the US Civil War. Reasons are arguable, and the extent of the support is a bit uncertain, but the existence is certain, and it's one of the reasons the South was able to continue as long as it did. I don't know anything about the British side of the story, though. I'd suspect that Britain wasn't exactly friendly with the US government, as well as obvious economic reasons.

128:

John Hughes @ 123: Hey, but give it 200 years or so and things can be running a bit more smoothly...

And I'm really glad that it turned out that way, but you gotta' admit the success of the American Revolution was an extreme outlier. Name another country where "the revolution" hasn't degenerated into tyranny within less than a generation.

And even here it's been a close run thing. Close enough I worry if we're going to make it to 250 ...

129:

Re: '... subject to being purged if not requested after a reasonable period of time, say a few months.'

Nope - length of time to trial can be years esp. in the US.

https://money.cnn.com/2016/05/10/news/bronx-court-lawsuit/index.html

'According to the suit, at the beginning of this year 2,378 misdemeanor cases had been pending for more than a year and 538 had been pending for more than two years. On average, defendants can wait 642 days for a non-jury trial and 827 days for a jury trial in the Bronx, the complaint alleges. Each week, an average of 800 new misdemeanor cases come into the court, yet less than two get to trial.'

Then there's the appeal and re-trial.

https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1366&context=facpub

'Federal data sets covering district court and appellate court civil cases for cases terminating in fiscal years 1988 through 2000 are analyzed. Appeals are filed in 10.9 percent of filed cases, and 21.0 percent of cases if one limits the sample to cases with a definitive judgment for plaintiff or defendant.The appeal rate is 39.6 percent in tried cases compared to 10.0 percent of nontried cases. For cases with definitive judgments, the appeal filing rate is 19.0 percent in nontried cases and 40.9 percent in tried cases. Tried cases with definitive judgments are appealed to a conclusion on the merits in 22.7 percent of concluded trials compared to 10.2 percent of concluded non-tried cases.'

Therefore purging such records after a few months is (IMO - I'm not a lawyer) equivalent to deliberately destroying evidence.

And I'm guessing because of gov't budget cutbacks and COVID-19 related shut-downs and postponements that things are even worse now re: pretrial, appeal and retrial delays.

130:

Scientific American has an interesting visual aid on how the virus "works". Haven't been through it yet but the visuals are great looking. Hope it is accurate as it will be a good intro for people who can't read the papers.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/interactive/inside-the-coronavirus

131:

Good grief, I wasn't talking about America, where it's looking like "give it a bit more like 240 years and it'll start turning into fascism".

132:

Funny that -- I've called it right every time on this pandemic, at least as how it has played out in the US and its separated at birth sibling, the UK. Not that it matters when one's life has been destroyed as one said it would be.

I have none of these things: yard, patio, porch -- or even a sidewalk to walk on.

There is no way to be safely outside at all where we live because we are surrounded by restaurants that have taken over all the sidewalk and street space where no safety is being observed and people yell for hours closely together without masks or distance and get drunker and drunker.

In the meantime we are also in constant danger of being hit by maskless scooter and bike riders, runners and just idiots on their phones.

The parks are filled the same way. Just waiting to cross the major roadways to get the river 'walking' park, I am surrounded by people running, biking, in large groups, nobody wearing masks. Before these people and their phones never paid attention to not running into pedestrians. They still aren't.

Today the official number of new cases in the US is over 50,000; over 10,000 of them in Florida alone.

This may be the only thing to get the US on any remotely sane track with the virus:

A National Mask Mandate Could Save The U.S. Economy $1 Trillion, Goldman Sachs Says

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/06/30/a-national-mask-mandate-could-save-the-us-economy-1-trillion-goldman-sachs-says/#676ded4456f1

Key Take Aways:

Quote:

[ "As mask-wearing becomes a political flashpoint—despite coronavirus cases spiking to record levels across the country—new research from Goldman Sachs suggests a national mask mandate would slow the growth rate of new coronavirus infections and prevent a 5% GDP loss caused by additional lockdown measures.

Goldman’s analysts found that wearing face coverings has a significant impact on coronavirus outcomes, and they suggest that a federal mask mandate would “meaningfully” increase mask usage across the country, especially in states like Florida and Texas, where masks are not currently required.

The researchers estimate that a national mandate would increase the portion of people wearing masks by 15 percentage points, and cut the daily growth of new cases by 1.0 percentage point to 0.6%.

Reducing the spread of the virus through mask-wearing, the analysts found, could be a substitute for strict lockdown measures that would otherwise shave 5%—or $1 trillion—off the U.S. GDP." ]

~~~~~~~

Charles H @ 187 -- That is not true. The Brits never recognized the CSA as a nation; Charles Adams, Lincoln's minister to Saint James, and his son, Henry Adams, provide the very best sources as to what happened in those years, and who was who and did or didn't do what.

133:

I think that you're dreaming if you think that Biden will win by a landslide. The estate of the economy will likely prove the decisive factor and, since the election is 4 months away, that really can't be predicted one way or another right now. The recent rioting, not the protesting to be clear, has likely scared at least some voters away from the politicians that allowed the violence or even cheered it on. It's certainly sent gun sales soaring, with an estimated 45% going to first-time buyers, so maybe support for gun control has weakened across all voters. Maybe, maybe not. And how much anger is there for the ludicrous restrictions imposed by some Democrats (can anyone say the Governor of Michigan's name?) and then violate those very same restrictions themselves? (I'm looking at you, Lori Lightfoot of Chicago!) Will it persist through November, or will it all be water under the bridge by then? The world and the nation wonders.

I have no idea how the ongoing shitstorm in the US is going to play with the undecided and non-voters. I have little doubt that current events will have no effect on those already firmly in one camp or another as it's always easy to play the blame game for those we dislike or disagree with. If non-voters come out and actually vote, all bets are off, IMO. In my little town in purple Virginia, there was record turnout for the local elections last month and all of the Democrats lost, despite being slightly more liberal than the surrounding area. A harbinger of things to come? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on where they live, as always. Adding excess voters in an area that you already control does your party no good (cf. 2016).

I'm not at all concerned about the possibility that Trump will refuse to cede the Presidency if he loses, but I do worry a lot about the rioting and violence that I anticipate if he wins. I think that they'll be far more numerous and destructive than the recent events and could rival those of 1968.

134:

Therefore purging such records after a few months is (IMO - I'm not a lawyer) equivalent to deliberately destroying evidence.

In the US, destroying records on a per-determined "reasonable" schedule is NOT destroying evidence. But once the record holder is aware of a legal issue related to some records, said records must be preserved. And if not then it is equivalent to deliberately destroying evidence.

Got to read up on this when clients started asking about backup tapes. Basically have a reasonable policy and follow it.

135:

Charles H @ 127: According to US history, the British *did* support the South in the US Civil War. Reasons are arguable, and the extent of the support is a bit uncertain, but the existence *is* certain, and it's one of the reasons the South was able to continue as long as it did. I don't know anything about the British side of the story, though. I'd suspect that Britain wasn't exactly friendly with the US government, as well as obvious economic reasons.

The British elite tended to support the Confederacy, but ordinary people tended to support the United States, the Union or "the North"[citation needed]. Large-scale trade continued between Britain and the US. The US shipped grain to Britain, and Britain sent manufactured items and munitions to the US. Immigration continued into the US, with many Britons volunteering for its army.[quantify] British trade with the Confederacy fell over 90% from the prewar period, with a small amount of cotton going to Britain and some munitions and luxury goods slipped in by numerous small blockade runners. They were operated and funded by British private interests. They were legal under international law and caused no dispute between the US and Britain.[1]

Although ...

A long-term issue was sales of warships to the Confederacy. A British shipyard (John Laird and Sons) built two warships for the Confederacy, including the CSS Alabama,[3] over vehement protests from the US. Known as the Alabama Claims, the controversy was resolved peacefully after the Civil War when the US was awarded $15.5 million in arbitration by an international tribunal for damages caused by the warships.

The British Government remained "neutral". British "elites" [mercantile interests] supported the Confederacy, putting profit ahead of [anti-slavery] principles.

British public opinion was divided on the American Civil War. The Confederacy tended to have support from the elites: the aristocracy and the gentry, which identified with the landed plantation owners, and Anglican clergy and some professionals who admired tradition, hierarchy and paternalism. The Union was favored by the middle classes, the religious Nonconformists, intellectuals, reformers and most factory workers, who saw slavery and forced labor as a threat to the status of the workingman. The cabinet made the decisions. Chancellor of the Exchequer William E Gladstone, whose family fortune had been based on slavery in the West Indies before 1833, supported the Confederacy. Foreign Minister Lord Russell wanted neutrality. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston wavered between support for national independence, his opposition to slavery and the strong economic advantages of Britain remaining neutral.[10]

The British Government did not want war with the United States any more than the United States wanted war with Great Britain.

Meanwhile France had all they could handle trying to establish another New World empire in Mexico, so Confederate diplomacy there failed to bear fruit as well.

136:

Re: 'In the US, destroying records on a per-determined "reasonable" schedule is NOT destroying evidence.'

I have no idea who determines what a 'reasonable' schedule is based on what criteria. Just seems reasonable that if more and more cases are increasingly delayed, then the 'reasonable' schedule should also be automatically adjusted. Regardless - based on the large number of cases that are delayed by more than a few months - it would be irresponsible to purge records after 'a few months'.

137:

I agree completely, Moz. That's an absurdly low number.

Even with that, I'll note that with the Black population of the US at about 13%, the percentage of deaths is over twice the population.

138:

Thanks, Mike, that was a thing I enjoyed reading.

139:

I dunno. France went up and back - they are on the Fifth Republic, and the Republics have worked at last part of the time.

My slogan for the new American Revolution is liberta, egalite, sibilite*

  • Y'know, siblinghood.... [g]
140:

Charles H A lot of rich business interests in Britain were against the US Civil War, for obvious reasons. But the anti-slavery movement was very strong in the UK. And backed by Prince Albert ..... After the battle of (?) Antietam (?) & The Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln, support for the "South" basically evaporated, apart from a few greedy rich shits ( Sound familiar? )

It CERTAINLY DIDN'T HELP that some fuckwit idiot blowhards in the "union" wanted to actually go & pick a fight with the UK by invading Canada, again - but were stopped - IIRC by Lincoln. See also the utter fuckwittery of the Trent incident. The sale of CSS Alabama was THE US' OWN FAULT - they had refused to sign an international treaty banning "Private Ships of War" - & the US STILL has not learnt this lesson about International treaties.

JBS Name another country where "the revolution" hasn't degenerated into tyranny within less than a generation. Erm - Great Britain actually, culminating in 1688-89. Oops.

Foxessa You are in Florida? If so, my deepest sympathies.

141:

"Be careful what you wish for. Revolutions frequently don't know when to say "Enough is enough.""

Oh, I know all about that. It's better to think of the word in relation not to "revolt" but to "revolve". Thing is when the bicycle is speeding down the hill with no brakes it ends up being better to knock it over than to let it carry on and go over the cliff at the bottom.

"you gotta' admit the success of the American Revolution was an extreme outlier. Name another country where "the revolution" hasn't degenerated into tyranny within less than a generation.

England.

Not sure either of them count though. One of them the government being revolved against was on the other side of the ocean, the other one it was basically their own idea and the main problem was persuading their selected revolver to think it was a good idea for himself as well.

142:

Oh, aye. The French know all about revolutionary politics. Round and round and round...

143:

we are surrounded by restaurants that have taken over all the sidewalk and street space where no safety is being observed and people yell for hours closely together without masks or distance and get drunker and drunker. The NYS positive tests tracker is reassuring. (I check it every day.) Drill down by county, and look at all the history, and it is not obvious that there is an unmasked-outdoor-dining/etc effect. Probably there is a small effect because as you say people are in close proximity unmasked for hours, and being outdoors only helps so much. (I'm assuming without evidence an about 80 percent reduction in risk, varying wildly depending on stillness of air, humidity, etc.) Agree entirely that mandatory face coverings indoors (public places and work places), and outdoors where there is crowding, is the rational path forward. The GS piece might be helpful. (It was obvious months ago, but the GS endorsement with big confidently estimated money numbers is new.) This and distancing where possible and also discipline about private gatherings (masks) are the tools (NPIs) we have until there is a whole-population vaccine. We all know that the initial vaccine doses will be for the rich and powerful, with some for the police and oh yes health care workers. They won't get their economy back until it's universal. Cuomo's face-coverings indoors in public places order was 17 April 2020. In my area, a hard hit (suburban) county in the Hudson Valley, observed mask discipline for people entering stores was maybe 50 percent the day before the order (I sat in a car and counted people entering stores a few times), and 100 percent the day after the order. It was startling.

UK people, please take note. Experience basically everywhere is that the only way to get significant mask/face coverings discipline in places where there isn't a strong cultural tradition is to make face coverings mandatory. Push for it, and push for mask wearing in your local area by example. (Yeah, "face coverings will be mandatory in shops in Scotland from July 10."! Smiling. You'll finally be in the intervention arm of a natural experiment. :-)

Re people on phones outside, this is awesome:

This is one extraordinarily accurate prediction in a work of science fiction. This seldom ever happens. I’m amazed that I hadn’t seen it before today. https://t.co/Zbwe0xKn0E

— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) June 29, 2020
144:

'reasonable' schedule is based on what criteria

Well, it all depends (of course) and the real answer is "as long as necessary", which is a total non-answer. However, the US Internal Revenue Service has this advice for small businesses:

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/how-long-should-i-keep-records

Summary: Four to seven years in uncomplicated circumstances, as long as necessary in others involving long-term assets.

145:

They should keep them until enough time has elapsed that there is no longer any possibility of any legal action arising where they would be relevant. At the minimum, for something like 100 years, so that everyone involved will be dead and therefore any possible legal action will itself be irrelevant. After all, it's only data. It's not like an officer is going to fill up multiple VHS cassettes per shift, it's more like all the video from their entire time in the force will fit in their pocket. Not a lot of point deleting anything any more, it's become more hassle than not doing it.

146:

And I'm really glad that it turned out that way, but you gotta' admit the success of the American Revolution was an extreme outlier. Name another country where "the revolution" hasn't degenerated into tyranny within less than a generation.

Reminder that the nation established by the US revolution lasted less than 90 years before it was engulfed in civil war. Arguably it took that long because the distances involved were vast, when a horse-drawn carriage on poor roads could only average about 6-10mph during daylight hours: most countries that had revolutions were either geographically more compact, or had them with better transportation technology. (It's really hard today to grasp the degree to which even trains moving at 30-50mph revolutionized long range transport in the first half of the 19th century.)

147:

We are apparently on course for 400Tb LTO magnetic tape cartridges by 2028 using Strontium Ferrite (per FujiFilm), which I have to say is a mind-bogglingly large amount of HD video. If you've ever seen a big robotized tape library swapping cartridges, it suggests there should be no problem keeping video evidence from all the police wearable cameras in a large force online for several years, and retrievable within a day or two for decades (or until tape delamination, if they forget to copy and verify).

148:

Well, one of them - the other was tyrannical from the start.

149:
Name another country where "the revolution" hasn't degenerated into tyranny within less than a generation. Erm - Great Britain actually, culminating in 1688-89. Oops.

Yes, because that revolution's tyranny was established in the country it was actually fought in.

(The "Bloodless Revolution" was what really established the Ascendancy in Ireland; it's the reason the Orange Order is named such.)

150:

There's an interesting insight into long-distance journeying in the horse era at the beginning of Wuthering Heights: old man Earnshaw goes to Liverpool and back, 60 miles each way. He is well off enough to have his own horses, but he doesn't go by horse; he walks it. Reason being that once your journey becomes longer than a horse can manage in a single maintenance interval you get caught with so much pissing about maintaining it that it's easier to not bother with it in the first place.

151:

Sure. I chose the word "England" deliberately.

152:

Thanks Greg. That was a good summary. But it didn't mention the ending of the slave trade in East Africa after the UK swapped Heligoland for Zanzibar.

153:

I work with public safety answering points, airports, etc who record calls and screen captures. Massively generalizing, they normally keep things like audio records for a few months or less. Mortgage companies kept their records forever as loans can be 30 years, so . . . Basically, each agency I deal with has their own requirements - some only record audio, some screen captures of agents', there are even now ways to record SMS messages. In the USA, all 911 calls must be recorded, they are easily exported to a CD or file.

154:

Because what we want is police having millions of hours of bodycam footage to feed to machine-learning algorithms trained to recognise "criminality" (defined however the designer/owner/law enforcement system defines it).

155:

We are apparently on course for 400Tb LTO magnetic tape cartridges by 2028 using Strontium Ferrite (per FujiFilm), which I have to say is a mind-bogglingly large amount of HD video.

I've setup / used LTO tape for backup/archiving systems.

The problem isn't what fits on a current tape. It has a lot to do with what do you do with the older tapes? I think the LTO spec requires drives to read/write back 2 iterations of storage spec. So 8th gen tapes (LTO-8) should be readable on LTO-9 and LTO-10 drives and an LTO-8 drive should be able to read (and maybe write) LTO-6 and LTO-7 tapes.

So what do we do when we move past those edges? I would basically wrap up the old backups, seal them and the drive and computer into a container. If someone needed them for legal reasons we could hand over the "box". Bit rot and all that. In real time we always had data on 3 tapes but once in storage who knows how long all bits would be readable.

Just before the world shut down we were going to go through and purge old DAT (2 and 4 GB) tape backups and drives as they were past the legal needs to retain data. Ditto that other format we used after DAT and before LTO that we used for a while. I just can't remember the name for it.

PS: LTO-8 is current (I think) and can hold 12TB uncompressed which can get to 30TB in many cases.

156:

Reason being that once your journey becomes longer than a horse can manage in a single maintenance interval you get caught with so much pissing about maintaining it that it's easier to not bother with it in the first place.

Most people in the US think that horses pulled the wagons that settled the west with the settlers riding in the wagons. Moves, TV, and all that.

The reality is the wagons were pulled by oxen, everyone who could walk did walk, and the horses were not ridden except when needed.

Why use fragile engines, wear out the engines you have, and waste fuel you might need later.

157:

I think I should really shred all my paid bills, etc, from the eighties and nineties, though, at least....

158:

There is a reason that 'coaching' inns were about 10-12 miles apart - that's all you could reliably walk, or even drive a coach, in the winter. That's in the 17th century - 6-10 MPH is the 19th century speed, with suspension and much better roads.

159:

I have none of these things: yard, patio, porch -- or even a sidewalk to walk on.

Oh dear! I am so sorry! You may have to go for late-night/early morning walks just to stay sane - being outdoors with a mask after the crowds have gone shouldn't be more dangerous that the possibility of going crazy from the isolation. Also, I find that one of the things that's keeping me from going nuts is having regular, scheduled calls with childhood friends (and a once-a-week online D&D game.)

Anyway, I hope the pressure comes off of you one way or another!

160:

Um, I rather think a large number of horse nomads would disagree with you. There are some simple solutions, like caring for the horse, allowing it time to graze...and taking multiple horses in a string. Mongol warriors, IIRC, took five horses with them and alternated which one they rode every day.

The critical distance issue is when you're putting grain in a cart and feeding the draft animal from the cart. After about 250 miles, the animal (horse or ox) has eaten all the grain, so there's no point in the exercise unless the cart and animal needed to go that far and you had some other way back. For human porters, it's about half as far.

Another good point is that Mongols could get away with this, but people in settled England had more trouble. The Mongols were living off the land, so food for their animals was effectively free. If the land is completely owned and settled, feeding animals gets harder, and that in turn makes transportation more complex.

This kind of calculation is actually pretty critical in the 21st Century, because it matters in things like moving fuel and food around. A good example is feeding people in a famine. If a famine is hundreds of miles from the nearest food supply, and there's no powered transport, it's really hard to get food in to relieve the situation, because the animals transporting the food need to be fed as well, and there's no food for them either (although they could be said to be meat on the hoof).

Another good example is moving oil. In some cases bulk container ships and trains are more fuel efficient than a big pipeline (counting costs of pumping versus costs of moving the vehicle). Bulk carriers are extremely fuel efficient (they can move a ton of payload something like a million miles on a ton of fuel), which is why they're the backbone of our economy right now. If we get to the point where big container ships are to fuel inefficient to run, we're in real trouble, unless we've got solar powered or sail ships to take up the slack, because it's hard to get more fuel efficient than that.

And, incidentally, something like a Concorde is about as fuel efficient as walking to the destination (although it's jet fuel versus food). Something like a suborbital hypersonic vehicle is even less fuel efficient than the Concorde. Absent an energy breakthrough of the tiny fusion plant variety, it's unlikely that we're going to see jets replaced by hypersonic transport. Indeed, we may see more people traveling on container ships than jets in a few decades. All because of fuel efficiency.

161:

Oh, now that we've solved the rest of the world's problems, I have a Complaint: what is it with every single orchestra? The classical station I'm streaming (it happens to be WFMT, Chicago) played a galliard. Every. Single. Recording. I have ever heard of the Lord Chamberlain's Galliard is played at, like, 33, when it needs to be 45 at least, and 78 would be about right.

I learned to galliard when I was in the SCA in the late seventies... and I can't go that slow as the way they play it.

162:

Yes, being able to walk and garden has been a line of sanity for me.

That said, you want to write the great American Novel about living in a generation ship? Everybody seems to assume that you can live for generations in a cramped apartment hurdling between stars, and not go insane doing it.

163:

Pigeon @ 141: Thing is when the bicycle is speeding down the hill with no brakes it ends up being better to knock it over than to let it carry on and go over the cliff at the bottom.

You've never been a mountain biker have you?

164:

What are you growing? I'm in western Riverside county and we just moved into a new house. Trying to get plants to grow seemed to require prying them out of the ground with a crowbar. Finally I succeeded by starting everything inside and moving it outdoors and planting it in the shadow of the house...

But finally I've got the three sisters all growing in one bed, tomatoes and peppers, and many varieties of squash/pumpkins, plus some herbs and eggplant that might successfully grow, and kale and onions...

165:

@133: Let's look at your arguments point by point:

I think that you're dreaming if you think that Biden will win by a landslide. The estate of the economy will likely prove the decisive factor and, since the election is 4 months away, that really can't be predicted one way or another right now.

The massive spike in infections across the South and West has forced governors to quickly backpedal on "opening" of their states, and in some cases is threatening to overwhelm health services. The resulting re-closing of those states is going to lead to more business failures and greatly increased unemployment, with associated contraction of the economy. It's not unlikely that the U.S. economy could move from our current recession to an actual depression between now and November.

The recent rioting, not the protesting to be clear, has likely scared at least some voters away from the politicians that allowed the violence or even cheered it on.

Um, since the first week, the level of rioting associated with BLM protests has gone WAY down, as police and protestors are more aware of troublemakers attempting to take advantage of the situation. And our "Law'n Order" President's shamble to Lafayette Square, preceded by jackboot tactics clearing peaceful protestors, played so well that the SECDEF and CJCS were both appalled and driven to publicly distance themselves from the awful spectacle. Plus, please show me one politician that "cheered on the violence".

[H]ow much anger is there for the ludicrous restrictions imposed by some Democrats

Specify which restrictions were ludicrous as we head for more than 150,000 EXCESS deaths. Granted, politicians who don't follow their own rules are rightly excoriated (Dominic Cummings, anyone?), but that's true across the board. My Texas friends are VERY unhappy with Governor Abbott and his open/closed backflip.

I have no idea how the ongoing shitstorm in the US is going to play with the undecided and non-voters.

Here's a link to the CNN list of current national polls from a variety of pollsters. Independent approval of the current administration continues to erode; the polls show a margin in Biden's favor from 8 to 14 points.

As to McGrath vs. McConnell in Kentucky, I said a victory for McGrath would be a surprise - but as of now, they're neck and neck. Not exactly heartening news for an incumbent who was first elected in 1984.

166:

Re: '... trained to recognise "criminality" (defined however the designer/owner/law enforcement system defines it).'

This assumes that only 'the law' has all the footage. There's also CCTV, smartphones, plus various in/at-home (and less often, in-car) security recording devices. Even though Google, MSFT and Big River have pulled their face-recog tech, I'm guessing they're still working on improving this and related tech. Ditto various universities.

There's also this scenario which is showing up more often esp. on local news: senior with dementia goes outside for a walk and gets lost/forgets where they live. Neighborhood surveillance with or without face-recog algo help the police to quickly identify, locate and return senior home. Not all cops/techs are evil.

167:

Some frank statements by an airline.

Doug Parker at American Airlines

"When we did the CARES Act, we CEOs sitting in a room in March fully believed, as did the people negotiating with Congress, fully believed by Oct. 1 this would be over with. I know that sounds insane now."

Our politicians are just beginning to admit that might be right.

168:

Everybody seems to assume that you can live for generations in a cramped apartment hurdling between stars, and not go insane doing it.

Jim Gaffigan does a few minutes long monologue on CBS Sunday Morning (USA thing that might be available elsewhere) about living in his apartment with wife and 5 kids. And he's "rich" and has a big apartment. And even with that separate "school spaces" for each is a hassle.

Best one was when he showed the metal cage they got for the portable electronics for the times they are off limits.

169:

inally I succeeded by starting everything inside and moving it outdoors and planting it in the shadow of the house...

May I ship you some Periwinkle and what the locals call "English Ivy"? I'm thinking of IEDs to stop them. They have their place but they don't seem to care about staying there.

170:

My Texas friends are VERY unhappy with Governor Abbott and his open/closed backflip.

He just went to mandatory face masks in most of the state. (Where gophers don't out number people.)

I suspect there is going to be some real R infighting behind the scenes down there. Especially with the Lt. Gov saying let us old fart die to save the economy.

171:

This proves beyond reasonable doubt that computers only exist to support the mag tape industry. I knew Boolean logic was just a flash in the pan.

172:

Sure there's a current spike, but the real question is what will the status be in 3-4 month and I don't believe that that can be reliably predicted at this stage. LA-area hospitals are being absolutely slammed with ICU-worthy cases, so it's not just the red states in those areas that are being hit. Austin's outbreak shows a strong correlation to the maskless demonstrations 4 or 5 weeks ago there so it's not just the "premature" lifting of restrictions. Conversely how many New Yorkers will remember de Blasio and Cuomo's failure to implement restrictions in a timely manner? Dunno, but it probably won't matter much nationally.

Sure, you remember his walk across Lafayette Park to pose by the church, but how many people will in 4 months? Or attach as much weight to that stunt as you do? Recentism is a real thing when it comes to elections, unless canny politicians remind voters of their opponents' fuckups.

Governor Whitmer forbade people from fishing if they used used a motor as opposed to rowing or sailing when she expanded her restrictions on 9 April. WTF? And she prevented people from buying plants and gardening supplies just when Michiganders need to start seedlings before actually planting them once things warm up. And that was a blanket order, not just one for flowers, so food crops were involved as well for serious gardeners who like to live off their gardens as much as possible.

I doubt the validity of all polling data this far ahead of the election. IIRC, Clinton showed a significant lead over Trump this far ahead of election day four years ago, so that should tell you something. Polls did get a lot closer to the actual results nearer to the election last time and some of the state-level polls were within the margin of error a few days before the election. So far as I'm concerned, polls at this stage might as well be a magic 8-ball, "conditions cloudy, try again later".

If the economy tanks, which I agree is a real possibility, than I think Trump is screwed, no matter what he does. If it's still sort of chugging along, then I believe that he's got a significant chance, especially if non-voters go their civic duty and COVID-19 remains about the same level as it is now. I have no idea idea if or how any of that will play out over the near future, which is why I refuse to write him off at this stage.

I took plenty of international relations classes many, many moons ago, and some people tried to express the possibilities of going to war mathematically; you know if the expected profit/outcome from a victory is greater than the costs for various elite groups, then sum up the outcomes and "Bob's your uncle!" The most obvious absurdity to my eyes was to how to weight all the variables modifying the individual equations; that would be perfectly subjective and likely to be seriously influenced by the actual outcome. I said all this to emphasize that you and I are obviously putting different weights on the variables affecting each voter's decision making and things that you may find very important in your own decision making may well be far less so in other people's evaluations. I'm very deliberately trying to prevent myself from repeating Pauline Kael's infamous remark about Nixon's victory in '72, the actual quote, not the paraphrase, reads, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.' One that was repeated by many liberals in '16, IMO. And trying not to fall into groupthink. And if I can keep a few others out of the groupthink cesspit, all the better.

173:

that other format we used after DAT and before LTO that we used for a while. I just can't remember the name for it.

Had it on the tip of my tongue several times, but ended up having to google. DLT. From Exabyte to DAT to DLT to LTO in my world, with at least three co-existing.

I personally toured a petabyte-capable tape library built with a single robot ,two drives and (then) I guess LTO-1 or LTO-2 tapes in the late 2000s (it was built to back up MRI scans). They didn't have a petabyte worth of media in it yet, but it spread over 5 racks. Systems were already available that could accommodate multiple robots. They were also capable of constantly taking in backup streams and also constantly consolidating backups for optimal ability to handle its recovery use cases, generating separate image sets for off-site transport, etc, so multiple drives would be favourite too. I'm pretty sure this stuff is quite standard these days for large installations with lots of important but not time-critical data. Even then, there were also mature hierarchical storage systems where the tape was just the endpoint in a data ageing process that started on fast disk (SSD now I guess), moved to slow disk and then to tape. Backups were always faster to tape than to disk until SSDs became affordable (and even now it's probably faster to use an SSD cache for streaming to tape than to backup to disk, though it depends on the data I guess).

With the big could providers all this stuff would just be commoditised now.

174:

No in NYC, to where the people in Florida now want to come to hide from what they brought to Florida.

I live in downtown, which is OLD, and it is very densely populated -- though not as bad as some areas. But few have as many restaurants and bars are here. That's all there are, as a matter of fact, since they drove out everything else -- international restaurant corps -- by agreed to the ridiculous rents charged by the real estate owners. There were too many of them to survive Before, and now it's impossible. On my block alone there are 8 restaurants, and it is a short block. Radiating out from the block ends there are even more, all the way. We'd have moved, but we came here a long time ago, and we can't afford to move. None of these places existed here, not a single one, until deep into the 1990's. Then after 9/11 it went crazy, and has been going crazier ever since, with a new one opening every month or two, along with yogurt joints, cafes, ice cream parlors and so on and so forth.

JBS @135 -- thanks for all that! And there's even more to say about the ins and outs of GB and the Union -- and France. Many a CSA plantation owner, particularly those from Louisiana, refugeed there. They established their own social circles, sending their daughters to convents, and the boys to military school. But the class system etc. -- made it pretty hard for them to break into the world of the Real French. And spies, o spies everywhere for everybody.

As for invading Canada -- that was because the CSA really thought THEY could take it over. They maintained a big spy network there. They even tried to launch a coup on New York from Canada -- with the enthusiastic support of some Canadians -- on which the Union looked poorly. They rolled them up and the coup failed.

175:

I was always working with firms 25 or smaller. But they would still generate a LOT of daily data. Especially those pesky architects and their CAD files.

IBM had tape robots in the later 70s / early 80s. There was one at KY state government.

176:

Now that the voting is over, the reasons to calm down the population are pretty much gone and everything can go as usual, I guess. We are getting ready to a "second wave" of crisis and pandemic, it is very much not as panicked and predictable as the first. Truly it is a strange time. I actually expect a period of recovery until the end of the year, but since this recovery is mostly just bullshit and money-printing, one cannot expect it to last, and what happens next belongs to wild speculations.

to Charlie Stross @50:

That's not what's happening in Scotland. England (different government) is more prone to cronyism, and a lot more inept at channeling funds to sick people: there's cronyism and corruption there, but typically b/c incompetent politicians demand action then commission companies owned by people they know to do the work. That is also a familiar sight, but not as widespread nowadays. But a careful observer can notice it - for one, in my region there was a corruption scandal (aforementioned cronyism, but more about conflict in hierarcy), quite public one, so president fired the governor, but since there was no charges he was let go. The new governor in the region started with preparations for republic's celebration of jubilee of the republic or some sort of thing, so most of the main roads in the center of the city are being reconstructed, and people are saying that the new governor is closely connected to these . But one cannot expect for these transgressions to be punished, unless they are pretty severe, like it happened last time. Still there's certain dynamic, and for all the 85 regions, you can regularly hear someone replaced, or convicted. For example, my home region's (I left it 15 years ago) governor was caught red-handed in bribery 4 years ago and is now in jail.

It went viral all over Europe. There are BLM demos in the UK, in France, in Spain ... and there's a growing scandal in London over how the Metropolitan police have been going backward over addressing institutional racism in the past 30 years (and similar issues in other forces). But then we do realize that this racism is the result of the similar workforce movement, only it is a modern equivalent of it. Neoliberalism likes to idealize "freedom of movement" that modern system allows, but in the end it results in human trafficking and modern forms of slavery, better known as neocolonialism. From the point of view of corporations, human resources should move where the capital is, not the other way around - it is clearly a destructive tendencies and people react to it accordingly. It's not like you can tell them to SHTFU and go rot in a social bottom, people have to realize that better than rescue a person from the third world country (i.e. turn him into a zombified consumer), you can more safely help him rescue his own life in his own homeland.

to whitroth @52: Geez, I don't know what to say, other than I'm very glad you made it through. Are you still in bed a lot of the time, or walking and doing stuff? People from other regions who I tell this about are all very shocked and say this is probably the worst it ever been, they are sure their services are in better condition. I don't know what to say tho them, maybe it was a bad luck.

We are totally OK, I was in bed for three weeks and for first 10 days I've had a high fever(due to pneumonia) we couldn't do anything about. I was dead tired, couldn't move a finger by the end of that time, and only then some infusions (we invited an acquainted nurse for that) really helped when we managed to get chest scan and secondary infection became more obvious. But still, it is hard to recover energy afterwards, and now two weeks later I am only mostly to the usual rhythm of life.

What you should remember about COVID is that it acts very much like heavy case of flu initially, it really hits you like a truck for the first 2 or 3 days after first symptoms, and you can lose your energy very fast. If that happens, better watch out for consequences. This is the important period of time and if you can't sure you are safe it is better to not take chances. Psychology like "it will be over by the morning", "it is probably nothing", "I will be OK as usual" will lead to unnecessary casualties. Still, it fascinates me how people really know that the virus is out there, but cannot actually believe it.

My job management bought some test services, so after I came out of illness I've had to take a test (for free) for the virus (actually negative), and only then I was allowed to work. Generally I say, the management reaction on our place was somewhat sporadic and improvised, but it prevented outbreaks, which in situation of large company would lead to shutdown.

177:

Perhaps "Boris clung to power" should read "Boris clung to life"...

178:

nonemouse The revolution was fought in FOUR countries, actually: England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland. It's arguable that Scotland actually suffered more casualties, certainly per capita, than any of the othe kingdoms.

And, a reminder ... the RC church or it's apparent minions made at least FIVE attempts to overthrow the government in England - & you wonder why they were regarded with suspicion?

Mike C Thanks for that. REMINDER ... As I mentioned a few links back in a previous thread ... British ( evil colonial) "residents" were still freeing numbers of slaves ( In Arab countries, natch ) as late as the 1950's ....

EC @ 158 ALways excepting the epic Carey's Ride ... London (Richmond, actually) to Edinburgh

179:

Sorry, I types those stats from memory and bleeped them up a bit. I've checked the sources at

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-deaths-per-million?tab=table

and see that only Belgium (with quite a hard lockdown) has come in over 700 per 1M of population (very foolish of me to type 100K by accident earlier), Germany with 100 deaths per 1M of population is about the lowest amongst large and heavily connected places. Most countries with lower rates than Germany are either small and/or not major (business or leisure) international travel destinations, or have very little health infrastructure to notice a covid-19 epidemic against the much worse diseases they face every day, or closed external borders early enough to stop the virus entering.

I must still stand by my point that in the UK cases were declining before lockdown, there is a paper from Prof Simon Wood in Bristol which works on calculating back from the deaths peak and finds that cases had peaked in the UK and were declining before lockdown began. This is a UK specific paper, so stating it to be universally true wouldn't be appropriate, but it does imply that locking down the UK may have been unnecessary. There is also this from the Uni of East Anglia which suggests lockdowns were ineffective and unnecessary, but less intrusive measures like banning large events helepd bring the virus under some control https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20088260v1 . I did have a graph showing there to be no correlation between the strength and "starting conditions"(how many cases per M of population when it was imposed) of national lockdowns, and the total deaths (per million) seen in the country by the time the covid-19 peak was declining and cases had stabilised at a low level, but can't remember the source, so that will look quite bad for my argument. I could also point to Michael Levitt's commentary on looking at the virus from a purely empirical data viewpoint, this too suggests the lockdowns were un-necessary. I think we've been lucky with this virus, lucky it is not something with a much higher IFR. The fact that so many places resort to terrible lockdowns, shows we were unprepared for handling diease. The fact that Sweden is seeming like a world leader (deaths per million lower than quite a few locked down countries, higher coivd deaths than some countries but balanced against the fact they've kept their civil liberties and maintained healthcare for non-covid patients) for doing very little, shows that no-one is particularly great at handling the pandemic. COVID is a wakeup call to be prepared for emergencies, not to obsess over short term profit but to find ways to make society resilient enough to prevail. And the lockdowns are a stark warning that we must prepare to prevail in ways which keep quality of life preserved, not just quantity. There is also the civil liberties case to consider, my greatest fear is that tolerance of lockdown could so easily usher in what Charlie here has described as "the lazy genocide". China has already taken the virus as an opportunity to roll out the red-amber-green system across the country, undoubtedly this app is already being used to trap those with low "social credit" scores. They've also taken the distraction of the west with the virus as a chance to turn further aggression against the people of Hong-kong. In america we see the worst president in their history sending troops on to the streets, an action which would get far less support were he not able to make suggestions about "diseased protesters" and use these to deepen division in the US. In Singapore we see plans for mandatory carrying of a tracking token. In India we've seen all government employees and users of any public service required to tun a surveillance app which states in its terms and conditions that data will be used for purposes beyond covid control and will be retaiend forever. In parts of the state of western australia we see CCTV cameras being mounted outside their doors of anyone suspected of having the virus so they can be arrested if they peep from the door. We're seeing businesses across the world refuse cash payments, even though as the typical coin or note spends quite a long time in tills or wallets betwen uses it only touches a few hands every few days, and switch to tracable cards (with terminals everyone touches!), cards which as well as leaving records of all your private transacations are dependent on vulnerable (to accidents and malicious attacks) telecom and finanical infrastructure, VISA's systes went down last year for a day and caused chaos, imagine that without cash to fall back to. In "Happy 21st Century" Charlie warned of these sorts of steps, we are seeing in the form of lockdown far too much power concentrated in government hands. Government and megacorporations are grabbing all the powers they can, powers which will be abused either by the current rulers of such states and companies, or by successors to their roles at some point in the next few decades. This will be like having DRM installed onto every aspect of our world, not just assaulting our rights for entertainment and digital device spare parts. Everything will require a government permission signed in triplicate by an algorithm which has decided that "you are an undesirable". I want to be very clear I'm talking about civil liberties here, when one thinks of the standard left-right split of state-spending vs private-profit I don't have much of an opinion, whatever works is fine whether it is socialism, centrism or capitalism. I'm talking here about government objecting to government intrusion into the liberties of individuals, I'm not making an argument as to what the role of governments should be in the world's finances. I think a new world which emerges from this could be a very depressing place in which none of us would be welcome, I'd rather risk death from a virus than live like that. By all means, I'll wear a mask, wash my hands, avoid crowds, keep rather more than 2 metres apart, limit my visits to far-away friends and relatives, stay home if I have symptoms, I'll do my bit to help end that nasty strain of self-replicating enveloped RNA, but I'm against draconian measures which exacerbate a dangerous power imbalance between citizen and state.

180:

My apologies if what I'm saying seems a bit strong, but I've been on the receiving end of police harassment for "non-essential" shopping early in the lockdown. Who are they to say what items from the supermarket are "non-essential" when they know nothing of dietary problems. And I've had family members in prolonged agony due to cancelled "elective" surgey, they were scheduled for early April but the NHS decided to ignore them and focus on preparing for covid cases, they still haven't had a new surgery date scheduled and I fear that the number of people put in to very poor health by the lockdown will make a wave on the NHS much worse than an uncontrolled covid spike would have been likely to be. I've also been having a very miserable time unable to work at a job I used to love before the lockdown hit us. I am angry with how the response to the pandemic has wrecked so much in our society, to have all life's quality sacrificed for eliminating a risk of covid-19's magnitude doesn't stack up on my scale. I just wish we'd had Anders Tegnell in charge in the UK, we'd have had much the same tragic losses to covid-19 as we have actually had, but atleast we'd not have suffered all the othr human tragedies.

181:

Charlie Stross @ 146:

And I'm really glad that it turned out that way, but you gotta' admit the success of the American Revolution was an extreme outlier. Name another country where "the revolution" hasn't degenerated into tyranny within less than a generation.

Reminder that the nation established by the US revolution lasted less than 90 years before it was engulfed in civil war. Arguably it took that long because the distances involved were vast, when a horse-drawn carriage on poor roads could only average about 6-10mph during daylight hours: most countries that had revolutions were either geographically more compact, or had them with better transportation technology. (It's really hard today to grasp the degree to which even trains moving at 30-50mph revolutionized long range transport in the first half of the 19th century.)

I think I did mention it being "a close run thing". The government established by the American Revolution lasted less than a decade, 1781 to 1789 before being overthrown (fortunately non-violently) by our current government.

182:

I've no idea about the credibility of your sources, but the US shows, utterly without a doubt, that lockdowns work. The idiot FreeDumb run Southern states that held off on lockdown, then reopened early, have infection and death rates through the roof.

183:

The fact that Sweden is seeming like a world leader (deaths per million lower than quite a few locked down countries, higher coivd deaths than some countries but balanced against the fact they've kept their civil liberties and maintained healthcare for non-covid patients) for doing very little, shows that no-one is particularly great at handling the pandemic.

Sweden is the fifth-worst in the world for total deaths when normalized by population. It's also fifth-worst for total confirmed cases, doing only slightly better than Brazil. What you posted is a right-wing talking point which has ZERO relationship to reality, and at the very least I would have to question where you're getting your information.

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

You'll have to dig a little, but the graph you're looking for is the third graph down, and you'll have to choose Sweden and then pick out exactly what you'd like to learn about.

184:

whitroth @ 157: I think I should really shred all my paid bills, etc, from the eighties and nineties, though, at least....

Spend the money to get a really good one that does multiple pages and shreds to micro-cut. The smaller the pieces the better.

185:

I'm betting a bunch of bills from the nineties would make really excellent paper for someone who's into the whole crafting thing.

186:

You've got more than I do. I'm on adobe clay soil, mostly on a steep slope. A pry bar is mandatory for large hole construction.

So far I had a good crop of fava beans, and now I'm working on collards and tomatoes mostly, with a few squash starts to see if they'll take or if the bugs get them. I've also got an avocado and a couple of citrus trees. Most of my yard is a mix of the previous owner's plants and the natives I'm gradually replacing them with.

187:

Thanks for the link, nice graphing tools. We should note though that in Sweden the cases have isen recently, with an increase in testing capacity (at last!), but hospital ICU admissions with the virus are very low and have been declining since april, and deaths are also very low (wikipedia shwos these graphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden as of 00:02 BST 03/07/2020). So most of the recent rise in Sweden is mild cases being detected that would previously have been not noticed by the more limited earlier scale of testing. If we see deaths rise a lot in the coming weeks then I'll admit my mistake.

As for US states which have seen surges post-unlocking, they have tended to have less deaths per million overall than european countries, and still haven't risen to meet the european level. It might well be the case that this virus will, pretty inevitably, rise until the kinds of death levels seen in much of europe occur, and only then will it decline. In which case lockdowns simply delay the inevitable. Initially lockdown was infact described in just such terms, merely a way to flatten the curve to reduce health service pressure, when did it become a cure-all to stop the virus? When we've seen that, very fortunately, this virus doesn't seem able to overwhelm health services (although ovrwhelming them in the US could be easy compared to the rest of the world, given how badly the US lets corporate interests control its medical infrastructure), even in countries like Sweden which didn't lock down, the point of lockdowns gets a bit hard to see. I'm not disputing other public health measures, mask wearing, hand washing and physical distance are wise steps, and ones the Swedes have adhered strongly to, just that lockdown is too authoritarian and quite unnecessary.

188:

I can't find it in a hurry but an article from one of the epidemiological team who worked on Ebola and the original SARS outbreaks a decade and more ago, an experienced and knowledgeable expert said something to the effect that massive intervention early in an outbreak/pandemic is always going to look bad later when the deaths and illness figures are looked at, some uninformed people will always say with hindsight that we didn't need to go that far, really considering the results.

He went on to say that we really really didn't want to see the figures for deaths and illness if we DIDN'T over-react early and hard. The early Imperial College mathematical models for SARS-CoV-2 were hinting at a million deaths in the UK without the medium-hard lockdown we went through and which was implemented later than it should have been. The care homes cockup didn't help the headline numbers of cases and especially deaths.

Now we're opening things up again, taking the foot off the brakes because the weather's nice and people want to socialise and spread the disease a bit more because freedom and alcohol (Greater Manchester police have cancelled all leave for the force on Saturday, the day pubs re-open in England) and footy and all the things we did without to drive the case loads and death rates down to a fraction of what they were a couple of months ago. The IC epidemiologists have predicted this too in their modelling -- it's called "the second wave".

189:

Foxessa @ 174: As for invading Canada -- that was because the CSA really thought THEY could take it over. They maintained a big spy network there. They even tried to launch a coup on New York from Canada -- with the enthusiastic support of some Canadians -- on which the Union looked poorly. They rolled them up and the coup failed.

I gotta' go back and read all that Wikipedia stuff again. I completely missed the part about the Confederacy thinking they could take over Canada.

190:

The care homes cockup is truly shameful. This is a virus which is primarily a risk to the old and frail, so the policy of moving patients from hospitals to carehomes and letting the virus go with them has contributed to a very large number of deaths. This mistake was one thing that both the Uk and Sweden did, and quite possibly why both countries have high deaths-per-million figures. With the virus concentrated like this, largely but not solely a nosocomial disease, goings on in wider society have probably had a lot less effect on the tragic deaths than this one policy alone. SARS and Ebola were both warnings which we ignored, we should have used them as reason to better prepare things like PPE stockpiles, although in neither was a lockdown considered, and at its height the Ebola outbreaks in africa seemed a lot worse than covid-19. I do fear what will happen when the pubs reopen, not epidemiologically, just in terms of all the drunken disorder we'll see. Maybe I'm thinking wishfully but I am quite convinced by suggestions that covid-19 has naturally run its course, especially as despite so many earlier chances to flare up again massively during the decline it has only managed a few local outbreaks (looking around the world we mostly see the post-national-peak covid spikes in places where it was not prevalent early on, almost as if the separate places are experiencing separate local mini-peaks delayed behind the rest of their countrys' rather than being anything like a second wave).

191:

And with all that. In 1815 one side was Prussian, Austrian, Russian, various weirdos from part of the Spanish aristocracy, some very nasty Neapolitans, the British and all kinds of others. The other side had Napoleon, most of France, much of the old Netherlands republic, lots of Italy and Spain. I think the wrong side won.

192:

"You've never been a mountain biker have you?"

No. Mountains and bicycles do not go together. You don't need something to make it easier to get down the mountain; that's easy in any case. Too easy sometimes. What you need is something to make it easier to get up the mountain, and you need it even more if you're trying to lug a bicycle up there too.

"Spend the money to get a really good one that does multiple pages and shreds to micro-cut. The smaller the pieces the better."

You don't need that. Paper comes with a built-in self-destruct mechanism. It's free, it shreds it to molecular-sized pieces (and sticks them on to bits of other molecules just to mix things up even more), and it's great fun to operate.

193:

Troutwaxer @ 185: I'm betting a bunch of bills from the nineties would make really excellent paper for someone who's into the whole crafting thing.

Shredded & soaked in water for a couple of days they make pretty good "logs" for the fireplace or wood stove.

I've had one of these doohickeys for about 40 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXd6xabm4D0

I make a couple of batches per year (depending on how much stuff I need to shred). When the basket on the shredder gets full, I take it downstairs & dump it in a horse-bucket and add water. When the horse-bucket is full of pulp, I make bricks.

My shredder does micro-cuts so my bricks are denser. Before I got the shredder I just tore the paper into strips by hand. With the shredded paper you don't have to soak it as long for it to form good pulp, although that's not really a concern for me.

194:

No, that's a different problem. The camera systems already exist, so they can do that anyway, all they have to do is decide they want to. Indeed it would probably make the thing come out a bit better if they could feed it the data from the entirety of an officer's beat instead of just the bit where someone stabbed someone.

195:

I generally have to wet the soil, dig a couple shallow depressions so I can wet the soil some more, and when I've excavated to the necessary depth I pile up an inch of peat moss and an inch of composted chicken manure over the dirt, then turn it over. I raise all my seeds inside, then transplant them. The only thing I've successfully planted outside is Kentucky Wonder Beans, and they only grow if soaked first.

And since it's Southern California everything gets twice as much water as it says on the seed packet and I grow in areas with lots of morning or afternoon shade - right next to a fence or at the side of the house or whatever. I've also got all my tomatoes growing in pots, and the cucumbers too.

196:

The tip here is: if there are late night rapid access dumps + removals, PM B.Arnold. You'll get a raft on nonsense spam with some diamonds in it, this is kinda required.

For instance: DB is "allegedly" about to Bail-Out various Wirecard stuff, mentioned here before even the UK / DE press had a snifter, and mentioned some CH juicy stuff etc and there's FCA stuff that's never ever going to float, plus whatever else they forget to find in Mauritius and so on.

Like: Don't care, it's human bullshit. Even the EUREX T7 stuff was [redacted] wobbles.

~

But it meant a seriously dangerous little coughnot really human malecough thing came and threatened to eat us, again.

1 Points to Mars Green HALO 2 Points to Poland, skies 3 Points to Rapid escalating insect death

Like: fucking the Apes around over their shit and making fun of them for their complex systems being laughed at?

Dude.

T7 EUREX / DAX is [redacted] taking the fucking piss.

197:

"Sure there's a current spike, but the real question is what will the status be in 3-4 month and I don't believe that that can be reliably predicted at this stage. "

Actually, it can be, because it will be one of three things:

1) Sky-high, in a way which makes New York in spring look low, with the hospitals basically hammered flat.

2) Recovering from a draconian lock-down, which will have crushed the outbreak, but hammered the economy.

3) Possibly both, since the culture war has the right siding with the virus.

The GOP Senate is delaying any federal relief, which means that (a) supplemental unemployment runs out this month and (b) a number of US states are this month having to adjust their budgets to deal with vast shortfalls. That means that they cut employees, and their suppliers cut employees.

The Florida state government is cutting down on reporting their numbers, and they aren't doing that because those numbers are good.

At least one major Texas medical system has admitted that they have hit capacity.

Cases are increasing radically in California, and they are going back into shutdown.

Yesterday 'Moscow Mitch' McConnell, the Senate majority leader, warned Democrats against trying to steamroller the GOP next term ('do as I say, not as I do'). He's not doing that because he feels confident of a Republican victory.

The polls have shown that white Americans are moving to the left on racial issues, and that's after weeks of Black Lives Matter protests. I think that here we are actually seeing a major political shift in US politics.

198:

Oh, and kinda deliberately HAM-HANDED foreshadowing a load of CURRENT EVENTS about Yachts and so on, but, again. Apparently not allowed.[0]

If you know anything about anything, that was all to hide the actual stuff anyhow.

But fine: $14 billion drop and you can't collect on it (like max totals are E132 mil / $3.2 bil total) says Humans are crap at this fixed game anyhow.

You should hook up some of the outraged HN dev crew[1] to the idea of pre-quake modelling. It's basically how Stuxnet worked, only you can do it. Well. [redacted]

[0] Thing [redacted] and Child-Abuse etc. Let's just say, we've no faith in your systems, but these fuckers.... view that kind of Mind as Candy. Expect T and Bid to loose more cognitive functions, that stuff is... literally rotting their brains, In Real Time.

[1] Host has ties

[2] Pay attention: Turkey just went full And-redocogomre-foresajkin Conspiracy / burn the West on y;akk. No, really. Nice cover, if a lot of it wasn't actually true. Like: just what the fuck is in your anti-aging cream apart from the unnecessary human foreskin (like: is pig skin too fucking haram?) or the whiteners.

OOH.

Anyhow: Pidg. Serious attempt to protect some of you UK peeps, derailed. Hint too hard and too close, we do.

~

MEOW. Got to do see about eating a fucking Void Beast.

199:

I suspect there is going to be some real R infighting behind the scenes down there. Especially with the Lt. Gov saying let us old fart die to save the economy.

I suspect there won't be.

Whether it be the hospital CEO's, the business CEO's, or something else the GOP has found the face mask gospel in the last week. The turnabout has been quite spectacular with almost every GOP person now recommending people wear face masks, and even Trump moving to accepting them

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53258792

200:

"The fact that Sweden is seeming like a world leader (deaths per million lower than quite a few locked down countries, higher coivd deaths than some countries but balanced against the fact they've kept their civil liberties and maintained healthcare for non-covid patients) for doing very little, shows that no-one is particularly great at handling the pandemic. "

Compared to Norway, Finland and Denmark, Sweden looks extremely bad. From the COVID tracking page courtesy of the Financial Times (https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441), the excess mortality was:

Denmark +6% Norway - none Sweden +26%

201:

Imagining Right Wing peeps can't do high level strategy is kinda like imagining that the Soviets lost 27 million people through their own racial inferiority or that Soviet Technology was never a thing.

Someone smart and hard took a look at the PPE numbers, the $$ available and the PR spend and how much donor cash was coming from Life Insurance vrs Media down-turn, ran it through, shoved a couple of trillion on the stock market.

And you know what: 11% unemployment (completely fudged) is super-green, and the Stock Market is up, and those riots? FR intel + IL software + a few good old Americans policing the White Lines got it done. Only +112 over average dying mysteriously this year, that's a number Covid easily hides.

Fuck me.

Literally why you're losing this. You can't even imagine that they'll kill you for it.

Now, excuse me:

One LARGE fucking nasty [redacted] is about to Eat Us [translation] who thinks hes [male voice taken, probably using direct line gender insert into body via cock, it's the hard/fast/rude method] and HE WANTS TO EAT ME.

Which, unlike you unsophisticated fucks, means I've got to Black-Hole his* Mind, do various other things and THEN FUCKING EAT HIS SOUL.

~

And you fucks: can't even do decent protest against people murdering your "allies". Ask the Algerians, I'm fucking busy.

202:

We have a decent one, does 4 or more pages at once.

But I have these checkbooks, and, since I've been using duplicate checks since my late wife started us on them, all these NCR dups... tear out a bunch. Shred. Repeat and repeat and repeat.... It's hours and hours of work.

Turning them into fire logs... interesting thought.

203:

Oh, I think they would have agreed a lot. After all, their entire lives were structured around those limitations, and all the stuff you have to do and not do in consequence would be second nature to them. You've listed some examples. They make those choices for the same reasons, as they apply to their circumstances. If you changed the circumstances, put one in the middle of a moor in Yorkshire 200 years ago in winter and told them to go and bring something back from 60 miles away, I doubt they'd do it by horse either, or not more than once at any rate.

The trick of taking multiple horses along and using them in rotation was used by lots of people, but it doesn't solve the maintenance problem, it just defers it, and then gives you a bigger one when you do have to deal with it. IIRC it extends your operating radius to maybe 50 miles as a borderline practical limit, more likely less, or you can take the advantage in speed instead with a correspondingly smaller radius. It's still jolly good for messengers, scouts or specialist units acting as part of a horse-era army, but you can't have the whole army operating like that unless all you're doing is occasionally fighting for a couple of hours and then disappearing again for a few weeks. You've still got to find room for the maintenance somehow, either in numbers or in time. And in cost, however that is expressed for you, money or oats or grassland or whatever.

If you've got infrastructure, you can express it in money and hand it off to a bunch of horse-swapping stations along the route. I've never really understood how anyone ended up getting their own horse back again in the end, though. Maybe you just had to not care about that.

Thing is horses really are amazingly useless when you're used to engines. They're not so much like a car as like an electric mobility scooter with a lead-acid battery and a solar charger. We just forget because we don't use them any more and the one or two people who do are never interested in using them enough to find the limits a problem.

"And, incidentally, something like a Concorde is about as fuel efficient as walking to the destination (although it's jet fuel versus food)."

There used to be an advert for a 50cc Honda with the headline "it costs less to run than you do". It did 150mpg which was about a penny a mile at the time, and the advert pointed out that whatever food you ate to replace the number of calories you'd use to walk a mile would cost a whole lot more than a penny. I liked it because every single other piece of propaganda that mentioned food and calories was all about spending more money to eat more food with more bulk and no calories, and then spending more money to flare off the excess calories you still got. (And is even worse now, of course.) It was such a refreshing contrast to see something taking the sensible view that you should be adjusting your input to suit your output instead of the other way round, and advocating the use of machinery in place of higher output levels so you can cut the input down to suit.

"Indeed, we may see more people traveling on container ships than jets in a few decades. All because of fuel efficiency."

It's one of the silver linings I'm hoping for, though not so much because of fuel as because of all the airlines and aeroplane makers and aeroplane spare parts makers and aeroplane spare parts tooling makers etc. discovering that relying entirely on dynamic stability actually is a bad idea no matter what the fairies tell you. Along with a reduction in the amount of long distance travel in general, as one group of people finally work out what phones are for, and another group work out that there's no discernible difference between going to Spain and getting blotto for a week and doing it in the local pub instead, except that in the local pub it's a heck of a lot cheaper and you don't get the shits.

204:

I just wish we'd had Anders Tegnell in charge in the UK, we'd have had much the same tragic losses to covid-19 as we have actually had, but atleast we'd not have suffered all the othr human tragedies.

That would be the Anders Tegnell that has admitted he screwed up, that is tanking the Swedish government in the polls? https://fortune.com/2020/06/10/sweden-coronavirus-briefings-scandal/

The one who is responsible for Sweden continuing to be isolated from its neighbours because of their refusal to take steps to limit Covid? https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-shut-out-coronavirus-reopening-by-finland-norway-denmark-2020-6

The one who has admitted his failures have resulted in far too many deaths in Sweden, with a death rate far higher than its Nordic neighbours? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52903717

(Sweden, 10 million people, 4,500 deaths - Denmark, 5 million people, only 580 deaths - in an honourable world the Swedish government would have resigned for the complete and utter failure in dealing with this pandemic - the only redeeming thing is that they have managed to not overwhelm their health care system with the limited shutdowns that they did do)

You have some strange preferences.

205:

(re: Texas GOP officials)

"Whether it be the hospital CEO's, the business CEO's, or something else the GOP has found the face mask gospel in the last week. The turnabout has been quite spectacular with almost every GOP person now recommending people wear face masks, and even Trump moving to accepting them"

I think that the glow in the sky from the firestorm whose smoke is choking them has caused them to accept reality.

Remember that a lot of GOP state politicians are up for re-election this November, and having my option #3 hitting the state (massive death toll + economic collapse) this fall would doom a bunch of them.

206:

Austin's outbreak shows a strong correlation to the maskless demonstrations 4 or 5 weeks ago there so it's not just the "premature" lifting of restrictions.

Texas must be really special if their outdoor demonstrations caused a Covid outbreak, while demonstrations elsewhere in the US (and around the world) haven't.

Covid doesn't spread well outdoors - it is happiest indoors.

The far more likely explanation is that it was the reopening, like the people sitting in bars for long periods drinking and inhaling Covid droplets.

207:

Speaking of TX: just came in from a reconnoiter around the restaurant-bar insane nabe.  Everywhere Very Expensive vehicles, disgorging Very Expensive passengers. Many of those vehicles with license plates -- Texas and Florida.  None of the passengers wearing masks.  The places into which they are sashaying -- nobody is wearing masks either.  Except the servers.  Nobody's anywhere near 6 feet apart.  In many of these places the awnings / tents are essentially inside, and they have some form of a portable a/c unit.  There are of course also NY plates on other vehicles.  But I made a count and about 1/3 were with Florida and Texas plates.

Many of these places have more tables now on the sidewalks and streets than they were able to have inside. There is nowhere for people like us to walk.

Not  cop in sight to enforce anything.  I suppose if they're enforcing, it's in the Bronx.

This is return to NYC's previous catastrophe.

208:

"that stuff is... literally rotting their brains, In Real Time."

There's certainly something going round. Seen more and more weird-arsed fnords cropping up unexpectedly in the middle of normally-coherent people's posts (here and elsewhere). Seen at least two instances (not on here) of it spreading like mould until their entire posts are like that and so is their actual mind and they've gone full-on paranoid freakout (to the point where quite a lot of other people are seriously wondering what the utter fuck has happened to them). Seen more and more behavioural equivalents of fnords in the middle of the post in those aspects of people's mentalities which are expressed other than as posts on the internet. Having bursts of strange difficulty with my own verbal composition and other mental activities myself. Makes me wonder if the coronavirus has mutated into a "headfuck" strain which doesn't really affect the rest of your body and which hasn't been officially reported yet.

209:

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210:

[[ Exceeded the SoMN daily limit - mod ]]

211:

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212:

or something else the GOP has found the face mask gospel in the last week.

Sort of. But DT's hard core don't believe it.

From some of my relatives and their friends on FB:

The USA may cease to exist as a nation after the November election.

It’s Not About Masks or Health– It’s About POWER (a YouTube video)

The goal of the D’s after winning the election is to turn the country into a communist socialist state that will confiscate all your guns…

I have a pile of relatives in SC and TX. And we have an apartment in TX. We get to see all of this first hand.

213:

As you mention it, my guess would be that they've bought so deeply into the distant world of the Orange Hairball and Rupert "he should be hung" Murdoch that when the real world suddenly becomes something they can't ignore, they lose it, because if they admit it, they admit to themselves that they've been so brainwashed that they lost reality, and a good part of their lives, and of who and what they are.

214:

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215:

He (an assumption here) is also trying to assert that the new infections were peaking before the lockdowns, and so they weren't necessary.

That's why I posted, what was it, last night, that I think he's a troll.

216:

Ralph is pretty obviously getting his information from right-wing media. The whole Sweden thing was debunked weeks ago.

217:

Sort of. But DT's hard core don't believe it.

Yep, the GOP leaders have learned, but they are now attempting to do the proverbial row upstream without a paddle given their previous comments having brainwashed their base.

Which is why the assertion that things will be back to normal for DT to win in November is such a joke - the GOP/DT have done everthing they can to make sure Covid trashes the economy by October.

Or, to put it another way, if those GOP leaders are suddenly doing 180's on masks then you can guess the non-public numbers and predictions are very bad.

218:

In a way, it's amusing. Talk about a blog for them to post to that probably ranks way up there in "this is a waste of your time trying to change these folks' minds, who know more than you do" ratings.

Hey, SotMN: toss some cookies at these folks. I want to see them do an imitation of the dying Nazi in Raiders, and you're the perfect person to do it to them.

219:

I've got a series of specialized tools for digging: pry bar, pick axe, or (what works really well) a spetnaz shovel. I'm doing it the lazy, carbon conserving way, by trying to dig as little as possible and letting the soil gradually build up.

220:

It sounds like your ground is worse than mine, which is saying something! I don't expect to live here long, so I'm doing it the easy way; not sure how I'd do it if I was going to be long-term in this place.

221:

Paper comes with a built-in self-destruct mechanism.

But chickens make it much more fun. And I kind of like the idea of some fascist having to painstakingly separate the paper from the poo and stick the paper back together.

222:

I have clay cap over acid sulphate soils. Oh, and 5cm of sand on top of that with lawn in it. My only option is to build soil on top. But yeah, it does mean very little digging. And much of the digging is either trying to kill lawn, or recently, deciding that actually 300mm down is fine for conduit with mains electricity in it (technically 500mm), because if I don't like digging that deep no tradesman who can avoid it is going to dig that deep. Someone with a BYD* will be more inclined to suggest I turn the power off, I reckon.

  • Big Yellow Digger, not that other thing. Geez.
223:

wake up call:

RealDead (C19 & BLM & toxic dumping due to EPA cuts) FakePOTUS (golf & tear gas & upside down bible thumping)

if I had children, I'd be terrified, for one brief moment I am glad I have none...

as it is, I am waiting for sad day when USA reaches 200K and there is not enough storage; here in NYC the corpses are stacked up in refrigerated trucks outside of hospitals; we will run out of trucks before we run out of fools

not being of any use to relief efforts, all I can do is wait, watch and whine...

224:

RalphB SLIGHT correction: the worst president in theor history ... not yet. At the moment, Buchanan was the worst ... Agree about overall intrusive untrustworthy guvmint surveillance, though. [ I will probabky have ONE pint tomorrow, on principle, but I'm very chary of the registration system ... ]

Chris Blanchard Fuck right off Boney was a mass-murdering military dictator, who spread war across the face of Europe & the world Beethoven's quote on altering the header to his 3rd Symphony should tell you. Oh yes, on a fashionable topic: Boney Re-Introduced slavery ....

225:

OK, I'll bite:

Republic of Ireland: 3 year war of independence a century ago, a full democracy* today (cf the USA, a flawed democracy)

South Africa: long-running insurgency leading to a semi-peaceful transfer of power in 1994; the one generation is over, also a "flawed democracy"

Romania: violent overthrow of Communists in 1989, also a flawed democracy today (worse than South Africa, better than Mexico)

*I'm using the Economist's Democracy Index

226:

And the early ones, which used open-reel 1/2" tape, were seriously unreliable. They were got going, but never took off because storage density and power draw improved so much. But I have seen reports of CDROM robots, and I can beleve that people of thinking of SD card ones.

227:
I must still stand by my point that in the UK cases were declining before lockdown, there is a paper from Prof Simon Wood in Bristol which works on calculating back from the deaths peak and finds that cases had peaked in the UK and were declining before lockdown began.

Per https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries&highlight=United%20Kingdom&show=25&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=left#countries

Peak deaths in the UK was 13/4/2020. Lockdown started 23/3/2020, 3 weeks before. Not much sign that cases were falling before lockdown started.

228:

You are largely right about horses, but you are glossing over the fact that engines are much easier to use only because you have a truly massive industrial capacity supporting them. And, as far as transport goes, are much more constrained as to feasible routes. Lastly, for quite a few tricky uses, horses still beat motorised solutions in most respects - though those are carthorses and ponies, not riding horses - and even they are often beaten by other low-tech. solutions.

I fully agree that, under most conditions, a 60 mile trip is easier on foot than on a horse.

229:

The fact that Sweden is seeming like a world leader (deaths per million lower than quite a few locked down countries, higher coivd deaths than some countries but balanced against the fact they've kept their civil liberties and maintained healthcare for non-covid patients) for doing very little, shows that no-one is particularly great at handling the pandemic.
The total Swedish death rate is lower than some other countries, see my #107, but the current death rate is the highest in the developed world and it is not falling.

As for "maintained health care for non-covid patients", you mean "maintained health care for non-covid patients, except for those elderly patients expelled from hospitals to die of covid-19 in care homes, infecting staff and other elderly".

230:
My apologies if what I'm saying seems a bit strong, but I've been on the receiving end of police harassment for "non-essential" shopping early in the lockdown.

Ah, now I understand why you're so desperate to "prove" that lockdowns wer unnecessary, you were personally inconvenienced. Got it.

231:

See also this Metafilter discussion, and in particular the very first link posted in the OP (all about travel times/constraints in 18th/19th-pre-railway England).

232:

there's no discernible difference between going to Spain and getting blotto for a week and doing it in the local pub instead, except that in the local pub it's a heck of a lot cheaper and you don't get the shits.
Your pub is obviously too posh.

233:

SLIGHT correction: the worst president in theor history ... not yet. At the moment, Buchanan was the worst ...

I'll quibble and suggest that Buchanan is in the running for most ineffective president the US had. Other presidents have had more redeeming qualities; Jimmy Carter might be the best human being to be US president in the last fifty years but he wasn't the most effective.

Buchanan did put himself on the wrong side of pretty much every historical issue to come up during his term in office, a rare thing to find in any politician, and he was called a doughface to his face. On the other hand he was not particularly corrupt in his personal life nor did he conspire with foreign powers.

Bottom quartile, yes; worst, not necessarily.

(Anyone interested can read Buchanan's Wikipedia page.)

234:
Republic of Ireland: 3 year war of independence a century ago, a full democracy* today (cf the USA, a flawed democracy)

...skipping blithely over that whole Civil War bit. Soldiers tying tortured prisoners to land mines, anyone?

If you grant a century gap between revolution and your measuring point the French Revolution brought about the Third Republic.

235:

That said, you want to write the great American Novel about living in a generation ship? Everybody seems to assume that you can live for generations in a cramped apartment hurdling between stars, and not go insane doing it.

Yep: that's why my normative assumption for non-relativistic slower-than-light SF novels is that either the travelers have got cryonic suspension sorted[*], or it's a very slow but absolutely gigantic moving city with green spaces, lakes, recreation/theme parks, and zones big enough to trick the eye into thinking there's a horizon.

"Ships" that resemble today's ocean-going steel-hulled vessels (or submarines) are a big "nope" for anything longer than a couple of years.

[*] Although they may need to keep a rotating "warm" watch on duty, if defrosting the corpsicles at the far end requires human/medical supervision: this is of course potentially a plot driver.

236:

Yes. I took the bus from Nairobi to Lusaka in the late 1960s and, while it was a lot faster, many of the remarks in the first link still applied :-) However, while coach travel was getting cheaper by the early 19th century, it was still used mainly by richer people. The railways changed that.

Most fit people of working age can walk on relatively good going at 3 MPH for over 8 hours for up to a fortnight, so 25 miles a day was feasible in summer in good weather - and about half that in winter. Very comparable to coaches before the 18th century road and suspension improvements; Edinburgh-London in a week to ten days etc. I have done that sort of thing.

237:

Sorry, I'm probably being dumb here (its been known), but how does a satellite provide differential GPS? A satellite might get a GPS fix every few seconds but then needs a very good predictor.

They were clearly inappropriate to do Galileo or GPS type tricks as they don't have good quality atomic clocks on board.

You would hope the Cabinet Office and STFC were asking the right questions, but in both departments technical experts are thin on the ground - especially in the CO where most the staff have a single degree in history or PPE and no experience (outside of politics they are most likely to be heard using the expression "Would you like fries with that?").

The CO can't even get the UK flag right on the plane they stole from the RAF to allow BS Johnson and chums admission to the 5 mile high club.

238:

Synchronising clocks at a distance is fairly easy, down the the variation in the time messages take to pass between the two clocks plus the short-term variation in the local clock rate. The movement of the satellite makes that trickier, but not insoluble. A satellite could fairly easily be synchronised from a ground station to within c. 10 nanoseconds that way - essentially, doing a GPS fix in reverse.

No, I have no idea how they would do it - merely that it's a problem that has been solved in several different ways, with and without local atomic clocks. I doubt VERY much that TPTB ever consulted an expert on what was feasible before proceeding, given their track record.

239:

The NPL would know the answers, if anybody bothered to ask them. There have certainly been studies by capable people of how the UK infrastructure would cope in the event of GPS denial, both large scale (the satellites are switched off, or the moral equivalent) and small (White Van Man routinely uses GPS jammers so his employers can't see what he's up to.)

240:

there's no discernible difference between going to Spain and getting blotto for a week and doing it in the local pub instead,

The phrase that comes to mind about cheap and cheerful Spanish holidays is "Sun, sand and sangria". Going down the pub in late winter in the driving rain and freezing cold compares unkindly with warm(ish) and sunny(ish) Torremolinos, typically five deg C warmer than central England and with two or three hours more daylight. The beer prices in Torremolinos look to be about a third those of a typical non-London pub which helps pay for the cheap flight and an AirBNB shared between five mates.

241:

About the new world being born, I have good and bad news.

Young people being progressive will not revert, probably.

But Polarisation may well mean we can kiss democracy goodbye (warning, PDF).

So the new world will be fine, if there's enough beige to keep it democratic.

[[ HTML requires you to quote your URLs. Now done - mod ]]

242:

And you too. Boney was certainly a murdering loon, but so were the rest of them. What he did was embed some of the gains of the French revolution in legal systems across a big part of Europe. The reactionaries did their murderous best to reverse those gains but they survived well enough to form the basis for modern European democracy and liberties. The difference between the regimes which folllowed Boney and the old sort is the difference between brutal prisons and having your leg torn off on a public platform. Not a great choice, but still a change for the better. And that change, including Boney's consolidation, made room for improvements like the Risorgimento, the collapse of the Spanish empire and the French third republic. The freedoms we have now (and I know their weaknesses) spread out of the example of the French revolution, more than anything else - not the peripheral USA, or English Whigism, or the flickers of Enlightenment policy which had sometimes shown up in the Austrian part of their Empire, or some of the smaller German states, and not even the Dutch Republic. They are all important parts of what we are now, but the French revolution is the big thing, and without Boney, even mad as he went, that impetus would have just been squashed, with its legs torn off, as was the old normal. And before anyone comes up with economic arguments to say the happy torturers would have had to stop because of ..., that isn't enough. Without changes to the legal systems, like ending internal tariffs and barriers to trade and starting the uniform metric system, never mind forcing aristos into paying their debts, most of western Europe would have had a much harder time developing. Boney forced those changes on places he ruled, and once done, even the stupid reactionaries saw they made sense, so they stuck, and people could develop industries and that. As for slavery (for a bit of what-about-ism), the whole of eastern Europe, as in the bits never governed by one of Napoleon's relatives or cronys, had serfdom, which was slavery with a stupid legalistic quibble. That is much of Prussia, occupied Poland, Russia and all the rest. And they didn't develop until another round of revolutions (I suppose I had better say 'and Bismark'). So there.

243:

White Van Man routinely uses GPS jammers so his employers can't see what he's up to.

The UK has White Van Man but the US has Florida Man? You Brits definitely have the better of that. grin

244:

Remember that a lot of GOP state politicians are up for re-election this November, and having my option #3 hitting the state (massive death toll + economic collapse) this fall would doom a bunch of them.

Texas is still on track to hit 60% of the state population, eighteen million people, being on the "confirmed positive" list by late October - early November. Some areas (like the lower Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio) will get there sooner than that unless doubling rates improve quite a bit sooner, not later.

And then, even if 60% does get to "herd immunity", that means reduced, not zero, infection rate among the as-yet-uninfected. How's that going to be managed?

245:

I've only been abroad twice in the last decade or so, Prague and Malta. A week in either of those destinations was no dearer, or cheaper, including spending-money, in total than a three-night city break to Edinburgh (where I have been many times). Meals out are half or a third the price, drink a third or quarter the price, the hotels are cheaper per night for an extra star of comfort and for Malta the direct return flights from my local airport cost less than the cheapest advance rail-return to Edinburgh. For those who smoke there's also the cheaper fags and the duty free to bring home.

246:

I live in Edinburgh. I had vague plans to go off to, where else, Torremolinos some time in late March or early April before the summer lager-lout rush just to get warm and pick up some natural Vitamin D and maybe go for a paddle in the Mediterranean. This did not happen. Ditto for my planned trip to Japan in May around my birthday which also did not happen.

247:

The soil where I live is granite/sandy, and there's very little organic matter, with a very high ph near the cement fence that separates our yard from the main street out back. If I planned to live here for several years I'd expect to redo the entire yards, as it is I'm just turning over limited amounts of soil and planting.

248:

To be fair, not every governor did a good job on lockdown. Michigan's governor declaring that nobody could buy seeds was as bad an idea as I've seen, despite the fact that she otherwise has handled her responsibilities quite well re the pandemic. But I also haven't seen anyone talking in terms of rights versus responsibilities, and when the needle should move between them. IMHO, during a pandemic we should be much more oriented towards responsibilities.

249:

Hmmmm

Broken link.

250:

JH/RalphB No - SOME Plod forces were really nasty arseholes about harassing people, because they could - it was amazingly variable. Lancashire attracted a lot of bad publicity, f'rinstance.

Charlie @ 231 Again ... Robert Carey's ride ...

hmmm @ 241 Your links are broken ......

Chris Blanchard Still eff off ... The Corsican Tyrant was called such for very good reasons Again - see the famous Beethoven quote. And "freedoms" - bollocks - Britain reformed ( or rather started to reform ) it's voting system in 1832, French women didn't get the vote until 1945 NOT BUYING IT.

252:

When I said "not requested", I meant not requested by anyone. Certainly by anyone with an interest in anything that might be related to the film. I didn't specify that it be done by a lawyer, or a trial judge or some such. The only reason for not just "keep the stuff forever" is the sheer volume of data that would mean. And a video of a police officer eating a hamburger is really only a small public health offense...and from the viewpoint of the officer's camera it would quickly get old.

But the camera's off switch needs to be welded shut, and the mic active.

253:

Britain may not have recognized the CSA, but there were a lot of British trading with them. Enough that the US Navy had patrols out to stop them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_and_the_American_Civil_War

254:

Man, you USA'nians and your weird measuring systems. I followed your link to the bucket, and the lable on it says 70 quart, and it's description says 1.75 bushel. Google says 61.66 litres from bushel, and 66.24l from quart (US quart, of course, cos you can't even measure a pint or gallon properly).

65l bucket is soooo much simpler.

255:

Most fit people of working age can walk on relatively good going at 3 MPH for over 8 hours for up to a fortnight, so 25 miles a day was feasible in summer in good weather - and about half that in winter.

I think you missed out a factor: clothing, and in particular, footwear.

Back in the 18th/early 19th century, before the spinning jenny, cloth was ridiculously expensive in modern terms because thread was spun by hand/wheel: upshot, a suit of new clothes was the equivalent of a new budget car in terms of earning power, and most everyone wore second hand/hand-me-down and had maybe two outfits plus Sunday best. On a cross-country journey you'd be wearing one outfit and carrying another for smart events/wash day. And your clothing on the road would take a hammering from weather, rain, mud from passing wagons, and so on. Shoes ... also not cheap: and while they were repairable by cobblers pretty much everywhere, that would cost and cause you to take hours to a day off the road.

(Another side-effect of walking: you couldn't go quite as far in a day as you could in a coach, so your journey would take longer, and you'd be paying more for inn space and/or meals en route.)

Anyway: travel was Not Great, especially if you were poor and ran the risk of vagrancy charges and/or having to take time out to earn a crust.

(Am paying attention to this because of plans, slowly advancing, for the next novel I start to be a Regency romance/The Prisoner/Laundry universe crossover. Complete with all the gritty realism you don't usually expect in that subgenre.)

256:

White Van Man's US cognate isn't Florida Man; it's Pick-Up Truck Contractor Dude (probably with truck nutz and a confederate battle flag bumper sticker, and maybe a MAGA redcap these days). Drives a Ford F250 because F150s are for quiche-eating greenies, Rolls Coal, either lots of tacked-on chrome brightwork or else the truck is rusting through and covered up to the hubcaps in cow dung.

257:

A new world is being born. I just hope I live to see it, and that there's room in it for someone like me to exist.

Yeah. I feel this a lot, lately. A lot.

258:

My big plan for this summer, cancelled by COVID19, was my first ever trip to New Zealand. Worldcon is there this year which made it a business trip (expensable), I've been saving air miles for a decade, the plan was to spend a couple of weeks there and take the long way home via somewhere interesting. Did I say "plan"? We'd been planning it for five goddamn years and I now don't know if I'll ever get to the antipodes (Aus included) ever again.

259:

No, I wasn't, and here I am speaking from experience. Walking (except through undergrowth) does a lot less damage to clothing than almost any kind of working, and most people did not have the attitude to cleanliness as today; that length of time with no change of clothing is not a problem. Really. Yes, their walking clothes would have got filthy.

Footwear, to some extent. I personally have never walked for more than a few hours barefoot, but it was common in my youth among people who couldn't afford many (or any) shoes. In the UK, that's feasible only in spring to autumn, and probably not in seriously wet spells; extended periods of wet feet causes the skin to soften. I have also used (traditionally) hobnailed leather boots, and they last far longer than most people imagine.

Inns also put multiple people in a bed, and made stable space available even more cheaply, but the poorest people often slept out. Again, that's much easier in summer, but look up the history of the belted plaid! I have done that, too :-)

I fully agree that travel was Not Great, but people DID walk long distances, and histories refer to a lot of people who walked from all corners of Great Britain to London for work. That was primarily young men, of course. And don't forget travelling tinkers, peddlers and so on.

260:

Off topic observation: OGH and Missile Gap are name-dropped in James Nicoll's latest essay, A Brief History of the Megastructure in Science Fiction.

"... without question the finest Locus Award-winning story inspired by a post of mine on a USENET newsgroup ..."

261:

In the U.S. White Vans are commonly referred to as "Murder Vans," because urban legends says that child molesters, rapists and serial killers all drive white vans full of torture gear. The mere presence of a strange white van in a neighborhood is sometimes enough to cause people to call the police.

263:

We'd been planning it for five goddamn years and I now don't know if I'll ever get to the antipodes (Aus included) ever again.

My wife and I had miles and nights (upper range Marriott 7 night free) and the plan was for London mid March.

Oops.

264:

USA'nians and your weird measuring systems.

Consider the source. :)

265:

I did, however, make a stupid error! It's York or Devon to London in a week to ten days in reasonable weather in summer - at least double that for Edinburgh.

266:

On this matter, I have a close friend who is an economic historian, specialising in the position of women and children in the workplace during that era.

267:

When that happens I'll revise the time the evidence should be kept.

Actually, thinking it over, until then random time slots should be burned to DVD and just kept forever as well as anything that anyone shows any interest in...that includes reporters, random public citizens, lawyers, busy-bodies, etc. And public decency laws should not exclude this. Sorry to those who are shy, but public access is important...don't do anything you wouldn't want your grandma to see where a policeman can see it.

268:

Texas is still on track to hit 60% of the state population, eighteen million people, being on the "confirmed positive" list by late October

Except the State is now backtracking, and doing other things, to try to slow/stop the spread which will throw those estimates off - and those estimates are likely based on testing results that don't reflect the wider population.

Prime example of this is Sweden, where despite the denials they now put out a goal was to develop herd immunity - but they found Covid (while causing excess deaths) wasn't creating the herd immunity they desired fast enough.

And then, even if 60% does get to "herd immunity"

Others on here may know more definitively, but I think it is around 90% with vaccines to have herd immunity so at 60% you wouldn't even be close.

But worse, there are indications (as reported in the previous thread) that we may not all keep immunity from Covid even after having it. Usual caveats, early science etc. but doesn't look promising https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/asymptomatic-covid-19-1.5629172

269:

I did wonder - it's about 45 miles from Darlington to York so 30 minutes by train but an hour by car and 2 days to walk

https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/15346535.four-days-to-london-by-coach-to-the-capital-on-the-great-north-road/ has an interesting outline of coach times - they first appeared in 1650's with 4 days for London to York, 5 days York to Edinburgh (it's a more difficult route as well as slightly longer).

The interesting bit is that it cost £2 (in 1710 money) to make the journey, coaching Inns extra.

270:
JH/RalphB No - SOME Plod forces were really nasty arseholes about harassing people,

You're giving Ralphy Boy to much credit, he's clearly a self-centred right wing dick, the only thing that matters to him is his convenience.

He got hassled during lockdown, yeah, maybe the police were dicks (well, obviously, they're police, duh) but his reaction to that is not "the police are dicks" but "lockdown doesn't work, we should be Sweden and preserve our precious freedums even if all the olds die".

271:

Why are you assuming a generation ship would be cramped? That's not a reasonable design. Generation ships should be designed to be lived in more than to travel. In fact, my default assumption is that by the time folks get to where they were nominally headed they'll be saying "Why leave our home?", and they'll be right.

If you design it to be an efficient traveller...well, space has very low friction, so that's not much of a constraint. It's going to be very massive, so you aren't going to be making any rapid turns. So that's not a constraint. It's not going to accelerate rapidly, so that's not a constraint. And if you make it too uncomfortable, it won't survive the mutiny. So that's not a constraint.

A generation ship need to carry a nearly closed ecosystem, and that means it's going to need lots of space. It's going to need a rapid internal transport system anyway, and that system is going to need maintenance and... you want lots of duplicate greenhouses so a single failure doesn't kill you all. People like living near growing plants. Etc.

A crowded generation ship is a bad design. A generation ship with an unhappy crew is a bad design. Etc. (Even so, I expect that an improved virtual reality is going to be a necessity to make it work. But what the programs should be is a real question. They should teach a correct morality, but what that means in this context isn't clear, and teach means "provide experiences which causes one to learn".)

272:

Ben Thompson Timetable says 29 minutes for the 44 miles York-Darlington - 91 mph Close enough!

273:

When I moved to Texas to be with the woman who was my late wife - this is mid-eighties - we were living in an immobile home on two acres. Former ranch, subdivided.

Anyway, she wanted a garden, and I had some money. Now, you have to understand that this was central Texas, I mean, we'd only been above the Tethys Sea about 10M years, it takes time for dirt, just give us another 10M years, and we'd have nice soil for turf for you, humans always in a rush.

In the meantime, 15" (not quite half a meter) down was kaliche. Sea shells, compressed into ROCK.

So she went out on a weekend to buy a truckload of dirt. "You sure you mean that, lady?""Yes, I want 10 yards of dirt, and another three yards of compost."

Neither of us had ever considered dirt as a high-demand item. Took till the next Thursday, while we were at work, before it was delivered, dumped right where we wanted it. For the next two weeks, we'd get home from work, and I'd go out with my shovel and fling dirt in all directions.

Afterwards, we rented a rototiller. Had a garden about 20'x30'.

274:

People are backing up to LARGE RAIDs. Where I was working, the last couple years or so, for large RAIDS, our "offline backup" was to a server in another building that had, um, 42 4TB h/d, set up as two monster RAIDs.

Here at home, I do what I started doing when I got the job in '09: an eSATA external drive bay, and a drive in it. I do my backup from one h/d to another, then turn on the drive bay, mount it, and back up to that, unmount it, turn it off. Protected from surges....

275:

Except the State [TX] is now backtracking, and doing other things, to try to slow/stop the spread which will throw those estimates off - and those estimates are likely based on testing results that don't reflect the wider population.

Yes, there are many things in play and the numbers are, as has been noted by several people here, subject to considerable uncertainty. However, if you just look at the daily case numbers reported by Texas itself, you can extract the following doubling times in days for the past two weeks ending yesterday:

23.01 Two weeks ago 21.27 18.27 19.20 19.74 18.50 17.44 16.98 16.45 15.69 16.46 17.94 17.99 17.26 Yesterday

The numbers and the trend aren't encouraging, but we'll see how they go in the next week or so.

276:

The issue is that we need to shut down Rupert Murdoch, for a start.

From the huge BLM demonstrations that go on and on, what I think we're seeing is just what I've thought all along: the GOP, in desperation to satisfy the ultrawealthy owners, have moved right and further right for the only base they can use.

However, they've left a lot of people behind.

The overwhelming majority is not that fascist, and the opinion polls are showing this. It's the extremists who want to go beyond... and even there, they're a bipolar force. They want to go back to Jim Crow... but they also don't want someone telling them what to do (see all the conspiracists about their 2nd Amendment Rights Gonna Save Us All from an Overreaching Gummint).

I'm hoping sanity reigns in these dolts come Nov. If there's an explosion afterwards, I think there are plenty of folks who are going to remind them who has the tanks and air support.

277:

Yes. Stupid of me.

The 4 days by coach was the 'express' service, and £2 was within the means of only well-off people - and note the 'gotchas' in the link in #231. The working class walked, if they travelled at all.

https://pascalbonenfant.com/18c/wages.html

278:

Don't get me started, I mean, metric is soooo hard.... Besides, the rest of you lot will come around, sooner or later, and join us, and, um, er, Myanmar, I think, and is it South Africa, or did they go metric...?

279:

RAIDs are useful, especially for hot-swapping, but have several weaknesses - such as the controller misbehaving. And they don't provide any protection against software or human error.

I take a similar approach to you at home, though the details are very different.

280:

Yeah. "Florida Man" is the Darwin-Award chasing idiot who's last words are "Here, hold my beer...."

On the other hand, white van... a white van, mostly still Ford E150's or E250's, is the standard for contractors, and a lot of other companies. Ford, because they came out first with them, around '51 or '52, and as of a few years ago, were still 50% of the market.

I had one for a while... ah, right, Nojay, that was the one we drove through the fuckbugs after Worldcon in Orlando in '92, taking you to Lake Charles.

281:

One of the effects of COVID is to create small circulating blood clots. If they nest in the lungs, you get pneumonia. If they nest in the kidneys, you get kidney failure. (Fortunately, most people have a lot of spare kidney function, as it's not believe you recover function later.) If they nest in the brain, you get micro-strokes...and sometimes not so micro.

I'm no doctor, but I hypothesize that this is the main way COVID does its damage. Of course, it also messes with the immune system.

This first came to my attention when "pink toe" was shown to be a COVID symptom. Tiny blood clots were blocking blood from getting out of baby's toes.

282:

About walking on foot: https://fastestknowntime.com/routes

It's amazing how well we handle long walks

a few examples (and all those below are Mountain Trails!): - Appalachian Trail (US) - 2189 miles, fkt: 41d 7h 39m - Pacific Crest Trail (US) - 2655 miles, fkt: 52d 8h 25m - South West Coast Path (UK) - 630 miles, fkt: 10d 15h 18m - Hadrian's Wall Path (UK) - 84 miles, fkt: 16h 25m 55s

283:

Clothes get dirty, esp. if you didn't leap off the road fast enough for some toff on horseback, but they were NOT THE CRAP that's forced on us today (want to buy clothes equivalent to what was ordinary 40 years ago? pay double or triple the price; everything else is made to be comfortable in, say, southern California, or southeast Asia, forget cold weather (defined as < 10C).

Boots on the other hand... their shoes were SOLID. Plain leather-soled boots have lasted me about 10 years, without resoling.

284:

What was the recent Kim Stanley Robinson book about the generation ship? It was built like a wheeled space-station, rotated for gravity, and was 3-4 kilometers in diameter... and of course it didn't work very well.

285:

Two pounds is a HUGE amount of money for anyone but upper middle class, nobility, and highway robbers (but I repeat myself).

I've read that, in Holmes' London in late Victorian times, 500 or 550 pounds was a large enough trust to live (frugally, perhaps) on the interest for life.

286:

Oh, and forget inflation - I've read that between about 1712(?) and about 1912, the British pound INCREASED in value by 5%.

287:

RAIDs are useful, especially for hot-swapping, but have several weaknesses - such as the controller misbehaving.
Controller? I don't need not steenking controller.

288:

The 4 days by coach was the 'express' service, and £2 was within the means of only well-off people

Checking those tables, that'd be 2-4 weeks' wages for a skilled male worker, 2-3 months' wages for a maidservant or footman or other low-wage person (although the servants would usually get their meals and accommodation for free). One week of pay for a solicitor or a clergyman, both professional/middle-class.

So let's call it the equivalent, in today's terms, of buying a plane ticket to the antipodes -- similar duration (within an order of magnitude), equivalent chunk of disposable income.

289:

Do you find that your sandy soil requires continued applications of organic material because it doesn't last long in the sand? Living 800 feet downslope from an eroding sandstone cliff, I have that problem.

My tomatoes and peppers are in EarthBox containers on my deck, using none of the local soil. I have rhubarb growing in the ground and I'm trying for asparagus, but so far without success. Gardening here (Colorado at 7500 ft) is a matter of having your fingers crossed, since HOA rules don't allow fences and a bear wandering onto the deck would be a disaster.

290:

IMHO you're exactly right. If you want to be effective as an activist, take down FOX news. Start every protest at the scene of the crime, then end it in front of the local FOX outlet.

291:

SD cards are a seriously bad choice for long term storage. They depend on barely metastable conditions. Some of them depend on a capacitor holding its charge. I've had them lose memory within a couple of months. Presumably the ones used for mass storage would be better, but how much better? I guess you could make sure that they were always hooked up to power, and that the memory was frequently refreshed, but...

Tape and DVDs and even hard disks are much better long term storage devices. (If it's really long term, then use the OLD CD standard where pits were burned into metal sandwiched between two sheets of glass.)

292:
  • I worked for 10 years in my late job. I'd say, by the end, well over half the servers (I can't really say maybe 100, 120, because we'd buy new ones to replace the 10 or more year old servers (yes, this is the US NIH, and no, I'm not kidding)). I think I remember one or two hardware RAID controllers failing. Ever.

  • At home, my main system is on Linux software RAID.

  • If you buy a consumer-grade m/b, and it's got Intel RAID on it (or, as everyone in the field referred to them, fakeRAID), DO NOT USE the Intel RAID. Spend a few bucks (ok, $120-$330) and buy a real RAID card (LSI, um, Avoga?, sorry, Broadcom).

  • But merely having something running on a RAID (like the partitions that my o/s or home directory are on) is NOT a replacement for backups to something else.

    293:

    On the other hand, I believe I've read Roman Legionnaires considered 20m/day a good days march (carrying a lot of weight in packs), and 30 a forced march.

    294:

    3. If you buy a consumer-grade m/b, and it's got Intel RAID on it (or, as everyone in the field referred to them, fakeRAID), DO NOT USE the Intel RAID.
    If you're using Linux then Intel RAID is Linux software RAID (mdadm). So called "Intel Fake RAID" is just a container format, the RAID is done during boot by the BIOS on the motherboard, but after boot it's up to the OS. Linux MDADM is quite happy with the Intel raid container format. These days many actual RAID controllers use the same format, which is interesting as if you pull one or more of the disks and bung 'em in a Linux system mdadm will recognise the RAID layout and usually be able to access the data.

    295:

    Um, I had a couple of servers we finally replaced about four years ago where I was working.

    Couldn't replace the h/d with larger... they were true SCSI, and had been running, continuously, since about '05.

    Our offline backups that I did, not to the other system RAID, I'd do the backup, then go down to the basement machine room, and put them back in the fire safe. I slowly replaced them over 10 years, just because we needed larger drives.

    And they don't have to be spun up regularly. I'm a h/d person....

    296:

    Liberia is the third one.

    297:

    See! US "English" measurement is in the forefront of, um, er, abandoned storefront waiting for urban renewal?

    298:

    FWIW, "herd immunity" is both disease specific and situation specific. Densely commingled population have a higher percentage requirement, but it also depends on the mechanism for contagion and the persistence in the environment.

    That said, while antibodies don't seem to persist for COVID, there are various indications that TCells may be more important. Unfortunately, they're very hard to test for so they're largely being ignored. So perhaps a persistent immunity is possible, just not persistent antibodies. But we also don't really know that the TCells persist, though I believe that's expected to be the case.

    299:

    YUCK! RAIDs for backup? Very bad idea. Recovering from a few bits in error can be impossibly difficult, and lose the whole database/filesystem. Much better to back up files, where possible, and partitioned files where not. Backup systems already have great compression built-in, and their compression systems are designed to allow recovery, unlike RAID, which is designed for quick access.

    300:

    Er, 3-4 months' wages for a maidservant, footman etc.! But, yes, that's a comparable expenditure, except that it is no longer feasible to get there in any other way. An unemployed person could walk from places as far away as York or even Edinburgh to London for work and quite a few did. The railways made a huge difference, of course.

    301:

    @224 and @233 re: Buchanan

    I'd also like to nominate James K. Polk as possibly one of the most morally reprehensible persons to have become President of the United States [NB: The wiki article is quite slanted in his favor].

    He was a devious plotter, and petty to boot. He came into office determined to gain Texas to the U.S., and manufactured the start of the Mexican-American War , as well as encouraging rebellion in California. During the war, he sidelined General Zachary Taylor as a potential political competitor - he turned out to be right, as Taylor was drafted as a candidate in 1848.

    Polk was a public devotee of the jingoistic theory of Manifest Destiny, used to justify American imperialist and genocidal subjugation of the middle third of North America. Also, from his wiki article, "A slaveholder for most of his adult life, he owned a plantation in Mississippi and bought slaves while president."

    The more you read U.S. history, the more we have to apologize for. Perhaps we're trying to do better.

    302:

    whitroth @ 202: We have a decent one, does 4 or more pages at once.

    But I have these checkbooks, and, since I've been using duplicate checks since my late wife started us on them, all these NCR dups... tear out a bunch. Shred. Repeat and repeat and repeat.... It's hours and hours of work.

    Turning them into fire logs... interesting thought.

    I use the top stub kind of checks & shred the old stubs as well as the checks. It's easier to get the wire out of the top stubs than it is to pull the staples out of the end stub type (which I learned when I first started shredding stuff because before I switched to top stubs I had the end stub kind).

    The one drawback of the micro-cut shredders is they don't handle staples very well. I actually ruined my first shredder - burned out the motor - by feeding paper that I hadn't removed the staples from. My current shredder says it will handle up to 16 sheets, but I usually feed about half that many.

    I keep one of those cardboard "banker boxes" here next to my desk & accumulate the stuff to be shredded. When the box gets full, I'll shred the whole lot which fills the bin up a couple of times. That seems to be the least time consuming way for me to do it.

    I was making the paper pulp fire logs long before I got my first shredder. I had a subscription to the local newspaper & used that and one day figured out I could add the junk mail to it. This was early "recycling" days when you had to separate materials (paper, cardboard, plastic, aluminum cans, steel cans) into different containers before the city would pick them up.

    303:

    (If it's really long term, then use the OLD CD standard where pits were burned into metal sandwiched between two sheets of glass.)

    Uh, CD writers didn't "burn" pits into metal... Pressed CDs were manufactured from masters with 160 nm-deep pits pressed into polycarbonate substrate then metallised. Write-once and later rewritable CDs used a phase-change layer of plastic which was written by a more powerful laser to make areas with different reflectivity which could also be read like pressed pits, but with lower signal-to-noise since it didn't involve a beam-splitter and interference. The pressed pits were 1/4 wavelength of the 650nm read laser and the detector read the mixed reference beam and reflected beam with constructive or destructive interference.

    The energy pattern to the laser for writeable media was a "secret sauce" deal for companies like the one I worked for making CD writers and their control chips. It wasn't a simple on-off thing but a carefully shaped pulse which produced a sharp well-defined image in the disc's phase-change material.

    If you want long-term data storage involving making holes then punched tape is your best bet. There was a cartridge-based punched tape data storage system I saw demoed a long time back. Going from memory it used either a 1-inch or 2-inch videotape substrate and an array of laser diodes to make the holes and read them back, about 150 of them across the width of the tape. I think it recorded 128 bits of data plus parity and error-correcting bits and a cartridge could store a few hundred MB of data, a lot at that time.

    304:

    Perhaps I'm confused. When I saw "SD card" I read "flash memory card". Is this not correct?

    Yeah, hard drives are pretty good, usually for decades, or at least that used to be the case. Eventually the lubricants would get stiff, and then it was better to have copied them somewhere else. Good tapes last longer in a controlled environment, though I'm not sure about the current generation. Higher densities seem to inherently cause corruption problems, and I've had a couple of 556 BPI odd parity tapes that eventually went bad (became unreadble in places) without delaminating. (The even parity tapes were worse, but you'd only lose a couple of characters, with the odd parity tapes you lost an entire record.)

    305:

    David L @ 212: I have a pile of relatives in SC and TX. And we have an apartment in TX. We get to see all of this first hand.

    Ha! You know you don't have to go that far. We got plenty of right-wingnuts here in Raleigh.

    306:

    Me @301: If this period of history, not well covered, interests you, I'd recommend starting with So Far From God, co-written by John S. D. Eisenhower, Ike's son.

    307:

    Right. To a good first approximation, walking speed on the flat goes down by the square root of the person's all-up weight (faster in hilly going), PROVIDED that you can carry that weight without it impeding your walking. Possibly 25 miles a day was a bit optimistic, but not by a huge margin - I have certainly done it, and am no athlete.

    308:

    "Yep: that's why my normative assumption for non-relativistic slower-than-light SF novels is that either the travelers have got cryonic suspension sorted[*], or it's a very slow but absolutely gigantic moving city with green spaces, lakes, recreation/theme parks, and zones big enough to trick the eye into thinking there's a horizon."

    Or the society is highly adapted to a very crowded living situation. It's a similar problem to the likely situation with biotech/neurotech in a century, that the people will be sharply different from us.

    309:

    You are thinking of a later, and less stable, version of the CD. The first version used laser burned pits in metal sandwiched between two panes of glass. They couldn't come up with a way to make it cost effective, so they replaced it with multiple different technologies. But I believe the original technology was used to create the "golden CD" sent out on the Voyager 1 probe.

    310:

    (note, I live in Southeast Michigan)

    "To be fair, not every governor did a good job on lockdown. Michigan's governor declaring that nobody could buy seeds was as bad an idea as I've seen, despite the fact that she otherwise has handled her responsibilities quite well re the pandemic. "

    A few comments:

    1) She called it right. She wasn't perfect, but we have to look to find things which she messed up on, rather than look to find things which she did right.

    2) Trump called for an armed mob to storm the legislature, which they did. The police had to physically line up and block them, which they did with no riot gear; I didn't hear of any arrests.

    3) The mob armed mob was handled with utmost delicacy. White right-wingers get this.

    4) Hospitals in Detroit were hammered, and almost overwhelmed. Any later for the lock-down and it'd have been a disaster.

    5) There was something interesting going on in my town. A motel was full of random looking people, with two security guards blocking the driveway. They would not tell me what was going on. I think that the government put homeless people there. There'd be better separation than in the local homeless shelter.

    6) The local economy was hammered. The auto companies shut down for a couple of months, and are still not back totally. The university campus looked like it did between Christmas and New Year's.

    7) People were avoiding restaurants in the week before the lockdown.

    311:

    "About walking on foot: https://fastestknowntime.com/routes

    It's amazing how well we handle long walks"

    These times will be based on modern equipment, good trails and selection of prime weather.

    Assume that you have to wear/carry 20 lbs of wool to start with, have crappy shoes (with slick leather soles), and whatever weather comes along.

    312:

    Sorry, but you don't understand the environment I was working in.

    How many gigabit SINGLE FILES are you used to dealing with? As I said, the RAID box - it was actually a RAID appliance, held 42 drives, had its own internal controllers, and you had a hub card in the server. We had that one partitioned into... IIRC, two 66TB partitions.

    And you also may not be familiar with commercial-grade RAID controller cards. AFAICT, they had very serious quality control on those. If a corporation, or other organization lost tens or hundreds of terabytes, there would be lawyers involved....

    At home, I don't have a fraction of that, and I expect my 4TB external WD Red drive to last me for a long, long time.

    313:

    IIRC it was more like a phonograph record, and they included a stylus for playing it.

    314:

    Sorry, the Hairball's still worse, because he's actively trying to mangle the government.

    Polk, getting us into a war? So, just like the Shrub and Cheney.

    315:

    WaveyDavey @ 254: Man, you USA'nians and your weird measuring systems. I followed your link to the bucket, and the lable on it says 70 quart, and it's description says 1.75 bushel. Google says 61.66 litres from bushel, and 66.24l from quart (US quart, of course, cos you can't even measure a pint or gallon properly).

    65l bucket is soooo much simpler.

    Blame England. That's where the "system" of measures came from.

    FWIW, that's not the exact bucket I have 'cause I bought mine from a local ag-supply company many, many years ago, long before Amazon existed. But it gives you a rough idea of the size I meant by "horse-bucket". I think mine may be slightly larger. But the precise amount of material either one might hold doesn't really matter for soaking paper to make pulp for fire logs.

    316:

    JBS, Do you shred the pressure sensitive duplicate check (and other forms) paper along with the plain white and then make it into logs to burn? Or do you only make logs out of non-chemically treated paper?

    317:

    Been there, done that - with the distances I said - i.e. 25 miles a day, not 50-65! Your assumption about the soles is wrong because, if people wore footwear to walk long distances in, it would have been hobnailed boots - been there, done that, too.

    318:

    @313: I agree, El Cheeto Grande is the worst. And Polk, unlike him or '43, succeeded in his (morally bankrupt) goal of seizing the southwest 1/3 of the future U.S.

    319:

    whitroth Funny, I'm usually the one with the typos... Referring to Murdoch - you used a "u" where you meant a double "o" didn't you - as in shoot down RM ...

    Charles H Take more Warfarin, then!

    Bohdan Horst Even in England The Pennine Way [ I've walked about half of it ... ] The Coast-to-Coast Path And many others

    Rocky Tom My sympathies I have to leaven my London Clay with horse manure, but otherwise it isn't a problem ... The Asparagus has finished, the new spuds are now lifting, my beans are flowering & the peas are productive ... the first (green) tomatoes are clearly visible & the courgettes have started. I'm picking pink & white-currants for jam & sorbets. Yum.

    Dave P What about Warren Harding & H Hoover as prime arseholes, too?

    320:

    Charlie Stross @ 258: My big plan for this summer, cancelled by COVID19, was my first ever trip to New Zealand. Worldcon is there this year which made it a business trip (expensable), I've been saving air miles for a decade, the plan was to spend a couple of weeks there and take the long way home via somewhere interesting. Did I say "plan"? We'd been planning it for five goddamn years and I now don't know if I'll ever get to the antipodes (Aus included) ever again.

    This year was going to be an extended road trip out to the Western U.S. to photograph some of the National Parks & public lands that restrict travel to high clearance 4WD vehicles (since I finally have one). All those beautiful photos in National Geographic are great, but can't compare to standing out there in the real and seeing it for yourself (even if your own photos don't turn out quite as good).

    I do have "plans" to visit the U.K. again. Someday.

    There were (maybe still are but I couldn't find them on the internet when I looked recently) steam excursions that ran up the east & west coasts of the island of Britain (one in particular that ran from Cambridge to Ft. William where it linked up with the Jacobite Steam Train so you could ride it as well). The price was fairly reasonable and if they ever get going again (i.e. if I can find them and can afford the air-fare after what Covid-19 is going to do to them) I may still give it a go. I hope I can.

    321:

    CD == "Compact Disc" which has a very specific definitions for disc manufacture and data structures. See:

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

    The team I worked in used the Orange Book mostly with occasional diversions into the "Cooked Orange Book" when necessary (Orange Book plus fudges to cope with multisession and incremental data writes to a partially-written disc).

    There were other optical disc data formats around at about the same time the first CDs were produced, like large WORM discs in a similar form factor to Laserdisc, but punching holes in metal with lasers takes a surprising amount of energy, especially at speed and back then powerful lasers cost a lot and were typically gas tube devices, not laser diodes as in commodity CD units of the time. Phase-change was easier and could be done faster with less energy required.

    322:

    Greg @318: What about Warren Harding & H Hoover as prime arseholes, too?

    Yes - see again my last line @301.

    323:

    whitroth @ 278: Don't get me started, I mean, metric is soooo hard.... Besides, the rest of you lot will come around, sooner or later, and join us, and, um, er, Myanmar, I think, and is it South Africa, or did they go metric...?

    Metric is EASY. Everything is a multiple of 10 or divisible by 10. It's only difficult if you try to convert metric to U.S. standard measure or vice versa (and even that's not especially difficult if you use a cheat sheet with the conversion formulas). So why do it? It's a 2 liter bottle. Don't worry about how many quarts that translates to.

    When I was pacing a hundred meters (land nav), I didn't worry about how many feet and inches it was. When I need an 8ft 2x4 I don't give a shit about how many meters it is.

    324:

    Re: weights and measures silliness - remember that a US “fluid ounce” is not the same as anyone else’s. I almost ruined a keyboard when I discovered that.

    325:

    Hey, Greg, I see some pubs are opening tomorrow at 06:00. Going?

    326:

    None of that mattered because without recognition as a nation the CSA wasn't able to get loans, make treaties, establish embassies, negotiate trade agreements, or anything else that a nation must be able to do.

    As the UK wasn't about to recognize the CSA, France certainly wasn't going to. Nor did either of them wish to go to war with the US, i.e. the Union, because that would be the inevitable outcome if the CSA was recognized as a nation. Plus both of them knew that when it came to the competing capitalist economies here, which would one was inevitable to survive a long war, and it wasn't the slaveocracy. Their economy only worked within their own geographic, paradigmatic system -- no where else in the world. No where else in the world would there be loans provided for which the bodies of human beings were the collateral.

    The fire eaters who made Secession really believed they were modeling on the War of Independence and that both Britain and France would do what France did in the 18th century. They had gone so far in their delusions of grandeur and self-importance they could not read the international auguries.

    As far as the worst POTUS ever -- this one has won hands down. He's destroyed even more than Buchanan who did -- who wasn't in the least ineffective as president in allowing for the transfer of all federal monies and arms to the secession states, moving the navy and army far away from D.C., and packing the judgeships. He loved the south -- his long-time lover was a plantation owner.

    Their plan was that James would be Potus, and Rufus Devane King would be his Sec of State. (Andrew Jackson called Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy.) But King -- who did manage to be F. Pierce's VP -- died of that omnipresent southern infection, cholera.

    But ultimately all the Federal systems remained intact -- unlike now when within days, for just one instance, the US Post Office will be dissolved say those who know.

    327:

    Bohdan Horst @ 282: About walking on foot: https://fastestknowntime.com/routes

    It's amazing how well we handle long walks"

    a few examples (and all those below are Mountain Trails!):
    - Appalachian Trail (US) - 2189 miles, fkt: 41d 7h 39m
    - Pacific Crest Trail (US) - 2655 miles, fkt: 52d 8h 25m
    - South West Coast Path (UK) - 630 miles, fkt: 10d 15h 18m
    - Hadrian's Wall Path (UK) - 84 miles, fkt: 16h 25m 55s

    Shortly after Kennedy became President the 50 mile hike became a fad for a while. I think it originated with the U.S. Army Special Forces; something they did in training.

    328:

    Like that. But we need a bunch of firing squads.

    The Pennine Way... oh, my. I wish... I've only done about 10 mi of the Appalachian Trail in PA 2-3 times, from a parking lot to the top of Hawk Mountain and back, camping overnight with a buddy, back in the '80's.

    329:

    Even better -- read the first part of President Grant's Memoir, which is the Mexican American War, and which within -- and in his letters of the time -- he condemned as a naked property and power grab by the slaveocracy to expand itself.

    Ya, Polk was effective too -- as far as it went. He had his list of objectives, which he was certain he could achieve in a single term. And he did, within his single term. Then he had the consideration to die of cholera, acquired while being feted in New Orleans. (Polk never did possess robust health, into the bargain, so his immune system wasn't so good.)

    330:

    whitroth As a matter of principle, I will be going to one of my locals ( Proably the Queen's Arms ) tomorrow, at some point. But I expect that the "registration" restrictions will make it a pita... Pub-going is probably not going to be enjoyable or regular until August or September at this rate ...

    331:

    Steam train... When my recent ex and I were in the UK for the '14 Worldcon, we traveled before the con. On the trip, in Wales, we took the short (11 mi) trip on the steam railway that used to ship Welsh slate to the ships, way down....

    https://www.festrail.co.uk/

    It was gorgeous, beautiful, and the scenery was, too.

    332:

    I've got it!

    Moz, you were wondering what kind of test I'd give, in order to run for office?

    Ellen just read this:

    Joe Biden: "I'll read my daily briefing." Republicans for Biden: "You had us at 'I'll read'".

    333:

    The furthest I think I've doen in a day was Patterdale-to-Troutbeck, about 15/16k but over 2000m of climbing ( Up-&-down, it's a superb ridgewalk! ) I have, fortunately done all of the Ffestiniog AND the Welsh Highland lines :-: the 2-ft guage Garratt articulated locos on the latter are something else

    334:

    (If it's really long term, then use the OLD CD standard where pits were burned into metal sandwiched between two sheets of glass.)

    Well there is that down side of the price of the first disc. #2 is almost free but #1 ...

    335:

    On the other hand, I believe I've read Roman Legionnaires considered 20m/day a good days march (carrying a lot of weight in packs)

    If you look up the records for US western expansion and were headed to the coast, 20 miles a day was the average you needed to do to make sure you didn't get caught in the winter in the Sierras.

    The plains help the average a lot.

    336:

    Walking that kind of distance over consecutive days carrying a pack is not a trivial thing though. While our bodies are certainly capable of it, even most relatively in shape western humans would need to work up to it

    One thing that has helped immensely is lightweight water filtration systems . Boy I wish I had those 30 years ago

    337:

    My longest single day walk was the Dartmoor North-South, Okehampton battle camp to Ivybridge School. 40km or thereabouts. Hardest one I can remember was Boscastle to Tintagel (or possibly T to B) along the Coastal Path which is only 4 miles or so on the map, but feels about the same vertically as you dip down into small coves then up and over the next headland.

    The Abbots Way (East to West across the moor) is a nice day out, Buckfast (Yes, that one, beloved of Glaswegians) Abbey to the site of Tavistock Abbey. A mere 35km, did it several times in my youth on the annual organised event.

    338:

    There certainly have been reports on that from about 2000 onward. Just watch a ferry dock at Holyhead and you realise that without a differential GPS feed you would be taking 10x longer.

    Then theres the 50% of the population who do not seem to own a map book.

    The real fun and games with banks is safer than it was after they bought lots of accurate clocks to protect themselves.

    In about 2000 a russian company was selling GPS jammers disguisd as discarded cigarette packets at the Paris airshow for $1000 a pop. Blatted normal receivers over a 3mile radius. Trivial to make.

    339:

    I'd love to go out to eat, or pick up something, and go to the fourth Friday at an American Legion post that has the DC Blues Society-sponsored band, or eat first, and go to this cafe, a great venue for music (but beer only, not eat, since they went argh Vegan about two years ago).

    340:

    Packs are for mules, not people. They're sure-footed covering rough ground, they can find forage where a regular horse would starve, they're less prone to illness than horses and you can get an assist from them going up hills by holding onto the pack frame. The bad news is that when they stop, you stop so you're not in charge of the daily pace.

    The Romans used mules quite a lot, especially in their desert campaigning.

    341:

    Re: 'Wildcards: we might conceivably find a simple and effective medical treatment.

    Hydroxychloroquine is a bust (snake oil is about what you can expect from a snake oil salesman).'

    Oh crap - rt-leaning rel just sent me this news. Here we go again and again and again:

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hydroxychloroquine-given-early-helped-coronavirus-patients-study-finds-11593729664

    'Hydroxychloroquine Given Early Helped Coronavirus Patients, Study Finds

    Analysis suggests certain Covid-19 patients could benefit from taking antimalaria drug early in their illness, though further research is needed.'

    When I checked for other media coverage, got this:

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/health/hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-detroit-study/index.html

    No surprise - This is also a major Faux headline.

    The article author is legit as is the journal however I hit a paywall when trying to access the paper. Hoping someone here can access, read and provide basic English translation.

    342:

    One of my Cheap Chinese Crap suppliers sells a multipurpose jammer -- it will kill GPS, WiFi, cellular phone service and even Bluetooth for at least a hundred metres around. Use cases include the White Van Man wanting to bugger up his employer's recording of his movements, criminals jamming GPS trackers fitted covertly to their vehicles by the cops, errant spouses jamming GPS trackers fitted covertly to their vehicles by their suspicious others, privacy proponents preventing The Man from bugging their phones etc.

    Yes, operation of these things is highly illegal in most jurisdictions, just owning one can get you prosecuted in some places. I suspect there's probably an Open Source design on for one Thingiverse if you wanted to roll your own.

    343:

    You missed the legitimate use case: jamming the asshole who is illegally on their phone while driving on the freeway. (Most states say, "no hand-held phones or texting while driving, period")

    344:

    Until recently all armies literally ran on mule power -- at least in those places where horses and asses thrived.

    Mules being both horse and ass, were sturdier than horses, and faster than asses.

    Plus being a mule breeder was an excellent business since mules can't replace themselves.

    One of my joys in watching this epic Indian film, Jodha Akbar, is seeing all the varieties of military warfare and person-to-person combat common in the Mughal and Hindustan kingdoms. The groups on the Indian subcontinent were very good at all these disciplines.

    I was particularly fascinated by seeing just how elephants in warfare were used. It's pretty amazing. (Something Euros and Americans forget or never realized was how important the elephant trade was -- it was a sub-economy even, that ranged for centuries from African to the very edges of Southeast Asia. And not only for warfare.)

    https://www.rediff.com/movies/2008/feb/14jodhaa.htm

    https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/movies/16akba.html

    345:

    RockyTom @ 315: JBS, Do you shred the pressure sensitive duplicate check (and other forms) paper along with the plain white and then make it into logs to burn? Or do you only make logs out of non-chemically treated paper?

    I don't use those kind of checks. I have to manually write the information on the stubs. I have had other kinds of paper that included those multi-layer "carbonless" forms and I did shred those and dumped them in the bucket for pulp. I basically shred anything with my name & address or any other information I think might be personally identifiable, including junk mail.

    The stuff that comes to "resident" or "occupant" can go into recycling, but if it has my name on it, my paranoia about identity theft kicks in and I'm going to shred it.

    I don't get that many of those paper logs; not enough to heat my house anyway. It's more a process for protecting personal information - shred it, pulp it, burn it.

    346:

    Elderly Cynic @ 316: Been there, done that - with the distances I said - i.e. 25 miles a day, not 50-65! Your assumption about the soles is wrong because, if people wore footwear to walk long distances in, it would have been hobnailed boots - been there, done that, too.

    I've done 20+ miles in good hiking boots (Vasque), combat boots (McManara boot), jungle boots & jump boots (Corcoran) - comfortable to excruciating as you read left to right, but I made it to the rally point despite the pain. Never owned a pair of hobnailed boots.

    347:

    Troutwaxer at 284: Aurora was the Kim Stanley Robinson.

    348:

    the legitimate use case: jamming the asshole

    Ah, nope. In the US jamming cell signals in almost any situation, at least by civilians, is a huge no no.

    349:

    I used a paper brad for the bendable wire on mine. And carefully mad buttonholes to get it in correctly. (It works fine.) If you want it less visible, nail polish comes in lots of colors and sticks well.

    350:

    I've seen people "wearing masks" in stores so that their noses are exposed. And at least one woman, in a pharmacy, who'd pulled it all the way down. (I wish stores would enforce their "no mask, no service" rules.)

    351:

    Read (&saved) all those posts last night. Meditating on them. (Details of a memory posted ... elsewhere ... earlier this year.)

    352:

    I understand that they used river and sea travel as much as possible, before railroads. (Canals, too. Growing up, we got to sing "Erie Canal", about boats that were towed by mules.)

    353:

    In my area, with mandatory face coverings indoors in public places (NYS), it's "no masks, no customer", loudly out loud, then leaving. Have only done it once, so far.

    354:

    A year or so back, some contractors working on a house elsewhere in Southern California broke a gas pipe (which should have been marked beforehand, but they probably didn't bother with that step). The company sent someone out to check on it, and he had the bad luck to be at the front door when the house blew up. Video was available via doorbell cam.

    355:

    Video doesn't forget. Pay attention to the Lincoln Project, the Meidas people, and VoteVets. They'll be using those. And they have a turnaround time in hours.

    356:

    "You had us at 'I'll read'".

    🤣

    357:

    Most of the BLM protesters wore masks. There's no noticeable spike from those. But the "opening up" stuff - lots of cases. And the churches that insisted that they had the right to have indoor services with singing - lots of cases. Governor Newsom has now banned indoor choirs.

    358:

    there's very little organic matter

    I use chickens and woodchips (cheap/free from an abourist if you can take a truckload). Woodchips rot fairly readily if you pile them 60+cm deep and there's enough moisture and warmth for composting. I mix in dumpster dived vege waste to help the process, and the chickens add poo where they can.

    One discovery is that even fresh woodchips can be spread 3-5cm deep on lawn in the spring, and within a month the lawn will eat them/grow over them. You get a higher, springier lawn than holds moisture better than before (in Sydney that means "needs to be mowed during the drought")

    But that does rely somewhat on you having space and being able to make a bit of a mess of your yard. Chickens are generally regulated in some manner but even in Australia that ranges from "if the neighbours complain" to a list of 20 rules.

    359:

    Greg, I'm curous about the Patterdale-Troutbeck route - did you follow the Roman road over High Street?

    360:

    My father had a pick where the pointy end got so worn down from digging in the local soil (adobe with gravel-to-small-rocks) that he turned it into an adze. But the fruit trees and grape vines loved it: it held moisture really well...once you got the water into it.

    361:

    Actually, that bible was right side up. You can tell by the ribbon bookmark. (Some shots showed the edge of the spine, where you could just see the title and version.)

    362:

    The Spanish missionaries walking north from somewhere in Mexico (probably Monterrey or Guadalajara) into northern California did about 25 miles a day - more on flat land, less in the central coast, which is hilly. It's well over 500 miles from San Diego to San Francisco. (Ships came after they had established locations. But there aren't all that many harbors.)

    363:

    Why are you assuming a generation ship would be cramped?

    Given human nature, and the costs of very large things (not just to build, but in space to fill with air) why would one assume it wouldn't be cramped?

    364:

    In some places in the US the landfills will shred "yard waste" and turn it into mulch, which they'll give away so it doesn't take up so much space.

    365:

    I knew of a local town where yard waste and all municipal tree clearing wood/brush chips (and perhaps above ground power line right of way clearing crew's wood chips) and also large wildlife road kills (white tail deer at least) were all shredded into a large municipal compost heap; it was rotated so that the new stuff was put onto a section at a time. At least when I lived in that town, the resulting compost was free for the taking. Also, trucks (municipal and private) that capture chips from tree work will often drop their load of chips if you ask.

    366:

    I didn't mean that it was legal[1], just that it was a legitimate use.

  • I dunno - I thought FCC said that as long as it didn't go past 100' 100 yards? it was ok, to cover amateur radio.
  • 367:

    Unfortunately, I've only lived here since March, and was a little late to get the gardening started due to the move. So I can't answer your question about the soil, unfortunately.

    368:

    In my current fantasy novel I'm assuming 20 miles/day for someone walking a string of packhorses, mostly through mountainous or semi-mountainous terrain. The maximum reasonable mileage in a day would be an Orc mounted on a dire wolf, who might make 100 miles in a day, but be too tired to fight the next day, while an Elf on a Unicorn could make a similar distance. Ordinary people who are walking can make 20-30 miles a day.

    If your polity is lucky enough to be multi-species Humans on big horses form your heavy cavalry, Orc's riding dire wolves are your medium cavalry, and Elves on unicorns are your light cavalry; mainly messengers and raiders, but deadly when the unicorn uses magic to increase it's mass just prior to hitting your lines...

    369:

    We just ate the first half-dozen tomatoes in a soup, and my peppers are producing. The dill plant is huge and it is flowering, and the mint and rosemary are doing well.

    But the thing I'm really stoked about is that I have the three sisters growing very nicely together, after much effort and sadness! I also have four kinds of squash plus gourds growing and two species of pumpkins!

    370:

    A quick Google search shows the record for a human being running over a 24 hour period is over 180 miles. That's on a track with rest stops, water and food available on demand. People have been known to run marathon distances and more day after day for weeks. The record for crossing the US on foot, a distance of 3,100 miles is 42 days or about 73 miles a day average.

    Someone who walks or marches 20 miles in a day is going to use up a lot of food calories -- I have a vague recollection that travelling a mile on foot takes about 100 calories whether walking or running.

    371:

    In the US jamming cell signals in almost any situation, at least by civilians, is a huge no no.

    Yes. Perhaps twenty years ago a late friend and I were having a discussion about that. He was a Senior Executive Service technical/policy guy with the FCC's cellphone department, so I'd assume, at least at the time, he knew what he was talking about. He said that jamming, even locally and in arguably justifiable circumstances, was forbidden because it would potentially interfere with safety-of-life calls (physicians at the opera was an example), and they didn't want to open that door.

    372:

    My big plan for this summer, cancelled by COVID19, was my first ever trip to New Zealand.

    Yeah, bummer. We were very much looking forward to seeing you here.

    A virtual worldcon based in Wellington is very much not the same as being able to offer to buy you a beer.

    373:

    He said that jamming, even locally and in arguably justifiable circumstances, was forbidden

    Of course the difference between jamming and a malfunctioning microcell is a bit theoretical these days. And you can always blame the local fascists for operating a stingray or equivalent should the need arise.

    374:

    Heh. The treaty that Billy Penn made with the Leni Lenapi Native Americans for the land where Philly is was legit... he just pulled a fast one. They agreed that he could have the land that a man could walk around in three days. They expected the walkers (there were three of them) to have to hunt, make dinner... instead, the three men carried food and just kept walking.

    But Penn didn't break that treaty, nor was it broken for several generations.

    375:

    Repeat aftyer me: "RAID is NOT backup" "RAID is NOT backup" "RAID is NOT backup" ... Ad infinitum.

    I worked in the "File Serving Technologies" group at SGI (before they went completely titsup and were bought by Rackable) (alas post-IRIX), when our quiet motto was, "We don't get out of bed for less than tens of terabytes."

    By the time I left (two weeks before the aforementioned titsup) it was, "We don't get out of bed for less that a petabyte." :-)

    My home server runs Solaris, with bunches of disks RAIDed using ZFS, things just work.

    HW RAID cards are the devil's work, I recall one particular bunch of cards that had a problem, but it only showed up when one failed and you replaced it - with the same model card from a different batch - and it sort of went "RAID array corrupt, initialise (Y/N): ". So yes, you had to initialise it and restore from backup. Some of the SAN racks had hundreds of disks in them, it was, shall we say, "interesting?" to see who had a sensible backup regime in place...

    My first ZFS array is now now in its third machine, (okay, the disks have been replaced a couple of times, but it's the same axe!), and I don't have to spend money getting just the right controller to keep it alive, and the important stuff is in the cloud, on DVDs, and on a couple of removable disks.

    "If it doesn't exists in at least three other places, it isn't backed up."

    376:

    In some places in the US the landfills will shred "yard waste" and turn it into mulch, which they'll give away so it doesn't take up so much space.

    Here in Raleigh NC (500K people) about 25 years ago when it became obvious that tossing everything into a big pile and then covering it up was going to be a big loose in the not too distant future they changed things. Now we all have separate bins for trash vs recycling and in general they pick up yard waste on the same days if you put it out. Or you can take it to the yard waste facility yourself. They mulch it up and sell it at a very low price. No packaging. You load it into buckets your bring or a pickup truck or trailer.

    Not a bad deal but I don't use it. You have a chance to get things back like saw briar that have enough green left in them to re-grow.

    377:

    There are very specific rules about cell phone interference. And if noticed and a complaint made, people with badges WILL show up. Some churches and theaters try and use such things every now and then and get slapped down hard. As I understand it, Israel is a major source for such widgets.

    378:

    A virtual worldcon based in Wellington is very much not the same as being able to offer to buy you a beer.

    Ditto, especially after you didn't make it to NZ just before AussieCon either (and I had to lug my hardcover of The Trade of Queens to Melbourne).

    379:

    No packaging. You load it into buckets your bring or a pickup truck or trailer.

    I've seen video of people in the US doing that, and one guy who was concerned that he was abusing the system but the operators were happy to say "that's not a dump truck, this is a dump truck" when he turned up.

    That's what I'd like, but sadly in Australia they all seem to insist on single-use plastic plastic bags holding ~20-25 litres. It's quite annoying but I suspect they have a big industrial composting machine to reduce land area used and pretty much guarantee that no seeds etc make it through alive.

    Councils all seem to use their own compost quite extensively, as well as woodchipping their own trees and using that for mulch. The landcare group I'm in can get the mulch but not the compost by the truckload for our planting on council land.

    And then of course the likes of Karl Hammer who have giant mountains of compost and feed hundreds of chickens off it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWChH9MHkHg

    380:

    That's what I'd like, but sadly in Australia they all seem to insist on single-use plastic plastic bags holding ~20-25 litres. It's quite annoying but I suspect they have a big industrial composting machine to reduce land area used and pretty much guarantee that no seeds etc make it through alive.

    Oh you can buy that. Just go to Lowes, Home Depot, Ace Hardware, etc...

    And as you said, you know you're not buying seeds of things you might not want.

    The city operation sells it by the bucket for those with a few buckets for their trunk or pickup. And if you want their 1 or 2 yard sized bucket loader will dump a load into whatever big thing you show up with.

    There are also a few commercial operations that are best for mulch. You have a lot of options to pick from. They will deliver or dump it into your "thing".

    381:

    Heteromeles has talked about how the Syrian Civil War was about a shortage of water.

    USA PBS has a 2 part show that I just finished: H2O The Molecule that Made Us Covers how the planet uses and doesn't use fresh water.

    In part 3 it draws an interesting thread.

    some droughts in Middle East. then drought in Australia causes food shortages in Middle East then Arab Spring then Syria gets the short end of the short stick and the country falls apart then refugees from Middle East head to Europe

    Then Brexit and Trump

    Not the only cause but a huge influence leading Brexit and Trump.

    382:

    Re walking in the good old days.

    Would they have worn shoes at all? I've never taken note of the furthest I've walked barefoot, but certainly something over 10km. I used to avoid shoes when walking the dogs in summer so I could be sure I wasn't burning their pads. If a soft, old, modern man can go months between shoe wearings, would these people have bothered at all?

    383:

    Bill Arnold @ 350 Don't call us & we won't call you!

    PJ evens Well, there's a canal a couple of miles from here that has been in continuous use since Hernry VIII's reign ... carrying supplies to & gunpowder from his powder mills in Waltham Abbey

    waldo Of course, but I was younger then ... [ Angletarn Pikes, the Knott, Rampsgill Hd, High Street, Thornthwaite Crag, Froswick, Ill Bell, Yoke. ] I have been to the top of every fell in Wainwright vols 1&2 ( "The Eastern & the far Eastern Fells" ) The really long one there is Patterdale - Pooley Bridge - & get the lake steamer back .... { Short version is to cut out, after Loadpot Hill & divert to Howtown ]

    384:

    Wirecard has just had the use of its services banned (temporarily, for a week or so, now lifted) in the UK.

    I hope you don't have any money in their system just now. It seems their fraud is deep and they seem to be shut down around the world as TPTB try and figure out what's up.

    Plus the guy who was running (or maybe second in command) it seems to have vanished. With forged papers to boot.

    385:

    Yeah my home RAID has run on ZFS for years too. I have considered using Solaris as the server OS on and off, but generally found that driver issues are pretty easy using a reasonably popular Linux, and you're not even really limited to user land anymore.

    386:

    There's a growing, seemingly global, sense that we can't or shouldn't go back to the status quo ante

    I am pessimistic about that.

    Because I had that feeling here in NZ during our lockdown.

    A sense that everyone in the country was playing on the same team, that maybe we could keep that up and change some things. A solidarity as people realised that many of our "essential workers" that we rely on are paid shit. Discussion of how great it was for the environment that the daily rush hours were gone, and things we could to to keep that up.

    And a month later, as life here has gone back to normal, that spirit just seems totally gone. So gone that I was wondering if I'd imagined it.

    387:

    May I be rude and suggest that you might want to stick a paragraph in somewhere explaining that "mile" is a translation convention for "everyday big unit for walking distances", and the actual measurement of their unit is somewhere between half and three-quarters of ours?

    I think you'd be very lucky to make 20 miles a day with pack horses in mountainous terrain. I think you're looking at more like half that on a good day and less than a tenth on a bad one, where you have to keep stopping to move boulders and things so the horses can get past and most of the distance you do cover is vertical. For a more reliable reference than my vague memories check out "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush" by Eric Newby, which contains a good deal of first-hand description of this sort of logistics.

    For a different kind of perspective try the histories of the opening months of WW1 and the initial mobile phase in France, the retreat to the Marne etc. Armies moving on foot, with horses to pull the guns and other heavy things. 20 miles a day is a killing pace and causes the additional problem if you're retreating that once you start doing that you have to keep going until the attacking side runs out of steam, because your troops are too knackered to throw a defensive position together and fight effectively to defend it until they've had time for a bit of rest - not to mention food and water; another big problem those guys had was that they were going too fast to keep everyone supplied with water and people were having to keep going for days with nowhere near enough to drink.

    WW1 cavalry officer memoirs make an interesting contrast with the experiences of the infantry. Infantry memoirs are all about doing actual war stuff like fighting and marching and doing things with guns and trenches. The cavalry experience was more like running a big horse farm with something happening in the background a few miles away involving things going bang and stuff. Their actual combat troops would still take their turn in the trenches, but more than twice as many were too busy doing horse maintenance all the time to be spared for that shooting crap. Not using the horses in battle just means that someone has to ride them around not in battle instead otherwise they seize up and go creaky. There's a heck of a lot of effort involved just in having cavalry whether you can use them or not.

    Also worth taking note from WW1 of the truly vast amounts of hay and stuff consumed by all the draught horses, and the large part of the logistical effort that was simply about moving horse food about. If you have a lot of cavalry on carnivorous mounts, that kind of problem gets a lot worse and acquires a lot of interesting new aspects. The Raj Whitehall series fudges this horribly by inventing a kind of fish which acts as logical hay and using that as an excuse to basically ignore it most of the time, which I don't think would work even if you did have a fish like that.

    388:

    Hobnailed boots are fine on soft going, even packed dirt and gravel, but seriously bad for knees (and damn slippery) on hard going - they were required when I was in the CCF, because of the sound they made during drill.

    389:

    Three sisters doesn't work in the UK, partly because of not enough sunlight and partly because we can't get anything except dwarf maize seed :-( I grow 5 types of beans() over a (now) 10'x12'x6' cage and 3 kinds of squashes(*) underneath, but also unusual things (often herbs) like kohl rabi, agretti, rock samphire, sculpit and ramsons. Etc.

    () Borlotti, Greek Gigantes, Trail of Tears, a blue bean and Shiny Fardenlosa. (*) Trombincino d'Albenga, a crown prince and a Gem type.

    390:

    No. I don't keep money in their system. I keep it underneath things (electronic junk, old socks, piles of ash and fag ends, those kind of things). I have this card I can put it onto when I need to pay for something and can't do so by straightforward methods, like buying stuff on ebay. It stopped working recently, so I couldn't do that. It turned out that the reason was that one of the Chinese hitmen was Wirecard, who I had never heard of until that point. The Financial Conduct Authority had decreed that all operations where Wirecard was one of the Chinese hitmen had to stop doing anything. Now they have said they can start doing things again, and the card bunch have said that they have started looking for another hitman in case it happens again. I have no idea how long that might take them.

    391:

    Unless there are two Wirecards they are kaput. Seriously. Do some news searches.

    392:

    I think you'd be very lucky to make 20 miles a day with pack horses in mountainous terrain.

    Right. You can do that when there is a route through the mountains, as there often is, but the difficulty of actually having to climb mountains is measured in feet vertical not miles horizontal. And, as you say, if there's no clear route, all bets are off.

    It's worse in the jungle. I can't remember which war (a British Imperial one of the 19th century), but one book described marching from eastern India (now Bangladesh) to Burmah, having to cut a route, and averaging under 1 mile a day.

    393:

    Yeah, that's why I don't use hardware RAID. When it goes wrong you're fucked unless you can find an absolutely identical card to replace it with. The original one came with the box but a replacement costs £100 for the only one on ebay and then it turns out to be not quite identical enough.

    I find Linux software RAID is completely solid and works well enough that I can just forget it's there. Whatever extra CPU load it may impose is not noticeable.

    394:

    No. Even poor people in the UK often had boots, because of the winter, but they were worn only when necessary; slightly richer ones might have worn them all the time. I have walked that sort of distance barefoot, too, both with and without a pack, over moorland, dirt/gravel roads and even rock. I would have walked further, because my feet are hard and I can't get boots to fit, but the combination of cold, wet and sharp objects (both stones and heather) is not good.

    395:

    Yes, it's really weird reading about the earlier phases of European colonisation of North America because of that. The logical shape of the country was so different from its physical shape that you keep running across instances of X being thought of as being at the bottom of your garden and Y as Timbuctoo even though Y is quite close and x is 1000 miles further off.

    adze

    A tool which I am quite happy never to have had the need for. It seems to be far better designed for chopping your own legs off than for any actually desirable purpose.

    396:

    EC Greek gigantes simply don't work for me - huge plants, unfilled/wierd shaped pods However: Runners (x2 ) Borlotti, pole beans, white French beans, Broad, Field & 2 or 3 sorts of dwarf beans. My Maize are doing OK, but they grow much more slowly - it's the latitude ...

    Wirecard "Biggest financial fraud since the Deutschmark" German Financial regulator ( BarFin ) looks dodgy, too ... report/comment that every singke person making complaints of suspicious behaviour ( including Wirecard ) have themseleves been investigated, whilt the perpetrators run arounbd free. Apparently the "FT" who uncovered this giant fraud, were also pursued ... Unfortunately, the Brexshiteers will go: "Told you so!" Other superb comment was to the effect that Wirecard were promoters of "cashless" - until it was discovered that they had no cash thmeseleves. Ouch.

    397:

    I didn't doubt that people had boots. I was thinking of multi day walks. I would have thought people would simply stay put in winter. As is often pointed out, there's not many hours of daylight, and without artificial lights I can't imagine stumbling about in the forest would be habit forming behaviour. I also don't really understand winter, but I hear stories of deaths due to people going out their back door to visit the woodpile in a blizzard and losing their way back.

    So walking to London would be a fair weather activity. Given that, would people wear out an expensive pair of winter boots on a summer walk?

    399:

    Latest comment from the card bunch was: "The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has confirmed, after an in depth review, that Wirecard can continue to support the processing of transactions."

    That was on 30th June. I have heard nothing since. They then go on to say:

    "we believe it is the right thing to do (who do they get to write this shit?) to have an orderly transition to another provider, which we will inform you about in due course."

    So far, the Duke's horse hasn't arrived. (It's probably off discussing how fast humans can carry hay up a mountain.) Maybe it will eventually, or maybe they will switch it off again; as long as the latter does not chance to eventuate in the hour or two between me putting some money on it and spending it out again, I really do not care. I don't care all that much even if that does happen, as the amount won't be all that large, whereas my "fuck even thinking of thinking about this" index for this kind of thing is very large indeed.

    I am strongly disinclined to see what the papers have to say about it. The emperor never has any fucking clothes on and it would be far too infuriating to investigate a bunch of fools all doing their nut because they think it's the wrong kind of clothes he hasn't got.

    400:

    I would have thought people would simply stay put in winter.

    It can be the best time to travel, if you have the right gear. Sleds and toboggans are easier to pull than carts over unprepared trails (easier to make and maintain, too)), no mud to sink in, skis/snowshoes to go over (not through) the snow, etc.

    401:
    I'm assuming 20 miles/day for someone walking a string of packhorses, mostly through mountainous or semi-mountainous terrain.

    Yeah, I'd revise that down. I've spent a lot of time on foot, or on horseback, in the Patagonian Andes, doing 300 square km of field mapping in terrain that went from 500 to 2000 metre peaks. Generally I'd make about 6 miles a day, on foot or on horseback. When I had trails, and wasn't stopping to map, or didn't have to stop to set up/take down camp, I could do about 8 miles, maybe 10. If I had a well formed (read macadamised gravel) trail, I'd guess maybe 15, and 20 miles if you didn't care about the health of your animals/were purchasing remounts as you went. Horses meant I could move more stuff, (I still have 600 kilos of Patagonia, if anyone needs some) but they didn't really increase my speed that much. Although I did discover I could sleep while riding, as long as the horse knew where we were going, and there were no low branches.

    Modern transport is magic - I've done 1300km in a single day on outback bush roads in Australia, although it was nearly fatal at multiple points.

    402:

    Forest? That's North America, not Great Britain. There has been a network of long-distance routes here for at least 5,000 years, though it was probably pretty sparse until c. 3,000 years ago. The same applies to the forest/woodland cover, in reverse. By even Mediaeval times, those were much as they are today. Without those routes, 25 miles a day would be infeasible.

    Except during the exceptional cold spells, that was a minor risk - the normal problem in Britain in the winter was and is hypothermia from the wet, cold and wind. And, as I said, halve the distance you can travel in a day, even in reasonable weather. It's perfectly possible to travel and even sleep out in the winter, but it's tough and weaker people die. You need heavy wool clothing designed for that sort of use - but outside workers would often have had it - and enough high-calorie food.

    For those reasons, people would have normally travelled only from late spring to early autumn, but it was just about feasible.

    403:

    For most of the modern era (i.e. the past 5,000 years) in Britain, winters have not been reliably cold enough to do that - which is why those technologies never really took off here. You do not want to have to travel through winter mud, slush, wind and rain, I assure you!

    404:

    Growing up in California I was taught that the 21 missions were spaced a day's walk apart.

    405:

    One of my neighbours on our allotment site is on his second year of three sisters. His first try was last year. He's using the method adapted for England which involves several small mounds with four sweetcorn plants, squashes at ground level and beans planted later. He uses a legacy bean and saves his own seeds. I plan do do the same next year when l've sourced a climbing bean which is not too tall.

    406:

    Well, I've just done a quick round-the block survey ... the following are all OPEN for business: he Bell / The Queen's Arms / The Village / The Castle / The Nag's Head / Wild Card (Barrel Store) / Pillars brewery. And the restuarants are open & there are stalls selling food. ( I had a pint in the Queen's & a half in the Nag's .... )

    Mike Collins Climbing beans - do you want "runners" ( Which are originally S-American ) or "pole" beans ( a.k.a. "French" beans ) ?? I don't think there are any actual climbing varieties that simply don't just go on growing ..... There are "dwarf" varieties of course. I can recommend the vriety "cobra" which are v productive for "French" beans.

    407:

    Well, England doesn't really have winters. :-)

    "Nice weather yesterday. Spring. Missed it last year, I was in the bathroom."

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eT40eV7OiI

    When I was a lad the snow arrived in October and didn't melt until April — and significant blizzards in May/June weren't unknown.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/%27Winter_Landscape%2C_Laval%27%2C_oil_on_canvas_painting_by_Cornelius_Krieghoff%2C_1862%2C_National_Gallery_of_Canada.jpg

    408:

    Donaldo Trumpolini appears to be in even more trouble. An US services Veterans organisation has publicly labelled him a threat to their national security & called him "Benedict Trump" And some of his campaign T-shirts recall the late-1930's "Amerika First" of the Bund together with a symbol that's horribly reminiscent of a well-known Nazi one ....

    409:

    And some of his campaign T-shirts recall the late-1930's "Amerika First" of the Bund together with a symbol that's horribly reminiscent of a well-known Nazi one ...

    For anyone who missed this turd in the national punch bowl, yes. It's on Trump's campaign's website and, wow, the dog whistle has turned into a sousaphone. A quick search turned up a side by side comparison here; you're welcome to find your own. Any PR campaign can produce unfortunate art once; when it keeps happening we have to think it's intentional. It was thought probably a mistake when when a Trump election art featured Waffen SS troops...

    One can even debate whether "America First" is The Donald is sucking up to Neo-Nazis by reminding them of the Americans who sucked up to Nazi Germany or if it's a reminder to racists that it was also a slogan of the KKK. But who are we kidding? They're the same people. And they love him no matter which hate group he's embracing today.

    410:

    Don't confuse recent decades with what happened in previous centuries. The weather in Britain has always been extremely erratic, because it is controlled by air flows, unlike in continental climates (e.g. the USA). Late frosts and snow are common here, too, even now - and don't ask about the Scottish Highlands! That is why snowshoes and skis never became mainstream (though sledges were, for other reasons) - they simply weren't reliable enough to justify the effort of making and learning to use them.

    https://www.netweather.tv/weather-forecasts/uk/winter/winter-history

    Also, from survival and travel points of view, temperatures around freezing are worse than colder ones, as you pointed out for the latter in #399. When the temperature is persistently well below freezing, the air is dry, which helps a lot - in the 1980s, people from Canada regularly said they had never been so cold as wehn they moved to Cambridge (and we are one of the drier areas of Britain). Even when the weather is persistently cold, we quite often get a warm front moving over, bringing rain, and rained-on snow (whether it refreezes or not) is foul for travel. The Ice Man's boots, for example, would keep him warm only in dry conditions.

    So, for historical authenticity, the exact date makes a big difference to the plausible weather conditions.

    411:

    Re: 'Donaldo Trumpolini appears to be in even more trouble.'

    DT's got more trouble heading his way ... Another tell-all book, this time by a niece (see below).

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53243354

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

    Here's the author info ...

    Background

    The book's author, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist,[3] is a daughter of Fred Trump Jr., and a granddaughter of Fred Trump Sr. According to her book's publisher, Simon & Schuster, she has taught graduate students in the subjects of trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology.[4] She has written a dissertation on stalking victims, conducted research on schizophrenia, and written parts of the prominent medical manual Diagnosis: Schizophrenia.[5] Mary's father died in 1981 at the age of 42 from a heart attack due to alcoholism.[6]

    Following the death of Fred Sr. in 1999, Mary and her brother, Fred III, contested Fred Sr.'s will in probate court, claiming that Fred Sr. was suffering from dementia, and the will was "procured by fraud and undue influence" by Fred Sr.'s other children, Donald, Maryanne, and Robert. A week later, Donald, Maryanne, and Robert terminated the medical coverage for Fred III's son, William, an 18-month old with epileptic spasms. In an interview with the New York Daily News, Mary said that her "aunt and uncles should be ashamed of themselves. I'm sure they are not."[7] The suit was settled, with William's health insurance reinstated.[8] Donald in 2016 explained his actions: "I was angry because they sued."[9]

    After her uncle's presidential campaign, Mary Trump came into contact with The New York Times, and provided tax documents from the Trump family as an anonymous source. The documents were used for a 2018 article that detailed financial fraud by Trump that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner.[2][10]'

    Considering he's incapable of reading more than 240 characters at a stretch, he's been remarkably good for publishers. There must be at least a dozen 'million sellers' about him by now.

    412:

    @ Pigeon and @ Zane

    The reason I say 20 miles/day is because there is a road which has been recently maintained, and much of the trip is through a high mountain valley which is relatively flat. If they were bushwhacking I'd cut the number in half, at the very least. (They also have a bard with them who can heal a horse if necessary, but I don't want to burden the reader with that trivia if I can avoid it. Maybe I should have the bard play for the horses whenever they stop for lunch...)

    As far as cavalry with carnivorous steeds, at this point in the civilization, only the rich/noble Orcs can afford them, and the heroine is (off stage) purchasing a pig or goat twice a week to feed her dire wolf. Once again, I'm not sure the reader wants to know...

    413:

    Maybe you don't find out at all until the bard complains that one of the horses is still lame even after three performances of the anticlockwise version of "Paraiso dos Cavalos". And it turns out that the reason is that the stone in its hoof was actually a spent weaponised fragment of a troll's baculum, and (portentous drumroll) only one sort of people use ammunition like that. (everyone goes quiet and looks a bit nervous.)

    414:

    That's not where the story is going, but it's definitely a fun thought!

    My big problem with the story isn't the horses, it's that I discovered that I was writing a Peter Watts-style 800 page Opus, which needed to be cut into two novels, and that meant changing the trope of the first novel from "Arrives at a new town" to "town with a dark secret," and I think that's going to prove very difficult.

    415:

    Yiii. You've got a point, in that I was thinking of much smaller files. My first take is still "partition the file into manageable chunks, and depend on multiple copies" though because unless your application isn't sensitive to small errors backing it up as a single file would be likely to ensure loss. Still...perhaps one of the RAID setting would handle that automatically...though I'd bet those chunks would be larger than I would consider safe.

    The closest thing I did to that involved 800 BPI 7 track tapes, and I ensured that the backups had the same block sizes and record format...were essentially exact copies...so that if one block on the backup went bad I could get it from the other tape. And when I could I avoided large block sizes, even with each block being checksummed.

    416:

    It’s important to bear in mind that a single road can only move so many troops at a time before becoming jammed

    They often did get jammed with broken down wagons and whatnot

    Extremely good analysis here

    https://acoup.blog/2019/10/06/new-acquisitions-how-fast-do-armies-move/

    Also if you haven’t read his analysis of the siege of Gondor and the siege of helms deep you should

    417:

    OK. I wasn't talking about a system that was commercially released. To me CD just means Compact Disk, though I understand that to designers it's more significant, and the system I described was the first laboratory production, years before the first commercial release, OR the first official specification. As I said they decided that that approach was too expensive to be implemented, and the commercial releases used different technologies...none of which were as stable and durable as the original, but were a lot cheaper to implement.

    418:

    Fortunately, I'm not expecting to move any armies, except possibly for a small cavalry group that will live off the land, and that will be in the second book.

    419:

    Re: ' ... we quite often get a warm front moving over, bringing rain, and rained-on snow (whether it refreezes or not) is foul for travel.'

    There's a stretch of highway in northeastern NYS that's approx. 5,000 ft above sea level. One side of the highway is rocky, mostly fir covered mountain, the other side shows a clear view of hillsides and a lake below. Nice scenic view - just don't drive there if there's any rain in the forecast because this type of scenery means flash flooding. I've also seen fast racing streams almost filling the recently widened ditches just from early Spring snowmelt.

    Troutwaxer ... Re: Walking/riding through mountain passes ...

    Don't recall reading any SF/F that discusses the banal reality of traversing mountains at speed.

    For example, I've no problem walking several miles in Boston, Chicago, or NYC - they're all around sea level. But there's no way that I could go for an extended walk the moment I hopped off the plane in Mexico City (7,380 ft) let alone Cusco Peru (11,150 ft) former Inca Empire capital. Not sure my horse or pack animal could either. Seems the assumption is that if you do an ascent slowly enough, you and your animal will automatically acclimatize. Not sure about this. And even if both species do eventually acclimatize, is it at the same rate? The quickest you can do your trip will depend on the slowest-to-acclimatize member of your team.

    420:

    The quickest you can do your trip will depend on the slowest-to-acclimatize member of your team.

    True, unless you have a healer-bard with you. But the medical issue/plot point which it's essential for readers to remember is something else; that a particular Elven character has an allergy to sage... which is why I probably won't address any of the adaptation issues.

    421:

    Typically an airliner is pressurised to about 700mBar or the equivalent altitude of 2.5km (call it 8000 feet). Hopping off a plane in Mexico City after a long-duration flight from, say, Schiphol Amsterdam then you're already well on the way to being acclimatised to the existing altitude.

    422:

    P J Evans @ 363: In some places in the US the landfills will shred "yard waste" and turn it into mulch, which they'll give away so it doesn't take up so much space.

    We have that here in Raleigh, but it's a separate operation from the "landfill". They sell it to help defray the cost of collecting & processing "yard waste" - $10 - $15 for a pickup truck load (12-15 cubic yards).

    You can get organic compost, organic mulch, leaf mulch & dyed mulch.

    You also get monthly bill for garbage, recycling & yard waste on your water bill, based on the number of cubic feet of water you used.

    423:

    Pigeon @ 389: No. I don't keep money in their system. I keep it underneath things (electronic junk, old socks, piles of ash and fag ends, those kind of things). I have this card I can put it onto when I need to pay for something and can't do so by straightforward methods, like buying stuff on ebay. It stopped working recently, so I couldn't do that. It turned out that the reason was that one of the Chinese hitmen was Wirecard, who I had never heard of until that point. The Financial Conduct Authority had decreed that all operations where Wirecard was one of the Chinese hitmen had to stop doing anything. Now they have said they can start doing things again, and the card bunch have said that they have started looking for another hitman in case it happens again. I have no idea how long that might take them.

    Could you use PayPal? I have a PayPal account that I use for eBay. It bills to my American Express, so I don't have to keep money in the account.

    I'm not exactly sure what "Chinese hitmen" signifies?

    424:

    What I'd like is that any driver caught using a hand-held phone while driving gets a unit install that if the vehicle is not in park, it makes a Faraday cafe for the driver, making them unable to use a phone while driving.

    They do have locks that you have to breath into before you can turn the ignition for people convicted of multiple DUIs.

    425:

    Very cool. Thanks for posting that.

    Note: NO FUCKING POINTY-TOED BULLSHIT....

    I think the only thing pointy toes have any use is for getting them into stirrups....

    426:

    I can't speak about horses, have limited experience at altitude, and agree with Unholyguy's comment (#415). My figure was for a single person or small group and no pack animals. You also need to add the best part of an hour for every 1000' climbed, or more if the walker has a heavy pack. Those things all add up.

    427:

    "...the Duke's horse hasn't arrived. (It's probably off discussing how fast humans can carry hay up a mountain.)"

    Note that for the Grand Canyon, they do NOT have horses, only mules. Much steadier and more sure-footed. They were they choice over the horses when the Canyon was first being explored, btw - the cliffs freaked the horses.

    428:

    Warthog mask? Here y'go (I may be somewhat late to the party, so apologies, but this one was the best I could find and, given the quality, remarkably reasonably priced): https://www.madabouthorror.co.uk/deluxe-warthog-mask.html

    429:

    I have to say that my entire life - half in Philly, 7.5 years in and around Austin, 11.5 (in two stints) in Chicago, and the last 11 in the DC area (we'll ignore Florida), I keep hearing of this thing called "spring", and folks say they used to have it, but I've never lived anywhere where it's lasted more than a week or two, at most. Winter,winter,springwinterspringsummer.

    430:

    Elderly Cynic @ 401: Forest? That's North America, not Great Britain. There has been a network of long-distance routes here for at least 5,000 years, though it was probably pretty sparse until c. 3,000 years ago. The same applies to the forest/woodland cover, in reverse. By even Mediaeval times, those were much as they are today. Without those routes, 25 miles a day would be infeasible.

    Not really North America ... eastern North America & the Pacific Coast. The central part of the continent is mostly grassland steppe and/or desert.

    Even in the forested areas the natives had their roads; just not paved in approved Roman Legion fashion. Also, in the east the natives regularly cleared out the undergrowth to improve the "hunting" part of "hunter/gatherer" as well as practicing agriculture. They didn't have European style agriculture, but they did raise crops and traded with distant tribes who raised other crops.

    They were easily capable of making 20+ miles per day. What they lacked were draft animals, so the trade loads they could carry were small.

    431:

    JEZUZ FUCKING H!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Thank you for posting those. I've facepalmed them, and need to send it to my small mailing lists....

    432:

    Let me explain: we'd have a cluster (torque, descendant of beowulf) of 10 or 20 servers, typically modelling protein folding. They'd run for weeks.

    Or there was the guy who was using R on DNA snips. In a talk he gave around the end of '13, he said he'd done library research, and there was one published study with 300 snips, and another with, I think it was 1200 snips, and he was looking for correlations with known diseases that had certain characteristics.

    This was running on a large Dell server, with two GPUs. And he was looking at 64,000 SNIPS!!! His jobs would run 2-3 WEEKS, with nothing else running on them.

    His data was stored on, and results to, a 42 drive RAID appliance.

    Sorry, former SGI guy, but we NEEDED the performance of hardware RAID. And the two or three times we had failures, I *never8 had a big problem with a random new card. "Import foreign configuration"? Yep. "All there."

    433:

    Thanks for that link, great stuff. So were his comments (I read the first one) on the Siege of Gondor.

    434:

    I keep hearing of this thing called "spring", and folks say they used to have it, but I've never lived anywhere where it's lasted more than a week or two, at most. Winter,winter,springwinterspringsummer.

    Cause in general you've lived north or south of where it happens. DC is a bit of an outlier due to the vast amounts of water around it.

    I've spend most of my life in far western and central KY and central North Carolina. We have spring. Although visitors at times will refer to it as monsoon season depending on the week they are around.

    My stints in Pittsburgh and Connecticut made me want to get somewhere with seasons again. Or at least where Winter wasn't 1/2 of the year.

    435:

    I think there is something to be said for what morality your entertainment medium teaches, and particularly what systems are appropriate for solving problems.

    Most Anglosphere cinema, certainly the 'Action' genre but almost all of them really, has a lone character or small band of rebels/resisters/objectors resolving whatever the problem might be through solitary action and violence.

    In a generation ship a 'lone wolf' or rebel anything is a major hazard for everyone. There would need to be fun and exciting stories about how someone found a problem and worked the system (whatever it might be) to resolve it before everyone dies.

    436:

    Sorry, but I think he was referring to an A-10.....

    437:

    After the years in Austin, when a job for me relocated us to Chicago, I was so glad to get back to somewhere with an actual winter (and that first fall was glorious, I could show my late wife and son, both from central/south Texas, the flaming leaves of fall). And I could sit in the grass again (can you say grass burrs and fire ants?).

    Austin - the other name for "winter" is "cedar fever season".

    438:

    Re: ' ... then you're already well on the way to being acclimatised to the existing altitude.'

    The commercial aircraft pressurization level you mentioned is probably okay for most people. But just in my family about half experience minor to severe symptoms/pains related to air pressure changes. The weirdest is the family member who's also into scuba diving: no problems diving or immediately after diving but experiences major localized pain when flying. (So the direction in which the pressure is changing - therefore the way the body has to adapt in response to maintain homeostasis- also matters.)

    439:

    @420: Hopping off a plane in Mexico City after a long-duration flight from, say, Schiphol Amsterdam then you're already well on the way to being acclimatised to the existing altitude.

    Umm, nope. You'd better be VERY careful about any physical activity with that sort of altitude change within a day. The Wiki article on altitude sickness, which seems well researched, cites a limit of a net 300m altitude per day for mountain climbing acclimatization, saying you can ascend up to 1,500m in a day, but you should then descend back to your previous day's altitude +300m to sleep.

    Having lived in Colorado Springs, mean altitude 1,839m, for nearly twenty years, I can tell you visitors from the lowlands frequently get themselves in trouble doing normal activities, including visiting nearby Pike's Peak, at 4,302m altitude. You can drive the 2,463m difference, take a cog railway, or there's even an up and down marathon (madness, I tell you!). But you'd better be prepared for "headaches, vomiting, tiredness, trouble sleeping, and dizziness" (from the Wiki article).

    Even the U.S. military acknowledges the impact; when I was stationed at Lowry AFB, just east of Denver, personnel were excused from fitness testing until they'd been at altitude for 30 days.

    440:

    One thing is that drop from about sea-level air pressure to 8000 ft ASL pressure happens in a few minutes as the plane climbs. Modern airline operators have an incentive to get their planes into high thin air as soon as possible as the reduced drag at altitude reduces the fuel burn so they climb as fast as they can. That may be the reason for the discomfort they feel.

    441:

    Another thing about mountain travel, even with created trails: avalanches, sometimes, yes, even in summer, depending on the mountain chain. If not a regular travel route, there will certainly be canyons, cliffs and RIVERS that one has to get oneself, animals and baggage over, down or up.

    A really good idea of what it is to do mountain travel are the accounts of how Hannibal and his elephants got from Spain to northern Italy. Yes, that was a full army, not a small raiding party. But no way even a small raiding party is getting through a long stretch of mountain travel without pack train / animals.

    Nor is food easily found in mountainous terrain, for either man or beast. Hunting? for birds maybe. But the good game animals tend not to live closely together in mountains. Pine needles are pretty, but they don't provide sustenance for anything, except -- maybe? a goat? Mountains don't grow vegetation in large swathes, as prairies do for bison and antelope and deer. For mountain goats, one needs to go very very high. Without a helicopter it takes a very long time to get there.

    And if these trails, if there are trails, are frequently traveled, anything for miles on either side, up and down, have long been hunted out.

    442:

    My most vivid memory of Chicago winter is, in somewhat terms I heard a comedian put it once, that place where the wind can peel the skin off your face. Continuously.

    OK to visit at times but I've decided to try and live in the middle band of the eastern half of the country.

    443:

    SFR Don't recall reading any SF/F that discusses the banal reality of traversing mountains at speed. Cazaril's ride from Chalion to Ibra - using despatch horses, ordinary horses, mules then ordinary horses again ....

    444:

    Re: ' ... personnel were excused from fitness testing until they'd been at altitude for 30 days.'

    Interesting. Wonder whether the military has developed specific tests to determine who's most at risk for this.

    From the family perspective - because this is one of those transient things tied to a specific situation, we've never consulted an MD for a diagnosis/cause.

    445:

    Airplanes are "different". You also have to factor in the dryness of the air.

    446:

    @443: Wonder whether the military has developed specific tests to determine who's most at risk for this.

    Yes, for specific use cases. Hypobaric chambers have been used by the U.S. military, and sometimes by civilian airlines, since at least the 1950s both to train aircrew on the effects of altitude and to identify those who are particularly susceptible to altitude sickness. It can be a disqualifying condition for a pilot trainee.

    447:

    Heteromeles has talked about how the Syrian Civil War was about a shortage of water.

    The point that follows this is really important. Thanks for bringing it up.

    There are two additional issues, beyond just drought making refugees.

    One issue is what happens with the migrants. A state in part is founded on the notion that it guarantees property rights through various means. If the state gets flooded with migrants, and those migrants take property, then the state has to respond to assure its own legitimacy. Otherwise it's in trouble.

    Now normally we think about desperate refugees (aka Them) as the people who are threatening property values. I'd point out though, that the biggest threats to ownership at the moment are actually migrating ultra-rich, because they warp politics as they move.

    But both matter. The real problem with the desperate refugees is that, if they get too desperate and too numerous, they'll probably start getting organized. While I haven't read much about the Migration Ages at the end of the western Roman and Han Dynasties, I do get the impression that the "barbarians" who "over-ran" them* were polygot groups of migrants, more than nations of people with a single past. Right now, some of those leaders who form migrant nations might even arise among the ultra-wealthy, since they've been forging a transnational identity for decades.

    Stop them? Well, that requires doing something substantial about climate change, and strengthening nation-states to so that everybody can stay happily in their own place.

    The second notion is something David L. did bring up, but I want to rephrase it slightly: it takes a lot of water to make food, with varying amounts for different foods. I won't bore you with the details of this, because the point is that most of the fresh water in the world moves around as food and other products made with fresh water, moving the food from where there's water to grow it to where there's not enough water. For example, it's cheaper to ship wheat to Egypt or Syria from Australia than it is to repipe the Tigris to make sure Syria has enough water to grow its own wheat (although this is a very bad example).

    This is how crop failures spread across the world. The bigger problem, as that show brought up, is that a lot of the food we're growing depends on fast-disappearing groundwater, so we can't keep this up for too much longer.

    This is why dealing with climate change is so important.

    448:

    Oh yeah, the footnote:

    *I'm not much about the history of the end of empires invaded by barbarians, but I wanted to highlight a real problem. Often historians who look closely at the family names of people find that people with the names of so-called "barbarians" were living in the cities for generations before the alleged invasion took place. That doesn't necessarily mean that a city wasn't seized and sacked by a migrating army, but it does mean we have to be careful. For example, Flavius Odoacer, the first barbarian king of Rome (portrayed on a coin with a mustache, no less), was a Roman citizen and a Christian who deposed the last western Roman emperor.

    The analogy would be if future historians used Barack Obama's presidency as evidence that this was the time when the Muslim (and/or African) migrants took over the US after their home was devastated by climate change.

    449:

    The real danger is when someone's been scuba diving and then goes to altitude. They may be okay at sea level, but going above 10,000 feet can place them at risk for the bends.

    This is a known problem for divers, who get told not to fly right after a really deep dive (details depending on how much nitrogen they soaked up). The more ironic issue isn't flying it's when you go to the Big Island of Hawai'i or to Maui, where the peaks get over 10,000 feet around 30 miles from the ocean (to be fair, you can something similar in Los Angeles or Seattle too). Going from scuba to mountaineering can be a really bad idea, and tourists get warned not to do it.

    450:

    For example, it's cheaper to ship wheat to Egypt or Syria from Australia than it is to repipe the Tigris to make sure Syria has enough water to grow its own wheat (although this is a very bad example).

    The show made a point of showing that Israel recycles way more water than any place else on the planet. Apparently they studied the geology and did the math. And go the population on board.

    Also interesting was the bit about how Saudi Arabia is big into aquifer irrigation crop growing. Around the world.

    451:

    There’s a House episode for that: S3E18. Some nice echoes of pandemia in it too.

    452:

    Ah well ... the pubs are open ... I did a quick survey of my locals & had a pint in one & a half in another. People were still spacing themselves out, no bar-flies & ordering semi-remotely ( Me standing back & saying "I'll have one of those" ) If it goes on like that, then the chances of infection are low ... but, it wasn' raining & it wasn't cold. Not so sure about the restaurants - &the number of bodies actually on the street was almost a normal Saturday - but again, in the open & fresh air. The second pub, where I had a half, one of the pub's cats was going... "MY humans are back & I'm STARVING!"

    453:

    I live in the DC 'burbs these days, and I'm not moving again (a, I own the house, and b, too much stuff, and c, too old to do it), but I feel that I have two hometowns, Philly and Chicago, and miss both of them badly.

    454:

    Unlike the US farming, with the huge, long walking irrigators (or idiots who water in the afternoon, spraying water for half an hour or more), in Israel, I gather, they use the drip irrigation, hoses that basically leak.

    Uses a LOT less water.

    455:

    They do all kinds of things. The show indicated they only waste/lose 10% of what they use. I would expect they do things like irrigation with treated sewage and such. 10% seems low but Israel is very good at applied tech.

    456:

    Unlike the US farming, with the huge, long walking irrigators

    Apparently the Saudi's are doing this on their own "sand" but also buying up such operations and building them in other countries. Sort of as a hedge to feed their people and against the end of oil.

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

    457:

    I read the first part of the Siege of Gondor analysis, and am impressed.

    However, I think he's missing a trick on the logistics; the point is not to conquer Gondor, but to destroy it, and that means the Orc element of the army, at least, doesn't need to have supplies for the return home; they can use the Gondorian population (dead or alive) as a source of meat.

    The Southrons would have to be segregated, probably, but I seem to recall a description of them as having filed teeth anyway.

    458:

    To feed their horses! That's what they are growing on all the aquafer land they've bought up and tapped in the southwest and California -- they're growing alfalfa, and shipping the hay back to Saudi.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/15/saudi-arabia-buying-up-farmland-in-us-southwest.html#:~:text=Saudi%20Arabia%20and%20other%20Persian,California%20and%20Arizona%20seeing%20red.&text=Saudi%20Arabia%20grows%20alfalfa%20hay,to%20its%20domestic%20dairy%20herds.

    I wrote a big research report about this back in 2003.

    459:

    Loved that book

    The article I linked estimates that as a best case scenario (frequent remounts, no need to carry supplies for either man or horse) at around 60 mikes / day

    The real key is the remounts without those a horse and rider over many days don’t really move much faster then a man walking

    460:

    The helms deep one is even better IMO.

    It’s also pretty amazing how immensely good Tolkien was at getting all the details right, and what a good grasp he had on things strategic (from his ww1 days and his historical studies) . Like him or not he was certainly his own kind of genius

    461:

    As a serious thing: Yes, but not how you think it's being done. But you should probably filter your water anyhow.

    [Note: we get this a little more hard-core than RNG punters when we shit on Heavy-Messing Capital without them understanding what's going on. Egos run wild].

    Ok, we'll do this slow. In the last two weeks, running up to July 4th, "mysteriously" about every lame-ass to high-power Social Crises point has been punted into the stratosphere in the Anglo-Sphere. It's fairly crude, but the Smart Weapon[0] aspect is that pretty much all involved are either: a) blinkered, b) blinkered and invested and c) careful X-patching across media allows the 'well, our drama is X, but look at drama Y, that's even more pathetic'.

    Ask Het (and Host and others here) about mad-cap plans to nuke open seismic folds as a weapon. It's a timing cascade.

    And then points to urgent HI-IP data breach stuff. That's someone telling some other people that the Bell is Ringing and all of their knickers are fluttering in the wind.

    The scale up is: "Punitive Social Distress" btw. And trust me: there's communities you know nothing about being run into it.

    Just thought SFF with a little prod could avoid it, but meh. But, anyhow. We do tone it down & at least attempt to warn you about things.[6]

    ~

    And yes: the entire model is to structure meta-stress across an entire subject's information bubble then ramp it into psychosis[7]. What you've probably not seen before is when that kind of thing is like... your entire Internet. shrug I didn't insult this fucker - he's very very good. Ancient Mind and slow as fuck but, hey. Only Humans are so fucking psychotically egotistical they imagine nothing else on the planet can learn.[8]

    But yes: blowing a hole in the entire German market is kinda just the pawns getting cleared. Big things coming to play, to play...

    [0] Hello Langley.

    [1] There are exceptions, but they're serious enough not to piss around with making money off Stock Markets

    [2] Like: look @ deleted posts. Already fingered this one ages ago.

    [3] Look: Softbank losing out, via their Cameron (yes, your EX-PM) fund and various CH shinagles will come out. But this stuff is the obvious.

    [4] The real power-play was that basically no-one serious[1] noticed it, and certainly didn't notice that Germany's 'affront' to the major SWIFT / SIBOS[2] or whatever they're saying their name is now stuff coming in. Like: everyone knew the scam - who wins via buying[3]? The real play is about preventing EU from forming Banking networks outside of US dominion, serious money cash.

    [5] Pretty sure that E2 billion did actually exist. Just like HSBC's Cartel money did exist. Bit rough edges, but fairly sure you could look at a drugs bust in Italy recently (ISIS don't make the speed-knockoff stuff btw, someone else in the MENA ships it to them by the bucket-load: and spiders love the name, but "LION'S BRAVERY" is, in many cases, like the SS - hyped up the wazooo on amphetamines. Plus, the current MENA version is a bit nasty on the old reverb / psychosis stuff, not like the US Airforce uses.

    [6] $14 bil is chicken-feed. This "male" Void Creature. Well, he's made his play. Cognitively, was just faking the Boris Bake-n-Shake.

    [7] You saw this waaay back when various Trump lawyer types were breaking down on live TV.

    [8] For real. Reality is going to be ... a little bit weird in the last 6 months of 2020. "I am not a Goddess" said the Titan who declared she would be a Goddesss. Translate that.

    462:

    As a serious one. Don't watch TV. Or listen to the Radio in the car. And if you're running YT vids have a spectroscope / filter handy. There are some seriously naughty fuckers running some stuff most[0] brains can't process out there.

    That's not paranoia: it's active warfare and 100% it's being done[1]. Since most here are somewhat older (lower audio-range) and also stubborn mule Minds and also still got marbles, you're going have an irritating fuzz.

    They're driving other Mind types who have smaller protections psychotic with it.

    ~

    Note: 100% in the bank proven. Some lower-tier fuckwad forgot that Diplomatic Crickets shouldn't be shoved onto various Propaganda vids[2].

    First one to say "Conspiracy Theory" gets a visit from the FCA.

    [0] No idea: think those 'mosquito boxes' for children on shops, then ramp it up three tiers.

    [1] Now, you can argue if it's only against FT Journalists you've employed ex-Libyan intel at, Mr David "FUCKING BURN YOUR CARAVAN DOWN MATE" Cameron on the behest of various of the fcuking morally challenged fcukers attempting to make bank from pawning off the scam onto CH investors but. It's getting a bit more wide-spread than that.

    [2] Or, more likely: .mil tech leaks to Black Corporate types with fudges etc etc. Told you this years ago.

    463:

    Or, last post, limit hit!!

    Ask why certain BT teams in 8 man sections[0] are required to pipe a fucking dragon winking eye at a target and all the rest.

    Then. Mr Man-child and I will have it out, and we'll probably end up burning down the fucking London Eye as well.

    Checked that cladding recently, you psychotic fuck?

    [0] There are no domestic / non-industrial teams in fiber / coms that work in such teams.

    464:

    Just started that. Many thanks for the link, it's excellent stuff. (Good enough to keep me up this late, for a start!)

    465:

    Fastest horse oriented long distance communications on the planet? 3000 miles give or take in 10 days. Lasted 18 months. Telegraph systems wiped them out.

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

    And even then while using telegraph systems for the first 1/3 or so it was only 12.5 miles per hour.

    466:

    Oooh. Nice stuff. I've just waded through the Helm's Deep critique, and now I'll take a look at Gondor.

    467:

    [[ Limit passed - mod ]]

    468:

    Ah, yes, HSBC.

    I had a credit card from a bank in Philly, the first one I ever had, first half of the eighties. Got sold a dozen or 15 years later, then sold, then - get this - the servicing of it was sold to... HSBC.

    Now, I'd been paying it off every month, but hadn't used it in the previous year, because they'd moved the interest rate up to something like 25%, what you ask from a college student with no credit history.

    Then, a few years ago, I get a letter from HSBC that they're canceling my card, with no good real reason. I mailed back to complain.

    The complaint letter was bounced by the Post Office as "no such address".

    The next year they had huge fines for money laundering.... I wan't paying them enough, I guess.

    469:

    Yeah, isn't it fun to use a combination of Colorado River Water and ground water to feed alfalfa to the middle East?

    If you like California water management issues described by an insider with serious attitude, read the blog "On The Public Record" onthepublicrecord.org. Their take is that California could easily feed itself more-or-less sustainably with the water we have, but the problem is that most of our water goes to commercial exports, like almonds and alfalfa.

    This is what I was alluding to about the problem of migrating wealth, although it's far from limited to the Saudis. There's a snarky "law" here that water flows uphill to money in these parts. Not strictly true, but not entirely false either.

    470:

    As a kid, we went camping in the Yosemite back country a couple of times. About a day from home to the jumping-off point, where we left the cars. The second day we did the hike in to the camping site - there was a mule train to take the heavy stuff. The altitude didn't affect the younger people so much - my sister was six the first year we did it, and ISTR there was a kid younger than that, who most got a piggy-back ride. (It was 6 miles to hike, with a pass a bit over halfway that was over 3000m.) Going home, there were a lot of jokes about needing wringers to get all the lumps out of the air.

    471:

    Those #$%^&*()s planting irrigated orchards in the SW San Joaquin Valley should have their permits yanked. That's near-desert land without irrigation, and it's going to be dead land from the salt buildup. Also, they're trying to pull water from the Klamath River, which is subject to treaties with the natives in the valleys and over to the coast. I don't buy their products if I can help it. (I personally would not be unhappy if a few bricks of C4 or something similar got dropped into that very-expensive tunnel they're boring under the Delta.)

    472:

    Charles H @414: RAIT - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Tapes - we played around with that when we were decommissioning some HP MPE3000 systems back when the Spectrum (later "PA-RISC") machines were coming out, and got it working.

    I have no recollection of how, and doubt I would recognise a line of SPL if it hit me in the face these days!

    473:

    There is a human vs horse race been going on in hilly terrain in Wales for years. 22 miles. There is a bit of handicapping going on to make the racing closer. Sometimes a horse rider wins, sometimes a runner. Since allowing push bikes, sometimes a cyclist wins. Not as much in it as you'd think. Man vs Horse

    Around a lot of the UK, the distance between old market towns is around 12 to 14 miles. Particularly noticeable in Herefordshire, where I mostly grew up as there hasn't been the large scale development that other counties have had. About the distance that a farmer mid way between could drive stock to, or from market and walk home in a day, perhaps the next day if they stayed in a tavern to spend some of the money.

    474:

    @431: Whitroth - Oh, beowulf, recent, then. :-)

    I was first exposed to parallelising stuff on an Elyxsi, which was a vector processor machine, so SIMD not MIMD, then later in the Real World when VAX Clusters arrived there was a lot of time spent trying to get people to understand how, if they thought about their data, and segmented it, they could have each machine in the cluster do 1/nth of the work, and get a result faster. Even two machines could do wonders, not that data sets were that big back then! VMS having built-in checkpointing made it easier to re-start a failed job, too, if you used it.

    Of course those jobs wouldn't take more than minutes these days, but back when one true VAX MIPS was a real thing, 2-3 weeks on a current back-yard cluster would have taken months or years. :-)

    And 42 drives isn't big, one of the systems the NSA bought in my SGI days was built around several rows of racks of hard drives, it had something like 256 * 4-CPU Itanium blades in it, as delivered. I wonder if it's still sitting there doing its thing? (I presumed out loud that it was for recording and searching trans-continental telephone calls, and was requested to avoid all subsequent meetings about it!)

    475:

    I assume all you storage guys know about Backblaze? They are a cloud storage/backup vendor who builds their own stuff. They open source their designs so you can build your own or buy them direct from them. Currently on the 6th iteration.

    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/

    https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html

    They're also known for buying the cheapest big drives they can and building in the redundancy to deal with failures. (If BestBuy has a sale on external drives they might buy 500 and remove them from the cases.) They've done the math and decided this is a lot cheaper (at their scale) (net life of the drives) than buying NAS/Enterprise drives. They also publish their reliability stats. Quarterly I think.

    https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

    476:

    Charlie, you're wrong on the US. We're still in the first wave and it's growing. The appearance of a disproportionately death rate is a temporary statistical blip. Wait a few weeks and see. (Source: https://t.co/pkIJQh8auz?amp=1) Gonna hit 200k confirmed deaths by Labor Day. You have a national leadership of a POTUS who refused to act timely because of his ego and and a legislature that triggered an economic depression because all that mattered was ensuring that their special interests did not suffer unnecessary financial losses. That the people of the did and will, well, that's something they don't care about. Still don't at the moment. And as for the economic loss: We've a consumer-based economy; with consumers no longer working because dead or disabled by Covid and scared of certain things involving being in confined spaces that are mini-hot spots (restaurants, planes, theaters and, apparently, the Oval Office), well, that's a real hit. Add: Simple fear of spending because who knows what the economic future will bring under the current regime. Now, if Moscow Mitch deigned to respond to the economic effects like a developed nation would, things might be different, but no. As for Donnie, the other problem is that the US has no national response worth a goddam to a global pandemic. As someone living in a state where we net had competent leadership, I'm grateful for that. But relying on fifty governors to make up for Donnie's failure, well, per se they can't fully close that gap. And here we are. I was about to add we're a shithole nation but I think some shithole nations may have had competent responses, so...

    477:

    Interesting. I don't know much about horses, but I do know that people who rode them long distances (whether on their back or on a cart) often got off for climbing steep hills, because carrying a rider up those tired the horse disproportionately to the gain. I know more about cycling.

    On a good flattish road with little wind, a cyclist is c. 4 times faster than a walker/runner, but up a steep hill, cycling is slower. Rough surfaces also even things out. And while, even on extreme routes, rarely more than 20% of the route is uphill, it's common for that to take 50% of the time. Despite cycling dogma, it is at least as easy to get off and push once you drop below walking speed.

    478:

    people who rode them long distances (whether on their back or on a cart) often got off for climbing steep hills, because carrying a rider up those tired the horse disproportionately to the gain.

    It was common on public roads to have hostlers at the bottom of steep hills to provide extra horses for carters and carriages for the hill climb, so-called "wheel horses".

    My father's cousin was a heavy-horse farrier a century ago when horse-drawn transport was still a thing. His forge was at the bottom of a long moderately-steep hill and it had a hostler nearby. He had earned farthings as a kid running the horses back down from the top of the hill and helping out and that got him started into working as a farrier.

    479:

    whitroth @ 431: His data was stored on, and results to, a 42 drive RAID appliance.

    Sorry, former SGI guy, but we NEEDED the performance of hardware RAID. And the two or three times we had failures, I *never8 had a big problem with a random new card. "Import foreign configuration"? Yep. "All there."

    Works great if you're a federal agency with your budget backed by the "full faith and credit" of the American Taxpayers and can to keep hot backups running & just pull replacement parts out of stock if there is a hardware failure. Small businesses and/or regular dude with a home server may not have that kind of budget resources.

    480:

    Dave P @ 438:

    @420: Hopping off a plane in Mexico City after a long-duration flight from, say, Schiphol Amsterdam then you're already well on the way to being acclimatised to the existing altitude.

    Umm, nope. You'd better be VERY careful about any physical activity with that sort of altitude change within a day. The Wiki article on altitude sickness, which seems well researched, cites a limit of a net 300m altitude per day for mountain climbing acclimatization, saying you can ascend up to 1,500m in a day, but you should then descend back to your previous day's altitude +300m to sleep.

    Having lived in Colorado Springs, mean altitude 1,839m, for nearly twenty years, I can tell you visitors from the lowlands frequently get themselves in trouble doing normal activities, including visiting nearby Pike's Peak, at 4,302m altitude. You can drive the 2,463m difference, take a cog railway, or there's even an up and down marathon (madness, I tell you!). But you'd better be prepared for "headaches, vomiting, tiredness, trouble sleeping, and dizziness" (from the Wiki article).

    Even the U.S. military acknowledges the impact; when I was stationed at Lowry AFB, just east of Denver, personnel were excused from fitness testing until they'd been at altitude for 30 days.

    Yes & no. For much of my career in the Army National Guard, my home armory was at RDU Airport (133m). When we did Annual Training at Ft Carson (1,780 meters) we had to fall in and get to work immediately, ... and that included daily PT.

    There was no PT TESTING, but we did PT every day.

    Despite the difference in elevation, it was actually less stressful than AT at Ft. Hood (246 meters) because the weather was less oppressive (lower temp & humidity).

    481:
    Widespread flouting of social distancing and/or masking guidelines, and the emergence of anti-mask rhetoric among Trump loyalists as a very disturbing kind of political statement.

    I have a feeling COVID-19 might divide the German Left somewhat, just like the Gulf War in the 1990s did.

    The local anarcho-whatever bar closed even before the official lockdown, you can read their analysis here:

    https://ms-alternativ.de/index.php/artikel/falsche-freundinnen-verkehrte-forderungen-zwielichtige-versprechen-hygienedemonstrationen

    OTOH, quite a few "left" acquaintances[1] of mine are of to the rallies against social distancing.

    Not that I'm surprised.

    Problem is, I start to sympathize with Söder, the CSU front man from Bavaria. And Ramelow, a politician from the LEFT, wanted to relax the lockdown faster than anybody else.

    [1] I keep a quite varied contact list on WhatsApp; it's, err, interesting.

    482:

    SFReader @ 443:

    Re: ' ... personnel were excused from fitness testing until they'd been at altitude for 30 days.'

    Interesting. Wonder whether the military has developed specific tests to determine who's most at risk for this.

    From the family perspective - because this is one of those transient things tied to a specific situation, we've never consulted an MD for a diagnosis/cause.

    It's a blanket policy that applies to any PCS move. You have 30 days to acclimate before you can be required to take a PT TEST. Doesn't matter if it's a change in elevation (Ft Bragg to Ft Carson) or a change in climate (Germany to Ft Hood), you have 30 days to get acclimated to your new duty station. Most Active Army units do PT testing twice a year, so you may have as much as six months to get ready if you arrive there within 30 days of their regular testing dates.

    But you have to start doing PT right away.

    When you reach age 40, they schedule a stress test (EKG on a treadmill) to clear you to continue to perform PT, so you don't drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of a PT test, and if you can't be cleared, you're likely going to be eased out the door. I had the stress test twice, at age 42 (because I was already past 40 when the rule was implemented) and again at age 50.

    483:

    I was about to add we're a shithole nation but I think some shithole nations may have had competent responses, so...

    Not to worry: England is collectively saying "hold my beer"

    John Apter, the chair of the Police Federation, was on shift in Southampton where he said he dealt with “naked men, happy drunks, angry drunks, fights and more angry drunks”. “What was crystal clear is that drunk people can’t/won’t socially distance,” he said. “It was a busy night but the shift managed to cope. I know other areas have had issues with officers being assaulted.”

    England allowed pubs to reopen yesterday, although punters were supposed to observe social distancing. Shock horror: drunks don't social distance.

    (The Scottish government had more sense than to re-open the pubs: I expect if there's a new wave of hotspots in England in about two weeks the Scottish pub sector will stay closed a lot longer. In fact, the gap between how England and Scotland are running COVID19 response is becomning glaringly obvious, to such an extent the Conservatives are focussing political hit-jobs on the SNP for holding regular briefings and press conferences about the pandemic.)

    484:

    waldo @ 456: I read the first part of the Siege of Gondor analysis, and am impressed.

    However, I think he's missing a trick on the logistics; the point is not to conquer Gondor, but to destroy it, and that means the Orc element of the army, at least, doesn't need to have supplies for the return home; they can use the Gondorian population (dead or alive) as a source of meat.

    The Southrons would have to be segregated, probably, but I seem to recall a description of them as having filed teeth anyway.

    He's a historian specializing in the Roman economy & military. Pre-industrial logistics, operations & tactics are his field of expertise. I'll have to go back and read the Siege of Gondor analysis again, but IIRC he's comparing what Peter Jackson shows on screen to the way an army would have to function in the real world.

    I think sometimes he forgets to allow for the limitations of film making in critiquing the logistics & tactics shown in the film.

    You can't stage a REAL cavalry charge with the kinds of weapons that would actually have been used because you don't have enough extras and you have to follow safety guidelines to make sure those extras (and the horses they're riding) don't get hurt.

    Plus realistic logistics don't always make for good cinema. When they're done right, logistics are boring & dull, like watching paint dry. You never notice them when they're working well. It's when they stop working that things start to get really interesting.

    485:

    We were a small division - at our height, around '12, not sure if we had 80 people, including 3 offoce people.

    On the other hand, the four or so It-ain't-iums were ancient (and we even had a couple of Alpha boxen...).

    Did I mention that the big single-box dell had, damn, was it 512 cores, or only 256. The boxes with the two newer GPUs did have plenty, along with 750G RAM.

    And then there was the newsest, with 512 cores and 2TB RAM. But then, there was the bought in '12 SGI (sorry, HP, with service about to be outsourced to Unisys....) UV-2000, 512 cores, mapped memory....

    Nice boxes.

    486:

    Sorry, that's ludicrous.

  • Cloud storage is not a good thing. (Explain the difference between "cloud" and "time sharing on a mainframe" - oh, that's right, you have no idea where in the world your data is).
  • You. Do. No. EVER. Buy. consumer drives for a RAID. a) They're slower b) they are "green", and so will try to spin down whenever they can... which YOU CAN NOT DO in a RAID - the RAID will declare it a failed drive. For RAID, you MUST at least use an NAS-rated drive. This is not the forum, or I'd explain the technical details as to why it will not work. c) Best Buy? That's insanely stupid. You go through a vendor, and buy, as I used to, 20 bare disks at a time. Five or so years ago, I was buying, through one of our vendors, 20 drives at about $135US/4 TB WD Red.
  • 487:

    Germany

    Just read this the other day. This appears to be a lift (new by line?) of a Washington Post article.

    https://upnewsinfo.com/2020/07/05/coronavirus-vaccine-anti-vaxxers-far-right-and-hippie-moms-unite-in-germany/

    488:

    So, like pusher locos used on the railroads....

    489:

    Just maybe you're wrong?

    And behind the times? By this I mean applying concepts to current situations where they don't fit?

    490:

    I think you misunderstand a few things....

  • This was the NIH, which is comprised of 27 Centers and Institutes. The Center of which we were a part, HAD NO line-item in the budget. We had to get those that did to give us money. (Perhaps you missed us running 10+ year old servers?).
  • A decent hardware RAID card runs around $330 or so, so probably not something you want to spend money at home for, but easily in reach of a small business.
  • "Stock"? "Hot spares"? Sorry, a failed RAID card, use the other machine until we could either get a replacement under warranty (we paid, through the nose... but we have 5-yr NBD support), or ordered a new one rushed to us. In the meantime, well, if you must use that server, save to an NFS-mounted drive.
  • I have said that at home, I run Linux' software RAID, and I'm happy with it.

    491:

    Charlie Some people are stupid & get drunk. Most, however didn't & did distance .... As you already know, I checked my locals out & had a pint in one & a half in another - everyone was playing nice & being careful It all depends very much upon the known unkowns here ... How many actual cases have we had? [ I think a lot more than recorded ] How much accidental immunity is there in the population? [ Given a recent report/question from some experts, I think this is bigger than supposed, but not a large number ] How bad is it locally - given there seems to be huge regional & local variations [ See "Leicester ] Etc.

    whitroth Here, they wer called "bankers" & special signalling aarangements were used ... Many years ago, I actually got a picture of the banking tank loco dropping off the rear-end of a freight it had helped shove over the top of Shap summit,

    492:

    That is insulting.

    I just retired last year, having spent the previous 10 as a sr. Linux systems administrator. I was the one getting the quotes, setting up the orders, and dealing with vendors.

    No. I know what the fuck I'm talking about. You don't.

    493:

    Nice.

    Things change. We change with them. Or we "just fade away".

    Anyway, we disagree.

    494:

    "extra horses for carters and carriages for the hill climb, so-called "wheel horses"."

    Because their owners used to tell overoptimistic carters "that nag's no good, you need a wheel horse for this".

    495:

    Sorry to say, it sounds familiar.

    Actually, social distancing is working quite well, especially in buses and trains, but a few weeks ago, I biked into the city; perception is a difficult beast, but out of about 100 people, I only saw about 3 to far masks.

    I had a short moment of derealization, as in "I'm asleep and dreaming now, right?"; thankfully, before I had a small scale panic attack I got into a small bookshop, the girl behind the counter of course wearing a mask; I remember recently talked to somebody at the counter about "Distress" by Egan while I bought one book by David Sedaris and another one by Hunter S. Thompson, no idea if it was that day.

    Guess there is something with gonzo journalism that appeals to me, I also like Jon Ronson, who seems to be a similar crank magnet just as me.

    As for the derealization, I have had this feeling from time to time, might be stress-induced dissociation or my autistic traits. At least, it was a reminder why I like reading Philip K. Dick so much. ;)

    496:

    By hanging out of the window and using a long lens, I once got a picture of the two bankers that had just shoved me up the Lickey moving onto the centre road after dropping off.

    Pair of 37s though, nothing really exciting. Not like the train that went up there once with two ex-LNER Garratts and the ex-LMS one. Now that would have been a sight to see.

    497:

    “ I think sometimes he forgets to allow for the limitations of film making in critiquing the logistics & tactics shown in the film.”

    He mentions that quite a lot actually

    498:

    Or maybe you don't know what you're talking about.

    Since you insist, consumer drives have a TLER of up to two minutes when they encounter a bad sector - they'll just keep trying. RAID, and servers, REQUIRE a TLER of seven seconds, and at that point, they go relocate the sector data.

    So, no, you are, in fact, WRONG.

    I'm getting pissed off. This is the second time in a month when someone explicitly insulted me.

    In the past (feel free to grep through old blogs), when I've made a mistake, and been corrected. I APOLOGIZE, which is something my mother taught me as a kid.

    I've yet to see anyone else do so. Does that make me the "adult".

    499:

    I think sometimes he forgets to allow for the limitations of film making in critiquing the logistics & tactics shown in the film.

    He mentions that, actually, when discussing the unrealistic cavalry tactics — a limitation of safety in both spacing (horses spaced too far apart) and weapons use (spears not used right).

    500:

    "I think sometimes he forgets to allow for the limitations of film making in critiquing the logistics & tactics shown in the film."

    Having just read one of those and part way through the other, it seems to me that he's using that excuse all the time. Maybe I notice it more because I detest it and don't accept it. Never have done. So doing a film makes some things more difficult; so you either face up properly to the difficulties and find a way to do those things anyway, or you admit that you can't manage it and simply don't do that film. You do not just go "ah, fuck it" and bodge around it because you can't be arsed to do it properly, otherwise you just end up with a pile of arse, which is what Jacksoff has done.

    It is of course even more important with the aspects that are not so arcane as the mechanics of how battles are fought. Aspects like reducing a complex character to a cardboard ranting dick, for instance; military details are a bit of a specialised interest, but characters are what it's all about.

    Or like changing the fucking story so the things that happen no longer make sense - a complaint I have about the film of Watership Down, another favourite book of mine. That film was animated, so a lot of the constraints are off, but they still fell back on the excuse that doing it properly "would have made the film far too long". Rubbish. Films are only "too long" if they're shit to begin with. If they are good they can't be "too long", but they can be spoiled by being too short, and very often are deliberately spoiled in that way because of exactly this misconception.

    501:

    So Backblaze is interesting, but there seems to be a misunderstanding of them by some poster(s).

    1) they aren't running file servers - they are in the file storage/backup business which is very different - lots of write once and never touch other than to verify the contents periodically.

    1a) they aren't running raid.

    2) yes, they tend to use desktop drives for price reasons - again, see 1) where the demand on the driver is low compared to a file server that is reading/writing stuff all the time.

    3) no, they don't run off to Best Buy to take advantage of sales and then shuck external drives - their drive volume is way to large. What did happen is they temporarily did that after the tsunami that sent hard drive prices skyrocketing and availability crashing. But that was temporary, and they were much smaller back then.

    4) the only ones who still do the buy cheap external drives and shuck them to put them in a file server are the r/datahoarder people on Reddit - but there is a very big difference between what a home file server does vs an office/lab file server.

    502:

    Correction, it was the flooding in Thailand in 2011 that caused the hard driver shortages.

    503:

    Sorry, I just did some looking at the h/d stats that they publish online. I know some of those serial numbers without having to look them up, and they're ALL at least NAS-rated - the ST8000 are Seagate Ironwolf or Ironwolf Pro drrive, the WD Reds....

    The other thing is that NAS or Enterprise drives are faster, and they need the speed.

    504:

    Not really North America ... eastern North America & the Pacific Coast. The central part of the continent is mostly grassland steppe and/or desert.

    All of the western mountain ranges would like a word. Much of that is wooded, although large amounts of that are open forest rather than the crowded coastal stuff. Count up how many million acres of trees have been killed by bark beetles and the follow-on fungus in the last 20 years.

    The Mississippi River is also worth mentioning. It was a significant barrier for both the natives and settlers for a long time. There are still remarkably few bridge crossings, given its length and that it sits in the middle of a country as wealthy as the US.

    505:

    Pigeon Um. The LMS had a whole class of 2-6-0+0-6-2 Garratts, the LNER had the one 2-8-0+0-8-2 monster, class "U1"

    506:

    I don't really think it's being done in a manner that could be addressed by filtering the water :) The comment about the coronavirus headfuck strain was basically sarcasm, or something related to it. I boil all my water, anyway, to make tea with it, apart from a few mouthfuls a day to swallow tablets with; I'm one of the reasons they decided that method was basically no good.

    I'm also one of the reasons why the "Snow Crash" method also fails in universality (if to a lesser extent). I never listen to the radio. I see a TV about once a month, in someone else's house so I haven't seen one since the virus arrived. I do not watch videos off youtube, or anywhere else. I have for years taken extensive steps to ensure that neither video or audio do or can work in the browser. I think your explanation is good, but also that it does not achieve complete coverage.

    Thinking less of the weapons themselves than of those wielding them, I find good metaphors in places like Charlie's Laundry and Robert Anton Wilson. As you allude later on.

    507:

    OK, other way round, then. Still would have loved to see it.

    508:

    That would make no difference. On the UK ebay checkout when you pay by card it uses paypal anyway. I don't know what the exact underlying mechanism is, but the effect is equivalent to automatically creating an anonymous one-off paypal account, having that take money off the card to do the transaction, and then deleting the account. All behind the scenes, so all you actually do yourself is the standard single click on the checkout button. So the only difference creating an explicit paypal account would make would be that some of that stuff which is presently done automatically I would have to explicitly do myself instead (even if only once).

    I don't know how it works for selling. I never sell anything on ebay and have never even investigated doing it.

    "Chinese hitmen" is a reference to that hilarious article Charlie posted a while back about all those Chinese hitmen who each in turn accepted the hit and then passed it on to someone else to do it, until the recursion was terminated by the police and the whole lot of them ended up in court together. It alludes to the way the card outfit and innumerable other outfits these days that purport to do something are really just passing it on to someone else, who then does the same, etc, so whoever it is that actually does do it in the end you have no bloody idea. Hence me never even knowing Wirecard existed until their failure caused my card to fail and it turned out that lots of other things had fallen into the same unexpected hole. (Sure, I'd heard about some big financial fuckup in Germany; I still didn't know about Wirecard, because none of the people who were talking about the German thing called it that.)

    509:

    Oh, and about prices: historically speaking, since NAS drives were introduced in the early teens, they have run about 1.3 - 1.5 times the cost of consumer drives, while enterprise drives (rolls eyes) are consistently 3-4 times the price of consumer drives, or 2 or 2+ times the cost of NAS drives.

    510:

    It seems to me here people have just bloody given up. For the last few months it has been very quiet, but I went out yesterday to get some food and it was just as crowded as ever. People everywhere and nobody making any effort to stay apart from anyone else. In the shop I could smell people a good half the time, which does my head in, since if they can waft odours as far as me they can waft fresh virus droplets as far as me too, and what about all the other people who aren't smelly? I'd got used to shopping in a state of fear, but I was right back to the same reaction of barely-repressed freakout that I had when it all started.

    Pub is open again, looking just like it usually does, and resulting in drunk people wandering over the road into the shop to buy scratch cards or three bottles of vodka.

    One person wearing a mask - piece of cloth tied on with two bits of string, so it basically just means don't stand behind them instead of don't stand in front. Nobody wears masks here. I counted maybe three people on one expedition a month or two back, but it's just noise.

    The through section of the route to my house was back to car, car, car, car, car without a break again. It's a circumferential route in a city which is badly supplied with them, but it's still been quiet enough that you could wander all over the road most of the time if you felt like it.

    Even the pharmacy are slacking off. They've been using a plague table which they come out and put medicines on while you stand behind the line and getting shirty if you didn't. They've now moved the table so it is less than a metre from the line and don't wait for you to move away before they come out.

    511:

    All together, now "Goin' up Camborne Hill, coming down ...."

    512:

    This is the second time in a month when someone explicitly insulted me.

    Sorry. I didn't hurl the first one here.

    And yes, you have some definite opinions on this subject. So do I. I admit some of mine might be wrong. And I interact with a lot of Linux admins. And other admins. Your position is a minority one. But you are valid to have it.

    But I disagree with you opinion. And have no plans to yell at you about said disagreement.

    513:

    If I may ask and it is not prying too much, in what region of Germany do you live? (I hope I didn't misinterpret this. The few people I know in Germany are from and live in the south in areas near Stuttgart. Plus a family in Bad Harzburg.

    I've learned/been told that German culture varies across the country almost as much as in the US.

    Now you've got me curious. I'll ask how mask wearing is going with them.

    514:

    Considering the drunks won't/can't socially distance experience of the UK (I read that in the Guardian too this AM) -- and it's exactly the same here -- its drunks in cohorts of thousands who are drunk driving into the rest of us.

    Yes, the England the US are spiritual siblings, which is something all right to contemplate on this star spangled holiday weekend celebrating our so-called division. We are indeed of the same gene pool determined to destroy others, and maybe even ourselves, just so we can welter in our drunken vomit and all around idiocy -- while making as much noise as possible.

    Shame on us. Just shame on us.

    515:

    There is a LOT of German ancestry in the US. My last name it Scottish but I'm 1/2 German if you trace it back a bit. Those pesky World Wars made it less likely that people talk about it so much anymore.

    Anyway, checking out family trees in the mid west, especially Michigan and the St Louis area, plus Texas and you'll find Germans under nearly every family tree.

    So is my wife but for much more recent reasons.

    Anyway I find it amusing at times that so many of us in the US think of us as all English derived.

    Never mind all of those from southern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Plus those who were here first and managed to survive.

    Oh, wait. That's the current debate. Sigh.

    516:

    Sorry, I just did some looking at the h/d stats that they publish online. I know some of those serial numbers without having to look them up, and they're ALL at least NAS-rated - the ST8000 are Seagate Ironwolf or Ironwolf Pro drrive, the WD Reds....

    From the Backblaze Q1 2020 stats:

    Seagate ST8000DM002 - desktop drive https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/desktop-hdd-fam/en-us/docs/100782401c.pdf

    Seagate ST8000NM0055 - enterprise capacity drive https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/enterprise-hdd-fam/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd/constellation-es-4/en-us/docs/ent-capacity-3-5-hdd-8tb-ds1863-2-1510us.pdf

    They don't necessarily go for NAS drives, they go based on price (and their experience with the drive models)

    517:

    And just to be sure since everyone everywhere is so touchy these days. I was NOT trying to be snide or snarky at you.

    518:

    It seems to me here people have just bloody given up

    Messaging by leaders, and media, is screwed up.

    Following Dominic and his "eye test" we have Boris' father likely violating the rules to Covidize an isolated property, and then stupidly broadcasting to the entire world via social media that he was breaking the rules.

    In the meantime, authorities and media are failing to differentiate between the indoor and outdoor risk - and with summer here after weeks of being locked up people aren't going to miss the good weather. But instead of saying have fun outdoors and be careful indoors, the message still seems to be everywhere id dangerous so the public just gives up, lead by the 1% who keep demonstrating that the rules are really just guidance to be ignored.

    Over the in the US, the mask issue has joined the culture wars, with a GOP newspaper owner publishing a cartoon equating a DNC governor's mask rules with loading jews onto trains...

    And in the meantime, Covid really doesn't care about any of our human stupidity and is merrily going about its way spreading.

    In Australia, Victoria has an outbreak in some buildings and Spain has re-instated lockdown in 2 regions. The news from much of the non-Western world (other than Asia) isn't great either.

    And President Nero is fiddling while the US figuratively burns with Covid cases, claiming that for 99% Covid is nothing.

    With so many leaders out of touch with reality, is it any wonder the public (for now) doesn't care?

    519:

    Slightly off topic, but relevant to people not following the law:

    In Los Angeles, this July 4 there were no public displays due to the Corona virus, but this didn't stop people from putting a private display. Here's a video of what went on from 8:45 p.m. until 10:30 p.m. when the locals started running out of ammunition. Standing on your roof, it's not quite as good as this but it's pretty spectacular.

    Remember, every firework you see going off in this video is illegal.

    Someone estimated that the firework expenditure was $500 / second.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvdcdogC6k

    520:

    And perhaps the Canadian authorities are finally getting fed up with American visitors.

    Two Americans have been charged with quarantine violations in Northern Ontario.

    https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/07/05/two-americans-charged-with-quarantine-violation-in-ontario-face-1k-fine.html

    521:

    (Bold mine) In the meantime, authorities and media are failing to differentiate between the indoor and outdoor risk - and with summer here after weeks of being locked up people aren't going to miss the good weather. But instead of saying have fun outdoors and be careful indoors, the message still seems to be everywhere id dangerous so the public just gives up, lead by the 1% who keep demonstrating that the rules are really just guidance to be ignored. Very much this. It's long past time that the guidelines be revised based on 6 months of worldwide experience with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, with bunches of national (and smaller jurisdictions) level natural experiments, with much better instrumentation than in the past. E.g. store surveillance video could be used to measure face-coverings compliance, and use to supplement or correct self-reported data, and medical information is now vastly more available (constrained a bit by privacy laws in some places). The initial guidelines were close to generic WHO guidelines for dealing with a generic epidemic/pandemic. It is clear there is a lot of dogma at WHO (CDC is a little better at self-correction), some of it related to masks, but also other aspects of COVID-19 [1] I'd suggest something like this, based on the Japanese and Hong Kong experiences (a) Mandatory face coverings while indoors in shared public places (including transportation) and shared workplaces. (Mandatory to get mask discipline from selfish people.) (b) Social distancing at 2 meters where possible, especially indoors. (c) Advice to the public to avoid crowded indoor situations. Or maybe go with the Japanese advice to avoid the "three C's: closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings."

    • Ditch the emphasis on obsessive hand washing and surface washing unless there is evidence that it helps to significantly prevent new SARS-CoV-2 infections.
    • Don't worry about outdoors, excepting crowds where masks/face coverings should be worn.

    [1] e.g. and sorry NYTimes link, awkward headline: 239 Experts With One Big Claim: The Coronavirus Is Airborne - The W.H.O. has resisted mounting evidence that viral particles floating indoors are infectious, some scientists say. The agency maintains the research is still inconclusive. (Apoorva Mandavilli, July 4, 2020) Even in its latest update on the coronavirus, released June 29, the W.H.O. said airborne transmission of the virus is possible only after medical procedures that produce aerosols, or droplets smaller than 5 microns. (A micron is equal to one millionth of a meter.) Proper ventilation and N95 masks are of concern only in those circumstances, according to the W.H.O. Instead, its infection control guidance, before and during this pandemic, has heavily promoted the importance of handwashing as a primary prevention strategy, even though there is limited evidence for transmission of the virus from surfaces. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says surfaces are likely to play only a minor role.)

    Telepathy (last night by ET!HK, deleted, some sensible rationalist points addressed to skeptics.) The ruler drop test to measure simple reaction time is interesting. When you first give it to people, they typically clock at 200+ milliseconds. I tell people (kids, usually) to blank their mind, and instantly they drop to 140-160 milliseconds, occasionally faster. The standard accepted simple reaction time for visual stimuli is 200+ milliseconds. So where do the faster timings come from? Auditory? (no) Touch? (no) Blank mind faster? (why not in literature?) Something else? (This is often done with paper currency folded a few times to limit air resistance.)

    522:

    "and with summer here after weeks of being locked up people aren't going to miss the good weather."

    Pretty well exactly when the virus got going here and everything switched off, it started consistently being lovely and sunny every day. Not a cloud in the sky, and markedly fewer linear advertisements of human extravagance too. It was great.

    Pretty well exactly when people started talking about switching things on again, it stopped being like that and went back to being largely crap again. Some sunny spells or sunny days, but rarely two together, and mostly cloudy with bits of rain, or once or twice quite a lot of it. You can maybe go out without a coat on, but you can't rely on continuing not to want one until you get back. That thing in the news about Bournemouth beach was one of the "rarely" bits.

    523:

    David L @ 486:

    Germany

    Just read this the other day. This appears to be a lift (new by line?) of a Washington Post article.

    https://upnewsinfo.com/2020/07/05/coronavirus-vaccine-anti-vaxxers-far-right-and-hippie-moms-unite-in-germany/

    Just goes to show the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on ignorance.

    524:

    Anticipation. When you tell them to "blank their minds" they stop concentrating fiercely and exclusively on the ruler and have enough spare attention to do a Virgilia Samms on you. What happens if you release the ruler by turning off an electromagnet from behind a screen with a silent switch?

    525:

    True, you can synchronise a satellite to a good accuracy, but how long will that last if it doesn't have a high precision atomic clock on board? And given how many there are in that constellation, the UK would need to buy quite a few more laser ranging facilities to maintain synchs - Herstmonceux is not enough. Actually, I'm not even sure if the satellites involved have the retroreflectors usually present on satellites that are laser ranged.

    The gov probably ignored RAL, NPL, Dstl and STFC when deciding to do this. Its the sort of dumb thing that happens when walking examples of Dunning-Kruger get assigned Ministerial posts by fellow sufferers.

    526:

    David L @ 492: "Nice.

    Things change. We change with them. Or we "just fade away"."

    Not love! Love will "not fade away". 8^)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkY6ZOx411g

    527:

    "Not to worry: England is collectively saying "hold my beer""

    The proud Americans won't be one-upped :

    "Here in Texas, political leaders have been at odds with one another, and residents sharply disagree about the danger the virus poses and what precautions are necessary. At some Houston hospitals, visitors and patients have refused to wear masks, creating conflicts with security guards at entrances.

    As the Fourth of July holiday approached, Methodist spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a public information campaign — including full-page ads wrapped around a local newspaper, social media efforts and billboards. “Stay Safe and Stay Home This July 4th,” the signs say. Methodist also sent a text message to about 10,000 patients providing safety tips. In response, the hospital system received some angry phone calls and texts. “How about you stay at home and quit telling me what to do,” was how one hospital official described them."

    (this quote is from the nytimes)

    This is some interesting level of stupid.

    528:

    "There is a LOT of German ancestry in the US."

    Foxessa's point stands, though. Still the same gene pool. After all, that's why it's called England in the first place.

    529:

    What happens if you release the ruler by turning off an electromagnet from behind a screen with a silent switch? Dunno. I skimmed the literature last night and did not notice any such experiment or variation. The presentation of a visual stimulus with a mechanical (or computer) apparatus and random timing seems to result in typically 200+ milliseconds simple reaction times, in the literature. You made me look up Virgilia Samms. :-) I've had other people do the ruler drop as well, and the effect still seems to be there. Even with mental care taken to do the release with no other muscle movements. (Martial arts people, for who visual telegraphing of impending moves is a habit to be trained away.)

    530:

    It seems to me here people have just bloody given up.

    Yes, de facto even if they don't realize it, which I suspect most don't.

    If you look at the reported statistics from as-respectable-as-available sources, many large populations now have doubling times less than 20 days, will hit 50% of the population well before the end of the year. Happy Halloween!

    531:

    It alludes to the way the card outfit and innumerable other outfits these days that purport to do something are really just passing it on to someone else, who then does the same, etc, so whoever it is that actually does do it in the end you have no bloody idea.

    Yeah, there's some Canadian businesses who's been bitten by that. A Canadian business, using a Canadian payment processor to handle purchases from Canadian customers, losing money because their processor used an American processor and the purchases were illegal under American laws, so they just kept the money…

    https://www.thestar.com/business/2019/10/02/toronto-food-truck-caught-up-in-trumps-battle-with-cuba.html

    532:

    Unholyguy @ 496:

    “I think sometimes he forgets to allow for the limitations of film making in critiquing the logistics & tactics shown in the film.”

    He mentions that quite a lot actually

    He does mention it, and a few paragraphs later seems to have completely forgotten it again. His critique of what is shown on the screen is valid, but sometimes he misses why the film maker shows what he does.

    I like his writing a lot. It's entertaining & educational. But I also understand where some of his critics are coming from.

    It's not Peter Jackson's failure to understand how armies work that causes the apparent errors, it's an inherent limitation of what the film maker can do when making movies and I think Devereaux should sometimes make that distinction a little bit clearer.

    533:

    I'm in Canada, and yahoos have been lighting off fireworks at my local park every damn night all week. I'm getting bloody cranky from being woken up by loud bangs just as I get to sleep…

    (The heat wave isn't helping, either.)

    534:

    Another one of those off topic things, but for you fictioneers looking for something very weird on the galactic scale, there's this:

    https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2020/hubble-spots-feathered-spiral

    535:

    Michael Cain @ 503:

    Not really North America ... eastern North America & the Pacific Coast. The central part of the continent is mostly grassland steppe and/or desert.

    All of the western mountain ranges would like a word. Much of that is wooded, although large amounts of that are open forest rather than the crowded coastal stuff. Count up how many million acres of trees have been killed by bark beetles and the follow-on fungus in the last 20 years.

    The Mississippi River is also worth mentioning. It was a significant barrier for both the natives and settlers for a long time. There are still remarkably few bridge crossings, given its length and that it sits in the middle of a country as wealthy as the US.

    I was kind of lumping the western mountains in with the Pacific Coast; how the central part of the continent is open & mostly un-forested. Probably shouldn't, since they are different forests. I was more interested in the way natives managed the forests, particularly in the east where English settlers first encountered them.

    Nonetheless, the natives had their trade routes. And the Mississippi River (and the Ohio & Missouri rivers) was as much a highway for natives as it was a barrier. They didn't need bridges because they didn't have mechanized transport (trucks & trains & freight wagons). But even without mechanized transport there's solid evidence they engaged in long distance trading.

    536:

    In Los Angeles, this July 4 there were no public displays due to the Corona virus, but this didn't stop people from putting a private display. Here's a video of what went on from 8:45 p.m. until 10:30 p.m. when the locals started running out of ammunition.

    Here they cancelled the city display as much for social distancing as cost. (Local governments in NC are hurting due to lack of sales tax revenue.) Normally I can hear the official ones and there's a lot of neighbors making the dogs nuts as they do things. Interestingly this year it was quiet.

    537:

    mdlve @ 517: In the meantime, ... with summer here after weeks of being locked up people aren't going to miss the good weather.

    I don't really understand that. Just because you want to go out in the good weather doesn't mean you have to behave like an idiot out there. There's no reason why you can't enjoy outdoor recreation while still taking adequate precautions against spreading disease.

    538:

    Dave Moore @ 518: Slightly off topic, but relevant to people not following the law:

    In Los Angeles, this July 4 there were no public displays due to the Corona virus, but this didn't stop people from putting a private display. Here's a video of what went on from 8:45 p.m. until 10:30 p.m. when the locals started running out of ammunition. Standing on your roof, it's not quite as good as this but it's pretty spectacular.

    Remember, every firework you see going off in this video is illegal.

    Someone estimated that the firework expenditure was $500 / second.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvdcdogC6k

    For comparison, here's the 4th of July in Los Angeles in 2019

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-X8t7rKFq8

    539:

    Just to be honest, CDC now has another case where there is a single suspected case of indirect contact transmission of SARS-CoV-2, this time in an elevator, in a cluster of greater than or equal to 71 cases. Could be persistent aerosol or small droplets in the elevator, or an undocumented close contact.[1] Still clear that spread is overwhelmingly via airborne droplets, large and small (and possibly very small). Large SARS-CoV-2 Outbreak Caused by Asymptomatic Traveler, China (June 30, 2020)

    Patient B1.1 was the downstairs neighbor of case-patient A0. They used the same elevator in the building but not at the same time and did not have close contact otherwise.

    [1] Previous suspected case I've read was a shared church seat (same day, not same time, video surveillance as evidence). That one could have been particles lofted into the air by sitting in a seat, depending on unstated details of seat construction.

    540:

    Remember, every firework you see going off in this video is illegal.

    So where do those who live in the LA basin buy such? Here in NC folks drive down to SC for things that go "up". You can do the total trip in 4 hours if you obey the speed laws.

    541:

    David L @ 535:

    In Los Angeles, this July 4 there were no public displays due to the Corona virus, but this didn't stop people from putting a private display. Here's a video of what went on from 8:45 p.m. until 10:30 p.m. when the locals started running out of ammunition.

    Here they cancelled the city display as much for social distancing as cost. (Local governments in NC are hurting due to lack of sales tax revenue.) Normally I can hear the official ones and there's a lot of neighbors making the dogs nuts as they do things. Interestingly this year it was quiet. [emphasis added]

    Not closer in to downtown it wasn't.

    Not quite up to the "Am I back in Iraq? PTSD triggering levels it has been some years, but they had their fun and some of it did not sound like illegal fireworks IYKWIM.

    542:

    They quit about 11pm in my neighborhood, after starting at 8:30 or so. Mostly noisy stuff AFAICT. (It's been going on, in much smaller amounts, for the last 6 weeks. I hope they've run out of pyrotechnics.) Fortunately there weren't many fires.

    I'm very tired of the cherry-bomb/M80 type shot off at close range.

    @Dave L I don't know about the basin, but it's possible to find cities in the area where they're semi-legal (going to the next county is possible). There may be outfits that ship them from out of state.

    543:

    The earlier arrivals from Germany mostly "disappeared" - they kept the family names, or translated them, and not much else from the old country was kept.

    544:

    I love the way Germany comes up with the name of something new.

    Superkavitierender Unterwasserlaufkörper

    545:

    In California, they managed the grasslands-with-oaks - acorns were a food, and they knew how to process them to get the tannin out. That management also allowed for smaller game, as well as deer.

    546:

    David L @ 539:

    Remember, every firework you see going off in this video is illegal.

    So where do those who live in the LA basin buy such? Here in NC folks drive down to SC for things that go "up". You can do the total trip in 4 hours if you obey the speed laws.

    Primm Nevada looks like it might serve the same relationship to LA as "South of the Border" does to Raleigh. It's about 230 miles one way, but it's on the way to Las Vegas the way "South of the Border" would be to Myrtle Beach. In fact it's slightly less of a detour, because I-15 runs directly from LA to Las Vegas. Round trip probably takes twice as long as a run down to "South of the Border".

    More likely it's a stop on the way back from Las Vegas (last chance to buy fireworks) the way "South of the Border" is coming back from Myrtle Beach.

    547:

    I'm in Canada, and yahoos have been lighting off fireworks at my local park every damn night all week.

    Up here in 'Straya there's been outbreaks of fireworks, more commonly on weekends and not limited to the park. But only once a week or so.

    No idea what social distancing is like, I'm still observing quarantine because I can and it seems sensible. Still tossing up renting out rooms, the $500-odd a week of income would be nice but it's not worth dying for.

    548:

    I'm living in Münster (went there to study and stayed), but originally I'm from an industry town near Gelsenkirchen and Recklinghausen.

    Dortmund is quite close, which explains why I visited DortCon every time since 2003.

    Err, sorry, on the way to work.

    549:

    So more from the north?

    So Lederhosen not a thing there as I understand it. It was a part of my mother in law's childhood and she imparted it to her husband and my wife and her sisters.

    If we can connect off the blog I have a question about getting some genealogy records in Germany. If you don't mind.

    550:

    Well, Lederhosen are about as much part of my area like Texan hats are part of most of America; e.g. everybody wears them.

    My BoardGameGeek profile is

    https://boardgamegeek.com/user/Trottelreiner77

    No idea if I can help.

    551:

    Sicherheitsunterwasserganggerät.

    552:

    foxessa "the drunks" ... Snarl ... this is the language of the New Puritans Some of us just want a pint or two & a chat, & then go home - in fact, the great majority.

    mdive Yes Outdoors, even sitting at an outdoors pub table, more than a metre from anyone else is very different to being in a crowded room (etc) I will be carrying my mask, if I go shopping & wearing it if it looks at all crowded "indoors" f'rinstance. SOME of our so-called "leadership" seem to have got the message, finally. Others, not so much - the USA - seems split along political lines, what a suprise. ... see also Bill Arnold's comments To which I would add ... that it seems to be that public transport is a lower risk than many thought.

    Trottelreiner Ah ... I know Münster - & Rheine & Osnabrück ... bur I won't be going to Hörstel/Bevergern this year. Hopefully next, though. Braueri Pinkus!

    553:

    And in turn, you made me try the search just to see what happens :) And got a link to this very site on the first page. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/07/gods-and-genre.html Hello recursion my old friend.

    554:

    I note the deliberate ( Almost certainly paid-for ) attempt to split the US Dem vote by one Kanye West, whom I'd never heard of - & now wish I hadn't ....

    555:

    Indefinitely. All you need is (a) a local clock with nanosecond resolution and stability over a single orbit and (b) a communication mechanism with nanosecond revolution. You don't need laser ranging facilities.

    What you do is the standard double handshake to an atomic clock source on the earth - that is, send a message, get an earth timestamp back, and then use the average of the sent and received time to tell what the local time was corresponding to that. Then adjust the correction (both the offset and rate of drift), rinse, and repeat. You need remarkably few handshakes to keep in synchronisation. Been there - done that.

    It's trickier for a satellite, because it is moving, so you need to fit multiple parameters (i.e. the offset, rate, orbital constants, and position), but that's not hard and doesn't need much computing power. And note that the calculations do NOT need to be done in real time - only the double handshake needs to be.

    Doubtless there are other methods, but I can guarantee that one needs easily available kit and works well. When I did it, I was synchronising only to millisecond accuracy, but it was over UDP and the Internet in 1995 with erratic round-trip times of approaching a second. Using hardware directly and a direct signal would give the required resolution.

    556:

    However, my point was that, by mediaeval times, England and the lowlands of Scotland were NOT covered by woodland (they were much as it is today, outside the connurbations) and the road network was much as it is today (just unmetalled and without road signs and no motorways). By the 17th century, almost all current bridges were in place, too. It was not like northern America before Columbus, and hadn't been for 3,000 years.

    557:

    So Lederhosen not a thing there as I understand it.

    They are Bavarian. (As are dirndls.) Kind of like the way Texas is into big hats and elaborate boots, it's a regionalism from a region with its own idiosyncratic quasi-nationalist culture.

    558:

    dirndls

    Actually my daughter had one of those a few years ago for some reason that I forget.

    Now I remember, Swabian, was the cultural background.

    559:

    I note the deliberate ( Almost certainly paid-for ) attempt to split the US Dem vote by one Kanye West

    Not really. Think of Ringo Star announcing he was running for Prime Minister. Now think of a UK entertainer who is less likely to do such. Nonsense of the week spouted by someone known for being known.

    It is likely just way too late to even get on the ballot in most states.

    560:

    Totally off-topic Beautiful promo video of artifical birds massing 42 grams each - most impressive.

    561:

    David L @474: Re: Backblaze - it's been interesting reading their studies, since I got out of storage and nowadays just argue with people about coding and design.

    What I've been told by those still in the game is that the HBA chip and card manufacturers are moving away from purely supporting "Enterprise" drives (that 7ms TLER thingie that whitroth pointed out) into having firmware that adapts to the drives, and survive long time outs. This is being driven by customers wanting cheaper large storage - where "wanting" means, "We're not paying," full stop.

    Then there are "Shingled" drives. It's turning into yet another mess.

    All my home systems survive on consumer drives, and I can rebuild my mobs critical systems using whiteboxes et al if it becomes necessary - of course, the moment that anyone further up the food chain realises we haven't used our own equipment there will be a stink, but my manager agrees that in getting systems back, cheap and fast is more important than having the right labels on everything. :->

    562:

    JBS @479: ... but we did PT every day.

    Every time I see a variation of this, I am reminded of the old joke: "They get us up at five, fill us full of coffee, and then expect us to P T for an hour." ;-)

    563:

    whitroth @ 484: ...'12 SGI (sorry, HP, with service about to be outsourced to Unisys....) UV-2000, 512 cores, mapped memory....

    The UV boxes were one of the last things I worked on at SGI - after I got the "we are really, really, so, so much smarter than you," guys who did HFS , um, "unhappy" with me after I proved that it didn't do what was on the label. :->>>>

    The idea with UV was to have racks that were just CPUs without hard disks in them connected to racks that were only hard disks, so the heat from the disks would not have an impact on the CPUs.

    It worked, in the sense that the CPU racks were easier to keep cool without disks in them, but at the time I left they would not boot without needing the occasional kick up the jacksie. I wonder if they got them working, or did the heretical thing someone (not me) suggested, of putting the boot stuff on USB keys inside the CPU boxes?

    564:

    And on a COVID-19 note, here in Victoria, Australia, we are closing the state borders, and putting whole suburbs, and, indeed, clusters of High-rises into lock-down.

    Looks like we may be heading for a second spike. :-(

    565:

    Well, I do hope you are right and they do have appropriate/capable hardware components onboard or we just wasted £0.4B on one of Cummings whims.

    Its such a pain when the restricted bits of Galileo are only in there because the UK championed them in the late 90s.

    Personally, I'm expecting RAL/NPL/Dstl to receive yet another "Help!" directive from the CO any day now. Though, I suppose its only 25% of the subsidy to the theatres and museum. So, small beer.

    566:

    Speaking of COVID19 ...

    I've just been out to a local shop for supplies we'd run out of. (Tesco Express, small supermarket nearby, plus local organic grocery store.)

    For the duration of lockdown I've been able to judge how tight things were by vehicle traffic in my street -- there's a set of traffic lights at the top, feeding into a gyratory that's under construction, and in normal times at rush hour the tailback extended half a mile down the road.

    During the initial weeks, there were maybe one or two vehicles at the lights, at most. Over the past two weeks it's gotten busier; and today it was halfway back to normal congestion.

    Similarly, the Tesco Express has a limit of 15 shoppers and it had hit the limit as of 3pm, with a doorman letting people in as shoppers exited.

    Masks are to be mandatory in shops in Scotland from the 10th. Today, mask use was up significantly from the maybe 10% of last week to about 30%-40%. Still inadequate but improving.

    Distancing ... the young 'uns simply can't be bothered. And I dread to think what it'll be like when pubs re-open. (I gather they're considering allowing those with beer gardens/outdoor seating to reopen in a few weeks, but not for indoor service except off-sales.)

    567:

    Re: '[Kanye] ... Nonsense of the week spouted by someone known for being known.'

    Nope!

    Suggest you do not blow this off: KW is at least as big an egotist/jackass/volatile as DT. Seriously.

    See below story:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-50178788

    'Kanye West: 'I'm the greatest artist of all time'

    He's previously called himself a "creative genius" and said his "music is perfect", not to mention his plans to run for President.

    So his latest interview, with Beats 1 presenter Zane Lowe, was on-brand for the musician.

    He not only touched on porn and religion, but also said: "I'm unquestionably, undoubtedly, the greatest human artist of all time."

    "It's just not even a question anymore."'

    Added bonus: He's had a messiah complex thing going for quite a while now.

    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/kanye-wests-sunday-service-is-full-of-longing-and-self-promotion

    Excerpt:

    ' ...a new position as the unofficial head of communications for a pop-up church experience called Sunday Service, which was created by her husband, Kanye West'

    568:

    "Gyratory under construction" York place rebuild for the tram extension, yes? Traffic is similar here .... I had to look & wait to cross the semi-main road to get to/from the allotment, yesterday. Pubs - depends on which one, & the usual clientele, I suspect. I will carefully only be going to those with outside seating areas for the time being...

    569:

    I didn't say that, but was merely pointing out that the mechanism you said were essential, aren't. There is also supposed to be a launch capability, and the UK gummint is hoping to deliver broadbang on the cheap. Given the UK gummint's record, it will probably be a fiasco, but they HAVE had partial successes in the past.

    570:

    Very few face masks at our local (well, 10+ miles) supermarket last weekend - none of the staff and only one amongst the many older customers. Which is odd, because in an area where they are worried about the impact of the impending wave of tourists one easy response is for said hordes to be encouraged to use masks by seeing all the locals wearing them.

    572:

    A bit inside the park kind of things but the SCOTUS just went 9-0 to say states can require electors to follow rules.

    https://www.npr.org/2020/07/06/885168480/supreme-court-rules-state-faithless-elector-laws-constitutional

    This matters as it makes it a bit less likely that Trump can mess with the results of the state by state votes. A bit.

    9-0 is hard to argue with.

    573:

    Trying to remember... I think each brick had a drive in it. We bought a RAID appliance from our favorite folks, AC&NC (cheap (half or 1/3 as expensive as Dell or HP), REALIABLE... and assembled in offices in Pittsburgh, PA.) for storage, and put a hub in the brick with the ethernet.

    Those suckers can take a beating. Since we admitted what happened, I can say this: one of our machine rooms, in the basement (the bigger room) had the steam pipe for the building going through it. We'd had steam leaks before... but in Feb of '18, we had heavy rain, it got into the tunnel, and about 35 min after I, the other admin, and a guy from Fire who was looking at a failed smoke detector walked out of the room, steam from the water outside the pipe exploded into the room, video died in 10 sec. Anyone in there would have been scalded to death. Fire couldn't get in there to hit the EPO for almost half an hour; meanwhile, the UPSes had given up.

    Let's see, we paid about $7k (!!!) to replace the Supermicro head node, and repair 1? 2? of the bricks, and one PSU. AND IT RAN!

    Fabulous machine.

    574:

    I think so - I think if he can get on the ballot, or if people write him in, he's hoping to siphon off votes for Biden.

    But then, we'll see how much he actually plays the game.

    575:

    Hey, Greg, good news: I read "Moderate drinking may improve cognitive health for older adults, study says"

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/health/alcohol-cognitive-improvement-wellness/index.html

    576:

    Doesn't that also imply that states can legislate the result they want ahead of the election and the federal government can't make them be democratic?

    577:

    And... about farming, something good: robots to go in the rows between the crops and cut or zap weeds. Both the company in the US, and the one in the UK, are in beta test...and looking to price on the lower side of the cost for chemicals.

    https://onezero.medium.com/tiny-weed-killing-robots-could-make-pesticides-obsolete-99b3a6359c39

    578:

    Re: 'There is a LOT of German ancestry in the US.'

    Along with some interesting legends including how English only narrowly beat out German as the US of A's official language. (Spoiler: The winning vote for English was cast by a German.)

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

    579:

    Oh, human interest: last night, Ellen and I went to socially distance (in a large back yard) as one of my daughters remarried. There was a LARGE attendance. Including from Oz.

    They did it as a zoom meeting, for everyone who couldn't come. Went well, and after the ceremony, my daughter, her new husband, and my granddaughter sat and visited with the folks on zoom, before we got to the cupcaks and drinks.

    580:

    York place rebuild for the tram extension, yes?

    Correct. Although they're not actually building the tram extension yet -- they're rebuilding York Place as part of the road infrastructure for the new shopping mall/hotel complex up Leith Street, which had to down tools due to COVID19 lockdown. It's beginning to move again and so will the trams, in due course.

    581:

    whitroth Been known for some time ... similar results pop up quite frequently, same as moderate consuption is actually good for your blood circulation, & probably your urinary system as well. The vile New Puritans continue to do their "best" (worst) to ignore all this.

    582:

    To which I would add ... that it seems to be that public transport is a lower risk than many thought.

    I think the jury is still out on that.

    Yes, the story out of Japan is very good - though I suspect for cultural reasons the public transit experiences are very different.

    Specically, the mentioned that everyone was wearing masks and they generally don't speak/socialise on public transit.

    This is very different to the western world - where there are groups of people socializing but more annoyingly you get the people constantly talking on their phones - and that talking increases the risk of droplets if there is no mask.

    And as the french bus driver found out, trying to enforce the rules can have very bad consequences

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53309424

    583:

    Um, Greg? I believe you mean the teetotalers, not the Puritans.

    The Puritans stopped at Plymouth Rock because they ran out of beer (reference). They were using that instead of water in their ship.

    584:

    H No "The New Puritans" who are loose right now. Very prohibitionist. Complete arseholes "hair shtrts" & healthy exercise & team games & all the usual shit ....

    585:

    Interesting.

    I just signed up to be a part of a phase 3 trial of a Covid-19 vaccine.

    Based on what I was told will happen I'm guessing this is costing $10K to $20K per person NOT included the drug costs. A physical, 3 more in person doc visits, 8 phone calls. Lasting over 2 years.

    Plus paying me $1800 and $50 per referral.

    Didn't know about the money to me until after I was in.

    586:

    I just signed up to be a part of a phase 3 trial of a Covid-19 vaccine.

    Thank you for your service. Seriously.

    I've considered volunteering for a vaccine trial myself, I presume the developers are looking for a complete spectrum of candidates, everyone from age 18 up to coffin-dodgers, people with odd conditions and morbidities as well as generally healthy folks. I don't know how they plan to validate any vaccine on kids and anyone who can't give informed consent.

    I'm a great believer in Science! (tm Agatha Heterodyne) and I'm not unwilling to put myself in the firing line in this situation. Thank you again for doing this.

    587:

    We're aware that no-one reads our stuff[0], so here's a tale in a similar style to the above that is not fiction.

    So, you're the leader of a leading G7 Nation and you've got a bit of a cash-money scandal coming up. So what you do is this:

    1) Set up an Apocalyptic style 'leaked' set of PR shots including yourself and the person involved 2) You make it really heavily symbolic: the full works - black sky, the person in question in control, perhaps steering you in some manner, some nasty vibe stuff like miserable children looking oppressed in a dark cramped place, really shove home the insult by making a joyous innocent place look like the dungeon for the doomed. 3) You make sure this leaks just as the FinTwit Knights start unearthing well: "Cash for Policy" paper trails. You've got a handle on this, your backer makes sure to have a memorably offensive Power-Lunch with them, say... a week before, so everyone knows this is coming. 4) You then make sure that all Political opposition to this is immediately re-framed into the culture-war adjunct, complete with deploying the goons, twitter bots, outrage junkies and so on and force a high-profile resignation / scandal over it. Not of your side: of theirs. Make sure the language / trope usage is right up there with 1933 precursors to trip everyone's switches. 5) Make sure that the children angle is 100% included just at the time when the media as a whole is refocusing on that Dark Crystal stuff and that the question lingers: whose child was that in the picture, anyhow?

    You'd have to be an idiot not see immediately right through that one, wouldn't you? Real genius level PR moves of "unintended effect", right?

    ~

    Now then: adjunct to various Twitter fires going on, here's a question: what do you think turns up to Party / Play when you're firing that kind of non-Color Firework[0.5] into the sky? Frck the Humans, stuff that likes to Eat Things[1].

    The fact that this is the state of a major G7 Political sphere in 2020 should perhaps make you worry.

    True story. Go look it up.

    [0] Dear Polish woman: the finger taps are code for we love you and we're sorry. Reference: Ian M. Banks, The Algebraist

    [0.5] TP - "Color of Magick"

    [1] Perennial note: although you can re-write in your Mind all content above HP style into a meta-comment, which it is, it's also fairly strict: we're not talking about Humans, and our definition of Human is much much broader than most of yours. Like... Canis lupus familiaris is pretty much Human Mind 0.6 function due to symbiotic ties, never trust a culture that doesn't have that link, type stuff. i.e. Your categories, not applicable.

    588:

    As Nojay said, thank you for your service.

    589:

    Algerians, commentary:

    France to return skulls of 24 Algerian anti-colonial fighters, Algiers says

    Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune disclosed the move at a military ceremony on Thursday. The skulls of some of the fighters have been on display in a museum in Paris. Algeria gained independence from France in 1962...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-53270288

    WW2, that great teaching moment for all humanity, eh? Since most Americans seem unable to deal with statues, let's not put too great a hope on sequestering all those ash-trays and paper-weights from WWII anytime soon.

    Colonial statues and their afterlives

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13629387.2019.1644897

    Zeynep Çelik The Journal of North African Studies Published online: 13 Aug 2019

    We'd suggest the actual remains first, but hey.

    Even the Spanish aren't still digging up their War dead or ignoring shameful treatment of their fellows (spoiler: yes, yes they are).

    ~

    25 years.

    "Good we have a date on it" hysterical weeping. Yeah, probably best not to bet too much cash-money on current events.

    Now then, now then: got to go find the [redacted] whose "genius level" PR stuff was so labelled above: dem's the rules - οὐροβόρος completed, you got your Trophy. Now let's see what the real cost is: spoilers. Kiddies menu has been banned.

    590:

    Did you see Runaway (from the 80s)? Remember the cute little farming robots?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pan5Jo91e8I

    591:

    The US doesn't have an official language, not even now, after all the bs about immigrants and English Only and English First and NO SPANISH, NO YOU NAME IT LANGUAGE ENGLISH ONLY.

    Not new puritans, people who want to stay safe. A drunken loudmouth setting off fireworks under one's home with a crowd of people is a drunk. He is not a sweet guy enjoying a pint or two and chatting with mates. He's out of control and out of control in midst a whole bunch of people who are out of control drunk too. You clean up the vomit and the piss and the fireworks mess and get some sleep while all that is going on -- or even try to walk outside your apartment to get milk, and then start yelling at us about neo puritans (and by the way, the Puritan women made terrific beer and everybody in the congregation drank it).

    592:

    [[ link quota exceeded. Post quota subsequently exceeded by such a large margin that this account is now banned too - mod ]]

    593:

    They finally released a list of some of the "small companies" that got the loans.

    One of them was the Ayn Rand society.

    From the comments on the site I read it:

    Atlas Shrugged. Telemachus sneezed.

    And having read Anthem when I was 18 or 19 (straw men, with the wires showing), and a quarter or a third of Atlas Shrugged when a co-worker forced it on me, Ghu, she was a TERRIBLE writer.

    594:

    Sorry, Foxessa, but you're coming on as just what Greg's complaining about.

    I read your post, and how I read it is that everyone who drinks, at all, is a drunk and dangerous. Even if my lady and I have a beer with dinner, or a drink in the evening, or the 'Rita we had when I made bbq on the back patio Sat eve, it sounds like you're saying we are dangerous drunks.

    I don't approve.

    595:

    Foxessa Oh dear - you realy don't get it do you? Prohibtionism & all its hang-ups & resultant gross criminality still stalks the USA. Look, Stratford Bill commented on this, over 400 years ago: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more Cakes & Ale?"

    I can tell the difference between a raoucus piss-head & someone who simply wants a pint - & apparently, so can you ... but the "New" ( actually very old) puritans can't & won't.

    596:

    On, and by the bye, I've mentioned on this blog before, but you may not have seen it, that I've been married too many times.

    And my late ex died, summer of 2012, of complications of cirrhosis.

    So I REALLY object to light-to-moderate drinkers being tarred with binge/alcoholics.

    597:

    I'll also note that I don't see huge criminal organizations before Projibition, when suddenly there was HUGE money.

    598:

    Fireworks as proxy, and "no one noticed"? Really? You think half of us weren't appalled at the crapola fireworks over Mount Rushmore, where the Hairball made his fascist, racist speech, and the National Guard was pushing back Native Americans WHOSE LAND IT IS?

    Nah, nobody notices....

    599:

    I'll also note that I don't see huge criminal organizations before Projibition, when suddenly there was HUGE money.

    La Cosa Nostra, Yakuza, Triads, Pirates, Corsairs, Buccaneers...no, I don't see any large scale criminal enterprises before Prohibition.

    And I won't even count the British Opium trade into China and the two wars fought to guarantee that Britain could sell Afghan opium in China, because that wasn't criminal, it was all perfectly legal. From the British perspective.

    600:

    Martin Scorsese made a recent movie called "Gangs of New York" which was set well before Prohibition.

    601:

    Except for nation-states (can you say "Barbary Coast"?), they weren't national, on the scale that the immense money from Prohibition offered, Hell, the Mafia bought and owned Havana until Castro.

    I had (haven't been able to get him in several years, he may have died) a friend, superannuated actual outlaw biker, not Hell's Angels, one of the other big clubs though, and he told me until the eighties, the big thing for clubs was rides, drinking, and having fun (for their values of "fun"), Then, in the eighties, came the War on (Some) Drugs, and suddenly it was about smuggling, and big bucks, and in the last 10 years, he'd complain it was never the same after that.

    602:

    Martin Scorsese made a recent movie called "Gangs of New York" which was set well before Prohibition.

    But that wasn't about crime. It was about politics.

    Right?

    And my city's namesake, Sir Walter. He wasn't a pirate. Right?

    603:

    I'd be interested in learning more about this. I'm in California - is it geographically limited? (If you want to message me privately, I'm (my user name here) @ gmail.com.

    604:

    Telemachus Sneezed is what Atlas Shrugged was called in the Illuminatus Trilogy.

    605:

    La Cosa Nostra, Yakuza, Triads, Pirates, Corsairs, Buccaneers

    ... the British government, the French government, the East India Company... I'm sure there were other criminal organisations much bigger than (most) pirates

    606:

    But I never said that. You want me to have said that though, for reasons only you know. This is how people are behaving right where I live and all through the country right now -- this last weekend was a reign of terror in some places even. Here the National Guard had to break it up. You want to read my and my neighborhood's anger and resentment against these yahoo as puritanism -- we, who have kept our neighborhood liquor stores in business this whole time -- go ahead, but that's neither a correct reading nor an intelligent one. You all are having a problem here that is your choice to have.

    Also there was organized crime in New York at least long before prohibition. Even the Cosa Nostra was here in the 19th C. There are interesting books that write about it and how stopping it was part of reforming and revamping the police in New York. Not to mention Theodore Roosevelt's part in this.

    Though what was going on was very small compared to what Prohibition let loos, which was huge and has never gone away.

    Gangs of New York isn't a recent film -- it's from 2002, 18 years ago -- one of my favorite all around films, btw. It is about crime and criminals, and rival criminals, who run everything from setting fires and extorting money to put them out, to petty thievery and far worse. It's also about class and racism -- set in the Civil War era, concluding with the great NY Draft Riot in which many people of color, and an entire orphanage of black kids were killed. It's pretty terrific, and brilliant addition to Scorsese's filmic history of NYC.

    607:

    That's not how it read to me. Sounded more like she was pissed with assholes who come into her neighbourhood and get obnoxiously drunk outside her apartment.

    608:

    Re: 'I just signed up to be a part of a phase 3 trial of a Covid-19 vaccine.' [Incentive]

    Good luck & hope the vaccine works!

    Not all clinical trials offer patient incentives but it seems to be becoming somewhat more common. The argument for incentives is that it helps defray costs that the patient/subject might incur in order to participate according to the trial schedule, i.e., travel, parking, meals, etc.

    However some medical professionals and ethicists dislike any form of patient incentive because patients in need of money might choose to continue on a therapy/drug just for the money: If they hadn't been offered any money, they might have dropped out.

    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1747016119898669

    Research Ethics

    'What do patients value as incentives for participation in clinical trials? A pilot discrete choice experiment' (Jan 21 2020)

    Truly hope this goes well for you and everyone involved, just keep in mind that this is also about your own personal health.

    609:

    In this thread:

    AI space lobster warns not to access YouTube videos due to unspecified cognitohazards potentially hacking brain, provides link to YouTube videos.

    610:

    As for prohibition of alcohol and various drugs...

    Where to begin? I don't think any country has clean hands in this.

    One part of the problem in Christian culture countries and elsewhere is that people get inculcated into binary logic and decision making at a very early age. Good versus evil. White versus black. Man or woman, ad nauseum. It's a quick way to make decisions, and it gets extra credit from people working in digital computers that are structured around base 2 math.

    But reality isn't binary. Reality's generally analog above the quantum level. It can be symbolically represented to some level of accuracy using digital systems, but the signals tend to be analog. Getting back to the original topic: Let me pose a question: If you had to categorize the color red, where does it fit better: black or white? If you're like most normal people, you chewed on that one for awhile, maybe even came up with a reason. Thing is, it's a bullshit question, because what makes something red has nothing to do with black or white. Because you had a normal education, you got very good at trying to answer such questions, even when they make absolutely no sense. The proper answer is that red is neither black, nor is it white.

    Getting to the problems with alcohol and numerous other drugs, the endless, stupid argument is either legalize or outlaw. That doesn't cover the diversity of experiences with use of substances. Some people do indeed need help to avoid them. Some people are indeed helped by them. But a thoughtful approach is neither black nor white, and it doesn't lend itself to the simple kind of approaches that win mass support.

    The problem doesn't stop there, of course. I do wish I'd been given a euro for every false dichotomy that's appeared on this blog since I started here. Any statement that has some version of "if it's not X then it has to be opposite of X" really has to be checked against reality, rather than accepted uncritically. But of course, that's not fun, which is why I'd rather get a euro for each of these.

    And I'd like 10 quid from everyone who thinks that Puritans are into banning alcohol like they were observant Muslims or Mormons. I mean, sheesh, even the Mormons are sly enough to thoroughly enjoy chocolate, even though they know perfectly well how similar theobromine and the caffeine they're forbidden to drink are...

    611:

    I'd be interested in learning more about this. I'm in California - is it geographically limited?

    There are a LOT of companies trying to get ready for Phase 3 testing. So it's likely that their are some collecting people near you. The one I hooked up with is called "Wake Research" and Wake is the county I live in so local it is. But I suspect they and all the other testing plans are all over the country.

    Saw a bland notice on nextdoor.com and filled out a simple form then got an email then a call back. They seem to be screening out people with various conditions at this point. Diebetees, kidney issues, imunosurpressive issues, etc... They want to know all the drugs you take. I suspect they are looking at actually giving up the vaccine in late August or maybe September AT THE EARLIEST based on us getting physicals in August.

    Since each trial needs 10K to 30K people and they want a broad variety of bodies, life situations, and such they are all likely recruiting all over. And most are planning to also do trials in non "first world" countries as that's were things are spreading fastest.

    Check out nextdoor.com, your local paper, Facebook (I know), and anything else. Google might even find some.

    612:

    He also stated that he had visited his son (who lives in IL?) and his son's room-mate had contracted COVD19 (somehow?) and he was really annoyed at this but he had never left AMURICA.

    Let's see. 2 errors up front which makes everything else nonsense.

    Now moving on.

    613:

    "Then we'll do a track, find your funding, hit a mask-back into who is your patron, "

    That would be great - let me know who runs the agent beneath my Greg Feely-esque para-personality. Money's a bit tight at the moment.

    I suspect I'm due several decades of back pay, and might be able to submit some expenses claims if that's the case.

    614:

    Good luck & hope the vaccine works!

    I realize there's also somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of us who will likely get a placebo.

    As to the incentive. I had no idea till after I had agreed. I was willing to do it anyway. Even though I know if it works some folks in this particular food chain will walk off will pockets full of gold.

    Money wise, it doesn't matter to my net. We're sitting reasonably for income and assets and own 1/3 of a $mil of dirt give or take free and clear. And as I told my wife, if real estate goes up ours will likely go up more than average and if it goes down less than average.

    615:

    "And I'd like 10 quid from everyone who thinks that Puritans are into banning alcohol like they were observant Muslims or Mormons."

    AIUI, the Puritans were, by and large, drunkards, gamblers, wenchers and adulterers (and sometimes actual rapists). There would of course be exceptions.

    But they were very proud that their theology was pure, unpolluted by Romish heresy and the like. That's what made them Puritans.

    JHomes.
    616:

    If anyone cares. My son has never been east of Berlin or west of Thailand. He has never had Covid-19. Neither has his roommate. And I've never said otherwise.

    So stick it where .....

    Actually I'm starting to feel sad for you. Your rants are so far off base that they are making you look insane. Literally. I hope you're not and that posting your nonsense here is what you do for therapy. But more and more ....

    617:

    Impressive. My Trump loving relatives aren't so vile.

    Oh well.

    618:

    You replied to the wrong commenter re: YT.

    Meanwhile ...

    As a general FYI, there are 1,621 COVID-19 Studies from the World Health Organization Database shown here:

    https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/who_table

    And another separate batch of 2,427 studies found for COVID-19 here:

    https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=COVID-19

    And these are the 54 Federally funded COVID-19 clinical studies:

    https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=COVID-19&fund=0&fund=1

    Wondering how you were able to search all of them so fast.

    Looked up Wake Research: their client list includes a cross-section of big thru small pharma cos. Unless you have legit, specific and verifiable info that proves otherwise, suggest you desist.

    619:

    Stop right fucking there. I want you to have said that?

    You can step right out. I don't care how you feel about it, I'm telling YOU how I, and apparently Greg, read what YOU posted. You're not fucking Humpty Dumpty, where the words mean only what was in your head, and everyone else will read it that way. I'm telling you that you FAILED TO COMMUNICATE well, and whatever you thought you were saying, that's not how others read it.

    You have ZERO right to decide that I have a problem, nor do you have any right to diss how I respond to what you say. You've got the wrong fucking person to pull that on.

    620:

    Given that this thread is recently about 2/3 Seagull, probably best to use a comment blocker and get on with life.

    621:

    AIUI, the Puritans were, by and large, drunkards, gamblers, wenchers and adulterers (and sometimes actual rapists). There would of course be exceptions. But they were very proud that their theology was pure, unpolluted by Romish heresy and the like. That's what made them Puritans.

    Yup. Very 'Murrican, that.

    That's why I object to clean-living types being called Puritans. If you object to clean-livers, there are much more original ways to lampoon such practices. Eating corn flakes ironically, for example.

    622:

    Which, if I put it in quotes, gets nothing, without, a lot of church references.

    623:

    probably best to use a comment blocker and get on with life.

    It was sort of fun at first. In a perverse way. Now just sad. Just now I even went back and re-read what I wrote just to make sure I didn't say something that might lead to this. Nope.

    Yeah, I'm done. I have work to do.

    624:

    "...probably best to use a comment blocker and get on with life."

    That's what I do.

    625:

    ET!HK: I do not Know why you did that, or rather why to that extent. Thanks for the Propaganda "The Murder of Love" video link; new to me and it should not have been. Still looking at/digging from the first few comments tonight.

    626:

    One part of the problem in Christian culture countries and elsewhere is that people get inculcated into binary logic and decision making at a very early age..

    I don't think it's a Christian/Western thing at all.

    I think it's a universal human mistake, a result of how our minds work. We simplify things. It's as natural to us as breathing. And so we often over-simplify and get things wrong, but them's the evolutionary breaks with a strategy that often works and gets things right.

    Our 2-value logic was formalized to Aristotle's Syllogisms. Which was taught in schools until the early 20th century.

    India had a 2-value logic which was more commonly used in ancient and medieval India - and which De Morgan and Boole were both aware of. I'm told it was broadley similar to Syllogistic Logic.

    Chinese and Japanese traditional disputes were likewise binary, or at least my friends studying their historic approach to logic claimed so. Though I think they lacked the sort of 'formal' 2-valued logical system that Aristotle or the Hindus developed.

    There were historic exceptions to the 2-valued logic approaches. Medieval Europeans had a modal logic that one of the professors in my Logic programme ran graduate courses on. And a colleague was doing her thesis on the Jain 7-valued logic which ancient Hindu philosophers used. I'm sure there are other examples too. But none were in common use, AFAIK. Partly because it's harder to get a useful answer out.

    627:

    I was scrolling down to enter a (hopefully) thoughtful comment on the pubs opening up around here etc. etc.

    But I see that OGH has likely gone to bed and the thread has become a toxic cesspool of monomaniacal spam posting, so maybe another time.

    628:

    Posted according to the in-line clock today - 7/7/2020 597, 602, 604, 605, 608, 609, 613, 612, 613, 614, 615, 617, 619, 622, 623, 624, 626, 627, 628, 631, 634, 636, 637, 639, 640, 643, 644, 645, 647, 648, 650, 653, 655, 656, 657, 658, Moderators? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    David L @ 638 Yes, she is quite mad & is to be pitied, but we should not have to endure this ... I thought there was a limit on a number of posts per day? Moderators?

    Rocketjps Most pubs round here are opne, they are all being careful - I'm only going into those with outdoor space to drink in.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I have just noted the date ... 15 years to the day that The Boss walked over a railway footbridge, turned left, saw a bright orange FLASH, followed by the pressure-wave ... Lest we Forget What momomania & extremism can produce

    629:

    Any statement that has some version of "if it's not X then it has to be opposite of X" really has to be checked against reality

    I'd just like to take a moment to emphasise this remark, which cuts to the core of a bunch of things that get me quite upset about how daft people seem to be at times. Thanks for making it. The world is not Manichean, but some people have a Manichean world in their heads.

    630:

    The entire album, "A Secret Wish", is worth checking out.

    Note that there are two versions. The LP came out some time before the CD and the interval was used to alter the mix. They say that the LP mix was done in a rush or something and the CD mix was how it was intended to be and is a lot better. I think it's a lot worse and they'd have done better to leave it as it was. So YMMV.

    It's also not a good idea to play it very often, for the same kind of reason that similar advice applies to certain drugs.

    631:

    Well, Victoria is back into lock down, 191 cases today...

    SotMN gets less rational the more it is ignored, I've been using "Blog Comment Killfile" on Firefox for a long time, but this particular nym-shifting idiot seems to really have no other outlet. I realise that OGH considers its behaviour tolerable, but it's no longer amusing seeing the density of "Comment by blocked." lines increasing.

    632:

    Victoria is back into lock down, 191 cases today...

    Didn't they already jail the povos last week? Sorry, "use police to prevent people in some public housing tower blocks from leaving their apartments". As one resident therin said, there are more cases in one of the wealthy suburbs but there's no police-enforced 24 hour curfew over there. The trouble with that sort of "die in place" programme is that people now have to find new cleaners, dog walkers, checkout staff etc, because even if their help are still alive they can't get out to do their jobs.

    It's very short-sighted of the Premier, and dashed inconvenient. Charles tells me he had to drive past two closed valet services before he found someone to properly clean my Bentley. Thank goodness for live-ins, I don't know what I'd do without them.

    633:

    I think it's a universal human mistake, a result of how our minds work.

    I think that is a large call and it isn't one you can really hold without reference to ethnography as well as history. Though you need to agree on what this "mistake" is beforehand and I think that it isn't itself a binary thing. We characterised Structuralism by its overarching tendency to reduce real world observations to a geometry of binary continua. Arguably things really are so reducible, so long as you identify the "right" continua. So for example we know that MBTI is essentially no different to astrology, whereas we think the Big 5 might be more valid based on their alignment to things we have actually observed, and then when we've incorporated them into hypotheses and tested them they have been essentially consistent with what we've observed as a result. Continua are different to what we sometimes mean by "binary" of course, but that's an angle to the question.

    I think the straw man we have most of the craziness around is the left-right continuum. I don't know about you, but when I want to talk about giving resources to poor people, making healthcare and education more accessible and treating financial success as something other than a kind of moral value, and there are people who want to say that these perspectives make me like Stalin in a way that they are not simply because of these things, I think there is something wrong with the way that sort of classification works. I think many, and perhaps most "right" leaning thinkers are quite a lot more like Stalin than I am. There's an extent to which the Political Compass two dimensional continua address this, but you'll find the arseholes won't play in that space, insisting that left and authoritarian are the same thing. Hence the complain about Manicheanism, though there is a stronger complaint about comprehension with people like that.

    634:

    And speaking of beneficiaries who are a blight on the public purse:

    On television on the evening of July 5 2020 we saw social capital being accumulated: ordinary Melburnians bringing carloads of food and other essentials for the 3,000 people locked down in the residential tower blocks of Flemington and Kensington.

    On television that same morning, we had seen social capital being destroyed: Senator Pauline Hanson delivering a divisive and ignorant rant, with racist overtones, excoriating those same 3,000 people. They couldn’t speak English, said Hanson. They were drug addicts who were now having their habits fed at public expense.

    D'ya think if we rana GoFundMe cmpaign to buy her a fish'n'chip shop she'd go back there and stay there?

    635:

    craziness around is the left-right continuum.

    There was an article in some left wing nonsense-peddlar the other day suggesting that the English population especially has stopped breaking on left-right and there's no real single axis any more. Sure, there's socially conservative + economically liberal types as well as the socially liberal + poltically left and all the other "look, more than one axis" breakdowns, but no single subgroup is big enough to form a majority and while the UK isn't strictly a two party system, they still struggle to build governing coalitions even with other English parties.

    The English parliament have a problem because of all the foreign MPs, who are difficult or impossible to accommodate and not all as obliging as Sinn Féin who refuse to sit and thus don't affect the numbers required for a majority on the floor of the house. The Conservatives are currently struggling a little with the (Northern) Irish, but nothing like the struggle within Labour to keep anyone from even suggesting they work with the SDP. Albeit the primary goal of British Labour seems to be preventing a left-wing government happening in the UK.

    In Australia we see that mainly in first preferences going to "minor" parties*, and in countries with proportional representation those votes often elect small numbers of MPs (when not prevented by anti-democratic measures, like the 5% threshold in Aotearoa).

    Quite how anyone can pretend that politics happens along a left-right axis when you have parties in parliament who primarily or exclusively focus on things like the environment, nuclear weapons, keeping foreigners* out, getting the coal out*, stopping animal cruelty, obeying God**. It's a big mess, especially if your hammer is "Communist or Capitalist" .

    • the definition of "minor" is local, because the National Party are agreed to be a Major Party despite getting 5-15% of the vote, and thus The Greens are also a Major Party since they regularly beat the Nationals, and at times so do other "fringe" or "niche" parties (who don't count because of those labels). * again, the local definition of "foreigner" is eccentric, loosely meaning someone who is a member of an identifiable ethnic group who only became noticeable in the immigration stats in the last 20 years. Italians used to be "nasty wogs who must be kept out" but are now Proper Australians who must be defended from the attacking hordes of (looks it up) Sudanese. Pauline Hanson's One Nation was most definitely not the first of these and is unlikely to be the last * subtly different to immigrants in that we sell the coal but not the immigrants not any more, anyway. weirdly even though one huge problem is live exports to Muslim countries the xenophobes have decided they support the farmers doing the exporting not the people trying to stop the Muslims torturing our livestock * so far only the Protestant or Catholic one, not the Jewish or Islamic* one let alone one of the really weird (non-Abrahamic) ones ** we have MPs of a wide range of faiths, but not so far as I know representing parties primarily focussed on expressing that faith. Viz, no branch of Likud or Crescent Star Party.
    636:

    "Let me pose a question: If you had to categorize the color red, where does it fit better: black or white? ... The proper answer is that red is neither black, nor is it white."

    Cough Cough, BZZZT, Pingggg, Ahem, and other such noises.

    "Thing is, it's a bullshit question, because what makes something red has nothing to do with black or white."

    It's a bullshit answer, because the question is quite specific that it requires a one-bit answer. "Neither" is not a proper answer: it is specifically disallowed, nor is there even a way to represent it in the context.

    What does make it a dodgy question is that it is too unspecific on other points. It does not define the criteria for assessing the degree of correspondence between different categories, by which one correspondence may be said to be "better" than another. It doesn't define the categories either - "logic high" has a hard definition, which you can look up in the datasheets, but "black" does not, and if you try to come up with one that both makes sense and does not have obvious counterexamples you very rapidly get tied in knots.

    It's entirely possible to answer the question if you do have proper definitions. A well-defined question of the same form might be more like "is the DC voltage on test point 3a closer to 0V or 5V". (The probability of it being exactly 2.5V is zero, so that problem never actually arises.) You may well have difficulty answering because of the limitations of your measuring equipment, but that's not a problem with the logic of the question, it's a problem of capturing the data, which is not the same thing.

    Your question is difficult to answer because the vague and incomplete definitions which people find completely adequate for everyday purposes usually are not complete or definite enough to cover that particular use. So they find themselves having to construct something to fill the holes, on the fly and more or less from scratch, and it is not generally a simple task. But if you do have a complete enough set of definitions it's readily answerable. I have had to answer it myself, in real situations, and it was not a source of knottage, because the nature of those situations constrained the categories enough that the answer could be looked up, calculated, or determined by experiment.

    The deeper problem is that people want to use the same set of definitions to answer the question regardless of the situation, when it is not generally the case that universally-applicable definitions do or even can exist. Indeed, they may definitely not exist. The situations in which I have encountered your question provide an example: the correct answer for some of them is not the same as the correct answer for others.

    I don't see what this has to do with Christianity, other than that one might regard a religion as an attempt to provide a set of universally-applicable definitions, but that doesn't make it a cause of the tendency, just an example. (But see also my comment recently that when Americans use the word "Christian" I don't really know what they mean because they seem to be using a definition that has very little overlap with what I'm used to. Definitions again.) It's just the standard way any sentient being deals with a situation which while it may be novel is still obviously related to what they're familiar with: they try and process it in terms of what they already know. So cats know that it's fun to catch moths and flies and other airborne insects, so the first time they encounter a bee they react in the same way - and learn that you don't touch the yellow and black ones. They then apply that extended body of knowledge on their first encounter with a hoverfly, which of course is why hoverflies look like that in the first place.

    Humans are just doing the same thing only on a larger and more complex scale, that includes factors like being able to share definitions with each other by communication and finding things easier if everyone is using the same ones. So if one person encounters a bee they can tell everyone else not to touch the yellow and black ones, and this sort of thing is rather useful a lot more often than not.

    637:

    I was advised to read Atlas Shrugged to understand how 'their' minds worked - she was a terrible writer, true, but a better writer than philosopher (or even realist).

    638:

    "And my city's namesake, Sir Walter. He wasn't a pirate. Right?"

    Theft, atrocities and piracy are a bit like treason - if they prosper, they are reclassified.

    639:

    Ah, I see the Seagull has your attention again, Greg. You may wish to disengage now before you respond further.

    640:

    It is a perfectly reasonable question if you are interested in studying visual perception or semantics, though I agree it should be more precise, but I don't see any other use for such a question.

    His main point stands, though it is both tribalism and forcing things into discrete categories - as someone who has always thought in terms of distributions and probabilities, I have beaten my head against that all my life. But the tribalism matters here, because simple artificial categorisation doesn't lead to the good versus evil dogma.

    641:

    I've been given to wonder which of Atlas Shrugged and 50 Shades of Grey contains the worse writing, but I'm undermotivated to read either.

    642:

    I have concluded that bad writing is like politics, in that you need a multi dimensional classification.

    644:

    Yes. I did have a lot more of that post which went on about what happens when the tribe who won't eat the mushrooms that make an extra leg grow out of your belly button, because a thousand years ago the now-extinct predators that ate three-legged swamp camels would mistake you for their usual prey, meet the tribe from another island, where there never were any swamps or camels or predators, who eat the mushrooms all the time and they all have an extra belly button leg. But I deleted it because I was losing my thread and rambling too much without making the point :)

    645:

    627: Posted according to the in-line clock today - 7/7/2020 597, 602, 604, 605, 608, 609, 613, 612, 613, 614, 615, 617, 619, 622, 623, 624, 626, 627, 628, 631, 634, 636, 637, 639, 640, 643, 644, 645, 647, 648, 650, 653, 655, 656, 657, 658, Moderators?

    Looks like a lot of posts disappeared, both from and to the Seagull.

    646:

    I promised a friend that I'd read Atlas Shrugged. I think he thought it might cure my empathy. I really really tried to read it, but I gave up at about half distance. It really is the worst thing I've ever read. Vastly less interesting than anything I've ever cast my eye over. Actively repellent. I've read log tables when there was nothing else, and quite enjoyed them. AS is... Words fail me. Just so so so bad. The characters are cardboard cutouts. The dialog is excruciating. The plot is as unbelievable as the dialog. The exposition is, clumsy isn't the word. Deranged? But not in a good way. My eyes felt dirty.

    I've flicked through 50 shades and found it hilarious. So bad it's funny. You could make a parlor game of reading excerpts.

    647:

    That book was amusingly referred to Monday and today in the "Girls With Slingshots" rerun. https://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-chaser-1390

    648:

    You have to remember that there are two kinds of Libertarians: Those who don't know that Heinlein was writing fiction, and those who don't know that Ayn Rand was writing fiction.

    649:

    Moz Private Eye take on that: 1: I'm working class, I can't work from home 2: I'm middle class, I can easily work from home 3: I'm upper class, other people work in my home .....

    Nojay @ 638 Judging by the comment-numbering, her comments have been evaporated.

    Pigeon Ah yes, geared locomotives .....

    650:

    No, it's a bullshit question, and it's worth understanding the difference. The bullshit, in this case, arises from me trying to force you to evaluate something on an improper scale. Adding more details to this particular bullshit premise will not stop it from being, fundamentally, bullshit.

    So instead of asking "is red better categorized as white or black," let's try something questions like:

    --Is race a good predictor of intelligence? --Is whether a person is religious or an atheist a good predictor of their intelligence? --Is race a good predictor of moral character? --Is whether a person is religious or an atheist a good predictor of their moral character? --Is whether a person is religious or an atheist a good predictor of their skill at curbing drug abuse in a particular susceptible population?

    And for those who aren't American, race is generally seen as a "black or white" question, even though most races are neither, and race is a social construct in any case.

    At this point, I'll just sit back and watch people say that, if I just asked the questions properly, they wouldn't be total bullshit.

    651:

    H Your second question seems to have a statistically significant answer - over large numbers, it seems that atheists have a proportionately higher set of educational qualifications .... Only the religious ( Especially those with an actual "god" ) seem to be able to do really horrible things for a supposed higher ideal & that individual people's sufferings do not matter. Based on historical evidence at any rate. For the latter, note that there are several christian "saints" who cheerfully caused suffering & death - & they are still "on the books" as saints. Um.

    652:

    Check out this ad by The Lincoln project (a group of anti-Trump Republicans)

    653:

    Err, thats "Brauerei Pinkus", sorry to say.

    Actually, AFAIR I got Charlie and Feorag a few bottles of Pinkus when they visited DortCon. Tell me when you're near, they have a nice store in town, I might pass some on; BoardGameGeek has GeekMail (you need to register), setting up a burner mail adress would be too much work.

    Funny thing, quite a few local historians have a problem explaining the name "Pinkus", they try to relate it to "pinkeln" (to pee), but "Pinkus" is also a variant of "Pinchas", a common Jewish name. The brewery is in the Kuhviertel ("cow quarter"), one of the areas where Masematte, a jargon heavily drawing on Jiddish (and Romani/Sintitikes, and Westphalian Low German, and...) was spoken, but I couldn't find any other connections.

    As for Masematte, quite a few street names derive from it, and somehow the term "Chaloschickse" stuck in my head, it means "farmer woman". I guess "chalo" derives from "gadjo", though I'd have to look it up, and "Schickse", err, I guess anybody who saw "The Nanny" knows what a "shiksa" is... ;)

    654:

    Err, please note I usually don't drink any alcohol, which includes beer, but I make an exception from time to time for about 5 ml of good wine or beer. ;)

    655:

    In other news, my cohabitant said I should move out, I'm too noisy, and my room looks like a bad storehouse.

    Funny thing, nobody complained when I was in the appartment all day, apparantly it only started when I got a new job with a deliverer to laboratories; I'm away for about 10 hours, and I don't do much after that; oh, and st about the same time she got the cats and already thinks about giving them away because she's overworked.

    And I take objections to the "bad" in "bad storehouse". ;)

    I don't care moving out, in my experience "I'm just honest" means "I'm rude and just tell what my reptile brain comes up with, without thinking why I react that way". Oh, and "I can't speak reasonable with you" means "You have the better arguments and are more intelligent, and I can't browbeat you with being busy and working".

    She complained about me not cleaning up, I proposed a cleaning plan, she said she couldn't keep it. Let's just say I have enough experience with attentionally challenged hyperactives masquerading as workaholics (myself included) to see her bluff.

    Time to move on.

    656:

    Re: headline It isn't This open development is very disturbing Is it just hot air, or are these people like the S in the years before 1861, who bullied & used monstrous force & got away with it & convinced themselves that secession was a "good" idea. Puffed-up with their own importance.

    Trottelreiner Ah, typos R us - again! If all goes well, I'll be in Bevergern & area in July or August next year. I've been to the Pinkus main outlet by Rosenplatz

    657:

    @557: Swabian, was the cultural background. The Swabiche in Baden-Wuerttemberg, being neighbors to the Bayeriche, have picked up a number of their cultural attributes, including the wearing of the lederhosen and dirndl; Stuttgart hosts a very nice version of Oktoberfest, called locally Volksfest, each September at the city fairgrounds. It's less crowded, less rowdy and less expensive than Oktoberfest, to boot.

    658:

    And, just to add to the fun, my SO, on one side, is very distantly related to John Alden (one of those from the Mayflower)... and she says that the first shipload of Pilgrims got along fine with the Native Americans. Now, the second shipload were the ones who attacked them....

    659:

    Me @656: I didn't spend much time in Bavaria, but if it's like Baden-Wuerttemberg, folks only wear the lederhosen and dirndls during Fests, or if they're in the tourist trade.

    660:

    Never heard of the 7-value logic. Now the modal, according to a glance at wikipedia, uses "necessarily" and "probably".

    Which suggests to me that if I decided we necessarily need interstellar travel, then an FTL drive exists....

    662:

    Sorry, 15 years ago today? Flash?

    663:

    Swabian is quite distinct from Bavarian, the language is quite close to Swiss German.

    "Dirndl" is related to "dirn", an old term for a young girl; in most other German dialects, the term "dirne" means a female prostitute.

    Wiki says the "Dirndl" only developed in the 19th century; as Charlie noted, Bavarian culture is quite distinct from the rest of Germany, but since their brand of "traditional" is quite visible, you can find "traditional" Octoberfest reenactments everywhere. There is even one in Münster, I try to keep clear of it, maybe next time I'll talk to one of those guys in Westphalian Low German and invite him to Vesakh or Şeker Bayramı.

    Leather trousers are typical worker's clothing, so they are not that uncommon in "traditional" dresses (which may only stem from the 19th century, see above); Bavarian "lederhosen" have been used outside of Bavaria since at least the Weimar days; err, there is even a photo of me in one of those from back when I was about 8, come to think; old shame.

    As mentioned, BGG has GeekMail, you might need to register. Alternatively, I might put up a new gmail account or like, though as you might see from my last message, it might take some time.

    Err, going to bed, I need about 8 hours of sleep and 2 hours to really wake up...

    664:

    Your cmt, and the cmt it's replying to, has Inspired me, for a program at the next con.

    Perhaps you've heard of readings of Eye of Argon, which go on until enough money has been donated that they STOP!

    I think we should do that with Rand. Atlas Shrugged may be too long, unless we produce a Cliff's Notes version, with "60 page speech elided" to start....

    665:

    Err, come on, you see how I buther the English language. ;)

    The outlet at Rosenplatz was the one I was thinking about, there is a bookshop called "Medium" near, they have quite a few nice offers.

    666:

    ROTFLMAO!!!

    I posted it to facepalm. Well, I posted a workaround to facepalm, because anything from that domain, apparently, "violates community standards".

    But staring at the background... AGHGHGH!

    667:

    @662: Swabian is quite distinct from Bavarian, the language is quite close to Swiss German.

    Swabian is also my least favorite German dialect; it grates on my ear. The way they swallow their pronunciation reminds me of the Alabama accent around Montgomery - it's like they all left their dentures out.

    Although I only studied Hochdeutsch in school, I got by with the Bavarian dialect. Swabian just confounds me.

    668:

    That's what I meant about the wires showing. It's like an ancient puppet show in the town square, that the local noble paid for, where you see the strings. Or, what I've always thought - have you ever seen the old Republic serials, where the wires holding the spaceships occasionally show? The wires on her strawmen always show.

    And for the what, 60+ page speech by Galt: as Samual Goldwin allegedly said, "If you've got a message, send it Western Union", except, of course, she'd have been bankrupt to afford to send that crap.

    669:

    Its relationship to formal mathematics is interesting, because an assertion can be true, false or unprovable / orthogonal.

    670:

    As for the details in the bloody mess that is history...

    Interesting tidbit, the original "Prussians" spoke no Germanic language but a Baltic language related to Lithuanian and Latvian, quite closely related to Slavic languages.

    I might ask some of my historical linguist friends how related, till then, the usual strange attractor discussion about religion made me look up Agnosticism (my stance), and I found this:

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

    Hm, my Sanskrit is a little rusty, and actually it's Vedic, not Sanskrit. Err, did I mention the story of Rensch, a local biologist, who put up "tat tvam asi" above the chimp enclosure. ;)

    671:

    Swabian

    We're past the edge of my knowledge. I THINK my mother in law considered herself Swabian but you're really have to get my wife into this conversation. We do have a coffee table book on the topic that I think came from my MIL.

    MIL born in southern Germany in 1928 and grew up there and didn't leave till she married in the mid 50s. My wife spend her later teens and early 20s in the area due to her father being Colonel at 5th and 7th Corp then later staying for a bit.

    Anyway my daughter spend a year in Germany and the two of them know much more about the culture than me. I got to skim the surface of the area in Dec 2018 for a couple of weeks visiting friends and distant family.

    673:

    Although I only studied Hochdeutsch in school, I got by with the Bavarian dialect. Swabian just confounds me.

    Supposedly my MIL could move between all 3 but I was clueless. I've had enough issues with my native Merican English that I can't deal with dialects in other languages of which I only know a few words.

    674:

    pdpb @ 575: Doesn't that also imply that states can legislate the result they want ahead of the election and the federal government can't make them be democratic?

    No. It just means that states with "winner takes all" laws that also have laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate to which they are pledged can remove "faithless" electors and replace them with compliant electors.

    It only applies in the 32 states plus DC that do have laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate for which they were pledged. In the other 18 states electors are still free to "vote their conscience".

    675:

    I've been given to wonder which of Atlas Shrugged and 50 Shades of Grey contains the worse writing, but I'm undermotivated to read either.

    In the US a few years ago "Atlas Shrugged" was made into a 3 movie series. My wife and I know people who think the books are pure genius and highly recommended the movies. So when they made it to one of the streaming services my wife and I forced ourselves to watch all 3. We both agreed it was utter nonsense.

    676:

    Ok, last one for today.

    Baden-Würtemberg is trying to promote itself.

    Slogan: Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch.

    Translation: "We can everything. Except High German."

    Let's just say when working in a call center, we thought Swabian and Bavarian should be classed as "foreign language skills" and paid accordingly.

    There is a funny dub of A New Hope in Swabian.

    677:

    Well, there is the Catuskoti logic of Buddhism: things can be true, false, neither true nor false, or both true and false. That's fairly well known.

    While I agree that binary logic is widespread and also simple to learn, that doesn't excuse the fundamental bullshit of trying to rank something on an inappropriate, two-value scale.

    678:

    Me @656: I didn't spend much time in Bavaria, but if it's like Baden-Wuerttemberg, folks only wear the lederhosen and dirndls during Fests, or if they're in the tourist trade.

    In Munich, most of the bierhall waitresses wear dirndls; I also noted extremely fancy versions in the windows of dress shops as a regional alternative to the boringly-universalized white wedding gown. Similarly, here in Scotland formal kilt outfits are an alternative to tuxedo or morning suit as a wedding/formalwear outfit for men -- only more expensive. I suspect "fancy version of historical national costume is an option for formalwear" is pretty much universal.

    679:

    David L @ 601: And my city's namesake, Sir Walter. He wasn't a pirate. Right?

    Not a particularly successful one. If he'd actually found El Dorado maybe James 1 wouldn't have had him executed to please the Spanish Ambassador.

    680:

    Robert Prior @ 619: Given that this thread is recently about 2/3 Seagull, probably best to use a comment blocker and get on with life.

    I dunno. I do use the comment blocker & unless she(?) has a new alias I haven't recognized she hasn't been around that much in this thread. And given how distinct her(?) style is I don't think she(?) does have a new alias ... yet.

    681:

    Autarch/whitroth Yes. The first bomb. The train with the bomber on it was in front of her as she approached the platform & stairs ... it's doors closed as she was about to go over the footbridge to the "inner rail" (anti-clockwise) of the Circle/Met line. As she turned left & went down one step, she saw the flash of the bomb detonating in the train that had just left - incidentally stalling the oncoming train coming towards her. Quite close enough for comfort, thamk you. I note the excuse given in the wiki article for a supposed "electrical" explosion, but IMHO that's an ex post facto cover-up for a lie. Because we spoke by phone & I asked her "What colour was the flash?" & she replied "Bright Orange" - to which my response was: "Explosives, must have been a bomb, probably Nitrates"

    682:

    grs1961 @ 630: Well, Victoria is back into lock down, 191 cases today...

    SotMN gets less rational the more it is ignored, I've been using "Blog Comment Killfile" on Firefox for a long time, but this particular nym-shifting idiot seems to really have no other outlet. I realise that OGH considers its behaviour tolerable, but it's no longer amusing seeing the density of "Comment by blocked." lines increasing.

    Funny thing that ... I haven't seen as many of those in this thread as I usually do. Maybe there's a new alias I haven't recognized, but the style IS distinctive, and I don't think it would take many posts for me to recognize it.

    683:

    Robert Prior @ 644: 627:
    Posted according to the in-line clock today - 7/7/2020
    597, 602, 604, 605, 608, 609, 613, 612, 613, 614, 615, 617, 619, 622, 623, 624, 626, 627, 628, 631, 634, 636, 637, 639, 640, 643, 644, 645, 647, 648, 650, 653, 655, 656, 657, 658,
    Moderators?

    Looks like a lot of posts disappeared, both from and to the Seagull.

    Aah. That might explain. I had to take a couple of days off to do some work that mostly kept me away from the computer, so I didn't see the exchanges before they were removed.

    684:

    In my teen years I spent some time in 'Army Cadets' and went to summer camps. On Sundays we were dutifully sorted to attend mandatory church sessions.

    Catholic or Protestant were the two choices. One of my closest friends was a Buddhist whose family had recently immigrated from Hong Kong. 'So, Protestant then' was the response of our CO.

    Presumably things have improved, but binary choices are still for the infantile. One of the many reasons referenda are colossally stupid as an approach to governance.

    685:

    @675: Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch.

    Yeah, that was already in use before we left Stuttgart in late 2017. And they say Germans don't have a sense of humor . . .

    686:

    Taking it in another direction, once upon a time I was staying at an apartment in Swabia. My line of work includes sometimes getting construction materials delivered by a big lorry and unloaded by crane by a bloke in a hi-viz jacket. So when a big lorry pulled up opposite, I was curious as to how this ritual might be different in a foreign land. So the blöke climbs out of the cab wearing his hi-viz lederhosen...

    687:

    Pubs around her have opened with measures in place. You have to add your name to a contact list, presumably in case of outbreak so they can track you down.

    Last week a small outbreak happened in a strip club in Vancouver, the contact tracing of which was I'm sure a series of uncomfortable conversations.

    Where I live (Sunshine Coast BC) we haven't had a confirmed case in over 2 months. We are a tourist town so there is a lot of traffic around since the beginning of summer, but so far so good.

    688:

    "The bullshit, in this case, arises from me trying to force you to evaluate something on an improper scale. Adding more details to this particular bullshit premise will not stop it from being, fundamentally, bullshit."

    It's not a bullshit premise. That you are asking it with the intention of tripping people up makes it a trick question, but it isn't inherently that either. It's an entirely reasonable question and it only trips people up because they suddenly realise that the definitions they are used to using every day are not by and large useful for deriving an answer to it, so they have to concoct something from scratch on the spot. If it's asked in a context where suitably precise definitions do exist then it's no harder to answer than anything else.

    I'm now thinking that you're taking the position that it actually cannot ever have any kind of an answer so the fundamental mistake people are making is to try and answer it at all (because you call it a "bullshit premise", and because in the light of that your previous comment "maybe even came up with a reason" now seems to carry an implication that that's an even more ludicrous thing to do than to provide an answer). Now what I think we have here is a case of "hoist with your own petard". It looks to me like your reasoning is that the question is unanswerable according to your own personal definitions of what "red", "white" and "black" mean - and then assuming that those definitions are themselves universally applicable, therefore anyone who does manage to provide an answer must be using definitions which are wrong, or making some similar kind of error.

    If you were asking a similar question that is based on universally applicable definitions (eg. "is the square root of 2 a rational or irrational number") then you would not be able to use it as a trick question. That you can so use it is not because, even though The Definition Of Colour states that such questions are invalid, people have been educated to ignore the invalidity and come up with an answer regardless; nor is it because they don't know that definition and are just trying to do their best. It's because there is no such definition. Your own definition may be such that it has that consequence, but that doesn't mean anyone else's has to. Chances are, indeed, that everyone's is quite a lot different. Even on the level of basic consensus for communication, if you tell people "turn left at the red sign" plenty of them will stare right at it and then go "no, that's not it" and keep straight on, not because they are physiologically colour blind but simply because they don't agree what "red" is.

    "At this point, I'll just sit back and watch people say that, if I just asked the questions properly, they wouldn't be total bullshit."

    They aren't total bullshit at all. They are entirely reasonable questions. To be sure, there is a problem with definitions (the best way to reduce drug abuse is to disband the drug squad, since it is their professional function and they are its principal practitioners) and there is a fucking huge problem with objectivity, but that doesn't mean the questions themselves aren't valid. They are very much the kind of questions that are asked (mutatis mutandis) and scientifically answered in relation to non-human species. There is no scientific reason not to ask them about the human species either. The reasons for not asking them are entirely non-scientific ones to do with the amount of yelling and screaming you have to take just for daring to even consider the idea of asking them. It's kind of ironic that (as far as I am aware) to the extent that they have been asked, the conclusions have been mostly negative, but are also rather less solid than in the case of other species.

    "race is a social construct"

    No. This looks like another of those things like America/Christianity: whatever the people who say it think it means has to be based on some definition of "race" that is so thoroughly different from what I define it as that I have no bleeding clue what they actually do mean. Where I see "social construct" is that some people seem to have come to consider it necessary to say that phrase or something like it every so often to renew their self-advertisement as not-racist; that is also the only meaning I find in it, since taken literally it's as palpably nonsensical as saying that different breeds of dogs are a "social construct".

    For nearly all the history of the human species it has existed in widely separated population groups effectively isolated from each other by distance and other geographical obstacles. So it has a set of distinctive genetic characteristics that vary between the populations of different areas. There is nothing surprising or shameful in that. It's what happens to all species sooner or later if their distribution forms settled and separated populations that don't interbreed. Given enough time the differences get significant enough that biologists call the populations different sub-species, longer still they become different actual species, etc. How they decide what differences count for which level of categorisation is a mystery to me, nor do I know what they call the levels below even sub-species, only that there are some, and as far as I am aware that is the level of differentiation the human species is supposed to be at.

    It's completely daft to allow ideology to supervene over observable fact to the extent of asserting that the human species has somehow magically maintained planet-wide genetic uniformity over periods of hundreds of thousands of years when no other widely-distributed species can manage it. It's also completely daft to assert that the non-uniformity is entirely inside people's heads when the phenotypical differences are obvious enough to be distinguished by species that aren't human at all.

    As far as I am concerned those differences in the genotype of subpopulations that have naturally arisen through time and distance, or their visible phenotypical manifestations, are exactly what "race" means. Therefore when someone says "race is a social construct" I hear "my ideology is driving me to assert that these undeniably objectively real, observable and measurable differences which the human species exhibits just as any other species does are in fact completely made up and only exist in people's heads". It's basically on the same level of rationality as the Daily Mail saying "immigrants give you cancer". If on the other hand people are not talking counterfactual nonsense, then they must be assuming some meaning for "race" which I cannot imagine.

    I know the differences are not permanent and immutable, and interbreeding flattens them out. That doesn't mean they don't exist in the first place, and it hasn't happened yet otherwise the subject wouldn't arise in the first place.

    I know people use it as a reason to be shits. That doesn't mean the differences don't exist, it just means those people are shits. And they're not complaining about the differences which do exist in any case; they're inventing some bollocks of their own which they assert is strongly correlated with the visual differences, and then complaining about their own autogenous bullshit.

    It's absolutely valid to ask whether the characteristic differences include differences beyond the visually obvious ones, whether physical, physiological or mental, and if so what are they. All the evidence we have from the operation of both natural and artificial selection on other species indicates that the chances of the visually apparent differences being the only ones there are are minute. If there are others, the medical profession at least needs to know about them in case they include something important, like relative suisceptibility to some novel virus. If there aren't, there are probably some significant chunks of biology that we need to take a good hard second look at.

    It is not scientific to refuse to investigate such questions in case you find answers that someone doesn't like. Whatever the answers are they do not ever constitute any kind of licence to be a shit to people. In any case, the shits will answer the question in their own terms whether the scientists ask it or not and use made-up science if it suits them, like they do all the time anyway.

    Similarly with the atheist/religious questions. It's completely valid to ask that kind of question too. You're simply asking whether some varieties of intelligence/interest/aptitude for various things tend to occur together with intelligence/interest/aptitude for various other things. People do research into such correlations all the time. There's endless interest in short cuts to try and predict whether people are likely to be good at something or not without them having to actually try it. For sure there's also a lot of balls, but that doesn't mean it's not possible to do good research, and certainly not that the idea of doing any research is invalid.

    The problem with the questions in your list is not that they are bullshit questions; they're perfectly fine. Nor is it the need for some nailing down of definitions and tying up of loose ends before you can start to organise the research properly, nor that the data would be a pain in the arse to collect accurately.

    The problem is that they are the kind of questions to which arseholes like to make up bullshit answers. To debate the validity of the question is to miss the point because rationality doesn't come into it anyway. The arseholes will make up answers not to be correct but to persuade other people (and/or themselves) that being an arsehole is desirable. If rationality makes any kind of appearance it will be in the form of some external counterargument which they will simply assert is wrong because they say so and bugger the facts, they're wrong too. The answer will always be "it is right and proper for me to shit on people" regardless of what the question is.

    (Puritans: you know what kind of people Greg means by "New Puritans" because you wrote that list of questions with the kind of answers you would expect them (among others) to give in mind. Popular culture over here has the Puritans as the gloomy buggers who banned Christmas, and that's about the limit. Not that I can't see their point. Hey, Santa, pass us that bottle, will ya?)

    689:

    binary choices are still for the infantile. One of the many reasons referenda are colossally stupid as an approach to governance.

    Disagree. A sensible referendum comes at the end of a process of decision-making, and the question is "should we do what the experts say, yes or no".

    It's usually entirely reasonable to say no, not least because the experts may have been asked something stupid. "should unicorns have to register flight paths with air traffic control" sort of thing... they can come up with the most reasonable regulation for that process that you can possibly imagine, but the answer is still no.

    IMO any single answer to a complex question is problematic, but that's the least awful approach when you have to get answers from more people than you can reasonably accept amendments from.

    Trying to come up with a ranked preference or multiple selection question for complex situations is just garbage. In the worst case you have the US style "the state has to have a balanced budget. How?" where people get to spend time dropping numbers into budget buckets, then what... you average all the answers for each bucket? You're into a situation where the sheer computational complexity of generating the question renders it infeasible, let alone the optimisation problem of coming up with a question that's acceptable to even a small minority of people (is the dog catcher part of the law enforcement bucket? Or the agriculture one? What?).

    690:

    Facebook doesn't like dyndns domains? Wankers. But then I knew that much already.

    But the background... yeah, that was exactly what I designed it to do; nice to hear it works! :D

    691:

    Two values is just fine, as long as you can change your mind more than twice as fast as the situation changes...

    692:

    Let me get this straight:

    You seem to be arguing that questions such as:

    "Is race a reliable predictor of intelligence?"

    or

    "Is race a reliable predictor of moral character?"

    Would be good questions to ask if they were properly phrased?

    Remember, what started this was Greg's rant about "Puritans" wanting to outlaw alcohol. When I objected to his word choice, knowing that the Pilgrims were issued 1 gallon/day of beer on the Mayflower, he insisted that this is what he meant, and that it was about religion, and that atheists are smarter anyway.

    693:

    Thought I'd post this link because he mentions being a "red diaper baby", which I'd never heard before and now I've encountered it twice in one week.

    It's not important and has no other relevance to anything being discussed here. Enjoy.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GD8qXInI00

    694:

    I solved that in the std. computer way: http:// (domain) /shay

    695:

    The SCOTUS electors decision may have made the most sense, avoiding potential chaos around the presidential election. It's also directly contradictory to the intention behind creating the whole clunky elector system in the first place. Originally, electors were supposed to be trusted members of the community who took the vote tally under advisement in deciding who should be president.

    The undemocratic underpinnings of presidential elections also mean there are no inherent constitutional protections against another nightmare scenario that the SCOTUS decision has kind of further enabled. States aren't necessarily required to hold elections to determine their selection of which electors they choose to vote for president. All the states currently do hold elections and abide by the announced results, but they haven't always. Early on, it was common for legislatures to make the determination. The infamous compromise that resulted in the election of Rutherford Hayes came about because some states sent conflicting delegations of electors and denied a clear majority in the electoral college vote.

    If this election is close, republican controlled state governments like Florida could overturn their election results just by passing a law requiring the their electors to fall in line and that would be hunky dory. That's not to mention the jiggery pokey that can result from legal language that can often define the winner of the election as the person certified by the (secretary of state, governor, assembly etc).

    It would almost be guaranteed to burn the house down, but with this crowd of arsonists it's something that I can't entirely discount.

    696:

    My point was that it reduces the possible chaotic options. Especially given that it was 9-0.

    697:

    As far as I am concerned those differences in the genotype of subpopulations that have naturally arisen through time and distance, or their visible phenotypical manifestations, are exactly what "race" means.

    A lot of people say things like this, but you'd be extremely unusual if this is in fact what you think. Take myself as an example of a genetic case in point. I have an observable Xanthelasma on each eyelid, something that is taken to be a sign of higher cholesterol. In fact people with a Silesian background (including those descended from the Silesian migration to Pomerania in the late Middle Ages) are genetically prone to both higher cholesterol and Xanthelasmas (I think there's currently limited evidence connecting the two). This has been shown to be genetic rather than cultural (for instance, by overconsumption of mettwurst, a totally believable alternative explanation).

    By your logic, this visibly distinguishable factor would contribute toward a notion that Silesians are "racially" distinct from other Europeans. You might contrast it with the gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia, but confers considerable natural resistance to malaria, which is noted in some people with Northern African descent. That one isn't visible, but arises in outcomes.

    The problem is that isn't really what we're doing when we talk about "race", is it? A "race" is not simply a sum of common genetic variations - if that were so we would treat the traits I discussed above as racial ones, but we clearly don't. They are standalone genetic traits that we treat as part of life's rich tapestry. There were people who went into that degree of detail in the 19th century, and their contributions have largely been superseded by modern genetics.

    Another popular efflorescence from 19th century genetic thinking was show dog breeding (it applies to other pet and agricultural breeding too, but dogs are a particularly familiar and outstanding example). There is definitely no such thing as a "breed" in the way that our language about them suggests exists, and no such concept existed prior to the 18th or 19th century. There were dogs bred for specific purposes, but the idea of a poodle versus a German shepherd didn't exist. And while it's easy for us to attribute the visible differences between dog breeds as relating to their genetic diversity, this is actually an example of being wrong about how genetics work. Basically it's totally feasible to take a bunch of Great Danes and breed Chihuahahas from them and vice versa. It isn't that there are "big" genes and "small" genes, the selection is about the timing of the release of hormones during development. Outside of some extremely in-bred varieties with tiny gene pools that passed through a historical choke point, and even then, you can breed for most doggy traits from almost any dog population.

    The point is that how we classify this stuff is a classic example of ideology, and I'm using that in it's more technical sense where it is about adapting empirical observation to fit with abstractions based in the world of ideas. That is, it's a way of fitting facts into your world-view. It doesn't take much reflection to see how much potential we all have to error and how the journey from observation to concept is a mediated one that can be fraught even in the best circumstances. You can say that it's observable reality, but really what you're doing with it is not driven by that observable reality, instead it is mediated by how you connect your thoughts about it with other thoughts.

    Therefore when someone says "race is a social construct" I hear "my ideology is driving me to assert that these undeniably objectively real, observable and measurable differences which the human species exhibits just as any other species does are in fact completely made up and only exist in people's heads".

    This is an example of the pattern that generates my teeth-gnashing as I described above. No it is not an ideological position to reject an ideological position. It can be quite the opposite, though this is a binary you're stepping right into here.

    698:

    sigh "Race"

    So, let me break into these looong posts to ask one simple question: is a standard poodle a different race than a chihuahua?

    699:

    Re: ' ... the contact tracing of which was I'm sure a series of uncomfortable conversations.'

    Not into strip clubs but assume that like most other businesses, they and their staff would prefer tap & pay credit/debit card payments. If yes, then it should be easy to do contact tracing just by looking at the retailer's/bar's transactions. Same for tracing most adults' movements: just look at their debit/credit card transactions.

    700:

    I do use the comment blocker & unless she(?) has a new alias I haven't recognized she hasn't been around that much in this thread.

    When I posted that there were about 30 posts in a few hours (plus some replies), coming in bursts of half a dozen in 10-15 minutes.

    They then vanished — both Seagull posts and replies to the Seagull. No idea why (as I block), but if you're curious I'm certain David, Greg, or Moz could explain.

    701:

    If you are trying to avoid significant others knowing you are there then cash is king.

    702:

    I usually visit the Sunshine Coast every year to see my mother. Probably won't this year, as I can't see a way of getting there that wouldn't require me to isolate for a fortnight before actually seeing her. (Mid-80s, definitely in the vulnerable group.)

    Are you near Sechelt?

    703:

    "should unicorns have to register flight paths with air traffic control"

    Definitely. Have you seen what a unicorn does to a jet engine? :-)

    704:

    Speaking of experts, and binary choices, and returning momentarily to the subject. (discussing the Australian situation re Covid 19)

    There's an epidemiologist who's been on the telly a bit lately. They're always asking her what we should do, and I'm always finding her answers utterly mystifying. Because they're always of the type that will keep the disease simmering along, high enough to be maximally disruptive without being high enough to crash the Healthcare system.

    Last night in what appeared to be a fit of exasperation she blurted out the truth. The question was something like "given the disruption of the second round of lockdown, would we have been better to have maintained the first lockdown a few more days and done as New Zealand has done and eliminate the virus from the population?" I can't remember the exact words but something like,

    "I'm not an economist or a politician, of course elimination is possible and vastly preferable to containment, but we aren't being asked how to get to elimination, the decision has been made to have containment and that's what we have to live with even if it's not ideal from an epidemiological point of view. I'm sure there are very good reasons for that decision from a political and economic point of view."

    Which says to me that the experts have been telling the government exactly what I would have told them and they're ignoring the expert advice. Moreover, the experts have kept quiet about their advice for months for whatever reason.

    705:

    is a standard poodle a different race than a chihuahua?

    ... given that you can breed a standard poodle starting with only chihuahuas and vice versa. It’s faster if you get to include some poodles in the gene pool, but not as much as you might think (it require some extra generations for them to “breed true”).

    The same is true of people and “racial” traits, it’s just that experiments involving selective breeding of humans won’t get HREC approval and may find it difficult to attract funding (Obligatory sarcasm tag goes here I suppose).

    706:

    it should be easy to do contact tracing just by looking at the retailer's/bar's transactions

    Easier to contact a customer at the phone number they left, though. Also implicitly gets consent for being contacted.

    Also, imagine how your local right-winger would react to learning that a contact tracer can get a record of their purchases from their bank…

    (Back in May I audited an online course for contact tracers. It was interesting and I'll be volunteering if we need it here.)

    707:

    Moreover, the experts have kept quiet about their advice for months for whatever reason.

    The medical experts are very aware that they are not political or economic experts. Sadly the converse is often not the case, and often the people who know things are constrained in the answers they're able to give.

    So when the politicians ask "what are some of the things we can do to contain this?" the experts can't say "to eliminate it you must do all of the following" because that's not an answer to the question. Bad expert, no bananana.

    Then you get the likes of Boris or Trumpf seeing the list of things that can be done, but rather than ask "if we pick this combo what happens" they go "this one looks easy, we will just do that".

    708:

    The medical experts are very aware that they are not political or economic experts. Sadly the converse is often not the case, and often the people who know things are constrained in the answers they're able to give.

    Heh. There was an article in the Globe & Mail (right-wing pro-business paper) about how airlines shouldn't have to keep the middle seat free because there's nothing in the contract of carriage on your ticket about that:

    To limit the spread of COVID-19, carriers like Air Canada offered passengers more space by limiting seating in adjacent seats. But the move only ever applied to cases “whenever possible.” In other words, it’s courtesy, not compulsory. If an airplane can seat 100 passengers and 100 passengers show up, the airline is well within its rights to accommodate them all. There’s a lesson here for flyers: it pays to read the fine print (or at the very least, the airline’s tweets) before buying a ticket.

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-airlines-are-stuck-in-the-middle-on-distanced-seating-but-theyre/

    Written by a Research Fellow at the Harvard Law School, which naturally makes them an expert in viral epidemiology.

    709:

    There was in interesting comment on the Spinoff yesterday to the effect that Jacinda Ardern wasn't very good as a shadow minister because she did not go hard, early and often against the minister she was shadowing. But that exact problem-for-a-shadow-minister is one of the factors that makes her so good as prime minister (especially during any of the crises she's faced).

    This pair of articles should probably be read together:

    Politics is often talked about like a competitive sport, or worse a battle. By those in politics itself, political commentators, media, and all of us who love the thrill of the chase. Language is incredibly powerful in framing our thoughts and behaviours. https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/07-07-2020/the-clare-curran-story-reveals-a-political-culture-that-makes-nz-meaner-smaller/

    the core problems in politics are always tyranny, corruption and incompetence. ... The solution to this problem is to set all of these ambitious seekers-after-high-office against each other, so that they’re all competing for that power. That way they act on a check against one another. https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/07-07-2020/in-defence-of-adversarial-politics/

    This story is also worth reading: an MP shopped the names of covid patients round multiple media outlets. The fan has definitely hit that particular shit.

    710:

    Re: 'The point is that how we classify this stuff is a classic example of ideology, and I'm using that in it's more technical sense where it is about adapting empirical observation to fit with abstractions based in the world of ideas.'

    Your and Heteromeles' discussion reminds me of some of the arguments in 'Darwin's Watch' (Pratchett, Stewart & Cohen).

    There's the Sky-Fairy Watchmaker (a la Paley) approach: because I 'know' that you're such-and-such, then working backwards, I'm able to create an argument carefully picking my route/points to reach whatever 'first principles' I wanted to establish anyway.

    Or, there's Xeno's Paradox approach: everything is 'distance', or everything is 'time', no such thing as 'velocity' (distance/time).

    The above are the two examples I most remember - there probably were more. Anyways, interesting discussion - empirical observations included.

    711:

    My point, exactly. There is only ONE FUCKING RACE of homo sap, and that's homo sap. All the rest is decoration and eye candy, same as eye color or hair color.

    712:

    This story is also worth reading: an MP shopped the names of covid patients round multiple media outlets. The fan has definitely hit that particular shit.

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin/08-07-2020/the-bulletin-hamish-walker-former-nat-president-in-disgrace-after-covid-leak/

    713:

    There are arguments that the notion of a species called "homo sapiens" is a bit optimistic (let alone sap sap), and what we actually have is a literal clusterfuck of hominids breeding with each other whenever the opportunity arose. So it might be more reasonable to think of neanderthals as a race and sapsap as a race, because they're at least somewhat distinct.

    I go with the dog example, because there are still people who think that "dog" is a different species to "wolf" (and, bob help us, "dingo") despite observation suggesting that interbreeding will happen whenever someone lets the dogs out.

    714:

    Have you seen what a unicorn does to a jet engine?

    I would have thought it more the other way around. Unless the horn is very very hard.

    715:

    ' ...imagine how your local right-winger would react to learning that a contact tracer can get a record of their purchases from their bank…'

    Yeah but the contact tracing request would be only for in-person transactions, so the right-wingers needn't worry about the contact tracers (or their spouse) finding out about any of the porn/guns they bought online.

    Seriously - humans, overall, have really crappy memories so if we want accurate info about people's locations at specific times, it will have to be via transactions and/or CCTV.

    716:

    The time lines involved are also an issue.

    717:

    lightweight water filtration systems

    I just drink (in ireland) clear surface water where i see it. 50+ years on, no liverfluke or amoebic dysentry (etc)

    718:

    Also, imagine how your local right-winger would react to learning that a contact tracer can get a record of their purchases from their bank…

    Due to the Bork SCOTUS hearings we got a law about video rental history confidentiality. I've heard it discussed about updating it to cover almost anything but don't think it has happened yet. USA here.

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

    719:

    There was an article in the Globe & Mail (right-wing pro-business paper) about how airlines shouldn't have to keep the middle seat free because there's nothing in the contract of carriage on your ticket about that:

    The US Airlines (their trade association) and now an association of large US retailers are yelling that they WANT consistent country wide regulation. That puts everyone at the same level and removes a lot (but not all) of the customer arguments.

    720:

    Is a standard poodle a different race than a chihuahua?

    When the country I live in, Thuringia, came up with a new law on dangerous dog races it became mandatory for all owners to report the race of their dogs. Our dog is midsize with sort of fluffy black hair, some grey patches, and enjoys to swerve of on hopeless chases after larger flying birds. Her mother was a mongrel of undetermined origin and her father preferred to remain unknown. I went to the communal office and told the official: How would I know what race she is? I'm a biologist and I sincerely can't say. The official retorted that the form had to be filled in and asked me to just make a guess. I refused and asked her to tell up the chain of administration that the law wasn't realizable. However, as the demands of bureaucracy couldn't be avoided I went to a veterinarian and ordered a genetic determination of the dog's race. These tests work with a set of genetic markers which are allegedly indicative for race. When the results came back the veterinarian was devastated and almost passed on billing me. Eventually she had to admit that our dog was, with a high certainty, a chihuahua. Though it seemed obvious to anybody involved that our dog wasn't a chihuahua, at least as far as administrative procedures are to be satisfied I'm now the proud owner of one.

    721:

    I have it on good authority from a 7 year old expert on the subject that unicorns don't fly - you must be thinking of Alicorns.

    722:

    We were counting down stuff with active measures while dumping some other stuff that will be handy. Oh, and HK stuff which is getting wild, loads of UK people suddenly deleting their twitter accounts.

    Deutsche Bank Is Fined $150 Million Over Jeffrey Epstein Links, Other Lapses

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/deutsche-bank-fined-150-million-over-epstein-links-other-lapses-11594132041

    I mean, literally: Front-running your greatest Banking Scandals and so on. While noting the extremely psychotic black-PR done for a certain "ex" Porn Baron. While hooping it up to certain 'Turk' radical media.

    And so on.

    Chances are: it's a Chimeric test suite, the nasty evvvvul fucker who is running those "playground black sky child abuse hints" shit just got a notice. He's pretty good, so he'll burn a few of his slaves / fealty shit first.

    The notice is: "Black-hole bending screaming existential Mind-Death", but as we said: You're not supposed to read it. It's all about the Music.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jul/06/jonathan-sackler-dies-purdue-pharma-opioids

    723:

    unicorns don't fly

    Not enough jet engines?

    724:

    Is there some reason why you couldn't simply write "mongrel" on the form?

    725:

    Holy fuck.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8493669/Genes-raise-risk-dying-Covid-19-inherited-NEANDERTHALS.html

    You need to step up and get quicker. Told you that one years ago.

    ~

    Anyhow: any muppet still thinking that 2020 UK politics is about "tropes" needs firing. It's about shit-tier "defended phone hacking" media PR shite vrs frankly byzantine levels of crusty fuck and us just ganking you all.

    UK news: expect a fire in a small flat.

    Sad thing is: they really really did summon something nasty. Forgot the wards though - "OMG SEAGULL SPREADING AAFDGDFHGH". Lol, no. We don't give a fuck if a significant number of his slaves go insane. They make their money doing it, it's karma ;)

    "unicorns".

    Yeah. Burn a few more billion dollars, we'll talk.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2vIah3FeNg

    p.s.

    Don't remake it. You've a society to rebuild.

    Look it up: literally front run your reality, chimpy-little-apes, once more ;)

    726:

    They can't fly stick so can't get their pilot's licenses.

    BTW ever tried squeezing a horse into a flight simulator? Not pretty...

    727:

    Unicorns fly, but like humans, use prosthetics. (aircraft, rockets, magic).

    https://www.fimfiction.net/story/396744/the-maretian

    728:

    dangerous dog races ... report the race of their dogs

    We have similar laws down here and they are equally silly in some respects. There's a binary "is it one of the dangerous breeds" question and it can be fun trying to decide whether your purebred "Old German Grey Pointing Terrier" counts as a "pit bull terrier" for the purposes of the law.

    It gets exceptionally stupid when it's local councils trying to enforce the silly law:

    We recognise the American Staffordshire Terrier as a Pit Bull type of dog. We can exempt your dog from being classified as menacing if you can prove that it is an American Staffordshire Terrier.

    https://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/dogs-animals/problems-dogs/Pages/dangerous-dogs.aspx

    But the wheels really fall off when you read the actual legislation:

    33E Territorial authority may classify dog as menacing, (1)(b) ... may pose a threat to any person, stock, poultry, domestic animal, or protected wildlife because of (ii) any characteristics typically associated with the dog’s breed or type.

    Since any dog is a threat to many birds simply because it exists that section captures all breeds (almost all penguins, for example, will stay at sea and not visit their nests to feed their young if they see a dog on shore).

    729:

    Better than squeezing a flight simulator into a horse.

    730:

    Is there some reason why you couldn't simply write "mongrel" on the form?

    Yes. At least at that time law assumed that "mixed race" progeny of dog races determined to be dangerous would also be dangerous. Just writing mongrel wouldn't have been sufficient to declare our dog to be harmless. Also I wanted to make the point about of the untenability of the concept -- and the genetic testing delivered. The law has been adjusted since then, but I didn't follow up on that in detail and the yearly dog tax record labels our dog now actually as a mongrel.

    731:

    Why bother?

    You do nothing anyway.

    Literally showed you UK evvvul apparatus working over-time and getting results from frankly made-up shit-tier 1933 propaganda stuff.

    Literally showed you trillion dollar shorts

    Literally showed you billion dollar shorts in a real that could change the world.

    Literally showed you moves in DB / Wirecard before even your fucking shit tier Legal system showed it.

    I mean, just add in: "Tom Watson, Ex-Labour Stalwart, coming out for JK Rowling and some Little Briton dude accused of fondling under-age fans"

    Response: about a few trillion, and shit loads of stuff and the entire world going batshit and no more of that Human Mind ignoring ecosystems stuff...

    What do you want?

    Ask nicely. You'd be amazed at the effects. I mean: give us 48 hrs typing or 6 months, whatever.

    TIME: YOU'RE NOT GOOD AT IT.

    732:

    "Better than squeezing a flight simulator into a horse."

    It's not something you try more than once...

    733:

    Of course not. That's pegasi.

    I was wondering what unicorns had to do with jet engines.

    734:

    Cool, what fun!

    Here's the "problem" with human races: they're defined by a varying set of descriptors, including variations in skin color, hair type, eye color, culture, lip shape, body shape, diet, language, and so forth. No race is remotely reproductively isolated, so don't make subspecies and human races equivalent. They aren't.

    Dog breeds, in contrast, are inbred populations that have been specifically selected for an exact standard set of traits, and mostly in the last century or two, and which probably won't last much longer. If the inbreeding continues long enough, chihuahuas and great danes (for example) may become reproductively isolated, but then that makes dogs are a species complex, not multiple species*, because different inbred breeds can interbreed, producing mutts, and through a chain of mutts progeny chihuahua ancestors can mix genes with other breeds in a chain up to dogs that are big enough to breed successfully with great danes. It's complex.

    *Canids, including wolves, jackals, coyotes, dingos, New Guinea Singing Dogs and dogs, are notorious for interbreeding and producing fertile hybrids, like coywolves and red wolves.

    735:

    why you couldn't simply write "mongrel" on the form

    Coz the PTB don't recognise it as a "race or ethnic identity"?

    Not a problem for me, I am 100% pure New Zealand{tm}*

    But I have written a whole range of things on forms when I think the question is stupid. I had raised eyebrows from customs once coz my occupation was "geek".

    • of course with New Zealand not being the origin point of the human races no-one is really "ethically opinionated" from there. But maybe some ethnicities originate here. Hmm.
    737:

    Like that. Back in the summer of '69, my first wife and I had an apt in a small complex/whateveritwas. The landlord's wife had a goose. We wanted it for T-day, it was nasty. As were the Canadian geese that, twice a year, made real pests of themselves on the NIH campus.

    How about "dangerous geese"?

    738:

    Oh, right. After I moved to TX to be with her, my late wife got a dog (I hadn't known she always had dogs...). I could write his breed (that is what they're called, folks, not "race"): half cocker spaniel, half purebread fencejumper.

    739:

    Saw this, and thought some here might be interested, so I'm passing it along:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ww3/fuck-neoliberalism-translating-resistance

    What began as an expletive-laden paper delivered at an academic conference has become an international call-to-arms. A cry of rage against the way that the neoliberal ideology dominates every aspect of our lives. From birth to death, the overbearing hand of the market is always there, squeezing and enclosing everything.

    AUTHOR - Simon Springer is professor of human geography and director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research agenda explores the social and political exclusions that neoliberalism has engendered, particularly in post-transitional Cambodia, where he emphasizes the geographies of violence and power. He cultivates a cutting-edge theoretical approach to his scholarship by foregrounding both post-structuralist critique and a radical revival of anarchist geographies.

    740:

    The unearned belligerence of your comment comes through as posted by someone belligerently drunk.

    You destroyed my previous opinion of you.

    741:

    @ Whitroth too!

    Children! Play nice with the tinker-toys!

    742:
    Dog breeds, in contrast, are inbred populations that have been specifically selected for an exact standard set of traits, and mostly in the last century or two, and which probably won't last much longer.

    I'm tempted to make comments about the usual people droning on about race, but actually in most cases if you go back a little their background may be more varied than mine.

    Passing was quite a thing back in the day, and it would be quite funny if some of the alt-right people had some, err, Portuguese or like ancestry, err.

    743:

    "Let me get this straight:

    You seem to be arguing that questions such as:

    "Is race a reliable predictor of intelligence?"

    or

    "Is race a reliable predictor of moral character?"

    Would be good questions to ask if they were properly phrased?"

    I'm arguing that they're valid questions from a logical and scientific point of view. And that this surely isn't a controversial point since questions of the form "is [easily observable heritable characteristic] a reliable predictor of [characteristic which is less easy to observe]" are what large chunks of science are all about. It doesn't even have to be human science; from further up, learning the answer to "is being yellow and black a reliable predictor of having a concealed sting?" is an important part of the self-education of cats.

    They may well be difficult questions to answer because you have to agree on usable definitions, but that's hardly unusual; indeed, one of those, the problem of how do you define intelligence, is pretty familiar, but that doesn't prevent science addressing questions that depend on it. (Indeed, that's where most of the context comes from that makes it familiar.) Similarly with the difficulties like how the ruddy heck do you collect unbiased data, which is familiar on cliche level.

    Of course I'm familiar with your specific examples in the context of them being raised by arseholes who then make up their own shitty answer. You seem to be decrying this usage on the grounds that the questions themselves are universally invalid, deciding invalidity on some basis which is obscure but which I can say is definitely not universal since your previous example of a universally invalid question is one to which I have demonstrated the correctness of answers by succeeding in the endeavours in which it arose, and your current example is a class of question which has featured in innumerable successful scientific endeavours.

    I believe even the specific questions have attracted some attempt at scientific investigation, and as far as I am aware what results they have managed to produce have been negative. Though given the number of levels of hearsay it came through first and the noise to signal ratio of the general subject matter I hesitate to go any further than that.

    The questions themselves are fine; the problem relating to them in specific is that the arseholes aren't asking them sincerely in the first place. They're just using them as a rhetorical device to which they can supply their own made up answer, which has bugger all to do with reality but everything to do with furthering their own nasty agenda. Whether or not the question is valid is pretty much irrelevant, because they're not genuinely asking it; they don't give a toss what the scientific answer might be, only their own made up one. If the two happen to be the same, fine; if they're not, then the real answer must be wrong and they'll invent some bollocks science to prove it. Sometimes they even manage to produce enough bollocks science to take over from the genuine science of an entire nation.

    "Remember, what started this was Greg's rant about "Puritans" wanting to outlaw alcohol."

    Greg has been fairly consistent about referring to New Puritans, which is a new one on me but I guess he's using it to distinguish them from the original ones. Thing is that, over here at least, people know exactly one thing about the Puritans, which is that they were a bunch of miserable buggers who banned Christmas. You get periodic reminders about it in the crappy newspapers. So the term has become generic slang for all the miserable buggers who froth at the mouth about people enjoying themselves. Prepending "new" is also a reasonably standard way of distinguishing groups or concepts which resemble the distorted pop culture version of something rather than the real original version (though if someone mentioned "new druids" I'd probably need to ask which iteration).

    744:

    If you excuse me, on my way to work, there is a four-legged assasin, AKA male cat in front of my room door...

    745:

    If anyone wonders if the guard geese referred to in Cold War spy novels etc were real, there is first-hand confirmation of them being used at a Pershing 2 site in Germany in this podcast interview.

    https://coldwarconversations.com/episode122/

    746:

    half purebread fencejumper.

    Now that Houdini is too old to fly much I have new teenage chickens. This is them supervising me from the roof of the garage last night to make sure that the repairs to the fence around their coop are up to the necessary standard.

    The fence is only ~1.8m high, but the lowest part of the garage roof is over 2m. I'm pretty sure they climbed the tree next to the garage first, but the other day one of them flew straight to the top of the gate from the ground and that's only slightly less than 1.8m so I'm not entirely sure.

    747:

    It occurs to me that one thing that our host got totally wrong in one of his novels was that everyone in America forgetting the president exists would beba BAD thing.... ;-)

    748:

    I'm arguing that they're valid questions from a logical and scientific point of view. And that this surely isn't a controversial point since questions of the form "is [easily observable heritable characteristic] a reliable predictor of [characteristic which is less easy to observe]" are what large chunks of science are all about. It doesn't even have to be human science; from further up, learning the answer to "is being yellow and black a reliable predictor of having a concealed sting?" is an important part of the self-education of cats.

    The problem with the idea that race is [easily observable heritable characteristic] is right where we start.

    Let's start with a couple of examples: Barack Obama and Henry Louis Gates Jr. I'll pick on them because their heritage is known.

    Racially, they're both black, right? We know that Pres Obama is 50% white, while Dr. Gates turns out to be 55% white from the DNA test he took and publicized.

    Does their character come from their white ancestry, or their black side? Or is it not genetic at all, but cultural from their parents and teachers?

    This is how pernicious it is. Race isn't inherited, it follows the more stigmatized group. You can't be half-black, you can only be black in America. It takes a lot of white ancestors for someone to "pass as white."

    That gets at the root of the problem with race: it's not inherited, it's imposed by culture. In America, if I get a tan that makes my skin darker than that of President Obama (I took a winter vacation in Hawai'i, while Obama was stuck in a snowing Washington), I'm still a white guy, while Obama is still black. Even skin color doesn't always matter, once the label is applied.

    This gets at the bullshit part of the question: race takes a shifting and subjective suite of characters, falsely categorizes it as a unified whole ("black") then uses that as if it's a useful metric to look for whether it correlates to other traits that (like character) are also falsely presumed to be genetically inherited.

    As for being black and yellow being predictive of a concealed sting, I assume you're talking about a sunflower? Or are you talking about a cat with yellow eyes? It can't possibly be something with a sting, like a tarantula hawk or black widow spider.

    749:

    Just to be totally ridiculous, let's take another fallacy: the sky is blue.

    Really? I'll bet, if you looked up, at least half the time, it's black, because it's night. Then there are all the days that it's gray or white with clouds, silvery yellow with smog, or mottled with multiple colors of cloud, or at dawn or dusk, or with a rainbow. And if you go high enough it turns black again. Pure blue is one of its less common states.

    Perhaps the reason why young children can't tell you the sky is blue is that they have to be taught that this is the socially correct response in western society?

    750:

    I had meant to mention something along these lines with the “Is red black or white?” question. Recently paused a book on the subject because I find the author’s style annoying, but will have to come back to this later.

    751:

    "By your logic, this visibly distinguishable factor would contribute toward a notion that Silesians are "racially" distinct from other Europeans."

    People mostly seem to call it something else when the scales get that small, but they get a lot smaller than that. Right down to the limit of individual families, where it gets called the Habsburg Lip or something like that. Down to the scale of towns wasn't that unusual once upon a time, but transport got good enough to wipe out the differences on that kind of scale quite a long time ago in most places.

    The problem is that isn't really what we're doing when we talk about "race", is it? A "race" is not simply a sum of common genetic variations"

    Dunno about "we". I've told you what I'm talking about, though for some reason you don't seem to find it credible. You've said what you're not talking about, but your rhetorical question remains unanswered.

    "if that were so we would treat the traits I discussed above as racial ones, but we clearly don't."

    We clearly do; maybe we call it different names as the scale reduces, maybe we're in the wrong historical period to observe the smaller scales any more, maybe we accord it less significance the smaller the scale gets, but the basic categorisation still happens, or did until quite recently. And in case you insist on prejudice as a necessary element for it to count, then for sure there was. I'm reasonably sure there are parts of the world where it still is.

    "There is definitely no such thing as a "breed" in the way that our language about them suggests exists, and no such concept existed prior to the 18th or 19th century."

    That's just too ridiculous for words. Of course dog breeds exist. I suppose different coloured budgies don't exist either, or different milk and beef cattle.

    "There were dogs bred for specific purposes"

    ...and you contradict yourself in the very next sentence. That may not be what Kennel Club nerds define as a "breed", but it's certainly covered by the everyday usage of the word, and the base classes for very many of the Kennel Club classifications-to-ten-places are the very old names for the very old breeds that the Victorians used as a basis to practise nerdery on. To be sure there was an explosion in the fashion for repurposing ancient selective breeding methods to increasingly impractical ends, but they weren't doing anything new, just taking something that was established practice to ridiculous extremes.

    "but the idea of a poodle versus a German shepherd didn't exist."

    The idea of a sheepdog versus a hunting dog did, though. Also the idea of a sheepdog which specialises in rounding them up versus a sheepdog which specialises in defending them against predators. The German shepherd was an attempt to breed a dog that looked more like a wolf and I think at least part if not most of the reason was the supposition that it would make it better at chasing wolves off. Dunno about the poodle, but the idea of a dog for confused topiary workers to practice on is novel only in silliness, not in execution.

    "And while it's easy for us to attribute the visible differences between dog breeds as relating to their genetic diversity, this is actually an example of being wrong about how genetics work. Basically it's totally feasible to take a bunch of Great Danes and breed Chihuahahas from them and vice versa."

    That does not mean though that Great Danes and Chihuahuas do not exist; they patently do. And they are undeniably distinct, which makes them a good example. And the distinction is genetically based, heritable, and stable: they don't turn into each other if you don't mess about with them, they stay as they are, at least on human timescales. (They do, of course, get mixed up with each other, or if they don't it's not for want of trying.)

    It doesn't contradict my point that the actual amount of genetic difference is not very large. All I said on that aspect was that it was basically less than the amount required to count as a sub-species, with the caution that I don't actually know how biologists decide how much difference does count. (And part of the answer is very likely "it depends", which makes it even vaguer.)

    "That is, it's a way of fitting facts into your world-view."

    I'm trying to maintain a world-view based on facts. Observed facts, that is. It appears that I am being criticised for being insufficiently factual because I'm not using a definition of "fact" that subordinates observation to assertion, by someone who does believe in such a definition so sincerely that he can say things like "dog breeds don't exist" with a straight face.

    "You can say that it's observable reality, but really what you're doing with it is not driven by that observable reality, instead it is mediated by how you connect your thoughts about it with other thoughts."

    False contradiction. If the final clause was a valid objection, all mental activity would be futile.

    "This is an example of the pattern that generates my teeth-gnashing as I described above. No it is not an ideological position to reject an ideological position."

    It is absolutely an ideological position to reject a fact-based position on some basis which is apparently impossible not only to defend rationally, but even to explain. Look, this is just too weird:

    I clearly and explicitly state my position to make sure there is no confusion on that point. You begin by saying you don't really believe I actually think that. Later, you restate what I've said I'm talking about and say that "we" (which "we"?) are not talking about that. But what this mysterious "we" are talking about, you never actually say. You just carry on as if it doesn't need saying, with a coy little "do we?" as if this is some sort of silly game, as if of course I know what you mean and why don't I stop pretending to think the thing you don't believe I think and we'll all be merry as lambkins on the lea.

    Well, no, I do actually think that, I am actually talking about that, whoever "we" are I'm not one of them, I don't have a bloody clue what you think I ought to know you mean and yes it does need saying (unless it's going to be another "dog breeds don't exist", in which case don't bother.)

    752:

    You should have put it down as "Illyrian poodle"...

    753:

    Heteromeles I was referring to "The New Puritans" - let's get that straight, shall we? Like the early puritans they are absolutist killjoys, determined to see exaggeratred risks at every turn. Some of them are, what a suprise, religious bigots, but most are interfering nannys of the worst sort, as caricatured by "Viz" SAee also the very clear addendum at the end of Pigeon's post @ 742

    Rbt Prior @ 699 PLEASE refer back to current post # 591! And my last comment. @ 702 😁

    Unicorns flying? See R Zelazny: "Unicorn Variations"

    Moz If there's the space & i have the time, I fill in the "other" box in "race" or equivalent in forms: Homo spiens sapientes Africanus Which ( I think ) translates back as: "Man who thinks he thinks & comes from Africa"

    Please refer to Mod's post @ 591 - I'm fairly certain she/it is back ... AS "Adjunct Professor of Translation" 721, 724, 730, Oh shit.

    754:

    "Racially, they're both black, right? We know that Pres Obama is 50% white, while Dr. Gates turns out to be 55% white from the DNA test he took and publicized."

    Right, so there must be a scientific definition of race in genetic terms at least good enough for such a test and result to be possible. Somehow it had slipped my mind that there are such tests.

    "Does their character come from their white ancestry, or their black side? Or is it not genetic at all, but cultural from their parents and teachers?"

    I'm not sure we even yet have a proper answer to that, but as far as I'm aware the consensus is something like cultural and environmental factors are by far the major part of it but probably not the entirety, lots of fuzz around the edges. I'm not aware of anything to suggest that whatever genetic contribution there may be is anything other than the default half and half.

    "This is how pernicious it is. Race isn't inherited, it follows the more stigmatized group. You can't be half-black, you can only be black in America. It takes a lot of white ancestors for someone to "pass as white." "

    Hmm. Over here we have a superficially similar result from a different cause. I wouldn't refer to someone as "half-black" unless they called themselves that, in case they took it as an insult. A lot of people take pride in the black component of their ancestry and don't like having attention called to the other bits.

    "That gets at the root of the problem with race: it's not inherited, it's imposed by culture. In America, if I get a tan that makes my skin darker than that of President Obama (I took a winter vacation in Hawai'i, while Obama was stuck in a snowing Washington), I'm still a white guy, while Obama is still black. Even skin color doesn't always matter, once the label is applied."

    Have you read One Hundred and One Dalmatians? I don't know about Disney, I'm talking about the book. (Which, as an aside, I would recommend to anyone who hasn't read it or not since they were little. The Marie Antoinette reference and a whole load of other stuff went right over my head when I was a kid.)

    "This gets at the bullshit part of the question: race takes a shifting and subjective suite of characters, falsely categorizes it as a unified whole ("black") then uses that as if it's a useful metric to look for whether it correlates to other traits that (like character) are also falsely presumed to be genetically inherited."

    Right, that's the kind of thing I was talking about with the validity of the question being irrelevant when people are not asking it in good faith in the first place. It's bullshit all right, but the bullshit is in taking a useless definition, doing horseshit science with it (or at least pretending that horseshit science has been done), writing "SCIENCE PROVES that we should kick 'em all out" under the "conclusion" heading, and presenting the result as if it meant something. Truth or validity doesn't come into it; it's a propaganda generation exercise, in some form or another, even if the intended audience is only themselves.

    But it doesn't imply that it's not possible to ask it in good faith. I don't think there's any known result that eliminates the possibility (even if it is extremely small) of, say, someone data mining DNA records of all the road accident victims who came into the hospital and discovering a statistically significant correlation between people who had got hit by a truck while throwing little kiddies out of the way of it and some genetic marker for a well-defined ancestry. Yes, I am struggling a bit to concoct an example off the top of my head, but I don't think I've imagined anything known to be flat out impossible. And let us also suppose that that well defined ancestry is African; but we need not bother detailing how the abovementioned Trumpthink crew would react to having their question answered in that way.

    Sting: haha, but hoverflies know what I mean...

    756:

    About the only racial thing I ever found convincing is the vitamin d deficiency thing.

    • Being pale is very recent for Europeans, but it spread across Europe very, very fast once the genes for it were in play - about as fast as the genes for lactase permanence. This rate of spread implies that being short on vitamin D is seriously bad for you, far beyond just "more likely to break bones when old", and it does correlate with all sorts of bad things. (Depression, for one.)

    Just about the entire population of african-americans is vitamin d deficient. So this is likely a major public health problem going unaddressed.

    757:

    My yard has about a 2-3m section where the property line is shared with the lot that attached to that back corner.

    The fencing there is some sort of ornamental metal that is mostly open to see through.

    Our two dogs, then the one still left, would almost always spend some time last few years of their life walking back to that corner to "see" the dogs on the other side of said fence. The 2 dogs there would run up and go absolutely nuts. Barking non stop. Our might bark for a few second but one would walk away. Blackie would just stand there and stare for 5 to 10 minutes, at times longer, before walking away. All the time the 2 dogs on the other side of the fence were going nuts.

    At times I think Blackie was the smarted mammal in the area.

    At times I mentally remind myself of Blackie and the other dogs.

    758:

    Actually on the African side they are of different races. Biologically there are perhaps 4 races (groups with significantly different genes). East African (e.g. Obama's father) West African (most of the African ancestry for African-Americans) South African (eg San) and North African (which includes all non-Africans). (there may be some African groups I've missed). But we're really very uniform in our genetic makeup (compared to say Chimps). We move around and interbreed a lot.

    759:

    Then I suggest that you look up adult lactose tolerance, and sickle cell anaemia, for a start. Subtle differences in metabolism between subpopulations have been well-known for centuries, and ignoring them causes a LOT of harm to people who do not belong to the dominant 'white' majority in 'the west'(*). That is despite the fact that we (I am one) are a highly inbred subgroup, and a minority in the world as a whole; as has been posted many times before, there is about five times as much genetic variation in sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the world combined.

    https://www.drugtopics.com/view/first-race-specific-drug-approved-heart-failure

    But the people who use the bigoted and unscientific classifications of 'black' can go bugger themselves with the end of a broken 4"x4" - and that applies to the bigots at BOTH ends of the spectrum (i.e. including the 'politically correct' ones)!

    (*) Here, I am siding with many of the 'BAME'/'black'/etc. pressure groups, and against the politically correct and unscientific dogma that subpopulation differences may be ignored in health and safety planning. There are fairly often warnings about prescribing some drugs to people of specific ethicities, or recommendations of different doses.

    760:

    But appearance and skin colour are not very good predictors of the actual genes you carry, and African-Americans are definitely not a uniform population. So drugs tailored to "whites" might work (though there is variation there too) but for "Blacks" there is too much variation

    761:

    This story is also worth reading: an MP shopped the names of covid patients round multiple media outlets. The fan has definitely hit that particular shit.

    Not to diminish the seriousness of that report, but to me the far more interesting story was further down the page where (per the Telegraph) the Leave.EU people are going to be working for the New Zealand First party in the upcoming elections.

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/07-07-2020/brexit-campaigners-pledge-to-bring-mischief-mayhem-and-guerrilla-warfare-to-nz-election/

    762:

    AS "Adjunct Professor of Translation"

    Greg, the rules I laid down were (a) no more than three posts per 24 hours, (b) no more than three links per post, and (c) no doxxing/abuse. As long as they stick within those limits I'm not going to ban them again (unless they overstep the other moderation guidelines).

    Hint: I try to play by the rules, and I expect others to do likewise here. It's a social compact: if it stops working, I may have to shut down the comments/discussions.

    763:

    Interesting indeed, possibly enough so to get me to buy it, thanks for the link. Be a damned shame if we lost the good bits of capitalism because of bad actors seeking to evade responsibility for their actions and using malicious business practices to promote various right-wingnut memes.

    764:

    I like to think that any given variety of Human can be expected to have strengths and weaknesses from a range of Human potential, so, no short cuts, everyone must be evaluated individually. For instance, I, living in Western Missouri, might've been expected to vote GOP in 2008 & 2012, but Obama, even though he's half Kansan, was the better choice.

    765:

    Re: '... any given variety of Human can be expected to have strengths and weaknesses from a range of Human potential, so, no short cuts, everyone must be evaluated individually.'

    Agree.

    I just read this piece and thought it was particularly timely - as in 'written for right now' timely - until I noticed that it was first published almost two years ago. Worth the read/reminder.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/05/survived-warsaw-ghetto-wartime-lessons-extremism-europe

    766:

    Charlie Thanks & "oops" & noted.

    Question ... is a "VPN" being used in this case? And, more generally, are there any benefits to using such a thing? Some appear to be suprisingly cheap to use & appear to be a way arounbd paywalls & area-restrictions. And maybe anonymising the origins of the sender (?) I would welcome comments on this subject .....

    768:

    Yes it was, some things stay true.

    769:

    Re: KW's run for POTUS

    Seriously - do not overestimate the ability and consequences of fed up people doing something rash/fun like a 'protest vote' for someone/some policy* that can't possibly win, can they/it!?

    • DT for POTUS in the US/BrExit in the UK.
    770:

    This is really interesting to me. Can you point me someplace where I can learn more?

    771:

    I am indeed in Sechelt at this moment (work), though I live elsewhere. Perhaps our mothers are friends.

    772:

    Thank you!

    To Troutwaxer (#709), the logic is actually fairly simple:

    --The people on the African continent contain a majority of human genetic diversity, whether you count colonists or not. It is normal that areas where species evolve contain a majority of their diversity, which is why it's so important to save areas where crops evolved, for example. --African Americans average about 24% white on the commercial DNA tests like 23andme (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/genetic-study-reveals-surprising-ancestry-many-americans). --About 3.5% of white Americans have an African American ancestor.

    I don't deny that genetics affects drug interaction. What this says is that skin color is a bad predictor of how a drug will act on genes not associated with skin color.

    Our traditional classes of "Asian" and "White" are much more genetically uniform, even including the Neanderthal and Denisovan genes kicking around. So there are two better ways to link between race and drug effects.

    The first is to say that, if something works on whites but not blacks, it's because whites are more uniform. Targeting a drug to a black population based on skin color is unlikely to work .

    The other thing you're often targeting by focusing on blackness may well be discrimination and poverty. These have enormous biological effects on their victims too, and studies that show a racial signal in a drug effect aren't (to my limited knowledge) also correcting for income and other stressors, just looking at skin color and binning their data by the category of race.

    Now, if you want to get another gauge of human diversity, one way is to untrain yourself to see race. If you're American, you've been trained to look for signifiers of race pretty much automatically. Instead, look at humans the way artists do, not as categories, but as collections of shapes and colors. Look at, say, the faces of Barack Obama, Kanye West, and so forth, and do your best to ignore their various skin colors. What you'll find, after a bit of looking, is that African faces are enormously diverse. You'll find some that look "Chinese" or "White" except for skin color and hair curliness. Keep looking and you'll find face shapes you'll see nowhere else. That's part of the diversity I'm talking about, and it disappears when your main effort in looking at people to assign them to a race category rather than focus on their unique slice of human diversity.

    773:

    To drift back for a moment to the original topic, evidence continues to arrive that Covid-19 can cause terrifying (and potentially permanent) brain/neurological problems weeks or months after infection, and often in patients who had no respiratory symptoms. (First link is to Grauniad summary article; original scientific paper is here.)

    774:

    Mine is into fibre arts (spinning, weaving, dying) and goes to St. Hilda's.

    776:

    Tom M @ 694: The SCOTUS electors decision may have made the most sense, avoiding potential chaos around the presidential election. It's also directly contradictory to the intention behind creating the whole clunky elector system in the first place. Originally, electors were supposed to be trusted members of the community who took the vote tally under advisement in deciding who should be president.

    You got that much right. The rest is just malarkey.

    777:

    How do you add an avatar image? I see a couple of people have avatars (besides OGH).

    I have a small, icon sized JPEG that I think fits my personality & would NOT be in any way offensive. I'd like to use it as an avatar instead of that shadowy silhouette.

    But I haven't been able to figure out how to do it.

    778:

    ChrisJ Covid-19 can cause terrifying (and potentially permanent) brain/neurological problems weeks or months after infection, BoZo the not-so-funny clown? Even compared to previously, he seems to be flopping around with no coherent message or consistency at all - can't even keep his lies striaght. For instance, he's been Mayor of London, he knows perfectly well that "driverless trains" are a non-starter for the Tube, yet he suddenly pops up with this repeated lie & apparently expects to geta away with it. Makes Scummings grip seem even more scary.

    779:

    whitroth @ 697: *sigh*
    "Race"

    So, let me break into these looong posts to ask one simple question: is a standard poodle a different race than a chihuahua?

    If I understand the TL;DR, the answer is no. Dog breeds are not an analog for "race".

    "Race" appears to be a pseudo-science construct. The actual genetic differences between us upon which some people base the idea of race amount to NOTHING.

    I read somewhere that the physical characteristics that differentiate the various "races" amount to less than 0.1% of our DNA. And that we share 96% of our DNA with chimpanzees1. You may, in fact, actually be "a monkey's uncle" [BIG smiley]

    1 It may be more or less than 96%, but that's the number I remember reading somewhere.

    780:

    Gilead approaching Rigged US Supreme judgement. Presume this could be overturned by subsequent act of Congress if Biden wins?

    JBS "Race" is sometimes used as a synonym for "partial sub-species" in bird identification. Which can be very confusing

    781:

    SFReader @ 698:

    Re: ' ... the contact tracing of which was I'm sure a series of uncomfortable conversations.'

    Not into strip clubs but assume that like most other businesses, they and their staff would prefer tap & pay credit/debit card payments. If yes, then it should be easy to do contact tracing just by looking at the retailer's/bar's transactions. Same for tracing most adults' movements: just look at their debit/credit card transactions.

    You need dollar bills to tuck into the G-string ... or so I've been told.

    Having to wear a credit/debit card terminal there would surely spoil the effect. Although, I guess a strategically placed QR code tattoo might work.

    782:

    I do understand that already. I was hoping the original poster could provide links.

    783:

    Robert Prior @ 699:

    I do use the comment blocker & unless she(?) has a new alias I haven't recognized she hasn't been around that much in this thread.

    When I posted that there were about 30 posts in a few hours (plus some replies), coming in bursts of half a dozen in 10-15 minutes.

    They then vanished — both Seagull posts and replies to the Seagull. No idea why (as I block), but if you're curious I'm certain David, Greg, or Moz could explain.

    Thanks. I didn't check in here for a day or two while I was doing some work & I figure they must have all come and gone while I was away.

    784:

    Short update, the situation has cleared up, I'm going to stay till the end of August, and she asked me if I want some of the food she cooked.

    Err, I guess both sides overreacted somewhat, I'll have to analyze some of the happenings.

    As for moving out, it suits me, I get real unemployment now, and I want to meet some old friends; I'd camp in the garden of my parents; somebody there to do the shopping for them. ;)

    785:

    I believe it's 98.5 % shared DNA with chimpanzees.

    786:

    Trottelreiner @ 741:

    Dog breeds, in contrast, are inbred populations that have been specifically selected for an exact standard set of traits, and mostly in the last century or two, and which probably won't last much longer.

    I'm tempted to make comments about the usual people droning on about race, but actually in most cases if you go back a little their background may be more varied than mine.

    Passing was quite a thing back in the day, and it would be quite funny if some of the alt-right people had some, err, Portuguese or like ancestry, err.

    I still remember back when the mini-series "Roots" was on TV here in the U.S. Tracing your genealogy became a big fad.

    A couple of people I knew tried it and were unhappy with what they found out.

    787:

    Tracing your genealogy became a big fad. ... A couple of people I knew tried it and were unhappy with what they found out.

    I don't know if they do much business in the EU or other parts of the world but the DNA analysis consumer oriented firms in the US had to staff up their customer service lines as things got going. Seems they were getting a lot of calls along the lines of:

    "What do you mean he's not my brother..." and even better "What do you mean she's my half sister..." and even better/worse that those.

    788:

    Troutwaxer Or, in DJT's case 99.95%

    David L VERY old joke about that .... Smallish boy finds old lamp, polishes it, Djinn appears ... one of the wishes is:" I hate my father, he's cruel, can you make hin die?" Djinn grants wish ... Next morning the milkman is found dead on the doorstep ....

    789:

    Covid-19 Phase 3 trial volunteers in the US.

    https://www.coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org/

    This link came from a Washington Post article about how the various trial are coordinating volunteer recruiting.

    790:

    Interesting. Half price dining out in the UK this fall. Maybe.

    Businesses in the U.K. will receive £1,000 ($1254.55) bonuses per furloughed worker brought back to work retained through January earning at least £520 per month.

    Finance Minister Rishi Sunak announced a 50% discount for citizens to eat out from Monday to Wednesday through the month of August, in a bid to get the hospitality industry back up and running

    The government unveiled a £2 billion “kickstart scheme” aimed at subsidizing six-month work placements for people aged 16-24 who are at risk of long-term unemployment.

    Sunak also announced a temporary holiday from the property tax known as stamp duty for properties worth up to £500,000 in a bid to stimulate the property market.

    At times a nation wide policy does make sense.

    792:

    No, it is not. It has meant "A group of people, animals, or plants, connected by common descent or origin" since before 1547, and was originally used by anthropologists in a genuinely scientific sense, now proven to be completely erroneous. Unfortunately, the bigots got hold of it almost immediately, and it has been abused to justify bigotry and worse ever since. I agree that 90% of its usage is pseudo-scientific garbage.

    As Greg Tingey points out, it is is still in use today in several sciences (including botany) to indicate a taxon below subspecies. Anthropologists and sociologists now use the terms "subpopulation" or "ethnicity" to refer to the scientific construct, because of its dog-whistle effect, but those are the same concept.

    793:

    Race is an absurdity. I really like the example used above of Barack Obama being 50% 'White', it helped me rethink my own stupid assumptions.

    I think there is great potential in genetics for developing therapy for a great many ailments and issues. Any number of promising drugs have 'failed' trials because while they worked wonderfully for some, they killed others.

    If genetic sequencing can reliably identify who fits which group it can help expand the range of treatment options dramatically. From what my cancer scientist friend tells me this has become a very rich mine for medical research in the last 10 years. (There may also be some application for other ailments such as Covid or syphilis or whatever). I know in my personal experience I have worked on remote jobsites in Northern BC and Alberta where contaminated water supply meant that every single person caught Giardia (Beaver Fever), and the responses ranged on a curve from hospitalization to feeling a bit queasy for a couple of hours. Luckily for me I was on the mild discomfort side of the curve.

    Skin colour is only one trivial aspect of gene expression where correlation is highly unlikely to equal causation. It's just a lazy way to take shortcuts to fit cultural or personal assumptions. 100 years ago it was appalling, now it remains appalling but has also become embarrassing with the obvious progress made in scientific understanding on so very many fronts.

    Interpretation of medical results with a 'race' lens is comparable to measuring time with a thermometer. Occasionally the numbers might match up but any further interpretation or extrapolation is stupid at best and intentionally evil at worst.

    Richard Prior #773 Mine also (knitting, sewing), does not go to church but volunteers heavily.

    794:

    EC Thanks for the clarification. Here's an example

    795:

    Race doesn't get used much in botany, because we've got phylogenetics that make statements about ancestry more quantifiable.

    Furthermore, botanists treat variety and subspecies as effectively synonyms. Cultivar generally means a clone via a cutting, so it's genetically more-or-less a single individual.

    Now, getting to the question of dog breeds versus human races: dog breeds are inbred populations set to specific standards.Canis familiaris or Canis lupus ssp. familiaris) also has a lot of individuals that are not in breeds. They're known , among other things as mutts. Now, we could treat humans as we treat dogs, but that's generally considered illegal. If we, say, forced people with growth hormone issues to breed with each other, and selected their blue-eyed children and made sure only they got to breed, that's the kind of thing that gets done to dogs.

    Humans don't tolerate inbreeding all that well (cf the Habsburg jaw theory). Actually, dogs don't either, which is why most dog breeds don't last all that long. Probably some of the dogs that are common today (some bulldog breeds) will be gone in a century or less, because they have a lot of trouble even breeding.

    Human races are not based on inbreeding, their criteria are much more subjective and labile, and they've been around for a bit longer: millennia, likely longer.

    If we wanted to define "races" in dogs, we could do things like: --Classify all dogs with coats that do not contain more than a little white, but do contain "medium brown" to black as a dog race. "Medium" is highly subjective as is "a little," but you know it when you see it. --We could classify all dogs with curly tails as a race. How curly does a curly tail have to be fit? You'll know it when you see it. Except if the dog has too much dark brown or black in its coat, in which case it's in the first race. --Dogs with pure light brown, tan, gray, or white coats are in a race by themselves. Having more than a little black in their coat disqualifies them, as does having too curly a tail. What counts as more than a little or too curly? Again, it's subjective.

    And so on.

    796:

    At times a nation wide policy does make sense.

    I swear they're trying to murder us.

    (Yet again they're prioritizing economic activity over public safety. NB: if this subsidy applies to take-away orders from restaurants then fine, I'll take maximum advantage of it! But I'm not going to sit down in a cramped, ill-ventilated space with unmasked strangers for over an hour.)

    797:

    It is used, however - e.g. the forms of Viscum album that grow on different hosts are often referred to as races. And, while some botanists use variety and subspecies as interchangeable, others don't - Wikipedia describes the confusion:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_%28botany%29

    Unfortunately, botanical taxonomy is far more a religion with feuding sects than a science!

    798:

    EC Don't! Oh the evil horrible "Spanish" bluebell & the wonderful native "British" bluebell ... that interbreed quite freely ....

    799:

    I agree. The UK system seems to have locked in the current government for another 4 years unless there's a revolt of MPs. (I get the impression here that a revolt isn't likely until Labour becomes a less chaotic party.)

    Interestingly there's a WaPo article contrasting poll results this week and statements by the Texas representatives in Congress. Texans seem to be more and more taking things seriously. Those in Congress not so much unless it's about money. With only 4 months to go before the elections we might have an earthquake. And it would one indeed if more than a trivial number of those staunchly R Texans went D.

    Over here there's this big call for schools to reopen. Kid's don't get sick. Right? Of course the teachers are not happy AT ALL.

    800:

    What more often happens in a voters revolt is that core supporters stay home. This happened to HRC in 2016, enough to lose key states.

    It happened in Alberta 2 elections ago, when the local Tories had comprehensively failed to deal with or prepare for the collapse in the speculative boom in global oil prices. Sadly, their long nightmare of competent governance ended within a single election.

    801:

    This is one where I disagree with Wikipedia, and I've taught this stuff. I've never seen "X ssp. y var. yz." While there's no pattern to it, some genera get varieties, some get subspecies, and a few get both.

    And it's not a religion, especially now with phylogenetics: it's hypothesis-driven.

    For example, English mistletoe is Viscum album L. What that means is that person L. (in this case, Linnaeus) described a group of plants in the mistletoe genus (Viscum) as part of a unique species (album), and no one has seen fit to dispute this since.

    That's the second part: priority. Linnaeus gets first priority by fiat, and no species name prior to Linnaeus counts. However, researchers can and do contest and modify what any other researcher, from Linnaeus onwards, meant when he created a scientific name.

    To continue the example, if the noted botanist Charles Stross wants to split out a population of Viscum album L. because they're tetraploid and can't interbreed with other mistletoes, they could be called, for example, Viscum album L. var. howardii Stross. This means that the botanist Charles Stross published a description of this tetraploid mistletoe in a reputable journal,* designated a type specimen as the type for the species, and named it after his friend Bob Howard, because he couldn't name it after himself.

    Now if another botanist thinks that V. a. ssp. howardii is bunk because Stross screwed up the chromosome count, he could publish a paper making this subspecies synonymous with the original name and stating his reasons why. And if it turns out that Stross was right and the other guy never learned the old art of the chromosome squashed and relied on a faulty DNA metric, then it the Stross hypothesis gets resurrected and the name gets used again.

    But the names, especially under cladistics, are hypotheses about how the diversity in nature is grouped. The rules are arcane to outsiders, but they give researchers ways to talk about different hypotheses without getting totally mixed up.

    *There's actually a fairly notorious case in herpetology of an Australian snake wrangler who got his jollies renaming stuff, like rattlesnakes and cobras (neither of which are native to Australia), in his self-published scientific journals. And unfortunately, some bureaucrats who were relatively unfamiliar with the science but responsible for conservation of sensitive species took his work seriously. The growing nomenclatural chaos was hindering legitimate work. IIRC the International Union of Zoological Nomenclature took the unusual step of Hosing out all this dude's proposed scientific names and refusing to accept more, because otherwise he was generating what was basically taxonomic spam. I'm not posting his name because IIRC he was known to be a bit of a troublemaker.

    802:

    To add to and clarify my comment above.

    Race is a !scientific! absurdity. It is and has been a cultural reality, in that our cultures have created and maintained race as a tool for identification, exclusion and oppression.

    Some of the comments in this thread and others are testaments to the persistence of the notion that race tells us ANYTHING other than skin pigmentation about another human being.

    803:

    Some poll results from the article.

    Trump can holler at states to reopen schools, but 65 percent of Texans — not some wacky fringe of the left — say it is not safe to send children back now. Nearly two-thirds of Texans say they leave home only when they “absolutely have to,” while 81 percent say they wear masks outside when in contact with others.

    And I'll be there in a couple of weeks. [eyeroll]

    804:

    I swear they're trying to murder us.

    (Yet again they're prioritizing economic activity over public safety. NB: if this subsidy applies to take-away orders from restaurants then fine, I'll take maximum advantage of it! But I'm not going to sit down in a cramped, ill-ventilated space with unmasked strangers for over an hour.)

    It is for eat in - and is just further evidence that the world has not changed as a result of Covid but that the same people are still in charge behind the scenes, and they have forced most governments around the world to pivot from early promises as government debt has yet again been thrown up as a major danger and that we must return the economies back to normal as soon as possible regardless of what Covid does and the resulting death toll and left behind people who face lifetime side effects of Covid.

    805:

    For instance, he's been Mayor of London, he knows perfectly well that "driverless trains" are a non-starter for the Tube, yet he suddenly pops up with this repeated lie & apparently expects to geta away with it.

    More likely a scrap thrown to "traditional" members of the Conservative Party to help them accept the damage being done to the budget, with added union bashing for the win. In other words, more likely yet another indication Boris's base of power is weakening.

    Rigged US Supreme judgement. Presume this could be overturned by subsequent act of Congress if Biden wins?

    Not rigged - a 7-2 decision so even 2 nominally DNC judges agreed with it.

    As for Biden overturning, depends on what exactly the judgement says. If it is to be overturned it would need to be done in a way that goes around whatever reasoning was used for today's decision which may not be easy.

    More importantly (if problematic for those who have lost birth control coverage) Biden is going to have a full plate of stuff to attempt to deal with if he wins and this may not be high enough up the priority list.

    806:

    Probably the simplest solution is Medicaid for all, and it includes contraceptive coverage.

    The only reason I bring this up, other than that it's sort of an American version of the otherwise normal notion of universal healthcare, is that if the economy tanks still further, if we desperately need people to have health insurance so that getting Covid19 doesn't also bankrupt them and/or the hospital if they require months of care to survive, then it may make sense for the government to New Deal the health care system and progressively nationalize it. It will require a big lift, as there are a lot of millionaires and billionaires in the healthcare system who've been arbitraging its inefficiencies to make their politically active fortunes. But if the rest of the economy is tanking while the Insurance Bros make out like bandits, they may end up getting treated like bandits to save the rest of the economy.

    At least, that's one possibility I see.

    807:

    There is a lot of information if you google "genetic diversity africa". Here is some info for a start:

    Africans are more genetically diverse than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined, according to a sweeping study that carried researchers into remote regions to sample the bloodlines of more than 100 distinct populations. ... Her team looked at 98 African Americans from North Carolina, Baltimore, Chicago and Pittsburgh. The researchers determined that, on average, 71 percent of their genes could be traced to the far-flung African linguistic group Niger-Kordofanian, 8 percent to other African groups and 13 percent to Europe, with a smattering of genetic markers pointing to other places on the globe.

    But the percentages vary widely from individual to individual. In a conference call with reporters, Tishkoff said the 13 percent figure for European genetic markers may be a slight underestimate; other studies have found numbers closer to 20 percent. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043002485.html

    African Americans can trace most of their ancestry to speakers of the Niger-Kordofanian language family originating from a vast swath of west Africa In light of the genetic and clinical evidence, placing a black HIV-positive US resident who has a non-Niger-Kordofanian ethnic background—such as, for instance, an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants from the horn of Africa—in the same ethnic category as descendents of American slaves of west African ancestry might be scientifically and clinically misleading. www.nature.com/articles/nrneph.2009.202

    808:

    Re: 'Having to wear a credit/debit card terminal there would surely spoil the effect.'

    Maybe not ... Just have the card reader at every table with a light that blinks a special color or code whenever a patron taps on a 'tip'.

    What would probably be a worse fun spoiler is having to tell patrons that because heavy breathing and shouts of 'take it off' produces more aerosols, it is banned. So a work-around for this problem would have to be found, like maybe each client-table gets its own air circulation/filtration system. But that would mean that stag party participants would be separated from each other - and what fun is that! And so on. After a while virtual reality parties would probably look good in comparison.

    809:

    Quoth Greg, re Bozo the "PM"

    For instance, he's been Mayor of London, he knows perfectly well that "driverless trains" are a non-starter for the Tube, yet he suddenly pops up with this repeated lie & apparently expects to geta away with it.

    You're assuming that he actually paid some attention to the job back then, rather than just being surrounded by competent people he wasn't allowed to fire?

    Part of the problem with Johnson finally achieving his dream and becoming emperor of manPM is that for the first time he's in a position where he actually can fire everyone he doesn't like. He doesn't like competent people (they show him up), so everyone who could protect us from him and Cummings (who I see has given himself oversight of our military and intelligence agencies despite explicitly failing clearance) has to go. (Is it the whole problem? Absolutely not. The largest part? Still probably not. But a major issue that would be having horrific effects even if everything else about him were fine? Yup, very much so.)

    810:

    You know, after I moved my late ex up to Chicago, it was as though she was deliberately trying to cut me off from my friends there - she'd get seriously drunk, then, esp. at home, accuse them of being drunks, ho's, etc.

    The fact that you appear to be utterly unwilling to try to rephrase what you're saying, and insted attacking me as being a drunk, reminds me of that. You seem to be denying even the slightest possibility that what you wrote did not convey what you intended well, and left me infuriated, seems to not be in your script.

    But then, yuo did say that you and someone helped keep the liquor store in business.

    PIty.

    811:

    Ah, yes, "part Black" is "Black".

    Y'know, I find it interesting that Pure Aryan, er, White genes are so recessive that one Black grandparent makes yuo Black ("an octoroon"), but one "white" grandparent doesn't make you "white".

    Oh, and the amount of DNA we share with chimps, if you refer to the Orange Hairball, I think you're insulting chips. I mean, a million chimps, given enough time and typewriters, will do up Shakespeare's plays. A million Hairballs, on the other hand, will never manage that....

    812:

    "It's just a lazy way to take shortcuts to fit cultural or personal assumptions. 100 years ago it was appalling, now it remains appalling but has also become embarrassing with the obvious progress made in scientific understanding on so very many fronts."

    I realise your comment was not a reply to me, but since I was responsible for some of the initial development of the topic I feel I need to repeat yet again a very important point which people don't seem to be able to read, in the (faint) hope that if I point out that that's what I'm doing just maybe it might not be immediately ignored and forgotten.

    As far as I am concerned what you are talking about there is not race. It's a load of stupid bollocks that people have attached to the concept of race in the context of human races. I don't call it race. I call it very rude things. It can get fucked.

    I do not subscribe to the "humans are special" school of thought (except in their capacity for culturally-preserved systematic stupidity and similar). Humans are just one of many species and follow the same biological patterns; there is no special exclusion for the human species in the rules of biology beyond what is implied by the definition of a species.

    Genetic differentiation does not stop at the level of "species". It continues right down to the level of individuals. The lower you go, the more difficult categorisation becomes because the amount of data required shoots up while our ability to collect it hits the deck, and more and more workarounds of dubious reliability have to be used to substitute. And below species level you are dealing with populations and individuals that are all able to interbreed if they meet, so everything becomes a lot more fuzzy and fluid. Accordingly, the categorisation is less formal, less well defined, and needs to take account of indefinite amounts of mixing and overlap.

    Race is nothing more than fuzzy and not very formal categorisation used for some part of the range below sub-species but larger than individual families. It is no different (other than in scale and the consequences thereof) from categorisations used over the rest of the range, all the way from "family history of berrolytic goberoplasm" to "eukaryote" and beyond.

    I am not going to pretend that the human species is, uniquely, inherently indescribable by any categorisation in that range, because that is patently nonsense. There are races of other species and there are races of the human species, because species are not uniform and localised variations in the gene pool are universal. (For sure they get mixed. That's how the whole "life" thing works.)

    What the human species does uniquely do is devise predictive principles of the quality "if you are born when Mentula is in the constellation of Puta you will have three arses", believe in them fanatically in despite of the total absence of any instances of polyarsism at all ever, and invent test conditions based on their own species' races. Not to the races of other species, just their own. That's not race, that's bleeding stupidity.

    I am not going to pretend the human species doesn't have races because it does have bleeding stupidity.

    I am certainly not going to use the term "race" as if it means "bleeding stupidity". That's just even more stupidity and makes things even worse by normalising confusion.

    I would also like to add that one of the things that pisses me off about this shit is that when there is a genuine scientific result that is correlated with human race, it gets swept under the carpet because of bleeding stupidity. Someone mentioned further up that almost all African Americans are deficient in vitamin D. It is natural to suppose that this result probably is not limited exclusively to within the borders of the US. This is important. It must have been known about for quite a while, because it takes time to acquire and validate data over such a wide area. Yet it seems to have taken a global plague before anyone even noticed, and nobody, I think, who's mentioned it in that context has also mentioned any official action relating to it being included in anti-plague measures.

    That's a topical example, but similar results crop up from time to time in normal conditions, and since they generally don't involve an immediate risk of acute death there's not enough importance to get people to focus their minds on the actual problem even to the limited extent of the vitamin D example. So you get consequences of the form of "all people with Indian ancestry in the UK are at increased risk of protulaemia but nothing is done because blah blah blah Indian blah blah it's wacist".

    813:

    I believe the SCOTUS decision said the Trump Administration was allowed to make a change to the policy, not that they were required to, so Biden could reverse it if he wanted to.

    814:

    ...and now I see that someone has posted an actual example of what I'm complaining about in the last paragraph while I was composing my own post. How's that for a coincidence.

    815:

    I thought one-quarter black was a "quadroon," and one-eighth was an "octoroon," and there was also a word for one-sixteenth, but I forgot what that one was.

    But yes, it's amazing how fragile whiteness is...

    816:

    You could be right, I forget the technical terms from the Confederacy....

    But maybe we need a reservation for Pure Aryans, and tourist buses, with signs "please do not breed with the natives".

    817:

    Oh lordy. This is the approach of looking at a sweater, and insisting that there are fractally smaller and smaller swathes of knit that can be distinguished as subsweaters.

    The metaphor is deliberate. Species boundaries are variable, but most are pretty strong. For example, even if it was legal and ethical to mix the eggs and sperm of a human and a chimpanzee, the resulting individual would not be fertile, because chimps and humans have differing numbers of chromosomes. Hence, even though the sequences that make up those chromosomes are quite similar, we're different species because of how the DNA is organized.

    When you get within one interbreeding species, the tree image disappears, because you've got individuals interbreeding, not a stem that's isolated from other stems. That's where the whole theory of human races falls apart: We interbreed. If you look at the weave, it turns out that you can't chop out a chunk and say it's a separate subspecies, or even a separate race. That's why Obama's such a good example: he's of one category, but genetically he's woven into the fabric and not apart from it.

    This is wildly different than species that have good subspecies. Those subspecies may interbreed on occasion, but generally they're isolated enough that they seldom do. And if they do interbreed normally, the subspecies get thrown out and the species gets redefined as highly variable and polymorphic.

    So no, I'm not treating humans any differently than I treat other species. All I'm asking you to do is to stop assuming that races are good categories for categorizing human genetic variation. They. Are. Not. I'm trying to avoid using racist in this discussion, but it's getting harder.

    818:

    Oh, after I hit enter, I amused myself by noting that unlike them, I could legitimately claim to be caucasian, given that all four of my grandparents came to the US from closer to the Caucuses Mountains than any of their ancestors have been in 500 or 1000 years....

    I do, however, prefer "beige", or "salmon" if I must, not being an albino.

    819:

    I simply don't have time to go through this in any detail and it would serve little purpose. You are misrepresenting my statements to a certain extent and I'll give the benefit of the doubt that it's in good faith and not deliberate.

    On stability in dog breeds: that's incorrect. Even just breeding among other Great Danes or Poodles or Chihuahuas will converge toward a dog that is around 10-15kg and resembles a dingo or basenji. The maintenance of dog breeds as most of us know them, kennel club rules included, is actually a very active task focused on selection to traits that align with the documented breed standard, which is the sort of ideological content I referred to above.

    The premise is that dogs, while interbreedable with wolves and technically the same species, diverged a long time ago in the genetic record (there have been mDNA studies) and much of that time is thought to have involved "pre-adaptation" that preceded any domestication that occurred under the conscious agency of humans. Dogs are descended from animals that followed nomadic human populations around, didn't interbreed with local wolves and gradually became more adapted to being around humans through natural selection.

    In contrast wolf behaviours include things that make it really hard to see them brought into a domestic context. Female wolves, for instance, even where they may have bonded with a male human handler from a very young age, have a pattern of biting their male handlers on the genitals hard enough to require hospitalisation. Ray Coppinger, who wrote a pop-sci survey book across the current state of knowledge around 20 years ago, suggested this could be a show stopper "even for a bunch of hairy guys with clubs". Therefore the "self domestication" theory has a lot of credibility.

    In general: I support a fact based world view. We are disputing facts, not some sort of ideology that denies them. There are different ways to account for observed phenomena and insisting that they relate to a specific abstract concept, one that has an identifiable historical location, is not itself fact based. My insistence that certain abstract concepts are inherently bound to their specific social, cultural or historical contexts does not make those concepts not "real" in the way you characterise above. We learn more about what we are doing when we consider what our frame of reference looks like from outside it (even while we perhaps can't really understand a perspective that omits our prejudices).

    It might help to talk briefly about Plato. Platonic forms are supposed to be timeless, that is that even while abstract they existed long before and will exist long after any human thought of them. Geometrical concepts are like that: there will always be triangles, cubes, spheres and tesseracts. However Plato would claim that the concepts of tables and chairs (their "ideal forms") are like that too. Now no-one would deny that a square or a cube is a real thing, though some may struggle with the idea that it is an abstract concept which can be instantiated in a real world object (rather than simply a description for a real world object). No-one would deny that a chair is a real thing either, or that when you say "that chair" you are referring to a specific object, but when you say "a chair" when there are none in the room you are referring to an abstract class of "chairs". I'm not sure everyone would agree that this implies that the abstract class of chairs is timeless, that it existed before humans thought of it and will exist long after humans have gone, given that chairs are human artefacts. As an aside, it's worth considering how we might build a relational or object-oriented data model for a chair. Does our model express cultural assumptions about attributes a chair must have or can have, and how it interacts with other furniture. Are chair legs separate entities, does the count of legs fall into a uniform range that covers all known chairs, etc.

    Similarly consider the concept of race, both your narrow version that as you say is limited to observable phenomena and the broader sense I'm referring to that adds the cultural baggage - that is the assumptions and the attitudes of all the bigots who apply things to the concept that mere observation can't possible bring. We know the narrow version was used simply taxonomically in certain disciplines and that version of the concept still has a place (although it's usually referred to as subpopulation now). However it's worth acknowledge how limited that is and how it doesn't really relate to the broader version (in fact there is a high risk it would be treated as synonymous with the broader version and used in bad faith). Whatever, you can't say that either version is timeless. It's the concept of a chair rather than the concept of a circle. Maybe you do want to say that you think the narrow version is like the concept of a circle. The point is that it's a taxonomic abstraction and not something emergent from the observable reality on its own. If you think it is emergent from the observable reality on its own, then the real question is "why".

    820:

    Those subspecies may interbreed on occasion

    Am I right to suspect that you get non-transitive fertile offspring pairings? Species A can produce fertile offspring with species B, B with C, but not A with B?

    821:

    Goshdarnit! A with C, grr. Brainfart.

    Those subspecies may interbreed on occasion

    Am I right to suspect that you get non-transitive fertile offspring pairings? Species A can produce fertile offspring with species B, B with C, but not A with C?

    822:

    As I said... I don't refer to partly-black people in such words because of what my social experience informs me what they are likely to think about it. A lot of people (in the UK at least, which is what I'm familiar with) apply the "part => whole" logic to themselves, with pride. It's a sort of "fuck you white oppressors, I'm not like you, I'm BLACK" thing. I can dig that, and I'm quite happy to call them what they want to be called. And people who don't follow that line mostly don't really care, so if I don't know them, it's a safe default option.

    823:

    there was also a word for one-sixteenth

    Presumably sexteen :)

    824:

    Btw, thanks for the link. I'm really enjoying the comic.

    825:

    On a different topic, UK people might see more masks in their future. (I hope so, and yay Scotland 10 July!) Compact (and still long) summary of some of the available evidence on masks/face coverings vs SARS-CoV-2: Report on Face Masks for the General Public - An Update (Royal Society DELVE Initiative, Jul 7, 2020, Paul Edelstein, Lalita Ramakrishnan) Worth reading IMO, and perhaps forwarding to mask skeptics/anti-maskers. Point 5 of 5 in the summary, bold mine: 5. While the UK government has mandated wearing of masks on public transport and in healthcare settings, it has not mandated mask use in other settings where the risk of transmission is high, such as in shops and close-quarter workplaces. This is concerning at a time when lockdown is being ended and the 2m distancing rule is being relaxed. The accumulated evidence warrants urgent reconsideration of government policy on masks. Mandatory use of masks or shields in all situations outside the home where physical distancing is not possible will help to counterbalance the expected increase in population-level exposure as lockdown ends.

    The summaries are accurate for the papers that I've read. (I'll be reading some of the other refs.)

    826:

    I never have, either. As you may have guessed, it's an insanely stupid categorization. and, IMO, demonstrates an AMAZING insecurity by the classifier.

    827:

    I went and looked it up. It was a little more complicated:

    Mulatto: All people of mixed race (as used on the census) and also people with 1/2 Black ancestry and 1/2 White ancestry.

    Quadroon: One European grandparent.

    Octoroon: One European great-grandparent. Also terceroon and mustee.

    Quintoon: One European great-great-grandparent. Also mustefino and hexadecaroon were used. (Hexadecaroon is a fun word to say, I think because it is both mathematical and rhythmic, but probably not a good word to use where others can hear you.)

    There were also special words for people who were 3/8, 3/4, 7/8 and so forth... The whole set of naming conventions is part of the system of "hypodescent" which means (as someone said above) that the race of a mixed child is assigned to the race which the dominant race sees as subordinate.

    828:

    I'm a big "Girls With Slingshots" fan. I wish she'd write more comics.

    829:

    The statue-removal movement has reached Sweden too, but gone a bit overboard due to a relative shortage of slave owners and war criminals. There is a push to remove the statues of Linnaeus since he attributed different temperaments to different races. However, he did not make any value judgements beyond temperaments.

    Also, of the four putative races, Linnaeus put the (Indian) Americans first in the list, not something a white supremacist is likely to have done. Finally, he stated all humans are one species, not something all people of the 18th century accepted. So we have some wankers who are into virtue signalling without doing their homework.

    The real baddies are back at the 17th centuries and earlier, and are usually not well enough known to arouse passions.

    830:

    APoT 730: What do you want? Ask nicely. You'd be amazed at the effects.

    (Not Moz) These have been on my mind: - Render global heating denialist propaganda/etc impotent at dampening mitigation responses to global heating.
    With low collateral damage; no nuclear war or whatever, and nation state actors involved could have their current governments replaced. - Mid (ASAP) term, humans need to break out of carbon lock-in.

    831:

    Moz @ 819 Ever heard of "Ring Species" ??? That is exactly what you are talking about - see "Larus" gulls for instance. From Lesser B;ack-backs ... all the way around the planet until you get to Herring Gulls, back in Britain .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species Needless to say, somoene is now disputing this ....

    833:

    Well, Trump's time as President has claimed another victim.

    The CDC has caved and will redo it's guidelines for the opening of schools to suit Trumps demand that schools reopen in the fall so he can pretend the US is back to normal

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/08/pence-cdc-changing-coronavirus-school-guidelines-after-trump-attack/5398493002/

    834:

    "That's where the whole theory of human races falls apart: We interbreed."

    I know that. All races interbreed, not just human ones. I specifically covered that point. I also specifically said that I'm not thinking in the same terms as of a sub-species, that that refers to a higher level of organisation. It's lower level and a lot less well defined precisely because there isn't an interbreeding barrier to stop things getting mixed up.

    "If you look at the weave, it turns out that you can't chop out a chunk and say it's a separate subspecies, or even a separate race."

    So it's a context-dependent heap-of-sand problem. You come across those all the time when you're categorising things.

    "All I'm asking you to do is to stop assuming that races are good categories for categorizing human genetic variation. They. Are. Not."

    They're not good categories for categorising any species's genetic variation. They are a category which originates in genetic variation, and are sufficiently well defined in terms of genetic variation that you can devise genetic tests to determine racial composition to at least some scientifically defensible level of confidence. That doesn't mean that the definition is an unrestrictedly reversible function which you can just turn back to front and say "this broad category implies these specific genes". A many-to-one mapping is not the same thing as one-to-many.

    Oh, and I know you can't just devise one single genetic test and keep it for all time. I've mentioned impermanence already, but it seems I have to mention everything at least twice.

    "I'm trying to avoid using racist in this discussion, but it's getting harder."

    Then perhaps you should try actually fucking reading my posts and not repeatedly coming back with objections based on points I have already covered, and then covered again because they weren't fucking read the first time round, etc.

    Have I at any point tried to excuse prejudice? Or have I instead been explicit that it can get fucked, and also that even if there did eventuate a genuinely valid scientific result with negative implications towards some race it still would absolutely not in any way constitute a licence for prejudice?

    I'm talking about a pure category definition, which has meaning for any species. The stupid fucking shite that humans associate with it when it concerns their own species is not part of the category definition. It's an idiotic misapplication of the categorisation, which has no scientific basis in large part because it doesn't even fucking understand what kind of thing it's even purporting to apply.

    They are two entirely separate things of entirely different kinds and it makes no sense to conflate the two. Like a spider web with a piece of shit in it. This is right back to the "bullshit question" thing, where I thought we had finally got it clear that just because it's easy to do bullshit things with a question doesn't mean the question itself is bullshit, nor that it isn't possible to do other things with it that are not bullshit... but apparently not.

    But no matter how explicit I am that I am talking only about one of those two entirely separate kinds of things, it seems that everyone responding insists not only on conflating them but on viewing the piece of shit as the primary defining item and the spider web as nothing more than some kind of addendum or adjunct. (Which is really silly.) And then responding to me as if I too was actually talking about the piece of shit. When I have repeatedly pointed out that I am talking about the spider web. The piece of shit is NOT THE SAME THING. It's not even the same fucking kind of thing. One is a support structure and the other is a piece of shit.

    When I was at school we used to get these exercises called "English comprehension". A few pages out of some book followed by ten questions about their content, questions of mindbuggering triviality which I invariably answered as fast as I could write the answers down and got all ten of them right. We got them for years and years and they never got any harder as we got older; they were so trivial I never understood how anyone could get anything wrong. I was never entirely sure why they were so persistent in trying to teach us this. I've got a better idea now.

    So basically fuck this topic because otherwise it's just going to turn this entire comment thread into an endless succession of "not Y because of X"/"no, I covered X three times already" and even the people who are claiming to be reading it patently are just passing their eyes over the words and then inventing a supposed position for me based on shit I'm not talking about.

    835:

    "I swear they're trying to murder us."

    That was exactly the sense I made of that nationwide policy too. Which is par for the course, and they're not even being subtle about it... because what can we do?

    Lucky for those on here who are American, at least you guys have got an election coming up.

    836:

    I'm talking about a pure category definition

    Yes. But you're using language straight out of some of the nastier parts of human politics/history, and you're being very strident about it.

    You don't have to like that nasty people have tainted your "pure category definition", but it might behove you to accept it. When you find yourself using the same language to define the same concepts as people who built on those exact things to commit genocide... it might be time to think about why it's so important to you to do that.

    837:

    I'd never happened across ring species before either, but that is fascinating. Thanks for posting.

    838:

    First, here's the American Association of Physical Anthrpology's 2019 statement on race and racism. It's obviously been updated from the 1996 version I used it Hot Earth Dreams back in 2015. Can we accept that these are among the experts on the study of human variation?

    https://physanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/

    Some quotes:

    From the Executive Summary:

    "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination. It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination. Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences."

    From the Introduction

    "The concept of race has developed hand-in-hand with racist ideologies over the last five centuries, and biological anthropology has played an important role in the creation and perpetuation of both the race concept and racist ideologies. Racist political doctrines should not receive support from scientific endeavors, but in practice racism has been co-constructed with inaccurate depictions of human variation provided by scientists. Over our history, the AAPA, and many of its members, have been complicit in producing and reifying racist ideologies via the misuse, falsification, or biased production of scientific information. We acknowledge this history and stress that we should not paper over it even as we seek to end these practices and prevent the reemergence of misconceptions about race in the future.

    "While science is often represented as objective, apolitical, and unbiased, many ostensibly biological concepts of race have cultural stereotypes, biases, and ethnocentric views embedded within them. We acknowledge that outdated and inaccurate ideas about race, and racism, still inform scientific research today, and are sometimes embedded in what otherwise appears to be “modern,” technologically-advanced science. We stand against such practices."

    So I'm very sorry, but to quote you: "But no matter how explicit I am that I am talking only about one of those two entirely separate kinds of things, it seems that everyone responding insists not only on conflating them but on viewing the piece of shit as the primary defining item and the spider web as nothing more than some kind of addendum or adjunct."

    There is only the shit. And you're defending it. Please read the entire AAPA statement before you reply.

    839:

    he knows perfectly well that "driverless trains" are a non-starter for the Tube,
    Uh, why?

    840:

    There is a simple way of cutting through a lot of this stuff about race. The word has a common plain English meaning, and it is that meaning (and all the explicit and implicit inferences from it) which is a socially constructed piece of abominable shite. That means, if you want to discus genetic differences between between different human lineages you should not ever refer to them as having to do with race, otherwise you are mixing potential arguments about medicine and the like with mythologising bullshit. Otherwise, even if you have some sensible points they will coloured by an INEVITABLE association with racist crap. 'Inevitable' is a harsh word. I use it because I see otherwise intelligent and decent people taking race based arguments, particularly about supposed differences in 'intelligence', as if they were even worth considering, and, particularly, accademic psychology generating paper after paper with, for the reasons Heteromeles gives, and lots of others to do with crap statistics, no logic or common sense involved. So go for purity of language; ban the word race from everything you do; that helps towards purity of thought.

    841:

    the notion that race tells us ANYTHING other than skin pigmentation about another human being

    Not even that. Because of the crazy "just one drop" idea, you can be considered Black even when you look White. My grandniece is nearly as pale as me (English), certainly paler than a Greek colleague, and yet she is technically Black (or Mixed, if you prefer).

    842:

    "you're being very strident about it."

    Read. The. Fucking. Paragraph. immediately above the line you quoted before you post veiled implications that I'm some kind of fucking Nazi.

    I'm not being "strident", I'm being pissed off.

    I'm being pissed off because I explain until I am blue in the face that I am talking about a concept which applies to ALL species and the human species is no different - just the same as a whole pile of other concepts in biology. Which is a perfectly standard and uncontroversial scientific principle (and not just in biology): you don't get "special exceptions", you don't get to say things don't apply in this particular instance because you don't like it. Then people like you somehow twist that into insulting shite implying I'm a genocide supporter. And everyone mentally rewrites my posts to suit their dogmatic conviction that I can't possibly really be talking about the thing I am talking about and must be talking about the completely different thing I've explicitly rejected. Of course I'm getting pissed off.

    And I'm pissed off with the mental rewriting of my posts so that I have to reply with "no, I did not say that, this is what I said", over and over and over and over a bloody gain. As I said above there is no point me continuing with the topic because I don't know how to get people to turn that filter off or even to understand that they've got it switched on, and communication has been shown to be impossible. But I'm not going to sit here and be called a fucking genocide supporter on the grounds of other people's mental edits of my posts.

    843:

    Quadroon: One European grandparent.

    Actually the reverse: one black grandparent, three white grandparents.

    And so on for decreasing amounts of 'blackness'. Basically, any black ancestors at all and you were still black not white. I think the technical term is "hypodescent".

    If you look at advertisements for runaway slaves, many descriptions include "may pass as white", because, well, that's what they looked like.

    On May 15, 1845, an enslaved black woman named Fanny ran away from her Alabama owner. Since Fanny could read and write, her owner speculates in an advertisement posted in the Alabama Beacon (June 14, 1845) that she might forge a pass for herself. But Fanny’s master also comments that “she is as white as most white women, with straight light hair, and blue eyes, and can pass herself for a white woman.”

    https://journals.ku.edu/amsj/article/download/7040/6372

    844:

    "There is only the shit. And you're defending it. Please read the entire AAPA statement before you reply."

    I have read it. It is describing the shit. It is not describing a concept which applies to multiple species of which humans are but one example. Therefore it is not talking about what I am talking about. Which is ABUNDANTLY clear but it's evidently pointless to spell it out yet again so basically you can FUCK OFF accusing me of defending it.

    845:

    And the too-frequently-unstated implication in the whole "many African Americans have significant amounts of European DNA" thing…

    The main reason all these runaway slaves could 'pass as white' was that they were the children of generations of rape. And generations of slavers were quite willing to consider their own children as property, to be sold for profit.

    846:

    Pigeon,

    Pse read, carefully, Chris Blanchard's post above. Read it multiple times if you need to, to make sure you are not internally eliding bits that you might not like. It explains exactly why you are not getting through, and will continue not to get through, as long as you continue to use that language.

    I can believe that you are not in fact a racist jerk. But you are managing to sound very much like one, and getting called on it.

    JHomes.

    847:

    On which point see Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain. The whole thing is horrific and there are innumerable real life tragedies just as bad.

    848:

    technically Black (or Mixed, if you prefer).

    It's all about how long ago your ancestors came out of Africa, and just how far they have strayed from the pure stock.

    It used to be just European royalty who proudly measured and certified their inbredness, but then the eugenicists got hold of the idea and now ... oh well, never mind. So much for my idea of breeding humans with long shaggy coats and short stumpy tails.

    849:

    Posts crossed in time.

    Thank you.

    Though I'm not sure that the term "explains" is accurate because I can't believe the "inevitable" bit. Surely all I have to do is make it clear at the start what I am talking about, like doing #include <stdio.h> before I use printf(), and rational people should then have no difficulty in parsing it correctly for the whole of the rest of the file. After all, it's not as if the function I'm using isn't in the standard libraries; in the case of this particular instance, someone's even posted the prototype somewhere further up. I don't expect the compiler to override/ignore my #include and substitute some unrelated function of its own choosing.

    If I did run across a compiler doing that, I could look up the reasons why it happened and work out what incantation I needed to make it stick to the actual code. When people do it, I have no idea. I resort to things like repeating the #include in bigger and bigger type and seeing if it'll compile this time, like shouting slowly at someone in a language they don't understand, because I can't think of anything better to do. And I tend to carry on doing it because surely it's got to work eventually if I just keep trying.

    This sort of thing is why I prefer machines and pigeons to people. And also, that xkcd about "someone is NOT MAKING SENSE on the internet", that's me that is.

    And I find it hard to terminate the loop because it's crap to just give up on something that's not basically a hard problem if only it would stop being weird on me. So thank you for the break;

    850:

    So much for my idea of breeding humans with long shaggy coats and short stumpy tails.

    Already been done. Did you see those pictures of protestors surrounding the statehouse in Michigan?

    Many of them had long shaggy hair. And judging by the many large guns prominently displayed, they were obviously compensating for something being short and stumpy… :-)

    851:

    VPN

    Not sure if you're looking for one. Paywall avoidance, less and less. See amiunique.org

    For a good overview and review of VPNs (the good and bad):

    https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-vpn-service/

    852:

    From my experience, VPNs don't get you round paywalls. They are useful for hiding the sites you are accessing and some types of traffic from your ISP. Here, in the mythical country of Oz, our ISPs have to maintain logs and pass that over to pretty much anyone who asks these days. They also obscure your real IP address behind the VPN service's IP address. I'm sure spooks have ways to get around this, but if you want to mask your bittorrent traffic or convince BBC/ITV etc you're accessing their service from within the UK (honest, Guv, I'm a Lahndahner) they are fine.

    853:

    On the subject of race and racism...

    I read something recently wherein some smartass pointed out that believing the Earth is flat is really nothing more than a measurement error, and it's not a large one at all. If you're standing in the middle of a farmer's field, the difference between "flat" and "sphere 7000 miles in diameter" isn't something you can perceive with the naked eye. Worse, if you're using instruments to measure the curvature and they're out of adjustment by one-thousandth of one-percent, you absolutely won't perceive that the world is round. (Or at least you'll get the size wrong...)

    The concept of "Race" is very similar to the concept of "the flat earth." You can measure "race" by things like skin-color, color and curliness of hair, lip-shape, nose-shape, etc., but the best results you can get that way are essentially probabilistic in nature: "This person is more likely than that person to be vulnerable to sickle-cell anemia" or some such, and that's without introducing further inaccuracies by doing something stupid like assuming that someone with 75% European blood is of majority African descent! But the best anyone can manage with "race" is a probability. And not very long ago, that was the best we could do. Maybe there were some studies on diseases of East Africans versus West Africans or something, but these were all pretty weak sauce. Essentially, anyone who believes in "race" is assuming the existence of a spherical, friction-free Black person in a vacuum...

    But the difference between a round earth and a flat earth is completely fucking profound. One of them leads to ridiculous levels of ignorance and a total lack of sophisticated understanding. The difference between "race" (or "sub-sub-sub-species") and "I sequenced your genome" is mind-bogglingly different. One leads to a very ugly kind of ignorance, while the other leads to enlightenment and certainty - at least until we find an even better way of measuring this particular system.

    854:

    (Wrote this earlier, dups your comment a bit, might as well post it as another answer to Greg's question.) If Greg just wants paywall bypassing, well there is an interesting plugin by close to that name (words similar and reversed), available from github. Since it is legally dubious, I will not recommend using it without a VPN plus ad/tracker blocker plugins and maybe a script blocker and not being logged into any social media, and even then only sparingly. Re VPNs, and ""more generally, are there any benefits to using such a thing?". It depends on one's threat model. Yes, they are a way around area restrictions (might be legally dubious), though sometimes known VPN endpoints are blocked by content providers. They (at least the serious ones) will offer at least some anonymity to the user, since your traffic is shared among all the others using the same endpoint, and the endpoint IP will show up in logs of visited sites. You can still be tracked by browser trackers so install tracker blockers/ad blockers at least. Paid VPNs that have an explicit no-logs policy, and available endpoints in various jurisdictions hostile to each other, and have a track record of telling governments to fuck off at least once are probably best. Though they could be lying about the last in the general case, and about the first. If one's threat model includes well-funded organizations (e.g. large governments), it's considerably harder. And one screw up can be used to identify you if you are or become of interest. You probably want to stack Tor (Tor Browser is OK) on top of a good VPN. Leakage of DNS queries is also a major concern. You do not want DNS queries coming from your home (or whatever) machine. (Some VPNs will protect against this, as will Tor Browser) Serious comsec is about 2-5x this (e.g. including self-sniffing audits), and expect to screw up. (That's not even getting into the creation and use of solidly anonymous accounts.)

    855:

    USA Sports.

    The Ivy League has decided to not have football (the US crazy version to the rest of the planet) this season and suspend all other sports until next year. With no plans of how this will work except to not start practice or play at this time. This is either the first domino or an outlier. The Ivy League doesn't have a $billions TV contract for football and actually looses money at it. But it does keep big donor alumni happy. But they do make money on basketball. Well not $billions, but non trivial amounts.

    There are outbreaks at more than a few Power 5 conference schools as they try and do social distancing practice (Power 5 = $billions). One just down the road. Seems the students keep going to parties and bars.

    Personally I just don't think they will be able to make it work. ESPN gives the Power 5 conferences $5 to $10 billion each year. Maybe more. No games. No $billions. Plus tickets can run $20 to $100 or way more at some schools. 50K tickets per game average. And a lot of that money goes to tranisent workers and retired people who supplement their incomes by working the games as ticket takers, ushers, etc... Plus a lot of lower schools raise money by parents doing the same with the money going to the schools.

    And this is just US college football. Basketball is indoors and I suspect they are all waiting for the other guy to blink. (Duke was an early domino for much of college basketball last March.) Again $billions.

    And while the "pro" leagues are trying really hard to have shortened seasons, the number of people involved even without spectators is making the concept of a bubble a bit hard to implement.

    And to toss one more tidbit into the discussion, Disney owns ESPN. So it's not like they are not worrying that the parks and movie theaters will have to close back down or stay closed. Also they own the ABC television network and no one is making new shows for next fall at this time. Hard to sell ads for a premium for re-runs of last year's shows. And again all those workers not working. From minimal wage janitors to highly paid technical staff. The applies to all TV and Movie production companies.

    So if you don't like the mouse, now is your chance to pile on.

    Why my wife's now former airline employer announced a 30% cut in payroll a few weeks back, United just said maybe 50% by end of year. Roll that across the airline industry (airlines, Boeing, Airbus, airports, rental cars, hotels, etc...) and I think we're talking about a million jobs that no longer exist.

    Nope, this is NOT going to be over by Christmas.

    So how are sports, entertainment, and such in Europe. Fantasy plans to play or is reality setting in?

    856:

    though sometimes known VPN endpoints are blocked by content providers

    I found out quickly that Citi Bank and other similar big financial institutions will just sort of ignore you if they think you're on a VPN. Login never works. Or you just get a blank screen.

    I can understand it as most attacks likely come through VPNs.

    857:

    Refreshing some old google scholar searches, this is some serious(ly goofy) stuff if one is not religious. The Mathematics (and Metaphysics) of Identical Twins (Richard Playford, 13 May 2020) He covers Twinning, Semi-Identical Twins, and Chimeras. Interestingly argued. Even Ernst Mayr gets a mention/citation.

    Cites (jstor account needed, or uhm sci-hub) "Embryos, souls, and the fourth dimension", David W. Shoemaker, 2005

    Or, if you prefer, an excellent recent short story by ctrlcreep: Sibyl’s blending (ctrlcreep, Jul 6, 2020) The Facility had established its reputation through the rigorous examination of relics, though at the time of my employment its mission had broadened to include, and in fact prioritize, the financing of myriad theological projects, whose dual basis in the material and sublime rendered them unpalatable to academia and ministry alike.

    858:

    Damian & Moz Ring Species are one of the real killers of the cretinists non-arguments. They really hate ring species ... oh dear, how sad.

    Joh Nughes Basically, driverless trains work if you design the system that way from the start. To convert an existing system to driverless is so expensive, complicate & time-consuming as to make the exercise pointless. ( Paris did it with Ligne 1 - is planning on new driverless lines, only, IIRC ) For underground lines, you have to fit Platform-Edge Doors (PED's) to existing platforms - which narrows the platform spaces, which are already crowded .... Now, you will probably have to fit PED's to aboveground lines as wel, after a recent fatality on the DLR & those PED's must operate faultlessly in all weather conditions ... And you not only have to totally reconfiogure the signalling system, you also have to overlay train-control onto that system And the diriverless trains cannot operate in areas where there might be driven trains, as well & vice versa .... And ... and ... & ...

    VPN's Thank you - those who informed me. I want to be abke to apeear to be somewhere other than Britain &/or I wish to anonymise myself & appear as not myself, to the casual observer. Both appear to be relatively easy using a VPN. Oh I generally speaking, I do not use social media - I have a Twatter account, which gets used about twice a year ....

    859:

    non-transitive fertile offspring pairings Yes, like ring species en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

    860:

    Whitroth: Yellow card.

    Take a deep breath.

    Take a step back.

    You are not under attack, but you appear to be responding with increasingly randomly and aggressively to anyone you interact with.

    If it continues, I will have to start moderating your comments.

    861:

    Pigeon: As far as I am concerned what you are talking about there is not race. It's a load of stupid bollocks that people have attached to the concept of race in the context of human races. I don't call it race. I call it very rude things. It can get fucked.

    You are correct in principle but in practice you've already lost the argument. In non-specialist use, "race" is a synonym for "caste", just as "organic" means "farmed without fertilizer or pesticides", not "chemicals based on an alkane or other carbon backbone".

    862:

    Charlie Um I often used to say "I woild love to see non-organic food!" - passes people by, nowadays ...

    863:
    oh well, never mind. So much for my idea of breeding humans with long shaggy coats and short stumpy tails.

    The Warriors of Dawn, M.A. Foster.

    864:

    Race

    This is an argument that can never be resolved.

    Arguing that a word encodes for a useful scientific meaning despite it having a different meaning in lay language sometimes simply cannot be conveyed no matter how much effort you put into it.

    My mother came home from university one day. She'd been studying psychology for three years. It was the last week of a semester on personality theory. One of her classmates had put up their hand in class and uttered the words "but personality is one of those things, either you have it or you don't"

    BTW, Asimov wrote a story based on ring species. Humans had spread through the galaxy, finding no life more complex than slime. Finally after 100 000 years of searching they encounter intelligent alien life. It's very very alien, living in a toxic atmosphere. After some months of establishing communication they realise they've found humans. One arm of humans having explored the galaxy clockwise, the other anticlockwise.

    865:
    Paris did it [ converted to driverless operation ] with Ligne 1

    Yes, I know. Which is why I found your "it's a non starter" claim a bit odd. Ligne 4 is also being converted with a cost estimate of 256M EUR, not particularly expensive.

    866:

    That's one form. The simple form he described is also fairly common, too. Plants get even more perverse, with some that are not self-fertile, but can be fertilised by another species. This (which I used to grow) is an example (also look at its names!):

    http://mg.biology.kyushu-u.ac.jp/Yoneda_DB/E/relatives/03.html https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ipomoea_indica

    867:

    Ligne 4 is also being converted with a cost estimate of 256M EUR, not particularly expensive. All new lines are to be driverless (line 14) Driverless train lines do not go on strike

    868:

    I have. It always was rare, and now is very rare, but I have seen it. And the formal (i.e. bureaucratic) naming mechanism has NOTHING to do with my Viscum album example, as I would have thought you would have known. Many botanists use the terms "variety" or "race" (especially in the form "geographical race") to describe a distinct subpopulation that they do not feel justifies subspecies status, or has not been granted formal subspecies status. I have several examples on my bookshelves, and here is another use for another parasitic plant:

    https://core.ac.uk/reader/186726010

    I shall refrain from describing the misbehaviours of the botanical taxonomy fanatics, because they are complex and sordid and only a few people here would have any interest at all. Greg Tingey has pointed out one example; there are many others.

    869:

    the Leave.EU people are going to be working for the New Zealand First party in the upcoming elections.

    Yeah, nah, bra.

    One of them was in Aotearoa earlier this year, he went back to the hellhole and now he's stuck there. Not even Winston is saying the government will make an exception to the quarantine for "political specialists" or whatever you want to call those people.

    When they're explicitly trying to get in so they can damage the democratic process I think it's going to be hard for anyone to explain why they should be granted special dispensation to do so. Sure, if there was no pandemic it might be difficult to have their visa's cancelled. But regardless of their hatred of facts, there is a pandemic, the Kiwi government knows there's a pandemic, and they are just going to have to settle for trying to find ways to fuck the UK even more than it already is.

    870:

    All new lines are to be driverless (line 14)
    and 15, and 16, and 17, and 18...
    Driverless train lines do not go on strike
    One day we'll unionize the AIs! Don't give up hope, brother!

    871:

    Seems the students keep going to parties and bars.

    Yep. Ask the people of Mercier how they feel about that.

    A town south of Montreal has partially shut down—again—all because of the recklessness of a few teenagers, its mayor says.

    About 50 people have now tested positive for COVID-19 in a new outbreak in the Montéregie region, all of them directly linked to two house parties that happened there recently, health authorities say.

    Locals reported that around nine or 10 Mercier businesses seem to have shut their doors since Monday. Many local people said they were angry.

    "It seems no one will be having any consequences for their actions, which, in my opinion, is ridiculous," said Jennifer Kinsella Wedrick, who lives a few minutes from Mercier in nearby Chateauguay and normally works at a hospital in the area.

    She said the chilling effects were spreading to her own town, with some confirmed cases at businesses there, too. People are "upset and scared," she said.

    "My children haven't been able to hug their grandparents since March, yet a bunch of teens feel they... get to throw house parties, putting us all at risk."

    https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/enormous-impact-after-teenage-parties-near-montreal-businesses-shut-to-stem-outbreak-1.5016557

    Extensive reporting on the party that sparked the outbreak — a gathering of at least 60 young people in St-Chrysostome on June 28 — has fuelled discussions in Mercier about whether there should be consequences for those who flout public health guidelines.

    Bordeleau suggested there should be fines for those who irresponsibly spread the virus. Roger Taillefer, who cycled down a quiet side street off the city’s main stretch, called the situation “deplorable.”

    https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/youth-criticized-after-covid-19-outbreak-linked-to-mercier-house-party

    And this is why I'm so apprehensive about students returning to school in September. Teenagers push boundaries and flout rules, and have become accustomed to there being few real consequences. And in a school of 1500, it won't taken many being irresponsible to put everyone (and their families) at risk.

    872:

    Perhaps the reason why young children can't tell you the sky is blue is that they have to be taught that this is the socially correct response in western society?

    I promised to come back to this - and the "back to this" thought is actually a reference to the Guy Deutscher book Through the Language Glass.

    It's more than that actually, it's just that that book contains the story. This article sort of does too:

    https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

    I've actually only got halfway through Deustscher's book partly because I'm taking breaks when his style gets irritating (he is prone to digressions where he cleverly argues against competing theories unnecessarily). I'll finish it eventually then evaluate in context with other work.

    Greg may find this especially interesting as one of the protagonists is Gladstone (yeah that Gladstone). I'd be amazed if it hasn't come up here before, though

    873:

    And in a school of 1500, it won't taken many being irresponsible to put everyone (and their families) at risk.

    Oh I know it. NCSU with 30K+ students is 5 miles from here. UNC-CH with similar numbers is 20 miles down the road. Then there's Duke with 5K or so 20 miles in a slightly different direction. Plus a collection of 5 or so in the 1K to 4K range within a 25 mile radius. Maybe more than 5. I'd have to count.

    All in the middle of small to medium sized cities.

    I'm waiting for it to all blow up. And/or the student athletes to "Just say no."

    Across the county there are 100 or so college athletes who will get a $1mil to $10mil payday when they go pro. How many want to take a chance on getting sick and being told "never mind"?

    874:

    So where does that leave the word "theory" which has a popular meaning almost opposite to its scientific meaning? I've also noticed that American English seems to use variants of 'evolve', evolved' with a quite different meaning to the scientific one (whereas the words are largely only used in a scientific context in British English). How much of this is deliberate sowing of confusion by an anti-science agenda?

    875:

    Race does tell us a few things, for instance the probability of having sickle cell anemia changes if you know the race. There are various other things, and some things about Vitamin D metabolism. (Don't ask me what, as I'm no medic, but it's significant...sometimes.)

    It's not a cladistic group, but it does have meaning. But also not that it's a probabilistic modifier, not a definitive one EXCEPT for the distinguishing characteristics...which aren't skin color. An albino negro is still a negro. I'm told that there are shapes of cartilage in the nose and bone structures that are more diagnostic, but I think even that's oversimplified. Still, I've seen black and white photos in which some of the folks with darker skin were "Caucasian" and some of the folks with lighter skin were "negro". I don't usually bother to make that kind of distinction, though. But it is meaningful, if you're interested in the correct meanings.

    That said, there's greater genetic variation among humans within Africa than in the entire rest of the human species. E.g. one group of them independently evolved the ability to digest cows milk.

    876:

    There is a lot of stuff that fits this pattern. It's not all bad, and it's not even all "unscientific".

    Here's an example. I get stuck on the term "Rationalism", usually with a capital R. My default understanding of what it means is the belief that all phenomena in the universe can be deduced predictively (or should that be predicted deductively?) by (a priori) reason, given a reasonable starting point with first principles and an appreciation of the rules of logic and nature (if not perhaps irony). This was not an unusual position during the time we refer to as the European Enlightenment, although it is today perhaps better regarded as an end in a continuum. The other end of the continuum (the "opposite") is not "irrationalism" (although we'll return to that), but rather Empiricism. This is the view that knowledge of phenomena must be derived from what can be (a posteriori) observed. The Enlightenment contained a debate between these positions, and arguably every type of argument or knowledge claim falls somewhere on the continuum between these poles. There are various solutions to this situation, including what we learned in school to call the scientific method (hypothesis, test, revision, new hypothesis, retest, re-revise, and so on). Kant also provides a synthesis, though that is a digression. It's true that we as a culture got past this debate and distinction, although it's still arguably true that you can say something useful about a knowledge claim in terms of where it sits on that scale... is it more Rational or more Empirical?

    Anyway, the term "rationalism" is not used this way in general language, and it is not used this way even in technical language in several disciplines. And between disciplines, it isn't even necessarily used the same way. For instance, in Film Studies, there is a prevailing "irrationalist" theory which holds that especially genre movies work by manipulating their audience, and this is in contrast to art movies. This has led to a fierce debate, since it is quite clear that genre-savvy audiences are essential to the success of certain genres and intertextual references are a bit part of the appeal in many areas. So this is discussing the proposed rationality or irrationality of film audiences, where the ossified ideology has a faith position based around irrationality.

    Contrast this with laissez faire microeconomics, where the ossified ideology has faith in the rationality of economic actors, in spite of the impossibility of knowledge, phenomena like sticky prices and the vicious cycles of poverty. We talk about market rationalism referring to rational consumers and this is the only meaning for "rationalism" in a huge range of contexts.

    Does this mean if I "load" my meaning of Rationalism into a conversation with an include statement, we're good? Or do I have to make sure one of the other meanings is not going to be in play by constantly monitoring and watching my own language? I am really not sure about that one. But I do accept that my version of that word is now pretty niche and refers to the Enlightenment era. It may still be common when people who are used to talking about epistemology and philosophy of science talk with each other, but outside those contexts I need to accept that it isn't going to be understood in the same way.

    I actually wrote something resembling the above a few months ago in response to a comment of Troutwaxer's about democracies versus republics, because I saw that conceptual distinction as equivalently niche to Enlightenment era language, and today these terms mean something quite different outside a specific discourse in political science (and outside the USA, where this stuff is internalised as part of the state religion). I see the form of the distinction being largely an 18th century invention made in the process of interpreting classical history for contemporary purposes, and had only limited reface to any actual differences between the Greek and Roman forms of government. And today (again outside the USA and perhaps some specific political science contexts) the distinction does not carry this meaning, and instead a "democracy" is a jurisdiction with the rule of law (as opposed to the rule of man), has free elections with universal suffrage and uses them to achieve the peaceful transfer of power from one government to another over many successive changes. Freedom of speech and of assembly come into it too, but it's mostly the rule of law and the free elections that do the job.

    Back at the time I'd proposed to insist that if "democracy" is limited to the technical sense that was really only prevalent in the Enlightenment, then I can have my version of Rationalism too.

    Of course rehashing this for its impact on concepts like race is an exercise for the reader.

    877:

    John Hughes & stirner Erm ... I THINK L 4 is all-underground? (Can't remember) AND the metro is a larger gauge, often with double track Deep-level narrow-profile London tubes are more difficult. The DLR is driverless & they still had a strike. This is right-wing worker-bashing bollocks I'm afraid. YES - like I said if you build it FROM NEW, with PED's you can make it dirverkess ... conversion is expensive & time-consuming

    W T Goodall And how much to simple old-fashioned STUPIDITY?

    878:

    My point wasn't that words sometimes have special technical meanings in different areas of discourse (aside - with over a million words in English why does this even happen?) but that the bleed-through from specialist to general meaning sows confusion and obfuscates communication. Words like 'theory' and 'evolve' are particularly egregious examples because these words are widely used in general non-specialised discourse but the specialised contexts are also widely discussed in non-specialised contexts leading to farcical levels of misunderstanding.

    879:

    The DLR is driverless & they still had a strike. This is right-wing worker-bashing bollocks I'm afraid. Not really, the bosses of the RATP (transport authority) certainly envision a driverless metro as being strike-proof. (lots more strikes in France than in the UK, btw). And last winter during the great transport strike the driverless lines kept running.

    880:

    One of them was in Aotearoa earlier this year, he went back to the hellhole and now he's stuck there. Not even Winston is saying the government will make an exception to the quarantine for "political specialists" or whatever you want to call those people.

    While some things likely are easier if they are in country, they can still do a lot of damage to the NZ election from the UK.

    881:

    And this is why I'm so apprehensive about students returning to school in September.

    Not saying returning to school will be great and safe - I think it is likely to early to tell.

    But, there is/should be a big difference between a house party/night club/rave/etc and school in terms of risk - the lack of dancing and other high energy activities, with the corresponding heavier use of the lungs and thus greater danger of virus transmission for one.

    But it all comes down to the simple fact that society can't return to normal without the kids being taken care of - and for much of the year that means schools.

    The argument can certainly be made that it is far too early for society to attempt to return to normal - but for now the deficit scolds and the "we must protect the economy at all costs" factions hold sway in much of the world and sadly it will take things getting significantly worse before our elected officials are willing to ignore them and go with what much of the public wants.

    882:

    But, there is/should be a big difference between a house party/night club/rave/etc and school in terms of risk

    I was thinking more about teenagers being teenagers away from the school, and then bringing infection into it. Like those businesses in Mercier that are shut down because one of their teenaged employees went to the house party.

    883:

    While some things likely are easier if they are in country, they can still do a lot of damage to the NZ election from the UK.

    And apparently you can still move to New Zealand if you are immigrating.

    New York Times best-selling author and leading forensic pathologist Dr Judy Melinek has moved her family to New Zealand as her home country continues to be ravaged by covid-19.

    Melinek today told the Herald she felt so unsafe in her job in San Francisco Bay she didn't think twice about taking up a job offer when head-hunted by a New Zealand recruitment company in May.

    Nearly two months to the day of receiving the email, Melinek and her family, including husband and co-author TJ Mitchell and their two teenage daughters, Leah and Diana, landed in Auckland, arriving early yesterday.

    The family - who have never been to New Zealand before - are now doing their two-week quarantine, after which they plan to move to Wellington and begin their new life.

    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12346829

    So someone needs to offer the Brexiteers a job in NZ, which they accept, and they apply to immigrate. Or possibly a rich sponsor provides enough money for an investor visa…

    884:

    Meanwhile, even Time Magazine in the U.S. has noticed the decaying prospects of the BoJo government. As the UK economy continues to contract due to COVID-19, pressure is mounting on the Tories to (once again) punt on the post-Brexit trade negotiations. The article includes an amusing reference to Labor leader Starmer's treatment of BoJo during Prime Minister Questions, as well.

    [N.B. The link is via the MSN news aggregator and will not engage any paywalls.]

    885:

    The Israeli experience with school reopening is instructive. They had to close schools back down in June (2020) because of school outbreaks, apparently due to a breakdown in anti-pandemic NPI discipline (I'm having trouble finding reporting on the level of mask discipline in schools with outbreaks. Perhaps because there was a (embarrassing) total lack of discipline.) Schools outbreak jeopardises Israel's emergence from strict lockdown (David G Rose, 6 June 2020) Bold mine: As schools returned last month, children and staff were initially ordered to wear face masks and maintain strict social distancing. Pupils were limited to 15 per class, backed up by online lessons, but this soon proved “impossible” to coordinate and meant up to half of children remained at home, Dr Salmon added. “We had a massive heatwave late last month and we gave up on the policy of mandatory face masks, and began allowing students back in greater numbers,” he added. “Now we are closing any school even if one case of coronavirus is found, but we will keep this under review.”

    886:

    So how are sports, entertainment, and such in Europe. Fantasy plans to play or is reality setting in?

    I don't follow sports generally, but my wife's a soccer fan. Premier League football is actually being played -- but behind closed doors, for TV audiences. (The teams are more easily tested and quarantined than the audience at a match.)

    Sports that require physical contact are out, e.g. Rugby, Baseball/Rounders, boxing, wrestling, and so on. Cricket is I think adequately socially distanced and therefore ongoing. Football is kind of an edge case insofar as physical contact isn't supposed to happen -- where it does it's by accident, and the usual hugs and pile-ons in event of a goal are strongly frowned on right now.

    887:

    And now for something completely different: Researchers at the University of Liverpool have developed an independently mobile robot to assist with tedious lab work. The wheeled robot with a single arm is designed to be able to use lab equipment designed for humans. From the abstract:

    "The robot operated autonomously over eight days, performing 688 experiments within a ten-variable experimental space, driven by a batched Bayesian search algorithm. This autonomous search identified photocatalyst mixtures that were six times more active than the initial formulations, selecting beneficial components and deselecting negative ones."

    Something this useful deserves a name - perhaps Independently-Ground mobile Observational Robot (IGOR)?

    888:

    I love pointing out the problem in the "no one can see blue" thing.

    Here's the deal: many societies that don't use metals don't segregate blue from green (grue or bleen). Hawaiian is one such language. The argument is thus that Egyptian is the first language to develop blue in the Mediterranean area, so it's an iron age invention, and the alleged argument is that Ancient Greek had no word for blue

    That's where the profoundly problem starts.

    I got clued into this when I was looking at the blue monkeys fresco in the ruins of Minoan Thera on modern Santorini. The frescos from the buildings contain undoubtedly blue dolphins and yes, monkeys.

    Here's the thing: blue has nothing to do with iron or modernity. However, copper ores tend can be very blue indeed. I'm quite willing to bet that the words for blue first showed up in the context of copper and bronze metallurgy, then spread from there. And yes, the Minoans were very good at making bronze, as well as copper-based pigments.

    As on this blog, when OGH has wrongly referred to the Old Testament as a Bronze Age religion (it's mostly Iron Age and thus far younger), the researchers who came up with the "blue is a modern invention" idea weren't paying much attention to archaeology or history, nor to metallurgy. Blue is more likely a Bronze Age invention, because miners needed words to describe the minerals they were working with and looking for. The colors of the sky and sea have little to do with it, because they tend to be rather changeable. "The mineral is sky colored," doesn't tell you much: gray, blue, white?

    And ancient Greek? It did have a word for blue: glaucos. The word later shifted meaning to become gray. "Gray-Eyed Athena" in the Iliad probably had blue eyes.

    889:

    Hmmm... maybe I should look into AI, and see if modules could be added where, instead of "I can't do that, Dave", it comes back on strike....

    890:

    I suggest that using the word "possibly" would improve the accuracy of your statement; while your hypothesis is plausible, I doubt that you can provide much evidence. In most such cases, we simply don't know exactly how the ancients divided their classifications. As another possible aspect, the colour blue-grey is rather more useful for describing plants and fungi than either what we call pure blue or grey. Unless we have some text that is incompatible with that, "glaucos" could well originally have meant blue-grey.

    Also, the date of the text of the Old Testament merely provides one bound on the date of the religion. We don't know exactly when the Jehovah alone cult split off from the Ishtar and Her Jehovah one (if that is what happened).

    891:

    Please, that one drives me absolutely bonkers, and has for decades. Right-wingers, and journalists, esp. apparently believe the definition of "theory" is "I had too much beer and pizza last night, and had this crazy nightmare".

    I want to invite them to test the theory of gravity by stepping out the window....

    892:

    Actually, it's worse than that. The real problem comes in when you find yourself in an arguement, and don't understand why you're arguing.

    I know it's less than half a dozen times in my life that I was in an argument, and suddenly realized what was happening, and stopped, said, wait a minute, and proceeded to have a digression where I started defining my terms... and the argument *always stopped, and the person I was arguing with started defining theirs, and then we found out the issue.

    But I assure you that it's amazing hard to realize, in the middle of an argument, that this is happening.

    • The first time, I was 17 or 18, and arguing politics with my father. When i stopped, I started drawing something I'd just learned of, Venn diagrams, and well, wow, we'd been saying the same thing, but with different definitions of important words.
    893:

    That's EYE-gor, mahster.

    894:

    Blue? Why would people not see blue, from the beginning?

    "I'm going to take my coracle out and fish."

    "Don't be stupid, the sky is gray, and full of clouds, not blue, it's going to storm".

    My late ex told me that at the Cape, after Challenger, someone put a piece of duct tape where it was really visible, and a sign "If the sky is this color, DO NOT LAUNCH".

    Btw, I've always liked the color that, in Cymraeg,"glas", which is translated as a blue-gray. And my mother used to note that, when I was really tired, my blue eyes turned more gray.

    895:

    And while the "pro" leagues are trying really hard to have shortened seasons, the number of people involved even without spectators is making the concept of a bubble a bit hard to implement.

    I suspect given that sports leagues elsewhere in the world have managed to restart the problem isn't with the sports as such (at least for the usual ones), but rather that too many of the American players/staff aren't treating the Covid restrictions seriously enough and thus bringing Covid into the team environment.

    896:

    BTW, Asimov wrote a story based on ring species. Humans had spread through the galaxy, finding no life more complex than slime. Finally after 100 000 years of searching they encounter intelligent alien life. It's very very alien, living in a toxic atmosphere. After some months of establishing communication they realise they've found humans. One arm of humans having explored the galaxy clockwise, the other anticlockwise.

    By the sheerest coincidence, I just tracked down this story for someone else. It's not an Asimov story , but "Final Encounter" by Harry Harrison, first published in Galaxy Magazine, April 1964.

    897:

    The Israeli experience with school reopening is instructive. They had to close schools back down in June (2020) because of school outbreaks,

    It's not as clear cut as that.

    Israel is having a major second wave of Covid, with their hospitals possibly in trouble by the end of the month (serious cases apparently currently doubling daily).

    But it isn't the schools driving it, rather the schools are reflecting the Covid spread that is rapidly happening in Israel at the moment.

    And the major cause according to Israeli officials is weddings.

    Quote: “You have people coming from all over the county,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the matter. “They hug each other; they sing, they dance. That’s the ultimate opportunity to infect people.”*

    That was for almost 2,100 weddings in 10 days in late June.

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/08/middleeast/israel-coronavirus-second-wave-netanyahu-intl/index.html

    898:

    I was thinking more about teenagers being teenagers away from the school, and then bringing infection into it.

    Always a problem - but might a return to a structured life of school help keep at least some of them from partaking in more risky things?

    Part of the problem at the moment is that you have a lot of teenagers with nothing to do - most of the usual summer job opportunities don't exist this year - and teenagers with nothing to do are generally a recipe for trouble.

    899:

    I wish to complain about the scriptwriters - again: Good News - Trump tax returns Bad news - Trump tax returns Bad news ... So much for the US First Amendment INSANE News - Failing Grayling ( a.k.a. Return of the Undead ) Who makes this insane shit up?

    striner To hear the fascistright-wing press here, you'd think it was worse than Paris. Actually, ASLEF are very canny about picking, or not picking, fights, especially ones they can't win.

    Heteromeles No ( And yes ) Actually, most of the OT ( Torah ) was written down in the Iron Age, but a lot of the earliest bits are based on Bronze-Age myths & legends & (?)records(?) Sorry, I'll stick with my label of "Bronze-Age goatherders' myths" thank you.

    900:

    Now, yes, driven by weddings in (large) part. The initial round of (targeted) school closures in Israel was a month+ ago, early June, and should be studied by US people IMO. But yes, during a pandemic, parties where there is no mask discipline and people are ignoring distancing rules are seriously unwise. In my area (lower NY State, not NYC) some of the limited growth in new cases has been tracked down to be definitely related to late Spring/early Summer parties, and perhaps they are related to most of the growth; mask discipline in stores/shops remains at almost 100 percent since 17 April. Numbers still look good (for the US) but it is disconcerting hearing about gathers of 20-30 people not wearing masks and being close to each other for hours.

    901:

    Obviously, they did, but it's less clear that they could think of it as a concept. Many people can't think outside the language they use, though there is disagreement how fundamental that limitation is, and my observation is that it is inversely associated with Asperger's. I can witness that it's almost impossible to break through that barrier in someone else using words alone.

    902:

    One: the bad news appears to be that they sent the case over the House getting the records back to the lower courts.

    Two: It all depends about the Torah. It was first written down (unless this has been changed in the last 10-15 years) first part around 900-800 BCE, and the rest around 600 BCE. However...a lot of the mythical part is clearly from Ur, etc (can you say "Gilgamesh", boyos and grllls?)

    But Judaism seems to be from between 1400 BCE and 1200 BCE. So, you takes yer pics.

    903:

    Speaking of defining terms... let me define drinking, or "alcoholoic": when I was living with my late ex (before she was ex) in FL, every month and a half or two months, we'd go to the liquor store. I'd buy a liter and a half of bourbon. She's buy five? six? liter and a half bottles of vodka. And go through them in that time.

    Let me note that the once or twice I tasted her warm watered apple juice with vodka in the morning tastes as bad as it sounds....

    904:

    Blue? Why would people not see blue, from the beginning?

    Ask the Hawaiians. They don't distinguish blue and green in Hawaiian (this I've verified with my Hawaiian dictionary), and they were far better sailors than Europeans in the classical world were.

    I'm not fluent in Hawaiian, but there are certainly words for storms, winds, and clouds. Blue sky isn't very useful, actually.

    905:

    David L @ 787:

    Tracing your genealogy became a big fad. ... A couple of people I knew tried it and were unhappy with what they found out.

    I don't know if they do much business in the EU or other parts of the world but the DNA analysis consumer oriented firms in the US had to staff up their customer service lines as things got going. Seems they were getting a lot of calls along the lines of:

    "What do you mean he's not my brother..."
    and even better
    "What do you mean she's my half sister..."
    and even better/worse that those.

    This was just a couple of "gentlemen" who were quite proud of their "Southern" heritage and found out that heritage was not quite so "pure" as they thought it was. Wouldn't have been a problem except that some of their associates found out about it and decided they were not worthy of that association after all. They'd been drinking from the wrong water fountains, IYKWIM.

    906:

    mdlve @ 805:

    Rigged US Supreme judgement.
    Presume this could be overturned by subsequent act of Congress if Biden wins?

    Not rigged - a 7-2 decision so even 2 nominally DNC judges agreed with it.

    As for Biden overturning, depends on what exactly the judgement says. If it is to be overturned it would need to be done in a way that goes around whatever reasoning was used for today's decision which may not be easy.

    More importantly (if problematic for those who have lost birth control coverage) Biden is going to have a full plate of stuff to attempt to deal with if he wins and this may not be high enough up the priority list.

    It essentially says that Trumpolini can exempt organizations from complying with certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act by Executive Order. Presumably therefore, some future President could rescind that exemption by Executive Order should he/she choose to do so.

    907:

    Obviously, they did, but it's less clear that they could think of it as a concept.

    Well for a while in the Victorian era serious researchers really did take the Homeric blue issue to mean that colour vision developed very recently, in historical times. Darwin's published material was brand new, many people didn't understand it or even read it, but took it to suggest what we see clearly as an erroneous Lamarckian version of evolution, so even educated people thought that traits you have trained yourself to have get passed on to your kids. The discovery of red-green colourblindness was also brand new, and was made in the wake of the first rail disasters where an engineer was found to have been unable to distinguish signals. So people put these together, along with the several non-European languages that had been discovered without colour words, and concluded that colour vision was a peak modern European trait that confirmed European superiority. People had even found a pattern: the first colour words (other than black and white) are usually for red, then the other colours start being distinguished in what looks like a consistent order.

    This was really only dismissed when ethnographers took more and more sophisticated colour vision tests out into the communities of world. People whose languages don't have colour words really can see and distinguish the colours (of course they can, there's no mechanism for the sort of Larmarckian development the Victorians believed in). It's just that the way the concepts are arranged is not universal, although it does develop culturally along a pattern that is similar to the one devised in the Victorian era.

    Just like you and I might not distinguish between magenta and fuchsia, seeing them both as shades of purple (or even red), some people don't distinguish between blue and green, seeing them both as shades of the same colour (bleen or grue or something). The order in which languages acquire words for distinct colours does not relate EMR frequencies, the human eye's physical arrangements, or to the colour wheel, but instead relates generally to whether a colour is important to distinguish verbally from other colours for the cultural context that contains the language. And it's a big deal with creole languages, where the original language did not make distinctions but the people have been forced into a context where they are speaking English or another European language to interact with anyone outside their group. So you get weird combinations turning up in the creoles, words that look like European words but with the differently nuanced distinctions from the culture language.

    908:

    The CDC has caved and will redo it's guidelines for the opening of schools to suit Trumps demand that schools reopen in the fall so he can pretend the US is back to normal

    Or not. Apparently the PR talk from the WH didn't think they'd get push back. CDC director says guidelines will stand. They will add some more notes but not revise what they've said.

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/09/politics/cdc-guidelines-school-reopenings/index.html

    909:

    Oh and while I think of it, just in case it needed pointing out: This is yet another example of why taking "scientific" language from a Victoria-era context is a bit fraught. It often embeds cultural understandings that are quite alien to most of us today. We're okay with mathematics and engineering. Chemistry is an interesting one but Mendeleev is a great example of a predictive abstraction that worked out really well. But quite a bit of Victorian content that relates to human beings needs significant revision. While Darwin himself would almost certainly have said "you've got it all wrong" to the people claiming a recent evolutionary history for colour blindness, he'd have been moving sand with a pitchfork.

    910:

    They don't distinguish blue and green in Hawaiian There are rainbows in Hawaii, especially on the NE sides of the islands. Not having names for colours visible to human eyes in rainbows seems odd (and a rainbow's colours are obviously a continuum). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Rainbow_at_Big_Island_Hawaii.jpg Any theories about why the language does not distinguish between blue and green?

    https://wildlifeofhawaii.com/flowers/category/view-plants/purple-and-blue-hawaiian-flowers/

    911:

    whitroth @ 818: Oh, after I hit enter, I amused myself by noting that unlike them, I could legitimately claim to be caucasian, given that all four of my grandparents came to the US from closer to the Caucuses Mountains than any of their ancestors have been in 500 or 1000 years....

    I do, however, prefer "beige", or "salmon" if I must, not being an albino.

    I'm PANTONE 54-7 C or PANTONE 57-7 C.

    912:

    It goes a little further than that. The concept of "race" is pre-Victorian by at least 200 years. It's damn-near "pre-enlightenment."

    913:

    And apparently you can still move to New Zealand if you are immigrating.

    If your move is signed off at Ministerial level. I assume guidance was sought before headhunting internationally, in this case for a forensic pathologist position - not many suitable candidates in a population of 5 million.

    https://www.immigration.govt.nz/about-us/covid-19/border-closures-and-exceptions "An employer or supporting agency can request approval for their employee based on them being an ‘other critical worker’.

    These requests are considered on a case-by-case basis and will only be granted in very specific and limited circumstances. Holding an Essential Skills work visa is not sufficient to qualify as an ‘other critical worker’."

    This is the same provision that Avatar production crew entered under, as they enable significant economic activity (apologies in advance for enabling the movies in question). In that case, the production company covered the cost of managed isolation. There is pressure to widen these provisions to e.g. education, with the cost being met by the employers/institutions etc benefiting. Currently bookings for returning NZers are suspended, as Government-managed isolation facilities are at capacity. It is a struggle to find suitable facilities (moderately secure with isolated exercise area)

    914:

    There's pretty good evidence that color names in languages get acquired in a relatively fixed order: black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. What this means is that a language that has a indigenous word for green always has words for black, white, and red, but a language with words for black, white and red may not have a word for yellow. After blue there's all the fun stuff of orange, fuchsia, and so forth.

    Here's an article on this phenomenon: https://www.pnas.org/content/109/18/6819, one of many.

    Here's Wikipedia on blue-green distinctions in different languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-green_distinction_in_language

    915:

    Not having names for colours visible to human eyes in rainbows seems odd

    Oh, come on. You're writing in a language that doesn't have a word for female cousin, but I'm pretty sure you can tell the difference between them and your male cousins.

    916:

    And there is the question of indigo.

    917:

    How about precise words for smells that are not analogies (smells like...?). That's one whole sensory modality right there.

    Just remember, anything that you learned either from copying someone or from someone saying "let me show you how to do it," is nonverbal learning. It's more common than people think.

    Although it's a non-sequitur, I enjoyed the distinction a mathematician made: analog signals, versus digital symbols. In the analog version, the signal is the information. In digital, the signal encodes the information. It's a nice distinction when it comes to senses. We've done a better job "digitizing" sight, but smell is largely analog.

    918:

    Nahhh, magenta and fuscha... have you ever been in a paint store, or the paint section of a hardware supply store?

    They're all designer names. Pink, purple, off-white are all good enough for me.

    "Eggshell beige".... (and when was the last time you cracked an egg into a bowl where the shell wasn't brown or white?)

    919:

    Oh, yeah? I'll see your indigo, and give you... WOAD!

    "Woad's the stuff to show men, Woad to scare your foemen Boil it to a brilliant blue And rub it on your legs and your abdomen...."

    920:

    I think I'm pretty close to #ffc4ed ("lumber"?)

    921:

    Well pink is a recent name, even to Victorians it was just a shade of red, which in turn was a Manly! colour, so pink was definitely suitable for military uniforms. German still doesn't have a special word for pink, it is referred to as hellrot. Of course blue was a feminine colour, potentially for HubbaHubba! values thereof (cf. the blue light disco).

    But hold that thought about magenta and fuchsia. The way you feel about all those graduated shades, that is how people from a culture which doesn't make the blue/green distinction feel about us and our pettifogging silly distinctions between those slightly different shades of grue.

    922:

    It goes a little further than that. The concept of "race" is pre-Victorian by at least 200 years. It's damn-near "pre-enlightenment."

    Sure! Some might say that the same historical conditions that brought it also triggered the Enlightenment. There's a shared underlying causality rather than a direct linear causality. Confounding variables and all that.

    However, I think that the "scientific" usages that Pigeon has been talking about are primarily Victorian, specifically post-Darwinian. That is because the ideology embeds a hierarchical teleology where white Europeans represent a pinnacle of some sort (the particular "sort" depending on the discipline in question). I'm not saying that Pigeon is including that world view in the discussion here, I think we've pretty much established that it's just the technical content that the argument is about, but most of us are saying it isn't really possible to separate the two effectively in a way that can be communicated to others without some deeply challenging meta discussion.

    923:

    Oh and I forgot to mention again... I'd meant to include this in my comment above where I referred back to a comment of yours about republics versus democracies. I had written a comment with similar content to what I've written here, but lost it in a timeout/refresh/iPad related screwup. At the time I didn't bother re-typing it as it wouldn't really have added anything important to the discussion. It's actually a more useful contribution here.

    But apologies, I'd meant to mention this in case you tried to go back and find it. Sorry if this is too late!

    924:

    Where college students congregate, raves and house parties tend to follow.

    925:

    Re: Blue color-blindness

    Wonder if there were any old cultural practices (e.g., herbal medicines) that somehow damaged their color vision with age while protecting their health from something more serious. For example, color-blindness can be acquired via alcoholism and certain drugs.

    https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/color-vision-deficiency#inheritance

    'Acquired color vision deficiencies can also be side effects of certain drugs, such as chloroquine (which is used to treat malaria), or result from exposure to particular chemicals, such as organic solvents.'

    And then there's the below. So if the people who originally coined the language had medicated themselves into color-blindness by the time they were working members of their society, maybe they decided that it wasn't worthwhile to have a word in their lexicon for something they couldn't see. (Blue = A figment of a child's imagination?)

    'Cinchona is a genus of tropical evergreen trees and shrubs, belonging to the family Rubiaceae. Not all species of cinchona can be used to produce quinine; the most useful species are C. officinalis, C. calisaya and C. pubescens.2'

    Hmm .. interesting - Rubiaceae also includes the coffee plant.

    926:

    Looking around my suburban environment and thinking back to the edge of rural environment I grew up in, there just wasn't much blue around. A very few birds, the sky at times but not very consistent in tone and saturation, maybe a rock brought from somewhere else, and the rainbows. But rainbows aren't all that frequent or long lasting and it's not like blue dominates. Bluejays were seen more often by me.

    927:

    Eggshell

    You do know that the term refers to the texture/sheen, not the color?

    In general the range is: gloss or high gloss semi gloss satin eggshell flat or matte

    928:

    Re: ' ... pretty good evidence that color names in languages get acquired in a relatively'

    Trying to tie your comment in to another language oddity to show an alternate explanation, specifically: speakers of Castillian Spanish stopped pronouncing the 's' because one of their monarchs lisped. This is actually a folktale because according to historians these Spaniards started replacing 's' with 'th' about 200 years after that lisping monarch died. Regardless, the lisp is cultural not physiological so the lack of a specific word for a color could also be cultural. And possibly with a similar folklorish reason.

    No idea how these folks fare when learning/speaking some other language that does require the speaker to say 's', i.e., whether they maintain the lisp or nor.

    929:

    Consider: Texas may not have high-school (American) football this fall. It's nearly a religion there. (See also: "Friday Night Lights".)

    930:

    I'm sorry, but for Texas, and Michigan, and a number of other midwestern states, that's an incorrect statement. The correct statement is, "along with bbw, football is the local religion."

    931:

    have you ever been in a paint store, or the paint section of a hardware supply store?

    No but I used to hand print T shirts. We had both Pantone swatches and a couple of computer-friendly equivalents. Customers gave us whatever they liked and we did our best to colour match. By which I mean grabbing a bucket of near-enough coloured ink then mixing in other stuff to get close enough to what they wanted, allowing for the colour change as it dried and pass-through tinting from the background as well as psychological effects from the surrounding colours. It's totally a hard science is what I'm trying to say.

    What I love is some of the more computerised places who use colour analysers, and some of their competitors think that "digital camera" is the same as "cloth screen printing colour analyser" and their results make that very clear even to untrained observers.

    "colour matcher" is one of those jobs that sounds like B ark territory until you have to try it yourself. Then you start to understand that those people are trained/habituated specifically for the actual industry they work in. They don't just leap blithely from interior design to car painting.

    932:

    You do realize there's only one appropriate response to your cmment?

    "Your face was eaten by a grue."

    934:

    Consider: Texas may not have high-school (American) football this fall.

    Oh, I'm well aware. We've had an apartment in the Dallas area for 10 years for work and other reasons. Shutting it down now.

    Once drove by a high school football stadium that was bigger than most D3 college stadiums. Home stands 40'-50' tall brick. Would have made many colleges proud. Unreal it was. Out in the "sticks" also it was.

    935:

    I saw him live once. It was very nice!

    936:

    Well there you go. My memory is obviously scrambled. I guess I read it like 4 decades ago.

    937:

    SFR Cultural conditioning Try to get a Japanese to say something with "R" in it, especially if you need to "roll" it!

    Moz "50 thousand shades of green"

    938:

    https://sciblogs.co.nz/public-health-expert/2020/07/10/weekly-deaths-declined-in-nzs-lockdown-but-we-still-dont-know-exactly-why/

    The pandemic-related lockdown is possibly the most dramatic public health intervention in NZ history.

    It helped achieve the elimination of community transmission of the COVID-19 virus in NZ. But it was also associated with 548 fewer total deaths than for the same period in 2019. Death rates (per 100,000 population) were also lower in 2020 than the three preceding years. There are a range of plausible reasons for this reduction (eg, fewer road crashes, fewer circulating respiratory infections) but we still need precise cause of death data (available in the future) to make more informed assessments.

    I wonder how this affects notions of "risk compensation", or whether the pandemic risk made such an impact that it contributed to the lower death rate rather than compensating for it?

    939:

    Thank you for seeing the point. Sorry for the mess on your blog.

    940:

    "Well pink is a recent name, ..."

    The OED has 1669, with the modern meaning, derived from the flower; a little before the Victorians. There is a 1738 quote in a context where it is clear that it was not merely a shade of red.

    Interestingly, earlier than that, it meant a yellow or greenish yellow pigment!

    941:

    Damn. Just after I posted, I realised why you had got confused: hunting pink! The term 'pink' referred to the clothing which WAS red, but it's not known why it was called that.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20130825123254/http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/pink.html

    942:

    And there is the question of indigo.
    My father, who has spent quite a large part of his life painting rainbows, has always contended that indigo doesn't exist.

    943:

    That's interesting. It's following the pattern I'd have expected - if you look at a rainbow and purge your mind of the conditioning that it "has seven colours" it pretty obviously divides itself into four broad regions - three plateaus and one broad shallow gradient - separated by fiddly bits where things change very rapidly. (Or three regions if it's a weak rainbow and the short wavelength end doesn't show up.) Which makes sense in relation to the spectral sensitivity curves of the human colour receptors - "blue" is blue and its peak is off on its own, while "green" and "red" are more like sort of yellowy-green and sort of orangey and have considerable overlap - and also makes sense going the other way, as a source of regions where the variation is slow enough that most people will agree they're the same colour.

    I wonder if one reason blue tends to be the last to be named is the importance of colours of food. Very few edible things are blue compared to the number that aren't, and those that are often aren't much of a blue; if something is blue it usually means either it isn't edible or it might have been once but it isn't any more, so if colours of food are an important motivation for naming colours at all it would make sense for a colour that isn't food to be last on the list.

    For "ancient exemplars of undeniable blueness" I might add lapis lazuli, which has been highly prized for its rare blueness as long as people have known about it.

    Concerning smell, it has long struck me as being weird that we are so deficient in proper words for it. I don't know if this is something that only happens to crop up in languages I happen to know about, but it seems a weird for any language to have such a gaping hole in relation to a fundamental human experience.

    And some of the words we do use for it are even more weird. There seems to be some kind of literary convention to use "sweetness" to describe the smell of putrefaction and some related kinds of filth, which is one of the last things I'd associate with a smell like that and is bizarrely contradictory.

    944:

    Colour matching gets particularly interesting when you want to match under multiple lighting conditions - you don't even need artificial lighting for that, as daylight varies considerably and some people can see some colour under bright moonlight.

    945:

    The usual story I've heard is that Newton forced himself to see its presence in the rainbow because of some sort of religious conviction that it ought to have seven colours.

    I'm not sure it's as simple as that. I think part of it may be the non-uniform spectral sensitivity curve of the eye, so depending how bright the rainbow is you may see a "colour" which is basically darkness modified by the bits on either side. I think also the word "indigo" wasn't used in the same way at the time and the way we use it now is strongly modified by trying to see this colour we've been told is in a rainbow when actually it isn't.

    946:

    Sigh. No. In addition to the huge number of people writing pseudo-scientific bigotry, there were plenty of real scientists writing about it, too. Quite a few of the European ones classified the eastern broadheads (a technical term) as superior to themselves. We have since discovered that the categorisations they used were almost entirely wrong, because they were based on superficialities (the only things that could be measured at the time). Those anthropologists should be classified with the epicycle theorists - honest scientists, who simply got it wrong. But, to repeat, I agree that there was even more pseudo-science written to support bigotry.

    Today, we know better, and have even identified some of the gene complexes that cause certain subpopulation differences (*), of which there are a huge number known. There are a lot that affect health, some very seriously, and it is disgraceful when they are ignored for discriminated-against subpopulations, whether on the grounds of bigotry or political correctness.

    (*) Apparently including the one that means so many top marathon runners come from one small area in Africa.

    947:

    Indigo: I was told (in about 1976, I think) that indigo (in the rainbow) is dark blue, and rainbow blue is light blue; and that the colour definitions had shifted since Newton.

    Similarly, IIUC "orange" is a relatively recently introduced term (vbia Spanish) and previously it was just another red. (Whence "Robin Redbreast", at least in the UK - American Robin is a different colour.) Though that does leave the question of what colour "russet" is.

    948:

    Not to mention the contribution of factors like when did you last have a cup of coffee and have you just stood up too quickly.

    I once worked at a place repairing computer monitors. They had some fantastically expensive instrument for measuring and setting up a monitor's colour rendering which was in its own room and only two people were allowed to touch it. I never really saw the point of it since if any colour on a computer screen happens to match the colour of an actual object it's only a momentary coincidence, and if you do set up two screens identically with such an instrument they still won't, in general, look the same as each other if you put them side by side; come to that a screen doesn't even look the same as itself from one side to the other (and this was with CRT screens, so without the inherent viewing angle dependence of the modulation you get with LCDs.)

    This kind of thing crops up in photography as well of course. You take a picture of people under a tree and it comes out with them all looking like Cthulhu because your eye's automatic colour balance corrector edited out the colour cast from the light coming through the leaves but the film didn't. I've trained myself to be able to at least partially switch that automatic correction off, for just that kind of reason, and it's quite remarkable just how much it affects the perceived colours of things.

    949:

    Yes it seems we have words for colours when they become useful. The word Orange didn't enter the English language until the fruit arrived.

    950:

    There's also a gulf between reflective colour and transmissive colour (or additive/subtractive), which means you are just never going to get the wide colour gamut of a transmissive system in your reflective prints. Some galleries use backlit transparencies for this reason, others use slide projectors and of course the traditionalists use stained glass.

    At the extreme someone says "why can't you print transparent". We can... it looks just like the t shirt :)

    For t shirts fine detail often means a multilayer print, either to get a contrasting colour or just to get the detail of a print visible at all (ie, fine black lines on a black shirt). Cloth is a really shitty medium for art in many ways, which is why stuff like photo prints often result in a solid block of ink with a shirt attached (even if it's not literally a transfer, you still get a nice solid block of white ink with a pretty print on the front of it). Getting halftone prints to look right is a whole art in itself. The "we are all boat people" shirt had a lovely halftone photo of a tall ship, but the ink had to be just the right viscosity for it to work, and printing anything other than a nice dark ink on a very light coloured shirt never looked all that great.

    One large print I did ended up being replaced with a transpatrency because the customer had to see it in place before realising that the interior designer, the photographer, the printer and the art installer were all correct... what they wanted to do wasn't going to work. It looked amazing once complete though - a full wall print of the harbour at sunset, as see from the balcony. Also that cliche: if you have to ask how much a 2.3m x 6m transparency costs...

    951:

    If I've parsed your first paragraph correctly then yes, that's similar to the kind of things I've heard.

    "Orange" is an interesting point which relates to the article Heteromeles posted a link to (URL needs a comma chopped off the end). It's the same word in a lot of languages and it's the same word for the colour as for the fruit. The colour itself is in that broad band of gradual variation which doesn't lend itself well to being assigned unambiguous colour names - unless someone introduces a fruit which provides a familiar, bright and highly-saturated reference to compare things to. The article shows how the eye prefers to kind of skate over the more perceptually ambiguous part of the spectrum and take more notice of the colours of the more definite regions, and there's a neat diagram with a big perceptual hole with orange right in the middle of it.

    I think also that the thing we call an orange now isn't the same as what they were when they were first introduced; they used to be ?redder (and smaller), and the colour definition has shifted to match the changing colour of the fruit.

    952:

    Yellower, even greener - I believe that their reddening is a signal to animals to come and eat them, and occurs after they have ripened. If you pick them off the tree when just ripe, they are often still green and yellow. They have been bred to be redder, to be more attractive to the buyer.

    953:

    Pigeon "Sweetness" - maybe what they mean is cloying or clinging, really?

    EC For many years I worked for a photographic company ... don't get me started on colour matching - particularly in the days before LED's, when "aretificial light" usually meant filaments & a whole different reflected spectrum.

    954:

    I wonder if one reason blue tends to be the last to be named is the importance of colours of food. Very few edible things are blue compared to the number that aren't...

    Interesting thought there. Many years ago, in the early '90s, I worked at an industrial scale food plant where many of the working pieces were intentionally blue. (Plastic? Probably. It was a bright unnatural cobalt color.) The point was that none of the food was remotely blue - so if someone spotted a bit of blue anywhere in the product they'd know instantly that something mechanical had fallen off and nothing could go out the door until the problem had been found and fixed.

    955:

    I once drew colour seps for a t-shirt print run by hand, using a design someone else in the club had originally drawn. Of course the design outright required 3 colours plus black, so we could have had process colour if we wanted to, we were paying for enough colours, it might actually have been cheaper... but went for the 4 solid colours anyway, since we really wanted a comical green dragon in lederhosen and a Tyrollean hat, with a stein of yellow beer in one claw and a German flag on a stick in the other. It worked out - just using tracing paper and a black permanent marker. This was for the German language club at ANU, most social events did indeed involve beer in steins, but not so much flags or green dragons.

    956:

    "indigo (in the rainbow) is dark blue, and rainbow blue is light blue;"

    doesn't quite work. The rainbow (or prism or diffraction grating) separates colours by hue (wavelength or frequency) independent of their saturation or intensity, but "dark" and "light" are terms referring to brightness (lightness or value depending on your colour model, HLS or HSV) which is orthogonal to hue.

    Personally I alwys thought (without evidence) that indigo was just shoehorned in there to make the mnemonics work.

    957:

    Surely a filament is pretty much ideal for colour matching - as long as you run it hot enough. It's a continuous black body spectrum, and remarkably few artificial light sources give you that straight out of the box (including things like gas mantles, which are green, usually, or occasionally brown).

    I do agree that you have to be careful with filament lighting for taking photographs, since the usual general purpose sources are both brown and insufficient. Fine if the lighting is specifically designed for photography though.

    LEDs are awful - try reading resistor colour codes under general purpose LED lighting. You can certainly make them a lot better than that by adding more different wavelength emitters and phosphors, but they are still only an approximation to the continuous black body spectrum.

    958:

    Yes, but even if the light source you are separating has a completely flat spectrum, the separated spectrum you see still has some areas which look darker than others because the spectral response curve of the eye is very much not flat. It has wobbles and holes particularly at the blue end, so there is a difference in perceived intensity to which the indigo conundrum appears to be related.

    959:

    Curiously enough woad was probably known as glastum to the romans and possibly glas to the early Brits. A dyer might tell you that isatis tinctorium (or woad) gives a blue with a grey undertone.

    960:

    I was involved in the production of a book on woad (see above) and spent a lot of time working on colour corrections using my PC with two different manufacturers' screens. A helpful print specialist came over and used an extremely expensive gadget and software to calibrate the screens so that I got a good approximation of the actual colours of the photography. Having got the pictures to the author's satisfaction - she is my wife so that was hard - we took the proofs as digital output to the printers who immediately re-set the colours as they decided that the blues were not blue enough. A litle shouting later, they moved from a litho printer to a digital print run as they couldn't get the right blue for the woad based indigo.

    To be fair they did manage a number of runs trying to get the right tone, so we ended up with a stack of large proofs which we used for publicity.

    961:

    The Japanese 'R' exists, but is different than the English 'R'. It's the 'L' that's not there. In fact, they substitute their 'R' for it.

    962:

    Try getting an american or englishman pronounce the "vre" in french "lièvre".

    (not that I'm any good with "th" in english)

    963:

    I agree with that conclusion, but for a different reason; I can rarely see indigo in a rainbow because of the narrowness of the blue-violet band after the much wider green one. Indeed, if I were dividing a rainbow, it would be green-cyan-blue/violet. Whether that says something about my colour vision or not, I can't say.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans

    964:

    More utter, total Brexshit arrogant stupidity Charlie is right, for the wrong reasons - but they ARE trying to kill us.

    SS I think the same reasoning is behind medical gloves being blue, yes?

    Pigeon Maybe, if the filament lasts long enough. The introduction of Halide lamp-bulbs imoroved matters, but they were still "Yellow" compared to "natural" light.

    Ongaku Thanks - yes, I got that reversed, didn't I?

    Michel2Bec Something like "Frre" actually. ( Hard "f" soft lightly-rolled "r", "e" - just a hint - yes? ) Talking of shibboleths, I can almost/sometimes actually pronounce "Scheveningen" ......

    EC You can partially train yourself to tetrachromacy, if you are used to working in very dark ( but not "total" ) environments.

    Oh yes ... BBC news clip about "IGOR" - the robot.

    965:

    Oh I forgot ... I nearly wet myself when I read this, especially as Tulsa is in the land that now belongs to the natives & not the incomers ... oops.

    966:

    "If your move is signed off at Ministerial level. I assume guidance was sought before headhunting internationally, in this case for a forensic pathologist position - not many suitable candidates in a population of 5 million."

    Yes. NZ Defence lawyers regularly end up seeking overseas expert witnesses in that field as the few local ones are unavailable because of demand/commitments or are conflicted out. That can get very expensive.

    967:

    I bow to superior knowledge.

    Which does neatly highlight the difficulty of describing comparative colours.

    968:

    John Hughes @ 942:

    And there is the question of indigo.

    My father, who has spent quite a large part of his life painting rainbows, has always contended that indigo doesn't exist.

    I think it's purple that doesn't exist. We have Red, Green & Blue rods (or cones I don't remember which is for light & which is for color) in our eyes - call them red, green & blue color receptors ...

    Anyway ... purple is what our brain sees when our eyes are stimulated by equal amounts of red & blue light. We don't see green because that receptor is not stimulated, so the brain "knows" whatever we are seeing, it can't be green, so it substitutes "purple".

    969:

    whitroth @ 932: You do realize there's only one appropriate response to your cmment?

    "Your face was eaten by a grue."

    As long as I have this here cast iron frying pan & a butcher knife, I'm having grue stew for lunch!

    970:

    Elderly Cynic @ 944: Colour matching gets particularly interesting when you want to match under multiple lighting conditions - you don't even need artificial lighting for that, as daylight varies considerably and some people can see some colour under bright moonlight.

    When I was still doing manual darkroom I got a set of these:

    https://www.ephotozine.com/forums/topic/for-sale--kodak-colour-print-viewing-filters--119568

    We used them with a 5,000K light booth to determine needed color corrections.

    971:

    The ruling on eastern Oklahoma is very narrow. For a certain set of crimes in certain areas and involving members of the Five Nations tribes, the case must be tried in federal not state court. The Five Nations and the State of Oklahoma issued a joint statement yesterday afternoon saying they are making good progress on a specific proposal they will submit to Congress and the federal Dept of Justice on how to resolve the issues that need to be addressed.

    The big thing about the case is that it upsets the standard maxim about cases involving Indian treaties: "The Indians always lose." There may be a bunch of people in South Dakota running scared, since there is a substantial amount of actual land there which was granted to the Lakota Sioux by treaties that Congress has never explicitly repudiated. The Lakota have always refused payment, saying that they want their land not money.

    972:

    waldo @ 947: Indigo:
    I was told (in about 1976, I think) that indigo (in the rainbow) is dark blue, and rainbow blue is light blue; and that the colour definitions had shifted since Newton.

    Similarly, IIUC "orange" is a relatively recently introduced term (vbia Spanish) and previously it was just another red. (Whence "Robin Redbreast", at least in the UK - American Robin is a different colour.) Though that does leave the question of what colour "russet" is.

    It's the color of raw potatoes.

    973:

    purple is what our brain sees when our eyes are stimulated by equal amounts of red & blue light

    Not exactly. The red receptors in the eye have a second lower peak response that overlaps the high end of the blue receptors, which is why people see a purpleish shade in the rainbow beyond the blue bit. A similar response can be created by two seperate frequencies in the main peaks of the blue and red receptors.

    974:

    Potatoes come in many colours. Russet is a subdued reddish brown.

    975:

    That's... deeply strange.

    For one, where did he find all that circa 1980 hardware?

    For another, why on earth does he think programmers, esp those who wrote adventure/hack/etc, who were at colleges... wore a tie. I had ONE (count them) job I had to wear a tie at (the Scummy Mortgage Co), and nowhere else. And if you're wearing a tie, forget short-sleeved shirts.

    I really have no clue: was that hip-hop, rap, ??? and when was it made?

    976:

    Don't get me started on green. That's my preferred color, and the friggin' Designers have declared it color non grata, that it clashes with everything (except one season, every seven or ten years, when suddenly you can get green, and the next season, the usual "that's SOOOO last season...)

    977:

    I will note that I have heard, and read, the usage "you've pinked him/it", in referring to shooting something.

    978:

    whitroth I wear a (silk) cravat with my (silk) short-sleeved shirts in summer! When "properly" dressed, that is, rather than a scruffy old T-shirt for the allotment ....

    I see another fascistpopulist "leader" has crawled to his right-wing religious fuckwit base. Makes one want to scream religious "blasphemy" as loudly as possible, I'm afraid, which is shortly to be banned in Scotland .... [ I'm referring to Erdogan, of course ]

    979:

    That has a different origin. Pink has 14 top-level entries in the OED, of which at least half look independent back as far as the quotations go.

    980:

    Not exactly. The red receptor has a longer tail than the green receptor towards the high frequency part of the spectrum. Around "blue" the red and green curves cross, and the red response becomes larger than the green.

    Then, right after the colour receptors in the eye, information is combined. The three channels are : Red-Green difference channel, Red+Green sum channel (yellow channel), and Blue-Yellow difference channel. Each of these channels also have some adaptive gain applied. (And I think some adaptive gain also before the differences are made) (Meaning that the lower the value, the more it is amplified. It is not quite logarithmic compression, but something like it.) So the small difference in the small response in the red and green channels gets exaggerated, and passed to the brain. (After even more low-level processing in the eye... Vision is complicated!)

    So for high frequency light the red-green difference channel will point towards red, and the blue-yellow difference channel will point towards blue. It thus appears the same as a certain mix of red and blue would. This is the reason we can represent colour hues in a wheel format.

    (Incidentally, with some patience, you can see the exaggerated amplification of low difference levels if you look at a lightly textured white surface and sort of let your eyes defocus. It is like a thin film, like oil on water, detaches and slight colour variations that slide around appears. Certain illegal drugs will significantly enhance the effect in a rather spectacular manner, but it is there even without. Just much harder to see.)

    981:

    It's called "nerdcore rap." And maybe Steve Meretzky likes to wear a tie... I think it was made about ten years ago. He has a lot of very odd/funny songs you can find on youtube.

    982:

    (Incidentally, with some patience, you can see the exaggerated amplification of low difference levels if you look at a lightly textured white surface and sort of let your eyes defocus. It is like a thin film, like oil on water, detaches and slight colour variations that slide around appears. Certain illegal drugs will significantly enhance the effect in a rather spectacular manner, but it is there even without. Just much harder to see.)

    Thanks!

    For that last bit, you may have partially explained the phenomenon of seeing auras. The colors (in my experience) are naturally emphasized a bit if you look at something (like a hand) against a white or similarly neutral monochromatic background. I suspect eyes tend to emphasize edges and they get a bit haloed.

    983:

    I'm more used to seeing that kind of usage in reference to fencing, meaning you have got your opponent but haven't done more than a pinprick of damage, so it's the pink spot on their shirt that is the result you actually see. Whether that is the actual etymology or just happens to sound right I don't know. When I do see it referring to shooting I therefore take it to mean you've hit the target but not done any serious harm, whether because you hit it with an airgun pellet or something or simply because you were a fraction of a millimetre from not hitting it at all.

    984:

    I didn't know about that matrixing thing. That's very interesting. Thank you.

    985:

    So far as verbalizing smells goes, I wasn't entirely right, because English does have a few smell words: pungent, acrid, smelly, stinky that aren't similes, and some taste words (bitter, acid, sweet) translate readily into smells without similes.

    Still, English is depauperate enough in olfactory vocabulary that the Jahai group of languages got written up for its diversity of words for particular smells (e.g. https://www.popsci.com/article/science/malaysian-language-describes-smells-precisely-english-describes-colors/). There's nothing mind-blowing here, they just have words that describe things like "bloody," or "jasmine" that we use similes for, and they do not.

    And to be fair, we use similes for many colors too. One of the weirdest ones is pink, not because it came from garden pinks (Dianthus), but because garden pinks got their name because the edges of their petals look they've been "pinked." Pinking is the act of cutting a scalloped or zig-zag edge, and it's a characteristic of many plants in the pink family (Caryophyllaceae). So start with pinking shears, end with a color. Nothing random about that...

    986:

    Oh I forgot ... I nearly wet myself when I read this, especially as Tulsa is in the land that now belongs to the natives & not the incomers ... oops.

    Not quite. The decision did not deal with land ownership, rather just the native territory. The only real impact at this point is that members of those tribes cannot be charged with State crimes within their tribal territories (they can however be charged with US federal crimes).

    As for the longer term, future court cases, difficult to tell - though again one of Trump's appointments sided with the Native Americans.

    987:

    I prefer green too. My main objection to it is the infamous green screen, where if you wear green in a green screen system, you get edited out.

    988:

    Agreed, and that's actually the part that concerns me: Federal justice may not be as just as the state. Or not.

    The other thing that interests me is that Tulsa is officially Indian Country. Do they disband their judicial system? Put themselves under BIA management? The new Vegas until the Ogllala aquifer gives out? It's fun to be ignorant about that mess and to speculate wildly.

    989:

    Muppets doing the first act of Hamilton. Unfortunately, it's only the vocals, but damn!

    https://youtu.be/zZzDP-vQXao

    990:

    I only wear a cravat (or a jabot) when I'm working to outdress the waiters.*

    Where are you getting the short-sleeved silk shirts? I used to have a number, but they all wore out, and I'm afraid to order from overseas.**

    • When one of my daughters was getting married, 11 years ago, she had to call me to ask me not to outdress the groom.

    * Sizes. Let's put it this way: when my late ex and I were still together, and living in Chicago, I took her down to Devon** Ave - what I am told is the larges Indian and Pakistani community in North America - to see the sari shops, and jewelry. She got a, hell, what's it called, the tunic and pants pair. Anyway, we were amused that she had to get a large... given that, on a good day, standing up straight, she was 5' tall, and 105lbs soaking wet.

    * That's De-Von, not Devon... like in NYC, they've got Houston St, pronounced How-ston.

    991:

    The other thing that interests me is that Tulsa is officially Indian Country. Do they disband their judicial system? Put themselves under BIA management? The new Vegas until the Ogllala aquifer gives out? It's fun to be ignorant about that mess and to speculate wildly.

    Reports are that this ruling effectively only applies to the Natives - everyone else still needs to obey state and local laws and are subject to prosecution as such - this is based on the fact that there are only a handful of existing convictions that this ruling could overturn.

    The key is that the ruling doesn't consider actual ownership of the land so while it is officially a Native Reservation it would appear it is more in paper only rather than physical.

    992:

    Thanks. Where things get interesting again is if there's some way the ruling on the Dakota Access Pipeline gets fed into considerations about fracking in Oklahoma. Hopefully this will stay interesting, although I kind of doubt it.

    993:

    Random non-sequitur. I was thinking a bit about Burroughs Barsoom, which, while SFF of over a century ago, obviously hasn't aged well, what with the racial politics of a former confederate cavalryman conquering the red, black, yellow (and white) men of Mars.

    Then things got amusing. I vaguely recalled work on how human movement changes in lower gravity, so I started digging (Google "Walking Froude Number"). The tl;dr is the speed at which something moves from a walk to a run is proportion to the local gravity: the lower the gravity is, the slower one can run. As a separate note, skipping is energy inefficient on Earth, but it becomes progressively more efficient at lower gravity, to the point where skipping might be the preferred human gait in low gravity on the Moon, perhaps on Mars as well.

    Then I thought about ol' John Carter, skipping across the surface of Barsoom with swords harnessed to his naked body. For some reason the opening sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail bubbled up in my warped imagination. King Arthur looks like he's doing a pretty martian skip there. With sound effects even.

    And that's the image I'd like to leave you with: scarred swordsmen skipping dauntlessly across the red surface of an alt-planet, everything flapping and bouncing in Barsoom's thin air. Coconut shells optional.

    994:

    Could SARS-CoV-2 affect male fertility? (Andrologia, Rahul Vishvkarma, Singh Rajende, 21 May 2020D)

    Re long term damages to COVID-19 survivors, a reasonably well-grounded speculation, with an urgent call for research action since spermatogenesis takes "70-75 days to complete". (There are a few other relevant papers.) Those young men getting themselves infected through deliberate (and oft partisan) recklessness might find themselves to be undesirable partners for females who want to start a family now or in the future. This might get the attention of some of the male cull-the-weak to get herd immunity and save the economy crowd, and the attention of females who care (+/-) about their male partner's fertility.

    The presence of ACE2 on almost all testicular cells and the report of a significant impact of previous SARS coronavirus on testes suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is highly likely to affect testicular tissue, semen parameters and male fertility.

    Also covers the possibilities for any efffect of SARS Coronaviruses on fertility via impact on the brain, and for effects of SARS Coronaviruses on fertility via impact on the prostate.

    The bottom line, which could be read as a call for action: Since the impact of this viral disease is long-lasting, and spermatogenesis takes 70–75 days to completion, SARS-CoV-2 recovered patients are ideal subjects for studying its impact on spermatogenesis and fertility. We suggest that SARS-CoV-2 should be given a high priority to study its correlation with orchitis and infertility. Inclusion of a clause of SARS-CoV-2 infection history in infertility workup in future would help in consolidating these speculations.

    995:

    Indigo -- talking about it -- you all know where indigo comes from probably. But if not,

    https://medium.com/@tsbojer/the-history-of-indigo-dyeing-and-how-it-changed-the-world-35c8bc66f0e9

    Being rare and expensive, when it was found that indigo plants could be raised in the Sea Islands and Carolina low countries, it made fortunes for the slaveocracy. This is why the South Carolina state flag is INDIGO Blue. This can even be reliably googled.

    https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/indigo-fabric-early-south-carolina#:~:text=Indigo%20was%20grown%20in%20early,1740s%20to%20the%20late%201790s.

    "[....] "Indigo was grown in early South Carolina to produce blue dye that was exported to England for use in the British textile industry. Indigo formed a significant part of the South Carolina economy for approximately fifty years, from the late 1740s to the late 1790s. During that period, indigo (or, more specifically, indigo dyestuff) was South Carolina’s second most valuable export, behind rice.

    The cultivation and production of indigo also involved the labor of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of people in the South Carolina Lowcountry. For this reason, the cultural memory of indigo is heightened among members of the African-American community along what is now called the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.[....]"

    996:

    Re: 'COVID-19 survivors, a reasonably well-grounded speculation, with an urgent call for research action since spermatogenesis takes "70-75 days to complete".'

    There were similar concerns with the Zika virus. Maybe EC could add an analysis of expected vs. actual birth rates, birth defects, and various birth-related problems. Might be some data from China by end of year re: pregnancy rates. I'm assuming that OB/GYN practice there follows the same schedule as in NA with most women usually starting their regular medical pregnancy check-ups only once they're in their second trimester.

    If long term male fertility is indeed affected, the politics could get even uglier esp. funding for universal screening and vaccination. (I'm think closer to the 'final solution' than Atwood's 'Handmaid's Tale'.)

    997:

    Is it just hot air, or are these people like the S in the years before 1861, who bullied & used monstrous force & got away with it & convinced themselves that secession was a "good" idea.

    Yes, that's exactly what they are.

    The big difference between 1861 and today is that these mostly old jackasses do not have nearly as many young jackasses to do their fighting for them as they did back then.

    998:

    I think that there's one more issue: I have real trouble seeing them as a serious military force. For one, they're too scattered around the country, and heavily in rural and small town areas, not in major population centers.

    For another... I think they have real personal issues, resulting in them having problems picking someone to be in charge of a unit, and obeying orders.

    Oh, and I can't see any of them being told to charge a defended point, knowing that most of them wouldn't make it (think Normandy).

    999:

    salwar kameez?

    That's what my mum always wore in India. Much easier to put on than a sari and equally good at rendering her invisible.

    1000:

    That paper mentions one small study of damage to the testes caused by the original SARS: A lone study on testicular samples showed a significant impact of SARS coronavirus on the reproductive system (Xu et al., 2006). In this study, the authors inspected the pathological variations in the testis of six patients who deceased of SARS and compared it with controls. They found that SARS caused orchitis and testes showed widespread damage of germ cells with very few or no spermatozoa in the seminiferous tubules. The seminiferous tubules had thickened basement membrane and showed significant leukocyte infiltration and macrophage staining, suggesting the impact of immune response on the testis.

    Direct link to the wingnutty statement on the grant of clemancy (not pardon) for Roger Stone: Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Grant of Clemency for Roger Stone, Jr. (July 10, 2020) Because no such evidence exists, however, they could not charge him for any collusion-related crime. Earlier in the day, it was reported that Stone said “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.”

    New WHO scientific brief, that grudgingly acknowledges the possibility of airborne SARS-CoV-2 spread beyond 2 meters: Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: implications for infection prevention precautions (WHO Scientific Brief, 9 July 2020) It's better, but the authors are clearly still ego-involved in their early (expert, to be clear) guesswork recommendations and appear to be reluctant to change them. Bold mine: Despite consistent evidence as to SARS-CoV-2 contamination of surfaces and the survival of the virus on certain surfaces, there are no specific reports which have directly demonstrated fomite transmission. People who come into contact with potentially infectious surfaces often also have close contact with the infectious person, making the distinction between respiratory droplet and fomite transmission difficult to discern. However, fomite transmission is considered a likely mode of transmission for SARS-CoV-2, given consistent findings about environmental contamination in the vicinity of infected cases and the fact that other coronaviruses and respiratory viruses can transmit this way.

    And yet, hand hygiene is still given first place in their list of precautions, and masks for source control are at a later place in the list. At all times, practice frequent hand hygiene, physical distancing from others when possible, and respiratory etiquette; avoid crowded places, close-contact settings and confined and enclosed spaces with poor ventilation; wear fabric masks when in closed, overcrowded spaces to protect others; and ensure good environmental ventilation in all closed settings and appropriate environmental cleaning and disinfection.

    1001:

    Yes, that's it. Thanks!

    1002:

    It's a good point, but I think that Whitroth has another good point.

    The interesting dynamic here: in a sense we're seeing the death of Terror and the War on Terror. Right now, the far right's trying to (re)gain political power by attempting to be a terrifying force for potential violence. It worked in the past, even in 2015. Especially if they're (gasp, horror) lone wolves.

    Trouble is, in the last few months we've seen unarmed demonstrations gain far more politically than the gun-toters did in the last few years, just by marching in the street. And those marchers for the most part didn't come down with Covid-19, even when they were tear-gassed and pepper sprayed.

    Contrast this with Da Extremist Boyz, who seem to be making time with Rona wherever they go. That Cheeto rally in Oklahoma led to a hot spot, for example. It's hard to be terrified of someone who's so undisciplined that they can't wear a simple mask for self protection.

    1003:

    I think the same reasoning is behind medical gloves being blue, yes?

    I've never had a primary source tell me so but that would be my expectation too. It's advantageous to have obvious distinctions between equipment and parts of the patient.

    Even more than cooks, surgeons should not send their tools home with their clients.

    1004:

    ilya187 I was actually thinking of this incident - & everything that went before & with it. And comparing with the way US cough "police" forces are behaving, right now. And wondering if a similar long-deserved comeuppance is around the corner.

    [ From the wiki article "The South cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife, as they are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine, and murder." No change, there, then ..... ]

    1005:

    We won't see any such data for at least a year! What I have seen indicates that birth defects are relatively unlikely.

    1006:

    Er, no, definitely not! The flowers have been called pinks since 1566 and, while pinking was used for decorative puncturing from 1486, the use for zig-zag edging is much later (perhaps 18th century). So they probably have a different origin, and it would be the other way round if they didn't!

    1007:

    And yet, in the daily newsletters I get from a Republican congressman, demonstrations are linked to upticks in Covid but no mention is made of the rallies (or rather, rallies are mentioned but upticks in infection aren't).

    So I wonder whether right-wing supporters are even aware of what is actually causing infections — at least until it happens to them personally.

    There seems to be an awful lot of idiocy around infections…

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/people-in-alabama-are-throwing-covid-19-parties-with-a-payout-when-one-gets-infected-official-1.5007903

    https://www.kens5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/30-year-old-patient-dies-in-san-antonio-hospital-after-attending-covid-party/273-d6641659-1e2a-49cd-8ac8-bc7c15b98092

    1008:

    Re: 'We won't see any such data for at least a year!'

    Seems odd that birth rate data wouldn't be reported as it happened. There aren't that many countries where births are unattended by a professional of some sort. Plus there are quite a few countries where the registration of birth is compulsory in order to qualify for medical treatment, e.g. India.

    The analysis wouldn't have to be worldwide with every country included just a large enough sampling of countries across different socioeconomic strata/policies and populations.

    I'm expecting that anecdotal or partial data might surface via charitable/NFP orgs that have boots on the ground esp. in what may be the more seriously at-risk regions - overcrowded and medically under-serviced. Below is the only chart I could find showing birth defect data. Although it's pretty old (2003) it does show birth defect data from across 193 countries therefore could be used as a baseline.

    https://www.marchofdimes.org/materials/global-report-on-birth-defects-the-hidden-toll-of--WAk00l8AFdheR3Hyz4TRcSVNc5tvO5T0ziR4-AlnXYs.pdf

    1009:

    Externally-caused birth defects are primarily caused by events in early pregnancy, the covid infection rate is not large in most places, and you need enough cases to show up against the normal rate.

    1010:

    Re: 'Seems odd that birth rate data wouldn't be reported as it happened. ’

    You were talking about sperm damage, weren’t you? 75 days for spermatozoa genesis plus 9 months to make a baby (cue joke about project managers wanting to add resources to speed the project up) plus time to get enough data to see it.

    And then maybe a year or two to factor out the weird social effects - the flu pandemic in 1918 caused a temporary drop in births because raging pandemic death and uncertainty made people less keen to have a kid just now, my guess is we will see the same here. Most kids are planned, because people want kids. Pandemic would have made me think twice about whether this was a good time.

    1011:

    As for colors[1], I just stumbled into the color system ofPIE a few days ago, actually I guess the discussion about blue here started it.

    The Polish term for "green" is zielony, which ultimately derives from the PIE root ǵʰelh₃-[2].

    Funny thing, this PIE root is also the one the English "yellow", along with German "gelb" (also yellow) and Latin "helvus" ("honey-yellow").

    First explanation, the original PIE term meant something like a greenish yellow/yellowish green, and the meaning shifted differentially in different daughter languages; there might have been other PIE terms for "green" and yellow".

    Second explanation, PIE speakers had only one term for green and yellow, just as blue and green.

    As for "pink", well, PIE had a word for salmons/trouts, and their flesh has a somewhat pinkish hue, actually the term for "red" in some daughter languages derives from it.

    [1] Please excuse me jumping between American and british orthography... [2] h₃ is a larynghal, but let's not go into those, I don't completely understand them myself, and nobody knows how they were pronounced...

    1012:

    I looked up the Greek terms, because I remember χλωρός being the source of "chlorine" and "chlorophyll"[1]. It's related to zielony/yellow.

    Actual "yellow" would be ξανθός, "xanthos", the PIE root also became "white" in some daughter languages and is given as meaning "white, blond, grey".

    [1] Discussion about meta-dioxin comes to mind...

    1013:

    Re: 'Externally-caused birth defects are primarily caused by events in early pregnancy, ...'

    True. And because some are very serious, most OB/GYNs do regular non-invasive check-ups e.g., ultrasound to monitor fetal development. So it may be possible to obtain some data fairly early.

    Although I was mostly thinking about the potential for this virus to result in a large drop in overall birth rates in the near future, I then remembered that Dutch Hunger Winter study which showed how some harms continue to be passed on down a couple of generations. It's a scary thought.

    Yeah, I know that our planet is crowded but this is not an optimal or humane way to put a check on population growth.

    1014:

    And yet, in the daily newsletters I get from a Republican congressman, demonstrations are linked to upticks in Covid but no mention is made of the rallies (or rather, rallies are mentioned but upticks in infection aren't).

    Largely I suspect as a way to try and deflect (at least until November) the blame - easier to blame a bunch of non-white people and non-GOP-whites for the Covid crisis returning than to admit that reopening the economy was wrong...

    There seems to be an awful lot of idiocy around infections…

    I suspect yet again there is going to be a need to consider the media's role (and responsibility) in all of this after the fact.

    They have been good at reporting the "scary" numbers, but have been less good at getting the story out about what Covid is and how and when you are contagious - there seems to be an acceptance that Covid is just another variety of flu to much of their stories and decision making.

    As has been linked on here, Covid is anything but a flu variation with lots of complications and possible long term side effects for even those who show little to no symptoms. For whatever reason the media is not emphasizing this, thus allowing the public (particularly the younger who aren't in general getting the more immediate bad symptoms) to incorrectly judge the dangers.

    For example, the story on CTV website you linked about the Alabama parties - the far more interesting story was linked from that about a guy in California, desperate for human interaction, who went to a BBQ once things started to open and got Covid and died - but worse is this paragraph(*) about one of the attendees of that BBQ

    "A friend who was at the party reached out to Macias to say he had coronavirus, and he was aware of the diagnosis when he attended the gathering but didn't think he could infect anyone because he had no symptoms, "

    1015:

    New WHO scientific brief, that grudgingly acknowledges the possibility of airborne SARS-CoV-2 spread beyond 2 meters:

    It's better, but the authors are clearly still ego-involved in their early (expert, to be clear) guesswork recommendations and appear to be reluctant to change them.

    I don't know what to think of the WHO at this point, in part because some of the reporting reflects certain people trying to shift blame.

    That said, they have also been slow to adapt (perhaps in part as a result of being used as a scapegoat) to some of the developments that are being reported.

    So like many parts of Covid, there will need to be some analysis and changes made in the years to come.

    But as for this specific case, is it possible the WHO is stuck between a difference in the 1st world/ 3rd world realities of Covid?

    One of the things that I think will need to be researched in the coming years will be how much influence the massive cleaning/sterilizing emphasis much of the western world implemented had in the spread.

    It's easy for us in the 1st world to say contact isn't a transmission vector when almost every public surface is being cleaned to an extent that didn't happen prior to March of this year.

    So does anyone know what is happening in other parts of the world that haven't/can't implement these measures? And is this perhaps one reason why the WHO still considers contact to be a threat?

    1016:

    That is scary. (And parenthetically, not linked when I look at the story I originally linked. I think most media outlets choose those links to other stories dynamically, so you can't count on them staying the same.)

    And yet, when you get a positive test here you are informed of what to do. So I'm not certain how that chap got the idea he wouldn't be infectious — other than denial, maybe.

    1017:

    The World Health Organisation is slow to change its mind but that's actually a good thing in many ways. A lot of folks on this blog and elsewhere breathlessly trumpet news about cures and results based on preprint scientific publications reporting studies of a dozen or two dozen cases in one locale -- that's how we got the quinine pills thing that wasted a lot of time and effort, raised hopes and still to this day has millions of True Believers because it was politicized by President Trump, President Bolsarno and others on the Internet. The WHO said nothing about this supposed miracle medicine until multiple large widespread studies had proved quinine was worse than useless.

    There are lots of people who are obsessed with the public wearing masks to prevent the spread of this disease. The WHO was very reluctant to say "masks are absolutely a good thing" to start with and it still tries to not raise hopes that masks will save us all, especially the Etsy cloth masks that most punters wear when out and about which are only marginally effective but better than nothing at all according to most serious testing that's been carried out (ignore the bacterial cultivation tests popularised on Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet -- they're seriously deceptive).

    1018:

    Regarding Sweden, if thats the case can anyone point out the flaw in the reasoning at:

    http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/nordic_comparison_4jul.html

    It seems to make pretty good sense to me. And all the stats I'm seeing show that while cases are not hugely low (the Swedes claim increased testing capacity picking up milder cases they wouldn't have detected earlier on) ICU admissions and deaths with the virus are (each) well under 10 per day now.

    Also we've recently seen Macron in France, which had a much worse (stricter) lockdown than the UK, admitting that they regret using lockdown to fight the virus and that if a second wave occurs they want to fight it solely with less intrusive and destructive methods than lockdown. An admission like that from a contry with a strong lockdown suggests that if even countries which went hard with lockdown don't think it was so wise then it might be a pretty bad idea afterall.

    1019:

    Talking mnemonics, shame there isn't a colour near the violet end of the visible spectrum starting with a C. That way we could have Richard Of York Got Buried In Carpark.

    In the comment a little further down about resistor codes and lighting, there's some good mnemonics or them too, the one I first learnt was: Better Buy Resistors Or Your Great Big Venture Goes West, then I was introduced to Bad Beer Rots Out Your Guts But Vodka Goes Well

    1020:

    To my understanding the ONS only publish stats on all the specific causes of death and how this correlates to age brackets at the end of the year, but I wonder if when they do we'll see a surge of accident related deaths in the young related to what they got up to due to the frustrations of seeing lockdown take away their futures?

    1021:

    I ran across this in my daily news feed:

    https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-abnormally-high-blood-sugar-linked.html

    "A total of 605 COVID-19 patients were enrolled, including 114 who died in hospital. The median age of participants was 59 years and 322 (53.2%) were men. A total of 208 (34%) had one or more underlying conditions (but not diagnosed diabetes), of which high blood pressure was the most common. Almost one third (29%) of patients fell into the highest category of FBG on admission (7.0 mmol/L) which if found consistently would result in a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. A further 17% were in the range that would be considered pre-diabetic (6.1-6.9 mmol/L), while more than half (54%) were in the 'normal' FBG range of 6.0 mmol/L or below."

    Can someone who knows please explain how these numbers relate to the numbers I get on the testing machine when I do my finger sticks?

    1022:

    You probably need to multiply by 18-ish to convert.

    https://www.mdapp.co/blood-sugar-conversion-calculator-71/

    1023:

    To convert glucose mmol/L to mg/dL the ancient unit used in the USA multiply by 18.

    1024:
    Regarding Sweden, if thats the case can anyone point out the flaw in the reasoning at:

    I'd start with their arguments about virus testing; calling this article well researched is, err, interesting.

    I would be somewhat cautious when quoting Kary "AIDS is not caused by HIV"[1] Mullis about virus testing by PCR, he invented the method, together with others, but there has been a lot of research after that.

    Funny thing, when reading that article I have quite a flashback to the Duesberg crowd...

    I have done PCR with Reverse Transkriptase myself, a common problem is RNA degradation, which would mean "false negatives".

    As for RNA amplified not coming from SARS-COV2, can you spell "negative control"? Anybody who has seen a lab from the inside should know it, not that alls biologist apply it.

    As Christian Drosten said concerning coverage of his study in Bild, the German version of the "Daily Mail", I've got better things to do[2].

    [1] I just rebought his autobiography, can we agree the guy was interesting but hell, I'm not sure I'd like to drop acid with him...

    [2] Actually, a German punk band did a song about them. I might do a translation soon.

    1025:
    Most kids are planned, because people want kids.

    Let's just say when you know a bunch of people where the time between wedding of parents and date of birth is decidedly less than 9 months, you question that assumption somewhat.

    As for falling birth numbers, well, lockdown or social distancing means you're interacting more with your partner, which might not necessarily be a good thing, I haven't seen the statistics on divorce or "temporary" seperations.

    Also, stress might influence ovulation, though acute stress might actually induce ovulation[1]. And there are studies relating stress to spontaneous abortions.

    Of course, you might call the relation between stress and fertility "unconscious evolutionary developed planning".

    Personal associations omitted, damn it, err, except...

    Apparantly ancient Romans also had a reproductive problem, which makes me wonder how much of the modern lowering birth rate is due to planning or the pill and how much due to effects by population density and like. Though silphium might have been used as a contraceptive and might have had similar effects if contraceptives are the reason, though it went extinct well before the collapse of the Roman Empire.

    Whatever, I wonder if I can browbeat an acquaintance of mine to let me use his Late Roman Empire/time travel universe to do the Ancient Roman drug scene story we talked about why the Romans had no coffee or tea and why they used lettuce to get high. Err. Plenty of Dark Haired Girls around, though with the Goth Punks I knew, quite a few of those used dye. ;)

    [1] Am I the only one being somewhat troubled about a study starting with pregnancy rates due to rape to wonder about stress and ovulation?

    1026:

    They might not go on strike, but jut wait for what a borked software update will do...

    1027:

    Elderly Cynic @ 974: Potatoes come in many colours. Russet is a subdued reddish brown.

    Y'all take some of this stuff WAY too seriously.

    1028:

    That off-guardian article is pretty rotten, but given in what context it is cited it doesn't do much to the conclusions of the talkigy article. If tests are perfectly reliable, and indications are that they are pretty good, then counting overall mortality is still a valid count. Those scandinavian countries are pretty demographically similar, the age distributions close, and the prevalence of health issues in societies not so different, so the fact that Sweden hasn't seen vast mortality increases implies it did pretty well.

    1029:

    Well, the problem is there are a lot of charts around on this site, which reminds me somewhat of "Death by Powerpoint". The guy says he is in IT, a short university course on "how to do a presentation" might help.

    I'd have to wade through the data, which is a time-consuming process; controlling data is a form of computation.

    Computation time is always a scarce resource, so you go with a heuristic, when somebody calls such an article "well-researched", I'm alarmed.

    Don't get me wrong, actually I find Mullis fascinating, and back in 2004, Sasha Shulgin mentioned a nice story about him drinking wine during a lecture when he hung around at the entrance of Entheovision 2. Still, I have some problems with "mavericks".

    I'm not an expert on Scandinavian countries, but Finland is somewhat different from Sweden.

    And if you look at the numbers in a certain way, using certain statistics, Sweden has seen SIGNIFICANT[1] mortality increases, else there wouldn't be a need for that rebuttal.

    The elephant in the room is, countries that didn't institute lockdown, like e.g. the US and the UK have a much higher mortality rate than the rest. Using an possible outlier like Sweden with a number of possible explanations for the results can't change that. And using Asian countries, with a history of ill people using masks and a bunch of other differences[2] helps even less.

    [1] Where the statistical significance was actually the reason BILD got into a beef with Drosten, a study by Drosten said there was no significant difference in viral load between children and adults, while with another method they found one. Please note that even with a significant difference, e.g. half the viral load, standing in front of a class would make me uncomfortable, and not because of my sometimes social anxiety.

    [2] And don't get me started on people using Asian cultures for projection, when reading about Japanese not talking to foreigners, I was reminded about the English professor who wanted to get OGH to proofread his dictionary. There are differences in social etiquette etc., but it's not black and white, it's blue and orange.

    1030:

    And actually, the increase in mortality in Sweden can be seen in a graph on the site; just look for "Deaths per week".

    1031:

    Re: Sweden

    That's precisely the point: When the rest of the Scandinavia locked down hard, Sweden did not.

    It's not a perfect A/B experiement, there are important differences in geography, climate and to some extent culture which makes it hard to compare SE/DK/NO/FI/IS precisely.

    But the swedish death-toll is so outsized compared to NO/DK/FI/IS even with all those differences, the experiment delivers a clear and unmistakable conclusion:

    During pandemics, you want a female PM.

    1032:

    Well, we might still be mistaken if we involve the right analysis.

    I'm trying to go through the Drosten paper at the moment and my head is swirling from the statistics, but he got the people who said there were mistakes involved into a revised paper.

    As for the original "Nordic comparison", in retrospect, I have seen a fair amount of bullshitting with results, and I have done some myself, but usually the real signal was not that clearly visible. I'm not calling them liars, misguided, I guess.

    Actually, biologists are quite fond of Feyerabend, and I still remember one part of "Against Method"; you will always find rational reasons for what you do, because reason is slave to the passions. AFAIK he was partly quoting Hume with that one, Scottish Enlightenment, OGH would approve. ;)

    1033:
    Well, we might still be mistaken if we involve the right analysis.

    Meaning, if you take the differences between SE/DK/NO/FI/IS into account, the signal might still disappear; I wouldn't bet on it, though.

    1034:

    Regarding Sweden, if thats the case can anyone point out the flaw in the reasoning at:

    The danger, as always, is thanks to the Internet anyone can create a website and proclaim themselves an expert - usually done to promote something they believe that is outside mainstream acceptance.

    There has been a very strong reaction by people with money against the lockdowns and the costs involved - whether it be direct costs to government balance sheets or the indirect costs of lost business activity.

    Surrounding that are people who are against public health policies for ideological reasons.

    While there is nothing online to give an idea on how reliable InProportion2 is, the fact that they consider the article on off-guardian as good because it has lots of references is a warning sign - you can provide a lot of references to made up nonsense - and the fact that the site overall recommends off-guardian as a news source when (admittedly themselves potential biased) many sites consider off-guardian to be a conspiracy and pseudoscience website should set off alarm bells for anyone interested in actual facts.

    It seems to make pretty good sense to me. And all the stats I'm seeing show that while cases are not hugely low (the Swedes claim increased testing capacity picking up milder cases they wouldn't have detected earlier on) ICU admissions and deaths with the virus are (each) well under 10 per day now.

    The only stat that matters is overall deaths, and Sweden easily exceeds their Nordic neighbours.

    And despite what the right wing likes to claim, Sweden didn't just ignore Covid - while they didn't go into total lockdown they did do some stuff, and it is a fair guess that as the Swedish people lost faith in their government that they started to take action themselves when they could see what the actions of their Nordic neighbours achieved.

    Also we've recently seen Macron in France, which had a much worse (stricter) lockdown than the UK, admitting that they regret using lockdown to fight the virus and that if a second wave occurs they want to fight it solely with less intrusive and destructive methods than lockdown. An admission like that from a contry with a strong lockdown suggests that if even countries which went hard with lockdown don't think it was so wise then it might be a pretty bad idea afterall.

    Or it could simply mean that the economic costs have frightened the politicians, because their masters behind the scenes are angry with them for shutting down the economy and thus depriving them of their expected business profits.

    Don't assume what the politicians are doing or talking about doing reflects either the correct thing to do, or even what the general public wants. They nominally represent the people, but as the saying goes money talks (and that isn't the people).

    1035:

    back to Indigo...as I was driving recently from France back to Italy, from Nimes, to Genova - or as you might say, in an indigo frame of mind "de Nîmes" a "Gênes", where the material made in Nimes 'denim' was exported from the major port 'Genes' - to USA , where the cowboys liked them, indigo colored?

    My Russian lady tells me that indigo doesnt exist in russian , simply a spectral light-blue and a dark blue , is to be found in their rainbow. senee & guloboi. kartoshka/potatoes are brown (ignoring - so called "artistic colors")

    1036:

    then counting overall mortality is still a valid count. Those scandinavian countries are pretty demographically similar, the age distributions close, and the prevalence of health issues in societies not so different, so the fact that Sweden hasn't seen vast mortality increases implies it did pretty well.

    (did we not do this before with someone on this board, who was denying the figures?)

    Sorry, but the numbers tell a very different story.

    Deaths from Covid (as of July 8th)*

    Sweden - 5,482 (population 10.23 million) Denmark - 609 (population 5.8 million) Finland - 329 (population 5.52 million) Norway - 251 (population 5.4 million)

    There is simply no way to try and claim that Sweden is no different to their Nordic neighbours.

    I mean, that is the reason why the Nordic countries opened their borders among themselves except for Sweden https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/17/swedens-exclusion-from-nordic-travel-area-swedens-foreign-minister.html

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coronavirus-deaths-in-the-nordics/

    1037:

    "Most kids are planned"?

    Really? I'm old enough to be on social security, and in my experience, over a lifetime, kids are heavily NOT planned. More of a "ooops..."

    1038:
    But maybe we need a reservation for Pure Aryans...

    Minor note, I guess Greg and I already had some fun when pointing that one out...

    Aryan originally was a self designation of some steppe nomads[1], it's also used as a linguistic category for some Indian languages, e.g. Indo Aryan like Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu or Sinhalese. And Romani, which is the biggest group of Indo Aryans in Europe, no idea if Asian immigration into the UK changed that one.

    So you might ask any Aryan Nation guy from which side his Romanipen stems; if he doen't understand this term, explain to him Romani people used to be called "gypsies", but this term is somewhat problematic, first of, quite a few Romani object to it as a slur, second of, AFAIK gypsy is also sometimes used for Irish travellers and Jenish who don't speak an Indo Aryan language.

    As for racial categories, Sinhalese people speak an Indo Aryan language, Tamil people a Dravidian one, not that there is that much physical difference between them, I still remember the quite dark Sinhalese guy who nearly looked like an Australian Aborigine being surprised the Masematte term for water is "pany", just like in his language. Originally, it was Romani "pani".

    In relation to the "Nordic comparison" and the signal in one graph, I was reminded of Cavalli-Sforza, if you look at the principal components,

    https://www.nap.edu/read/5923/chapter/6#32

    the first one centers on Anatolia and was used to imply PIE was spoken there (long story), but if you look further down, there is one centered on the Caspic Steppe, and I'm quite in favor of the Kurgan hypothesis...

    Sorry for the digression, I have to catch a train, nice way to "waste" a Saturday...

    [1] Ethnonyms of Steppe people are funny, there is some confusion with who was and wasn't a "Hun", "Mongol", "Aryan" or like because related and unrelated groups used the terms because they implied prestige; think of official and unofficial chapters of the Hell's Angels.

    1039:

    Sorry, but Macron appears to ba talking targeted stay-at-home orders. He is NOT pulling an Orange Hairball.

    1040:

    Lettuce to get high?

    Let me assure you that, though it tastes odd/ok, smoking dried banana peels won't get you high, though smoking licorice root will freak people out, if they don't know what weed smells like....

    1041:

    off-guardian, wince I've never heard of it, I looked up: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/offguardian/

    "Overall, we rate OffGuardian a Strong Conspiracy and Moderate Pseudoscience website that also promotes Russian propaganda."

    The Guardian, it ain't.

    1042:

    (did we not do this before with someone on this board, who was denying the figures?)

    Same guy, or at least the same 'nym, RalphB. He really really wants the world to work the way he thinks it should so he's scrabbling around the Internet trying to find a good case for "lockdowns are bad" and torturing the data until it confesses. Sweden didn't lock down like its neighbours, it's had more deaths and, I believe, confirmed cases than its neighbours but if you squint and pretend those results over there don't exist and use some log-antilog graph paper to chart the trends then Hey Presto!

    By the way I keep on reading on the Internet people saying that Britain decided on herd immunity and didn't ever lock down and I'm scratching my head on that. Some time in early March, about the time cases started happening and the first deaths were recorded here staying open and taking the hit was discussed but that idea was swiftly abandoned once the modellers showed their work, a million or so dead by the end of the year and the economy in ruins anyway. As Greg will tell you at great length all the pubs in the UK were closed in a crime against humanity, all restaurants, most shops and workplaces, etc. etc. and they are only now being gradually reopened while attempts are being made to track clusters and jump on them hard when they do appear. I'm not copacetic about that being a successful strategy but until a vaccine is available in the UK quantity thirty million then that's all we got, really.

    1043:

    There's this meme floating around that the milky latex in really fresh lettuce (and especially in weedy wild lettuces) works as a analgesic and narcotic, known as lactucarium. Since it's a latex, you can treat it like opium and reduce it and smoke it. Dude.

    I've never tried it, but since it's legal and of questionable strength, I suspect it's up there with mellow yellow and Scotch broom seeds on the erowid site.

    Yeah, I suppose I should check, annnnnd yes, there is an entry for lactucaria: https://erowid.org/plants/lactuca/lactuca.shtml. Scotch broom too: https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Cytisus_scoparius.shtml. And bananas.

    "Knock yourself out."

    1044:

    You might follow the link, it was likely not Lactuca sativa, e.g. the garden variant, but Lactuca virosa, which in German is called "Gift-Lattich", e.g. "poisonous lettuce". My Rätsch[1] is not at hand, and wiki says the effect is debatable, but apparantly there are some successful animal tests. No idea if it's an opioid like morphine, or maybe a cannabinoid or benzodiazepine receptor ligand or...

    The active ingredients are terpenes, not alkaloids like most other opioids, but Salvinorin A is a terpene, too, and you could also classify it as an opioid since it binds to the kappa opioid receptor. But most of the effects opium users are after relate to the mu opioid receptor, one relative of Salvinorin A is a mu opioid agonist, but there seem to be no central effects. Not that Salvinorin A worked for me, back in the day...

    Of course, the best way to know if Lactuca virosa contains an opioid would be to dose some animal till you get an effect and see if Naloxone reverses the effect. Kids, don't do this at home!

    There is a third opioid receptor, the delta one, though we know little about its function; it seems to be implicated in hibernation in mammals, IIRC Watts based part of his vampire physiology on high levels of leu-enkephalin, the natural ligand, but I'd have to look it up.

    [1] Hand-signed copy, of course. ;)

    1045:

    Terpines? Related to turpentine?

    Excuse me, this reminds me I need to buy a bottle of Love Potion #9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rXhXLsNJL8 , er, a bottle of retsina, for the next time we order or make Greek....

    Yeah, I know, retsina is a white wine, not dark red....

    1046:

    This has all the hallmarks of internet pseudo-science.

    Excess Deaths is an all-causes mortality measure. Baseline to previous years, see how different this year is. Sweden does poorly on that measure.

    You want to reject that standard approach, toss away the baselines, and directly compare Swedish total mortality rates from all causes with various other countries. Then you notice that in some other countries it is lower than Sweden and (shock!) in some countries it is higher!

    But the same was true of comparisons of absolute mortality in Sweden vs those other countries in every other year as well. You going to blame that on their Covid 19 response? There is a reason the experts use baselines.

    Classic internet pseudo-science: Some amateur tells you that the standard way to measure things that the experts all use is WRONG, and proposes a different methodology, and then shows if you measure their way ( cue graphs ) you reach a conclusion they want. Young Earth creationists do this, climate change deniers do this, your Sweden analysis does it.

    Scientists make mistakes. They do. But claims on the internet by amateurs proposing rejecting scientific consensus around what standard measurements to use for something should be approached with great caution.

    1047:

    Oh yes, back in the day(tm) I tried to smoke some leaves and fruits of Laburnum anagyroides since cytisine is a nicotinic partial agonist; didn't get any effects, though. Varenicline is somewhat related.

    In retrospect, dosing plant material is quite tricky, especially with obscure plants where nobody can tell you the dosage; and I was always quite cautious with it[1]. I was quite amused when I read about Oliver Sacks trying to get high on 25 µg of LSD. Though with the current trend in microdosing... ;)

    Damn it, and now I think about visiting some Goa party again...

    [1] Except when I wasn't. This time I smoked a whole bowl of hash on a school trip in high school without the usual tolerance, err, of course I know Dickinsonia is extinct, but the optical pseudohallucinations I had looked quite similar. Err, yes, I know why Simon Conway Morris called some Burgess Shale organism Hallucigenia.

    1048:

    I guess the Greeks would say "Jámas!", though I'd have to ask some friends from school.

    The actual term is terpene, they are a big family of compounds you can get by combining isopren units.

    Turpentine is one, as is thujone in absinth (quite overhyped), and cholesterol.

    And now I'm reminded quite a few steroids act on the GABA(A) receptor, just as benzodiazepines, barbiturates and alcohol.

    And propofol. My next colonoscopy is due next month. And my flatmate is into Michael Jackson.

    Mnemonics are funny... ;)

    1049:

    I'm not copacetic about that being a successful strategy but until a vaccine is available in the UK quantity thirty million then that's all we got, really.

    And this really sums it up.

    We are 6 months into Covid and it is anything but "just another flu".

    It seems every couple of weeks / month we learn of some new terrible side effect - blood clots, slow recoveries, potentially lifetime life changing side effects, now potentially the male reproduction, etc - that I have to assume there are experts in the field having trouble sleeping at night wondering what all we will eventually find Covid causes after we have years of experience.

    Really, in that perfect ideal world we would simply shut down all but the very essentials until we can either have a vaccine(*) or concede that a vaccine isn't possible (entirely or in a reasonable time frame).

    But as we have seen we don't live in a perfect world and so we need to bumble along - though for obvious reasons one of the few things Canadians agree on is we are in no hurry to have the border with our southern neighbour reopened.

      • side thought about the anti-vaccine people - will they really expose their male kids to the risk of Covid, with the possibility of never having grandkids, over a fear of science? Sadly I expect the answer is going to be a lot of yes's.
    1050:

    So back to the US presidential race, the Guardian has a reasonable summary of how thing are currently and it doesn't look good for the GOP or Trump.

    Even McConnell an Lindsey Graham are in what appear to be competitive races, with their DNC opponents out fundraising them.

    And yes, its early, and so Americans need to both register to vote and vote.

    But there are 2 quotes in the article that are very telling about the status of things at this point:

    “The people who pay attention to the numbers internally are very worried and they’re spending money in places that they never imagined they’d have to allocate resources like New Hampshire, like Georgia, like South Carolina."

    followed by:

    “Politics on a national level is a numbers game. When you have to start spending money in states that were reliably red one cycle ago, you’re in trouble."

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/11/donald-trump-republicans-election-senate-biden

    1051:

    First, the only reliable, and in the end meaningful statistic when it comes to judging governance, is excess mortality: It doesn't matter if people die directly from the pathogen or from consequences of society trying to, or not trying to, deal with it.

    Second: The mortality in Sweden are five times what they are in the rest of Scandinavia and there are no cultural, environmental or health factors that can be stretched to explain that. In theory there could still be a genetic explanation, but nobody seriously believe that.

    Third: One of the very notable, if not THE most notable differences between Sweden and the rest of the Nordics is precisely that Sweden is much more industrialized, and as we have seen in other countries, that seems to be where a lot of the pressure to "keep things open" comes from.

    Fourth: The number one predictor, globally, of a countrys excess mortality is the gender of the prime minister, and that is plenty sufficient to explain the difference between Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia, or for that matter between Germany and France or England and Scotland.

    1052:

    Most kids are planned, because people want kids.

    Seriously?

    Last I looked it up, and yes it was 15 years ago, in the US.

    For couples together for a year who claim to be practicing birth control using condoms 10% of the woman will become pregnant.

    1053:

    I'm not copacetic about that being a successful strategy but until a vaccine is available in the UK quantity thirty million then that's all we got, really. Another NPI tool used by some jurisdictions is making face coverings mandatory in public indoor places, and in tightly-packed outdoor public places, and in indoor workplaces shared by multiple employees. (And tightly limiting exceptions; e.g. places of worship should not be exempt.) Restaurants and bars/pubs are still an issue, agreed.

    1054:

    For Foxessa; out of control alfresco dining in NYC has made the international news: New York’s hungry rats torment alfresco diners after lockdown famine (The Guardian, 10 July 2020) -Surge in rat activity as city starts to open outdoor restaurants -‘Last night, a customer had a baby rat running on his shoe’

    1055:

    will they really expose their male kids to the risk of Covid, with the possibility of never having grandkids, over a fear of science? BTW, my mistake; that andrologia speculative paper was published 23 June 2020 (I was looking at a researchgate copy). Here's the correct link: Could SARS‐CoV‐2 affect male fertility? (Rahul Vishvkarma, Singh Rajender, 23 June 2020, free access) I'll be monitoring (google scholar) for follow-ups.

    1056:

    As for the anti-vaxxers having no grandchildren, the cynic in me wonders why you say "sadly yes".

    Quite a few anti-vaxxers are social darwinists ("if you're fit, you survive the infection, if you are not, your fault."), and I really like boomerangs...

    1057:

    Speaking of statistics and the UK, as sometimes happens, did the UK adopt a more restrictive definition of confirmed COVID case on or around 1 July? The stats in https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-source-data show a step downward of some 30,000 cases. In addition, the rate of increase seems to have taken a downward turn at that point. On the face of it, it seems as if some cohort that was previously in is now out. Anybody know what that might be?

    Reported cases, daily

    311965 312654 313483 -- before (ca 1 July) 283757 -- after (ca 2 July) 284276 284900

    1058:

    side thought about the anti-vaccine people - will they really expose their male kids to the risk of Covid, with the possibility of never having grandkids, over a fear of science?

    Yes. They don't need dangerous vaccines — they have essential oils, herbal remedies, and homeopathic medicine, which are much safer and more effective.

    I worked with an anti-vaxxer, and that was what she relied on for everything.

    1059:

    I'm a real wimp about homeopathic medicine. I only used one (an arnica ointment) and I got what the homeopathic crowd told me was the weakest version: the 1x dilution. If I'd wanted to do it properly, I was informed I needed to get a 100x dilution. But I couldn't tolerate that, so I went with 1x. Worked for me, oddly enough.

    1060:

    In news that some may find encouraging, the University of Newcastle (in NSW) has put on the first public display of its printed solar panels:

    https://www.theage.com.au/environment/sustainability/printed-solar-panels-a-shining-light-for-saving-energy-20200707-p559po.html?fbclid=IwAR2soFuURuBMWADHc4_sqPEgKLy4DOPIEnrNu0OmxbN09Buu-OZj65y8gG4

    1061:

    in the US. For couples together for a year who claim to be practicing birth control using condoms 10% of the woman will become pregnant.

    I suspect icehawk was thinking about countries where post-conception contraception is available.

    Meanwhile, outside the #1 country for Covid deaths (a useful measure of both public health education and usefulness of the medical system), sex education is usually much more educational and contraceptive options more widely taught and widely available. Oh, and fallback options much more available too.

    The people I know who've had not-really-wanted kids have mostly been exactly like that "we're pregnant {shrug} oh well, baby time", rather than actively trying to avoid the whole process.

    1062:

    Quite a few anti-vaxxers are social darwinists ("if you're fit, you survive the infection, if you are not, your fault.")

    There are a non trivial number of them descended from my grandfather or married to same.

    For them it is all about the medical community is all lies. Well unless they need surgery or have a bacterial infection. Or want to demand an antibiotic for a viral infection. Or ...

    I and one brother seem to be outliers in this gene pool.

    To be honest I now feel such people have always been around in non trivial numbers. The Internet just let them find each other and think they are smart.

    1063:

    Worked for me,

    Placebo effect?

    1064:
    Re: 'Externally-caused birth defects are primarily caused by events in early pregnancy, ...' True. And because some are very serious, most OB/GYNs do regular non-invasive check-ups e.g., ultrasound to monitor fetal development. So it may be possible to obtain some data fairly early.

    That will only apply to the most physically substantial defects, though. If covid-19 exposure in the womb causes a ten-fold increase in the incidence of, say, coeliac disease, or multiple sclerosis, that's unlikely to be spotted until well after birth. It could plausibly be a decade before we know whether there's a problem or not.

    1065:

    I suspect icehawk was thinking about countries where post-conception contraception is available.

    In the US post-conception contraception supporters still tend to have the kids based on surveys.

    1066:

    "X" in homeopath mumbojumbo means "dilute by a factor of ten".

    So a "1X" arnica cream is 10% active ingredient, which is pretty strong; 1% creams are quite a bit more common, in which case Heteromeles would have meant a "2X" (or "1C") dilution.

    1067:

    That story was in papers here too -- and not for the first time by any means. The vermin's became ravenous and very aggressive as soon as lockdown was imposed, and there was no longer the easy picking of decades from the mountains of food in the street every day; for them it was literally the starving time, and they were eating each other.

    The place in the Guardian story is in my neighborhood. We were in that park Wednesday night, but on the other end. We had no food, so no rat sightings. The local vermin is very picky after all these years of fine dining 20 feet from the nest -- they were going for some of that nice scallopini and vino!

    Just another reason the very idea of eating in that situation makes those of us living here feel sick.

    1068:

    As for the anti-vaxxers having no grandchildren, the cynic in me wonders why you say "sadly yes".

    Because at the end of the day, other than the grandchildren issue, it is the kid that pays the direct price and not the idiot parent.

    It is the kid who (theoretically) won't be able to have his own natural kids, and thus who possibly may not be able to marry the love of his life if he ends up infertile.

    And that of course is assuming that long term the worst Covid does to these future kids is put them at risk of being infertile.

    1069:

    Another NPI tool used by some jurisdictions is making face coverings mandatory in public indoor places, and in tightly-packed outdoor public places, and in indoor workplaces shared by multiple employees. (And tightly limiting exceptions; e.g. places of worship should not be exempt.)

    The question is whether face masks are going to be enough.

    Tokyo is seeing a surge in Covid cases, and so the question becomes why in a country that seems to be face mask friendly.

    1070:

    Tokyo is seeing a surge in Covid cases, and so the question becomes why in a country that seems to be face mask friendly. I have been suspecting that greenfield no-precautions-in-crowded-cities R0 for SARS-CoV-2 is closer to 5 than 2.5, and that it's only precautions like distancing, staying at home that reduce it to the 2.5 or so being quoted. Masks probably reduce it substantially, but if the result of combined NPIs is above one, then it surges. It would be good to know where these new infections in Tokyo happened. E.g. bars, parties (esp weddings?), restaurants? It is reported that the current surge is skewing young and nightlife-associated. Also, 224 new cases in a day in a city the population of Tokyo is not desirable, but it's controllable if measures are increased a lot.

    (warning for the paranoid: html .cn link) Tokyo's daily COVID-19 cases surge to record 224, highest since virus outbreak (2020-07-10) Confirming the highest-ever number of COVID-19 cases being recorded in the capital, Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said at a taskforce meeting "that by age group, people in their 20s and 30s account for 75 percent of new cases. By infection route, so-called 'night town-related' cases occupies a certain number." Of the latest infections, 109 people were aged in their 20s, while 60 were aged in their 30s, the metropolitan government said. The infection routes are known in 120 of those testing positive, while 104 new cases have no known route of infection, officials said, adding that 74 people newly infected are employees and guests of downtown nighttime entertainment establishments.

    1071:

    Excuse me while I rant.

    I do buy "homeopathic" meds... of course, that's because the asshole marketing droids for CVS are just that: ignorant idiots.

    Zinc gluconate, in spite of what the box says, IS NOT HOMEOPATHIC.

    The first time I got it, for a bad cold, in 2000. a friend told me about it. I got the one brand, and looked at it... I'm used to advertising extolling the wonders. I am not used to seeing 4 or 5 citations to clinical studies from the NEJM and JAMA.... Yeah, it's clinically proven: start it when you first realize you might have a cold, and it will stop it, there. If you catch it later, it will cut the time down to one week instead of two.

    1072:

    You know that, and I know that, but do THEY know that?

    To explain the bit of obnoxiousness on my part, Chrisj has it right: the X is the dilution factor on homeopathic products, so 1x is the least diluted formula you can get. For a long time, it was the only way I could find arnica gel, and I just learned from whitroth that zinc gluconate comes that way too.

    But I actually had the amusing conversation with someone who tried to convince me that 10x or 100x arnica was that much more powerful. I didn't try to dissuade them, because there's obviously a placebo effect going on with the number, the bigger the more powerful for that person. No particular reason to mess with that.

    Alas, I know to much, so I'm stuck being a wimp with products labeled for homeopathy, and only buying those with the lowest X number.

    1073:

    CVS

    Why didn't you visit the experts at GNC then?

    As to dilutions. Some things are sold with dilutions that result in less than 1 molecule of "stuff" per bottle. But of course the essence is still there. [eyeroll]

    1074:

    Please understand - it's not cut to idiot non-potency, it's just labeled by idiots.

    Literally - I take one (three to four a day, NOT MORE, MORE IS NOT better), and in less than half an hour, my nose starts drying up, I stop coughing/sneezing....

    Great stuff. Actually cures a cold.

    1075:

    CVS

    Why didn't you visit the experts at GNC then?

    Yeah, I thought everyone was using git these days.

    1076:

    Those anthropologists should be classified with the epicycle theorists - honest scientists, who simply got it wrong. But, to repeat, I agree that there was even more pseudo-science written to support bigotry.

    I partly agree, but I think that in practice attempts to separate individuals from their social, cultural, ideological background is not really possible and the line between the honest scientists and the bigoted pseudo-scientists is pretty indistinct, often even incoherent. And on close examination, we are likely to find several honest scientists who happen to believe some of the same things as the bigots outside their field (or even in it, without letting it effect their work, at least consciously). As an example, even Marcel Mauss, the early sociologist/anthropologist who delivered an extraordinary paper in the 30s demonstrating that the very concept of an individual self as we appreciate it in a modern Western context is culturally and historically located, even he in that very paper declares that he believes the modern Western version to be the pinnacle and the correct version. Sure when I use some specific words and phrases to represent this, it is a sort of a caricature and sure sometimes the pejorative implications are not necessarily merited, but heck, that's how you communicate these concepts. People genuinely struggle with them and they need things to react against. Think of it as a continuum rather than a binary, the poles need to be caricatures.

    1077:

    That "persistence of essence" thing is a bit awkward really. For them, at least. Maybe they've invented another bit of subsidiary nonsense to cover it, but if they have it's nowhere near as widely publicised, so the option is still wide open for normal people to refer to homeopathic preparations as super-concentrated dinosaur piss.

    1078:

    Concerning reckless youth and suicide parties (btw, I always thought "Russian roulette" was a purely fictional idea, strange what you find out is real) it strikes me that reports that the virus canes male fertility are not unlikely to provide further encouragement. If you're a randy young lad who has already convinced yourself that catching the disease isn't really a big deal anyway, such a consequence is quite an attractive alternative to the disadvantages of the officially sanctioned methods (ie. not doing it, accepting the constraints on passion and spontaneity imposed by messing around with plastic bags in the middle of it, or having a doctor stick a knife in your bollocks).

    There seems to be a tendency among those who do not have that outlook themselves to assume that to regard such a consequence as undesirable is universal, but this is not the case. For instance the story is told that the invention of the magnetron led to servicemen using aircraft radars to cook their nuts to try and switch them off.

    1079:

    I also consider that off-G is quite likely an oppo nudge website, there is quite an active debate on its articles, quite a lot of freedom of speech, it handles hot topics and I’m sure they make stuff up. They ‘make-fun’ of the Guardian for its failings.

    Personally, I tried commenting in the Guardian during the run-up to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, (I’m neither Scottish nor had a particularly ‘independence’ frame of mind) my account stopped working. I reset, reloaded, renewed my CIF credentials, but it was as though a sentient firewall or org was impeding informed debate. As a bitnet user since the early 80s, I detected enemy action. It was beyond happenstance or co-incidence.

    Couple of years later, when the Guardian was reprinting some PR articles verbatim from that other bastion of independence, RL/RFE - radio liberty / radio free europe , I realise that probably the survivors of the original Guardian journalistic ethics were likely signalling, waving warning flags. We are in a total information war, have been since the early 2000’s. Many ostensibly free environments are bought, bribed, broken - but I agree that one ought to worry a bit about off-guardian! And the rest...

    1080:

    If I recall, yes, they did. They have been making changes every week or so and don't provide links to anything except the current page. Regard those numbers as indicative of how many people have symptoms, and no more than that. There was no jump in the proportion of positive tests, which is a more reliable figure; I haven't posted the pictures, as there has been no change from the slow decline.

    To Poul-Henning Kamp (#1052): actually, there are several other reliable measures (e.g. average age at death), and many of the ones that are unreliable are extremely useful (and would be more so if collected properly), but I agree that excess deaths is the only reliable one we can easily get.

    1081:

    No, in this case, the Internet people are right. The official policy was originally claimed to be to shield the most vulnerable (*) and establish herd immunity in the rest, much to the unhappiness of the experts. It rapidly became apparent it was a disaster, and it was changed. But it WAS the case for a while and is why we are a world leader in coronavirus.

    (*) "Claimed to be". Evidence later emerged that it was mere polemic, and the government was actively exposing many of the most vulnerable. So what else is new?

    1082:

    That's why I mentioned it's the cynic in me.

    On an only slightly less cynical note, as Daria notes at 2:00, idiocy is both genetic and environmental, so there is a good change the sobs will be anti-vaxxers themselves. In which case for ne further argumentation becomes moot.

    In case the sons grow up to be OK, well, I hope modern biology solves the problem, maybe transforming stem celks into spermatozoa producing ones and like.

    Also note I think children should have the right to sue their parents for the damage inflicted on them, though quite often the parents only repeat the mistakes their parents did or what the authorities or the media or some religious or secular cult or like saud. In which case the parents should sue those. I'm all for accountability, especially for those droning about personal accountability.

    If you excuse me, the security boots I'm wearing for work are killing my feet, my landlord thinks I'm too loud, the neighbours are telling her, though the neighbours say they hardly notice anything when I excuse myself, I have to stand up at 4 o'clock in the morning every second.

    My landlord is quite nice, sometimes she cooks for me, we had a short argument on WhatsApp, but after I told her I'll move out till the end of August we relaxed somewhat. Enougb time to tidy up (at the moment, my belongings are in fruit cartons from Lidl, no time and money to put them in better looking ones) and to disassemble the plastic storing cabinets I use since they are reusable, light and can take a load.

    (I jokingly think of myself as a time-displaced steppe nomad from time to time, people talk about gug economy and urban nomadism all the time, actually that's peopke just adapting slash'n'burb, real nomads, well, I have seen pictures of the inside of a jurt, place is a premium, and everything moveable. Feels familiar. But I digress... )

    I am eligible for real unemployment benefit again this month, not Hartz4; time to look if I can become a teacher or how to get a goid job in IT.

    I'll put up a tent in my parents' garden, less risk of infecting them, I can do some work fir them abd, best of, I won't get disturbed by them. There are sone friends who want to get into contact again, some googled me, and I wonder which USENET article by me they.

    My landlird and me are quite rekaxed, my mother says sge diesn't like it, and when I argue, she reminds ne if her hypertension, I guess I should remind her of mine, which actually is quite normal since I don't listen to what she says; last time I ignored her, the result was a quite successful studium of biology and a student job at the university. It went somewhat downhill after I listened to her and stopped smoking tobacco, but, well, methylphenidate is better than nicotine.

    I think I learn from my mistakes, though I may be a slow learner. So even if my landlord and me are quite relaxed, I have an appointment with a lawyer next week, her boyfriend can't stand me, for starters, and he might persuade her to change course. I told my mother not getting a lawyer is obe of the mistakes we dud in the padt, she said she has made no mistakes, so she doesn't gave to learn from tbem. Err...

    1083:

    Sorry for the typos, using my smartphone, it sucjs.

    1085:

    “Last I looked it up, and yes it was 15 years ago, in the US.

    For couples together for a year who claim to be practicing birth control using condoms 10% of the woman will become pregnant.”

    My memory is also that male condoms had a failure rate around 10% per year.

    Modern contraceptives are better. IUDs with hormonal implants are the rage, and for good reason - failure rate is under 1% per year. Of course balancing that are the stupid who fail to use contraception.

    But then there is abortion and abstinence from vaginal intercourse and etc.

    So instead I suggest you look up surveys on how many kids were planned vs unwanted.. Since that is the thing we’re looking at. That seems a lot more 50/50 than I’d realised - but yes, seems that most kids are wanted (probably, depending exactly what one means...different methodologies of how you ask give slightly different answers).

    ...all of which is a bit tangential to my point, which was that the social effects of the pandemic are going to have a big enough impact on the birth rate that the biological effects on fertility will be hard to see in birth rate figures. All I really need as a premise for that is “many kids are intended”.

    1086:

    Who could have guessed? (Sarcasm intended)

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-53381802

    TL:DR -- 73 out of a cohort of 200 farm workers on a large farm in Hereford have tested positive for COVID-19. They're gastarbeiters, some of the tens of thousands of workers brought in from places like eastern Europe on short-term work visas each year to harvest and pack food. They live in crowded caravans and temporary dormitories in farm outbuildings, a perfect breeding ground for COVID-19 infections. Since they're minimum wage workers no-one is going to pay them to sit through 14 days quarantine after they get here.

    I saw this coming weeks ago -- don't you just hate it when you're right?

    1087:

    Thank you. That's local, and I've just passed the link on.

    1089:

    So good news (if you are gullible) for the residents of the UK - columnist in the Telegraph knows better than everyone else and says the UK will soon have herd immunity and thus the knives are out again for Boris.

    https://twitter.com/TelePolitics/status/1281999834845773826

    And once again Gove is showing his disdain for "experts" by being against mandatory face mask rules https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53381000

    1090:

    mdive Gove is a really dangerous shit, because he's more "believable" than BoZo As for "herd immunity" ... well, not yet, but, as so often, already with this disease, there are surprises in store. I am now considerably more scared than I was previously, as the news of long-term damage, mostly from blood clots, emerges. Also the strong suspicion that it affects mental capacity & indices lethargy ( The latter being, apparently a common factor with "spanish" 'flu. OTOH, it also appears that, in some areas ( Spain, & elsewhere I believe ) the numbers of people showing a discernable immune reaction is much higher than expected ( Over 60-65% IIRC? ) which might indicate that there is some step towards "herd immunity" ... OR, of course, that it is much commoner than previously thought & that much larger numbers of people have been exposed to it ... & have had no adverse reaction.

    TL:DR - In other words, we simply do not know - do we?

    1091:

    and says the UK will soon have herd immunity

    For liberal values of "soon." If the doubling time derived from published statistics just stays constant at its present value rather than continuing to increase, 60% of the UK population will have tested positive by late 2027.

    Of course and has been noted upthread, the published statistics likely under-represent the actual number of infections, so who knows?

    1092:

    Re that Toby Young opinion piece in the Telegraph, New York City Coronavirus Map and Case Count Official COVID-19 death count: 22750 (12 July 2020) (an undercount) NYC population roughly 8.3 million That's 2740 deaths per million 66.65 (2019) is UK population 182685 UK deaths to achieve parity with the current NYC level of COVID-19 deaths.

    Antibody positivity rate New York City https://www.6sqft.com/new-york-covid-antibody-test-preliminary-results/ 19.9 percent 1 May 2020, 21.6 percent 13 June 2020 Fairly low new positives rate on SARS-CoV-2 testing from 13 June until now and it was higher 1 May, so let's say current antibody rate is 23 percent. Triple that for herd immunity, assuming without evidence that an antibody positive test means immunity. That means a UK equivalent of 182685*3 deaths = 548055. Reduce a bit for improved care of COVID patients, and call it 400000K UK deaths, plus several millions with long term damage of some sort, e.g. lungs, heart, brain, kidneys(, testes?). That's what Toby Young is arguing. He's been consistently anti-lockdown but the argument hasn't gotten better. I hope that the UK smart people shred him very publicly on this. FWIW after 6 months of experience globally with NPIs vs SARS-CoV-2, better, science-based lockdowns/NPIs should be devised. That largely means control of indoors spread of SARS-CoV-2, with mandatory measures in place because a dangerously large part of the population is selfish. Mandatory masks, distancing, much better ventilation with audits, density control (human bodies in indoor spaces) with fines, UV-C looks interesting, etc.

    Since that walk in urgent-care clinic in New York City [1] registered a high level of people showing antibodies (68.4 percent), by the rules of Toby Young logic, immunity to endemic coronaviruses does not appear to prevent enough of a COVID infection to develop antibodies, nor presumably to prevent spread of the virus by infected people.

    [1] For UK people, an "urgent care" clinic is for people who may not have a doctor and are in need of immediate health care in exchange for a substantial fee, possibly covered in part by insurance if they have insurance. It's a US healthcare thing. People who walk into an urgent care are not representative of the population. I don't know about this one in particular.

    1093:

    There are disturbing reports that some patients are getting the disease twice, and the second time is worse.

    The official word is still you can only get it once, but given that immunity to other coronaviruses fades and we've only had this one active for less than a year, not certain how reliable that it.

    Also saw this story this morning:

    Three teachers who shared a summer classroom at a school in Arizona all contracted coronavirus last month, leaving one of them dead.

    Kimberley Chavez Lopez Byrd, 61, died June 26, less than two weeks after she was hospitalized. The other two teachers -- Jena Martinez and Angela Skillings -- said they're still struggling with the effects of the virus that has killed nearly 135,000 people nationwide.

    All three teachers wore masks and gloves, used hand sanitizer and socially distanced, but still got sick, according to school officials at the small community in the eastern part of the state.

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/12/us/arizona-teachers-coronavirus/index.html

    Good example of what we already knew: that masks etc reduce the chance of infection, but they don't eliminate it. What wasn't mentioned in the story was whether they also shared the same kids, and also the level of ventilation in the classroom. One of the classrooms I teach in regularly has basically no ventilation.

    1094:

    I have failed to find a reliable source that says anything other than "we don't know" about catching it twice or "based on other coronaviruses, probably, but not immediately". There is a lot of Internet blithering, but that's best ignored. If you have a link that isn't completely speculation, I should be interested to see it.

    1095:

    The official word is still you can only get it once,

    Who's the "official" that's been saying that you can only catch it once? I don't think the WHO has claimed that catching and surviving COVID-19 confers any sort of absolute or even conditional mmunity because the evidence isn't in yet one way or the other. Generally though, coronavirus antibodies confer some levels of immunity to succeeding infections of the same coronavirus and there's little or no evidence (yet) that this coronavirus is very different to its predecessors.

    It's possible that some folks got a very mild case of COVID-19, had it confirmed by PCR swab test, got better but didn't develop a lot of antibodies in the process and then caught it "again", possibly in a more serious form. That sort of "lightning strikes twice" thing makes the press, so many folks getting it for the first and only time is just Business As Usual.

    Myself, I'd wait for at least six months until some real results from a few million case histories can be properly studied and analysed. If at that point it's clear we're all doomed then, well, we're all Doomed. Until then I'd put my fainting couch back in the spare room and unclutch my pearls.

    1096:

    You wrote: ...we are likely to find several honest scientists who happen to believe some of the same things as the bigots outside their field....

    One thing that's driven me nuts for decades is the problem that many "subject matter experts" think that they're experts on all subjects.

    1097:

    What wasn't mentioned in the story was whether they also shared the same kids, and also the level of ventilation in the classroom. Also not mentioned was whether the students/kids wore masks. Since this is from Arizona, I presume not. The emerging evidence is strongly suggesting that cloth(&surgical) masks are better for source control and the piece is implying that the teachers were infected by SARS-CoV-2 by one or more of the presumably unmasked kids. The emerging evidence is that masks are better for source control. It also doesn't say what they used for masks. I personally wouldn't go into such a schoolroom without an N95 and would stay more than a minute unless the kids all wore reasonable face coverings of some sort. (No gauze, no mesh, no exit valves, no Darth Vader mask (I saw one of those recently at a Home Depot).)

    1098:

    One of the many reasons I do not have, nor want, a "smart" phone/mobile is that a virtual keyboard is a REALLY crappy kludge of an interface. When "vitual" means I can see a real keyboard in VR, and type on it, then I'll find it not a kludge.

    1099:

    "Soon". This begins to remind me of the APA/fanzine definition of "RSN" (real soon now), which was "some time before the heat death of the universe, but maybe not. Example: Harlan will get Last Dangerous Visions out RSN.

    1100:

    Well, there's catching it again, and there's getting stuck as a "long hauler" (https://www.businessinsider.com/long-term-coronavirus-symptoms-patients-sick-for-months-2020-7)

    Some people have been sick with Covid-19 for more than 100 days (self-reported). While I'm not saying you can't catch it again, I think it would be far more worrisome to get stuck as a long hauler. Some of them report relapsing symptoms after weeks of being relatively fine.

    1101:

    Yes, on-screen QWERTY keyboards used to be crap. But you've missed a significant development -- gestural/swiping input.

    Any Roman-alphabet word can be entered by a sequence of strokes over the surface of the QWERTY map -- swiping keyboards essentially turn English (or other alphabetic languages) into an ideographic character set where the finger never leaves the screen.

    The result is spectacular: tap-typing on a smartphone screen maybe gets you up to 20-30 words per minute at best, but if your gestures are reasonably accurate you can hit 60-120 wpm, comparable with a touch-typist on a proper keyboard.

    Drawbacks: autocorrect is imperfect and if you're not an accurate finger-painter you can end up with a high error word rate. And I'd strongly advise turning off auto-prediction (which speeds up tap-typing but gets in the way of swiping).

    I got my hands on a smartphone with a Blackberry-style button keyboard (a modern machine, but old-school hardware layout) and found that it slowed me down a lot relative to the current iPhone. Only a decent-sized moving keyboard like the Gemini or Cosmo can compete with a modern touch board like SwiftKey.

    (Note that this sort of on-screen keyboard didn't really exist before 2010 and only got really usable since about 2015. They build on expertise developed for ideographic written languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.)

    More on gesture input methods here.

    1102:

    The original swiping input device is called a "bug" -- it's an uprated version of the classic Morse key, two sideswiping paddles actuated with finger and thumb. One paddle generates a dot, the other paddle a dash. A really good bug operator could send at more than thirty words per minute (a word in Morse is defined as having five letters and a space).

    Hams who could transmit at those sorts of speed caused the authorities in the US problems since the personnel in their radio monitoring stations couldn't read Morse that was being sent that fast so they issued an order telling the hams doing this to slow down.

    1103:

    "the problem that many "subject matter experts" think that they're experts on all subjects."

    Yes, one particular figure in the Open Source movement comes to mind as a spectacularly bad example of that kind of thing...

    1104:

    "Trump buying up the global supply of remdesivir (even though it's not very effective) is exactly the kind of Milo Minderbinder act you'd expect of the guy." This seems unfair to Milo. The character was evil, but he seemed intelligent enough to avoid recommending injecting disinfectant, or claiming that the 1775 revolutionary army took over the airports.

    1105:

    @mdlve 1069: "Tokyo is seeing a surge in Covid cases, and so the question becomes why in a country that seems to be face mask friendly."

    It's bars and other recreational spaces, such as "hostess clubs." They are Superspreader locations there, like bars, churches and schools here are (other countries seem -- so far -- to doing better with their schools, but here in the USA were're just being too stupid to live and throwing up our hands and taking all the money away from the schools. Plenty of stories about bars and parties contributing massively to the massie spreads this here and in Asia.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Plus, you know, at least in the US, the general too stupid to live is about 60 percent of citizens, when both young and old Too Stupids are factored in.

    [" 'I thought this was a hoax': Patient in 30s dies after attending 'COVID party' "]

    https://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/i-thought-this-was-a-hoax-patient-in-their-30s-dies-after-attending-covid-party

    [SAN ANTONIO, Texas (WOAI/KABB) – A patient in their 30s died from the coronavirus after attending what's being called a "COVID party," according to a San Antonio health official.

    Chief Medical Officer of Methodist Healthcare Dr. Jane Appleby said the idea of these parties is to see if the virus is real.

    "This is a party held by somebody diagnosed by the COVID virus and the thought is to see if the virus is real and to see if anyone gets infected," Dr. Appleby said.

    According to Appleby, the patient became critically ill and had a heartbreaking statement moments before death.

    "Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said 'I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it's not,'" Appleby said." [....]

    1106:

    Rbt Prior As I said In other words, we simply do not know - do we? Something else .. there are suggestive reports that C-19 was "out & about" before November/December 2019 in China ... from disease reporting & immune responses. More strange results & unanswered questions, in other words.

    whitroth I have a smartphone with a real, actual physical tactile keyboard ...

    1107:

    This article:

    https://www.vox.com/2020/7/12/21321653/getting-covid-19-twice-reinfection-antibody-herd-immunity

    It is possible, but unlikely, that my patient had a single infection that lasted three months. Some Covid-19 patients (now dubbed “long haulers”) do appear to suffer persistent infections and symptoms.

    My patient, however, cleared his infection — he had two negative PCR tests after his first infection — and felt healthy for nearly six weeks.

    It's possible long-haulers can go symptomless, test negative, and still carry the virus, but that raises different concerns.

    1108:

    One of the many reasons I do not have, nor want, a "smart" phone/mobile is that a virtual keyboard is a REALLY crappy kludge of an interface.

    Great. Your choice. Most of us (general population) has made a different choice. Neither is "wrong".

    I, and most others I've discussed this with, prefer more screen real estate and a thinner phone over a tactile keyboard. But we don't mind if others hold other opinions.

    1109:

    You wrote "which might indicate that there is some step towards "herd immunity".

    Unless I'm mistaken, you can't have herd immunity without some form of persistent immunity, whether from vaccination or previous infections. So people banking on herd immunity must believe that personal immunity is possible, at least for a while.

    That's why I posted the link to stories about multiple sequential infection — they seemed to indicate that (at least in some cases) there was no immunity, or immunity lasting mere weeks.

    1110:

    Good example of what we already knew: that masks etc reduce the chance of infection, but they don't eliminate it. What wasn't mentioned in the story was whether they also shared the same kids, and also the level of ventilation in the classroom. One of the classrooms I teach in regularly has basically no ventilation.

    Bad reporting by CNN.

    Reported elsewhere days ago, the summer school was virtual so no kids in the school building but the 3 teachers shared the physical classroom.

    https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education/2020/07/09/after-arizona-teacher-kim-byrd-dies-covid-questions-raised-over-school-reopening/5405651002/

    1111:

    Speaking of statistics and the UK, as sometimes happens, did the UK adopt a more restrictive definition of confirmed COVID case on or around 1 July?

    The UK changed methodology on 2nd July to eliminate duplicates:

    We’ve updated the methodology of reporting positive cases on 2 July to remove duplicates within and across pillars 1 and 2, to ensure that a person who tests positive is only counted once. To remove these instances, we have moved to a new data source and re-examined the records. This means the figures are not directly comparable with the figures previously reported. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-testing-data-methodology/covid-19-testing-data-methodology-note

    1112:

    I personally wouldn't go into such a schoolroom without an N95 and would stay more than a minute unless the kids all wore reasonable face coverings of some sort.

    Assuming that Arizona education laws are similar to Ontario ones, you wouldn't have the choice. Because a teacher has a duty of care, they cannot refuse to enter a classroom that they believe is dangerous if their students are there.

    Of course, Arizona being 'at will', you could quit and walk out immediately — if you were willing to sacrifice your career. (Because word gets around and you would likely never be hired as a teacher again.)

    In Ontario, even if the school policy was masks etc for kids, if they refused or kept taking them off to spit, there's not much you could do until the administration had worked its way through progressive discipline — which might take care of the problem in a week or so, or possibly not. If breaking mask discipline was viewed the same as assault you might get faster response, but maybe not*…

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/education/article-as-teachers-report-more-violent-incidents-in-schools-boards-struggle/

    https://globalnews.ca/news/6451886/ontario-classroom-violence/

    There's a reason most teachers are very nervous about going back to school in September…

    *I had a student who was bullying others in my class, whom the VP had to retrieve personally because he ignored instructions from me he disliked, and it took six months to get him out of my classroom. His mother was good at working the system.

    ** When I was assaulted (as a young teacher) I was told by the principal to ignore it as reporting it would leave a black mark on the student's record and negatively impact their life. Being young and probationary, I didn't file a charge myself — because even clued-out me could see that if I did that I would be ending my career because a probationary teacher can be dismissed on the principal's word alone. (Or could then — I think probationary teachers have more protection from arbitrary dismissal now.)

    1113:

    Thanks for that link.

    Makes it even scarier, though. Three adults taking precautions…

    (Unless the classroom is incidental and they coincidently got infected at the same time without passing it to each other.)

    1114:

    At the moment we're adding cases at around 70,000/day, with attendant coverage from news services. I don't think that going back to school will be an issue three weeks from now.

    1115:

    Trottelreiner @ 1082: That's why I mentioned it's the cynic in me.

    On an only slightly less cynical note, as Daria notes at 2:00, idiocy is both genetic and environmental, so there is a good change the sobs will be anti-vaxxers themselves. In which case for ne further argumentation becomes moot.

    I never saw the entertainment value of doing stupid shit & getting hurt. There was another "TV show" called Jackass. Took less than a 30 second video clip for me to decide fuck that. I don't have a TV, but I got some TV programming through the internet, which was a growing thing just about the time my TV went kaput. Now you can get all these streaming services ...

    But it seems like every time I start thinking about maybe it would be nice to have a TV again, I catch a glimpse of some of the stupid shit being passed off as entertainment and I'm right back at Nope!

    But I have a vague idea that "Daria" had her own show? I didn't know she was a character on "Beavis & Butthead".

    1116:

    I am both worried and angry about the way that phrase has suddenly become a buzzword, and gets passed around as if it's something that's going to save us. It isn't. It's something that may eventuate if something else has saved us already - or it may not.

    It's just a name for the situation that arises when enough people are individually immune that if someone who isn't does happen to catch the disease in question there are few enough other susceptible individuals around that they don't pass it on, and the disease doesn't spread. This means that you don't need 100% of the population to be immune for people not to have a significant risk of catching the disease; as long as there aren't too many non-immune individuals you can get away with it.

    Unless the disease is very bad at infecting other people anyway, though, "too many" isn't all that much. You still need the great majority of people to be individually immune.

    There are two ways to achieve that situation:

    1) Vaccinate loads and loads of people. 2) Have loads and loads of people catch the disease.

    Obviously, (2) is out of the question for any disease serious enough to be bothered about in the first place, let alone one that not only kills a lot of victims but seems to throw up some new nasty long term effect every other day.

    A government "pursuing a strategy of herd immunity" is not doing anything positive to justify the pride taken in such a statement. It's not behaving neutrally either. It is simply using fancy words to say that it thinks its best option is to let loads and loads of people catch the disease.

    The very mildest interpretation you can possibly put on this is that it is being murderously irresponsible and incompetent. If it does know what it's doing then it's being actively murderously evil. Either way, it is deliberately adopting a homicidal policy and needs to be put on trial for some variation on "conspiracy to commit homicide" (using that as a blanket term to cover all the relevant defininions, nuances and other wrinkles).

    But they call it "pursuing a strategy of herd immunity", and they get away with it because people don't understand what that actually implies.

    Heck, we don't even know - as you point out - whether a state of herd immunity to this virus can even exist.

    1117:

    Bad reporting by CNN. Egregiously bad reporting by CNN. From now on I'm treating stories as dubious when CNN is the sole source. :-( It is not clear if the teachers caught it from the infected teacher. I don't know what level of community spread there was in that area at that time. The current test positivity rate in AZ is roughly 25 percent (7(?) July 7 day rolling average). Scary though, and sad to see these southern US states going through what NY/NJ went through earlier this year, in part for ideological reasons.

    1118:

    Ah, yes, "if you're reasonably accurate". Given the amount of screen real estate... a while back, a friend asked me to put in - I forget if it was phone # or email, and my fingers, being larger than theirs, kept getting the wrong/multiple letters.

    Swiping... I watched Ellen try to get rid of a bunch of messages yesterday. There was no "delete all" option, or apparently any way to tap-tap-tap-tap delete all.

    1119:

    I have to admit being curious as to who that is. There's one I know well who's very well known for both a piece of software, and for an extremely widely-read essay years back.

    He's also a libertarian and a gun nut.

    1120:

    @1085: I suggest you look up surveys on how many kids were planned vs unwanted. . . I remember distinctly one conversation my mom and I had as adults when she told me she was really glad I was a full term baby . . . . I wouldn't say I was unwanted, but I was very likely unplanned.

    Which is more true:

    • Marriages lead to pregnancies

    or

    • Pregnancies lead to marriages?
    1121:

    Is that the clamshell?

    'Course, the folks who've chosen the std. "smart" phone are the ones that, well, let's put it this way: the zombie apocalypse already came... https://www.pinterest.com/pin/14073817559057875/

    1122:

    soreff @ 1104: "Trump buying up the global supply of remdesivir (even though it's not very effective)
    is exactly the kind of Milo Minderbinder act you'd expect of the guy."
    This seems unfair to Milo. The character was evil,
    but he seemed intelligent enough to avoid
    recommending injecting disinfectant, or claiming that
    the 1775 revolutionary army took over the airports.

    Milo did try to sell chocolate covered cotton as food.

    1123:

    The UK changed methodology on 2nd July to eliminate duplicates:

    Ah. Thank you. The statistic I like to keep track of is the doubling rate of reported cases derived from day-over-day ratios(*) and it was somewhat disconcerting to see it go negative. :-)

    (*) D = log(2)/log(C(d)/C(d-1)) where C has been smoothed with a five-day trailing average.

    1124:

    Why we're all in double deep Scheisse.

    From my local nextdoor.com. A discussion that started of with someone wanting to know how to stop a 5G cell site from being erected.

    Person1 I am EMF sensative. I get sick at the grocery store near all the registers. As I move further away in the store I start to feel better. As I have to approach the registers I get sick again. I have been wearing an EMF protector necklace for years. I do not know how it works but it does. I have not had a problem since then.

    Person2 As an expert in EMF who works in healthcare, a necklace wouldn't do anything.

    This sounds more like an anxiety disorder. I would hate for this to go untreated and for you to continue suffering like this.

    Person1 It would happen when entering the store till I was passed the registers and again as I went back to the front of the store and got near all the registers. Even if I was not ready to checkout. I don't have anxiety about shopping or being in stores or too many people ( does not include covid times).

    Person2 Science is always trying to factor out the placebo. That's great for understanding the effectiveness of a specific treatment, but avoiding the placebo is misapplied to treatment; a placebo can work great. It doesn't matter if it works or if you think it works... if it's what you need to feel comfortable, it's effective.

    Person1 I do not care if it is the placebo effect or not, as long as it works. I did accidentally forget to put it back on after swimming and did not realize until I went into a grocery store and got ill.

    1125:

    I once looked at the ingredients on some supermarket 'lemonade' and realised that it would be acceptable to mineralians - it had no natural substances in it whatsoever. At least chocolate covered cotton had some.

    1126:

    I am old enough to remember when the dogma was that there was no such thing as a psychosomatic disease, and such people were merely being hysterical and reporting made-up symptoms. This is something where 'the east' got it right LONG before 'the west'.

    1127:

    I have two relatives who planned their marriage ages ahead, and deliberately started a pregnancy well after the decision and well before the marriage. In many traditions, betrothal and marriage were separate and it was expected to start one after the first and before the second.

    1128:

    the dogma was that there was no such thing as a psychosomatic disease, and such people were merely being hysterical and reporting made-up symptoms.

    There's been a somewhat depressing replay of that wrt the "Havana Syndrome", slightly inverted. A certain cohort have real symptoms, how dare you suggest they're psychosomatic/hysterical?!?!? Or are you saying that they're faking it? How dare you?!?!?

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

    1129:

    whitroth @ 1118: Ah, yes, "if you're reasonably accurate". Given the amount of screen real estate... a while back, a friend asked me to put in - I forget if it was phone # or email, and my fingers, being larger than theirs, kept getting the wrong/multiple letters.

    Swiping... I watched Ellen try to get rid of a bunch of messages yesterday. There was no "delete all" option, or apparently any way to tap-tap-tap-tap delete all.

    I finally succumbed to the alure of the "smart phone" because I wanted to be able to run an "App" and my old flip phone wouldn't do it. I too suffer from "fat fingers". I particularly have trouble with 'Q' and 'P' because they are right up against the edge of the screen.

    I found an inexpensive stylus that works well with the iPhoneSE:

    https://www.staples.com/Staples-Universal-Touch-Screen-Pencil-Stylus/product_579499

    The "App" is "Gas Buddy" which I can use to find the cheapest gas whenever I travel ... if I ever get to travel again. I have used it a couple of times; on a trip down to the beach last year and when I went down to Arkansas to catch a train. I have a couple of other apps relating to photography that I really haven't had the chance to use and learn because of the lockdown keeping me from traveling.

    I've been fairly happy with the iPhoneSE. I did a bit of research before I got it, mostly asking people I knew had smart phones what they'd recommend for someone who hated the idea of getting a smart phone, didn't want one, but had reluctantly come to the conclusion that I was going to end up with one eventually.

    I had trouble replacing my flip phone when the network upgraded the last time & I figured the network was probably going to upgrade again someday & the flip phone would NOT be available after that.

    Deleting text messages is "swipe, delete, confirm delete".

    1130:

    A bug only has a single lever. You push it one way, you get continuous contact, which is for making dashes but you time it by hand/brain. Push it the other way you get a stream of dots as long as you leave it pushed over.

    The dot timing is automatic. The things with two paddles are iambic keyers, where you press one paddle for dots, one for dashes, and both together for a dot/dash/dot/dash sequence.

    1131:

    Those of you who are in the UK should be able to see comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE in half an hour or so . Look north about 9 degrees elevation. The bright star Capella is about the same height to the east of the comet. B Aurigae is west of Capella and the comet will be about the same distance west of B Aurigae and a little higher.

    1132:

    Update I can see the comet now.

    1133:

    deliberately started a pregnancy well after the decision and well before the marriage.

    That makes a great deal of sense for procreative marriages. There's an argument that the "consummation" should be a live birth rather than sex if you're looking for heirs. But the European fixation on "legitimate" birth counters that.

    The problem pre-Anglican was that the only way to try a different partner was to kill the old one. Which was a real incentive for the infertile wife to make really, really sure that it wasn't the sperm side that was the problem.

    1134:

    US post-conception contraception supporters still tend to have the kids

    To me that's not a real contraceptive failure, that's a heal-hearted pretence at using contraception. The pregnancy rate being 10x higher than the more general measure of condom success suggests that there's a lot of nonsense happening.

    It's something that's genuinely hard to measure, because people are unlikely to report "we kind of want a baby but we're kind of using condoms while we discuss it", let alone "I want a baby, she doesn't, so I have to wear a condom".

    Admittedly I'm seeing a biased sample because I've been quite open about having had a vasectomy for a long time, so people tend to talk to me about that angle more than the "we sorta want kids so we're being unreliable about contraception" angle. I am also judgemental about people who start pregnancies despite the objections of their partner which means people who've done that are less likely to tell me than some anonymous survey.

    1135:

    European fixation on legitimate birth? What century are you living in? I have two children. Both of them got married to their partners of fourteen years. My daughter had two sons who were the best men at their parents' wedding. My son's three daughters were bridesmaids at their parents' wedding. Most of their friends' marriages were similar.

    1136:

    I have a couple of other apps relating to photography that I really haven't had the chance to use and learn

    I find this one quite useful for planning shots: https://www.photoephemeris.com

    If you're stuck at home, you might also find this one handy: https://www.photoephemeris.com/tpt

    1137:

    Re: 'It's possible long-haulers can go symptomless, test negative, and still carry the virus, but that raises different concerns.'

    Was catching up on TWiV virology podcasts (Vincent Racaniello) on the below episode Dr. Daniel Griffin (clinician & researcher) mentioned that COVID-19 immunity is still not understood. And the very real danger that this virus could be similar to dengue fever, i.e., more serious the second time around. While Griffin didn't mention different COVID-19 strains, I'm wondering if that is a possibility as believed wrt dengue fever. And all of this also makes the actual design of a vaccine more critical and problematic.

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

    'It is not entirely clear why secondary infection with a different strain of dengue virus places people at risk of dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). The exact mechanism behind ADE is unclear. It may be caused by poor binding of non-neutralizing antibodies and delivery into the wrong compartment of white blood cells that have ingested the virus for destruction.[30][33] There is a suspicion that ADE is not the only mechanism underlying severe dengue-related complications,[20][31] and various lines of research have implied a role for T cells and soluble factors such as cytokines and the complement system.[46]'

    More bad news - pregnant women ...

    In the same episode, Griffin mentioned a recent meta-analysis/review showing a much higher proportion of pregnant women who tested positive for COVID-19 being admitted to hospital and needing urgent care.

    TWiV 632: Countering a miasma of anti-think

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

    The relevant discussion starts around 17:20; the entire podcast runs 2:24:48. A couple of items that I noted relevant to some of the discussions here.

    A bit of good news ...

    A- Thrombo-embolic complications ... Northwell re-analysis of the Mariner data, 45 days post-hospitalization showed a 28% reduction in major thrombotic events using Xarelto*.

    B- Effectiveness of immunosuppressant steroids ...

    Looks that immunosuppressant therapy is more helpful/beneficial for AfAms/Hisp than Caucasians. But does help all groups at least somewhat.

    But some areas (USA, and esp. India) are reporting shortages of/difficulty accessing the studied brand but other very similar compounds exist and the therapeutic dosage equivalencies between brands/compounds is fairly well known/established.

    *As per Wikipedia: 'Rivaroxaban, sold under the brand name Xarelto among others, is an anticoagulant medication used to treat and prevent blood clots. Specifically it is used to treat deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary emboli and prevent blood clots in atrial fibrillation and following hip or knee surgery. It is taken by mouth.'

    My mother was on this class of med for several years post-stroke. It's very widely prescribed but like all drugs in this particular class/category - there is no antidote.

    1138:

    "New York City Without Coronavirus Deaths Four Months After First Report By Jennifer Peltz, Michael R. Sisak and Marina Villeneuve • Published 4 hours ago • Updated 1 hour ago"

    I cannot describe the sensations that poured through me when I first read this headline late this afternoon -- a combo of relief, joy and -- still, almost disbelief, disbelief that after all these cases and so much death -- that nobody died of this in the last day. Breathless.

    https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/new-york-city-without-coronavirus-deaths-for-first-time-since-start-of-pandemic/2511864/

    Quote [....] "New York City health officials reported zero deaths related to the novel coronavirus four months after the state's first official death was recorded on March 11.

    According to initial data reported by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, no one died from the virus in New York City on July 11. Officials recorded no confirmed deaths the day before as well, but did have two probable deaths.

    The department's data shows there hasn't been a day without a coronavirus-related death since March 13, two days after the first reported death.

    Each sign of progress in New York has come in the shadow of an ever-growing national spike that continues to plague the U.S. crisis. On Sunday, Florida reported more than 15,000 positive cases of the virus. It's the highest single-day number for any state and cleared the record previously set in New York back in April.

    [....]

    At the same time, the Democratic governor has ordered travelers from more than a dozen states to quarantine for 14 days, while urging New Yorkers not to let up on wearing masks or social distancing.

    Yet with the virus tearing through the South and West, Cuomo warned Friday it would eventually rear up again in New York.

    We’re doing everything we can,” he told WAMC radio, but “I can feel it coming.”

    A widely cited University of Washington model doesn’t project spikes — at least through its Nov. 1 time frame — in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut, whose Democratic governors have coordinated on traveler quarantines and, earlier, some shutdown policies. But that doesn’t mean the densely populated tri-state area is in the clear."[....]

    If only we would be allowed to keep this up, which we could, with even fairly decent, intelligent leadership and action on the city, state and federal levels. One has little faith in mayor de Blasio, for reasons maybe rather different than having no faith in the feds as they are in These Times, but not so very different. The mayor's thinking only of himself, not the city -- and certainly not teachers and students. Only about the real estate people who are determined to have the bars and restaurants and theaters fully opened, inside and out -- which means the schools have to be reopened, because they are this nation's only daycare, and gotta get those people back making profit for us -- thus we pay them less than before even, provide no safety of equipment, clothing or conditions, and demand immunity from being held responsible for their illness and deaths.

    At least we have a governor who is canny and not stupid, and has the cojones to stand up to deathcultchief demanding all the schools reopen.

    But we're surrounded by idiot governors so, ya, Cuomo is right about how he can even feel it's looming to return.

    Still -- HOORAY!

    1139:

    European fixation on legitimate birth? What century are you living in?

    One where marriage was important.

    Like you, I know many people who aren't married or who married eventually for reasons not strictly related to the relationship (in one case because when sailing round the world they just got sick of one partner having a much easier time getting visas, so they married and both got "the right" citizenship and passport).

    That doesn't change the cultural importance of illegitimate birth to some people today, let alone its past importance.

    1140:

    Marriage still has cultural importance but has little do do with the legitimacy of children. Marriage almost always comes long after the birth of children.

    1141:

    All my nieces had children after marriage, not before. (Chinese, Canadian, American, and French cultural backgrounds.)

    Cousins in England mostly had kids after marriage (a couple had spouses who brought kids from previous relationships).

    1142:

    Perhaps Person 1 was stopped for shoplifing as a kid?

    Cynical, I know. But worth asking.

    1143:

    Anecdata:
    I and both my siblings are the result of contraceptive failure in marriage. So is a first cousin of mine.

    My gf and I got married because she fell pregnant. (My son is 26.)

    1144:

    But worth asking.

    Touching the 3rd rail recommending you are?

    Nope.

    1145:

    I don't see a third rail.

    Of course, the next question is what's Person 1's current financial state?

    And the one after that is, if this is going on now, then are they afraid that they might catch C-19 in line, or from the cashier?

    1146:

    Oh... and are they in their teens? 20's?

    1147:

    sigh ... And does this happen in EVERY STORE THEY GO IN?

    1148:

    I'd pay a bit more attention to the fact that certain banks have been zeroing/cancelling the furlong payments suddenly in like the last 4 hrs.

    Big move to go from "$xxxx" on card" to "$xxxx now owe us late fees". Look at what the poors are saying: "That's why I never trust those cards, switch it to my bank account".

    "Poors" here meaning middle class: poor working class don't get bank accounts, that's the fucking joke.

    ~

    And it's quite deliberate. No link, because: watching it in Real Time[tm] don't care about your media. Pour it on the "WE NEED YOUR VIOLENCE" altar. Something really wants to feed off the angst / futility / rage.

    p.s.

    You were warned. Instead of like, OMG, acting like Humans old version and noticing it, you've all gone ingrown mushroom crap.

    1149:

    People on nextdoor.com live nearby. Throwing rocks at neighbors is not a long term survival strategy unless you want to be in continuous war.

    I didn't go into the details about how the thread had all kinds of "proof" about the evils of 5G (youtube of course) with a side journey into the evil EMF of smart meters. With a seasoning of recalling the mayor and city council for allowing ADUs (accessory dwelling units or granny flats).

    1150:

    There is now a reversal agent for Xarelto and Eliquis (Andexxa by brand name, no idea what the generic is named.) It was approved for use in 2018, but in my recent US experience, ER departments might not be aware of that in all cases. (This is why I'm back on Warfarin, where I don't have to plan on explaining things in the middle of a crisis.)

    In most non-Covid patients, the need for reversal is dramatic enough to justify the risk of additional thrombotic events. Considering the extreme nature of coagulation problems found with Covid, reversing anti-coagulation might present an entirely different set of risks.

    1151:

    Don't be foolish.

    The tech is out there, it's a weee little bit more hardcore than the civ tech stuff you can use (and is used) currently, or even the LRAD shite the US police are all buying.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/business/14stream.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2019/05/22/scientists-use-ai-to-turn-brain-signals-into-speech/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190424153558.htm

    Langley says hello.

    Throwing rocks at neighbors is not a long term survival strategy unless you want to be in continuous war.

    We all remember the first time the USA used napalm against civilian targets. We all remember the first time IL used F15s against civilian targets. We all remember the first time CN used tanks against civilian targets. We all remember the first time RU used thermobaric weapons against civilian targets.

    Fucking savage. Nice to see HOAs in the USA being ruled by similar ethical practices.

    1152:

    There is a longstanding joke that one of his initials stands for "Ego". (It dates to early 90s, I think - first heard it back on Usenet.)

    1153:

    I don't know about the UK spin, especially as things are (comparatively) under better control, but the conservative messaging I the US as infections spike and the trailing indicator of deaths begin their completely predictable spike... The conservative message is in increasingly "we're going to learn to live with it".

    This seems very short sighted and self defeating, not just because the rest of the world moves to isolate travelers from the US, but because as this thing sweeps through red and blue states and cities alike, party alignment from mid-to-center right conservatives isn't going to mean much in election support for the home team when that team is responsible for killing 10% or more of all of their parents or grand parents.

    Florida alone saw over 15,000 cases today, and so from this day alone we'll be looking at 200 to 400 deaths in 3 to 5 weeks time. Compound that daily with ever more record breaking infections per day, and even staunch conservatives "never maskers" will start to feel the self preservation instinct kick in as the local coroner sets up an purpose in their retirement communities.

    The irony is that the whole thing coild have been managed to much less deaths and much less economic fallout had our Golfer in Chief focussed on mitigating the health problem. And extra 6 weeks of lockdown would have meant much better economic recover prospects, done safely, rather than the second wave of infections and subsequent business shutdowns to follow. Shooting himself in the foot would be an apt metaphor if there weren't so many other people that are going to die as a result. Current language fails. We need new metaphors. We risk having a metaphor gap as the situation evolves past all conceivable event horizons of stupidity and self-defeating behavior.

    1154:

    And it's back, five posts is a couple of hours, doesn't seem to be able to count, or hold to agreements...

    1155:

    Many Thanks! I'd vaguely recalled the ring species, thank you for the details.

    1156:

    I often used to say "I would love to see non-organic food!" - passes people by, nowadays ...

    Well, there is salt... :)

    BTW, my thanks about the ring species should actually go to you - I replied one comment further down than intended.

    1157:

    The conservative message is in increasingly "we're going to learn to live with it".

    This seems very short sighted and self defeating, not just because the rest of the world moves to isolate travelers from the US, but because as this thing sweeps through red and blue states and cities alike, party alignment from mid-to-center right conservatives isn't going to mean much in election support for the home team when that team is responsible for killing 10% or more of all of their parents or grand parents.

    Because to say the truth "we totally screwed up but we are still better than the D's" is a guaranteed fail at the ballot box in November. And the state politicians KNOW this is the key election. Because the people elected this November for the state legislatures get to draw the new boundaries for the US House and for many state legislatures.

    They are doing everything they can to keep from loosing totally at the ballot.

    Basically they drove the bus into an alley with no exit after telling everyone that anyone wanted to use the reverse gear back up is evil.

    1158:

    "Your face was eaten by a grue."

    Yes, there was a reason I didn't with with "bleen".

    1159:

    I remember reading somewhere that he'd got into a fistfight with China Mieville at an SF conference after the two of them were on a panel and argued about politics. It occurs to me that several people here were probably at the same con and some may have witnessed this event. Any comments?

    1160:

    Uh, okay. I tried googling and found OGH tweeted about this very incident about a month ago. That wasn't where I'd read about it, it could even have been one of their wikipedia pages.

    1161:

    foxessa Report on the BBC news this morning that Trump & his goons are after Dr A Fauci ... [ Article in this weekend's "FT" with Dr Fauci - one of their regular "lunch with" series. Most interesting. ] They appear to be setting themselves up to sack him & try to blame him, as usual. ... Which leads to Jim D's comment In the same BBC news item, there were comments that the fuck-up by DT et al & the professionalism of Fauci is driving Texas / Arizona & other places to vote Biden, oh the horror! We need new metaphors. We risk having a metaphor gap as the situation evolves past all conceivable event horizons of stupidity and self-defeating behavior. The word you are looking for is: "suicidal" Unfortunately, the suicide of a Head of State taking everything down with him is well-known - time to re-view "Untergang" perhaps?

    grs 196 I saw that, as well.

    1162:

    I remember it being true in at least the UK and France.

    1163:
    And all the stats I'm seeing show that while cases are not hugely low (the Swedes claim increased testing capacity picking up milder cases they wouldn't have detected earlier on) ICU admissions and deaths with the virus are (each) well under 10 per day now.

    https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=France&show=25&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=left&extra=Sweden#countries-normalized

    Current death rate/1m pop:

    France: 0.2 Sweden: 1.5

    I.E. Sweden currently has 7.5 times the death rate of France. And it's not going down.

    1164:

    Err, I never got Jackass, contrary to my lawyer student GM[1]. As for Beavis and Butthead...

    There is a long story of comedic cartoon violence, even in Disney, William E. Coyote is a personal hero of mine, there's Tom&Jerry, and the Simpsons made fun of it in "Itchy&Scratchy". As for Beavis&Butthead...

    A friend of mine at work objected to Simpsons because Homer is an idiot, and he can't stand idiots, I pointed him to the apocryphal quote Umberto Eco attributes to the lost book on poetics in "The Name of the Rose":

    "We shall now discuss the way comedy stimulates all the like and ridiculous by using vulgar persons and taking pleasure from their defects."

    B&B is a part of my early teens, actually I guess I improved my English on B&B, Inspector Gadget and later on Aeon Flux, so it might be nostalgia. Err, quite a nice choice we had back then, I even watched some Blake's Seven on Super Channel, back in the day.

    And actually, quite a few of us had a healthy laugh when people, my parents included, went crazy after toilet paper, and we remembered Cornholio searching for TP for his bungholio or like.

    And, well imagine two chemistry students you know on the way to work with concentrated sulfuric acid and metallic sodium, they sit in the bus and forget to press the buttom to stop it, because each thinks the other one did it, and you know the smoke pot daily. Or a guy sitting next to you and a friend lashing on about how he'd beat up all students. You could be annoyed, horrified, or laugh. Personally, well, laughing is not that bad.

    Sorry, on my way to work, so that's somewhat pretentious and unpolished.

    [1] The Runequest group; I might note that was the "sane" group, for debatable values of sane. There was another one somewhat later, that one was a bunch of biology and chemistry students, and we played Cyberpunk (can't hardly remember the time) and later on Kult.

    1165:

    "time to re-view "Untergang" perhaps?"

    Much more to the point: http://2020commission.com/

    1166:

    "An admission like that from a contry with a strong lockdown suggests that if even countries which went hard with lockdown don't think it was so wise then it might be a pretty bad idea afterall."

    You are missing important nuance here...

    Maybe try "... that if even countries which went for insufficiently hard lockdown ..."

    The primary reason why the lockdown didn't do much good for France was that they did not go far enough with it.

    As Bent Flyvbjerg has laid out: Any effective reaction to a pandemic will ipso facto always look by an overreaction:

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/regression-tail-how-mitigate-pandemics-climate-change-bent/

    There are no regrets in New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Germany or as I gather from OGH: Scotland.

    And again: The really harsh light shining in your eyes, is that all those countries have female PMs while France did not.

    1167:

    Eh, minor correction, there are some regrets in Germany by SOME people, but those are the usual idiots, including some people where I thought of as kinda friends. Err, B&B helps to cope with them.

    As for my family, quite a few people in my extended one are in the health sector, and we have a few good friends in Utaly, let's just say we think we didn't overreact.

    BTW, we have our own meat production COVID scandal with Tönnies.

    And I really need to get the Bluetooth keyboard I usually use with my smartphone.

    Pulse was 130 last time I checked with the pulseoximeter, it's in the range of a training pulse, much to do. Hope I go down till work, stress and concentrated sulfuric acid don't go well...

    1168:

    A brief summary from Sweden "Lockdown Lite: Sweden's Model of Coronavirus Control"
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=37&v=U6FiIz6u0Yk&feature=emb_logo

    NB: -While local doctors wanted tests that give as quick response as possible, the state wants tests that give as few false poitive results as possible in order to prevent a false sense of safety. This led to some conflicts. Also, the government does not have the power to order a lockdown, not as in other countries.
    The policies were set up by the People's Health Authority (Folkhälsomyndigheten) without any strong-arming from politicians. Whether these policiea are good remains to be seen.

    1169:

    "Also, the government does not have the power to order a lockdown, not as in other countries."

    Bollocks: The Swedish goverment has even bigger powers than the rest of the Nordics in that area, due to their policy of neutrality.

    They chose not to use those powers, because that would cost the swedish state money, and the current SE Gov't is neoliberal.

    This is the same ball-game to Georgia in US reopening to avoid paying unemployment benefits.

    1170:

    While not exactly granting your premise - I suspect it's more a case that being willing to elect a female head of state matches well with a mindset that also allows for support of good virus control behavior as a body - I'll go ahead and point out that, since you seem to be maintaining this list for posterity, you can go ahead and add Taiwan, which has some of the lowest numbers of all.

    1171:

    I follow Te Ao, the Māori language news service in NZ. There are regrets. Some people are massively annoyed by the lockdown and are still annoyed by the closed borders. They're quite vocal in the comments on any Mate Korona stories. However unlike other comment threads on mainstream media they don't get a whole lot of applause. What they get instead is a lot of "don't be so ridiculous" comments.

    1172:

    Re: 'There is now a reversal agent for Xarelto and Eliquis (Andexxa ...'

    Thanks for this info!

    While this new class of meds was more 'convenient for patients' because no travelling to a clinic for regular blood work pokes, it was problematic if the patient needed emergency surgery. One of the returned searches mentioned that this reversal agent was granted 'accelerated approval' by the FDA. Yeah - this was definitely a high priority gap that needed filling.

    For some reason I had assumed that all modern, recently approved meds automatically had to have some tested/verified antidote as part of their approved-safe-for-human-usage package. Wonder whether 'reversal agent' is now part of the patient info printout provided by the pharmacy. Do recall that the Costco pharmacist hadn't mentioned that there was any new info the last time I picked up my mother's Rx several months after this reversal agent's FDA approval.

    1173:

    "Some people are massively annoyed by the lockdown and are still annoyed by the closed borders. "

    There is a big difference between "annoyed" and "regret".

    There are people in all countries annoyed by Covid19.

    1174:

    Hmmm. Wife involuntary retired. (It's OK but wasn't the plan.) CLosing down an apartment 1100 miles away and moving stuff back home. Ugh. Neighbors acting like idiots.

    Oh yeah. I'm sitting on $14K in miles and points for travel and 18 nights of hotels that start expiring at the end of the year. Hoping this is close enough to "over" than I might be able to start traveling before these all go "poof".

    Annoyed. Yep.

    1175:

    Re: ' ... sitting on $14K in miles and points for travel and 18 nights of hotels'

    On the bright side - if you did have to travel somewhere at least the now mandatory 14-day isolation common in most major cities would be at a hotel of your choosing.

    Wonder how many airlines and hotels are going to extend these points. I have only a few nights' worth but while hating to throw money away, hate even more the idea of throwing my health (life) away.

    1176:

    This seems very short sighted and self defeating, not just because the rest of the world moves to isolate travelers from the US,

    The perils of time are such that memories of 2016 are unreliable.

    But my recollection is that while Trump was certainly more openly racist than the GOP would have liked, a lot of his popularity was because he was promising to grant everyone's wishes - even when that meant he was directly contradicting himself minutes later. But the people, largely left behind by a political system where all politicians were chasing Wall Street, ignored the contradictions and latched onto what they wanted to hear - bringing coal back! etc.

    The coalition of racists, the left behind, and the anybody by a Clinton were enough to get Trump the electoral college and hence the White House.

    But as the saying goes, a funny thing happened along the way.

    Trump (and to a lesser extent the GOP) discovered that being openly racist wasn't directly damaging(*) - the base loved it.

    So given who Trump is, he embraced this new reality on the assumption that a booming economy would bring in enough other voters to get him a second term (because while it turns out there are far too many racists in the US, there aren't quite enough to take the White House on racism alone).

    Note that repeating 2016 is difficult - while much of the electorate is gullible to choose one example - the coal miners - who haven't seen their jobs return aren't going to be so quick to believe Trump 4 years later.

    So 2020 happens, a government of incompetants surrounded by incompetants is ill-equipped to deal with a paper cut never mind a pandemic, and the stage is set.

    But because 2020 is an election year, Wall Street (as a proxy for the economy) and the economy are all that matters - and Trump both for re-election and self-image is desperate to keep the stock markets booming. This means ignore the pandemic.

    Now that Trump and the GOP have created the mess, their only hope (which helpfully coincides with what the rich want) is to try and ride a recovering economy to victory and any death toll along the way is merely collateral damage.

    But also remember, the people dying from Covid don't matter - they aren't the rich, and they frequently aren't white either (at least so far).

    but because as this thing sweeps through red and blue states and cities alike, party alignment from mid-to-center right conservatives isn't going to mean much in election support for the home team when that team is responsible for killing 10% or more of all of their parents or grand parents.

    it isn't the grandparents dying - there was a story out in late June that the US is different - the average age of those dying from Covid (well, at least so far as documented as such) in the US is about 20 years younger than the rest of the world - so the US has 40-50-60 year olds dying.

    *- I said directly damaging, because it wasn't - until again 2020 happened and circumstances created a BLM protest that has helped to re-energize the anti-Trump voters in the months prior to the election.

    1177:

    Wonder how many airlines and hotels are going to extend these points.

    In general the points don't expire if you keep the account active. Buy a Big Mac with the proper credit card. Or redeem some points for an Amazon purchase. Or similar.

    But the hotel nights start going away at the end of December this year with some good till December 2021. And a really nice 7 night certificate for upper end hotels goes away in March 2021. And almost all of these free night are already extended.

    If things stay bad maybe they will extend them again. But at some point they can't keep adding the liability to their booking lists.

    1178:

    Just speculating, but if SARS COV-2 leaves widespread reproductive damage in it's wake, we may see amore severe decline in population in parts of the World governed by "Right wing nuts". It may become the defining characteristic of a Nation governed by neoliberals in the early 21st century, deeply concerned with polishing the brightwork while the larger economy that supports the .01% declines.

    1179:

    mdive a lot of his popularity was because he was promising to grant everyone's wishes - even when that meant he was directly contradicting himself minutes later. Rather like the brexshiteers, in fact. The moon on a stick, powered by unicorn farts. "Openly Racist" - see also Poland & Hungary & many of the brexshiteers, too.

    Here, BoZo's misgovernment is becoming less & less popular ... bur BoZo has still got another 4 years to try to bullshit their way out of it. But, sooner or later the mutual contradictions may catch up with them, or not. And whether they can actually get away with blaming "the evil EU" for the inevitable crash that will come 2021-3? Because the contradictions between the brexit promises & reality have now, in the past couple of days, become obvious to all, though some sections of the fascist & right-wing press are still deep in an Egyptian river.

    1180:

    Oh, Ghu, warfarin.

    A dear fan friend wound up in the hospital a week or so ago. She'd picked up her normal antidepressant prescription, of which she takes one and a half pills.

    She was flossing, and her gums started bleeding. And wouldn't stop. Finally, she went to the doc/ER and they admitted her, and all the medical people were asking her about her warfarin prescription, and she was telling them she didn't take it.

    It turned out the pharmacy had FUCKED UP, and given her warfarin instead of her antidepressant, and she was getting several times the normal dose of warfarin.

    I think she's talking to a lawyer....

    1181:

    But organic food's ok? Like the bread that 20 or 30 years ago was on the market for about a year, promising "more fibre".

    Until the FSA came down on them like a ton of bricks, and they had to stop selling the bread with SAWDUST in it.

    This is not a joke, unfortunately.

    1182:

    It got better this morning: the Hairball is tweeting that "they're all lying", all the medical professionals, it's all political....

    At some point, all but the stupidest are going to say, WFF? and decide no, another four minutes is not a good idea.

    1183:

    [shakes head] I have not liked, or actively disliked, most American "humor" for decades, because it's not witty or clever, it's "laugh at me, I'm stupider than you've ever dreamed of being".

    It's not Sid Cesar, or George Carlin, or Lenny Bruce. It's not the Keystone Kops, and it's certainly not, say, Walt Kelly (Pogo).

    1184:

    The Hairball let his inner racist, that's always been there, and that he got from his father, out.

    Also, remember that the WSJ has been run by Murdoch since his company bought it in '07. Note that I know someone who worked (still works? haven't spoken to him in a while) for them, and the staff was deeply PO'd at Murdoch from the git-go.

    1185:

    I remember reading somewhere that he'd got into a fistfight with China Mieville at an SF conference after the two of them were on a panel and argued about politics. It occurs to me that several people here were probably at the same con and some may have witnessed this event. Any comments?

    I was on that panel. First-hand witness.

    There was no fist-fight. There was some very aggressive accusations thrown back and forth between China Mieville and Eric Raymond: the former is a sometime socialist candidate for Westminster, the latter is a Texan libertarian.

    (The panel was on "Scottish socialist science fiction" and I was the token Scot, I guess. It was meant to be moderated by Pat Cadigan but she couldn't make it to the convention, so some idiot assigned Lawrence Persson -- another Texan libertarian -- to moderate, and he basically tried to set it up as an auto da fe for China. Which was never going to end well.)

    1186:

    Nope. I've known Eric since '79, and if that was the subject... why would anyone assign more than a token libertarian to the panel?

    I agree with him, a lot, on computers. I've also heckled him onstage over his politics.

    1187:

    The current Swedish Labour leader/ prime minister will be surprised to learn that he is neoliberal. So will his coalition partners, the Green party.

    And if the PM had attempted to micromanage the FHM it would actually have been illegal. Sweden is different from Britain (and most countries) that way.

    1188:

    whitroth "another four minutes" - no comprende senor.

    1189:

    It got better this morning: the Hairball is tweeting that "they're all lying", all the medical professionals, it's all political....

    Yep, just as they are now going after Fauci - they have dug the hole and their only hope now is to bluff their way through the next 4 months using the big tobacco/big oil playbooks of attempting to merely confuse enough voters.

    At some point, all but the stupidest are going to say, WFF? and decide no, another four minutes is not a good idea.

    Unfortunately that "all but the stupidest" part of the population is rather large.

    1191:

    Another four years? Screw that, I don't want him another four minutes.

    1192:

    "Sweden is different from Britain (and most countries) that way."

    Yeah, I know, what with me being Danish and all :-)

    Yes, your PM is neoliberal, as is our danish so-called "Social Democrat" PM.

    In the last 25 years the political spectrum has moved so far in neo-liberal direction that a few years ago the members of the danish social-democrats complained that their own PM had not reduced corporate taxes enough(!).

    Somebody like Oluf Palme would be considered totally unelectable today with his extreme left policy proposals.

    1193:

    Interesting. Skimmed it. I've heard of NotWrong, and a few of the folks mentioned, but never heard of the Codex.

    1194:

    Wheeeeeeeee!

    I got my taxes done ON TIME (deadline is Wednesday). Had to do the paper forms this year because the Credit Union is doing Drive Thru banking only right now without an appointment and I lolly-gagged around until it was too late to get an appointment.

    I think this is the first time I've done my own taxes where I wasn't straggling in at the last possible second.

    1195:

    Robert Prior @ 1136:

    I have a couple of other apps relating to photography that I really haven't had the chance to use and learn

    I find this one quite useful for planning shots:
    https://www.photoephemeris.com"

    If you're stuck at home, you might also find this one handy:
    https://www.photoephemeris.com/tpt

    Yeah, that's one of the photography apps I have. I've been using it for years to plan photo safaris ... Where do I have to be to catch the Sun/Moon in just the right position? & "What time do I need to be there to set up?. I've been using it longer than I've had the iPhone & I'm pretty sure it can do more than I do with it. That's part of what I'm hoping to learn.

    The other is an app called PhotoPills which is supposed to be "the photographer's Swiss Army Knife". That's the one I didn't get a chance to use & learn before the lockdown. The interface confused me & I was counting on getting help from some of the photographers at PPNC who recommended it. But with the Covid19 situation we're not having the PhotoExpo this year, nor any of the regional guild meetings, so I'm on my own.

    I went out this morning to scope out the comet, so of course, it was overcast & raining.

    1196:

    Trottelreiner @ 1164: Err, I never got Jackass, contrary to my lawyer student GM[1]. As for Beavis and Butthead...

    There is a long story of comedic cartoon violence, even in Disney, William E. Coyote is a personal hero of mine, there's Tom&Jerry, and the Simpsons made fun of it in "Itchy&Scratchy". As for Beavis&Butthead...

    I don't think of "Beavis & Butthead" or Jackass for that matter were particularly violent. I don't really object to cartoon violence. But I'm not going to waste my time with willful stupidity.

    1197:

    But organic food's ok? Like the bread that 20 or 30 years ago was on the market for about a year, promising "more fibre".

    Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that.

    I was taking Greg's comment to mean "inorganic" in the chemical sense - not containing carbon atoms. And that is almost nonexistent... Which I was taking to be the humor in his comment.

    And I was trying to make a humorous comment in response, noting that while almost nothing edible omits carbon atoms, table salt (and water - and if one wants to restrict it to solids, I guess you could add ice...) are both edible and inorganic. (I guess one could add some micronutrients - one could usefully nibble some milligrams of ferrous sulfate or calcium chloride)

    1198:
    The primary reason why the lockdown didn't do much good for France was that they did not go far enough with it.

    WTF?

    Don't buy into ralphie boy's stupid narrative.

    Look at the facts.

    Guess, from this graph, when the French lockdown went into effect:

    https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=France&show=25&y=both&scale=linear&data=cases-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=left&extra=#countries-normalized

    Spoiler: it was 17/3/2020, exactly 29 days before the infection rate peaked. Coincidence? I don't think so. Without the lockdown? See the US.

    1199:

    Milo did try to sell chocolate covered cotton as food.

    Good point! Yeah, perhaps pushing cotton into peoples' throats is more similar to pushing Clorox into their veins than my first thought of comparing Milo to the Donald would imply...

    1200:
    ...because it's not witty or clever, it's "laugh at me, I'm stupider than you've ever dreamed of being".

    Hm, it's not just American "humor"; I guess you won't like "Little Britain" then, actually, I don't like it that much, either, but "Computer says No" is a classic.

    1201:

    I used to take the piss about "inorganic food" for years; the first thing to cross my mind the first time I ever saw the word "organic" used to describe food or farming (whichever it was, I forget, I remember my reaction though) was "so wtf is inorganic food/farming then?" and I would repeat that to anyone who used "organic" to me in that sense with a straight face.

    Until someone replied that it refers to inputs, not outputs, "as you very well know". Which, actually, I didn't; it had never crossed my mind to consider it as anything other than just another manifestation of the kind of silliness which also equates "natural" with benignity. I still hate the term, but I'm not so eager to take the piss now that I can construe it as a rational derivation, even though I'm still not convinced it was actually derived like that.

    Of course, in the case of creatures who ingest light elements only as "spare parts", and derive their metabolic energy from nuclear fission, you can add some much more interesting things than salt to the list. But you don't encounter that case very often.

    1202:

    soreff Entirely correct ... Of course, having a father who was a professional Organic Chemist helped ......

    1203:

    Actually, I think it started coming in in the seventies, and referred to food raise without using inorganic fertilizers.

    Besides, don't you like the taste of Roundup (tm) in your food?

    1204:

    I remember one item clearly from Jackass. They went round setting up a portable toilet cubicle next to bus stops and other places where people hung around waiting for things. A very big guy went in, there were a couple of minutes of continuous sound effects of the world falling out of someone's bottom, and a tiny little guy came out. He then unconcernedly took his place along with the random other people waiting for the bus. The humorous part was the uncomfortable reactions from the random waiting people when he took his place among them.

    I don't remember any other specific items but I do remember that they all had that basic theme - not painful bleeding stupidity, but enacting some bizarre scene in public and secretly filming people's confused reactions.

    The painful bleeding stupidity was some other show that tried to follow their lead and completely failed to see what that lead actually was. They had stuff like someone nailing his own nutsack to a plank of wood, or two guys tying ropes to a third guy's ankles, dragging him along at a run and going one either side of a tree. I quite agree about that sort of thing. At least the Russians launching one of their number into the ceiling by sitting him on a car airbag and setting it off had a claim to experimental creativity. The nutsack guys are just dense.

    1205:

    "Spoiler: it was 17/3/2020, exactly 29 days before the infection rate peaked. Coincidence? I don't think so. Without the lockdown? See the US."

    Absolutely agree.

    But read the piece by Bent Flyvbjerg I linked to above, he makes the point that with a pandemic and other similar "all or nothing" catastrophes, sensible reaction will look like overreaction, because you have to err on the side of caution.

    France did not do that, they erred on the side of "lets see how bad it gets" and therefore their lockdown was not as efficient as other countries in reducing infections, while still having roughly the same economic consequences.

    Which, as I understand it, is why the french goverment has mumbled that they will not do that again.

    However, it is not as obvious from the reports if they mean that there will be no lockdown next time, or if they will do a more comprehensive lockdown next time.

    1206:

    A substituted amino acid? Sounds organic enough to me... :)

    1207:

    "I suspect it's more a case that being willing to elect a female head of state matches well with a mindset that also allows for support of good virus control behavior as a body"

    I think you have that backwards.

    I would not classify France as a country "unwilling to elect a female head of state" that is very far from my impression of the place.

    UK have done it twice already, and as incompetent as she was, I still think UK might have fared better with Covid19 under Theresa than Boris. (Thatcher would probably have clamped down incredibly hard, having lived through "The Polio Year" 1956.)

    Sweden is the only Scandinavian country to not have had a female PM yet, but again, I dont think they are unwilling to do so, they just havn't done it yet. After all, Denmark only got there a decade ago.

    So I think your theory works better if I flip it over:

    A country which is unwilling, not unable, but unwilling, to implement efficient measures to limit infections, measures which have been known to work for half a millenium, is probably not very good at electing heads of state either, never mind the gender of the available candidates.

    1208:

    Off-topic ...

    Interesting real-world science twist on SF/F magic tats/embedded electronics. Not sure that your average human can actually draw a complete and probably complex circuit diagram on their own limbs. Maybe some sort of pre-fab cut-out decal activated by rubbing a pencil over it? Anyways, could be interesting coming up with all the different ways that this could work or fail.

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200713165604.htm

    'The new tattoo: Drawing electronics on skin Using pencils to draw bioelectronics on human skin

    ... In the study, the researchers discovered that pencils containing more than 90% graphite are able to conduct a high amount of energy created from the friction between paper and pencil caused by drawing or writing. Specifically, the researchers found pencils with 93% graphite were the best for creating a variety of on-skin bioelectronic devices drawn on commercial office copy paper. Yan said a biocompatible spray-on adhesive could also be applied to the paper to help it stick better to a person's skin.'

    1209:
    A country which is unwilling, not *unable*, but *unwilling*, to implement efficient measures to limit infections, measures which have been known to work for half a millenium, is probably not very good at electing heads of state either, never mind the gender of the available candidates.

    In the USA, I think Dave Barry described the nation's ability to elect heads of state best:

    The fall campaign was an unending national nightmare, broadcast relentlessly on cable TV. CNN told us over and over that Donald Trump was a colossally ignorant, narcissistic, out-of-control sex-predator buffoon; Fox News countered that Hillary Clinton was a greedy, corrupt, coldly calculating liar of massive ambition and minimal accomplishment. And in our hearts we knew the awful truth: They were both right.
    1210:

    This is fun, about optimizing playing-dead time. They used antlion larvae as model prey, but discuss other species/dimensions. Post-contact immobility and half-lives that save lives (Ana B. Sendova-Franks, Alan Worley, Nigel R. Franks, 08 July 2020) A wide variety of animals become completely immobile after initial contact with a potential predator. This behaviour is considered to be a last-ditch escape strategy. Here, we test the hypothesis that such immobility should have an extremely unpredictable duration. We find that it spans more than three orders of magnitude in antlion larvae. ... The unpredictability of PCI duration should lead to positive feedback in the coevolution of predator–prey interactions because it increases the chance that the predator looks elsewhere if the current prey escapes and this in turn exerts selection pressure on the prey to have extremely unpredictable PCI durations.

    As a kid, saw a golden retriever completely fooled by an eastern hognose snake[1] (US) that did the cobra routine, then when that didn't work, did the play dead routine. Haven't been looking at enough random biology papers. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2019/06/12/zombie-snake-eastern-hognose-plays-dead-orig.cnn but don't do this, it's not nice.

    Will be watching for this paper (paper link busted): Turning off 'junk DNA' may free stem cells to become neurons (July 13, 2020) The researchers performed most of their experiments on blood cells, drawn from healthy volunteers at the NIH's Clinical Center, that they genetically transformed into induced pluripotent stem cells, which can then turn into any cell type in the body. Surprisingly, they found that the surfaces of the stem cells were lined with high levels of HERV-K, subtype HML-2, an envelope protein, that viruses often use to latch onto and infect cells. These proteins progressively disappeared as the cells were served two rounds of "cocktails." One round nudged the cells into an intermediate, neural stem cell state followed by a second round that pushed the cells into finally becoming neurons. The researchers sped up this process by turning off HERV-K, HML-2 genes in the stem cells or by treating the cells with antibodies against the HML-2 protein.

    LtSoN: You're asking for the opposite, which is quite the ask. 70% losses spinning most of you up. Well, as I similarly said a few months ago, multiple staggered deadly global pandemics is a fucking big lift ethically, though one like that continues to be intriguing. Let's see whether HSS does something positive with the COVID-19 pandemic first. (You could (targeted) wake up a large(r) fraction of the large number of [latents]. :-) Meta, I am quite curious about how you do semantic embeds. Meta [something else], been tracking the Neanderthal(/etc) research for several years, I have. (Also, Charlie's rules say you can link if you "explain, in simple, transparent, and accessible language why you think this is important")

    1211:

    "Saw a golden retriever completely fooled..."

    From the dog and lightbulb jokes: Q: How many golden retrievers does it take to change a lightbulb? A. "Change the lightbulb, why? It's sunny out, we could go out and play!"

    1212:

    I described that campaign as "Satan vs. Cthulhu." Essentially, it was the complete failure of both parties to find a candidate who wasn't at the bottom of their respective barrels. I voted for Hillary (Satan) of course - I'm not stupid - but the really important thing is that "Trump vs. Clinton" or "Johnson vs. Corbyn" represents the complete failure of either side of the ruling class to find a figure who can inspire and rule capably.

    1213:

    Correction: ADMINISTER AND RUN, not "rule".

    1214:

    That works too. I wasn't really saying anything about how the system should work one way or another.

    1215:

    Interesting that they're thinking of tattoos. I'm thinking of circuit mandalas, where you use specially formulated graphite/iron/silver/whatever drawing materials to create the circuits you want, make bridges so that lines can cross without shorting, and so forth. Not sure how you power it up. Perhaps use the photoelectric effect with still other pigments, and put the mandala in the sunlight?

    You could also potentially draw figures onto vibrating surfaces to transfer information into current.

    Anyway, interesting... Thanks!

    1216:

    troutwaxer Spot on One who lies & bullshitts ALL the time & evades responsibility & the other, incapable of learning anything at all in 45+ years ... Both stuck in utterly wrong ideologies.

    1217:

    Oh I quite agree, the error France (and the UK) made was not the intensity of the lockdown, it was the timing, if they'd started a couple of weeks sooner the peak would have been way lower.

    1218:

    I would not classify France as a country "unwilling to elect a female head of state" that is very far from my impression of the place.

    UK have done it twice already,/i

    Being pedantic (I seem to be having that sort of morning) the UK has never* elected a female head of state. Along with Australia and New Zealand (and several other places) we have had one since 1952. Two elected women have been appointed as head of government in the UK.

    [*] With the possible exception of Mary II.

    1219:

    Re: '... draw figures onto vibrating surfaces to transfer information into current.'

    And now we have a perfectly plausible science-y explanation for how the [....]* were 'programmed' into experiencing various effects.

    Next stage might be two-way communication using such tats, i.e., the human wearing the tat is just a convenient intermediary mechanism. Could be used to show how a Zombie Lord controls his flock, how James Bond passes/obtains secret data, how to provide key knowledge/skills to an off world colony as in a Mars colonist's body is taken over by an Earth-side surgeon to perform some life saving procedure. In this scenario, we'd also an in-parallel feature with a second Earth-sider hooked up to OR/medical monitoring equipment whose magic tat is in communication with the Mars-side patient thereby providing the Earth-side surgeon with real-time data.

    • US Embassy staff in Cuba for conspiracy theory fans
    1220:

    It was very much the same thing in Sweden. The virus had apparently entered Stockholm in January, long before the official first case. . Re unwillingness to elect female PMs:
    There was the social democrat Mona Sahlin that was party secretary and poised to take over at the next election victory, but she had to step down due to a rather ridiculous pseudo-scandal invoving a bar of chocolate charged to her official credit card instead of her private card. This reflects a rather Swedish sense of political priorities (and not in a good way).

    There are currently three party leaders, I do not see the Swedish political culture as particularly hostile to women.

    1221:

    I meant "there are currently three female party leaders.

    1222:

    This may have been said before but, as far as I know, there is no evidence that those early occurrences WERE the virus that is causing the pandemic. Let's assume contamination has been excluded. Unless the samples have been sequenced in their entirety, it could have well been its less lethal or infectious precursor or parallel strain.

    Virology and even bacteriology is like that - not just in humans, or even mammals, but in plants.

    1223:

    Sad news from Adam Savage concerning Grant Imahara. Unfortunately Grant suffered a brain aneurysm.

    Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

    1224:

    Pigeon @ 1204: I don't remember any other specific items but I do remember that they all had that basic theme - not painful bleeding stupidity, but enacting some bizarre scene in public and secretly filming people's confused reactions.

    Since I didn't watch it, I have only snippets I caught here & there to go by ... it was popular to have it on a TV screen in a certain kind of restaurant catering to a college age male demographic and when I traveled I sometimes had no other choice if I needed to eat & get back on the road; so I couldn't completely avoid it.

    And I'd encounter it channel surfing when I had to stay in a motel somewhere & insomnia kept me awake. It was always there on one of the "57 channels with nothing on" ... I wonder if Newton Minow lived to see it?

    But there was stupidity, both painful AND bleeding. I'm not a fan of crude, rude humor either, but what I remember from Jackass and its imitators went far beyond mere crude & rude.

    1225:

    Birger J The virus had apparently entered Stockholm in January, long before the official first case. THIS The educated suspicion, to put it no stronger than that ... that C-19 was actually loose quite a lot earlier than many people, including medical experts, actually knew or suspected. Like it did not originate in the revolting wet meat market in Wuhan, but that said outbreak was the first obvious manifestation, & it had already been "about" for some time ..... As with so many other attributes of this virus, we are still struggling to get relevant facts & observations.

    1226:

    The educated suspicion, to put it no stronger than that ... that C-19 was actually loose quite a lot earlier than many people, including medical experts, actually knew or suspected.

    Per Wiki China has traced their first patients to sometime in November, though they weren't aware of a problem until late December.

    The Austrian authorities were apparently made aware of Covid being in their ski resort on March 5th, with the fateful decision to not close the ski resort for another week+ helping to seal Europe's fate.

    But the Austrians have now traced it to at least February 5th, and that Swiss woman had to have caught it elsewhere.

    Tracing however only works when their is an unbroken chain and enough evidence - people who catch Covid but through luck don't spread it and never show symptoms are inherently untraceable without a lot of blanket testing - and the disappearing antibodies means there are limits to that.

    So yes, it was around in Europe in January but like any virus was waiting for the perfect conditions - if a patient with no symptoms wasn't in a choir, didn't work in or party in crowded places, the virus may well simply die out in that patient.

    1228:

    So, what's the electrical conductivity of a henna tattoo?

    1229:

    Um, the Earth-side surgeon with real-time data.

    That assumes that "half an hour between sending and receiving is your idea of "real-time".

    1230:

    We're already talking about magic, breaking general relativity is not that much more of a stretch!

    1231:

    Micro-Carbon-nanotube filaments, "impressed" into the skin surface ... You might look like R Bradbury's Illustrated Man" - but you can perfom miracles, because of your EM powers ... Hmm, sure there's a story or two in there.

    1232:

    Canada does not have a female PM (Qanon loony theories notwithstanding). While we haven't had the best outcomes, we are close enough to the howling vortex to feel some satisfaction with the functioning of our current system.

    Important note. Lockdowns and masks are a big part of the picture. A non-obvious part of the picture in most of the countries is a functioning public health system.

    The US seems to have a health care 'system' almost perfectly designed to be terrible at handing public health crises such as a pandemic. Stories of coronavirus survivors leaving the ICU with a $1M bill in the mail are happening, which creates a powerful disincentive for anyone to actually seek help.

    Massive change happens with ongoing incremental steps and small changes, combined with occasional phase transitions where entire systems explode and something new emerges. Often the new thing would not happen without the constant effort involved in the incremental steps and small changes that went before.

    I have read that the private, for profit health system is losing money while failing to actually help the problem. Doctors and nurses are taking actual pay cuts right in the midst of the crisis because their employers are going broke. I'm not sure what is happening in the health insurance industry, but they can hardly claim that COVID was an existing condition, so they are also likely taking a beating.

    With the right combination of new leadership and some crisis-borne audacity, it might be possible to nationalize the lot as their market value crashes. Buy the shareholders out at the market price and build something that is actually viable with the existing infrastructure and without the profit maximization imperative. Other countries have shown that once a functioning public health system is in place it is all but impossible to remove it without risking a head-on-a-stick experience.

    Of course, I seriously doubt Joe Biden is the right leader for that job, and the moment will likely pass before AOC or someone more suitable can take over.

    1233:

    "Micro-Carbon-nanotube filaments, "impressed" into the skin surface ..."

    Count me out.

    The very preliminary information we have about CNT's in cell-cultures indicate that the "long, thin & strong" aspect of CNT is at least as damaging as it is for asbestos.

    The way it works is that 'garbage' particles are swallowed up by a particular kind of cell, which then drags itself and the garbage particle out of the system.

    However, "long, thin and strong" particles cannot be encapsulated, they pierce the cell walls.

    1234:

    Re: ' "half an hour between sending and receiving is your idea of "real-time".'

    And here I wave my arms about and invoke 'Let there be Quantum!'

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714132737.htm

    Date: June 25, 2020

    Source: The Optical Society

    Summary: In a critical step toward creating a global quantum communications network, researchers have generated and detected quantum entanglement onboard a CubeSat nanosatellite weighing less than 2.6 kilograms and orbiting the Earth.

    'Quantum entanglement demonstrated aboard orbiting CubeSat

    Advance poised to enable cost-effective space-based global quantum network for secure communications and more

    "In the future, our system could be part of a global quantum network transmitting quantum signals to receivers on Earth or on other spacecraft," said lead author Aitor Villar from the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. "These signals could be used to implement any type of quantum communications application, from quantum key distribution for extremely secure data transmission to quantum teleportation, where information is transferred by replicating the state of a quantum system from a distance."

    In Optica, The Optical Society's (OSA) journal for high impact research, Villar and an international group of researchers demonstrate that their miniaturized source of quantum entanglement can operate successfully in space aboard a low-resource, cost-effective CubeSat that is smaller than a shoebox. CubeSats are a standard type of nanosatellite made of multiples of 10 cm × 10 cm × 10 cm cubic units.

    ...

    Miniaturizing quantum entanglement

    The new miniaturized photon-pair source consists of a blue laser diode that shines on nonlinear crystals to create pairs of photons. Achieving high-quality entanglement required a complete redesign of the mounts that align the nonlinear crystals with high precision and stability.

    ... Launching into orbit

    The researchers incorporated their new instrument into SpooQy-1, a CubeSat that was deployed into orbit from the International Space Station on 17 June 2019. The instrument successfully generated entangled photon-pairs over temperatures from 16 °C to 21.5 °C.

    The researchers are now working with RALSpace in the UK to design and build a quantum nanosatellite similar to SpooQy-1 with the capabilities needed to beam entangled photons from space to a ground receiver. This is slated for demonstration aboard a 2022 mission. They are also collaborating with other teams to improve the ability of CubeSats to support quantum networks.'

    1235:

    Canada does not have a female PM (Qanon loony theories notwithstanding). While we haven't had the best outcomes, we are close enough to the howling vortex to feel some satisfaction with the functioning of our current system.

    Our system is also such that the important decision are made at the Provincial/Territory level and not the federal level - Trudeau's job in all of this negotiating a way to close the border with the US that didn't upset DT, and to fund a lot of stuff. His record on the funding side is mixed.

    There have certainly been surprises at the Provincial level - Ontario had elected a populist heavy right-wing premiere who had been dragged down with a lot of policies the electorate didn't like but (full credit) he has done well in implementing the lockdown and being cautious in removing it.

    The biggest problem in Canada, and that has somewhat blown up the numbers, is the scandal of the long term care homes in Ontario and Quebec which have had the brunt of deaths.

    I have read that the private, for profit health system is losing money while failing to actually help the problem. Doctors and nurses are taking actual pay cuts right in the midst of the crisis because their employers are going broke.

    They apparently don't make money on emergency care (given the number of patients unable to pay, not a surprise), but rather it is all of the out-patient "elective" surgeries that are the hospital profit areas and they have all been shut down at various times, immediately plunging the hospitals into financial trouble without even treating a Covid patient.

    With the right combination of new leadership and some crisis-borne audacity, it might be possible to nationalize the lot as their market value crashes.

    Biden isn't the main problem - it is unlikely even if the DNC takes the Senate that they will do so with a large enough margin (in part because not enough Senate seats are in play this year).

    Without say 70+ DNC Senators it won't matter if it is Biden as President or somebody far to the left of him, as they won't get single-payer through the Senate.

    1236:

    But what about the 666 on your forehead?

    1237:

    And, for our French and Canadian friends, Happy Bastille Day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIxOl1EraXA

    1238:

    So far, nobody has conclusively shown that any quantum wizardry can transmit information faster than light, but nobody has shown that is definitely impossible.

    1239:

    Re: 'Happy Bastille Day'

    Danged - but that woman can sing! Ages since I last watched any of Mirielle Mathieu's performances. Thanks!

    Below are some favorites from her Piaf repertoire:

    'La Vie en Rose' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW-pS4JEhkc

    'Non Je Ne Regrette Rien' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53XBe1R7y3Q

    'L'Hymne à l'amour' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWuplW-l-E0

    1240:

    Re: ' ... nobody has conclusively shown that any quantum wizardry can transmit information faster than light, but nobody has shown that is definitely impossible.'

    A perfectly acceptable quantum response! :)

    1241:

    Rocketjps Indeed - the USA simply does not have a "Health System" of any sort at all, because that might be commonist ... Now, the chickens are flocking home to roost, aided by DT & his goons who are now trying to rubbish the one public figure whom people trust - Dr Fauci.Apparently the US right have now taken to openly attacking him. As mentioned here though the cartoon is no longer visible... I have read that the private, for profit health system is losing money while failing to actually help the problem. Doctors and nurses are taking actual pay cuts right in the midst of the crisis because their employers are going broke. Oh dear, how sad, my heart bleeds.

    SFR What's the Signal transmission rate/speed? Is your handwavium strong enough?

    mdive Unless the emergancy really bites, of course - which, given current figures, it will. Even here, we have a very long "tail" of both cases & deaths, but they are both declining. Even with our gross misgovernment. The reverse appears to be happening in the USA - cases are still increasing & the rate is, or appears to be - going up.

    SFR/whitroth There is a better, classic version of that

    1242:

    "Indeed - the USA simply does not have a "Health System" of any sort at all, [...]"

    One of my first thoughts about Covid19 was "USA is going to be the control group in this medical test."

    1244:

    A few years ago, I was looking for a definitive version of Le Marseilles, and found that, and that was where I stopped. In addition, she's beautiful... and would be perfect if I was casting the the first novel that I'm still trying to sell, for the female lead.

    1245:

    Anyone know anything about Edge SF&Fantasy Publishing, from Canada?

    1246:

    Re: 'Is your handwavium strong enough?'

    Let's leave that to the engineers to sort out. :)

    Actually, I've no idea. Of the impression that since 'quantum' works over impossible distances defying both speed of light constraints and Newtonian laws concerning work/force, it's not dependent on any particular level of 'strength', i.e., it's either on or off. Period.

    Someone with a physics background might be able to speak to this.

    1247:

    ...in the USA - cases are still increasing & the rate is, or app ears to be - going up.

    Yep. In the last ten days the US doubling time of reported cases has slid from ca 40 to ca 35 days. Individual states differ and the aggregate case rate will change as those get worse or better or burn out.

    1248:

    Depends on your definition of "strength". It could be on or off... but it you don't do it in given amount of time, or you lose the occasional on/off, you could get garbage. Bandwidth, you see....

    1249:

    SFreader, etc,

    My understanding is that such forms of quantum entanglement that have been shown to happen (demonstrations of violations of Bell's Inequality) rely on the parties comparing notes via Slower Than Light means after the fact, and so cannot be use to send information faster than light.

    Each party just sees information-free noise, and it is only after the notes are compared that correlations between the sites appear in the noise.

    What the proposed quantum network could offer is a means of detecting third parties tapping the network, because they will destroy the entanglement. But actual communications will still be slower than light.

    JHomes.

    1250:

    Yes, some local hospitals laid off workers with the pandemic. The problem in the US is that elective surgeries are the major moneymaker for hospitals, while ED (Emergency Department. They're not ERs), is generally a huge money loser. When you have to ramp up the ER to deal with a pandemic influx, while getting rid of all elective surgeries, then the hospital will start losing money. And if the hospital bet too big on being a boutique destination for elective surgeries for wealthy foreigners, then things can get really bad.

    Elective, in this case, isn't just cosmetic surgery. It's a general category for bum knees and other problems that won't kill you rapidly, but which will make your life miserable without them. I'm trying to remember if kidney transplants qualify as an elective or not, but they might.

    Anyway, it's not just for-profit hospitals that are suffering. All hospitals are in the US. Emergency medicine is a service they are required to provide, but no one is required to reimburse them for it to the level that they spend, IIRC. That's a more fundamental problem than universal health care.

    The other thing is that insurance costs are huge for businesses that have to offer insurance to their workers. Get enough horror stories about how legitimate businesses are going under while trying to help their workers deal with million dollar Covid19 bills (30 days in the ICU will cost a lot in the US), and that could spur change, especially if the money goes to profit the rich, not to pay the hospital workers.

    That said, we're about two pharma bro-fucks and a hard left election away from single-payer health care becoming politically viable. Even Gilead's treading the line in charging $3000 for a week-long course of its Corona-Tamiflu (Remdesivir), and that's raising eyebrows, even though it's being pumped into every eligible patient. If some jackass pharma bro, say, screws up Trump's Operation Warp Speed by trying to profiteer in ways that kill people while not effectively dealing with Covid19, that might piss off enough people to cause major changes to happen.

    1251:

    Alas, that you're so right about the USA having no health system.

    And -- happy Bastille Day to we USians who can go anywhere are thoroughly incarcerated behind DeathCultChief's "beautiful wall."

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/opinion/coronavirus-schools-bars.html?

    Quote: [....]But that was the road not taken. Instead, many states not only rushed to reopen, they reopened stupidly. Instead of being treated as a cheap, effective way to fight contagion, face masks became a front in the culture war. Activities that posed an obvious risk of feeding the pandemic went unchecked: Large gatherings were permitted, bars reopened.

    And the cost of those parties and open bars extends beyond the thousands of Americans who will be killed or suffer permanent health damage as a result of Covid-19’s resurgence. The botched reopening has also endangered something that, unlike drinking in groups, can’t be suspended without doing long-run damage: in-person education.[....]

    And the reason we’re in this position is that states, cheered on by the Trump administration, rushed to allow large parties and reopen bars. In a real sense America drank away its children’s future.[....]

    But never fear -- the Greatest Warrior against covid-19 is saving us by having the National Guard storm the hospitals, because, after all, the health professionals are doing it all rong which is why the reported numbers are foney high numbers:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/13/trump-administration-recommend-national-guard-an-option-help-hospitals-report-covid-19-data/

    1252:

    Yeah, I'll believe it when someone demonstrates it convincingly, not when someone says "it's not conclusively impossible". Hard science fiction almost by definition operates in the "not proven impossible" part of the spectrum, and that covers quite a range.

    So yeah, I'll get my talking hologram to sit next to me so I can use the transit lane with my flying car as I commute to work from Sydney to orbit, relying on quantum wizardry to keep the hologram working, shall I?

    1253:

    I liked the time when the top of the tree was all women: we had a women head of state, governor general, head of the high court, prime minister and leader of the opposition. Liz, of course, Silvia Cartwright, Sian Elias, Helen Clark, Jenny Shipley respectively).

    About then I moved to Australia where there was a debate about whether the country was ready to accept a female leader of a minor non-government party. The conclusion was no, because Natasha Stott-Despoja is fundamentally evil and unfit. Some time later "we" also decided that a female Prime Minister was unacceptable, the bitch should be stuffed in a chaff bag and dumped at sea (I kid you not).

    Oh, did I mention that our "team of 5 million" has gone back into lockdown, and our second "team of five million" seems about to follow suit (the latter has a woman as premier if that's any consolation).

    1254:

    Just for those who really need a trip into the sewer (and because I should probably have more quote marks in that sentence above)

    https://timhein.com.au/2012/05/22/the-top-10-most-publicised-abusive-comments-about-julia-gillard/

    1255:

    we are close enough to the howling vortex

    Oh yeah. I saw a story on CTV that we've had over 20,000 cases where the police have been called in because people are non-compliant (or incommunicado).

    What really got me was this part:

    "As of July 3, 2020, the CBSA has referred information to both PHAC and the RCMP on 237 travellers who the CBSA believes may not have respected the requirement to quarantine or isolate and/or those who have signalled an unwillingness to comply," said CBSA spokesperson Rebecca Purdy in another emailed statement on Tuesday.

    If they have signalled an unwillingness to comply, why are they still being allowed in?

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/police-notified-of-21-422-cases-where-travellers-to-canada-may-have-broken-quarantine-rules-1.5024380

    1256:

    people are non-compliant

    That should be "visitors" — travellers arriving in Canada.

    1257:

    Their web site seems to be currently down, but if memory serves they publish the Tesseracts collections, which are very good in a definitely-not-Analog way.

    1258:

    What do you want to take your hologram out for?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLv4t7HWJ28

    (The Austin Lounge Lizards, "Grandpa's Hologram"

    1259:

    Doctors and nurses are taking actual pay cuts right in the midst of the crisis

    Here too.

    Alberta doctors are pissed off and many are thinking of leaving as soon as the crisis is over. True their pay cut was imposed before Covid, but the UCP is pressing ahead with their agenda anyway.

    https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/alberta-doctors-accuse-government-of-searching-for-scab-workers-as-200-job-applications-go-online

    In Ontario, nurses are pissed that Ford capped their pay rise at 1% (less than inflation, so actually a pay cut) right after the police were given 2%. And the police get paid during training and get higher salaries as well.

    Ford still seems to be playing by Harris' playbook, counting on nurses' compassion to see that patients don't suffer. (And it was Harris that gutted oversight of for-profit nursing homes.)

    (Note for non-Canadians: Ford and Harris are/were both populist Conservative premiers.)

    1260:

    I saw a meme yesterday that took the most optimistic death rate for children, multiplied it by the number of American schoolkids, and then said "this is the number of children the Republicans are willing to kill to get re-elected".

    And it looked pretty damning.

    Then I realized that it was about double the number of children killed in school shootings, which Americans are apparently OK with, so I wasn't certain it would have what I assumed was the intended effect.

    1261:

    Note for non-Canadians: Ford and Harris are/were both populist Conservative premiers.

    Is that particular Ford a scion of the Ford group that also produced the, erm, Rob Ford model?

    1262:

    So, what's the electrical conductivity of a henna tattoo?

    Not a clue. The only thing I could find was something about henna extracts being surfactants of some sort. So my guess is henna's conductivity is somewhere on the spectrum of "probably not very."

    Now if magical tattoos are supposed to conduct electricity, well on the low end I suppose we've got the prison cell tat done with pencil lead, while on the high end we've got gold. What fun.

    1263:

    most optimistic death rate for children... about double the number of children killed in school shootings

    I hope no-one is asking the Don to line them up in Fifth Avenue and shoot them one at a time. There's so many...

    Apparently rantback radio here is getting really into the false positive rate of covid tests, and also whether it's worth social distancing non vulnerable people. That's despite the pub outbreak this week (or maybe because of?).

    A coronavirus cluster at a south-western Sydney pub has been genomically linked to Melbourne cases, putting NSW on high alert for a similar large-scale outbreak. As the Crossroads Hotel outbreak in Casula grew to at least 30 cases on Tuesday

    https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/crossroads-hotel-covid-19-cluster-linked-to-melbourne-outbreak-20200714-p55c12.html

    1264:

    "La Marseilleise" Unfortunately it turns out that M Mattheiu is a rabid Roman Catholic & has a habit of crawling to right-wing autocrats .. Slightly ironic, I think.

    SFR I have a very ancient Physics background - & I'm confused ... But then this appears, also, to be a "confrontation" between QM & GR, doesn't it? Unless the after-the fact consultations slow the process to below "c", as suggested by others ...

    Cahrlie Right back at the beginning of this thread, you said: A new world is being born. R A Heinlein, "Monn is a Harsh Mistress" ... "All births involve blood & pain"

    1265:

    You (and perhaps others) have confused quantum entanglement with quantum tunnelling. There is some evidence that the latter DOES allow information to be transmitted faster than light, but it is not conclusive. The Disciples of Einstein refuse to consider the possibility, which may well be why the matter has never been properly investigated (or it may be because it is technically very difficult).

    Quantum entanglement as it currently exists cannot be used to transmit information, though I do not know if that is an absolute restriction. At most, you can transmit noise, and its use is to enable secure cryptographic transmission. There are multiple theories of how it works and the only one that would need FTL is very much out of fashion. As far as I know, nobody has ever done a proper experiment to check, which is a disgrace.

    1266:

    Is that particular Ford a scion of the Ford group that also produced the, erm, Rob Ford model?

    Yes. Impossible as it seems people saw Rob Ford and then voted for his brother Doug Ford anyway.

    1267:

    "You (and perhaps others) have confused quantum entanglement with quantum tunnelling. There is some evidence that the latter DOES allow information to be transmitted faster than light, but it is not conclusive."

    And more importantly: Wouldn't move the information very far, as in seriously sub-millimeter distances.

    1268:

    Thanks, good poem. Though I always wanted kids, and even kept (and keep) some of my childhood books for them.

    I guess I mentioned it in another thread, an old friend is pregnant, and I told her I'm happy about it, it's nice if there are more people around like her. Since she's the friend I once told I felt better as a person since I knew her, since it's nice to know someone who reminds you that much of yourself whom you like that much, that implies I think it would be good if more people like me were around, err. Yes, megalomania and narcissism...

    Later on, I thought that's somewhat strange coming from a guy who quite frequently had passive suicidal ideation back in the day to somebody who once said she thought it would be better if she was dead for everybody involved, had a story of self-medicating depression with psychoactives (being quite cautious, actually, whom am I reminded of?) and cautiously did quite a few somewhat drastic things. Err, I'll stop here, sorry for going there, and I know there is a reason for trigger warnings.

    I brought it up, because, first off, it shows we all have come a long way.

    Second off, well, I realized opening up helps, though you have to be careful to whom and when, people always say they don't believe I have a story of depression, I'm always cheerful and laughing, just like her back in the day, actually, I'm quite sure I should make an appointment with my therapist soon, but I'm not sure I want to go down that particular rabbit hole when there are quite a few other issues, e.g. the question if I'm slightly bipolar II and like, or my landlord, who reminds me of some people diagnosed with ADHD or suffering from atypical depression I knew quite much.

    Third of, well, I learned about the concept of "passive suicidal ideation" only recently, googling found this article about it. OK, here come the usual disclaimer, lockdown and like are quite taxing on mental health, so if you show symptoms like this, I'd say please talk to a doctor, social worker or like, but then, I just contacted a chemistry student I knew back in the day, room painted black, NIN and Tori Amos videos, there is a story how a psychology student friend of his once thought he was suicidal and sent in the ambulance. Story is they opened the door when he was just smoking a bowl of pot, but they didn't mind him finishing it; no idea how much of it was true, back in high school there was a rumor I had gotten drunk (well, actually, that happened a lot back then) and a girl was expecting a child from me (definitely not the case, except if my memory issues are worse than I thought). So, first of, prepare for overreactions, and, second of, err, my memories and associations.

    I'd have to compare the numbers with other diagnoses, but it's quite common on the autistic spectrum.

    And before I go into Babylon 5's "Day of the Dead" and the time I rediscovered "American God" after reading "Sandman" in high school, and how I also bought Wolpert's book on depression, him being the rockstar of evo-devo back then...

    1269:

    That is a technical limitation, not a theoretical one. If it were shown to allow information to be transmitted FTL, then we can be sure that serious research money would be put into seeing how far it could be extended. I suspect not very far!

    However, a more important point is that answering that question definitively would help a great deal in resolving the QM / GR conflict, by disproving a lot of hypotheses and possibly opening up other approaches.

    1270:

    "However, a more important point is that answering that question definitively"

    Yes, but the problem with tunneling things very short distances FTL, is that measuring if it is FTL becomes for all practical purposes impossible.

    It takes only three picoseconds for light to travel a millimeter, assuming your experiment can tunnel a full millimeter which is highly dubious, to credibly document even something as outrageous as 2c speeds, you would have to measure single-shot events with 10 femtosecond resolution.

    At the most fundamental level, to measure anything electrically, you have to move at least one electron sufficiently far that you can measure either its new position or the shift in electrical fields the movement causes, and you need the signal to be above the noise.

    Last I heard, single-shot time interval measurements had still not got to clean picoseconds.

    That leaves angular measurements, something like shooting two simultaneous electrons at each other in a shallow angle, one going through the tunneling gadget one not. If you can get all the parameters right, the angle of collision would depend on the tunneling speed, and the final angle of the electrons could be measured relatively simply.

    Unless you somehow can turn the tunnelling on and off between individual measurements, you have no way to calibrate that.

    So yeah, not exactly an easy experiment to construct...

    1271:

    I guess I mentioned it in another thread, an old friend is pregnant,

    Not what you were talking about but it trigger my thoughts about this article. Actually an article about this article.

    Anyway anyone born recently or in the next 20 years will be in a very different world than we live in now. Sociologically. Even if climate change and other such things don't happen.

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext

    I can't figure out what I first read but the summary is that the anti-migration / anti-immigration wave will either end or the generation after most of us in what we call first world countries will get to sit in their poop and be on starvation diets until they die.

    1272:

    Re: 'So yeah, not exactly an easy experiment to construct...'

    Are there any existing experiments that could be expanded upon or somehow built onto that could provide the power and resolution to conduct such an experiment? I'm specifically thinking of mega projects like CERN.

    Also recall that CERN is working with IBM on some sort of quantum computer. I realize this is not the same thing as quantum communications, but it does suggest that because CERN already has its toe in one quantum related line of research, it might be able to transfer some of its experience to some other 'quantum' technology.

    1273:

    these electrical tattoos...... OC tattoos , ive read of them before,,, Pandoras star

    1274:

    "So yeah, not exactly an easy experiment to construct..."

    No dissent there. I haven't looked at how they do it, but my immediate thought was a cascade of tunnels, created using some form of VLSI. Whether such a thing is feasible, I have no idea. Serious quantum and semiconductor mojo required :-)

    But I stand by my assertion about how important such an experiment would be. FAR too many physicists say "We know what the answer would be, so there's no need to do it."

    1275:

    Re: ' ... the question if I'm slightly bipolar II'

    Hope you're feeling better soon ...

    And hope that the above sentence/sentiment makes sense to you and doesn't come across as patronizing or outright stupid.

    Although I took some psych courses in undergrad none actually showed or discussed the everyday experience of any of the diagnoses. Neither can I rely on popular TV/film depictions -- the directors/producers seem more concerned with an interesting story than with depicting the reality of a condition, e.g., 'A Beautiful Mind'.

    So, if you don't mind: What are the do's and don'ts for folks like me who've no idea what you're going through?

    1276:

    Although I took some psych courses in undergrad none actually showed or discussed the everyday experience of any of the diagnoses.

    Being raise by a manic/depressive mother made life interesting. Till the day she died.

    1277:
    Emergency medicine is a service they are required to provide, but no one is required to reimburse them for it to the level that they spend, IIRC. That's a more fundamental problem than universal health care.

    Yeah, Ronald Reagan introduced socialised medicine into the US, he just "forgot" to implement a system for paying for it.

    1278:

    Much of the United States used to work with American labor at least if one doesn't view history through the fun house mirror of contemporary conservatism, and sixty years ago the minimum wage, by some measures, bought more, if one doesn't resort to spurious arguments like "But they couldn't buy X Boxes in 1960!". Wall $treet and agribusiness might suffer a financial haircut, but, before Reagan, more of the Nation managed than right wing ideologues would have you believe. Don't forget the extremely wealthy are a small part of a larger economy.

    1279:

    "Are there any existing experiments that could be expanded upon or somehow built onto that could provide the power and resolution to conduct such an experiment? I'm specifically thinking of mega projects like CERN."

    As a general rule, CERN is about huge energies per particle, and measuring quantum tunneling FTL effects would be all about reducing energies as much as possible to get the noise down.

    That doesn't rule out CERN of course, they also do low energy work there, but pretty much any gov't or university lab with a helium dewar and some way of producing microelectronic solid state devices to put in it can play.

    The most likely candidates would be places like PTB or NIST.

    1280:

    The anti-migration/anti-immigration wave will die, and sooner, rather than later.

    Tell me, do you know any US citizen who's looking to hire on to a farm, to do what's referred to as "stoop labor"?

    I sure don't. Nor have I seen them lining up at the gas stations or other places, waiting for the morning buses of temp labor companies looking for labor.

    But the idiots screaming about it are, literally, ignorant idiots who have no idea where their fruits and vegetables come from, or who takes care of the plants and picks them.

    In addition, as global warming, and water shortages hit harder, there will be actual huge masses of people leaving and crossing the borders.

    1281:

    mdlve @ 1235:

    With the right combination of new leadership and some crisis-borne audacity, it might be possible to nationalize the lot as their market value crashes.

    Biden isn't the main problem - it is unlikely even if the DNC takes the Senate that they will do so with a large enough margin (in part because not enough Senate seats are in play this year).

    Without say 70+ DNC Senators it won't matter if it is Biden as President or somebody far to the left of him, as they won't get single-payer through the Senate.

    Nope! It doesn't work that way.

    It takes a two-thirds majority in the Senate to CONVICT in an impeachment trial. It takes a two-thirds majority in BOTH houses to remove a President under the procedures of the 25th Amendment. And it takes a two-thirds majority to override a Presidential Veto.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veto#Constitutional_procedure

    But it only takes a simple majority to pass legislation. Even if they ditch McConnell rules for the filibuster, it only takes 60 (three-fifths majority) to break a filibuster.

    In 2020 there are 35 Senate seats being contested. Those seats are currently held by 12 Democrats with 1 open due to retirement and 23 Republicans with 3 open due to retirements.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_Senate_elections

    The Democrats have to take 16 of those seats to achieve to achieve a simple majority1. They only need 10 more currently Republican seats to reach a three-fifths majority (filibuster proof under the old Senate rules rendering McConnell rules moot.

    If the Democrats were to win 32 of the 35 races in contention this year, the would have a veto proof majority and would also have the necessary votes to convict any Federal Official2 impeached by the House.

    I don't think they'll win that many, but it looks to me like they will have a simple majority and it's not outside the realm of possibility they might end up with a three-fifths majority.

    1Hold the 11 Democratic held seats that are being contested, win Tom Udall's seat in New Mexico and pick up an additional 4 seats currently held by Republicans.

    2E.g. Supreme Court justices or other persons appointed to the Federal Judiciary who abuses his/her position to give the Greedy Oligarchs Party partisan advantage.

    1282:

    Tell me, do you know any US citizen who's looking to hire on to a farm, to do what's referred to as "stoop labor"?

    You're speaking to the choir. I'm 1 generation from the farm on my father's side and 2 generations on my mother's side.

    My father grew up on a moderately large farm, did the WWII thing, got a college degree and never looked back. His explanation to me was farming was fine on the tractor in good weather. Other than that, ah, nope. My mother's step mother had memories of picking cotton by hand as a young teen. Absolutely no interest in going back to the "good old days".

    Both of them did their farm time in the 30s in the US which was NOT a wonderful time in so many ways. Much less on the farm.

    1283:

    My guess is that the people who express that they will not comply are likely Canadian citizens and thus cannot be turned away.

    1266 Doug Ford is the unlamented bumbler Rob Ford's brother. Rumours are that Doug was the slightly smarter one. He has managed to somehow rise to the occasion of COVID, for a given value of 'rise' that still means operating as a cronyist neocon. In my opinion he was elected in the brief time after Trump's election where it was possible for incompetent morons to say awful toxic things as a path to election. We can all hope that Trump has taken the shine off that particular diamond.
    1284:

    The Democrats have to take 16 of those seats to achieve to achieve a simple majority

    I have a spread sheet that I put together and update when really pissed or bored.

    Did my second iteration yesterday. I'm using 270towin.org polling aggregate the data.

    If the Senate votes go with the Presidential polling for all polls where there is a 3% or greater lead then D's get 50 and R's get 45 with 5 too close to call using my crude analysis. Some states are missing polling but they also had huge margins in the 2016 election so I gave the party to that result. Some of the polls are 2 months old. Some this week.

    But we have 3 months to go. Starting up schools with a few clumps of dead teachers and kids will likely lead to rout for Biden. Other things might go against him like bars and restaurants still being shut down. Unemployment in October is likely to have an impact. 30K to 50K airlines employees go off the payrolls Oct 1.

    Most everyone in the US is very grumpy just now. Just not all in the same direction.

    1285:

    We can all hope that Trump has taken the shine off that particular diamond.

    Interacting with all political stripes can be enlightening. Depressingly so at times.

    In the US there is a non trivial sized contingent who have decided the D's are evil thus ANY R must be elected to keep the evil D's out. No mater how despicable.

    1286:

    Off - or ON topic? Read this - by John Simpson of the BBC about how far the USA has sunk since Kennedy's day, or Eisenhower's for that matter.

    John Hughes Emergency medicine is a service they are required to provide, but no one is required to reimburse them for it to the level that they spend, IIRC. That's a more fundamental problem than universal health care. No, it bloody is not. Complete bollocks. If you have UHC & the load is evenly spread, then emergency care "comes out in the wash" That is how we do it here & basically, across the whole of Europe ...

    1287:

    "If you have UHC & the load is evenly spread, then emergency care "comes out in the wash" That is how we do it here & basically, across the whole of Europe ..."

    I would go even further:

    If you have UHC, and a population not afraid to use it, you have a lot less going on in Emergency than the ridiculous levels seen in USA.

    1288:

    Re: ' ... how far the USA has sunk since Kennedy's day, or Eisenhower's'

    Depends on whose opinions you consider important.

    People who specifically voted for someone who campaigned on shutting down the borders (access into the US) really don't give a damn about what some ferriners think about them.

    Take a look at the first graph on the Gallup site below: 'current satisfaction with the position of the US in the world' is higher now than in the Kennedy era among US respondents (53% vs. 43%). How representative this might be of people who actually vote or will vote - no idea.

    https://news.gallup.com/poll/116350/position-world.aspx

    1289:

    I helped build and upgrade the antimatter machines, the antiproton collector systems, ran around 3.5GeV/c. (Fairly low considering that Fermilab was running the Tevatron at that time.

    My favourite CERN machine was called (at the time of Eifionydd Jones) the LEAR, low energy antiproton ring, about the size of a squash court. It was a decelerator, trying to get the pbars to zero forward motion. “Will antiprotons rise due to gravity?” was the question?, or one of them.

    I’m sure the experiment is ongoing, certainly we were visited in around 1986 by those guys dressed in smart suits, wearing shades indoors, underground. They did ask how many pbars will fit in a bottle, and how long will it take $country to do it? To which we gave the correct answer.

    So ask the kids running LEIR about QT, but any sentence with the “q” word in it is still wrong. Nice cern history pics here, note no skyshine shield, wasn’t needed on this one. https://home.cern/science/accelerators/low-energy-antiproton-ring

    1290:

    Robert Prior @ 1255: If they have signalled an unwillingness to comply, why are they still being allowed in?

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/police-notified-of-21-422-cases-where-travellers-to-canada-may-have-broken-quarantine-rules-1.5024380

    The way I read it they "signalled an unwillingness to comply" by their behavior AFTER they had been admitted.

    Also, I don't think this is about idiots from the U.S. driving from CONUS to Alaska abusing the privilege of transit.

    1291:

    "Take a look at the first graph on the Gallup site below: 'current satisfaction with the position of the US in the world' is higher now than in the Kennedy era among US respondents (53% vs. 43%)."

    I don't think those numbers are in any way sensibly comparable, given how different the "International Scene" was then vs. now ?

    1292:

    Re: 'I don't think those numbers are in any way sensibly comparable, ...'

    Not sure what you mean. These numbers/graphs show how USians feel about their country's place in the world, and the finding is that proportionally more USians are satisfied now than were during the Kennedy era. It's a point-in-time metric.

    Hmmm... odd -- I couldn't find the sample composition/size, sampling & data collection methodology for this study.

    1293:

    The way I read it they "signalled an unwillingness to comply" by their behavior AFTER they had been admitted.

    I doubt that — once you're in Border Services is done with you, so for Border Services to pass this along to Public Health/the police they must have done/said something at the border.

    And not all (or even most) were 'driving to Alaska'. The Florida couple had a seasonal home here, for example, and ignored several warning.

    I know I'm grumpy about this — I have several family members risking their damn lives looking after people with Covid, and I really don't see why they should be endangered by idiots deciding that they have a right to do what they want.

    1294:

    Robert Prior @ 1259:

    Doctors and nurses are taking actual pay cuts right in the midst of the crisis

    Here too.

    Alberta doctors are pissed off and many are thinking of leaving as soon as the crisis is over. True their pay cut was imposed before Covid, but the UCP is pressing ahead with their agenda anyway.

    https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/alberta-doctors-accuse-government-of-searching-for-scab-workers-as-200-job-applications-go-online

    In Ontario, nurses are pissed that Ford capped their pay rise at 1% (less than inflation, so actually a pay cut) right after the police were given 2%. And the police get paid during training and get higher salaries as well.

    Ford still seems to be playing by Harris' playbook, counting on nurses' compassion to see that patients don't suffer. (And it was Harris that gutted oversight of for-profit nursing homes.)

    (Note for non-Canadians: Ford and Harris are/were both populist Conservative premiers.)

    The doctors quoted in the article say they don't have a union. Maybe they need to form one.

    1295:

    "Take a look at the first graph on the Gallup site below: 'current satisfaction with the position of the US in the world' is higher now than in the Kennedy era among US respondents (53% vs. 43%). How representative this might be of people who actually vote or will vote - no idea."

    I'll bet that this is due to 90% satisfaction among Republicans. It's amazing how much skew can be obtained from a fanatical minority.

    1296:

    Robert Prior @ 1260: I saw a meme yesterday that took the most optimistic death rate for children, multiplied it by the number of American schoolkids, and then said "this is the number of children the Republicans are willing to kill to get re-elected".

    And it looked pretty damning.

    Then I realized that it was about double the number of children killed in school shootings, which Americans are apparently OK with, so I wasn't certain it would have what I assumed was the intended effect.

    Got a link? I did a google search on "this is the number of children the Republicans are willing to kill to get re-elected" & didn't find it?

    1297:

    What used to be called "yellow dog Democrats" are now "yellow dog GOP".

    1298:

    That's not "grumpy" by any sane measurement. That's public-spirited cut with concern for relatives and distaste for arrogance.

    1299:

    Re: '... really don't see why they should be endangered by idiots deciding that they have a right to do what they want.'

    My understanding is that the only thing Canada can do is not allow entry to non-compliant visitors in the future. What might work wrt to managing visitors who don't give a damn about other people's well-being is for local authorities to fine them for non-compliance with the fine payable on the spot, and then increasing the fine for each offence. (But you'll probably get push-back by some business operators, esp. bars and hotels who'll complain that you're targeting their clientele.)

    Here's some good news - wonder when this'll become available and for how much. (The deactivation is 99% in the lab.)

    https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/uoft-scientists-mask-deactivates-coronavirus

    'According to a report, the mask incorporates TrioMed’s technology and “provides an advanced level of active protection for healthcare workers and the general population.”

    The company has a patented antimicrobial technology that comprises their entire line of medical products.

    “The TrioMed Active Mask is the first and only respiratory protection that is scientifically proven to deactivate the virus causing Covid-19, therefore drastically reducing the risk of contamination for the wearer”, says Pierre Jean Messier, founder and CEO of i3 Biomedical Inc.

    The U of T scientists, led by Professor Scott Gray-Owen of the department of molecular genetics in the Faculty of Medicine, used their faculty’s high-tech containment level three (CL3) lab to test the efficacy of the TrioMed Active Mask’s antimicrobial coating.'

    1300:

    Excerpt I've noticed, over the last few years, that the Gallup organization tends to lean conservative.

    1301:

    @1299: Call me back when there's a peer-reviewed study of the mask's effectiveness. This is another example of the press calling a publicity release science. Notably, they don't discuss the mechanism by which the mask "deactivates" the virus.

    1302:

    Me @1301: A little quick web research shows i3 Biomedical is a biotech startup headquartered in Quebec with a marketing subsidiary, TrioMed, headquartered in Brussels but registered (and dodging EU taxes) in Malta. It lists a grand total of seven employees. It's most likely a one-man shop for Mssr. Messier. i3 would have to continue its apparent partnership with the University of Toronto to conduct a full study, and does not appear to have much in the way of manufacturing capacity. So, ironically, don't hold your breath.

    1303:

    the only thing Canada can do is not allow entry to non-compliant visitors in the future.

    I think deporting non-residents who don't comply would be effective. The threat of doing that might sufficiently terrify some of the arseholes that the number would reduce, because from what I know getting deported from anywhere makes it pretty hard to get in to most countries afterwards.

    "here's a token fine, and BTW you won't be allowed into Canada, Mexico or any other country for the next 10 years"

    1304:

    ....(and dodging EU taxes) in Malta

    Of course that makes for dodging EU taxes from inside the EU.

    1305:

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/15-07-2020/checkpoints-soldiers-door-to-door-testing-nzs-new-covid-outbreak-plan/

    The kiwis are looking at "team AU" and quaking in their boots. I guess that "trans tasman bubble" idea has died in a ditch somewhere south of NSW.

    1306:

    But we have 3 months to go. Starting up schools with a few clumps of dead teachers and kids will likely lead to rout for Biden. Other things might go against him like bars and restaurants still being shut down. Unemployment in October is likely to have an impact.

    I, too, have been amusing myself during lockdown with little spreadsheets, and what they're saying is that, if there's no serious turn for the better, things are going to get quite bad in a number of US states and some other countries in the Americas starting in September and worsening through October and November into December. "Bad" means having tens of percent of the population symptomatic at a time.

    Spreadsheetology with data of the low quality that's available is fraught with uncertainty, and I hope things do break for the better.

    1307:

    Nope! It doesn't work that way.

    You are theoretically correct.

    But in the real world the DNC needs 70+ seats because they simply can't count on every single DNC Senator voting for single payer - there will be some who come from more conservative states who will be more GOP light than true DNC, or who really are influenced by the insurance industry, or any number of other reasons that will prevent them from following the party line.

    Just consider the GOP in Trump's time - united front when blocking anything but despite their numbers unable to repeal ACA because enough pressure was put on a small number of GOP Senators that they voted against the party.

    1308:

    FWIW, there was a game-shifter re masks in the US yesterday: CDC Editorial in the JAMA: Editorial: Universal Masking to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Transmission—The Time Is Now (John T. Brooks, Jay C. Butler, Robert R. Redfield, JAMA. July 14, 2020)

    And that refs a moderately convincing study about masks for SARS-CoV-2 source control in health care settings: July 14, 2020 Research Letter: Association Between Universal Masking in a Health Care System and SARS-CoV-2 Positivity Among Health Care Workers (Xiaowen Wang, Enrico G. Ferro, Guohai Zhou, et al, Dean Hashimoto, Deepak L. Bhatt, JAMA. July 14, 2020)

    Also the attempts to slime Anthony Fauci [1] appear to be falling apart; I don't think that was the intent, at least not for P. Navarro's op-ed (that one is too arrogant). And Fauci is fighting back amusingly (that's praise) well: Fauci: ‘Bizarre’ White House Behavior Only Hurts the President - The nation’s top public-health expert tells The Atlantic that he isn’t going anywhere, despite the Trump administration’s newest attempts to undercut him. (Peter Nicholas, Ed Yong, 15 July 2020)

    [1] Not a fan of the h-index metric, but Fauci's numbers look good. (Semantic Scholar) Anthony S Fauci, (h-index 126) (Google Scholar) AS Fauci, NIAID, nih.gov (h-index 220)

    1309:

    @1304: Malta appears to be corporation friendly. The Malta Guide, posted as being run by an expat who moved there nine years ago, has this to say:

    What Makes Malta a Tax Paradise for Companies Then? The bright spot in the face of that high nominal rate is that if a company is not incorporated in Malta but is based in Malta, it may not pay very much tax on its worldwide income. That’s because:

    Companies are legally resident in Malta if they are controlled from Malta. - If a company is not incorporated in Malta (and therefore not domiciled here) only income that arises in Malta or is remitted to Malta is taxable. - As well, capital gains arising outside of Malta, are not taxable even if the proceeds are remitted to Malta. - Losses, trade and depreciation, can be used to offset gains and can be carried forward indefinitely. - A series of tax credits and refunds means that the effective tax rate on companies can be as low as 5%.

    TrioMed reports that it is incorporated in Belgium and Canada, but based in Malta.

    1310:

    Re: 'Call me back when there's a peer-reviewed study of the mask's effectiveness.'

    Would probably be easy enough to recruit participants for this study using free masks as an incentive.

    Did a very quick search for peer-reviewed studies on masks. Most of the recent articles are reviews basically saying that masks help control spread. Closest to anything looking at the specifics of a mask is below - published in 2008.

    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0002618

    'Professional and Home-Made Face Masks Reduce Exposure to Respiratory Infections among the General Population'

    I suppose the manufacturer could also send some masks to whichever uni (MIT?) that did that aerosolization study: how far does a virus spread when speaking, sneezing, coughing, etc..

    1311:

    My question, and I suspect DaveP's, was specifically about how the mask deactivates virus particles. That's the big selling point that makes that particular mask so much better than the competition.

    1312:

    Sorry, no link. Youtube channel on Apple TV. Maybe Reddit-aggregator, as Youtube is throwing a lot of those into the random mix lately. (Usually I watch drone and photography channels to relax, but the 'next video' function is eclectic and sometimes I get sucked in…)

    1313:

    how the mask deactivates virus particles

    Maple-flavoured quantum nanoparticles. :-)

    Article I saw said the coating was used on the outside of the mask to reduce the chance that fiddling with the mask would transfer virus to the face/inside and potentially infect. So it sounds like it would be most useful in high-risk areas like medical facilities.

    1314:
    Hope you're feeling better soon ...

    Actually, I'm feeling quite well at the moment, though there is quite a lot going on[1]; maybe I'll write a little bit more on the weekend, at the moment, filtering is too taxing, and I have to go to sleep.

    Please note we are talking about bipolar II, which means hypomania, not mania. In May, I noticed my emotions becoming more noticeable, my memories becoming more vivid and myself quite talkative; at the time, I was doing hard physical work in a storehouse, so my inner state was no problem, and after a few days, I calmed down.

    In retrospect, this has happened before, and usually at the same time; I wonder if it might explain some of the events in May 2019[2], I livened up somewhat at the time and actually was somewhat euphoric.

    Alternative explanation, well, quite a few people liven up in spring.

    I guess I'll describe some of the past events to my therapist, problem is, as you can see with the last posting, I have a problem with filtering, and when describing the past, my memories are quite vivid; I hope my therapist won't conclude I'm manic at the moment when doing an infodump.

    Nash ("A Beautiful Mind") was diagnosed with schizophrenia, though there is some overlap with severe cases of mania; a friend[3] was waiting for an appointment concerning bipolar and ADHD, which as usual triggered some memories; "The Eden Express" is a book by Mark Vonnegut about his experience with mania. If the name sounds familiar, he's the son of Kurt Vonnegut. So it goes. SCNR.

    Sorry, need to sleep.

    [1] Short update, the antibody test was negative, so I still have to be careful. [2] Oh, minor note, about my landlord in 2019, I later on learned he had physically assaulted another cohabitant. [3] Hm, he's into COVID-19 conspiracies, but I meet him again and again, so I told him I think he is part of my karass, and I haven't changed that opinion.

    1315:

    Interesting if true; suggestions that widespread exposure to one or more unknown animal betacoronaviruses may have caused some background immunity to SARS-CoV-2. (This possibility has been mentioned by few here, you know who you are, in the last several months. Bold mine.) New Data on T Cells and the Coronavirus (Derek Lowe, 15 July, 2020) And turning to patients who have never been exposed to either SARS or the latest SARS CoV-2, this new work confirms that there are people who nonetheless have T cells that are reactive to protein antigens from the new virus. As in the earlier paper, these cells have a different pattern of reactivity compared to people who have recovered from the current pandemic (which also serves to confirm that they truly have not been infected this time around). Recognition of the nsp7 and nsp13 proteins is prominent, as well as the N protein. And when they looked at that nsp7 response, it turns out that the T cells are recognizing particular protein regions that have low homology to those found in the “common cold” coronaviruses – but do have very high homology to various animal coronaviruses. Very interesting indeed! That would argue that there has been past zoonotic coronavirus transmission in humans, unknown viruses that apparently did not lead to serious disease, which have provided some people with a level of T-cell based protection to the current pandemic. This could potentially help to resolve another gap in our knowledge, as mentioned in that recent post: when antibody surveys come back saying that (say) 95% of a given population does not appear to have been exposed to the current virus, does that mean that all 95% of them are vulnerable – or not? I’ll reiterate the point of that post here: antibody profiling (while very important) is not the whole story, and we need to know what we’re missing.

    References this: SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls (Nature, 15 July 2020) SARS-CoV-2 T cells in uninfected donors exhibited a different pattern of immunodominance, frequently targeting the ORF-1-coded proteins NSP7 and 13 as well as the NP structural protein. Epitope characterization of NSP7-specific T cells showed recognition of protein fragments with low homology to “common cold” human coronaviruses but conserved amongst animal betacoranaviruses.

    1316:

    More suggestions that masks might help.

    Study: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e2.htm

    Discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/hrm82i/among_139_clients_exposed_to_two_symptomatic_hair/

    Discussion useful for the reminder that the PTB are not doing mandatory quarantine-and-test so a lot of the people exposed haven't been tested. It's the difference4 between observational studies like this and going the full Mengele.

    1317:

    The anti-migration/anti-immigration wave will die, and sooner, rather than later.

    Tell me, do you know any US citizen who's looking to hire on to a farm, to do what's referred to as "stoop labor"?

    Sorry, I don't see it. The idea of hating immigrants is almost completely disconnected from any facts about immigrants; rather it is a statement about nationalism and bigotry.

    I'm sure there are plenty of people here who can talk about horrible things British people have said about people arriving on the isles after 1066.

    As for stoop labor, been there, done that. (Berry picking is a good way to get tween kids out of the house, in season.) I didn't think it was a cost effective use of my time when I was 13 much less as an adult. I don't begrudge agricultural workers any benefits or labor organization; that stuff can be brutal.

    1318:

    Starting up schools with a few clumps of dead teachers and kids will likely lead to rout for Biden.

    Sadly, that has already begun even before the normal school year starts.

    To save you a click: In Arizona three teachers doing summer classes shared the same classroom while linking to remote classes. They took exceptional precautions, knowing one had a compromised immune system. All three caught Covid 19 and one has died (not the already compromised one). This was a best-case model with a small group, high precautions, and no children around.

    1319:

    Would probably be easy enough to recruit participants for this study using free masks as an incentive.

    Sure. But you need a mix of people with the same exposure risk and see how many get sick compared to other masks. And the inability for the wearers to know which mask they have. Which gets hard unless you get people to enter a room full of sneezes from sick people and see which ones get sick and which do not.

    1320:

    Bill Arnold Don't know who you are replying to, but that study is very interesting. Would parallel my suspicion thaty C-19 was already "out" before we thought it was ... except that the immunity or partial immunity has come form somewhere else. Analagous to cow-pox injections protecting against small pox, in fact. Definitely needs more study & work done.

    1321:

    Sadly, that has already begun even before the normal school year starts.

    In my mind it will take bigger clumps. We are around the 15th largest school district in the US with 160K students. Which means a LOT of teachers and staff. Current plan (of the hour) is to do a 1/3 student cycling. 1/3 in class for a week then home for 2 weeks. And families can opt for at home only remote instruction. So far we're up to 10% or more with online only and a month yet to go before school starts. Typical high schools here have 2K students normally.

    In our district or one of similar size (Miami/Dade maybe), a school will have an outbreak and a dozen or few adults in the hospital and/or on vents with some dying then it will all hit the fan.

    Duke University is 20 miles from my house. They are somewhat big [sarcasm] in medical research with a world class hospital system. All kinds of people who work in the research groups are saying opening the schools is insane. Even those going somewhat insane with 1 to 5 kids at home just now. But unless it is absolutely needed Duke has staff working from home.

    And the current R Lt. Gov who is running against the current D Gov is on the record saying that face masks don't do any good. And has a lot of fans who agree. [big huge shaking sad face] Our state has rising rates of everything but is on the better side of bad. And the R's are all complaining he's done way too much to shut the state down. [repeat previous emjoi]

    1322:

    Apropos of nothing much, save possibly 2020's general crappiness, yesterday saw Twitter hacked for a Bitcoin scam, on the theory that if you offer something stupid to millions of people a few of them will be stupid. The take seems to be about US$61,000.

    Die in a fire, indeed.

    1323:

    To save you a click: In Arizona three teachers doing summer classes shared the same classroom while linking to remote classes. They took exceptional precautions, knowing one had a compromised immune system. All three caught Covid 19 and one has died (not the already compromised one). This was a best-case model with a small group, high precautions, and no children around.

    I read about that case. My suspicion is that they took "exceptional precautions" for a while then they got sloppy and were less careful and even less careful but the virus was always present and it got its chance.

    Front-line medical staff, trained up and with the best available protective equipment, supervised and monitored on their hygiene practices catch this disease although often they're in a much higher-risk environment. Expecting teachers and especially children to observe nitpicking hygiene precautions 100% of the time in their plague Mixmaster classrooms is rainbows and unicorns levels of thinking.

    In the "this is a fucking stupid idea but we need the peons back at work" competition Scotland now has an entry -- it turns out that a couple of farms here imported temporary workers from eastern Europe like the Hereford farm which now has 93 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (up twenty from yesterday). Some of the Scottish workers travelled to the UK on the same flight as the ones from Hereford. Oh frabjous day...

    It also turns out that three of the Hereford workers have absconded from the farm, breaking the quarantine. They've apparently been tracked and are supposedly in self-isolation. Supposedly.

    1324:

    OK, one of my strange trains of thoughts (as mentioned, I'm quite well, it's just, well, my brain is working well, I know a lot of stuff, and, well, I don't want to join Mensa, but I'd have no problem with the test, err, the thin line between healthy self-esteem and bragging. But I digress...)

    Diagnoses like schizophrenia, bipolar, ADHD and like are something like umbrella terms that encompass quite a range, we might go for narrower categories, but then, people talk about "inventing diseases".

    Wiki notes a seasonal pattern with hypomania, as a variant of SAD. Which would tie it to clock genes, melatonin and like.

    On the other hand, the advent of molecular biology showed at least some cases of "mania" are autoimmune in origin, in the sense of the immune system the brain.

    On another note, cytokines might be involved in some cases of mood disorders, AFAIR interferon has the side effect of "depression", look for "HPA axis".

    I somewhat wonder if there is an indirect effect of seasonality on mood, every spring I get a rash at my hands that's likely autoimmune or like in origin, it's somewhat to early for hayfever. No idea if there might be a similar effect of the immune system on other tissues, like the brain.

    OK, to go back to the topic, we know COVID-19 fucks up the immune system, short reminder we should prepare for unexpected consequences.

    1325:

    This was a best-case model with a small group, high precautions, and no children around.

    The problem was that this was in Arizona. Which currently is likely the worst state to live in if you don't want to catch Covid-19.

    What this does illustrate is that schools don't exist in isolation from the community around them. Kids AND STAFF go home every day and get exposed to the bubble as it exists or not in their home. And all it takes is one home to be a "this is a hoax we don't need to do anything" to wreak the lives of a teacher or all teachers and staff at a school.

    1326:

    @Trottelheimer "I don't want to join Mensa, but I'd have no problem with the test"

    The intelligence test for MENSA is coupled with a less well known wisdom test - you need to fail that in order to want to join...

    1327:

    In the "this is a fucking stupid idea but we need the peons back at work" competition Scotland now has an entry -- it turns out that a couple of farms here imported temporary workers from eastern Europe

    So, on the assumption that even the people on this forum like to eat, I don't think Scotland (or any of the other places like Ontario) can be called "stupid" for allowing the annual arrival of migrant workers to work the farms producing the food we all seem to like to eat.

    As has been noted a bit in the media (though most are ignoring because they really don't want to face the truth) much of our food - even locally produced - is done under work conditions and pay levels that almost everyone in the western world would find unacceptable. Those conditions are frequently designed to be ideal for Covid, so it isn't a surprise those workers are getting infected.

    1328:

    Expecting teachers and especially children to observe nitpicking hygiene precautions 100% of the time in their plague Mixmaster classrooms is rainbows and unicorns levels of thinking.

    This.

    I went into my school for 15 minutes to pick up materials when we started online learning in March. Mask, sign up for slots with staggered entry/exit times to minimize contact, etc. Felt safe enough.

    Went back in June to prepare classrooms for next year* and clear out three decades of personal possessions. Ended up going in three times to get everything done. Saw lots of people not wearing masks even though they were working beside each other. "It's too much trouble." "I only need to wear it in the hallways." "I take essential oils so I'm safe."

    And then there was the person wearing a mask but pulling it down to talk…

    Magical thinking indeed.

    And schools (at least here) have crappy ventilation. Here's a comment from a teacher:

    My room has no ventilation, no windows that open meaningfully and a narrow doorway. Even with only 1/2 of students there are only 8 lab stations that have room for 16 students to stand shoulder to shoulder. Lab activities are more of a scrimmage than anything else.

    While my school was 'fixed' a few years ago for most of my career the heating plant dated to the 1950's. To save money the board sealed all the windows and I was constantly sick. A custodian told me that they had been directed to seal all the fresh air intakes to save money. Back in the 1950's fuel was so cheap there was no heat exchanger. Rather than address this, they simply closed the fresh air intakes.

    How many schools in the province have done this? Seal up the schools improperly and recirculate the air? Maintenance staff move between multiple schools. Buses serve multiple schools and boards. Food delivery services also serve multiple schools.

    Stop thinking of a school as an orderly grid of heads down students. It is a food court at lunch hour.

    (Comments section of this article:)

    https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/2020/07/15/quadmesters-for-teens-masks-when-physical-distancing-not-possible-the-tdsb-presents-proposal-for-reopening-in-the-fall.html?__vfz=medium%3Dcomment_share%7Csharer_uuid%3D00000000-0000-4000-8000-04cf4148a02b#vf-ba4bf425-c595-475a-8968-aed296650f4f

    That sounds like my school. Most of the rooms I teach in have no windows. Ventilation is turned off overnight, centrally (by the school board buildings & ops) with no local override, to save money — which means fume hoods and chemical storage cabinets are also turned off. When we complain about poor ventilation they hold a tissue by the vent and say "it's moving, you have ventilation" rather than actually measuring air flows.

    And forget HEPA filters. We have screens that are so coarse we get birds nesting in the ventilation ducts**.

    Sorry, getting ranty again. But yeah, will bet that Ontario has an uptick in the fall if/when in-person classes resume…

    *Supposed to have one half-hour slot per teacher, but it took half a dozen in my department four hours one day just to put equipment away (clear indication admin has no idea what front-line workers do.)

    **Seriously. Designed without screens because apparently birds won't fly into a windy tunnel. When they started turning off ventilation at nigh and on weekends, well, birds could fly in the ducts. Came in one Monday morning to a pile of birdshit in the classroom, right underneath a vent — birds had built a nest over the weekend and started a family. There are some screens in parts of the system — 1" wire mesh.

    1329:

    FWIW, there was a game-shifter re masks in the US yesterday: CDC Editorial in the JAMA:

    Actually, there was 2.

    Your CDC story, and then in the midst virus cases (and presumably resulting hospitalizations) growing out of control the Georgia Governor banned all the local governments in Georgia from having mandatory face masks:

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-governor-brian-kemp-rescinds-mask-orders-across-state/

    Though the back of mind now wonders if this might be deliberate - with the poor non-whites taking the brunt of Covid maybe it is an attempt to kill them all off before they can vote in November.

    1330:

    "I take essential oils so I'm safe."

    Sigh. And to a large degree this was my mother. Double sigh.

    1331:

    admin has no idea what front-line workers do

    It has been eye opening for some of my clients. Now that the owners are the only ones in the office many days they are discovering just how much crap had to be done to keep things operating. Yes, opening the mail can take an hour or more if you want to deal with it and not toss it to a flunky.

    And also how many things they used to ask be done "because" that they realize don't do much of anything to move the business forward.

    1332:

    I made an earlier comment about my mother's manic/depressive issues which might have come off as down playing or making light of your situation.

    In no way did I mean such.

    You are aware and dealing with your issues. My mother lived 70+ years in 100% denial. For the last 10 years only 80% denial. It made life with her tough to say the least.

    All the best.

    1333:

    mdive And certain people now want "natives" i.e. actual British peple to compete for these peon-level jobs, now we've got rid of all the nasty immigrants ... yes. Yup, it's Trump levels of arrogant stupidity. Along with BoZo's fit of petty spite in firing an experienced tory MP, because he displaced failing Grayling ... The reaction is ... inbteresting.

    Your piece on the Guv of Georgia is frightening. They really cannot seem to understand that some problems ARE NOT POLITICAL - they are technical - completely mind-blind ( AS well as stupid )

    trottelreiner Re. "Mensa" & "Intelligence" & socialisation. A quote: "Great wits are to madness, close allied And thin partitions do their bounds divide"

    1334:

    "As has been noted a bit in the media (though most are ignoring because they really don't want to face the truth) much of our food - even locally produced - is done under work conditions and pay levels that almost everyone in the western world would find unacceptable. Those conditions are frequently designed to be ideal for Covid, so it isn't a surprise those workers are getting infected."

    It was also noted by Marx. Since his time the conditions of most of the workers he wrote about have improved enormously. But for agricultural workers, especially seasonal/migrant temporary ones, there has been far less improvement. Unions are a lot more useful in factories and the like where everyone is physically together than they are for scattered handfuls of migrants living in sheds.

    1335:

    A recent quote from Trevor Noah, 'You might be bored with the virus, but the virus is not bored with you' and 'A virus has no politics. It is the ultimate bipartisan thing.'

    1336:

    Re: '... about how the mask deactivates virus particles.'

    Guessing that only that org and their patent attorney know what the magic sauce is. If they do go to clinical trials, they'll have to identify the specific active molecule(s). (Only after they've submitted paperwork to the Patent Office, of course.)

    1337:

    Re: 'But you need a mix of people with the same exposure risk and see how many get sick compared to other masks.'

    Just do a test and control across a sufficiently wide range of well defined sub-samples*, geographic regions and major urban areas, ideally in several countries and on different continents.

    • Aside from the classic age, gender, pre-existing medical conditions, blood type and antibody profile, etc. they could also balance their samples based on whatever the most current data show as being relevant re: COVID-19 risk. This might include living in an old folks homes, working in open concept office spaces or crowded factories, living in high density condos/apts, school teachers, etc.
    1338:

    Re: Mensa

    Guess they wouldn't accept Feynman. Their loss.

    1339:

    Re: 'But yeah, will bet that Ontario has an uptick in the fall if/when in-person classes resume…'

    Recently read that Ford is pushing for the gov't to get involved in old folks homes - basically taking over from the for-profits. If this is so, esp. considering how he's also no longer a DT fan, I'm guessing that he might be persuaded to address student health & safety.

    I'm familiar with the teaching/research hosps in Toronto including HSC, surely they can come up with a safety checklist for students and school buildings.

    1340:

    There will be stories, even on Faux, about why the price of fruits and vegetables are going up, and eventually....

    Alternatively, robots.

    Meanwhile, people will flee from permanent water shortages and dreadfully high temps.

    1341:

    My comment on the club mailing list, last night:

    People... conduct... financial... transactions...on TWITTER?!?!?!?!?!

    Every one who does: needs to be institutionalized. 1. Depending on the age of their computer, they need to turn it off, and either ship it back, or junk it, because THEY'RE TOO STUPID TO OWN A COMPUTER. 2. They need to give someone else in the family complete control over their credit and debit cards. 3. THEY NEED TO FUCKING BE INSTITUTIONALIZED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Do. Not. Tell. Me. "convenient".....

    1342:

    They're individual groups, I think per city, and they vary. The folks my late wife and I met in Austin, at a yard sale, were fun, while a group around Philly that a friend was in for a while (back in the seventies) was, they said, a lot of people walking around "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

    But why join MENSA, when you can [fnord] be a member of the Illuminati?

    1343:

    Just do a test and control across a sufficiently wide range of well defined sub-samples*, geographic regions and major urban areas, ideally in several countries and on different continents.

    Anytime something starts with "Just..." watch out.

    There's a reason that the phase 3 vaccine trials use 30K people. And cost $millions. That was my point.

    Side note my daughter works for a company that organizes and runs such trials. It takes a lot of people and paperwork (computer bits) to do it right. A freaking lot.

    1344:

    No big deal. They'll sell it as long as they can, maybe for years, with the words "patent pending".

    1345:

    Greg, get your attributions right for fucks sake.

    John Hughes Emergency medicine is a service they are required to provide, but no one is required to reimburse them for it to the level that they spend, IIRC. That's a more fundamental problem than universal health care. No, it bloody is not. Complete bollocks.

    The part you put in italics was a quote of what Heteromeles said, not what I wrote.

    And you have completely misunderstood what he (and I) were saying, which was about how American health care (doesn't) work.

    Learn to read before going around shouting about "complete bollocks".

    1346:

    I'm familiar with the teaching/research hosps in Toronto including HSC, surely they can come up with a safety checklist for students and school buildings.

    Money.

    Remember, this is a government that has been trying to cut education funding and jobs. To nearly double the budget — well, if they do then I made the wrong decision in retiring. And they will need to increase the number of teachers substantially to provide full-time school safely (which is what the right-wing press is pushing).

    Also, compliance.

    Unless the checklist is actually followed it won't work. And unless there are serious consequences for not following it there are those who will not, whether from ignorance or ideology.

    1347:

    Re: '... I have a problem with filtering, and when describing the past, my memories are quite vivid; I hope my therapist won't conclude I'm manic at the moment when doing an infodump.'

    Hopefully your therapist will be able to keep up with your infodump. (They don't take notes by hand these days, do they?)

    1348:

    SFR It does seem that UV light actually is a "magic sauce" for killing-off the bug. But has to be carefully controlled, to prevent eye damage, I suppose.

    David L The other word to watch out for is: "Simply" Frequently used by fuckwits w.r.t driverless trains, oh dear.

    John H oops - my bad - with the attribution(s), at any rate. But, nonethelss, USA "healthcare" is a non-existent thing, from the p.o.v. of someone from this side of the pond.

    1349:

    So, on the assumption that even the people on this forum like to eat, I don't think Scotland (or any of the other places like Ontario) can be called "stupid" for allowing the annual arrival of migrant workers to work the farms producing the food we all seem to like to eat.

    I don't have a problem with visa workers coming in to do seasonal jobs like harvesting crops, it's the stupidity of having them arrive in the UK and then immediately go to work while staying lumped together in crowded conditions with no attempt to prevent cross-infection with PPE that I object to. I predicted this exact situation months ago, it was begging to happen given the infection rate of COVID-19 and what we've seen reported of outbreaks in other gastarbeiter dormitories in places like Singapore.

    If the agricultural workers had arrived in the UK and been put into a tightly supervised individual quarantine for at least two weeks (no visiting their mates down the hotel corridor in the evening, no going out for a curry and a pint or popping round to the shops etc.) then okay, but that was never going to happen because it would have cost money and put up prices at the supermarket.

    1350:

    "fuckwits w.r.t driverless trains"

    Well, it's one of those 90% things. Getting 90% of the way there is very easy, as we see with the Victoria Line that's been "driven" with just the any key for 50 years, and then the more recent DLR not even needing that - most of the time. It's naively obvious to assume that all you need to do is take something we've got already, tart it up a bit and bolt it on to everything; it's too easy to overlook that "tart it up a bit" actually means "sort out all that remaining 10% which is extremely hard". Indeed, bits of it are probably harder than all previous railway technology combined.

    1351:

    Recently read that Ford is pushing for the gov't to get involved in old folks homes - basically taking over from the for-profits. If this is so, esp. considering how he's also no longer a DT fan, I'm guessing that he might be persuaded to address student health & safety.

    The long term care home issue is Ford trying to get ahead of the scandal - while noted before the conditions to create what happened aren't new, and there is blame for both the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals, the recent reports are that Ford dismantled some of the little checks that remained like the unannounced yearly inspections - they were "too onerous on the operators" - in his short time in office. So either he or someone in his office is looking forward to the investigation to come and working out the spin ahead of time.

    As for education, I have my doubts - ever since Mike Harris the teachers have been public enemy number one for many in the PC party. The biggest problem for the PC's is that despite their hatred the teachers and public education in general have solid public support - and I suspect that will have gone up with parents discovering the jobs of trying to teach their kids for the brief amount of virtual school that has been offered so far.

    But that brings up a big difference - unlike DT when Ford had a disastrous first year in power his polling numbers sank like a rock - they were so bad he effectively attempted a reboot.

    So while I won't hold out for great improvements, he does listen to polling and (perhaps more importantly) enough of the voters in Ontario are willing to express their displeasure when he does things they don't like.

    1352:

    About reopening schools... https://www.wfla.com/community/health/coronavirus/31-of-coronavirus-tests-in-florida-children-are-positive-data-shows/

    Yes, that does say 31% of all children tested in FL test positive for the virus.

    1353:

    Yes, that does say 31% of all children tested in FL test positive for the virus.

    But that mountain sized caveat is the "of children tested".

    Trying to take that 31% and apply it to the entire population of kids is going to be just slightly problematic given how little testing is being done, thus only those who might have Covid are likely even being tested.

    1354:

    Given the huge number of covidiots in FL, on the beaches, in the stores, with no masks....

    Kids will start dying before Nov.

    1355:

    Given the huge number of covidiots in FL, on the beaches, in the stores, with no masks....

    Kids will start dying before Nov.

    No argument (and in fact if one looks at the chart in the news article you linked to there are already 4 deaths in the under 18s).

    1356:

    Pigeon Indeed, bits of it are probably harder than all previous railway technology combined. Correct & the other bit as well - VERY expensive...

    And I note that the Trumpolini has sacked/demoted his campaign manager, in desperation ( One hopes)

    1357:

    What, because the polls are showing Biden with an 11-to-15% lead nationally?

    Or because voters registered or leaning GOP have gone from 47-44 to 39-51 (Dem)?

    1358:

    And I note that the Trumpolini has sacked/demoted his campaign manager, in desperation ( One hopes)

    Is it desperation - yes.

    But the danger is that despite the mess the US is in somehow a new competent campaign manager some how turns Trump's polling numbers around...

    1359:

    And certain people now want "natives" i.e. actual British people to compete for these peon-level jobs

    In a market economy what would happen is that the wage offered for those jobs would rise until they were filled.

    But luckily the UK has strong laws to prevent that nasty capitalist stuff interfering with their business-friendly operating environment.

    1360:

    You may find this article of interest:

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/10/elissa-slotkin-congress-trump-351513

    TLDR: Trump voters are undercounted by polls.

    1361:

    So some researchers apparently believe Covid only requires 20% for herd immunity, and that the UK may have already reached that and so may be safe.

    Not peer reviewed, and seems questionable to me, but some will latch onto it as an excuse to end protections.

    And a King's College preprint (already discussed on here??) indicates immunity may only last months

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-herd-immunity-second-wave-oxford-study-boris-johnson-a9623791.html

    And an article at The Atlantic on herd immunity https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/herd-immunity-coronavirus/614035/

    1362:

    the UK may have already reached that and so may be safe

    Literally magic!

    We can tell that this is true because the number of new cases in the UK continues to rise but the death rate has plummeted to near-zero.

    Oh, wait, in reality only the first part of that is true. Ooops. Not magic after all 😧

    1364:

    White House taking over Covid data directly, data no longer allowed to be submitted to the CDC.

    Indirect threat, those who don't comply may not get supplied with Remdesivir

    So solution to Covid is apparently to remove the data from public access. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/trump-admin-undercuts-cdc-seizes-control-of-national-covid-19-data/

    1365:

    Kids will start dying before Nov.

    Well, when you have the VP saying:

    "To be very clear, we don't want CDC guidance to be a reason why people don't reopen their schools,"

    dying kids would seem to be part of the plan.

    https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/vp-pence-says-schools-should-open-as-louisiana-schools-plan-delays/289-bd6818de-4836-4b33-b5f4-575ccae2baa8

    1366:

    Just saw the interview on Rahcel Maddow with Mary Trump. Two questions stood out: the first was, "why now, and not 2016?", and her answer was that then, she had been out of the family for like 20 years, and she was a disgruntled, disinherited relative, and no one would pay attention. Now... it's different, and critical.

    The second was, "Are you afraid?" She said, she's taking precautions, and yes, he's vindictive, but it was her responsibility.

    Oh, and she said if he's reelected, it will be the end of the American experiment.

    Charlie, sorry this is so much about the US, but....

    1367:

    TLDR: Trump voters are undercounted by polls.

    Perhaps.

    What the article says is that 1 pollster admitted/claimed they undercounted Trump voters in 2016.

    But we aren't in 2016 - the polling companies evaluate their performance after elections and make adjustments.

    Which isn't to say we can call the election now, and the DNC needs to get the vote out.

    But Trump is panicking not just because of polls, but because his rally was a flop and other signs that he is in trouble - including polling showing Trump voters switching to Biden.

    1369:

    Isn't the point of a "well armed militia" exactly so that "feds" doing that sort of thing get shot and killed?

    Or have I misunderstood the relationship?

    1370:

    It gets more fun: GOP officials are telling the Hairball to back off on the mail vote fraud... because he's scaring GOP voters, who may not vote if they can't get to the polls.

    1371:

    Indirect threat, those who don't comply may not get supplied with Remdesivir

    I may be wrong, but I think they're selling remdesivir now, for around $3000/course of therapy. So basically it's expensive tamiflu for Covid19.

    I'm mildly sarcastic about this, because remdesivir basically shortens your stay in the hospital if it's a suitable treatment for you. Maybe good, maybe bad, but not a cure.

    1372:

    But we aren't in 2016 - the polling companies evaluate their performance after elections and make adjustments.

    I read an analysis of this a while back. Basically the point made was that all of those close Trump state wins were where he was polling behind but it was close. Within the margin of error. And he basically drew to an inside straight and won the hand by winning enough of those states to win the election.

    Filling out an inside straight is not impossible, just improbable.

    1373:

    Saw the comet tonight. But I'm not comatose yet for some reason.

    1374:

    Saw the comet tonight. But I'm not comatose yet

    I can't digest comatose, it gives me wind.

    1375:

    “Polls”, whilst once upon a time polls and polling companies might have been trying to capture the voting intention of a nation, now they are simply another SC element.

    “Strategic Communications”, attempting & succeeded to sway the outcome of an election by including any form of bias that the controllers can get away with, whilst combined with docile controlled media, and pervasive social analytics.

    Examples of this, other than the USA of today, now,(1) include “Operation Volute” where from 2012 polling companies in US were suborned to undermine , well, you know - war is $$$$.

    Enjoy the voting, it’s supposed to be one vote per person, not millions for a powerful grouping(2)

    (1) ...and that minor kerfuffle in UK when ‘someone’ stole an entire lorry/truckload of blank votes in the constituency of the UK’s interior minister - on the eve of an election, culprit was never found... (2) we can do anything group: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/eu-court-again-rules-nsa-spying-makes-us-companies-inadequate-privacy

    1376:

    People... conduct... financial... transactions...on TWITTER?!?!?!?!?!

    ... THEY'RE TOO STUPID TO OWN A COMPUTER.

    I'm not arguing.

    What part of financial transactions via Twitter using Bitcoin sounds good to anyone? Yet apparently this is a thing. eyeroll

    1377:

    mdive @ 1364 That is straight out of Putin's playbook - what a surprise. - @ 1365 That level of stupidity is terrifying

    @ 1367 BUT - the pollsters did not undercount DT voters in 2016 - Hilary WON by 3 million votes, after all ... They were not watching the Electoral College.

    dark blue Ah the Freikorps, called in by the government ... Scary

    1378:

    Um I just read that article in full IF DT & (?)BArr(?) get away with it, that's it.] A throughly rigged fake election in November & an openly fascist dictatorship. What can "congress" do?

    Here, of course, in true mini-me fashion ( Thank you, Charlie ) BoZo is having hissy-fits of public spite, pointing in all directions at once & sacking a previously loyal tory MP, who could not stomach BoZo's incompetent stooge, Grayling

    1379:

    I just read that article in full IF DT & (?)BArr(?) get away with it, that's it.

    The article about unidentified masked armed people grabbing citizens off the street and making them disappear? Yeah, that's very bad. That's something from a Central American dictatorship or the bad days of East Germany, and hard to reconcile with even the pretense of being a functional nation.

    I may not have mentioned it recently but I'm in Portland. That park with the demonstrations and attacks on protesters is two miles from my home. I don't feel happy or safe these days.

    1380:

    The current era has been so stressful that when I read of a Navy ship on fire I felt perverse relief that finally there was a normal tragedy that just happened rather than being intentionally caused by stupidity, greed, or explicit evil.

    1381:
    John H oops - my bad - with the attribution(s), at any rate.

    Thank you for that (partial) apology.

    But, nonethelss, USA "healthcare" is a non-existent thing, from the p.o.v. of someone from this side of the pond.

    And there you go again.

    Yes, that's exactly what H. and I were saying, that you somehow were unable to understand. One of the (many) terrible things that's wrong with the American health care system is that it actually does have parts that are "free at the point of delivery", due to a law passed by Ronald Reagan. But those services are completely unfunded. Hospitals are required to provide emergency treatment for free and fund it themselves. Which is why some doctors, nurses &c are being forced to accept pay cuts due to the pandemic -- their hospitals are losing money because they can't do "elective" surgery which they charge for.

    Yes, this system is insane.

    1382:

    One "swiss cheese hole" aspect of this Twitter hack is that the hackers were wanting to be paid in Bitcoin -- it's difficult to trace the recipients and just about impossible to stop or reverse the transfers. The hack was aimed at gullible people who think Bitcoin is a good idea and even better said gullible idiots have a thousand bucks or more of Bitcoin already in their possession that they can send to the hackers with the press of a few keys. A profitable Perfect Storm of stupidity.

    Deciding on how much to ask for in this hack was a work of genius -- asking for, say, a hundred bucks and assuming they get a thousand suckers to bite only gets them 100,000 dollars. Asking for a thousand, they seem to have got about 500 suckers to pony up. I wonder if they ran min-max simulations to find the sweet spot? They could probably determine from public blockchains roughly what the average Bitcoin holding is and use that to refine their pitch.

    1383:

    Back 20 years ago or so there was a scam called phone bill slamming in the US. It was where 3rd parties could add a charge to your bill and the phone company had no real say so. (A consumer protection thing gone badly wrong.)

    So the "fake" but legally organized companies with a few layers of off shore would set up in a state, send official documents to the a phone company about adding a monthly charge for "Security Phone Monitoring" or similar for $9.99. And most people paid it. Disputing it took hours as the scammers had all kinds of documents backing up the charge and you had to write out notarized letters saying they were wrong. All to a phone company billing department that might be a time zone away. Took a year or so for the laws to be re-written so the phone companies got to stop being the collection agent for organized crime.

    1384:
    In no way did I mean such.

    Err, I didn't notice it and wouldn't take it as such. I already mentioned in another thread I consider myself something of a hypochondriac, but one of the reasons females live longer than males in our species is because males ignore illness symptoms.

    I guess sometimes the problem is I am aware of the issues and quite open about them, but then, nobody knowing what's going on doesn't help either.

    Around 12 years ago I had pain in one ear, I ignored it, and only when my head was visible tilting towards one side because I guess it somewhat affected my sense of balance did I visit a doctor; result, otitis media.

    A few month later I also had pain in one ear, I visited him again, no hint of inflammation, might be psychosomatic, might have been pain memory or like, neural pain perception is complicated. But at least I took care of it.

    One job option at the moment is becoming a biology teacher, I guess me getting a little bit to hyper in May and not realizing it wouldn't be that great since pupils would be overwhelmed. Err, for those horrified at the thought of me in front of a class, I'm more sane than quite a few of my teachers, and my memories of the aspiring teachers from university, err, I guess I'll tell you some stories about my less sane RPG group, the one with Cyberpunk (game is out soon) and Kult...

    1385:

    H: Saw the comet tonight. But I'm not comatose yet

    M: I can't digest comatose, it gives me wind.

    I have been so busy that I haven't even looked up to try to see the comet, so my eyesight is unaffected and those troublesome plants with the whippy stinging things haven't bothered me either.

    1386:

    The "well regulated militia" was the original version of the U.S. Army, and could be expected to be called up in the event of an invasion, a war, or a slave insurrection.

    The current version of "militiamen" seems to be a sort of anti-government, paranoid, usually right-wing (but not always) gun club, without good leadership, proper drill, or anyone in charge of logistics. If the feds keep showing up, unasked for, in Democrat-Run states I may purchase my first gun and join a group.

    1387:

    The major media (Washington Post, USA Today) have picked up the Oregon arrests story so it may be interesting to see what develops with the spotlight on this behaviour.

    Also to watch in the coming couple of weeks, the US federal $600/week covid benefit ends next week. https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1284098708754378760

    Given the number of households struggling to pay rent, and the GOP refusal to extend benefits, things could get ugly quickly. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/08/32-percent-of-us-households-missed-their-july-housing-payments.html

    1388:

    GOP refusal to extend benefits

    Nope. It's all about terms. And total $. Deal will be done. Neither side (I'm excluding the Trump here) wants to get to Nov as the bad guy on this.

    1389:

    One "swiss cheese hole" aspect of this Twitter hack is that the hackers were wanting to be paid in Bitcoin -- it's difficult to trace the recipients and just about impossible to stop or reverse the transfers. You're assuming that the motive is to acquire a few hundred K $ of bitcoin. There are other ways to monetize this sort of event , with much larger payoff(s). Also, the motive might not be financial. Also, we don't know yet for sure that this wasn't to e.g. disguise some other activity on twitter. (Trump moves markets with single tweets, and so do some others.) Etc.

    1390:

    I can't digest comatose, it gives me wind.

    Not surprising. Comatose has a really slow release rate. Mostly it just passes on its own.

    1391:

    The major media (Washington Post, USA Today) have picked up the Oregon arrests story so it may be interesting to see what develops with the spotlight on this behaviour. Municipalities and States will need to work out how to react to these provocations by DHS presumably under orders from D.J. Trump. They're trying to provoke violent reactions, and if it works, the tactic can be repeated in other cities and DJT can run on Law and Order in November, with the hope that people do not pay attention to the enormous and ongoing COVID-19 body count (947 yesterday). Maybe they have ambitions of Facist takeover; Chad Wolf, "acting Secretary of Homeland Security", is a RW Believer quite clearly. They're been calling the Portland Oregon protesters "violent anarchists". This is a dishonest play on the ignorance of Americans, who do not generally know that the US code classifies property damage and threats of property damage as violence. [1] Most of the violence against persons has been by the police. (And Portland PD has a deserved reputation.) The pushback against this development is young; lots of people trying to nudge it in a few directions.

    [1] 18 U.S. Code § 16. Crime of violence defined Hm. The threat of a bad movie or book review is violence using (physical) electrons against intellectual property, yes?

    1392:

    Yes, that's exactly what H. and I were saying, that you somehow were unable to understand. One of the (many) terrible things that's wrong with the American health care system is that it actually does have parts that are "free at the point of delivery", due to a law passed by Ronald Reagan. But those services are completely unfunded. Hospitals are required to provide emergency treatment for free and fund it themselves. Which is why some doctors, nurses &c are being forced to accept pay cuts due to the pandemic -- their hospitals are losing money because they can't do "elective" surgery which they charge for.

    They're not required to provide it for free, and a trip to the emergency room can be effing expensive, starting with the ambulance ride.

    The problem is that the emergency department doesn't make money. If they treat someone who can't pay (homeless, for example), they eat the cost of the emergency room visit.

    Elective surgery is the other way around, since it's pretty predictable. You know when the patient's coming in, they're prepped for the surgery, the insurance has already signed off (or they're paying on their own), and so it's easy to make some money on this.

    The problem with Covid19 is that it shut off the elective surgery and post-op care (which also makes money) and transferred all qualified personnel to dealing with an emergency situation, where you don't know what they need, you don't know how long the patients are in for, and so forth. Plus you can start losing personnel to the disease if you're not careful. If the hospital's budget is balanced on doing so many elective surgeries per week to stay solvent, they start hemorrhaging money when dealing with a pandemic.

    There are multiple levels of insanity in the US medical system. One of the big ones is that, with private insurance, you're in the perverse situation where a patient gets a treatment (as in the ER) and only then does the cost of treatment get negotiated between the hospital and whoever's paying for it. Since they're are many possible entities paying, there are all sorts of different processes to get tangled in, especially if the person is partially covered by a government program, partially by private insurance, and partially out of pocket.

    Then there's the cost of liability. I do think we need to be able to litigate, but there are perverse problems that make some fields (like ob-gyn) so litigious that it's hard to get doctors to go into them (if a new baby isn't perfect, an ob-gyn may get sued). This also drives up doctor's costs because they have to do tests to satisfy the lawyers as well as the science. There's no easy way out of this, because litigating has become too reflexive in our society.

    Then there's the cost of drugs. Certainly it costs a lot to develop drugs, but a rather large fraction of that cost in the US is advertising the drug, thanks to an unfortunate Supreme Court ruling that said that such advertising couldn't be banned. There are also less honest ways of pushing drugs, as the makers of synthetic opioids found. The penalties for suborning doctors to over-prescribe those drugs were so low that they got treated as a cost of doing business.

    The advantage of single-payer healthcare is that it cuts out the negotiation step: people pay for insurance as part of their taxes, and the government and the providers settle what that covers and how much it will cost. Whether it covers all possible procedures or not is something to be negotiated. There are two major reasons we don't have it at this point (IMHO). One is that there are too many rich insurance execs and shareholders who are profiting from the status quo and have the political muscle to keep it this way. The other is that the best-known examples of US government insurance (medicare and the Veteran's Administration) have their share of scandals and bureaucratic headaches (the VA rather more than Medicare). Plus they're governed by Washington, which hasn't generated much confidence recently.

    1393:

    John Hughes But ... from your description, that is functionally equivalent to simply not having any healthcare - certainly in the long term. I think we are arguing of defintions, whilst agreeing on functionality, or the lack of it? However see Heteromeles @ 1392

    Bill Arnold So ... if they can continue to get away with this, they can close down all the D-run states/cities/areas, then run a rigged-but-justabout-legal "election" & Nehemiah ScudderPence succedds TRump in due course. HOW can the D's states & others resist this, since it appears to be justabout-legal?

    Are other papers & news websites reporting on this?

    1394:

    Twenty-four years ago, there was one, back when some of us were wearing pagers. You'd get a page, and call back, and they'd claim to be some family member, and keep talking to keep you on as long as possible.

    The number was the Caribbean equivalent of a 900 number (you pay as you talk). I, being on the 'Net, had seen warnings on usenet, and posted a warning over the network printer at work.

    Within a week, several folks I worked with many H1-Bs, came to me to thank me for the warning, they'd gotten those pages, and did not call back.

    1395:

    It is about their refusal. McConnel's already thrown out a poison pill - that schools will reopen in the fall.

    I do not expect it by the end of the month. Paul Krugman is looking at economic disaster for millions within a month.

    They may pass it, after folks start being evicted, etc.

    1396:

    Re: 'Also, the motive might not be financial. Also, we don't know yet for sure that this wasn't to e.g. disguise some other activity on twitter.'

    Biggest surprise was that DT's account hadn't been hacked as well. The official story is that he's got some additional protections. I'm thinking either of two alternate possibilities:

    a- Someone turned off and hid his phone during the whatever critical time that the perpetrator was trying to 'hack' it.

    b- His name would have been a dead giveaway that this was a scam.

    Still, this is upsetting. Social networks need to be made and held accountable for safeguarding their customers' security. Just like we demand this from auto manufacturers for physical injury and damage because autos operate in the physical realm, we should demand safeguards against 'social' injury and damage from social goods/services providers.

    1397:

    "Biggest surprise was that DT's account hadn't been hacked as well."

    If they're just scammers out to make a quick buck, having Twitler promise to give money away would sound deeply suspect to even the densest potential victim.

    1398:

    And the reminder that this November will have long reaching consequences, Justice Ginsburg has cancer again and is undergoing chemotherapy.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53451208

    1399:

    There's a number of issues. For one, hospitals were starting to lose the elective surgeries to outpatient surge centers. Both of my knees were partially replaced that way (I'm coming out of anesthesia and they're getting me up on crutches). For another, they were charging so much per room night that stays were made shorter, though massive improvements in how we do surgery pushed that, too.

    Liability... a lot of that is the insurance companies. I've read 10% (or was it less?) of the doctors are responsible for 90% of the insurance payouts... and it's the same people in that 10%. But they won't dump them, they'll charge everyone more.

    Finally...prescription drug advertising. Nope: in '97, the FDA "relaxed" its rules, and that's when serious money suddenly went to end-user advertising.

    That. Needs. To. End.

    1400:

    Re: 'So solution to Covid is apparently to remove the data from public access.'

    Not sure how this can be done. My understanding is that a lot of CDC (and NIH) data come from outside the CDC (NIH). The CDC is primarily a central organizing/admin body that also happens to do some basic research. Since any of the other bodies that have copies of these data can allow public access on demand, there's no point to this exercise apart from scoring headlines on some rags. The sane, responsible media would then explain how the public can continue to access such data. Maybe interview some popular scientists/science spokespeople to provide examples. (At least I hope this is how it works.)

    This is like the EPA who fortunately were able to save their data in more than one 'location'.

    1401:

    My understanding is that El Cheeto's Twitter account is such an obvious target that it has special, additional protections. Unlike, say, Bill Gate's account, which is normal.

    1402:

    The solution to any problem is to make the problem hard to understand.

    Actually, this is straight out of fairy tales: the god king or powerful evil sorcerer whose word becomes reality. An astute and cynical version of the stories might be that there's not magic, but it is an important (if metaphorical) lesson about how unscrupulous, power hungry people force their narrative on those who can't escape them. Peasants need to learn that lesson or suffer from naively taking the word of the powerful for truth.

    On a more prosaic level, this isn't anything that El Cheeto and many other rich people haven't been doing for many, many years, sad to say.

    1403:

    Re: '... having Twitler promise to give money away would sound deeply suspect to even the densest potential victim.'

    Read somewhere that some folks took the bait. Problem is that while we were told the names of the celebrity folks whose accounts were hacked in one story, the victims may not have been following more than one of these celebrity's accounts. And if those celebrities had ever made a pitch for their followers to donate to some cause or ever mentioned liking a particular tech/manufacturer, some of their followers might have felt that that particular tweet was a good enough endorsement for them.

    If I had seen such a tweet I would have wondered if that celebrity had gone nuts -- mostly because that's a damned stupid thing to say on such media plus I don't have a favorable opinion of BitCoin.

    1404:

    if they can continue to get away with this, they can close down all the D-run states/cities/areas, ... That appears to be the intent, though appearances could be deliberate. This is one tine of a fork full of attacks, probably.

    Individuals in camouflage who refuse to identify themselves - to normalize the idea of RW death squads in the US - to provoke violence against persons to justify similar deployments in other cities with protests. The anarchists in the pacific northwest are quite active and the RW people like Wolf believe that they're easily triggered. Maybe they're right. With discipline, they can be proven wrong. - to try to provoke an aggressive response by local authorities whos' power is being usurped by DHS. - to encourage the idea of armed (right wing) civilians doing law enforcement, sort of death-squads-light. (There is DHS initiative that's close to this already.)

    Then come election time, some sort of interference by DHS in some urban US elections.

    Right now, it's probing by DHS and the DJT administration. Probing for reactions, mapping them out. (They are in for some big surprises, and their information feeds are so polluted with misinformation that they believe, that they will make a lot of mistakes.)

    1405:

    Apropos of nothing:

    The Singularity has apparently arrived in the US...The Conspiracy Singularity, that is (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gz53/the-conspiracy-singularity-has-arrived). Apparently there's no pandemic, this is just a major push by the satanic deep state to take over the world, with El Cheeto Grande valiantly leading the forces of White against the Darkness. And the New World Order will force everyone to be vaccinated. Or something.

    Remember when conspiracy theories were fun, things like Illuminatus card games? It's not so fun any more.

    1406:

    The number was the Caribbean equivalent of a 900 number (you pay as you talk)

    Ah yes. A lot of the Caribbean is a part of the North American numbering plan So they look like a phone number in the US or Canada. But are not. At all. For a while when people thought security meant a password an all set to the same, there was malware that would check to see if your modem was one that was known to it then call one of those Caribbean number at 2 am for 2 hours. Each night until you got the bill and thew a fit.

    1407:

    Moderators:

    1403 & 1407?

    Fixed

    1408:

    The purpose of the well regulated militia was to keep the labor incarcerated and getting the Native Americans off their own lands.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/arizona-doctors-say-gov-doug-ducey-steered-state-into-covid-19-surge?ref=home

    "[....]Several of the half-dozen doctors who spoke to The Daily Beast characterized these next few weeks as a “tipping point” for Arizona, where things could go from under control to completely out of their hands.

    “It doesn’t seem like there’s any end in sight,” DeLuca said. “But not necessarily because of the rhythm of the disease, but because of our government’s response to it.”

    One ICU physician in Tucson, who asked not to be named for fear of employer retaliation, said the official numbers actually underplayed the severity of the crisis. When hospitals reported that 90 percent of their ICU beds and half of their ventilators were in use, the physician said, those numbers included the extra beds and machines they’d brought in for the pandemic. If those percentages ever reached 100, there would be no feasible way for the hospital to scale up.

    “If you were going by our pre-COVID capacity, we would be actually operating at 120 percent of capacity,” the physician said, adding that the hospital to scale up. [....]" ]

    The need to continue scale up is truly concerning, because most other states are at that point too. At least at one point friendly states were loaning equipment and personnel to NYC, if it was necessary. But almost all the states are getting to this situation and the people are all worn out, supplies are running out. The very few states where this isn't happening, like North Dakota, don't have the scale to loan in any meaningful manner any of this. And our part of the world is hanging on for dear life trying to prepare for the huge surge that is coming to us due to the outsiders running from most of the other states and theirs and the Young's behavior.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Like Arizona's, Georgia's situation is tragic and heartbreaking:

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/georgia-gov-brian-kemps-mask-assault-stokes-coronavirus-despair-in-atlanta?

    [ "[....]“The problem here has been at every step of the way, the administrations in charge in a lot of the places that are suffering have not just failed to act, but have actively made the situation worse,” Sirkin told The Daily Beast. “So, it’s not that they did nothing. They did worse than nothing. They actively contributed to making the situation worse. And that’s what Kemp is doing here.”[....]" ]

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    But never fear -- those responsible have total immunity -- not to the virus, presumably? but to prosecution.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/world/coronavirus-updates.html?

    [ "Sound Alarm After U.S. Daily Record of 75,600 New Cases

    The number of deaths in the country is increasing, and more than half the states have enacted mask orders. Brazil surpasses 2 million total cases, and India has hit a million.

    RIGHT NOW Senate Republicans plan to propose sweeping liability protections for businesses, schools, hospitals, charities, government agencies and front-line medical workers as a centerpiece of the next round of coronavirus relief.

    The number of daily cases has more than doubled since June 24, when the country registered 37,014 cases after a lull in the outbreak had kept the previous record, 36,738, standing for two months. Daily virus fatalities had decreased slightly until last week, when they began rising again. Four states — Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Texas — set single-day case records on Thursday. And three states set single-day death records on Thursday — Florida, South Carolina and Texas — with Florida and Texas alone combining for more than 300.

    Seven others reached death records this week: Alabama, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Utah. Many of the states that reopened early are the ones seeing the biggest increases, while New York, the country’s hardest-hit city, has seen a 64 percent drop since June 1. [...." ]

    1409:

    Justice Ginsburg has cancer again and is undergoing chemotherapy

    My morbid thought this afternoon was that she has left instructions with her Medical POA folks that if DT loses they are not to take her off life support until after the swearing in of Biden.

    1411:

    FYI, for those who don't understand why southern governors particularly, such as him of Georgia, and the governors of states like AZ are deliberately making things worse and keeping science out it -- IT IS POLITICAL and political to the max. They are trying to kill as many black voters as possible as well latinos and Native Americans. It genocide and voter suppression via disease.

    Kemp knows very well that black voters in Atlanta are a huge threat to him keeping his seat now, just for a single instance.

    1412:

    Scott Sanford @ 1322: Apropos of nothing much, save possibly 2020's general crappiness, yesterday saw Twitter hacked for a Bitcoin scam, on the theory that if you offer something stupid to millions of people a few of them will be stupid. The take seems to be about US$61,000.

    Die in a fire, indeed.

    As far as I could tell from reading the various accounts, the only accounts that got "hacked" were those of Democrats or other people on Trumpolini's shit list.

    1413:

    "FYI, for those who don't understand why southern governors particularly, such as him of Georgia, and the governors of states like AZ are deliberately making things worse and keeping science out it"

    Actually, there are simpler and more plausible theories: Georgia has a tax limit in their state consitution, and the govenor was quite instrumental getting it there.

    He simply had to reopen the state, before the unemployment payments made the state insolvent, simple as that.

    That said, he's probably not going to die from sorrow seeing the many poor and black citizens in his state end up in an early grave.

    1414:

    A bit superficial, but article talking about kids and Covid based on interview with the Head of Infectious Diseases at Hospitial for Sick Children in Toronto.

    Key point - he fully supports reopening schools in September and kids returning to class.

    https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/07/17/questions-about-covid-19-that-keep-sick-kids-infectious-diseases-expert-up-at-night.html

    1415:

    Not completely. The "well-regulated militia" was also - and this is what we got in school - because the Founding Fathers were against a standing army, fearing that an unscrupulous leader would find uses for them.

    sigh Boy, have they ever....

    1416:

    @1398: Justice Ginsburg has cancer again.

    As the spouse of a three-year cancer survivor, you don't get cancer "again". You fight constantly with drugs and supportive care to keep it at bay - it's ALWAYS there waiting to flare up again.

    1417:

    _Moz_ @ 1369: Isn't the point of a "well armed militia" exactly so that "feds" doing that sort of thing get shot and killed?

    Or have I misunderstood the relationship?

    Yeah, I think you do misunderstand. There's nothing in the Constitution, and certainly not in the Second Amendment about a "well armed militia".

    It's "a well regulated militia" ... where "well regulated" meant organized, equipped and properly trained.

    The Constitution gives Congress the power To provide for: "calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;1" AND "organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;"

    NRA crazies, right-wingnuts & Boogaloo Bois are NOT a "well regulated militia".

    1 The executive (aka President) can "call" the militia into Federal service, but does so In Accordance With the laws passed by Congress and there is no provision in Federal Law that I'm aware of that allows the Department of Homeland Security to field Gestapo like goon squads to snatch protesters off the streets.

    1418:

    Sounds more cautious than full support…

    in his opinion, kids can safely go back to school in September (a cautious yes, but only with the proper public health precautions in place)

    Also, he doesn't sound confident that the little snotgoblins won't pass on infection:

    when they are ill, they are perhaps less likely to transmit infections to others

    Maybe I'm overly cynical from three decades in the system, but I'm skeptical that proper public precautions will be in place and observed. I've seen too many well-intentioned policies undermined and sabotaged.

    Also, schools include high schools, where the children are more likely to suffer from the disease, and where we know that they can get infected and pass it on…

    https://globalnews.ca/news/7188224/florida-dad-coronavirus-teen/

    https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/enormous-impact-after-teenage-parties-near-montreal-businesses-shut-to-stem-outbreak-1.5016557

    One of my friends is friends with one of the University of Toronto's top epidemiologists. He says the epidemiologist id still saying that schools should remain closed.

    1419:

    Heteromeles @ 1373: Saw the comet tonight. But I'm not comatose yet for some reason.

    Went out last night to try photograph it myself, but didn't find it. When I got back to the house I double checked the directions I was following & realized I misunderstood them (also got a good sky picture that cleared up the confusion).

    My instructions said to "follow the handle on the big dipper". They didn't make clear you were supposed to follow the handle from the tip down to the bowl & across the bowl toward the horizon directly below the big dipper. I was doing the traditional "follow the arc to Arcturus" ... which is the wrong direction.

    I'm going to try again tonight if the weather cooperates.

    There were a lot people out where I was, but they all seemed to be following "social distancing" rules ... mostly in small family-like groups. I was out there by myself and never had to ask anyone to step away. I had my mask on, but was able to take it off while fiddling with the camera.

    1420:

    Scott Sanford @ 1380: The current era has been so stressful that when I read of a Navy ship on fire I felt perverse relief that finally there was a normal tragedy that just happened rather than being intentionally caused by stupidity, greed, or explicit evil.

    Hate to burst your bubble, but they don't know how the fire started, so "stupidity, greed, or explicit evil" can't be definitively ruled out as yet.

    1421:

    Bill Arnold @ 1389:

    One "swiss cheese hole" aspect of this Twitter hack is that the hackers were wanting to be paid in Bitcoin -- it's difficult to trace the recipients and just about impossible to stop or reverse the transfers.

    You're assuming that the motive is to acquire a few hundred K $ of bitcoin. There are other ways to monetize this sort of event , with much larger payoff(s).
    Also, the motive might not be financial.
    Also, we don't know yet for sure that this wasn't to e.g. disguise some other activity on twitter. (Trump moves markets with single tweets, and so do some others.)
    Etc.

    I'm leaning towards the idea of a test run to see if they had managed to take control of the tools and/or targeted attacks aimed at discrediting Trumpolini's opponents (or anyone perceived as Trumpolini opponents.

    1422:

    Interesting. I'd missed that.

    1423:

    Depends on the cancer. I was treated for, and 'cured' in 2001, and have had only docs watching for it since, but that depends on the type.

    1424:

    SFReader @ 1396:

    Re: 'Also, the motive might not be financial.
    Also, we don't know yet for sure that this wasn't to e.g. disguise some other activity on twitter.'

    Biggest surprise was that DT's account hadn't been hacked as well. The official story is that he's got some additional protections.

    Not so surprising (at least not to me) all of the accounts that did get hacked were on the political left ... with the exception of Kanye West who appears to have got on Trumpolini's shit list by announcing he was running for President.

    1425:

    I'm betting on stupidity, myself (probably with an interaction effect with Murphy's Law). I was downwind of the ship burning in San Diego, although I didn't get much of the smoke. Fun week.

    The more general point is that the US Navy is kind of overstretched, and repairs are lagging, even without disasters and Covid19. This is another big ship out of service for awhile. So if the Powers That Be are thinking of, oh, invading Iran in October, they won't have the Bonhomme Richard to carry troops over there.

    1426:

    The first forensic reports from the white-hat and grey-hat community say that a darkWeb site was recently offering access to blue-check Twitter accounts for $250 a pop, discounts for quantity, money back if they didn't work. They showed screengrabs of a Twitter corporate user account control panel as their bona fides. The conspiracy theorists are having a field day but it looks like a simple phishing spam attack to make money rather than anything nefarious.

    Twitter is talking about how one of their account manager logins was compromised by spearphishing via emails, take that as you will. My own limited experience of banking IT many moons ago was that anything sensitive like customer account controls was locked down and definitely not accessible from the general internet. Customer accounts had to be managed from within the cabled firewalls, not even the in-house VPN could get access to such controls from outside the office. Twitter seems to have left that particular door wide open to their cost and detriment.

    1427:

    I'm not sure that's going to work nearly as well as those particular governors think it's going to, for two reasons. First, without reference to race, Kemp is looking extraordinarily stupid right now, like the worst kind of inept Trumpian toady, and that has limited appeal, and said appeal is rapidly getting worse. (Wait until the kids go back to school then start coming home sick if you really want to see being Trump's Toady get unpopular!)

    Second, the rest of the White world isn't nearly as racist as, for example, Kemp, and we've got his number.

    Third, given the statistics regarding COVID-19 and race that the average patient is either Black or Hispanic right now. When the disease makes it to the other side of town and White people start getting sick, the whole idea of removing a Black/Hispanic patient from a ventilator so a White person can have one isn't going to go over well. I don't think this will end up giving him better numbers.

    1428:

    Meanwhile in Australia

    After 35 days at sea alone, Queensland man David Fair ... But Mr Fair is now paying $200 a night for mandatory hotel quarantine in his home state

    https://www.9news.com.au/national/solo-sailor-paying-for-quarantine-despite-being-in-iso-for-months-qld-news/e689e102-e2a4-42de-bc84-eb87c76da221

    It seems weird to me that at the same time as quarantine systems are still being experimented with because they keep failing, that someone who has been isolated for a month is being forced into that system. He's more likely to catch covid in quarantine than to bring it in himself.

    1429:

    JBS Yes. It's a test, for implementation in, ohh ... mid-October?

    1430:

    I suspect that the key thing is 14-day supervised quarantine, given that there have been multiple cases of people sneaking out on self-quarantines.

    1431:

    Sneaking off a boat mid-ocean is not especially difficult, it's getting getting back on afterwards that can be tricky.

    Mr Fair said he applied for an exemption from mandatory quarantine but will have to wait 10 days for the application to process.

    I'm just struggling not to see this as officials being inflexible because it's not their money they're wasting. A $2800 fee is not trivial, and remember that not all boat owners are rich (from the pics his boat was ~$100k new 30+ years ago, so while second hand it probably cost him more than a cheap car, it's not "new house" level).

    I'm struggling to find decent media reports that are more than a paragraph. He's mentioned here:

    https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/small-boats-stuck-at-sea-covid-19/index.html

    Where he says he's been doing the longest legs he can possibly manage between landings because of quarantine restrictions.

    I'd also note that the step from "island hopping with two on board" to "long solo ocean passages" is considerable, and not one normally made lightly. I suspect there are people out there who are essentially stranded because they or their boats don't have the range* to bypass now-closed ports to get somewhere that will accept them.

    David is lucky in many ways: he's alive, he's in his home country, he can afford the fees, and his partner isn't likely to give birth while he's in quarantine. He may well come out of quarantine infected with covid-19, or unwell from his treatment while incarcerated, but he'll very likely survive it.

    • effective range is always the lowest of the boat, the crew and the provisioning. Losing half the crew generally reduces the range...
    1432:

    It's not unknown for boats at sea to meet up and exchange, ahem, cargo well out of sight of land. The folks in Cornwall and Devon used to be famous for it, they even gave us the name of a James Bond book and film, "Moonraker".

    NZ tried the "one leetle exemption to the rules won't hurt, really" thing and they ended up with a infected British couple driving most of the length of North Island spraying COVID-19 as they went because a relative was in a hospice and they wanted to visit to say goodbye. It's No More Mister Nice Guy time.

    1433:

    You don't seem to know how this works.

    The only way the wealthy die off -- and likely not even then -- is because the whole thing goes to pieces because all the health professionals and teams are sick and or dead too, from the virus and from being worked to death.

    Just like it won't be their kids by and large who get sick and / or die -- just the teachers, most of whom are not well off and many of whom are in the vulnerable classes who are most likely to get it worst and to die. And by the way, it's only the public schools that are mandated to re-open. The private schools are not re-opening.

    In any case they aren't dying off now. OTOH, with all the first line people taken out, that includes all the sanitation workers, etc. So maybe bubonic plague will return, and to the US, and then Holy Cow! Pneumonic Bubonic Plague is very fast from infection to death. Non of this long asymptomatic hang out stuff for the king of killers.

    1434:

    The jobs of the private sector data collection.

    In the US the Customs & Border Protection has gotten around the pesky court process by simply buying license plate information from the private sector, allowing them to track everyone.

    This is in addition to the cell phone tracking data they already buy per the article.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/cbp-does-end-run-around-warrants-simply-buys-license-plate-reader-data/

    Oh, and regarding those snatches of private citizens off the street in Oregan? Acting head of DHS tweeted today that his agents are patriots and will not surrender violent extremists.

    https://twitter.com/DHS_Wolf/status/1284095516276592641

    Again, Americans really need to vote come November or accept the consequences.

    1435:

    Yup, it’s not just ass-hats cheating on the “crossing to Alaska” thing, now it’s murderers arriving by boat. People are getting annoyed enough that one has to anticipate violence pretty soon.

    1436:

    “regarding those snatches of private citizens off the street” Y’know, I could have sworn that the gun wielding dicks claimed that their favourite amendment meant that they would be able to protect the citizens against exactly what trump is up to here. But no, it turns out that they are just gun wielding dicks that like actual nazi dictators.

    1437:

    https://krebsonsecurity.com/

    Brian Krebs, who I look at (doesn't update every day) every weekday, is one of the US' premier computer security journalists. He used to write a column for the WaPo... until they got scared, because he was getting too many credible death threats. He and his family have been SWATted more than once.

    1438:

    There, see, Charlie: all done by Christmas. You're such a pessimist. Dour Scott and all that:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGPFF-VbDk

    1439:

    "Scot", damnit. #@!%& autocorrect... apologies to Scots everywhere...

    1440:

    David is lucky in many ways: he's alive, he's in his home country, he can afford the fees, and his partner isn't likely to give birth while he's in quarantine.

    Yes. It isn't like the transition from unsupervised self isolation to mandatory supervised quarantine at your own expense had not been well publicised several weeks advance. You might expect some leeway* in this case but it looks like he sailed form Tahiti just assuming he'd get it - always a mistake when dealing with people who might even want to be reasonable but feel bound by events to be inflexible. The article goes to some lengths to point out both ABF and QPS are involved, but doesn't clarify whether he has run afoul** of Australia's or Queensland's border restrictions (the presence of ABF say Australia's). But the same rule is in place for people arriving from Victoria, in fact was for anyone arriving from interstate till they opened the borders on Monday. QLD still has single-digit active cases, and there might have been some hope of sitting out the whole second wave thing, but the border-opening is happening anyway (at the same time other restrictions are being relaxed). Meanwhile our friends in Melbourne are stocking up on alcohol in case level 4 restrictions that impact bottle sales come in.

    • I'm sure that you are rolling (and pitching and yawing) in the aisles (and the troughs). Mr Fair has been a very nautical boy. ** Ibid
    1441:

    You're missing the point. My assessment runs parallel to yours, not counter. Kemp may well succeed in killing lots of minorities, but he's not going to gain enough votes that way to overcome disgust at the way he's going about it, or for the White collateral damage. As the death toll gets worse and worse middle-class Whites will either vote for Biden (and find ways to justify it to themselves) or just stay home. At this point the GOP either needs a genuine Jebus-comes-down-from-the-sky miracle or a stolen election. Otherwise they're dead for a generation.

    Sinking ships are important evolutionary moments in the life-cycle of rats; Kemp, DeSantis and Ducy show no signs of getting off the boat.

    1442:

    "Acting head of DHS tweeted today that his agents are patriots and will not surrender violent extremists."

    "Will not surrender violent extremists," or "Will not surrender TO violent extremists?"

    1443:

    Not only middle class whites - working class people (remember, 43% of the US population does NOT have any college) are being hit as hard or harder, and see the Dems pushing relief, and the GOP fighting it tooth and nail. Losing them is a huge deal.

    1444:

    I'm betting on stupidity, myself (probably with an interaction effect with Murphy's Law). I was downwind of the ship burning in San Diego, although I didn't get much of the smoke. Fun week.

    Ordinary stupidity, yes, as in "That needs to be plugged in?" or "Someone has to watch that?" It's aggravating but much better than criminal stupidity like, "Nobody will notice if we take these smoke detectors home" or "We can save 20k by wiring this in series."

    I'd rather ships not be on fire at all but ordinary accidents and mishaps are to be preferred to negligent sabotage. Let's hope for something trivial like leaving a toaster running.

    1445:

    You're such a pessimist. Dour Scott and all that:

    <next post>

    "Scot", damnit. #@!%& autocorrect... apologies to Scots everywhere..

    Feh, I'm feeling pretty dour these days too.

    1446:

    Or the sort of stupidity like: "we can just fit flexible hose intended for cold hydraulic fluid in place of metal pipes to carry super heated fuel"

    https://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2003/s1013787.htm

    1447:

    I'd rather ships not be on fire at all but ordinary accidents and mishaps are to be preferred to negligent sabotage. Let's hope for something trivial like leaving a toaster running.

    Almost doesn't matter how it started. The ship was undergoing a major overhaul/fitup. So many internal systems were off and/or being removed/replaced. So things like the fire suppression system was off and all those compartment doors couldn't be closed due to the "work in progress" power being supplied by cables running through all the passage ways and doors.

    So in the end if the ship had been "active" it would likely have been a small fire in a compartment or two. But in the situation of work in progress it turned into a real mess.

    Here in Raleigh, NC a 5 story wood framed building under construction went up in a fire that wreaked all the buildings around it (across the streets). One was 13 or so stories tall and it took 2 years to make it so people could move in again. Which led to people trying to say wood framed buildings were not safe. Well they aren't if a fire starts when only the framing is up. There a window of time where all you have is a tall organized pile of wood. In that window they can be a fire hazard. Since the next step is adding the sprinklers the risk goes way down.

    Anyway timing is everything.

    1448:

    It is about their refusal. McConnel's already thrown out a poison pill - that schools will reopen in the fall.

    Congressional politics when different parties control the separate sides of the capital is a bare knuckle no rules when behind closed doors sport.

    And Mitch and Nancy are masters at it. In these situations both side load up these must past bills with things that make THEIR base gleeful but the other side will treat as poison. What is the name for this poison when it is on the other side? Christmas ornaments, err,thoughtful needed provisions.

    All so each side can have things to "give up" in the name of getting things done.

    Been this way for over 200 years. Likely since the second session of Congress.

    It's called reality.

    Now to those in the UK and other countries this may seem a bit nuts (to some of us also but I digress) as their parliamentary system doesn't work this way. In general.

    1449:

    I'd actually heard that from a QAnon fan evangelising for his conspiracy theories about a week ago. It's BLM (who are Marxist Soros-funded Antifa revolutionaries apparently, nothing to do with police violence) who are behind it all.

    Poe's Law very much holds. The guy was both angry and serious.

    1450:

    Not quite. If caught fast enough and treated correctly, a few cancers can be eliminated completely, and others can be effectively eliminated - e.g. 40 year remission, with no treatment and no symptoms. And it is possible that the latter cases are a new incidence of the same cancer. My wife works in cancer research, and we know a good many people who have both died and not died from cancer.

    1451:

    As the spouse of a three-year cancer survivor, you don't get cancer "again". You fight constantly with drugs and supportive care to keep it at bay - it's ALWAYS there waiting to flare up again.

    As the spouse of a -- seven? eight? -- year cancer survivor, it depends on the cancer. If you luck out in the cancer lottery it can be a single bout of surgery, then recovery, then signed off as cancer-free at five years.

    (Stage Ia uterine cancer is basically a hysterectomy and it's over apart from the menopause -- which admittedly can be brutal and lasts years. The uterus is an organ that evolved to contain a rapidly dividing bundle of alien human tissue; the cancer has to dig all the way through several layers of tissue dedicated to preventing that sort of thing before it becomes a lethal threat.)

    RBG, however, has liver cancer, and that's not good.

    1452:

    So if the Powers That Be are thinking of, oh, invading Iran in October, they won't have the Bonhomme Richard to carry troops over there.

    It's an assault carrier, not a transport ship. It's job is to land a battalion of Marines and provide air support and armoured support, securing a beachhead. (NB: with V-22 Ospreys and F-35B air support the "beachhead" can be up to 200 miles inland.)

    For deployment, US army troops mostly fly United, Delta, or American, while their kit travels on ships. IIRC, a modern US army mechanized brigade has an all-up weight on the order of a quarter of a million tons of armour and consumes roughly 1000 tons of fuel and ammunition per hour while it's advancing: it'd take every LHD in the US navy to transport just one of them, never mind keep them supplied.

    1453:

    Reminder that I don't watch random YouTube videos without a synopsis explaining what it's about. It's TLDR writ large -- I read a thousand words in three minutes, a video probably conveys a hundred words of content in that time and requires switching away from my blog tab, messing with settings, etc.

    1454:

    mdive snatches of private citizens off the street in Oregon? ... violent extremists .. How do we know that? Even if true, there must be an open trial, not "disappearance" - & what happens if they were actually after a real "violent extremist" - & got the worng person ... Of course, Wolf is a Trump "acting" appointee, isn't he - recommended, doubtless, by some real fascist or other. WHY is this not being given loud world-wide publicity ... No sign of it being mentioned over here, for instance. Come to that how much screaming is going on in the USA - and - very imoprtantly. Is anyone known to be suddenly missing & untraceable?

    timrowledge - could have told you that, even before this started.

    Troutwaxer At this point the GOP either needs a genuine Jebus-comes-down-from-the-sky miracle or a stolen election. Well, they will certainly try to steal the election, that's a given ... What happens if they succeed? The question we have all carefully not been asking, bacause all the answers are horrible.

    AVR They really hate Soros, don't they ( He IS Jewish, isn't he? ) But jewish AND Marxist AND a rich capitalist, all at once? Umr .... does not compute

    THIS DT getting ready to eliminate "Illegals" from census - amazingly stupid (again )

    1455:

    getting ready to eliminate "Illegals" from census

    And if true it most likely will be a lose and totally piss of the SCOTUS as this will quickly escalate and require them to interrupt their vacation. (They are gone or almost gone until first Monday in October.)

    SCOTUS has already dealt with this in related cases over the last 30 years and basically said "count every breathing body".

    In case no one noticed Roberts is extremely against tossing out precedent without a totally new reasoning that could possibly invalidate the previous ruling. The recent abortion case was one were he thought the previous courts had rules wrongly but since they HAD ruled he basically said "STOP IT".

    1456:

    No, that is not true, any more than when the Met. imprisoned hundreds of demonstrators for 5 hours. Merely detaining and releasing is still intimidation, and is much harder to fight. The BBC has reported this, but it rapidly vanished off its front pages, though it's still in its World updates. Funny that.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53453077

    1457:

    EC Correction - very disturbing, that, actually.

    However, I see Pelosi is giving it an airing My original Q still stands: Do we know who has been "vanished" - and have any of them reappeared, or not?

    1458:

    The point about "acting" position-holders was explained to me by an (off-duty) "acting" sergeant in the Metropolitan Police 30 years ago:

    "Acting" guys have the authority, but if they are seen to overstep it, all that happens is that they lose their "acting" authority.

    1459:

    mdlve: "Acting head of DHS tweeted today that his agents are patriots and will not surrender violent extremists."

    Troutwaxer: "Will not surrender violent extremists," or "Will not surrender TO violent extremists?"

    Yes.

    Given the record of police getting away with violence, and the lack of identification these chaps are displaying, I predict that any of them committing violence will not be surrendered to the courts for due process.

    1460:

    Wolf is a Trump "acting" appointee, isn't he

    That's what Trump likes. Acting means no Senate confirmation hearings, just Trump's wish, and acting means they can be fired with no consequences (and they know it).

    “I like acting,” Trump said. “It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like acting. So we have a few that are acting. We have a great, great cabinet.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/06/trump-acting-cabinet-members-give-him-more-flexibility

    Kinane found that from 1977 through mid-April of [2019] — the administrations of President Jimmy Carter through the first half of Trump’s — 266 individuals held Cabinet posts. Seventy-nine of them held their jobs on an acting basis, or 3 in 10.

    Under Trump, 22 of the 42 people in top Cabinet jobs have been acting, or just over half.

    And though Trump’s presidency has spanned only about 1 in 20 of the years covered, his administration accounts for more than 1 in 4 of the acting officials tallied. Kinane’s figures include holdovers from previous administrations, some of whom serve for just days.

    https://apnews.com/002bb07f6b8245d8abcfbac3322f4ede

    1461:

    "Acting" is an (now) all-too-obvious way of ignoring the law. It's an "ennabling act" for corrupt &/or prejudiced &/or plain old evil ersons to act (!) with impunity. Congress ought to be doing something, but I suspect the R sneate would veto it, yes?

    Oh, it's now just started to appear in UK media - the "indy" has mentioned it, f'rinstance And it's back on the BBC - HERE

    1462:

    That is not was I was responding to. Your claim ''Even if true, there must be an open trial, not "disappearance"'' isn't true, even in the USA and is in many ways worse in the UK. "Should be", I would agree with, but That Blair abolished that right with us.

    1463:

    There will definitely be attempted thievery, and as we've seen in Oregon, the possibilities for ugliness are substantial. On the other hand, I keep seeing unexpected people changing parties. Like Bill Kristol of all people:

    "I think I have said at some point, I am a Democrat for 2020."

    "I think it is very important that Trump loses. I think it is important that Biden wins. And I do think it is important that Trump enablers at the federal level also lose. So I am on board with a Democratic victory in 2020."

    1464:

    It is still not on the front page, not even the World front page - you have to search down as far as the US and Canada page. That's how the media claim to report everything, but ensure that inconvenient news is kept from raising political waves.

    1465:

    How do we know that? Even if true, there must be an open trial, not "disappearance" - & what happens if they were actually after a real "violent extremist" - & got the worng person ..

    Sadly, yes, this is happening. There's a video (mentioned here) of one, notable only because Customs & Border Patrol was caught claiming responsibility but lying about the snatch. How many gangs or vans there are nobody knows; I've seen a list of at least six suspected snatch vans but I am very dubious of its accuracy.

    The mentioned victim, Mark Pettibone, relates that they did not formally arrest him and after he kept asking for a lawyer eventually turned him loose. (It's unclear if he was put out the door of a location he could name to Portland police or if they drove him out and dumped him on the street. If I were either an aspiring Stazi or a Reich-wing fanboy getting my jollies, I'd do the latter; it increases fear and uncertainty.) How many others have been taken, nobody knows.

    Like many developing situations, there's a lot of 'nobody knows' and not nearly enough certainty. We do know DHS has declared itself part of the problem and defied local authorities to do anything about it.

    1466:

    For deployment, US army troops mostly fly United, Delta, or American, while their kit travels on ships.

    Which brings up the depressing thought that there is an awful lot of spare capacity in the airline business at the moment, and perhaps even in the shipping business.

    1467:

    US Attorney has requested an investigation into the activities of DHS

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/18/us/portland-arrests-federal-authorities/index.html

    1468:

    So he'll be the next one to find out he has resigned from a tweet about his replacement....

    1469:

    Yep.

    In fact, there's a lot of times I'm looking for something, and it's "why the hell would you make a youtube video of a command line set of commands?"

    1470:

    Because people have different learning styles. Some people learn best from verbal communication, some from reading, and others from doing it themselves (with appropriate guidance.) My wife was a teacher (before her medical retirement) and figuring out the learning style of a difficult pupil was always one of her challenges. This is also why classroom instruction includes, lectures, reading, and homework - a teacher covers all the bases that way.

    1471:

    I'd rather ships not be on fire at all but ordinary accidents and mishaps are to be preferred to negligent sabotage. Let's hope for something trivial like leaving a toaster running.

    I suspect it'll turn out to be non-trivial, but an accident. That sucker burned for days, which makes me suspect that there was a lot of fuel onboard that got heated up.

    The problem is that the US military, for all that it's bloated, is also massively overstretched, so that readiness levels are sub-par, and everything needs repairs. Couple that with Covid19 restrictions on how many people can work on a job at a time, and my guess is that it was some work gang working understaffed on a problem that was above their competence level, something went wrong, and it cascaded from there.

    One likely scenario is an ijit working with an angle grinder near some critical piece of the fueling infrastructure, and he didn't have the proper fire extinguishers nearby when the sparks lit something on fire. The other likely scenario is one of the infinite variations on "something shorted, things went boom."

    1472:

    And if Portland weren't already weird enough, last night riot police retreated from a naked woman doing yoga. At this point the writers of 2020 are out of plans and are just throwing in any idea that comes to mind.

    It worked on Cúchulainn...

    1473:

    Sorry, ignore that last link; I should have second-checked what I pasted. This is the naked woman versus police link: https://www.rt.com/usa/495163-naked-protester-portland-police/amp/

    1474:

    The other likely scenario is one of the infinite variations on "something shorted, things went boom."

    I've read that a contributing factor was that the fire had time to establish itself before being discovered, so that seems very likely.

    1475:

    For anyone interested ... Dr. Anthony Fauci

    Vincent Racaniello (virologist at Columbia Medical) does a semi-weekly podcast with fellow and guest scientists. This podcast's guest is Fauci. Also this is a much shorter podcast than usual (only 36:46 vs. upwards of 2 hours).

    TWiV 641: COVID-19 with Dr. Anthony Fauci (July 17, 2020)

    'Dr. Anthony Fauci joins TWiV to discuss SARS-CoV-2 transmission, testing, immunity, pathogenesis, vaccines, and preparedness.'

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE

    1476:

    Re: Podcast - Fauci

    The number of rabid 'right-wing' sounding conspiracy nuts commenting on this episode is higher than usual ... kinda scary.

    1477:

    Two reasons that spring to mind immediately are:

    1) Laziness. People seem to have this weird idea that writing is an incredibly difficult and onerous task even when you're just doing it by pressing buttons. They post videos because they can't be arsed to write about something and think doing a video is easier. This baffles me entirely, because it seems to me that it involves vastly more pissing about, fighting with stupidly designed technology, etc., but that's how it looks like they're thinking.

    2) Money. Innumerable random remarks from people on the internet carry the implication that it's almost automatic to get money from posting videos on youtube these days. It sounds as if you don't, any more, need to be some big professional organisation making good videos at significant effort that millions and millions of people will watch, but that nowadays it happens for any dweeb in their bedroom posting any old shite. So basically the same reason the whole internet is drowning in a soup of bollocks.

    I do not believe that they are simply doing it out of the goodness of their hearts to cater for everyone's different preferred learning methods, because they don't. They present whatever they have to say only as a video, and you can't even get a transcript of it, let alone the same material in a textual presentation written as such from the start. Anyone who does not want video is excluded.

    I'm more inclined to believe that a contributing factor may be that they don't understand differences in assimilation. Their model of reading is basically just an accelerated version of the little kid putting their finger under each word in succession and puzzling them out in strict sequence one at a time; "that's how everyone reads, adults just do it faster". Therefore there's no difference between reading and hearing speech except for using a different sensor to obtain the input, and therefore if you can't be arsed to write stuff recording it is equally as good.

    I for one certainly don't read like that. My focus of attention moves through the text not as a steadily-progressing spotlight on one word at a time but as a big fuzzy blob covering several paragraphs. I read everything out of sequence, on every scale from individual letters up to groups of several paragraphs, without noticing I'm doing it, and sort all the bits out equally subconsciously and automatically as I go along. Instead of turning pages over once and leaving them turned, I start to flip them back and forth as the forward border of my attention blob reaches the hiatus, and don't leave them turned until the rear border has also passed it. If I can't do this, it screws me up and I lose track. It's hard enough to follow an actual person speaking. I despise the fashion of web pages hiding things on purpose and making you click "read more" or otherwise fuck about before they show up (assuming it works at all, which it very often doesn't), and also the fashion of using enormous fonts and spacings so you get half a paragraph at a time when there's room for a whole page of A4. And videos are basically completely useless.

    (Even more useless now that youtube have engaged in some unbelievably moronic piece of utter idiocy and deliberately fucked up their entire site, so absolutely nothing works on it anywhere and every page is just a blank white expanse with some formless blobs in one corner. But that kind of stupidity is a different rant.)

    1478:

    Part one of three: watch this programme The echoes of police & ultra-right-wing "forces" colluding to bring down democracy from within are - interesting.

    1479:

    You are an idiot.

    "Civil liberties"? The US has had a Surgeon General since the beginning, and they HAVE THE AUTHORITY to override you for public safety. If there's someone with TB who can't or won't take their meds regularly for the 10 months it takes to kill it, the US Public Health Service can incarcerate them and MAKE THEM TAKE IT, for the entire time.

    Your "freedumbs" end where my face begins... and if YOU are breathing out viruses, then YOU can and should be restrained.

    There are laws, for example, to lock up someone who knowingly has unprotected sex without telling their parters that they have HIV.

    You do not understand "the public good", or "public health"

    1480:

    Troutwaxer @ 1442:

    "Acting head of DHS tweeted today that his agents are patriots and will not surrender violent extremists."

    "Will not surrender violent extremists," or "Will not surrender TO violent extremists?"

    I read it as DHS are the violent extremists and they have no plans to release the people they're abducting off of the streets.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo9vPpZQCpk

    1481:

    I should warn you not to feed the troll. In any case, the real damage of the lockdown isn't just the lockdown itself, it's that the US will have to do it at least once more because our leadership is incompetent to understand the point of doing short term harm for long-term good. As a result, we're going to lose hundreds of thousands of people and at least a trillion dollars.

    It's using the excuse of liberty to disguise a lack of self-discipline, a lack of compassion, a lack of understanding, and a lack of willingness to set goals and struggle towards them. If you look at the ideals the US was allegedly founded on, all of these are the reason previous generations thought we didn't need so much regulation. We got regulation because people braying about personal liberty and scoundrels wrapping themselves in the flag of patriotism demonstrated that they couldn't be trusted not to put others at risk, and so they need to be controlled so that the rest of us can go free sooner.

    1482:

    RalphB Oh yeah? Then why are the tories ( Or BoZo at any rate ) & some more insane cheerleaders STILL trying to destroy an irreplaceable instrument? You don't beleieve me? BRAIN-BLEACH WARNING Here

    I also note that the Portland dissapearances etc are now well over our news pages ... phew.

    1483:

    Administrative note

    RalphB has been banned and comments removed. Cause: Denial of mortality/morbidity due to COVID19 veering into batshit craziness about how to deal with it (I swear my eyes glazed over just before I read "wake up sheeple!?!").

    I do not have time to argue with crazies and I am not prepared to let my blog be used as a platform for anti-vaxxers (TBF, RalphB claims not to be one) or folks who think Sweden and "herd immunity" are good models to pursue.

    1484:

    On an entirely unrelated note, I visited a seaside park recently and found they’d relandscaped pretty recently. The turf was thick like carpet, but had clearly been laid quite recently, so recently that it hadn’t been mowed since. This was even around the playground, where I’m used to seeing fake grass these days. It could be a wealth differential- richer burbs get real turf. I wonder whether the existing analogy can be stretched to encompass something similar, though I expect the same phenomenon is already well catered. Tea for two please, Comrade Major, and all that.

    1485:

    Thank you.

    As easy as it is to say ignore the trolls, when they are claiming nonsense that can negatively influence pandemic measures either the host/moderators need to delete the messages or others need to spend time refuting the nonsense for others who just browse the blog and aren't as informed.

    1486:

    Re IFR, since I've already typed this up with links: The model was also using IFR estimates which were rather higher than the 0.26% reality, The CDC is currently suggesting 0.65 percent IFR for modeling: COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios (CDC, updated July 10, 2020) Which references: A systematic review and meta-analysis of published research data on COVID-19 infection-fatality rates (May 27, 2020) (there are a few versions of the later but all essentially the same.) Even a recent preprint metaanalysis by John P.A. Ioannidsi (who's making a COVID-career of low IFR estimates; somebody has to do it. :-) isn't going that low, or rather says that a global IFR is hard and gives IFR estimates for low, medium and high death rate locales. The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data (John P.A. Ioannidis, 14 July 2020)

    1487:

    "Herd immunity", is that like a herd of lemmings running towards the cliff?

    1488:

    I’ve started making a default assumption (null hypothesis) that commenters fitting a certain pattern are not even genuine trolls. Hence the astroturf allusion above - we crossed over!

    1489:

    Oh God, not again.

    Someone applying a plumbing solution to something entirely different.

    (As in Flixborough (Nypro UK 1974).)

    Does nobody even Read TFM (assuming TFM actually exists, of course).

    1490:

    It's an assault carrier, not a transport ship. It's job is to land a battalion of Marines and provide air support and armoured support, securing a beachhead. (NB: with V-22 Ospreys and F-35B air support the "beachhead" can be up to 200 miles inland.)

    I'm not sure that's quite correct, since big ships carry lots of people too.

    That said, there's the general problem of some people thinking a short, victorious war might help them politically. That person may not even be the one you're thinking about. Conceivably, the real problem might be Israel's reported shadow war with Iran, and Israel is rumored to be behind a series of explosions in Iran in the last month, explosions which hit nuclear enrichment facilities, missile sites, petrochemical centers, power plants, and medical clinics.

    So if Israel is hoping to force a confrontation with Iran before November, and if the US can't get a force together to back up Israel's power play if they overplay their hand...that could get kind of ugly for everybody.

    Anyway, cue your next idiot-induced nightmare...

    1491:

    Re: 'It's using the excuse of liberty to disguise a lack of self-discipline, a lack of compassion, a lack of understanding, and a lack of willingness to set goals and struggle towards them.'

    I'd add 'responsibility'.

    I wonder who'd make the list by demographics for 'US heroes' in the US if such a concept even exists any more. Not martyrs or comic book characters, but real life heroes*. Also not the powerful like the now-standard fallback of some president, general or billionaire.

    Whaddya know ... there's a (paywalled) academic UK paper on heroes in our present day.

    'The politics of heroes through the prism of popular heroism

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41293-019-00105-8

    Abstract

    In modern day Britain, the discourse of national heroification is routinely utilised by politicians, educationalists and cultural industry professionals, whilst also being a popular concept to describe deserving ‘do-gooders’ who contribute to British society in a myriad of ways. We argue that although this heroification discourse is enacted as a discursive device of encouraging politically and morally desirable behaviour, it is dissociated from the largely under-explored facets of contemporary popular heroism. To compensate for this gap, this paper explores public preferences for heroes using survey data representative of British adults. This analysis demonstrates a conceptual stretching in the understanding of heroism, and allows identifying age- and gender-linked dynamics which effect public choices of heroes. In particular, we demonstrate that age above all determines the preference for having a hero, but does not explain preferences for specific hero-types. The focus on gender illustrates that the landscape of popular heroism reproduces a male-dominated bias which exists in the wider political and cultural heroification discourse. Simultaneously, our study shows that if national heroification discourse in Britain remains male-centric, the landscape of popular heroism is characterised by a gendered trend towards privatisation of heroes being particularly prominent amongst women. In the conclusion, this paper argues for a conceptual revision and re-gendering of the national heroification discourse as a step towards both empirically grounded, and age- and gender-sensitive politics of heroes and heroines.'

    • Okay - since March there's been a huge boost in respect and appreciation for medical and other workers whose jobs are deemed important to the overall well-being of their community. But I'm not sure these folks have been elevated to the status of 'heroes'.
    1492:

    Um, what does "privatisation of heroes" mean in this context? I think I understand most of the abstract, but that has me stumped.

    1493:

    So if Israel is hoping to force a confrontation with Iran before November, and if the US can't get a force together to back up Israel's power play if they overplay their hand...that could get kind of ugly for everybody. Thanks, hadn't been tracking that. Ugh. Israel has been F-ing stupid about Iran. IMO. The JCPOA(full text, 2015) was a solid arms control agreement(I've read it fwiw), and helpful, and Israel interfered enough in American politics to destroy it, in the process turning support for Israel in the US from bipartisan to partisan, and doing serious damage to the international reputation of the US as a negotiation partner. (Trump broke other treaties, too, yes.) This is not easily forgiven. (Some deep and wide grudges were formed, in people with considerable patience.) From the first (WaPo) link: The 2009 Stuxnet operation successfully destroyed Iranian centrifuges. But like the Osirak attack, that appeared to only deepen Iran’s resolve to clandestinely develop a nuclear program. At best, it just bought time. Even after Stuxnet, Iran advanced its nuclear program so much that it could have converted its uranium to weapons grade material in just weeks, according to some accounts. The JCPOA restrictions on centrifuge development, enrichment levels and stockpiles extended that period — called its “breakout time” — to approximately a year. That’s consistent with findings that, historically, diplomacy and international arms control missions have been more successful in curbing regional nuclear ambitions than unilateral military strikes and cyberattacks. ... However, Israel’s bet that the Iranians will not respond is risky. It’s hard to control escalation when things are so volatile, especially as hardline Iranian leaders may increase pressure to retaliate. Israel and the United States may be pushing Iran toward recommitting itself to a nuclear weapons program and dangerous regional actions.

    1494:

    Yes, I think our reactions to what Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are doing with each other is fairly similar. I guess since the window for petroleum-based warfare is closing with increasing rapidity, the petroleum-based Powers* want to go out with a bang, so to speak?

    *Or at least the right-wing fantasists with guns who think of themselves that way.

    1495:

    And now for something completely different: has anyone heard of JP Aerospace, and their "airship to orbit" plan? (http://www.jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf). It looks daft enough to be interesting, but not beanstalk-level daft.

    The website's still up. What I'm curious about is, since JPA had contracts with the DoD, whether they were simply part of the DoD's flirtation with "black triangles" (the really big, black airships that showed up in the nineties and the oughts), or whether this is something ongoing that might conceivably work.

    Heck, if you want to jump into the Conspiracy Singularity, perhaps the US Space Force is already using this system, with sky forts with active optical camouflage at 140,000 feet? Yeah, I don't think so either, but the ships look cool and different.

    1496:
  • They don't say how the 2 mi wide station will stay at 140k'. And then there's the station-to-orbit, at 6,000' long....
  • "Propellors designed to operate in near-vacuum"?

    Is this an old ad for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?

    1497:

    Charlie @1451: Sorry, comments touched a nerve. My mother's mother, my aunt and my mother all fought cancer, the first two to their deaths. When my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017, it nearly destroyed me, particularly as we were in the progress of moving back from Germany to the U.S. for a job change. On top of the normal stress, she had a toxic reaction to one of the chemo drugs that literally nearly killed her.

    We are now two years past her last chemo, and three years from surgery in October. Her diagnosis is good (no history of cancer in her family), but there are still daily drugs to inhibit vulnerable hormone receptors, and increased vigilance the rest of her life.

    CANCER SUCKS.

    1498:

    I dunno - maybe it's "heroes", like sportsball stars, or movie supeheroes.

    I've certainly told family and friends my idea of a real hero: the 1982 plane crash on the 14th St. bridge in DC: From wikipedia: "Priscilla Tirado was too weak to grab the line when the helicopter returned to her. A watching bystander, Congressional Budget Office assistant Lenny Skutnik, stripped off his coat and boots, and in short sleeves, dove into the icy water and swam out to successfully pull her to shore."

    I heard an interview with Skutnik about 10 or 15 years later. He called himself just a bureaucrat, and did what had to be done, was still a bureaucrat, never got a book deal, never got rich.

    But he did the right thing. That's what a hero is.

    1499:

    Well, the late, great Hindenburg was 600' long, and apparently they've gotten inflatables to fly at high Mach numbers in thin atmospheres, so the size isn't stupid, nor is the mission. Maybe.

    The things that strike me as daft are: --Landing. I'm not sure how you land a big balloon without it overheating, although to be fair, the biggest balloon stays out where the air is pretty thin. --Radiation shielding for the 35-odd people in the transfer station. --Transferring from one ship to another (long way to fall) --Assembling the orbiter at the station.

    Then again, this is someone trying to build and launch what's basically a dry dock or transfer station in (near) space, so if you think it's okay to build spaceships that never land, it's going to involve some version of this tech, even if it's not all about balloons.

    The nice thing about this is that at least we've got another alternative for phallic rockets blasting off into orbit.

    1500:

    @1496: And now for something completely different

    That's some fine Powerpoint engineering, that is. Must've been some good weed those fellas were smoking.

    First thoughts: - How do you sustain a working environment for the three chumps stuck at 140,000 feet? How much payload does that leave for launches to orbit? What's the transit time from launch to mission altitude? - What's the payload capacity of the transfer vehicle? 6000' long - how do you build a structure to carry a load at that length and to the required low weight? Just what is this "hybrid chemical/electric propulsion" system you use? - How are the orbital vehicles constructed at 140,000 feet (42.4km) altitude? How do you deal with variations in the atmosphere due to solar activity?

    [N.B. I wrote the first DOD technical evaluation of the High Frontier concept from the Hoover Institution that later morphed into the Strategic Defense Initiative, so maybe my "this is bullshit" mojo is not so strong. Among other things, I pointed out that having over 400 satellites in LEO ready to shoot down missiles with very little human intervention amounted to having a veto of ANYONE launching ANYTHING to orbit.]

    1501:

    Me @1501: Sorry, that was the Heritage Foundation, not the Hoover Institute. It WAS nearly 40 years ago.

    1502:

    What do you have against phallic rockets blasting into space? https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/flesh-gordon.jpg

    1503:

    Well, full disclosure, I was thinking about steampunk airship design for RPG, thought about the Phoenix Lights and the Black triangles for alternate designs,and stumbled onto these guys.

    That Ascender makes a really good airship, under RPG rules, because it's got a lift bag volume on order of the Hindenburg. That's around 232 tons lifting capacity. The total gross weight of the Hindenburg was around 215 tons, "with fuel, equipment, 10,000 kg (22,000 lb) of mail and cargo, about 90 passengers and crew and their luggage" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg-class_airship#Lift_gas). Basically, the Ascender is a long, thin airship, bent double, which makes it more aerodynamic and more compact.

    I'm comparing it to the Hindenburg because these will fly on hydrogen, not helium.*

    John Powell, the JP of JP Aeronautics is also pretty clear that the engineering challenges are substantial (https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32082/we-talk-giant-boomerang-shaped-airships-space-and-phoenix-lights-with-jp-aerospaces-founder): --They haven't gotten any balloon to operating altitude yet --They haven't gotten any design to even half the speed they'd need for the orbiter yet. --It's not clear how to build the orbiter, especially at 140,000 feet.

    Still, we have to be appropriately skeptical with similar technology: beanstalks, for example, or SSTO rockets. Or, for that matter, space shuttles, which ultimately had, what, a 50% failure rate over the lifetime of the vehicle?

    1504:

    *Forgot the note. Helium's wonderfully safe and increasingly rare. Since it's a byproduct of petroleum and natural gas extraction, and since we've been effing careless with conserving a rather limited supply of it, we need to assume that, absent (cold) fusion, we're going to run out of helium this century and be stuck with hydrogen for all our lifting gas needs. But heck, for ease of manufacture and getting stuff to really high altitudes, hydrogen beats hydrazine.

    1505:

    The Shuttle: not fucking hardly.

    Two out of 135 missions.

    1506:

    Heteromeles NOT "Israel", please - "just" Benny N & his gang of corruot mobsters, clinging to power to avoid jail ... hmm - that sounds familiar, doesn't it? Now I'v realised what I've typed, I worry. Could Bennie & the Dump cook up a short vicrorious mass murder in order to cling to office? And would they get away with it, even if it did kick off?

    [ Really nasty possibility - both Iran & Israel have working nukes at the point of ignition ... ]

    1507:

    Helium is not rare, it's a more common constituent in the atmosphere than xenon. Cheap helium is being produced in quantity as a byproduct of other people's natural gas industries (like the Russians and Qataris). Helium production is no longer a US monopoly, a good thing since, frankly, the US is crazy and not a reliable trading partner any more.

    1508:

    Israel interfered enough in American politics to destroy it, in the process turning support for Israel in the US from bipartisan to partisan, and doing serious damage to the international reputation of the US as a negotiation partner.

    Damage which Trump has completed. Bluntly: nobody can now rely on the USA to stick to international agreements beyond the term in office of the POTUS who signs them.

    (This has always been potentially the case, but by convention Dem presidents honoured treaties negotiated by Rep presidents and -- generally -- vice versa. The convention has now been shattered, wilfully, due to Trump's racism and narcissistic desire to stomp Obama's historic rep into the dirt.)

    The problem now is that previously, Iran thought it was possible to negotiate with the USA; now the comforting illusion has been replaced by the certainty that the ability to engage in nuclear retaliation is the only guarantee of safety.

    But that's a very US-centric view, and Iran doesn't take a US-centric view of international relations: Iran, as the pre-eminent Shi'ite power, is engaged in an existential long-term struggle against Salafism and fundamentalism. Saudi has allied itself with Israel, and Israeli politics on the right demands a plausible threat to justify the continuing militarization of society and rule by a general (because that's basically what Benjamin Netenyahu is: a general-turned-politician). So prodding Iran into going back to developing nukes is actually a policy goal for Likud.

    As for Saudi Arabia they've got more urgent problems. On the one hand, they allegedly bankrolled the Pakistani nuclear program and could plausibly get hold of nukes (and probably NATO-supplied delivery systems) at short notice. Local deterrence is a given. On the other hand, they're staring into the abyss of collapsing oil prices. Iran has both an agricultural sector and a manufacturing economy to fall back on: that's not something Saudi Arabia is noted for.

    1509:

    CANCER SUCKS.

    Seconded wholeheartedly.

    And? I'm apparently a high risk candidate for colon cancer. My paternal grandfather's death certificate in 1963 said "generalised carcinomatosis of the abdomen" -- this was before modern classifications were introduced. My father was a colorectal cancer survivor when he died (at 93, of something else). And a sibling had a bad scare with a malignant polyp -- but is officially cancer-free. That's three generations, first-degree relatives, ergo high risk.

    It's our booby prize for living long enough, I guess.

    1510:

    It's a specific pointer to NHS key workers and fire services -- essential emergency services. You may have missed all the "clap for the NHS" nonsense Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock came up with during the peak of the pandemic to distract from the medical staff dying due to lack of protective equipment?

    Nursing and medicine are low-pay professions in the UK -- at least, compared to the USA and to comparable intensive-education/safety critical professions -- so "NHS heroes" is a thing in politics. Shame the Tories are trying to privatize it piecemeal ...

    The same rhetoric also gets applied, to varying degrees, to the fire and ambulance services (NB: in the UK, ambulances are free, because why wouldn't they be in any sane civilized society?), other rescue services (e.g. mountain rescue, RNLI), teachers, police (by the conservative/authoritarian right) etc. Basically anyone employed at poor wages to do a highly skilled, technically demanding, safety-critical job that puts their life at risk (and some where it doesn't).

    1511:

    "They post videos because they can't be arsed to write about something and think doing a video is easier. "

    I have a simple test: if the first word they utter is "so", it's also the last as far as I'm concerned.

    1512:

    Not all war-goods travel by ship....after the exothermic things land, and troops fly in coach, the next transport plane in, always carries batteries (portable power) https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2003/9/1/2003september-battery-supplies-ran-dangerously-low-in-iraq

    not this (missing) battery https://www.iraqicivilsociety.org/archives/4946 evidence of aliens in the bronze-age?

    1513:

    God help us, yes, but Israel has also done something very similar to the UK, though to a lesser degree, and that was quite possibly the main factor in getting Johnson his landslide. Politics here has not broken down in the same way or (yet) to the same extent, and there were other factors in causing that, but we're getting there :-(

    Come 2021, I really, really hope that I can echo you and say "I am really glad I got this wrong."

    Also Greg Tingey is wrong. Netanyahu, like Putin, Johnson and Trump, is merely a creature of his political system and a natural progression from his predecessors.

    1514:

    A piling on plus a contrarian point of view.

    Normally I'm with Charlie. Give me text with an illustration or two. Don't make me sit through a presentation for 5 or 10 minutes that a few paragraphs can handle.

    And PLEASE those 15 minutes YouTube videos by a "doctor" showing you why tests with mice have proven that leisure suits cause cancer.[1]

    On the other hand I'm a big fan of NPR radio podcasts. Having them play while I drive or mow the yard or whatever let's me catch up on things I'd otherwise miss.

    Then this morning I was trying to figure out what van to rent for the next week. Specs are OK but in general somewhat useless for something I rarely deal with. So after some Google searching and YouTube videos by various car dealers showing off their vans I can now pick what to rent that will work for me.

    There is an episode of an early cable only TV satire show about a small town late night talk show. Satire on steroids. Here's the clip on Leisure Suits Cause cancer. It's worth watching all the way through. It's only 4 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAJmwL0a2B8

    1515:

    Sorry. That last paragraph was supposed to be foot note [1].

    1516:

    The Shuttle: not fucking hardly.

    Two out of 135 missions.

    For lots of numbers relevant to space launch vehicles, see

    https://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2020.html#rate

    particularly the tables

    ACTIVE LAUNCH VEHICLE RELIABILITY STATISTICS

    and, relevant to STS,

    RETIRED LAUNCH VEHICLE RELIABILITY STATISTICS

    which gives 97% for the "Lewis Point Estimate" for the Shuttle, essentially the single-launch probability of success. That's actually not bad when compared to other SLVs, but they tend to be a risky lot.

    1517:

    You're missing something important on the subject of the Iranian nuclear agreement, and that is that under our Constitution all U.S. treaties must be BOTH signed by the president AND ratified by the Senate. Once a treaty is ratified by the Senate it becomes an actual law. Merely signing a treaty does not give it legal status under U.S. law.

    Obama signed the agreement. The Senate, under Moscow Mitch McConnell, refused to ratify it, both because they're exceedingly stupid warhawks, and also because McConnell was determined that he would not give the Obama administration any policy victories. Thus the "treaty" never became U.S. law, which meant that Trump (or any other president) could throw the agreement away any time he wished to, without violating the law.

    This was an obvious, known failure mode from the moment the agreement was signed, and it is not the least surprising that a Republican president treated the agreement like soggy toilet paper, because legally speaking it was soggy toilet paper and did not bind the U.S. government.

    All that being said, I think the Obama administration did a great job on the agreement and the Republicans who refused to sign it were pretty much insane, but it literally was not a treaty.

    1518:

    Saudi Arabia already has the delivery vehicles for any nuclear weapons it might “borrow” in the future - the Royal Saudi Strategic Missile Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Saudi_Strategic_Missile_Force

    1519:

    Oooh, I know how to power the ascender of that little piece of mad science. Build a dusty core reactor. You can use that as a rocket once you are in space, but that would be both irresponsible, and also insufficient trust in atmo. But.. the important thing about a dusty core reactor is that if rigged for direct power production (Basically, launch the fission fragments through coils and extract the energy as current) it weighs in at ten tonnes and outputs electricity in the gigawatt range.

    Which means you can move air with electric fields and get thrust that way. Lots of thrust.

    Uhm. I think you cant discard the balloon part - You need something pretty big to project fields with..

    I suppose you could just do an electric ram jet?

    1520:

    So what you're essentially saying is that countries should basically ignore treaties they sign with the US until ratified by the Senate.

    I suspect your First Nations would argue that even a treaty being ratified doesn't seem to bind the US government. Over 500 treaties ratified, all broken.

    1521:

    I don't know that I'd go that far. But I'd expect that any country with even a vaguely professional foreign service has some idea of the treaty-approval process for a country with which they are negotiating, and understands the actual point at which the treaty becomes law. I'd also expect that Iran was well-aware that the U.S. Senate under McConnell was unlikely to give Obama anything at all - Obama's fatal weakness was that he expected Republicans to behave intelligently and honourably in matters of national interest.*

    And yes, all the failed treaties with the First Nations are a national disgrace, and have been from their conception; the difficulty in restraining the general population from heading west into "Indian Territory" and setting up farms or ranches was well known at the time.

    *Hypothetically, if Obama had captured a thousand Islamic terrorists, had them all tied to phone poles, then walked down the row of terrorists with a shot gun, blowing off the testicles of each guerrilla, and 999 of the terrorists had died from this rough treatment... the next day the Republican-controlled House and Senate would have held hearings on why the Kenyan-Mooslim Terrorist Presnit let a terrorist live.

    1522:

    "The problem now is that previously, Iran thought it was possible to negotiate with the USA; now the comforting illusion has been replaced by the certainty that the ability to engage in nuclear retaliation is the only guarantee of safety."

    The indian vice-foreign minister said the quiet part aloud some years ago "You can only negotiate with USA if you have nuclear weapons"

    1523:

    "all U.S. treaties must be BOTH signed by the president AND ratified by the Senate. Once a treaty is ratified by the Senate it becomes an actual law. Merely signing a treaty does not give it legal status under U.S. law."

    Indeed, that should be well known in diplomatic circles as being something to watch out for, after all the people who got bitten by it after Versailles.

    1524:

    Charlie IIRC in Germany, you have to apy for ambulances (!) One of our group, several years back, became badly (short-term ) ill & had to go to hospital. The treatment was covered by EHIC ( FUCK the tories & Brexit, again, incidentally ) - but he had to pay for the ambulance ...

    EC Fundamnetally disagree about Benny. He was ( Or so it seems ) going to stay in NYC & make money ... then the religious loonies had a brain fart & kidnapped a whole plane load of "jews" - Entebbe ... & Bennie's brother was killed in the raid ( He was one of the rescue squad, I think ) So Bennie decided to go into Israeli politics with the sole object of cerrying the retaliation "game" on forever .... Johnson is not a natural succession & to some extent, neither is DT - but far too many people ar still being taken in by BoZO's act

    1525:
    They don't take notes by hand these days, do they?

    Depends; hm, I guess I won't go into my thoughts about mental hygiene (German term would be "Psychohygiene", learned it from a Ijon Tichy story by Stanislaw Lem, sadly, no suitable links in English language found, closest term would be "salutogenesis"), nosology and the biological basis of personality and body types.

    Nice thing of having a lot of time at hand it quite a lot of memories and associations coming up, categorizing it is somewhat taxing.

    I'll have to clean the "Katzenklo", err, litter box (link to a German nonsense song by Helge Schneider), so I'll keep it (somewhat) short and describe the current situation.

    My landlord/cohabitant and me decided I'll stay till the End of August; after that, I'll move to my parents, the tent I erected to self-isolate when I suspected I might have gotten COVID-19 is still in the garden, we discovered it's somewhat leaky (so, renew the impregnation), and I'll put up a hypocaust-like structure to protect the books and computer I'll have there from flooding and like. September is quite nice, for me it's still warm enough to go swimming in Rhein-Herne canal, the water is quite clear, I wonder if I'll do some (very cautious, there are ships nearby) snorkeling. Also, stargazing, maybe take up birdwatching. And playing chess and watching some East Asian movies with my father.

    I can't keep my job (working at a storeroom for laboratory supplies ATM, no career possibilities), we're doing early and late shifts to have a fallback if one shift is in quarantine, shifts change weekly, and tomorrow it starts at 6 o'clock; commuting from the Ruhr for that is impossible. I already talked to the temporary employment agency, they also work in the Ruhrgebiet, but I want to be fired, and they said it's OK.

    German law says you need to have worked 12 months in the last 24 months if you want to get < href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeitslosengeld_(Deutschland)">"Arbeitslosengeld 1" or ALG I. Basically, the dole, but you can stay a student and the PTB don't harass you as much as with ALG II or Hartz 4. According to my calculations, that's going to be the case end of July, one extra month to be on the safe, earn a little extra money and get more ALG I (it's calculated according to the mean income from the last few month, and I was unemployed for some months in this time but didn't apply for Hartz 4, usually I get a job quite quickly).

    Problem is, you can't terminate the employment yourself, or you are blocked for about 3 months from getting ALG I; at the moment, I'd get 6 months of ALG I, with blocking time, I'd get no money for the first 3 months and then only for the last 3 months; they would still pay health insurance, though, where I'd have to pay it myself if I were unemployed and didn't get ALG I or Hartz 4. If your employer fires you, there usually is no blocking time, and the firm said they'd employ me again, so there is another fallback.

    In March I got a nice offer for an job with on-site IT support, the lockdown interrupted it, and last I heard, it was cancelled; I'll try to get a job with IT again, not having to look for the 2 or more weeks notice period most work contracts have will help. Of course, plan A is becoming a teacher, should work for biology; universities did a lot work to implement online courses this year, so I might be able to do one course with mathematics, though I guess it won't be enough to apply as a teacher of mathematics, which are quite high in demand.

    Problem is, I missed the date for lateral entrants for the first half of the school year, so I'll have to wait a little bit, about 6 months according to my teacher brother, about the time I get ALG I. Serves me well, I'll get into contact with a few old friends, and to compress quite an emotional mess and long text, I guess all involved will work it out and, err, "find a way".

    My first calculations indicate ALG I should pay my rents and quite a few hobbies.

    So can we agree it actually fits quite well at the moment, though as one of the Moltkes once said, "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength", usually shortened to "No plan survives first contact with the enemy."

    On another note, I found a silicone filter mask that fits N3703 filter pads. they are quite cheap and AFAIK equivalent to N95.

    I tried to see Neowise yesterday, but it seems exactly that area was cloudy, since apparantly I could see the tail of Ursa Mayor but not the front and Lynx, err, hope I looked in the right place. Maybe I can see it in the next days. I wake up at 3 o'clock when doing early shift.

    It was quite nice walking at night, and somehow the melody from Stella's "The Harbour" came up, damn, I have the CD in storage somewhere, see rents, at the time there was a hype, it might be not to everybody's taste.

    Being somewhat older, the style of the singer reminds me somewhat of Nico, but people might differ, and I digress...

    1526:

    The ambulance needs to be paid, but if there was a "medical necessity", it's usually paid by health insurance. You can also take a taxi and they pay it in that case.

    Problem is if you could get to the hospital yourself, though the specifics are somewhat tricky; also, I have no idea how the NHS thought about paying the rent.

    Hm, now is the time the homeless get drunk in the streets and don't shelter from the sun, last time an ambulance was called, they already knew the guy, getting money should have been different; in any case, he didn't want to go to the hospital.

    1527:

    Netanyahu is only a minor progression from his predecessors - he is merely more obvious about it. Your comments smack of revisionism.

    And YOU may not have expected people like Johnson and Trump, but I did, and I have been despairing of the direction we have been heading for three decades now. Our politics in the two decades before that was pretty bad, but it wasn't progressing in a single, ghastly direction.

    1528:

    EC How very convenient that you were correct! Excuse my cynicism. Neither DT or BoZo was actually inevitable - & I was quite aware that arseholes like them were around - but in actual postions of power? You have to be joking! OTOH, can anyone explain why or how people like Mark Francois or Nadine Dorries even get selected, never mind elected? Then there's Grayling or Corbyn - fundamentally totally incompetenet & whom I would not trust with a second-hand bog-brush

    1529:

    Charlie Stross @ 1452: For deployment, US army troops mostly fly United, Delta, or American, while their kit travels on ships. IIRC, a modern US army mechanized brigade has an all-up weight on the order of a quarter of a million tons of armour and consumes roughly 1000 tons of fuel and ammunition per hour while it's advancing: it'd take every LHD in the US navy to transport just one of them, never mind keep them supplied.

    United, Delta and American don't usually fly into combat zones. Most troop deployments go by chartered aircraft. They only use the Airlines when they're moving small numbers of soldiers (usually < 100) within CONUS. Even then they might use a C-130 or a C-17 if the Air National Guard needed to get in training flight hours.

    When our 5,000+ brigade deployed to Iraq in 2004, we flew on ~ 25 charter flights. The limiting factor was the number of aircraft the airport in Kuwait could handle on their cargo ramp at one time.

    1530:

    This study out of Korea tracking covid-19 transmission and rates of infection among school children is important reading for everyone, but particularly for those with school age children and those who teach them.

    It is long, and it is in the NY Times, which limits access numbers, but it also contains many links to other studies and research work.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html

    "Older Children Spread the Coronavirus Just as Much as Adults, Large Study Finds The study of nearly 65,000 people in South Korea suggests that school reopenings will trigger more outbreaks."

    In the heated debate over reopening schools, one burning question has been whether and how efficiently children can spread the virus to others.

    A large new study from South Korea offers an answer: Children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often than adults do, but the risk is not zero. And those between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do.

    The findings suggest that as schools reopen, communities will see clusters of infection take root that include children of all ages, several experts cautioned.

    “I fear that there has been this sense that kids just won’t get infected or don’t get infected in the same way as adults and that, therefore, they’re almost like a bubbled population,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.

    “There will be transmission,” Dr. Osterholm said. “What we have to do is accept that now and include that in our plans.”[....]

    The study is more worrisome for children in middle and high school. This group was even more likely to infect others than adults were, the study found. But some experts said that finding may be a fluke or may stem from the children’s behaviors.

    These older children are frequently as big as adults, and yet may have some of the same unhygienic habits as young children do. They may also have been more likely than the younger children to socialize with their peers within the high-rise complexes in South Korea.

    “We can speculate all day about this, but we just don’t know,” Dr. Osterholm said. “The bottom line message is: There’s going to be transmission.”[....]

    1531:

    whitroth @ 1487: "Herd immunity", is that like a herd of lemmings running towards the cliff?

    The Disney film was "staged" - fake news if you will - so, "herd immunity" is a mirage. Herd immunity is what survivors have if the "PTB" DON'T have a plan for coping with a pandemic.

    1533:

    Heteromeles @ 1495: And now for something completely different: has anyone heard of JP Aerospace, and their "airship to orbit" plan? (http://www.jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf). It looks daft enough to be interesting, but not beanstalk-level daft.

    The website's still up. What I'm curious about is, since JPA had contracts with the DoD, whether they were simply part of the DoD's flirtation with "black triangles" (the really big, black airships that showed up in the nineties and the oughts), or whether this is something ongoing that might conceivably work.

    Heck, if you want to jump into the Conspiracy Singularity, perhaps the US Space Force is already using this system, with sky forts with active optical camouflage at 140,000 feet? Yeah, I don't think so either, but the ships look cool and different.

    I'm thinking probably DARPA money. DARPA funds A LOT of strange, whacko projects. Most people don't realize how many different research projects DARPA funds that never take off.

    How many other computer research projects did DARPA fund along the way that did not become the internet.

    DARPA takes Edison's "10,000 ways that don't work" as just a starting point from which to fund research into another 10,000 ways hoping to see if maybe one of them WILL work.

    1534:

    "Low-pay professions" - in the US, in the late seventies, they were already pushing nurses to get a BS. Now, mostly, they do management, unless, say, they're surgery nurses.

    There's still the low-pay professions, bedpan emptier, home health aide, low-level nursing.

    It's all a friggin' game for money, here.

    1535:

    There's a couple things you may be missing: one, desperation for homes - not all the people stealing the West Bank land are ultraOrthodox scum.

    Another - I've read that much of Net-and-yahoo's base are recently (last 20 years) arrived extreme orthodox from eastern Europe and the FSU.

    1536:

    Take this plane to PLUTO?

    1537:
  • What, you mean leisure suits don't cause cancer? (Nice white belt, there...)

  • Renting a van, or a truck? Feel free to email me: I own a large minivan have owned smaller full-sized vans (Ford #-150), driven vans both for a job, and for cons, and trucks. I can advise you.

  • 1538:

    That's completely untrue.

    It's all 301 treaties with the Native Americans the US broke.

    Oh, that's right, we kept our side: we took their land.

    1539:

    Guy, do I have to add [humor]/[satire] tags to my posts?

    1540:

    I am aware of both of those, but what I said is true. Israel was justified in occupying the rest of Palestine in 1967, but should have done so as a protectorate - and would have got UN approval for that on the nod. The atrocious behaviour did not start immediately (well, not officially) but started earlier than most Israel apologists admit (c. 1980). It was effectively official policy by 1987.

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

    1541:

    The dusty core is much higher power/weight than the Pluto reactor, because it has much laxer thermal limits - Most of the energy exits the core as fission fragments, and the part of the energy output that is thermal gets deposited in nano-scale ceramic dust that has no structural load on it and can therefor be allowed to reach silly temperatures - as long as it does not actually evaporate into gas phase, all is good. The issue comes with converting "All of the electricity" into thrust. I think if you have a very large and very light balloon at high altitude you can do Electrohydrodynamics and get thrust even with very low air density. - Especially since the reactor naturally outputs stupidly high direct current voltages.

    1542:

    http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/05/the-scottish-political-singula-1.html

    See #97. And, if you don't know why those shits got elected, you haven't been paying attention.

    1543:

    This seems to surface every few years. Last time it was all about using what little atmosphere there was at altitude as the reaction mass and some kind of electric field to generate the thrust from it. Same sort of principle as ion lifters, and the same drawbacks with the requirement for a lot of power. Rough sums on one of the sci.space.* newsgroups indicated that even with the whole upper surface covered in magic (very high % conversion and almost no weight) solar cells it was a long way short of the power required. This version has added some sort of chemical engines which is presumably to drop the power consumption.

    The 9 hours to reach orbit means the solar power input will be less than optimal. Launching to the east as for a normal rocket trajectory will mean sunset for the vehicle will occur sooner, they'll need to launch at local dawn and peak insolation will be midway through the flight.

    1544:

    Bennie's brother was killed in the raid ( He was one of the rescue squad, I think )

    Yonathan Netanyahu wasn't merely "one of the rescue squad" -- he was the Lt-Col commanding Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli counterpart of the SAS (on which it was expressly based), which carried out the mission. He was also the only Israeli casualty of the Entebbe operation.

    Benny Netanyahu was an academic high-flyer (did an MA at MIT in two years instead of the usual four) and a special forces officer in his own right, but not exactly the guy tipped for overall command of the army. He also responded to Yonatan's death much as Vladimir Lenin responded to his elder brother's execution, i.e. by becoming brutally radicalized.

    It's probable that we ended up in the time line that got the wrong Netanyahu.

    1545:

    See #97

    I think we've lucked out unbelievably well insofar as Salmond self-destructed, but left behind an extremely impressive successor who seems to have all the gravitas and attention to detail that Johnson lacks. (Observers of how leaders handle COVID19 medical updates and public briefings compare her to Angela Merkel.)

    1546:

    Which is why I want to drop the solar cells and use a completely bonkers nuclear power plant instead.

    http://www.rbsp.info/rbs/PDF/aiaa05.pdf 10 tonnes, one gigawatt thermal limit, 90+ % output as electricity. So 900 MW continuous power. That should do it, right? Or if not, just add more, they dont weigh much.

    1547:

    EC @ 1540 IIRC after the 1967 war the then Israeli government offered "Land for peace" - Israel would keep Jerusalem, but Egypt, Syria & Jordan could have all the rest back, in return for full diplomatic recognition & a cessation of attacks. The "arabs" turned it down flat & kept on attacking - thus starting the ongoing repetition & escalation & the drift towards ultr-militarism that we see now.

    EC @ 1542 Yes, so & more bollocks ... so, they are snake-oil salesmen ... And?

    CHarlie Thanks for the clarification "Brutally radicalised" - yes, in response to "the arabs" utter wilful stupidity. It really look as though it was going to stop, breifly in 1967-8, but no "God has given us this land"

    And yes - the female leaders doing well with C-19 Much as I dislike the Wee Fiswife, she's been surprisingly good, of late. Hope she's got the sense to modify or kill this stupid "hate speech" bill, though. [ For others, see The National Secular Society website as to why it's a supid idea ]

    1548:
    Israel would keep Jerusalem

    Leaving aside there are quite a few other issues involved, that alone is something of a dealbreaker.

    So I'll steal the idea of another cohabitant of mine, let's take Jerusalem from all involved and leave the administration to kuk Austria. Being hated by everybody shouldn't be new to them...

    1549:

    Yes. I liked Salmond, because he made Cameron look like the fool he was, but he was not really much more competent or decent than Johnson. As you say, Sturgeon is more what a political leader should be.

    1550:

    I think we should simply nuke Jerusalem. Get rid of the whole place. "If you guys can't share, it's going up on a shelf!"

    1551:

    Err, the failed archaeologist in me objects, nuking Jerusalem would be just like nuking Rome. Hm...

    Let's declare it a archaeological heritage site and do what we do with those and the zoological variety in Africa; move the people out and leave it that way; actual digging destroys the artifacts. And no visitors, they just disturb things.

    1552:

    I think you may have confused the ascender and the orbiter. The system is an ascender airship that goes from ground level to 140,000 feet (which is still 50,000 higher than the airship record, but what the heck). Then the ascender docks with a station at 140,000 ft. The load is transferred to the orbiter that takes it from 140,000 feet (26 miles or so) to above the atmosphere.

    The only orbiter I'm familiar with is a roughly mile-long V of a ship with six or so electric rockets on it that accelerates eventually up to Mach 14 at the top of the atmosphere and beyond (the record for an airship design is reportedly Mach 7 at the equivalent of 96 miles up(???)). Not sure how you flip a V-shaped orbiter around to decelerate, especially in the atmosphere, but mere details.

    This orbiter is probably where nukes are most useful. As I noted before, the ascender's supposed to be the size of the Hindenburg, and it goes up vertically around 26 miles. Not sure there's much use of putting a nuclear thruster on the ascender, but it would do better on the top end.

    1553:

    One theory I’ve heard: When narcissistic cult leaders go down they like to take others with them. Jim Jones had poisoned punch, Hitler had his “scorched earth” policy, and Trump is deliberately doing all he can to make the plague worse.

    1554:

    Yeah, as others have said, Jerusalem is the problem - the Israelis absolutely will not share.

    Never mind that for most of the last 2000 years, there was the Jewish quarter....

    1555:

    A Solomonic solution to Jerusalem may be useful*:

    One side decides where the beginning and the end points of the line of division are to be.

    The line gets drawn between the two points as a modified drunkard's walk, going down streets and avoiding structures.

    The other side gets to pick which side they want.

    We could alternatively do the Stephen King solution: put Jerusalem under a dome for seven years, and declare the survivors as the rightful rulers of the city. This might also be useful.*

    *Useful to no one, that is.

    1556:

    EC Actually Starmer is what a political leader should be .....

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Ah yes, a possible drug for treating one of the really nasty side-effects of C-19 "fenofibrate" - supposed to help the lungs to burn up "stuff" faster, so they keep open & not glogged up. Maybe.

    I see the torygraph has bought the rightwing line about the lockdown killing more people ... oh dear.

    1557:

    Sure: give the Israelis the Jewish Quarter, the Palestinians the Muslim Quarter, and put the Christian and Armenian Quarters under international control - say, like Trieste.

    1558:

    Minor nitpick with your language here:

    I think the Obama administration did a great job on the agreement and the Republicans who refused to sign it were pretty much insane, but it literally was not a treaty.

    From the Wikipedia entry for "Treaty" under the heading of United States:

    In the United States, the term "treaty" has a different, more restricted legal sense than in international law. US law distinguishes what it calls "treaties" from "executive agreements", which are either "congressional-executive agreements" or "sole executive agreements". The classes are all equally treaties under international law; they are distinct only in internal US law.

    In other words, all countries require ratification, it's only the USA that doesn't call it a treaty unless it is ratified (possibly because the situation where the executive negotiates and signs a treaty that is not later ratified by the legislature is rare in other countries). More broadly and further, the USA is in the minority of countries whose approach to international law is classified as monist, that is domestic and international law are seen as more or less continuous with each other and ratifying a treaty creates domestic law. The majority of countries, including all of the Commonwealth, have a dualist approach: domestic and international law are separate things, and you need "accession" or "implementation" legislation to create domestic law to match the treaty; ratification alone isn't enough to make it into domestic law.

    1559:

    A large new study from South Korea offers an answer: Children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often than adults do, but the risk is not zero. And those between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do.

    In one corner of my mind I think just maybe these results are due to the height or lack there of of the younger ones.

    1561:

    Way back in ancient of days there was an editorial I read about one of the arms treaties between the US and USSR. I think it was SALT-II but can't be sure.

    The Senate was all upset that we had agreed to not keep enough weapons to blow up the world multiple times over and not have a 1000 to 1 advantage over the USSR. So various Senators were pontificating about amendments they would add to the treaty.

    The title of the editorial was along the lines of "The Milk Maid from Minsk". The point being that for every amendment the Senate added there was sure to be some unknown member of the USSR legislative body would offer up some amendment that the USSR would require before ratification. Said unknown member being the proverbial "milk maid from Minsk".

    1562:

    Renting a van, or a truck? Feel free to email me:

    I found what I needed to find. 10' rear space with no seats or anything else in it but wheel wells.

    1563:

    A Solomonic solution to Jerusalem

    To the whole Palestine/Israel question might be better. Let the most rabid Zionists negotiate with the self-hating Jews and the Israeli-Palestinians and every other element of Israeli society to come up with a division none of them are willing to kill over. Then let the Palestinians decide which half they want.

    Rather than having a bunch of Christian warmongers (the kuk) who are surely biased, we should pick a non-involved but heavily armed nation to administer the area? I'm sure if we asked nicely enough Aztecs could be found to reintroduce their civil order and provide the necessary bureacrazy. Or you could use the Nepalese, they have a bit of a history in the mercenaries-applying-colonialism business.

    I am also reminded of the ladder in the Church of the Nativity as an example of the current level of cooperation between religions in the area. You might not like it, but it's hard to argue that it's reduced the death rate. Well, the rate of violent deaths, anyway, given the age of those involved I expect the death rate is pretty high.

    1564:

    In one corner of my mind I think just maybe these results are due to the height or lack there of of the younger ones.

    Wouldn't rule it out, but I also wonder if puberty might be a factor. The Florida figures that were discussed up thread including 4 child deaths - and those 4 were all post-puberty age groups.

    So maybe younger kids are lacking something that Covid relies on.

    1565:

    Re: "privatisation of heroes"

    From what little I've read about this topic, this phrase means that family and friends get together to promote a person as a hero - someone special. This often includes some physical symbol, i.e., statue, building which the rest of that particular population probably typically ignores but which over time becomes part of the background (culture) of that neck of the woods. (Leave a statue somewhere long enough and you too can write/create your own history - and even force your personal version of history down your neighbors' throats!)

    Privatisation in this case also means that there's often a direct personal relationship/line between the 'hero' and whoever says that this person is a 'hero', i.e, direct interpersonal interaction. This relationship is closer than between a music fan and his/her pop idol where there's seldom any meaningful direct interaction.

    1566:

    "...NZ tried the "one leetle exemption to the rules won't hurt, really" thing and they ended up with a infected British couple driving most of the length of North Island..."

    Minor correction, just for the sake of accuracy... If I remember the later reports correctly, the escapees were NZ citizens, just returned from Britain.

    I also remember reading one of their excuses for stopping on the way to meet some friends. Apparently they got lost finding their way out of the city and needed to ask for directions.

    1567:

    Apparently they got lost finding their way out of the city and needed to ask for directions.

    Too bad there isn't some common technological means of navigating strange places, which could possibly double as a telecommunications device…

    1568:

    Re: ' ... closest term would be "salutogenesis")'

    Maybe 'resilience'?

    This concept/approach has been popping up pretty consistently in psych literature especially in relation to PTSD like the 2013 review below.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3691279/

    'The Effect of Resilience on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Trauma-Exposed Inner-City Primary Care Patients

    Abstract

    Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has previously been associated with increased risk for a variety of chronic medical conditions and it is often underdiagnosed in minority civilian populations. The current study examined the effects of resilience on the likelihood of having a diagnosis of PTSD in an inner-city sample of primary care patients (n = 767). We measured resilience with the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, trauma with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and Trauma Events Inventory, and assessed for PTSD with the modified PTSD symptom scale. Multiple logistic regression model with presence/absence of PTSD as the outcome yielded 3 significant factors: childhood abuse, nonchild abuse trauma, and resilience. One type of childhood abuse in moderate to severe range (OR, 2.01; p = .0001), 2 or more types of childhood abuse in moderate to severe range (OR, 4.00; p ≤ .0001), and 2 or more types of nonchildhood abuse trauma exposure (OR, 3.33; p ≤ .0001), were significantly associated with an increased likelihood of PTSD, while resilience was robustly and significantly associated with a decreased likelihood of PTSD (OR, 0.93; p ≤ .0001). By understanding the role of resilience in recovery from adverse experiences, improved treatment and interventional methods may be developed. Furthermore, these results suggest a role for assessing resilience in highly traumatized primary care populations as a way to better characterize risk for PTSD and direct screening/psychiatric referral efforts.'

    Here's the 'resilience' test referred to above.

    https://positivepsychology.com/connor-davidson-brief-resilience-scale/

    There's been a lot of debate about the medical risk of opening schools this Fall. The experts seem somewhat unsure about the extent of the physiological risk but most seem pretty sure about the extent of the potential psychological risk (and eventual medical risks later on) if kids don't go back to school. There are too many kids in our society that are barely surviving - physically and emotionally - and schools are the most effective safety nets we've got for them.

    Another trolley problem writ large because the PTB prefer to not invest in community level social infrastructure.

    1569:

    It's one of the variants of the good old Farnsworth fusor device.

    Lots of argument over whether those devices are all inherently doomed to leak energy far faster than they can ever produce it, or whether some variants can exist that are usefully continent, but a depressing lack of usefully enthusiastic experimentation to try and actually settle the point.

    1570:

    Yes, "Resilience" would be another term, but it's used quite frequently, and at least for me, there isn't this implication of staying sane/healthy, it's more like dealing with stressful events and having some fallback and like.

    For the schools, there are indications the effect of socioeconomic standing of parents got bigger again after lockdown.

    Sorry, on my way to work, last thing, I looked out of the window for Neowise, and it's raining. Grrr...

    1571:
    self-hating Jews

    Hm, could we call Priti Patel a "self-hating Southern Asian"?

    Sorry, way to work...

    1572:

    For the schools, there are indications the effect of socioeconomic standing of parents got bigger again after lockdown.

    Oh, I'd say the results are a bit more conclusive than "indications"… at least in Toronto.

    1573:

    I was under the impression that the phrase "self-hating Jews" was on par with SJW; in other words, Jews who care about anyone and anything other than Eretz Israel (the extremists want that - kick out the Palestinians who've been there for a thousand or two thousand year, and move then all to Lebanon and/or Jordan).

    1574:

    It's certainly usually used in that way, but...

    I'm posting from my smartphone, so links are difficult, but there was an antisemitic Neo-Nazi group in the Israeli army, people who follow OGH on twitter may remember them:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrol_36

    The trope is not only with Jews, I even once met a Polish guy who wanted Hitler to reinvade Poland. Speaking about it, I noted the current junta, err, gouvernment would be in camps under Pilsudski:

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

    Look what happened to those guys: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democracy

    1575:

    I don't doubt that you're right about international law. However, it was the lack of ratification which under U.S. law allowed Trump to unilaterally cancel the treaty. Had the treaty been ratified, Trump would not have had that option. (Whether he would have done something else is up for grabs.)

    1576:

    Speaking of NZ - and for your ammusement - see this being reported in New Zealand: "NZ First leader Winston Peters has confirmed that the UK political operatives who worked on the Brexit campaign are helping his party this election." and "Peters, speaking on RNZ on Monday morning, said a contract had been signed with wealthy United Kingdom businessman Arron Banks and political activist Andy Wigmore – the self-described “Bad Boys of Brexit” – who were behind the Leave.EU​ campaign."

    For the full article - https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/122181820/winston-peters-confirms-brexit-political-operatives-working-for-nz-first-campaign

    And Peter's motivation - at present the "NZ First" party is below the threshold that in that it will return to Parliament after the NZ general elections that occurs in NZ in approx 61 days from how.

    1577:

    Sorry - last paragraph should read "...below the threshold that it needs to return to Parliament after..."

    1578:

    My best wishes to your wife - I'm two years past surgery, and the hormone-blocker brought back hot flashes. (But the pathology reports were all good, and all the follow-up tests are good.)

    1579:

    mdive So maybe younger kids are lacking something that Covid relies on. Yeah, post-pubescent stupidity, driven by hormones ....

    Rbt Prior I point-blank refuse to have anyhting to do with Shat-Nav in cars ... STOP & open the actual paper map, is much better.

    Trottelreiner No - simply: "hating"

    1580:

    Yes, well, Peters and the Brexit campaign have both been aimed at people pining for the "Good" Old Days, so they should find plenty in common.

    My dislike of Peters was sharpened by his demonstration, when for a little while while he was Acting Prime Minister instead of Deputy Prime Minister, that he is capable of being a statesman rather than a demagogue, but usually he has chosen the demagogue.

    JHomes.

    1581:

    The only good thing about Winston Peters is that in Australia I can point to him and say "we're still racist, but differently" and explain that Winston First is the equivalent to "Pauline Hanson's One Nation" and the chief racist is a Maori bloke. The idea of the Australian more-racist-than-thou uniting behind a first nations MP boggles the minds of most Australians.

    But honestly I would vote for Briggs in a heartbeat, even if (especially if?) his major policy was to deport whitey.

    Tim Minchin and Briggs do a funny song about quarantine: https://youtu.be/6nZQRt4BXr8

    Scotty from Marketing Standing there shuffling his papers Wondering why Jesus hasn't come to save us Looking at Peter Dutton like, "What the fuck's happening?" At least the Ruby Princess had a fuckin' captain

    1582:
    IIRC in Germany, you have to apy for ambulances (!)

    In France you have to pay for ambulances, that's to say medicalised vehicles used for transporting sick people, just like you have to pay for a hospital room.

    But if you're in an emergency the van with flashing lights that takes you to hospital, either a VSAV (Véhicule de secours et d'assistance aux victimes) from the sappeur-pompiers, or in extreme urgence a SMUR (Service mobile d'urgence et de réanimation), is not billed.

    (Of course, almost all the cost is reimbursed or paid by the securité sociale, and in most cases the rest is paid by your mutual health insurance, which is provided by all employers).

    1583:

    They do make decent neutron sources though. You can buy them off the shelf for that, subject to the usual restrictions on moving tritium across borders.

    Back of the fag packet calculation I did a while ago suggested there isn't much point in trying to scale them up for energy production but a neutron source you can switch off is still a pretty good thing to have.

    1584:

    STOP & open the actual paper map, is much better.

    For you. Sure. Great.

    So many times driving through strange cities, (and not so strange but not recent), sometimes at night when reading street signs is problematic, and the paper is out of date. For a while when going through Washington DC once or twice a month entire bridges over rivers would close down and re-open from trip to trip. And there was that time that a few elevated blocks of Pennsylvanian Ave was REMOVED between trips.

    And even here locally they are rebuilding a sections of our loop around town and literally day to day things close and re-open.

    You like paper, great. For some of us it just doesn't work. Soon over a 10 day period I'll be driving 2500 miles. Paper. No thanks.

    But to each his own. One size does NOT fit all.

    Oh, and those red colored routes are handy to know about.

    1585:

    I can completely understand the two returning kiwis getting to where they did. Get confused by the on ramp that they should have taken being one of those roundabout by-passes rather than coming off the roundabout proper, so get on the motorway going the opposite direction. Ignore the next two off ramps that are clearly for Auckland city, take next 'off ramp' that is actually the connection to another motorway, then exit motorway. Stressed and confused, not trusting the instructions that you thought you understood. They should never have been put in that position. The plan was supposedly for them to drive 6 hours or so without stopping - possible, but should not have been the plan. They needed an escort and planned stops. Authorities stuffed up.

    1586:

    Moz, To the whole Palestine/Israel question might be better. Let the most rabid Zionists negotiate with the self-hating Jews and the Israeli-Palestinians and

    Yellow card.

    Specifically: the term "self-hating Jew" is a derogatory dog-whistle invented by evangelical Christians to denounce anyone of Jewish ancestry who doesn't buy into their apocalyptic eschatological checklist (Jews have to return to the Kingdom of Israel then convert to Christianity: Jesus returns, any who refused to convert go in the fiery lake for eternity). It's also used by Likudniks to condemn anyone who maybe doesn't think that establishing a western apartheid state in the Middle East is a good idea. Hyper-specifically, when you use that terminology you're talking about me.

    The rest is equally dog-whistle deafening: it's possible to disagree with advocates of a political creed you disagree with -- even one you strongly disagree with -- without calling them "rabid".

    What comes through in the rest of your comment is a tone of contempt for everybody in the region regardless of whether they contributed to the mess.

    Don't do that.

    1587:

    David L These days, I will have computerised satellite back-up ... Google on my phone, but I'm still going to stop to read it. I have reasons for not like shat nav ... twice I have been in vehicles where the driver either did waht it told him - & got lost, because "computer was wrong" & the other, because he wasn't QUITE quick enough in following the moronic instructions. Then I've several times had to swerve or avoid drivers in front of me following the "instructions", somewhat erratically, shall we say/ The worst cause me an almost-emergency, almost-stop on an M-way slip road, where the wnaker in front really could not decide which lane to take & wound up in the striped middle patch of the division. NOT going there ... And, I have a full set of the OS !:50 000 paper maps

    1588:

    So maybe younger kids are lacking something that Covid relies on.

    Nope. The French have confirmed treating a neonate who contracted COVID19 in utero (they had a nasty bout of encephalitis after delivery), there are numerous other unconfirmed/not watertight reports of babies with COVID19 (contact tracing is iffy if they were born in a hospital during the pandemic). There are numerous cases of children dying of COVID19. And there's a particularly worrying variant syndrome that seems to affect children -- MIS-C -- multisystem inflammatory syndrome.

    1589:

    Yes. But, SO FAR, the rate of both deaths and serious problems is below noise level in children. Whether that continues as the virus mutates is anyone's guess.

    1590:

    Some unrelated, but good news items. German universities* have worked out how Sars-CoV-2 disables the innate immune response. . And in Sweden, the daily death toll (as seen ten days ago -there is "register lag") is down to 10-14. I should rejoice, but I am emotionally drained after five months of this horror.

    *Including the University of Ulm, a town only mentioned in english language media during a Monthy Python sketch.

    1591:

    Stopping to read a map, paper or electronic is smart. No argument. But paper is must not be.

    As to stupid people blindly following directions, well they might just be stupid. Other than "Here's your sign" we can't do much to fix that.

    And, I have a full set of the OS !:50 000 paper maps

    Those are no help whatsoever when driving around a city of 10 million (once every decade or so) and trying to decide to circle north or south. Where is the construction? Tolls? Accidents?

    I'll keep to my electronic (cached) maps. And if told to do something odd pull over and figure it out.

    Pssst. Here's a secret. Modern electronic mapping is very good. Shows you the speed limits where you are and which lanes take you where you want to go. And in some places that can be heaven compared to figuring out the overhead signage as to which lane out of 5 you should be in. Quick you only have 4 seconds. If that.

    1592:

    But, SO FAR, the rate of both deaths and serious problems is below noise level in children.

    The school opening concern is how are they at transmitting. So many have been locked up at home for so long there's not a lot of evidence. (Sweden maybe?)

    And many of the 50 year old and older teachers I know are not happy about being told to be the test cases.

    1593:

    University of Ulm, a town only mentioned in english language media during a Monthy Python sketch.

    Hey. I think my mother in law's sister when there. (1930s)

    1594:

    Report of a Doctor in Israel coming down with Covid a second time 3 months or so after first getting it.

    https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israeli-doctor-reinfected-with-coronavirus-3-months-after-recovering-635550

    1595:

    Nope.

    Sorry, should have made myself clearer.

    I wasn't trying to say that young kids were totally immune from Covid, because clearly they are not.

    But there is something different that appears to have resulted in a much lower death rate (but not zero), and what appears to be different complications with MIS-C - and perhaps a lower infection rate though without mass testing that is difficult to prove/disprove (though I think a French or German study found low Covid rates in a school).

    The French have confirmed treating a neonate who contracted COVID19 in utero (they had a nasty bout of encephalitis after delivery), there are numerous other unconfirmed/not watertight reports of babies with COVID19 (contact tracing is iffy if they were born in a hospital during the pandemic).

    I think I would consider babies (whether still inside the mother, or recently born) as yet another category - certainly public media over the years talking about vaccines indicates they have an immune system in flux.

    1596:
    And in Sweden, the daily death toll (as seen ten days ago -there is "register lag") is down to 10-14.

    So it's down to only 10 times the rate in other hard hit developed countries. Only Belgium, the UK, Spain and Italy have had a higher death rate. (Although some other countries are trying hard to catch up).

    https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=Sweden&show=25&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths&data-source=jhu&xaxis=left&extra=#countries-normalized

    Ah well, at least Sweden is "frugal", not like those nasty spendthrift people in southern Europe.

    1597:

    I point-blank refuse to have anyhting to do with Shat-Nav in cars ... STOP & open the actual paper map, is much better.

    Fine for you…

    But you aren't using "I got lost and had to ask for directions" as an excuse for visiting friends when you should be in quarantine, are you?

    I [darkblue] also remember reading one of their excuses for stopping on the way to meet some friends. Apparently they got lost finding their way out of the city and needed to ask for directions.

    The point I was sarcastically trying to make was that the excuse darkblue mentioned is just bonkers, in a world with smartphones. Or even just cell phones, for that matter — call your friend for directions from inside your car, no need to visit them.

    Kinda like your PM's Chief Advisor's excuse, actually.

    1598:

    Question for folks with more modelling skills than me…

    Suppose we get no Covid vaccine, and not much more in the way of treatment than we have now. In other words, things as they are now continue. Death rates as we've observed in different age groups. Immunity lasting a few months only. That kind of thing?

    What does that mean for things like life expectancy? Is it even possible to model this with any degree of calculable precision?

    On a more general (non-modelling) note, what would/might the world look like if that is the case? What societal changes are likely? Economic/political realignments?

    1599:

    David L That answer is SO US-centric. Here we have clear signage ( almost all the time ) uniform across the country ....

    Rbt Prior No. At the moment, I'm only driving routes I know. And that not very often

    & @ 1598 "No vaccine" is all too possible, though - given the vast resources being thrown at this problem - probably less than 50% chance. As for remediation - well, things are already emerging from "the works" & will only get better as more information becomes available. OTOH, this disease is a lot nastier than I forst thought. It's not "just" that you might get it & it might kill you - OK you play the odds ... but that it seems to have a range of v unpleasant afer & side effects, none of which I want to go anywhere near. As a result of our increased knowledege, I'm much more cautious & circumspect than I was on, say, 25th March

    1600:

    I did that in April, and may even have posted :-) A reasonable estimate for the UK would be 4 years less (74) for males and 3 years less (78) for females. That could easily be wrong by a factor of two, because there are a lot of uncertainties.

    1601:

    whitroth @ 1539: Guy, do I have to add [humor]/[satire] tags to my posts?

    Given the way Poe's Law works, yeah probably; wouldn't hurt ... or at least tag on a smiley.

    BTW, <tt> & </tt> work as an alternative to the commonly used <code> & </code> tag that doesn't seem to work here.

    1602:

    It's quite a nice little city, the one time I've been there (on a day trip out of Basel, so a wander around and lunch). It prides itself on being where Einstein came from

    1603:

    David L @ 1562:

    Renting a van, or a truck? Feel free to email me:

    I found what I needed to find. 10' rear space with no seats or anything else in it but wheel wells.

    That sounds like my old Chevy Van - 3/4 ton long-bed with a bumper sticker that said "Yes, this is my truck. No, I won't help you move. 8^)

    A full size sheet of plywood would lay flat on the floor inside with room to spare & I could fit a 24' extension ladder inside if I slid the top end up between the passenger seat & the engine hump so that it ran diagonally across the cargo compartment. I miss it sometimes. It was great for times I wanted to go "camping".

    1604:

    hat answer is SO US-centric. Here we have clear signage ( almost all the time ) uniform across the country ....

    So do we. But when you're dealing with multiple metro areas of 3 to 15 million people there can be a lot of things in flux. Even if it's only a small percentage of the total.

    Your life is simple compare to some of us. That means either of us are wrong to make blanket statements about "the right way" to do something in many cases.

    And as I said, I'll be driving 2500 miles soon all within a week. Paper would be a total PITA. Especially since most of what I'll be on is limited access what we call Interstate Highways. And those electronic maps can do things like tell me what restaurants are at the next exit and which are open.

    1605:

    Robert Prior @ 1567:

    Apparently they got lost finding their way out of the city and needed to ask for directions.

    Too bad there isn't some common technological means of navigating strange places, which could possibly double as a telecommunications device…

    Or something graphical you could fold up & keep in a glove compartment ...

    Of course, that would never happen in 'Murica 'cause real men don't have to stop and ask for directions. 8^)

    1606:

    Spare capacity in the shipping business is certainly there, most visibly in the cruise industry, I'd guess. But you'd want freighters for the kit.

    For reasons, I'm generally following where the Viking Ocean cruise fleet is at the moment. Of the 6 ships, 2 are in Norwegian ports (reasonable for a Norwegian flagged fleet). Three are no longer in Norway, having moved to Belfast. And one is in the middle of the South China Sea, parked near one of those tiny atolls that try to be countries (but in this case is Chinese).

    The three in Belfast are actually at Harland & Wolff, having repairs and upgrades, which strikes me as a little like F1 cars popping in tho the pits when a safety car is out. Given how financially strapped H&W have been, it looks like they've found themselves a new sideline.

    1607:

    @1529: United, Delta and American don't usually fly into combat zones. Most troop deployments go by chartered aircraft.

    Large-scale troop deployments are typically resourced by U.S. Transportation Command via charter airlines that are part of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet mechanism. Coming back from a TDY to Germany in the 1980s, I was able to catch a channel flight on a very well-worn 747 charter. I got to ride in the upstairs (there is NO first class section on a DOD charter, as I'm sure you know) for the only time. It was still a nice experience.

    1608:

    @1590: Including the University of Ulm, a town only mentioned in english language media during a Monthy Python sketch.

    A lovely town, even if you don't want to climb the 768 steps to the top of the Ulm Minster. Those of us who are WW II history geeks will remember Ulm as the home of Erwin Rommel.

    1609:

    And, for historygeeks ... Ulm: - Where Boney outmanoevered an "Austrian" army, to surrender, without a major battle - that came shortly afterwards, at Austerlitz.

    1610:

    Just for fun, it looks like carelessness on Twitter's part caused their breach: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/18/how-the-twitter-hacker-got-in.html

    1611:

    I dunno. I was just reading the wikipedia article, and followed a link or two... and it seems that the Lockmart Skunk Works has another take on them, and as of last year, were building? going to build? one that would fit on a truck....

    1612:

    Ah, the famous "password on a whiteboard" hack.

    1613:

    sigh

    In the US, far too often, street signs aren't readable before you get to them, or the locality let foliage grow up so you can't read it until you're at the intersection, or there is just NO signage, or it's been turned around , or "let's see, if I back up, and turn on the highs, maybe I can read that sign this time of night".

    I always look at the route online before I go, and right turn instructions (like on the old AAA triptik).

    Yes, it's nice to have a co-pilot who can check for alternate routes, but... The first time I used the tomtom that my kids got me, for some reason, at some point, it changed my destination, and when I finally got there (having to fine my own alternate route, since a railroad tank car was in the original route) I looked, and then found out that's what it had done.

    1614:

    I have zero patience for information in video form. Please, please give me a written instruction manual or set of directions.

    I used to volunteer as a 'safety' person in the local hockey league. To qualify one must take a few first aid/safety related online courses. All of the courses were in the form of dozens of slides which the announcer would then read to you, slowly, before allowing you to click forward to the next slide. 5 minutes of reading information clumsily stretched into an excruciating 2 hour 'class' that I had to re-take every two years.

    There is some utility in the many youtube videos that show you how to do a specific thing (i.e. replace the water pump in an 03 Civic).

    Having done my graduate studies in political psychology and the formation of political views through interaction with media, I have been unable to watch documentaries or television news for almost 2 decades now.

    1615:

    Charlie, I read that the way I've talked about setting up a reservation for Pure Aryan, er, "Whites", with signs for the tourists "please do not breed with the natives".

    1616:

    "let's see, if I back up, and turn on the highs, maybe I can read that sign this time of night"

    Eh, we should be so lucky.

    Far too much of Britain loves signs. They are everywhere, they are often huge, and they are very often trivial, down to the "this is a sign" level. And they set seed; where there is a large sign, there is also a scattering of lesser signs for a few hundred metres on either side, their size diminishing with distance from the parent.

    And they are retro-reflective, with an efficiency that almost defies belief; and they maintain that efficiency, it does not seem to fall off over time as the sign accumulates dirt. It's almost as if some git goes around washing them. Maybe they do.

    So you are going along a straight, empty bit of road, out in the middle of nowhere. It's night, so you have your headlights on. And you can't see a fucking thing, because a kilometre in the distance there is a three metre square of metal stuck up in the air shining them back into your eyes. The closer you get, the more unbearable it becomes. The main sign gets bigger and bigger, lesser signs begin to pop out of the hedgerows and add their own blinding contribution, and there is a metre-high placard saying "this is a sign" stuck up in the middle of the road to boot.

    It's not until you're really quite close to the big sign that you can begin to discern the actual words through the dazzle. It says "Big house >". Then you sweep past a little side road barely wide enough for two cars to pass, the blaze of reflected light abruptly vanishes, and you are plunged into all-enveloping blackness with any trace of dark-adaptation of your eyes destroyed utterly, still unable to see a fucking thing but now for the opposite reason.

    It's similar with individual small signs. The point of dazzling brightness far ahead in the hedge is not discernible as being a warning of an approaching bend until you are a fair bit closer than you would need to be to read it in daylight, and certainly a lot closer than you could have discerned the approach of a bend from for yourself if you hadn't been blinded by the stupid fucking sign.

    Consequently, there is a strong requirement to fit your car with a large paintball gun accurate to a few kilometres and an automatic aiming system that points it at the light. Unfortunately, nobody does.

    "a railroad tank car was in the original route"

    I am intrigued. This does not sound like a conventional kind of hazard.

    1617:

    Ah, I see google maps has, in fact, improved. A dozen years ago, going from where I lived in Rogers Park to O'Hare, they wanted me to take the Edens expressway (parking lot) towards downtown, then take the Kennedy expressway (also a parking lot) back.

    They appear to have discovered what long-term residents always knew, the through streets.

    1618:

    I dunno... given how long it lasts in many people, it sounds more like a relapse than reinfection.

    1619:

    Hmmmm... every year, I had to take four security refresher course, my late job. Two from the NIH, and two from the company, hopefully covering exactly the same ground.

    Well, except for the one from the company that was 99% COMPLETELY WRONG for those of us not working at company offices on DoD contracts (which, I think, were most of us).

    Anyway, as it began, there was an option to turn off audio, which let me go through at least three times faster.

    1620:

    The sign I was thinking of was at the corner of a friend's block. It was, perhaps, 8' or more up, and black on white.

    The ones in the US, where they do it right, are esp. on the Interstates: white letters on green background. Very readable.

    The rail car? Tomtom had reset my destination to a freight transfer station around Port of Baltimore....

    1621:

    Some interesting discussion coming up about the possibility of helping with limiting Covid 19 spread.

    "However, here we show that while a strong positive correlation between case-numbers and exposure level could be seen early-on as expected, at later times the infection-level is found to be negatively correlated with exposure-level. Moreover, the infection level is positively correlated with the population size, which is puzzling since it has not reached the level necessary for population-size to affect infection-level through herd immunity. These issues are resolved if a low-virulence Corona-strain (LVS) began spreading earlier in China outside of Wuhan, and later globally, providing immunity from the later appearing high-virulence strain (HVS). "

    1622:

    New development in the Portland, OR situation re: Gestapo tactics of snatching protestors off the streets. It's starting to piss off their Mothers.

    Chanting "Feds stay clear, Moms are here!"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqLNG8TvoPg

    Looks like it was last Friday night, but just getting reported now.

    1623:

    Online school for next year in NC, USA.

    We are a large school district. Over 161K students. The plan for the coming school year was 1 week in school, 2 weeks at home with remote learning. With an option to sign up for everything done at home remotely. In a big rebuke to the Trump and Betsy, 40% of the students (well their parents) have enrolled in the full time remote option. 67K students opted for this option. Which in some ways created the 4th largest school district in the state.

    Not that if things keep going along on the current trajectory all students will likely be sent home again full time.

    So how are things going in other "first world" countries?

    As a footnote to the US situation it sure looks like college football in the US will just not happen this fall. But since this is a $4bil or more issue everyone seems to be waiting till the last minute to pull the plug. No one individual wants to be blamed for the money hit so it has turned into a huge game of chicken. High school sports is much closer to being shut down this fall also but the politics of that are very different. Mostly. Sort of.

    1624:

    All of the courses were in the form of dozens of slides which the announcer would then read to you, slowly, before allowing you to click forward to the next slide. 5 minutes of reading information clumsily stretched into an excruciating 2 hour 'class' that I had to re-take every two years.

    Sounds like the compliance training teachers have to take every year. Sourced from a private company, because of course why would a school board with thousands of trained teachers use in-house expertise to produce something educational, eh?

    Many of the mandatory courses have no way to go faster. All of them have no way to return feedback about factual mistakes or contradictions in the content.

    Reminds me a lot of other admin-organized training sessions. Like being lectured for an hour about how lecturing is a really bad way of teaching and we're bad teachers because that's what we do, and we're looking at each other wondering who this woman is and why she's telling us this because we've been running hands-on activity-centred differentiated lessons for a couple of decades now…

    1625:

    The Ontario government has decided on three options for the fall: full-time attendance, full-time remote, or a hybrid of the two.

    They have left details up to the school boards, but this is the same government that did that with remote learning in the spring, and then publicly blamed lazy teachers and unions when the implementation the school boards settled on wasn't what the government wanted, so my read is that they know what they want, but they are setting things up to blame someone else if there's a catastrophe, or to get upset that the boards didn't read the government's mind if the boards' solutions aren't what the government actually wanted.

    I looks like they have opened the doors to privatizing online learning. If you look at Bill 197 – COVID-19 Economic Recovery Act, you see that it expands the scope of the Ontario Educational Communications Authority (TVO/TFO) to include provision of on-line courses and to work with third parties to provide distance learning. In addition, it expands the regulatory power of the Minister of Education to identify the duties of the Authority and how those duties will be carried out and allows those regulations to override other legislation/regulations (e.g. the Education Act). So essentially distance courses will not have to meet the standards of the Education Act.

    It also weakens occupational health and safety. The proposed legislation gives Cabinet the power to make regulations adopting codes, standards, criteria and guides under the health and safety statute, which would then become binding on the workplaces to which they applied. The source of these codes, standards, criteria and guides is not specified, and no provisions for input or response to such regulations is provided for. Similarly, there is no notice or review period required. These changes could be potentially far reaching and the implications equally troublesome.

    In terms of what specific school boards are doing, you can see what the TDSB is proposing here: https://pub-tdsb.escribemeetings.com/FileStream.ashx?DocumentId=6194

    Scroll past the agenda to the slide deck starting on page 14.

    1626:

    How about something good?

    Hope Eyrie

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXteSV8rBwY

    It's 52 years since, "Houson, the Eagle has landed."

    1628:

    The radios of the day were hard to understand at times.

    1629:

    Along vaguely similar lines, the Falcon 9 first stage that helped put the first crewed Dragon 2 in orbit at the end of May has just sent a Korean military satellite on its way to geostationary orbit.

    1630:

    Uh, I’ve driven west coast, some (northern) east coast, and gulf coast US and no, I most definitely cannot agree that you have signage to any sane level of quality nor uniformity. It’s one of the immediately obvious things about driving in the US, along with an apparent inability to make decent roads and decent cars - Tesla’s excepted.

    1631:

    @1616: Thank you - this made me laugh out loud.

    1632:

    So a tale of the pervasiveness of falsehoods. (Sorry about the length.) Back a few threads ago, Dirk mentioned that the CDC said that the IFR (Infection Fatality Ratio) for COVID-19 was 0.26 percent. This was a sort of true statement; the CDC released a document, "COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios", intended for modelers, which suggested some modeling parameters. Here's the first version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200521113035/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html In particular, Symptomatic Case Fatality Ratio Overall: 0.004 Percent of infections that are asymptomatic 35% This means 0.0026 IFR if one allows for 35% asymptomatic cases. The original document provide zero justification for its numbers, just "Source: Preliminary COVID-19 estimates, CDC".

    This number started circulating in the right-wing-o-sphere as the "true" IFR. Made its way here first via Dirk. Meanwhile, epidemiologists were livid, since they were worried that models, for pandemic planning purposes, would use this number, while the consensus metanalysis numbers at the time were more like 0.6 percent. They were loudly suspecting that an attempt was being made to influence models used for planning of things like lockdown relaxations.

    On July 19, 2020, Donald J. Trump said, in a long (Fox News!) interview with a lot of other vocalized counterfactuals: "TRUMP: Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day. They have the sniffles and we put it down as a test. Many of them -- don't forget, I guess it's like 99.7 percent, people are going to get better and in many cases they're going to get better very quickly."

    There's that number. Trump is repeating it because he heard it somewhere, from somebody who amplified a bit from a CDC document that clownishly (or maliciously) low-balled the SARS-CoV-2 IFR.

    But oops. CDC released a new version of that document, on 12 July: https://web.archive.org/web/20200712012519/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html In this one, the COVID-19 IFR is broken out to its own line: Infection Fatality Ratio, Overall† 0.0065

    Where "†" is a COVID-19 IFR metanalysis, previously linked here and in a previous thread: (A systematic review and meta-analysis of published research data on COVID-19 infection-fatality rates (May 27, 2020))

    So you basically have very dubious information, in a CDC document not intended for general consumption, that became entrenched as a right wing "we secretly know better than the libs" talking point. It's possible that Trump will continue to repeat this number.

    And that's pretty much the best case. Often the "information" is completely counterfactual, generated to support a narrative or influence operation. It is extremely easy to (anonymously, and by various actors) feed the Right-Wing meme swamps in the US; the grifter subset of "Conservatives" have been explicitly selecting for gullibility since realizing in the 1970s[1] that political contact lists are more monetizable if full of gullible people.

    [1] The Long Con - Mail-order conservatism (November 2012, Rick Perlstein)

    1633:

    Some areas have signs posted telling you what's at the next exit. A lot of travel-dependent businesses will have signs telling you where you can find one, even if it's miles ahead. (My long-distance driving tends to be on routes I'm reasonably familiar with, so I don't need so much signage - but I still look.) My parents' advice was start early, stop around sunup for breakfast (especially if going east), then stop for the day about 3pm. I found it very helpful when I did cross-country trips.

    1634:

    We got online training that was mixed video and slides. The tests were slides. (I retired several years ago, so I don't know what the training is like now. Particularly the driver training, which had been a 2-hour refresher course in a classroom (The department manager insisted that all of his people get it every year, whether they drove a company vehicle or not. It wasn't a bad idea; it's kept me out of some accidents.)

    My job was reading maps of various kinds, as well as aerial photos and ground-based photos. It got interesting when the maps and photos didn't match. (Some of the maps were from people whose engineering stationing was usually off by a few thousand feet.)

    1635:

    "Far too much of Britain loves signs. They are everywhere, they are often huge, and they are very often trivial, down to the "this is a sign" level. And they set seed; where there is a large sign, there is also a scattering of lesser signs for a few hundred metres on either side, their size diminishing with distance from the parent."

    I am reminded of one of the worst examples I have seen anywhere. Imagine driving along a dual-carriageway (for non-UK people this is two lanes in each direction with a central reservation) with a 70mph speed limit, and rapidly approaching a roundabout. At this point generally you need your full attention on the road, any other vehicles beside you, and any traffic already on the roundabout that has priority. Now, as you are braking in the last 100m before entering the roundabout, try reading and understanding the 25 or more different road signs...

    1637:

    " a 70mph speed limit, and rapidly approaching a roundabout."

    You had me boggling at that, never mind the signs.

    JHomes

    1638:

    There's nothing "dry" about this.

    1639:

    Unfortunately the solution appears not to be "we need to make the roads simpler, so fewer signs are required". Instead it appears to be "we need to lower the speed limit so that people can read the signs, and increase enforcement so that it works".

    1640:

    There's nothing "dry" about this.

    Quite. To all the Americans here, I struggle to express the sorrow I feel for what I expect will be happening in your world between now and November and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I think in the midst of it, all sorts of amazing stories of heroism and kindness will bubble out. I've no idea what the outcome will be either, it still seems that the pessimist doesn't have it all their own way.

    1641:

    What keeps surprising me, is how apt the metaphor about the frog being slowly boiled alive applies to USA these days.

    Shouldn't it have been torches and pitchforks already back when toddlers were being put in concentration camps ?

    What's happening in Portland is in no way "a dry run", it's the real thing, but like the frog in the pot USAnians who should know a LOT better just go "this could get bad" and do nothing real about it...

    Sheesh...

    1642:

    My favourite feature of British signage is labelling crossroads with only one sign, at varying locations (near the ground, on a building, etc.) that is visible to travellers coming from one direction only.

    1643:

    P H-K & Dmian The democratic opposition to DT & the fascists are in a bind. ( Note the lower-csae "d" incidentally ) If they react violently to this, DT can & will send in more goons. If they react peacefully, he will simply sweep them all up, or try to. And they only need one drugged victim to play the part of Van der Lubbe ( Who was a plant, anway, as we now know ) to apparently commit some "atrocity" or other & it's probably game over, without a civil war. And, if you actually manage to get to 4th November & DT & his goons are voted out - they have still got until January to do it, anyway. How does one get out of this?

    1644:

    How does one get out of this?

    History provides precedents, but they are not encouraging.

    1645:

    Troutwaxer,

    The things you are saying about the Iran Nuclear Agreement are not really correct.

    Foreign countries pay a lot of attention to US legal niceties (and internal politics) when signing deals with the US. It wasn't a "treaty". It was an "agreement". (That's a US legal nicety, not an international law thing). The agreement was 100% backed by US law. Obama got sneaky: he got pre-approval to do a deal, with a law passed that said the agreement would stand unless Senate voted not to approve it.

    "On 22 May 2015 President Obama signed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 into law; this legislation passed by the Senate in a 98-1 vote and the House in a 400-25 vote, and was approved by Obama on 22 May 2015. Under the Act, once a nuclear agreement was negotiated with Iran, Congress had sixty days in which it could pass a resolution of approval, a resolution of disapproval, or do nothing... Republicans could only defeat the deal if they mustered the two-thirds of both houses of Congress needed to override an expected veto by Obama of any resolution of disapprova." - from the wikipedia article on the deal.

    This is why Trump couldn't withdraw from the deal as soon as he was elected, which is what he wanted to do. Because that would have been illegal.

    But the deal included a clause that if the Iranians were breaking their side of it, then the US was allowed to withdraw.

    So Trump had to allege that the Iranians were breaking the deal when the US govt did the deal's annual review, and then withdraw on that basis. Of course, everyone knew Trump was lying about the Iranians not following the deal - he over-ruled his intelligence agency's assessments, ignored the guys who the US had sent into Iran to check if they were following the deal, etc. But the agreement did not include an appeal mechanism, so if the USA was willing to lie about things then they got to withdraw.

    1646:

    Folks. I have driven in at least 2/3s of the US states. Maybe 4/5s. I'd have to count. But in many ways I've seen it all.

    In the 80s I got to frequently navigate the Chicago, NYC, and Boston (pre big dig) areas with only paper and memories from a month or few ago. Plus other major cities. Getting off the Cross Bronx Expressway at the wrong place in the South Bronx in 82 at 2am was a real trip.

    Yes signage is all over the map. But for most cross country driving it is somewhat reasonable. But I've also spent a lot of time in the Dallas area over the last 10 years. And when you're on a 7 lane section with routes splitting off to the left and right some times 2 or 3 lanes at a time, Google/Apple maps sure does make it better. In the Dallas area over this 10 year period a 10+ miles stretch of 6 lanes was converted to 12 and two major routes I got to use were rebuilt from their 60s/70s bad designs into something that now mostly works. But paper would be hopeless as things could literally change day to day as the shifted lanes at 3 am or closed "your" exit the day before for the next 3 months. And this was just the areas where I was driving.

    I understand during the Boston big dig they literally moved concrete barriers twice a day to deal with road capacity issues between AM and PM drive times.

    Anyway, at some point about 10 years ago some idiot in the NC DOT apparently decided we needed rules about signage along streets. And since very few of our street look like mid town Manhattan the result is what I think of a signage diarrhea.

    My biggest issue with figuring out signs is when I switch from Texas to NC and back they put their next intersection signs on opposite sides of median lined streets so I'm always looking where they are not as I switch states.

    1647:

    Some areas have signs posted telling you what's at the next exit. A lot of travel-dependent businesses will have signs telling you where you can find one, even if it's miles ahead.

    I know. While I'm not a long haul trucker I have driven enough over the years. 4 years of monthly 250mile drives each way between NC and MD. Driven the PCH from San Diego to Portland (2 separate drives), ABQ to PHX through the 4 corners area, etc... To get home from college with 5 hours through very empty country in KY. Each way.

    I know how the signs work. But I'm also many times more interested in where is a Costco (for gas) or a grocery store to buy food at the sandwich counter instead of McD's and such. Although free WiFi at McD's is a big draw.

    Or after 6 hours without a stop seeing the sign for the Vicksburg battlefield park and going there just to walk around for a bit to let my body know this is not a permanent situation.

    1648:

    " a 70mph speed limit, and rapidly approaching a roundabout."

    You had me boggling at that, never mind the signs.

    Rural Texas would be fun for you. Driving down a road with nothing but sand and tumble brush in every direction. Speed limit is 70mph. Side of pavement doesn't even have a painted line to help you at night.

    You top a small rise. Less than 1000' ahead is an intersection with a stop sign for you.

    Speed limit never changes.

    1649:

    Indeed. The UK has been shafted many times in the past 75 years by such deceit, which makes the fervour of our current rulers to render us completely subservient to the USA close to treacherous.

    1650:

    I was once nearly knocked off my bicycle by a rising bollard I did not expect (and, yes, that route was legal for cycling). The rising bollard fans claim that I should have slowed down to read the signs - I was doing 15 MPH and had a bus following too closely behind (as is normal for them) to make a sudden stop safe. There were 5-10 signs in 5-10 yards.

    The normal problem on motorways and similar roads is not the number of signs, but being unable to see them through the high-sided vehicles.

    1651:

    The normal problem on motorways and similar roads is not the number of signs, but being unable to see them through the high-sided vehicles.

    That's why I've grown to like using my phone for navigation in the city. The 401* has a lot of semitrailers (HGV in British English), and it is impossible to read the road signs (which are all overhead) through them. And if one slows down enough to be able to see the signs, another truck pulls into the opening. :-(

    Driving in industrial areas is just as bad. Can't see the signs enough to know what the road ahead is. Those spoken "prepare to turn left in 200 metres" messages are very useful.

    *Busiest highway in North America, and one of Toronto's main transport routes. Also a parking lot during rush hours.

    1652:

    Some areas have signs posted telling you what's at the next exit. A lot of travel-dependent businesses will have signs telling you where you can find one, even if it's miles ahead.

    The problem at the moment will be that those signs don't actually tell you if the business is open or temporarily closed due to Covid.

    Which isn't to say Google will be 100% accurate, but it stands a better chance as well as giving you a better idea of what else may be an option at any given off ramp.

    1653:

    Very interesting. Do you have any cites?

    1654:

    Find out where the Feds are sleeping - they're quite possibly staying in a hotel somewhere. If so, divide your protestors into three shifts, one at the Federal building at night, and two shifts to loudly protest at the hotel. Don't let them get any sleep. I've got some other ideas, but won't post them on a family blog.

    1655:

    Dave P @ 1607:

    @1529: United, Delta and American don't usually fly into combat zones. Most troop deployments go by chartered aircraft.

    Large-scale troop deployments are typically resourced by U.S. Transportation Command via charter airlines that are part of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet mechanism. Coming back from a TDY to Germany in the 1980s, I was able to catch a channel flight on a very well-worn 747 charter. I got to ride in the upstairs (there is NO first class section on a DOD charter, as I'm sure you know) for the only time. It was still a nice experience.

    The one time I've flown on a 747 was a military charter. Due to the way troops load on those (fill all seats from tail to nose & I was at the back of the line) I ended up in the nose section where First Class would have been on a regular, scheduled airline and the seats were bigger.

    I guess the 747's design just isn't conducive to having steerage class seating up there.

    When we went to Iraq, the charter I was on to Kuwait was a DC-10. From Kuwait to Iraq I flew cargo class on a C-130; literally Space-A.

    1656:

    It seems pretty clear by now that we're going to get some kind of vaccine. The question is "What's it going to do?". The anti-bodies seems to be transient, and the TCells seem to be persistent, but it's a lot harder to test for TCells, so most reports don't talk about them.

    One possibility is that the vaccine doesn't provide immunity, but rather ensures that you have a mild case of COVID. Possibly it will ensure that you become a "silent spreader". This would clear out the ICUs and decrease load on the hospitals...but it would mean that those unable to be vaccinated would need to be in lockdown permanently. There are obvious reasons why many find this undesirable.

    1657:

    "How does one get out of this?"

    I thought that the facist state unleashing violence against its own peaceful protesters had answered that question already ?

    Do you seriously see any scenario where the November elections pivots USA back to civilization ?

    Biden's gonna swear on a bible, dispenses some grandfatherly anecdotes and everybody in the USA calms the fuck down and comes to their senses ?

    His black, female and very likely non-heteronormative VP will be seen as quaint, but harmless quirk of his ?

    Also by the 40% of likely US voters, who still, at this time and date, "approves" of Trumpolinos presidenting?

    The facists and racists and their second amendment right will quietly go back into hiding, concluding they didn't like the taste of fresh blood anyway ?

    That would be the absolutely indisputable best case scenario you can hope for, any possible variation you can imagine is worse in one or more ways.

    The absolute worst case, is the "unimaginable situation" (as in: Brexit referendum plurality) were Trumpolino comes out of November with "a mandate of reelection" and Ivanka becomes the Junior Supreme Court Justice responsible for the SCOTUS Canteen.

    The only variable I can identify, from the safety of being out of range, is when the shooting starts, not if it starts.

    Yes, you will get your hair hussed, but it will be one or two millions tops - depending on the breaks of course.

    1658:

    Rocketpjs @ 1614: There is some utility in the many youtube videos that show you how to do a specific thing (i.e. replace the water pump in an 03 Civic).

    Unless the guy who posted it has his account cancelled for violating YouTube's TOS.

    OTOH, you can have the Haynes Manual right there on the fender to consult while you figure it out. Maybe the pictures ain't quite 4K HD, but it won't matter if you get greasy fingerprints on the page (greasy fingerprints are why I HATE touchscreens).

    1659:

    Pigeon @ 1616:

    "let's see, if I back up, and turn on the highs, maybe I can read that sign this time of night"

    Eh, we should be so lucky.

    Far too much of Britain loves signs. They are everywhere, they are often huge, and they are very often trivial, down to the "this is a sign" level. And they set seed; where there is a large sign, there is also a scattering of lesser signs for a few hundred metres on either side, their size diminishing with distance from the parent.

    And they are retro-reflective, with an efficiency that almost defies belief; and they maintain that efficiency, it does not seem to fall off over time as the sign accumulates dirt. ...

    [edited for brevity]

    Consequently, there is a strong requirement to fit your car with a large paintball gun accurate to a few kilometres and an automatic aiming system that points it at the light. Unfortunately, nobody does.

    Guy out in Los Angeles, California decided the signage on the 110 Freeway didn't give adequate direction for drivers to find I-5 North ... so he made his own sign & installed it on the overhead gantry.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clgl63CWOkM

    It apparently stayed up for several years before the California DOT installed new signs on the 110 ... incorporating his changes.

    He did have a bit of a hassle getting his sign back when California DOT replaced it. It was done so well they at first didn't believe him.

    1660:

    P J Evans @ 1633: Some areas have signs posted telling you what's at the next exit. A lot of travel-dependent businesses will have signs telling you where you can find one, even if it's miles ahead.
    (My long-distance driving tends to be on routes I'm reasonably familiar with, so I don't need so much signage - but I still look.)
    My parents' advice was start early, stop around sunup for breakfast (especially if going east), then stop for the day about 3pm. I found it very helpful when I did cross-country trips.

    Thing is, I really like driving at night when there's less traffic, so I'm more likely to start around 3:00pm and stop just after sundown to have supper and start looking for a motel room (or somewhere to camp) at around midnight.

    Also, look out for GOTTAGETHOMEITIS. I once drove straight through from Albuquerque, NM to Raleigh, NC stopping only for bathroom breaks, fuel & the McDonald's drive-thru for coffee ... and then spent the next three days barely able to get out of bed.

    My dad was the type that had to be on the road before sunrise & kept on pushing until well after sunset and "If you had to go, why didn't you go before we left the house?" [A: I did, but that was 4 hours ago.]

    1661:

    Paper manuals are useful, I keep the big blue book of bike repair in my workshop and refer to it often.

    But in my work I tend to operate as something of a 'jack of all trades'. So a workweek can involve replumbing a sink, hanging some drywall, replacing some light fixtures and possibly rewiring a switch, then painting, taping the drywall, patching some concrete, fixing a fence, replacing a lock, hanging some doors etc. etc. (Other job is in a homeless shelter, which is vastly different).

    I can't afford nor do I desire the dozens/hundreds of relevant paper manuals, and when I come across a task I have not yet learned how to do I find it very useful to pull out my phone and watch a brief instructional video.

    When it comes to more 'academic' style learning I vastly prefer to read the information. My reading tends to be in large chunks of 15-20 words at a time and will get through many thousands of words in an hour. It means I am constantly in search of new material to consume (a word addict) but it makes me immensely impatient with video instruction.

    1662:

    It may not be straight for a coup, but it's deliberately intended massive intimidation, possibly to make up for him finally wearing a mask, and now saying it's "patriotic".

    This is raw meat for his base. Unfortunately for him, his base is shrinking. He had an interview on Faux News the other day, and the report says he was sweating, which is something he doesn't do on air....

    1663:

    Or maybe there should be signs, not covered by foliage or other obstructions, FURTHER BACK.

    This, of course, will not fix the utter morons who should never have gotten a driver's license, who don't even look at the signs until they need to cross 4 lanes at speed in a quarter mile in heavy traffic.

    1664:

    There may be one state of the lower 48 I have not at least driven through.

    But if you think it's bad... 1975, I think, driving up to see a friend in Boston from Philly. We got off the correct exit, took the correct street... and got to a five-way intersection where on the other side, the street name had changed, and there was no way back, and had to go over the Mystic River bridge. So, first tiny side street, we pull into... and at the intersection of the tiny side street with another tiny side street, are four one-way signs.

    All pointed inwards.

    We went the wrong way down one, got back across the Mystic River bridge, and found an entrance to the freeway we needed to get on.

    Which did not open until 09:30. We parked, the driver and someone else got coffee, and we waited until it opened....

    1665:

    Charles H Booster/repeater shots - like for Tetanus. Sooner or later, you will build up an immunity ( I probably can't have another Tetanus shot, because I've had 3 ( or is it 4? ) in the past. I must admit I like the idea behind the "oxford" vaccine, which IIRC is targeted at the unique "spike" that C-19 has.

    P H-K I thought that the facist state unleashing violence against its own peaceful protesters had answered that question already ? Actually, no, it does not answer the question, because people, especially the female section of the population are pushing back against it. Rermember, this is all happening on live TV & instagram & all the other instant tech channels. DT & his goons are not ( YET) as secure in their lies & monstering & brutality as the Han in Xinjiang. But - I think that: DT is going to lose bog-time & he & his fascists will try something really unpleasant - whether it's before the election, to tip it, or afterwards, in order to cling to power, I know not.

    1666:

    The 401 the busiest?

    I dunno 'bout that. I'd submit I'95 between Philly and NYC.

    30 mi or so from NYC, it goes to... let's see, is it 12 lanes, or 16 lanes - three, barrier, three, median? barrier?, other direction: three, barrier, three.....

    1667:

    Perfect. That's the kind of thing a Yippie would think of.

    Besides, if it was good enough for Noriega, it's good enough for them.

    1668:

    All of my kids were forced to read

    https://www.biblio.com/book/how-keep-your-volkswagen-alive-manual/d/987126082?aid=frg&utm_source=google&utm_medium=product&utm_campaign=feed-details&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIr4Dq2efe6gIViI7ICh1fzABPEAQYBSABEgJbb_D_BwE

    They at least had to read the preface? first chapter? "How to buy a used VW", and at least the first page or two of each chapter, so they would know what they were hearing or seeing, and so at least no scum mechanic would "you need a new widget on the frammistat, that's $800", they could come back with "no, I need a new starter motor, that's $100 including part."

    I've never rebuilt an engine, but....

    1669:

    References:

    https://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-11-wildest-highways-2012-8#highway-401-is-the-busiest-in-north-america-2

    Highway 401 widens to 18 lanes south of Toronto Pearson International Airport. Progressing eastward, eight lanes are carried beneath the large spaghetti junction at Highway 427. The highway curves northeast and follows a power transmission corridor to Highway 409, which merges with the mainline and forms the collector lanes. It returns to its eastward route through Toronto, now carrying 12–16 lanes of traffic on four carriageways. Highway 401 is often congested in this section, with an average of 442,900 vehicles passing between Weston Road and Highway 400 per day as of 2008.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_401

    I don't have more recent stats easily available, but from experience the 401 is busier than it was a decade ago…

    1670:

    My late wife and I both preferred between 02:00 and 06:00. The bars were mostly out, all the amateur drivers had stopped for their motel, and the only folks on the road were long-haul truckers, and people like us, who were used to long-distance driving, and were good.

    Someone weaves a little, they must be getting tired, give them a honk, and they're ok.

    I will admit it was rough, driving from Anaheim, CA (Worldcon '96) to Chicago, to get the kid back for the beginning of school (missing two days, I think).

    1671:

    I used to have a copy of that, I thought the author's decision to hire a cartoonist, rather than using grainy photographs, was brilliant.

    1672:

    Arthur C. Clarke also suggested choosing a President randomly from a list of qualified individuals, and giving them time off for good behavior. Just now it's difficult to think of someone who'd be worse than Trump, although it's not impossible.

    1673:

    Sorry, you're not close enough. There was no "proto-coup", and Obama was not planning to stay. That's outright GOP lies. Literrally. Because the FBI has been after him for many years - or do you think he hasn't kept being a billionaire (if he still is) by international money laundering?

    And no, he already is the worst President ever. He's the only one who literally is trying to destroy the federal goverment - there are whole departments, like State, that are decimated (literally), oh, sorry, *more than 10% drops. Hell, I personally know that there's some office? (not sure how big) of the NSA in one of the Carolinas that was going to reorg, and then all hiring stopped, and there's, count him, one guy.

    With McConnell, this is a slow-motion coup/destruction/insurrection.

    1674:

    It's certainly time for USA to bring in the Douglas Adams solution, and elect someone who doesn't want the job! KW is apparently bipolar manic-depressive, would he do better?

    We have the Douglas Adams solution! El Cheeto Grande remarked repeatedly (although he's not known for his veracity) prior to the election that he didn't think he was going to win it. My assumption all along, since I have some notion of how much money he owes, is that he saw that the last two elections cycled through roughly a billion dollars to get a president elected. He did his version of the math, realized that if he could skim off a respectable amount of that, he'd be out of debt, and went for it. What I suspect his original plan was to, if he lost, take the campaign money into his foundation and turn the laundry on super-spin. As it is, his major goal as President seems to have been getting himself out of debt.

    Thing is, he owes about half a billion over the next five years. Some of it he personally signed for, so he's on the hook for it personally if he can't pay.

    To get to your original point, the central bullshit about American politics is that anyone can do it. That's absolutely not the case: it's a hard job, relatively few people can do it, and vanishingly few can do it at the presidential level. As an activist I get to work with politicians of all levels of talent, and it does take real talent to put together an organization and keep it running for that long.

    The real problem is that politics is one skill set, but the President (and every high level executive), needs to have more than a basic familiarity with things like public health, climate change, military strategy, history, and so forth. That's why most decent presidents read constantly and voraciously.

    El Cheeto's given a good example of why being unskilled is so detrimental. When the coronavirus hit, he'd already dismantled a lot of the team who'd work on it, but getting them back together probably wouldn't have been all that hard. He had a well-written play book, based on previous administrations dealing with H1:N1 and ebola. He had owners of mothballed factories in the US asking if they could fire up and make PPE. He has the Defense Procurement Act that allows him to print money for emergencies. All he had to do was fire it up, let the CDC do its thing, cheer them on, fire up the PPE factories, print money to cover the costs, and he'd be well ahead of Biden and coasting towards his second term. Instead he threw out the playbook, silenced the CDC, ignored the offers of aid, tried to pocket as much of the aid money as possible, and he has spent far too much effort trying to disguise how utterly, abjectly, he's failed.

    While this wasn't the easiest test of leadership, he literally had a recipe book for how to do it that's about 80 pages long IIRC, and he couldn't follow it.

    That's why you don't want Joe Random in charge of the US or any country. You really do want the best person for the job, if you can get them.

    1675:

    The worst president ever is either Trump or Buchanan. For the sake of fairness, I'm going to wait until the end of Trump's term to make my own decision.

    1676:

    Administrative note:

    David.in.Italy: Red Card for parroting right-wing talking points and defending Trump.

    I'm sorry. I have no objectivity right now: daily news coverage of tear-gassing, skyrocketing COVID19 death tolls, and what looks like John Woo Yoo being brought in to lay the groundwork for rule by decree and a coup if Trump doesn't steal the election has left me with zero tolerance for neo-Nazi crap going forward.

    You are now banned.

    1677:

    That's why you don't want Joe Random in charge of the US or any country. You really do want the best person for the job, if you can get them.

    I've never gotten the point of "a president you can have a beer with." I want a president who's so much smarter than I am that having a beer with me would be a complete and utter waste of his/her time!

    1678:

    Re: 'Rermember, this is all happening on live TV & instagram & all the other instant tech channels.'

    The wrench in the works is cable networks and which stations they carry by tier-pricing structure.

    There are quite a few communities that can only get their TV news via cable. Once when visiting family I was somewhat taken aback to see that their default TV news channel was Faux - they didn't want to pay for more channels because they felt that all news stations reported the same news and had the same editorial policy. Really helped explain their beliefs re: then and now current political affairs including DT. BTW - they're still for the GOP and seem oblivious to the fact that they're living in a COVID-19 hot zone (AZ).

    I tried looking up which local cable corps carry which networks by default. Can't find data at this granular level for free, can only find total national figures/share data. But if this is so, i.e., that some regions are being effectively denied access to certain news channels/sources/politico-editorial policies - then I'm guessing that this is a form of denial/suppression of free speech*. (Would welcome any lawyers here having a go at dissecting this.)

    • Also - if this is so, then I'm questioning the intelligence and integrity of the three major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) that allowed this to happen.
    1679:

    David.in.Italy What are you smoking? I'd change your drug(s) immediately, if I were you. And read withroth & Heteromeles' comments, huh? { Ah, too late for this thread, anyway. ]

    whitroth At the moment, Buchanan is still (just) worse than DT, but that may change .... If what Foxessa said some time back, about Buchanan deliberately allowing the slavholders to sieze federal arms & misdirecting the US navy, then he was (so far) worse than DT, but I suspect even Chris Grayling would make a better POTUS than DT! See also Heteromeles ... about the difficulty of the job.

    Charlie "John Woo" ?? The wiki page gives no indication of why or how he would be useful to DT, or am I missing something?

    1680:

    Nuts. You may have started to react to it, but there is no limit on the number you can have. I must have had at least 10, perhaps a fair number more. When I started, the dogma was that you needed two initially, and then one every 2 years; the interval increased rapidly after that to 3 to 5 and to 10 years, became lifetime immunity, dropped back to 10 years, became lifetime immunity again, and God alone knows what it is today.

    1681:

    I'm sorry. I have no objectivity right now: daily news coverage of tear-gassing, skyrocketing COVID19 death tolls, and what looks like John Woo being brought in to lay the groundwork for rule by decree and a coup if Trump doesn't steal the election has left me with zero tolerance for neo-Nazi crap going forward.

    It's worth mentioning a Facepalm shared by a relative in Portland, OR, with shows over 20 pictures of "the occupied city." Basically it's a nothing burger once you get away from the Federal Courthouse. Life goes on as usual, except for the boarded up Scientology Office (maybe they lost their lease?).

    I don't take the CBP fucking around in Portland lightly. However, I live in the heartland of the CBP, where they do conduct regular raids and kidnap American citizens and toss them into Mexico for the crime of being Hispanic and being nabbed by an idiot officer. And yet we're doing okay, including my Hispanic friends and in-laws.

    What I'm trying to say is this: the Portland little green men story is wonderful news media fireworks in an otherwise tedious, in a country where we're either trying to survive or waiting for November to throw the bums out, and where I (for one) am utterly sick of the small government fuckups who have outlived their ideology, sad for them. Anything that happens right now will get overblown by the media. Double check before you believe the hype. Especially in a US election year. Especially in the late summer and fall of an election year. We don't call it silly season for nothing.

    The other thing I'll point to is this: A year ago, Jeffrey Epstein got busted, and coincidentally, El Cheeto went on a facist/racist rampage. Epstein's chief enabler Ghislaine Maxwell got nabbed last week, and coincidentally (I'm sure), El Cheeto's going on another rampage. Presumably it's entirely coincidental again.

    1682:

    Thing is the current methods of selection do worse than random selection. The process of getting to a position where you have any chance of becoming a candidate is one that strongly favours being an arsehole, and/or having a lot of friends who are arseholes. This seems to be a fundamental common factor which holds pretty much regardless of what country or political system you're talking about.

    Furthermore, it's remarkably hard to come up with an alternative process that doesn't have the same failing, actually or potentially, when you look at it closely enough. The mass of Peers may cry "Oh, horror!" at the idea of selection by competitive examination, but at the same time some little turd in the background is gleefully thinking about who sets the questions and who marks the answers.

    The point about random selection isn't that it does better, but that it selects from a pool that does not contain an unnatural concentration of arseholes. Existing systems are pretty well indistinguishable from randomness in terms of selecting someone who's likely to be good at it, but the pool from which they pick is highly polluted. The idea is to select from the people of whom one observes "Most Americans are pretty ordinary folk", instead of the subset who give rise to observations like "fuckin' America, aaaargh".

    1683:

    I still disagree - the Hairball is dismantling the gov't from the top - I don't think Buchannon did that. And, of course, he's taking cuts of the budget, and bribes, and....

    John Woo - the piece of shit who should have been in front of a firing squad in '06 or '07, the lawyer who found word games for W to claim what they were doing at Girmo wasn't torture.

    1684:

    "...the street name had changed, and there was no way back, and had to go over the Mystic River bridge. So, first tiny side street, we pull into... and at the intersection of the tiny side street with another tiny side street, are four one-way signs.

    All pointed inwards."

    Alors! La Société Anonyme pour la Confusion des Voyageurs frappe encore une fois.

    1685:

    I meant all-around shitbag Republican attorney and torture-monger John Yoo, not to be confused with talented and valuable film director John Woo.

    1686:

    It was 10 years the last time I had it; I was expecting 5, but they didn't seem to be very bothered that while I was sure my last shot had been more than 5 years ago I had no idea if it was more than 10.

    I remember as being of more significance (though maybe only because I wasn't expecting it at all) the point that you can't (straightforwardly) get a straight anti-tet any more; it's now a combination shot which also protects against something else where the battle between immunity and pathogenesis is fought on the same ground with the same kind of weapons - diphtheria, I think. The last shot I had for that was when I was tiny, but they did want to know.

    1687:

    Thing is the current methods of selection do worse than random selection. The process of getting to a position where you have any chance of becoming a candidate is one that strongly favours being an arsehole, and/or having a lot of friends who are arseholes. This seems to be a fundamental common factor which holds pretty much regardless of what country or political system you're talking about.

    Oh dear no. That's the same mistake that Dave In Banland made.

    The problem with politics is that power is truly addictive (would you like to be powerless? No? Then you're addicted to what power you have). So, when you're dealing with issues of power, you do get behavior, like from American Republicans or white wing extremists, where they're willing to do anything to get their next hit. It's both vile and pathetic in equal measure.

    However, not everyone deals with their addiction the same way. For example, I'll bet you're not willing to kill someone for caffeine, right? You're probably rational enough to realize that a week of headaches followed by a normal life is infinitely preferable to a murder conviction. And this is also true of politics. There are some who are in it for the power trip and nothing else, and those who are in it to try to make the world a better place. At worst, they can be ineffective, counterproductive, or annoyingly noblesse oblige. At best they can be people like, say, John Lewis, Maxine Waters, or Barack Obama, who really struggle to do something right in a system that's horribly complex and therefore not easy to change.

    Now I'm actually not a great fan of elections, because they're tedious, annoying, and revolve around skills and connections I mostly don't have. However, you don't have to be a panglossian to realize that what's going on in an election is a not unreasonable mechanism for sorting the generally competent from the also-rans. Remember also that the 2016 elections were hacked, so looking at their results as normal is probably not a good idea either.

    1688:

    whitroth & CHarlie I put "John Woo" into search engine - And I get this ... So you will have to provide more details, if it's not too much trouble!

    Pigeon Even better than ( the horror! ) Basingstoke - I have an anceint photo of two opposing signposts at a roundabout there, both saying ... "Town Centre"

    1689:

    I do not think the current failure mode of anglophone politics is inherent to democracy or politics more widely conceived.

    The issue is that one must never, ever lie for political gain.

    What happened is that the republican party had an agenda which, if honestly described, was simply not very popular. So they started lying to their base. Once you do that, your base has a very simple choice. Each individual in it can choose to abandon you, or to believe your lie. That results in you very, very quickly having a base which believes the party line. No matter how removed from reality it is. - I could at this point list a bunch of other examples a mile long, but I am sure you can come up with your own.

    The problem is, while this is an effective short term strategy for grasping power, all political movements recruit their membership from their base. Which means the cynical liars who know what the truth is, and are thus able to take action in concordance with reality, will by and by be replaced by people who have drunk the cool aid because there are very few cynical liars in the pipeline of new talent.

    And then you have a political movement which is detached from the real top to bottom. And which will take action as if the nonsense they spout is fact, until reality kicks their face in. Which always happens.

    1690:

    I mostly agree on this. Detachment from reality is a failure mode in politics that probably goes back to the Bronze Age, if you think about it.

    1691:

    Sorry, I knew who you meant....

    1692:

    Back in the... somewhere between the eighties and the nineties, the Congressional committee that controls (used to control a lot more) of DC decided that this main street through the district (small D, not DC as a whole) would be a great way out of that district. So they made it one-way. ALL four? five? of them ran smack into DuPont Circle, and for a week there were massive traffic jams, with the cops overriding the signs, until they finally fixed it.

    1693:

    Btw, really like your phrase "white wing" extremists.

    1694:

    I noted that too. It's really fun that the first thing you think is it's a typo, then decide no. I like it and may steal it.

    1695:

    "Oh dear no."

    ??? You seem to be identifying very much the same problems as me.

    "The problem with politics is that power is truly addictive ... willing to do anything to get their next hit"

    Indeed. This is one of the factors that renders being an arsehole advantageous.

    "There are some who are in it for the power trip and nothing else, and those who are in it to try to make the world a better place."

    Yes. But by the very natures of those two different aims, the former tends to crowd out the latter, so certainly at any level conferring significant influence you find a disproportionately large number of arseholes and a disproportionately small number of decent people compared to the general population.

    The point of random selection is to limit the number of arseholes as far as can be achieved by any means whose impartiality is unimpeachable, by selecting from the population as a whole in order to avoid that kind of concentration.

    Barack Obama is deservedly honoured as a very unusual politician, but that is kind of the point: he stands out because it is so unusual to get so far and still remain human.

    "Now I'm actually not a great fan of elections"

    It's not the voting I'm talking about, it's the means by which people get to be the ones voted for, and stand a reasonable chance of getting a significant number of votes. AIUI both in the US and the UK it is more or less true that any old random bod can stand, but it is also true that any old random bod will most likely get 3 votes and then vanish without trace, so the italic bit is important.

    The difficulty with elections as winnowers of the incompetent is that they tend to favour people who are competent at getting the public to vote for them. That correlates surprisingly poorly with competence at getting anything done in government, let alone with having the background knowledge to make what you get done actually useful. This is not the same problem as the nature of the pool from which the elections are choosing, although there is a large degree of overlap, and probably an even larger degree in the US due to the extent to which it allows money to be involved.

    It does however have a particular relevance here in that the effectiveness of an election in making objectively good choices is not seriously affected by picking candidates at random from the general public. The skills you are diluting by doing that are mostly of lesser importance in terms of someone's performance once elected.

    (If one is concerned with the shortage of such skills, a constructive way to increase their prevalence would be to educate people to have a broad knowledge base and think critically, instead of mushroom farming them. But of course that would ruin the effectiveness of many of the methods used to gather votes, and they would have to do so by honest means instead, so it doesn't happen.)

    Another aspect of the situation is of course the evolutionary factors which appear when people are allowed to be elected more than once. Again, not the same thing, but with considerable overlap.

    These, as I remember it, were basically the arguments Clarke used to devise his system of government in... oh, the one with the ocean planet and the space elevators. Candidates were selected at random from the general population, which naturally meant most of them didn't actually want to do it. Whichever of the candidates was then voted in had to do it for some reasonable period, and then was permanently excluded from then on. Since the population was well educated most of them could make a reasonable fist at it, and although you still did get a penis getting in sometimes, the damage was limited by the restricted term and the one-shot principle.

    1696:

    I put "John Woo" into search engine - And I get this ... So you will have to provide more details, if it's not too much trouble!

    Yoo, not Woo.

    As in John "waterboarding is legal" Yoo.

    See Guardian for what he is now up to

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/20/trump-john-yoo-lawyer-torture-waterboarding

    1697:

    I've been calling the alt.right the all.wrong for several years. Goes well... white wing, all.wrong.

    1698:

    In the meantime, as 2020 continues Turkey and Egypt appear to be heading to conflict as they try to influence the ongoing mess known as Libya - and presumably more importantly influence/control the oil reserves in Libya.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/egypt-turkey-libya-deployment-el-sisi-khalifa-haftar-a9629661.html

    1699:

    TJ ...will take action as if the nonsense they spout is fact, until reality kicks their face in. Which always happens. Unfortunately , that kicking-in can take nearly 6 years & cost, what ... 50 million lives?

    "John Yoo" - Shouldn't that be John Euuuewwwww ..... ? Having looked him up, now we've got the name right.

    mdive Libiya ... Saudi vs Turkey - ok, they can kill each other all they like, but .... France is apparenly on Egypt's "side" Oh shit - hopefully NOT a re-run of the Balkans 1912-14?

    1700:

    elections ... favour people who are competent at getting the public to vote for them. That correlates surprisingly poorly with competence

    That's what political parties do, and those are surprisingly necessary. Sure, some people call them other names but there's always a persistent organisational structure after a while, simply because that beats a newbie almost every time.

    You'll note that Trump is an outlier in that he captured a party rather than building one, and it looks as though he is inflicting significant damage on that structure (as he does to every organisation he gets involved with).

    But normally most candidates are pre-vetted by the party to make sure they are useful (to the party) as well as electable. The US might be unusual in having so many uncontested "elections" and anyone-can-stand elections from what I can see. I'm much more used to the UK/Anglonesia problem where most MPs end up being former party employees (staffers, apparatchiks, whatever you want to call them) so you end up with modern parliament dominated by "finished university, worked from a MP, worked for a aprty, now an MP" where in the good old days it was "got law degree, worked in father's chambers, inherited father's seat" (which might not be better?).

    But the other half of parliament used to be made up of working sods who made the mistake of getting involved in local politics, being obviously effective, and when a group of concerned citizens prodded them hard enough they stepped onto the platform and to their horror sentenced to parliament rather than being hanged.

    1701:

    I saw a joke on line today which went something like this:

    SILENT Ks

    Knot - one silent K.

    Knuckle - two silent Ks.

    Republican Controlled Senate - three silent Ks...

    1702:

    Workplace safety minister fired for 'unsafe' workplace relationship

    Te Ao has the best headlines outside of satirical media. That's a real story, and it really is what you'd expect from Boris or someone of that level of competence. Sigh.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Lees-Galloway

    1703:

    John Woo - the piece of shit who should have been in front of a firing squad in '06 or '07, the lawyer who found word games for W to claim what they were doing at Girmo wasn't torture.

    You mean John Yoo? The one who wrote the opinion that torture was legal, and anyway a lot of what was done in "enhanced interrogation" wasn't torture because it wasn't painful enough?

    I've always figured the appropriate consequence would be to take him at his word and repeatedly waterboard him, possibly interspersed with single blows to the body, and see how long he lasted before he changed his mind.

    1704:

    At the moment, I've got a list of people who I think would do well with an extended vacation from reality, on a respirator, for 40 days. Maybe longer.

    Yoo Who is one of them. I could do with a lot less hearing his name or seeing his face.

    1705:

    Thing is, random selection barely works for committee heads. If it has any serious time commitment, the easiest way out is to be so incompetent that they dump you and get a replacement in a hurry. And, unfortunately, there are many cases where you need someone to do a decent job.

    The fundamental place where we disagree is that assholes crowd out people of principle. That isn't necessarily what happens.

    A slightly better version is to think of the various estates: the landowners, the merchants, the military, and so on. All want that lovely, addictive power. The standard gambit is to try to engorge yourself with more power by preventing the other factions from being able to influence you.

    In our country, a disproportionately large amount of power has gone to landowners and merchants, due to ownership rules promulgated by our government. In return, they've worked very hard to get people elected who can't control them, this especially since 1980. The result of this is assholes in power. It didn't just happen normally, it was engineered just a bit.

    This is not to say that technocrats, if put in absolute power, can't screw up an economy, or that merchants can't disempower the military. They can and have, especially after the WWI and the Civil War This last is a good example, because about 125 years ago, the US Navy was considered inferior to the navy of Chile. That all changed when a bright bulb in the US Navy realized that, if the US didn't beef up it's Navy pronto, it would lose control of the soon-to-be-built Panama Canal and thereby lose the fast oceanic connection to the West Coast, with every nightmare that would entail. Over about 10 years, this bright bulb and his followers persuaded the US to start building top-of-the-line battleships, like the Iowa. And the rest is history. Now we've got a hard-to-control military, and we'll see how that goes.

    1706:

    Have you read Northcote Parkinson's book Parkinson's Law? (The collection of essays, not just the single eponymous essay.)

    I like this bit in the essay on selecting the right candidate by careful advertising:

    Let us suppose that the post to be filled is that of Prime Minister. The modern tendency is to trust in various methods of election, with results that are almost invariably disastrous. Were we to turn, instead, to the fairy stories we learned in childhood, we should realize that at the period to which these stories relate far more satisfactory methods were in use. When the king had to choose a man to marry his eldest or only daughter and so inherit the kingdom, he normally planned some obstacle course from which only the right candidate would emerge with credit; and from which indeed (in many instances) only the right candidate would emerge at all. For imposing such a test the kings of that rather vaguely defined period were well provided with both personnel and equipment. Their establishment included magicians, demons, fairies, vampires, werewolves, giants, and dwarfs. Their territories were supplied with magic mountains, rivers of fire, hidden treasures, and enchanted forests. It might be urged that modern governments are in this respect less fortunate. This, however, is by no means certain. An administrator able to command the services of psychologists, psychiatrists, alienists, statisticians, and efficiency experts is not perhaps in a worse (or better) position than one relying upon hideous crones and fairy godmothers. An administration equipped with movie cameras, television apparatus, radio networks, and X-ray machines would not appear to be in worse (or better) position than one employing magic wands, crystal balls, wishing wells, and cloaks of invisibility. Their means of assessment would seem, at any rate, to be strictly comparable. All that is required is to translate the technique of the fairy story into a form applicable to the modern world. In this, as we shall see, there is no essential difficulty.

    The first step in the process is to decide on the qualities a Prime Minister ought to have. These need not be the same in all circumstances, but they need to be listed and agreed upon. Let us suppose that the qualities deemed essential are (1) Energy, (2) Courage, (3) Patriotism, (4) Experience, (5) Popularity, and (6) Eloquence. Now, it will be observed that all these are general qualities which all possible applicants would believe themselves to possess. The field could readily, of course, be narrowed by stipulating (4) Experience of lion-taming, or (6) Eloquence in Mandarin. But that is not the way in which we want to narrow the field. We do not want to stipulate a quality in a special form; rather, each quality in an exceptional degree. In other words, the successful candidate must be the most energetic, courageous, patriotic, experienced, popular, and eloquent man in the country. Only one man can answer to that description and his is the only application we want. The terms of the appointment must thus be phrased so as to exclude everyone else. We should therefore word the advertisement in some such way as follows:

    Wanted—Prime Minister of Ruritania. Hours of work: 4 A.M. to 11.59 P.M. Candidates must be prepared to fight three rounds with the current heavyweight champion (regulation gloves to be worn. Candidates will die for their country, by painless means, on reaching the age of retirement (65). They will have to pass an examination in parliamentary procedure and will be liquidated should fail to obtain 95% marks. They will also be liquidated if they fail to gain 75% votes in a popularity poll held under the Gallup Rules. They will finally be invited to try their eloquence on a Baptist Congress, the object being to induce those present to rock and roll. Those who fail will be liquidated. All candidates should present themselves at the Sporting Club (side entrance) at 11.15 A.M. on the morning of September 19. Gloves will be provided, but they should bring their own rubber-soles shoes, singlet, and shorts.

    The book is well worth chasing down. I'm fortunate enough to have inherited a copy from my father.

    1707:

    Limbo, by Wolfe. As you go up in the power structure... you have a limb cut off. By the time you're the ruler, you have no arms and no legs, and are utterly dependent on others....

    1708:

    That's not the first serious mis-step by Lees-Galloway, and arguably not the worst (look up Karel Sroubek). It may be the one that meant Ardern could sack him, and even her many enemies would have to concede that she was entirely justified.

    JHomes.

    1709:

    I mentioned Boris and gave the wikipedia link in an effort to avoid having to think too much about that particular individual. He's not as bad as Boris, but on the other hand he's not PM either.

    1710:

    "This last is a good example, because about 125 years ago, the US Navy was considered inferior to the navy of Chile. That all changed when a bright bulb in the US Navy realized that, if the US didn't beef up it's Navy pronto, it would lose control of the soon-to-be-built Panama Canal and thereby lose the fast oceanic connection to the West Coast, with every nightmare that would entail. Over about 10 years, this bright bulb and his followers persuaded the US to start building top-of-the-line battleships, like the Iowa. And the rest is history."

    It was a bit more than just the Panama Canal. He wrote a book, detailing the critical influence of sea power over the history of the last few hundred years, particularly as regards the navy and empire of Britain. It was quite an influence, particularly with the imperialist crowd, and quite successful at pointing out to non-navally-minded people what having a strong navy can get you. The US involvement in the Philippines became what it did as another outgrowth of the same sphere of thought.

    "Now we've got a hard-to-control military, and we'll see how that goes."

    Unk. We know that. The book was also highly influential with some bloke with a gammy arm. He made sure there was a copy on board every ship of his own navy, and built lots more ships to put them on. Not long afterwards, he found out the hard way what happens when your military gets out of control. Trouble was, so did lots of other people.

    1711:

    Re the Portland protests, might not see this in the UK/non-US news. (I'm 3 time zones away; it's not local to me either.) Portland Protest Moms, the "Mom Bloc" (video):

    Moms sing lullaby “hands up please don’t shoot me” pic.twitter.com/GJhj8ymn12

    — Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) July 21, 2020

    Inspired street protest action. Trump's "Law and Order" moves/narratives are not particularly dealing with surprises like this, and they probably don't have enough personnel in the federal agencies involved to scale it up in a real way. The Moms were tear-gassed a couple of days ago; didn't stop them, and Mom Bloc has been joined by "PDX Dad Pod."

    This guy who writes for bellingcat has been tracking Portland: https://twitter.com/IwriteOK (Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans)) and he asks that you read this backgrounder by him: What You Need To Know About The Battle of Portland (July 20, 2020, Robert Evans)

    1712:

    I'm 3 time zones away; it's not local to me either.

    It's too damn local for me; I live two miles from this. If you, or anyone, have questions for locals I'm happy to answer.

    The Moms were tear-gassed a couple of days ago; didn't stop them, and Mom Bloc has been joined by "PDX Dad Pod."

    Before the mom line there was Naked Athena; a woman wearing only a full head hood confronted the police line, which left them confused and unready to fight. It worked on Cuchulainn...

    And dads showed up to help the moms. Last night they were going to bring leaf blowers to drive tear gas back toward the police. As I write this I've not seen any detailed reports but it didn't not work, so they'll probably keep trying that.

    1713:

    Find out where the Feds are sleeping - they're quite possibly staying in a hotel somewhere.

    Somewhere, right. Somewhere.

    • Insert dramatic beat for the video dramatization version *

    There have been rumors circulating about where that somewhere might be, a certain hotel belonging to a famous chain. On a map the hotel is a good choice for a group worried about security: the chain is known to rent to federal employees, this one is near the highway giving easy access to downtown, at the end of a cul-de-sac with no through traffic, yet with a back exit (a 50m gravel driveway to some industrial businesses and then out to the main roads well away from the official street address).

    Monday morning I had to go out and get gas anyway so it was easy for me to another mile and see if I could spot the rumored vans. I turned into the dead end street, found more construction barricades than I'd remembered narrowing an already narrow street, and deciding it would be prudent not to get trapped in all that I turned into the parking lot of the restaurant on the corner. In the few seconds it took me to decide that a three point turn wasn't as practical as driving in all the way and doing a U-turn, some guy in a dark van pulled into the lot behind me. He hadn't been there on the main street; he just watched me circle through the lot. What he did after I got onto the street I can't say; maybe he was just there for breakfast.

    So, yes, I have a suspicion about where they might be.

    1714:

    [T]he cynical liars who know what the truth is ... will by and by be replaced by people who have drunk the cool aid because there are very few cynical liars in the pipeline of new talent

    This is absolutely true and as you say it's neither new nor unique to democracies. There's quite a big question around: What do we make of those who have believed and bought into their own side's propaganda?

    My own experience reflects others' comments: that while there are certainly some corrupt, cynical power seekers among the mix of career politicians, there are also some who are in it to pursue what they honestly believe is some sort of greater good, whether it's for the entire community or just some of it. Local representatives can be quite conspicuous in the lengths they go to represent their electorates, to help their constituents and their local institutions, like schools and community services. Sure this isn't universal, and the way it happens can be different depending on the nature of the electorate and the politics of the representative. But it forms part of the work that needs to be done for someone to be elected, whether they do it themselves or their party organisation does it for them.

    The thing about these "second generation" movement conservatives is that while it is plainly true that the corrupt cynics who argued certain, for instance, economic policies in obviously bad faith, if the ones who were taken in by those arguments are now presenting their own case, what do we make of the case they are making? There's a contradiction: these are people who absolutely have access to all the resources to make themselves aware of the observable facts and the empirical evidence, the economic history and the "positive economics" that have enormous bodies of work behind them all clearly showing that these policies do not have the effects they are supposed to have. I don't really understand how it's possible for that "second generation" to argue in good faith: they are lying too, and they know they are lying; they even know that most people around them know they are lying. Yet somehow this lie is something that is accepted as a worldview issue, and we still see the self-image of people who appear to genuinely think they are working for the greater good.

    Makes it all terribly frustrating. But it doesn't change the functionality at the electoral level.

    As it happens I agree both with Pigeon, that the skillset for getting elected is different to and perhaps contrary to the skillset for governing and managing serious public policy, and with Heteromeles and (I think) Moz, that nonetheless the election process filters out those who are not competent at organising anything. You might need to try to imagine what happens where there is no such filter, but I don't and I'm sure many here don't either. You really end up with people who have the inflated self-image that comes with the search for power, but with no kind of competence at all. At least where there is a requirement to get elected, the candidate has to be competent at something, and that's not to be dismissed easily.

    1715:

    They at least had to read the preface? first chapter? "How to buy a used VW" ...

    I've never actually sat on the hood[1] and chanted "Om" but yes, there's timeless advice there.

    My father once told me to buy my used cars from their previous owners rather than from a lot, on the grounds that you might still get a lemon but you're not dealing with someone whose job is ripping you off. I have, and got one lemon anyway, but on the whole have been satisfied with my cars.

    [1] Last week I did have a crazy guy sitting on my hood. Inconvenient. It's hard to drive that way.

    1716:

    The problem of choosing leadership seems to be allowing the general public to choose the candidates. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbin were both chosen by the general public. If the MPs had had a veto Jeremy Corbin would not have had a chance of selection and it's possible that Conservative MPs would not have selected their last two leaders. Primary elections for Presidents are a disaster. Let the population have the final choice but not the initial selection. And the USA has a mechanism for eliminating the incompetent in the Electoral College. But they didn't do their job and allowed an incompetent who lost the popular vote to ruin their country.

    1717:

    Damian that nonetheless the election process filters out those who are not competent at organising anything Contra to that, I give you: Chris Grayling & J Corbyn ... Just for starters ...

    1718:

    Yes Greg, bless. You give two examples of people who were capable of being elected. It suits you to say they are no good for anything, but that's clearly not the case since the mere fact they got to where they did represents a significant achievement, no matter what else pertains. You may disagree with what they have done there, and it may well be that both did more harm than good once elevated as they have been, but the fact they got there requires some basic capability. Not understanding that demonstrates a fundamental lack of seriousness.

    1719:

    Sorry, my last sentence there is unnecessary and uncalled for. Apologies.

    But the point stands. Even Trump, the great counter example he is, proves the rule here. He had some obvious skills that he was able to deploy to get elected. They may have been profoundly negative ones that show him in a bad light, and show anyone who did vote for him in a bad light, but they are undoubtedly real. And they put him ahead of a whole world of people like, say, Alex Jones, who couldn't get elected to blow in a paper bag. I'm not saying this is an especially good thing at that end of the scale, but it's a thing, and the alternative is even more bad.

    1720:

    I keep waiting to hear what the LGMs considered response will be nice time a slim, young, white woman strips off and does yoga in front of them.

    The first time it was a shock and they just mumbled and went away. I can't imagine that went down well back in the locker room, especially not when it was publicised. So I'm betting that if someone tries it again there will be a vigorous response.

    I have seen in Oz that the plod don't hesitate to go hands-on in that situation. Sometimes with a blanket, but not having a covering does not stop them. And they don't charge naked-but-painted people for the cost of cleaning the paint out of the divvy van, which was a pleasant surprise.

    1721:

    It is true of all so-called representative democracies, as many philosophers and others have pointed out. Parkinson completely missed the principal reason, as do most people. I started despairing of UK politics as soon as I became aware (though, then, Labour was the most dysfunctional) and realised where we were heading as soon as the country accepted Thatcherism. The same applies to many other dysfunctional countries, including the USA, some of its vassals, and the ones I know something about in Africa.

    The failure mode is primarily tribalism. A bigotted, incompetent, venial or negligent ruler (let's not use the saccharine euphemism 'leader') isn't a long-term problem unless he has a tribe that will back him until he leads them over the cliff-edge. Without that, he will be removed by some means or other and replaced by a ruler with different biasses and faults. Once it depends on populism, the political system is beyond redemption and needs a revolution.

    The way that this is constrained in countries where that system works is that custom and convention imposes constraints, but that is unstable. No, formal constitutions do NOT solve that, though they help a little, as actually following them is custom and convention. Witness USA presidents Jackson and Trump, for a start. In the UK, Old Labour abused them, Thatcher weakened them and Blair weakened them more, which has led to Johnson largely ignoring them. But it's a failure of the system, not of the individual.

    By 2040, England will be Airstrip One to a degree that even Orwell did not expect (as I understand him). The sheeple abandoned the last chance to avoid that in 2019.

    1722:

    I keep waiting to hear what the LGMs considered response will be nice time a slim, young, white woman strips off and does yoga in front of them.

    The first time it was a shock and they just mumbled and went away. I can't imagine that went down well back in the locker room, especially not when it was publicised. So I'm betting that if someone tries it again there will be a vigorous response.

    Agreed; it would be sloppy not to have a plan and they might even follow it.

    For those following at a safe distance, public nudity per se is not illegal in Oregon. Portland even has a regular Naked Bike Ride article, video); once I talked with someone who'd discovered it by stopping for a red light and suddenly getting surrounded by naked bicyclists, which is a memorable way to arrive in the city. Moreover there is an explicit exemption for displays that are part of political statements.

    Any authoritarian group needs to react to people not doing as told, legal quibbles be damned. I'm sure there's something.

    They might be losing the tempo, though; I see a report that last night they were beaten back into the courthouse, which should be a much more frightening thing to authoritarians than women taunting them. If they can't hold the streets, they're holed up inside their fortress - physically safe but no longer dominant.

    I also read that the leafblowers versus tear gas idea is working. The DHS expressed frustration and surprise, prompting the observation, "Our democracy is being destroyed by people who lost a battle of wits to a leaf blower."

    1723:

    Dmaian I suspect that JC, for instance, was & is a prefectly good constituency MP, just utterly out of his depth at anything bigger - his inability to learn anything since about 1975, especially as regards foreign & international relations might be an indicator. Grayling might or might not be a good constituency MP, but, as a Minister, everything he touches turns to shit ... I think it's called "The Peter Principle"

    EC But Thatcher, for all her many faults, would never, ever have gone down the Brexit road - she really believed in collective security & co-operation ( On the best possible terms for Britain, natch ) I lke your point about formal constitutions ... The US is much further down the failure road than we are ( At present - though it's obvious that BoZo & his incompetent clowns are trying it on ) The alternative in 2019 was Corbyn ..... In other words, both main parties had selected someone utterly unfit to govern. I had it easy - I voted for my ( Social Democrat ) Labour MP - again.

    1724:

    "Our democracy is being destroyed by people who lost a battle of wits to a leaf blower."

    For whatever reason, this makes me think of the Emu War. There were definitely indigenous people in Australia in the 30s who thought: the people destroying our culture lost a war with old man emu". For reference, emu is a red meat, tastes like venison but at the least gamey end of the scale you get with that. Traditional land management practices would most likely encourage emu in grazing areas, and direct them through bottlenecks when needed for food.

    This kind of raises a perspective on fascism, that it resembles colonialism. In the 40s, it literally was colonialism, just expressed as a revival of the Baltic Crusades, but openly promoted as colonialism. But also that it is a version of colonialism turned inward. The people of a colonial power, at least some of them, become the object of the colonial subject. Our fear that our homes may become a place where people are "disappeared" is partly also of the mockery that we might be different to the places where this has occurred historically and might still.

    Sure you might say it has always been like this, but I think there have been moments where there has been a glimmer of hope.

    1725:

    That is completely irrelevant to my point. It has NOTHING to do with whether she would have taken good or bad decisions, but entirely about what she did to the checks and balances. What she did was (a) to undermine the controls on a Prime Minister becoming a de facto dictator, whether of the autocratic or oligarchic sort and (b) to hand over the control of our media to foreign powers. Blair and Johnson continued with that process.

    And, yes, the alternative was Corbyn. As I said at the time, the reason we needed him was that he was our last chance to reverse the rush towards Airstrip one fascism, despite his faults. You are clearly happier with that than a few years of minor chaos; I and some others on this blog am not. In this context, Johnson's landslide was largely due to concerted campaigns by foreign countries (no, NOT Russia) and media attacking Corbyn with a stream of falsehoods - some of which you have repeated here - and creating a fifth column within Labour.

    1726:

    This kind of raises a perspective on fascism, that it resembles colonialism. In the 40s, it literally was colonialism, just expressed as a revival of the Baltic Crusades, but openly promoted as colonialism. But also that it is a version of colonialism turned inward.

    See also Klein, on disaster capitalism. When you don't have colonies to exploit directly, you sponsor fascist coups overseas then use your arms sales as a corporate nose-in-the-tent to get your general commercial interests prioritized -- as witness Pinochet's Chile, or post-USSR Russia. But eventually you run out of former colonies and defeated enemies to loot, so the temptation is to turn the same techniques loose at home, and that's where you get neoliberalism and it's big bully brother, modern fascism.

    But fascism is fundamentally extractive rather than productive: it lines the pockets of cronies, but is terrible at actual wealth creation. Eventually it's out-competed by anyone who can organize and run logistics. Our real problem is that there's no "outside" any more -- it looks like a worldwide phenomenon today. But, paradoxically, fascists really hate each other and can't get on. And with COVID19 hammering international supply chains, the resulting fragmentation of the past 3-5 decades of integration may allow individual nations to begin fighting back against the internal threat.

    And it is a threat. In the century of peak population and cascading climate change, we can't afford to hand control over to demagogues who hold science in contempt, aren't interested in evidence-based policy, and are more interested in lining their own pockets than actually running things effectively.

    1727:

    Administrative note

    The reason I've been scarce around here and there hasn't been a new blog entry since the start of the month is that I'm dealing with overlapping deadlines: (a) trying to finish the ending of the 11th Laundry novel ("In His House", a sequel to "Dead Lies Dreaming"), and (b) I'm tackling the final round of edits to "Invisible Sun", the last Merchant Princes/Empire Games book. Both of which are being pushed backwards by the impact of COVID19 on publishing ("Invisible Sun" now looks more likely to drop in September 2021 than in March or July: "In His House" may end up pushed back to 2022) but which are still moving forward as long as I get my end of the job(s) done speedily and efficiently.

    So I'm currently working to make up for lost writing time during the first months of lockdown, which leaves very little time for blogging.

    1728:

    Actually, it doesn't always depend on sponsored coups or arms sales. The Belgian Congo was a shithole, but was a major source of income for the exploiters; they THOUGHT that they would lose out (hence Katanga and all that), but discovered that a dysfunctional country was as profitable as a subservient one. Since then, the policy has often been to create chaos rather than sponsor coups (Libya was a recent good example, and Syria another) and loot the corpse.

    1729:

    All I can say is that you should spread the news around. Has anyone confirmed that the Feds are renting from Enterprise?

    1730:

    I keep thinking that Maxwell comes before Marx, and while Maxwell died before Marx did, Marx was born before Maxwell so it's more correct to say they were contemporaries. Supposedly Marx read pretty much everything, so it is reasonable to assume he also read Maxwell. This is important in terms of his insights regarding what we now call macro. Maxwell studied heat engines and his observations have given us our understanding of the rules that closed systems follow. Marx had the insight that a monetary domain is such a closed system. Ricardo and Say had touched own the idea, but lacked the concept of a system. Capitalism suffers inevitable crises because it depends on growth and a closed system bounds the domain for growth. Colonialism was the cure: make the inputs external, so it is not a closed system.

    Keynes rescues capitalism by drawing out the relationships between growth, monetary policy and fiscal policy. WE don't need colonialism after all, huzzah and all that. But that doesn't mean the opportunity to make a killing on the road to globalisation doesn't create a new kind of rapaciousness. Disquised as neoliberalism for a while, it's teeth are showing in the US at the moment.

    1731:

    In other words, both main parties had selected someone utterly unfit to govern.

    That's what 2016 felt like in the U.S. The choice of Trump vs. Hillary Clinton felt very much like being forced to choose between Satan and Cthulhu. Hillary is marginally competent, I suspect, except at the one thing she most needs to be competent at; fighting crazed Republicans.

    1732:

    EC No & complete bollocks, as i have said several times. YOU may emote that I am happier with what we have got - I can assure you that I am not. And I just told you how I voted - not for any member of BoZo's party.

    1733:

    All I can say is that you should spread the news around. Has anyone confirmed that the Feds are renting from Enterprise?

    I've told the hotel visit story closer to home too. (Anyone willing to muck through Facepalm can probably find me there, though my name is pretty common.) I've heard a single report that they're also in the AC Marriott downtown, though that would be much too close to the excitement for my taste.

    Enterprise is what this local paper's article says, confirming multiple local rumors and reports. It seems as certain as we could ask without seeing rental receipts.

    1734:

    No, it's entirely different. I agree with your classification of them.

    In the case of the UK, it wasn't their unfitness, but the directions they were heading in. Johnson was clearly for bigotry, fascism, internal disaster capitalism, and servitude to the USA (direction A). Corbyn wasn't for anything worse than a return to Old Labour (pretty ghastly, I admit, but NOTHING by comparison).

    As it is, the worse side won, absolutely, and for at least the rest of my life. We shall probably get some sugar-coating of direction A under Starmer, but I can see no signs that he will even try to reverse it. Whether he will actively promote it, as Blair did, remains to be seen.

    1735:

    From this side of the Atlantic, Bojo the Clown doesn't seem very competent, but I'm probably on the wrong side of ocean to have a really clear idea of his worth. Of course, anyone who's in favor of Brexit seems incompetent to me...

    1736:

    So I'm currently working to make up for lost writing time during the first months of lockdown, which leaves very little time for blogging.

    Maybe it's time for a guest entry?

    I'd enjoy one by Greg Tingey on trains…

    1737:

    You are correct that he is incompetent, but whether Corbyn would have been any more competent is a moot point. Neither made anyone confident about their ability to govern, though their faults were different. But, as I said, that wasn't and isn't the critical difference between them.

    1738:

    The choice of Trump vs. Hillary Clinton felt very much like being forced to choose between Satan and Cthulhu. Hillary is marginally competent, I suspect, except at the one thing she most needs to be competent at; fighting crazed Republicans.

    Disagree, conditionally. Hillary was clean -- given the tens of millions the Republicans spent on digging dirt on both Clintons, if there was any dirt on her, they'd have made it stick. (Caveat: any dirt on her which didn't also incriminate a very senior Republican. E.g. she would have been safe from ratfucking if it had been over her having an affair with Mitch McConnell.)

    She was also the longest-serving SecState ever, if I remember correctly, a former senator, and -- despite having looked at first as if she started out by climbing Bill's coat-tails -- had matured into a solid, if uninspiring, politician of the "third way" variety (triangulating between the soft right and the howling-at-the-moon hard right).

    However she was female, and probably 30% of the US voters believe women should be kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and don't deserve the vote, much less to be beneficiaries of the vote. She also had the entire media circus lined up against her. And the aforementioned crazed Republicans.

    Despite all of which she gained a clear majority of the popular vote. But the Democrats hadn't gerrymandered the electoral college, so she didn't get a big enough majority.

    To win, a US Democratic party candidate can't simply win a narrow majority over the Republican candidate -- they have to absolutely steamroller them. The game's rigged.

    1739:

    That requires me taking time to recruit a guest blogger and train them. Too busy, must type faster or clowns will eat my fingertips ...

    1740:

    Charlie @1738: . . . her having an affair with Mitch McConnell.

    Ack - bring on the mind bleach!

    The game's rigged.

    Mandatory reference to Leonard Cohen's Everybody Knows.

    @1739: must type faster or clowns will eat my fingertips ...

    You REALLY need to lay off reading Steven King at bedtime.

    1741:

    That requires me taking time to recruit a guest blogger and train them.

    How about one of your previous guest bloggers doing a reprise? I assume they're already trained…

    1742:

    I also read that the leafblowers versus tear gas idea is working. The DHS expressed frustration and surprise, prompting the observation, "Our democracy is being destroyed by people who lost a battle of wits to a leaf blower."

    That word democracy, it might not mean what they think it means...

    More to the point, this may be the 2020 equivalent of the Guy Fawkes masks and "Oh Shit, the Internet is here" from a decade and more ago. It's "Oh shit, the suburbs are here."

    That's worse, at least from a Republican point of view. You know it's bad when suburban dads show up with their leaf blowers and their kid's hockey sticks* to keep a security response from getting out of hand. Because they vote, as do their putative wives who are standing on the front line. And if you're backing the CBP against suburban dads, you're eroding your base still more.

    Thing is, this election will be won or lost in the suburbs, so if the suburbanites are coming out against the pigs**, that's not a good sign for the side who's sending the pigs out.

    Some were using hockey sticks to slap shot tear gas away from the protests.
    *
    Not sure what the proper denigration of CBP assault forces sent away from the border, on the grounds that they don't need permission to be where they are is. But I apologize to real pigs for the comparison.

    1743:

    I rather think the point is that Hillary is good at governance, not at campaigning.

    The critical point here is that it's not her innate talent or charisma (she's got far more of both than I do, for instance), it was her failure with the particular campaign of 2016. The democrats knew what they were up against from both the Republicans and the Russians, and they lost that campaign even though they won the vote.

    That's squarely on the democratic strategists, and it's certainly what I hear from party insiders. Right now, there is a lot of frustration between the progressive wing who wants to organize and problem solve, and the mainstream wing who's just a wee bit too comfortable with the entrenched billionaires and unions, and wants to maintain those relationships.

    Problem is, the mainstream democrats really aren't the best campaigners in the country. Most of those are (ironically) Republicans, as you can see from the Lincoln Project. They kind of have to be good, because the only way to maintain power as a decreasing minority party is to play the campaign game very dirty and very well.

    Anyway, Biden's running a really good campaign, which consists of setting out how he'll fix the country, and staying out of the way while Trump self-destructs. No point in getting in the way of your enemy making a mistake, as the saying goes.

    1744:

    While that is true, it meant that she was positioning herself as a super-hawk, especially w.r.t. Russia, to attempt to counteract that - I was horribly afraid that she would get herself into a position where she had the choice between humiliating herself and starting WW III, and which she would choose :-(

    For all his faults, Trump is less aggressively militaristic than most of his recent predecessors, including Obama.

    1745:
    I've never gotten the point of "a president you can have a beer with."

    Especially when said president (Bush, Trump) famously doesn't drink.

    1746:

    Reminds me of the stories from the Rainbow Family Gatherings. The entire Gathering is put on for less money every year than the USFS LEOs budget to go in and hassle them ineffectively.

    I like how they're so subtle as to put up barricades. Want to make the veterans in the unit feel like they're in Fallujah again, so that they're more likely to treat the locals as hostiles?

    1747:

    Troutwaxer @ 1677:

    "That's why you don't want Joe Random in charge of the US or any country. You really do want the best person for the job, if you can get them."

    I've never gotten the point of "a president you can have a beer with." I want a president who's so much smarter than I am that having a beer with me would be a complete and utter waste of his/her time!

    I've never had a beer with a President, but I've frequently had brunch with a bunch of honest-to-god "rocket scientists".

    1748:
    Even better than ( the horror! ) Basingstoke - I have an anceint photo of two opposing signposts at a roundabout there, both saying ... "Town Centre"

    Isn't Basingstoke the place that has no town centre any more, they demolished it and built a shopping arcade.

    I may be confusing it with some other hell-hole.

    1749:

    Perhaps, but two directions to the same place isn't rare in the UK. If you look at a map, you will usually see that it's a perfectly reasonable way of directing people - i.e. it simply doesn't matter which you take. Most of our roads were originally tracks between fields and similar, and form a dense network in many places.

    1750:

    Date points: 1. After my late wife and I relocated to Chicago, for the first year, we were in a rental house in the 'burbs (oddly, the one Hillary grew up in). At one point I called my CongressThing... who, unfortunately, was the abominable Henry Hyde, of the Hyde Amendment (can't use federal funds for abortions).

    Understand, this is back in the day when you paid, by the minute, for long distance, and I was calling Washington, DC on my dime... and his asshole staffer ARGUED with me for five or ten minutes. He never took the time to write down name, and didn't ask for address.

    Every time I've called a Dem Congresscritter, or Senator, the staffer ALWAYS asks for my name and address.

    Obviously, if I'm calling, then I'm not a real person. Real Persons have their staff make the call....

    1751:

    I buy from dealers, and if they'll let you (which is becoming less common) take it to my mechanic to check it out.

    1752:

    Yeah, but two directions to a place that doesn't exist is a good one.

    (Looked it up on google maps and I was right -- Basingstoke doesn't have a town centre, just a huge shopping arcade. When we passed through it on a trip to somewhere else and stopped for food we were depressed for hours).

    1753:

    No: if you let those in power chose who can run, well, as Boss Tweed, of Tammany Hall said in, what, 1876, "The people can vote for whoever they want, as long as I get to chose who they can vote for."

    1754:

    Hyde's staffer should have got reassigned to the unemployment line.

    AFAIK, the reason to get name and address is (among other things) to make sure you're a constituent. A lot of stuff political offices deal with are pothole politics, making sure a kid gets a recommendation to go to a military academy, stuff like that. If someone got the wrong representative, the proper thing to do is to send them to the right office so that they can be helped. This is a whole aspect of national and state politics that gets missed in the US but is probably familiar in Britain: there are services those offices can provide you that have nothing to do with legislating.

    The other thing is that arguing with a constituent is stoopid, even if they're of the opposite party. You lose your boss a vote. Since political aides make careers out of working for politicians one after the other, getting a reputation as someone who doesn't take care of their boss's constituents isn't a good career move. And it seems to be a fairly small world where everyone knows each other, even across the aisle.

    1755:

    Sigh. Remember to take breaks....

    Since Friday, I've 1. had a short novella (8100 words) bounce from Amazing, so I submitted it to Analog. 2. Finished a 1 page synopsis (with help from a certain fish-polisher here), did a cover letter, and submitted the first novel (that had bounced from DAW) to a Canadian publisher, Edge (well, the story's set on a colony settled by French and French-Canadians...). 3. Had a bunch of go-rounds and think I'm about done with a synopsis for the new novel (5 pp, barely, and see no way to make it shorter - it's a large, complex novel). 4. Had feedback from a beta reader on that novel I'd forgotten about, who had some really insightful comments, and sent her the revised version, and made some changes per her cmts.

    So, with all that, I have an idea of what you're going through, though I have no deadline.

    1756:

    If he does.... About a month ago, I finally found the control panel I built for my model RR back in the early nineties. Then I realized I didn't remember how it worked. The other morning, waking up, I had a thought, and looked at it yesterday, and finally I know, and so I can use it - it doesn't control the power blocks, it only controls the switches (or turnouts, as model rr's refer to them, not to confuse them with electrical switches).

    If you're interested, here's a pic, and you'll see why I didn't want to build a new one http://silverdragon.5-cent.us/misc/rrlayoutcontrolpanel_s.jpg

    1757:

    Not a chance. The point was, he was GOP. This is '94 or '95, and this is where they were becoming the antiAmerican traitors they are now. Hyde would have patted him on the back for trying to put me in my place.

    1758:

    Heteromeles @ 1743: I rather think the point is that Hillary is good at governance, not at campaigning.

    The critical point here is that it's not her innate talent or charisma (she's got far more of both than I do, for instance), it was her failure with the particular campaign of 2016. The democrats knew what they were up against from both the Republicans and the Russians, and they lost that campaign even though they won the vote.

    That's squarely on the democratic strategists, and it's certainly what I hear from party insiders. Right now, there is a lot of frustration between the progressive wing who wants to organize and problem solve, and the mainstream wing who's just a wee bit too comfortable with the entrenched billionaires and unions, and wants to maintain those relationships.

    The best strategy in the world can't prepare you for the Director of the FBI coming out of right-field, violating the Hatch Act and knifing your candidate in the back a week before the election.

    Obama should have fired Comey after his disgraceful performance in July 2016. Comey shouldn't have been FBI Director when he delivered his "October Surprise"!

    And, I wouldn't take the Bernie Bros sour grapes as gospel about what the "mainstream wing" of the Democratic Party is or is not comfortable with either.

    Problem is, the mainstream democrats really aren't the best campaigners in the country. Most of those are (ironically) Republicans, as you can see from the Lincoln Project. They kind of have to be good, because the only way to maintain power as a decreasing minority party is to play the campaign game very dirty and very well.

    Anyway, Biden's running a really good campaign, which consists of setting out how he'll fix the country, and staying out of the way while Trump self-destructs. No point in getting in the way of your enemy making a mistake, as the saying goes.

    The Lincoln Project is running a strong mud slinging campaign against Trumpolini, but that doesn't make them "progressive".

    1759:

    EC @ 1734 IF JC had been for a return to "old Labour" it would have been bad, but not a bad a BoZo, but he wasn't & isn't - he's a complete idiot where foreign polcy is concerned, not that BoZo has proven any better at all. Remember. I live in London, we had BoZo as Mayor .....

    Troutwaxer No. NOT "incompetent" ( in this case ) "just" utterly mad &/or greedy &/or paid for by others.

    John Hughes More or less .... the other horror show is Crawley ( Often referred to as "Creepy" ) I nearly laughed myself sick, about 12 years back at a Beer Festival, when one of our staff number, a local-league football supporter, produced a set of directions to get to their next game - which was against Basingstoke Town FC .... the word "Roundabout" appeared 23 times in the directions. Guk.

    1760:

    whitroth @ 1751: I buy from dealers, and *if* they'll let you (which is becoming less common) take it to *my* mechanic to check it out.

    I did that when I bought my Jeep. I wouldn't buy a vehicle from a dealer that wouldn't let me take it to MY mechanic to check it out.

    It was REALLY low mileage & in great shape, but MY mechanic neglected to point out that although the tires were in "good shape" with lots of tread left on them, they were the 15 year old OEM tires.

    I still would have bought it if they'd mentioned the tires, but I might have been able to get the dealer to come down on the price just a little

    It was everything I was looking for in a Jeep (V6, 4WD, MANUAL transmission, AC, Cruise ...) and it was a great price; a bargain even with the dodgy tires, but I would have gone ahead and had them put new tires on it if I'd known.

    As it was, I had a flat on my second road trip & the place I took it to for the repair pointed out the problem with the old tires and they ended up making the sale instead. Even that wasn't too bad, 5 brand new OFF-ROAD tires for less than $1,000.

    They're not for extreme off-roading, but they'll do for the 4WD required dirt roads in the National Parks if I can ever get out west again.

    1761:

    RE: Hillary Clinton, speaking as someone who grew up in one of the reddest parts of "Red" America (western Kansas), there are two things "Blue" Americans and those abroad need to understand:

    1) The Clintons were on the receiving end of a largely effective two-decade plus long opposition research and smear campaign. Large numbers of Republican voters, even otherwise sane and moderate ones, were convinced by years and years of propaganda that the Clinton political machine was an organized crime family and that Hillary was its kingpin. They genuinely believe she's had people murdered (e.g. Vince Foster), secretly pulled the strings of several sectors of the U.S. economy, and would be Hitler-in-a-pantsuit if elected President.

    All of this was, of course, bullshit. The Clintons weren't any more corrupt than the median national-level politician, just perhaps sloppier about it during their earlier years. Neither of them came from money so they had a learning curve in understanding how the system worked.

    Moreover, the campaign against them was both the initial driving force and proof of concept for the Republican propaganda/media complex and the transformation of the GOP from a conservative party to a reactionary/petty fascist party. You can draw a straight line from that campaign to the never-ending hurricane of bullshit we get from the GOP and the Trump machine now.

    2) Progressives are a minority of the U.S. electorate. There is no vast, untapped reservoir of leftists out there to activate that's of a size sufficient to democratically swarm the system and take over. On top of that, what progressives that do exist are concentrated in too few places to win the Electoral College. Getting rid of the Electoral College requires a constitutional amendment and is therefore a non-starter. Getting such an amendment passed would require low-population states which benefit from the distortions of the Electoral College to vote away that benefit, and they're not going to do that.

    So, in order to win elections and enact change in the political system, progressives have to make coalitions with moderates (i.e. centrists in U.S. parlance, the "soft right" in UK/Commonwealth parlance). That necessarily involves compromise, pragmatism, and making trade-offs, none of which are satisfying to the romantic idealists that comprise the movement.

    The deck isn't just stacked against the U.S. left in legal terms; it's stacked against them in demographic terms as well.

    1762:

    I think you're misreading a few things.

    One is that I don't know any Bernie Bros, but I do know a bunch of progressive democrats and environmentalists, many of whom (not all) wanted to vote for Bernie. They're eyebrow deep in local politics. At least in California, there's a split between the progressive wing of the democratic party and the labor and business wing of the democratic party. The latter has most of the money and influence, and they do keep screwing up. That doesn't forgive the progressive screwups (of which there are many), but there are serious problems. One example of this (not from California) is the Iowa democratic caucus screwup where their software failed on the night of the vote, because the party had given a sweetheart deal to someone and not done their due diligence to make sure the system really worked.

    And that takes me to the Lincoln Project. Yes, they're slinging mud, and no they are nothing like progressive. What I'm talking about with campaigning isn't progressive values, it's about winning. Republicans have been doing a pretty good job of that, not just through dirty campaigning and soliciting help from all over the world (ahem!) but also through redistricting, vote suppression, and all that crap. That's the campaign field everyone has to fight on, thanks to their tactics. There's little use in mirroring what they do, but their crap does have to be dealt with, or else. My grumble about Hillary's campaign was that they knew this crap was going on, and didn't respond effectively. At the least, they needed the equivalent of a leaf blower brigade to blow away the teargas when the Republicans let loose. And unfortunately, I don't think the national Democratic campaigners are all that good at the innovative damage control they really need to have ready.

    1763:

    At least in California, there's a split between the progressive wing of the democratic party and the labor and business wing of the democratic party.

    It's not just in California.

    Progressives and moderates are fair-weather friends right now because of Trump.

    If Biden wins in November, that won't last. The next big fight in U.S. politics will be between progressives and moderates for control of the Democratic party. The outcome of that fight will, in turn, help determine the fate of the GOP.

    1764:

    FUBAR & Heteromeles What's the header for this thread? Answer: It won't be, certainly not THIS "christmas". Even IF DT & the R's lose on 3rd Novemeber ... and the arseholes can still try hard to pull-back - look at DT's latest volte-face ... then there's the drag to 20th January & whatever illegal & dirty tricks they can & will pull in that period & there is zero guarantee that DT will walk even on the 20th. For comparison I found this interesting ... for certain values of.

    1765:

    I agree that the fight is brewing. Will it determine what happens to the GOP? That we disagree on, I think.

    Part of the problem is that Biden's definitely a moderate, so they'll stay in power for awhile.

    Unfortunately, reality is increasingly extreme, and the stack of crises piling up is probably going to pull the Dems hard toward the Progressive side of reality, just to deal with Covid19, a likely economic depression, climate change, and other jollies. That's going to give the progressives some leverage regardless.

    As for the GOP, depends on whether they lose and if so, how badly. I agree that the correct strategy is to assume they'll win and to fight to take them all down as hard as legally possible. Assuming the movement conservatives go down hard, things get interesting. There are A Lot of former republicans hanging out as moderate democrats (if they were Roosevelt/Eisenhower Republicans), or independents (if they were more conservative than that but still had souls). If the GOP as currently constituted implodes, whatever arises from its ashes may pull leftward and start welcoming the leavers back to the fold. That will be interesting for the moderate wing of the Democratic Party that said former Republicans are propping up.

    But that's in the future. We've got to get through this year first.

    1766:

    About that progressives being a minority... that was true. However, the last 20 years of income remaining mostly steady, sometimes not keeping up with inflation, and all the good jobs, meaning manufacturing, being sent out of country, has really, really, really hurt that demographic. We saw them angry in '16. We also saw the beginning of them moving left in '18.

    Here's another thing: the best thing that happened to the Democrats in 84 years... was Bernie running.

    Now, note that my take is that his real intent was to speak to "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party", the FDR Democrats left, and young people. And it worked. Hillary even moved left, some. I, personally, think he was shocked that his campaign became a serious contender.

    His arguments, and then, this year, Warren's arguments, I think really hit home, though some won't admit it. The Hairball said he'd bring jobs back... and hasn't, any more than he's brought up a healthcare bill, or an infrastructure bill. These are things that hit home.

    Trust me on this: for some reason, I was in a bar (meeting folks?) in '93 in Austin, TX, and Clinton was on the TV, talking about a one card healthcare system, and the whole bar applauded.

    Remember, it was the country folks who were pro-socialism, too, during the Depression.

    1767:

    Hello, there. I was for Bernie... and Ellen and a friend say they know Bernie bros... but for some reason, they won't introduce me to them.

    I also haven't run into them online where I hang out. If someone would introduce me, I want to pound the sand in their heads... and I have more leftist credentials than any of them.

    1768:

    The scenario you describe for the GOP is pretty much what I envision. If progressives successfully get control of the Democratic party, today's moderate Democrats could be tomorrow's Republicans. Which would actually be a net gain for progressives because it would mean the Overton window has shifted left.

    OTOH, if the GOP continues to double down on being reactionary, it could go the way of the Whigs. In which case, I think the Democratic party itself would split along moderate/progressive lines.

    1769:

    Trust me on this: for some reason, I was in a bar (meeting folks?) in '93 in Austin, TX, and Clinton was on the TV, talking about a one card healthcare system, and the whole bar applauded.

    The catch is that most of them are conservative to reactionary on culture war issues.

    It's not that center-left, Bernie-style ideas don't appeal; they do. It's that Americans tend to vote based on culture war positions over their economic self-interest.

    Things have to get BAD--such as in an out of control pandemic--before they'll defect. Even then, it's a short-term deal.

    1770:

    Anyway, Biden's running a really good campaign, which consists of setting out how he'll fix the country, and staying out of the way while Trump self-destructs. No point in getting in the way of your enemy making a mistake, as the saying goes.

    That sounds an awful lot like the kind of campaign Hillary ran (although, admittedly during a very different time) so I am not filled with the rousing expectation of success.

    1771:

    Obama should have fired Comey after his disgraceful performance in July 2016. Comey shouldn't have been FBI Director when he delivered his "October Surprise"!

    Remind me please.

    1772:

    Hillary and her stupid decision to run a private email server when Sec. State, and the investigations into it and the timing of certain statements

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

    1773:

    "But her EMAILS".. really? Really. That is what you are going with?

    Trump had a damn congaline of scandals far, far worse following him around. But the media wanted a horserace, so the litany of Evil Deeds and Blackest Villainy got less column inches than.. Frankly, far better stories. I mean, seriously, I cant come up with a good faith explanation for what the US media was doing that year. Emails was a nothing burger, and worse, it was a boring nothingburger. While on the other side of the isle, the other candidate had dozens of scandals which were lurid, sensational stuff ripped from the pages of pulp legal thrillers.

    But that was not worth covering?

    Whut? Does bothesiderism and the false equivalency reflex run so deep it overrides the impulse to sell copy?

    1774:

    Whut? Does bothesiderism and the false equivalency reflex run so deep it overrides the impulse to sell copy?

    I think so. And it's a very slippery slope. You own a newspaper, and you a story a little to accommodate an advertiser, and it seems like such a little change... fifty-years later you're comparing Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump like they're both equally bad! Congratulations! You've gone from being an accommodating pal to your advertiser to being the reason democracy failed.

    1775:

    Sorry. That should read, "... you alter a story a little big..."

    1776:

    I disagree about Hillary's campaign. Story time: I've loathed Trump since before he was elected, so I spent a lot of time not listening to the radio or TV when they decided it was good to give him wall-to-wall coverage. But I stopped contributing to NPR permanently in September, 2016, when the following happened. I was on my way to a 5:30 meeting, stuck in traffic. Turn on NPR for the headline news at 5:00. Trump. Yuck, turn off. Turn on at 5:01. Trump is still speaking. Yuck. Turn on at 5:02 Trump is still speaking, Click off. Repeat eight more times, same result, Trump still speaking. At 5:10, I turn the radio on for the tenth time, to hear that Hillary gave an important policy speech that day. Then they played a clip of Trump reacting to it, before going on to other news.

    That's not her failing to campaign, that's the fucking lamestream media not having enough moral fiber to cover both sides of a campaign, as they purportedly learned to do in Journalism 101. Silencing a woman (or a black president), is as bigotry, pure and simple.

    Biden's getting similar non-coverage from allegedly non-partisan media outlets, so the best thing for them to do (IMHO) is look sane and statesmanlike, and let Trump continue to screw up. Why waste the money on press coverage and risk a gaffe, when all the media are interested in is the horse race, gotcha moments, and problems?

    1777:

    The weird thing, seen from afar, is that any outsiders can run in Republican or Democrat primaries. Don't they understand the concept of membership cards? Even more shocking is that other parties can't get on the ballot in many states. Yes, FPTP elections tend to favor a two party system (one step up from a one party system I guess, except when both parties agree on a strict pro-business platform).Frankly, Biden vs Trump would only be acceptable as a contest for leadership of the bingo comitee in a rich people's retirement home.

    1779:

    No. You register Democratic, or GOP, but there is no "part" per se. In '04, when we were pushing Dean, I actually became a member of the Democratic Committee in Brevard CO, FL. I don't remember dues, there was no membership card, you just signed a paper loyalty oath.

    Interestingly, someone can run for office, win, and never have signed that loyalty oath, and a few (Joe Lieberman comes to mind) have endorsed the GOP candidate.

    Now, the DSA, of which I am a dues-paying member, with a card....

    1780:

    I stopped donating, and most listening, to NPR news in Nov, of 1995. During that government shutdown, the first I ever remember, Bob Edwards (spits on ground) "interviewed" two freshman GOP Congressmen... and I had never heard someone brown-nose before. He handed them their talking points, and then encouraged them. Nothing resembling an actual hard question, or even softball.

    Actually, your post reminded me to email the PBS News Hour... they did EXACTLY THE SAME last night in an "interview" with GOP Sen. Purdue.

    I swear, if someone says, in my presence, "oh, esp. with the extra money in unemployment benefits, people don't want to work" I will kick them where it hurts, HARD.

    1781:

    "But her EMAILS".. really? Really. That is what you are going with?

    Regardless of one's opinions on the matter, the media reported it with glee and Comey timed things well from a Trump perspective.

    My only opinion on the matter is that it was stupid of Hillary - given all of the digging into her life by the GOP it was stupid to gift them with something no matter how minor.

    While on the other side of the isle, the other candidate had dozens of scandals which were lurid, sensational stuff ripped from the pages of pulp legal thrillers.

    And the media gleefully covered all of Trump's scandals as well - I mean the "secret" recording of him and Billy Bush via Access Hollywood was covered likely for a good week or more.

    The difference was the public didn't care about Trump's scandals.

    1782:

    That sounds an awful lot like the kind of campaign Hillary ran (although, admittedly during a very different time) so I am not filled with the rousing expectation of success.

    There are 4 big differences this time, plus a wildcard.

    1) Biden isn't hated the way Hillary is (doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense)

    2) after 4 years of Trump he has made it clear to a lot of people, both independents and Democrats, that elections matter.

    3) Trump's bungling the handling of Covid.

    4) BLM/racism

    While 3 and 4 weren't issues during most of the primaries, Biden was ultimately chosen simply because he was inoffensive to the most people.

    The wildcard of course is Covid, and the influence it has on the actual campaigning - or more importantly the prevention of traditional campaigning.

    Without Covid Trump would be having at least weekly rallies at this point, if not more per week, making his base enthusiastic.

    For better/worse this is going to be a unique election given the limitations public health have put on both campaigns.

    1783:

    About that progressives being a minority... that was true. However, the last 20 years of income remaining mostly steady, sometimes not keeping up with inflation, and all the good jobs, meaning manufacturing, being sent out of country, has really, really, really hurt that demographic. We saw them angry in '16. We also saw the beginning of them moving left in '18.

    The progressives are still very much a minority in the entire US - yes they have done well in a few (inner) city places but there is no indication that the rest of the US has started to move left.

    Here's another thing: the best thing that happened to the Democrats in 84 years... was Bernie running.

    Yes, Bernie was good. But he was merely the start of a 20 to 40 process (just like getting from Nixon to Trump took 40+ years).

    Trust me on this: for some reason, I was in a bar (meeting folks?) in '93 in Austin, TX, and Clinton was on the TV, talking about a one card healthcare system, and the whole bar applauded.

    Um, Austin isn't exactly GOP (or even middle America) territory...

    As always, winning in the US is a numbers game in a stacked deck - to achieve anything you need to play the electoral college and to play the Senate - and while in certain years a progressive may be able to win the electoral college they will lose the Senate and thus achieve nothing.

    1784:

    Things likely to get ugly for many Americans.

    The GOP doesn't appear to be likely to pass a new Covid bill this week, and are looking at cutting the Covid benefit from $600/week to $100/week.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/22/coronavirus-stimulus-republicans-consider-unemployment-insurance-extension.html

    Apparently the moratorium on evictions ends this weekend as well.

    Early this month it was reported 32% of Americans either missed their July rent payment or only paid part of it.

    https://www.marketplace.org/2020/07/10/rent-tenants-covid-19-federa-pandemic-unemployment-payments/

    And the US economy is slowing down again as Covid plays gleefully in the science avoiding south

    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-economic-growth-is-slowing-down-dallas-feds-kaplan-says-2020-07-13

    1785:

    Austin is not all one thing (weird). Like any city, it's a mixture. I was uncomfortable in the bar, and could see indications that a lot of the folks were "conservatives".

    1786:

    Good News:

    Trump has reversed himself, and now considers wearing a mask "Patriotic"

    https://globalnews.ca/news/7197959/trump-face-mask-patriotic/

    Bad News:

    Trump is sending a surge federal agents into Chicago following his actions in Oregon

    https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-chicago-trump-federal-agents-20200722-ki3dqmj3szgwvicltnoubvmmwu-story.html

    1787:

    Hillary and her stupid decision to run a private email server when Sec. State,

    Out of curiosity, did you ever hear of this bit, buried in paragraphs 11-12 of Hillary Clinton's Email Was Probably Hacked, Experts Say (2016/07/07, maliciously (IMO) misleading headline) Mrs. Clinton’s best defense, and one she cannot utter in public, is that whatever the risks of keeping her own email server, that server was certainly no more vulnerable than the State Department’s. Had she held an unclassified account in the State Department’s official system, as the rules required, she certainly would have been hacked. Russian intruders were thoroughly inside that system for years — since at least 2007 — before the State Department shut its system down several times to perform a digital exorcism in late 2014, nearly two years after Mrs. Clinton left office.

    (Note the article does not offer any evidence (just speculation) that that email server was hacked; it may not have been, and there was no evidence of a hack disclosed publicly.) I've often wondered why she didn't at least try to muddy up the issue by saying that the State Department unclassified emails system was compromised by the Russians during the GW Bush administration. (Assuming it was actually true.)

    1788:

    Re the discussion about words for blue upthread, I just watched a glorious bright horizon-to-horizon double rainbow, and TBH, blue was not obvious. Red/orange/yellow/green/something. The Hawaiians may have a point. (Blue is obvious if you use a glass prism on sunlight.)

    1789:

    Lucky you! I saw a red-bow once, so it's definitely possible to get a rainbow without all the colors in it.

    1790:

    I've often wondered why she didn't at least try to muddy up the issue by saying that the State Department unclassified emails system was compromised by the Russians during the GW Bush administration.

    Because as Sec. State she was responsible for her department, and that would include a compromised email server. And regardless of when it started, having a compromised email server for 75% of your time in office doesn't look good in the competence department (as unfair as it may be given the reality of what she could actually do).

    1791:

    Surely you lot all mean "compromised by people other than the US government", because I vaguely recall that various leaks include evidence that bits of the US government had compromised other bits. In that case asking even someone as high up as the secretary of state to prevent the NSA from spying on her department seems a bit much when the commander in chief can't do it.

    At least in that respect Trump is an equal opportunities employer... he can be compromised by anyone.

    1792:

    A couple of years ago I was riding home around dusk. I was traveling way over a safe speed, in the daft attempt to get home before the wildlife came out. On a quiet country road that was regularly signposted about every 2 km with the 100km/h limit on a normal size sign. Then for reasons best known to themselves, the authorities decided to erect two absolutely gigantic retroreflective speed limit signs. Like 3m wide, 4m high, one on each side of the road. I basically rode into the inky blackness because I could see nothing past the signs. As it turned out, just past the signs, there was a kangaroo sitting in the middle of my lane. I ran over its tail at about 100 km/h.

    After that I slowed down to the 40 km/h I use at that time of day. Which was good because about 5 minutes later a deer jumped out in front of me.

    1793:

    To go on a tangent on the "oops" side of things...

    I just found out we doubled the dose of one of my antihypertensives in April. Before that, I was taking lercanidipine/enalapril with the sticker "20mg/10mg". In April, we dropped the enalapril (ACE inhibitor) and switched to 20mg of lercanidipine only.

    Seems like the "20mg" in the "20mg/10mg" was the enalapril, so we just doubled my dose of the calcium channel blocker. It's quite OK, I somewhat wonder if my heart rate is somewhat down to reflex tachycardia, but usually I'm at about 90 beats per minutes, which is high but still normal; it goes up with stress, where I'm quite reactive, and I measure it with a pulsoximeter as some kind of biofeedback. Still...

    Sorry for the intergression...

    1794:

    Err, please note we didn't drop the ACE inhibitor because of the ACE2 COVID-19 angle; ACE inhibitors have coughing as a side effect, I have been dealing with low level respiratory distress since I got prescribed with the ACE inhibitor, and my mother even got a prescription for paracodine for the cough.

    1795:

    @1787: Boy, there's a lot of assumptions and suppositions in that story.

    "Had she held an unclassified account in the State Department’s official system, as the rules required, she certainly would have been hacked. Russian intruders were thoroughly inside that system for years — since at least 2007 — before the State Department shut its system down several times to perform a digital exorcism in late 2014, nearly two years after Mrs. Clinton left office."

    • No source, no elaboration. DOS's servers are run by U.S. government IT professionals with access to the latest, constantly updated security software, well in advance of the security a private server is likely to have. USG systems are also regularly subject to white hat probing by NSA for the express purpose of finding and fixing security holes. The left hand IS aware there is a right hand. Have USG systems been breached? Sure, but much less often than commercial or private servers; those systems just don't have the access to as many defensive assets.

    I've traveled to Israel on USG business. You are cautioned by IT that they WILL try to compromise your equipment; it is fully scanned before and after you travel. For that reason, I took only my iPad and did NOTHING remotely business related on it while there. (It was scanned and found clean, probably because this is the most "interesting" site I visit.)

    While Hillary would certainly have been the target of intrusion attempts using a State server, there is no way her own was more secure than the official one. Using a private server and her own device was foolish and arrogant.

    Was Comey wrong to do what he did when he did? Very likely. But read Comey's book, where he talks about his decision. It was not something he did lightly or without consideration of the consequences.

    1796:

    There was a breach of the State Department (and White House) unclassified email systems detected in 2014 (after Clinton left the SD position): State Department's unclassified email systems hacked (November 17, 2014) There's no reporting (that I've found) except that NYTimes piece that that breach might have happened earlier; reporting was that servers were rebuilt (people using gmail for a while), and presumably imaged first for late forensic analysis. Perhaps something was found, don't know, shrug. Using a private server and her own device was foolish and arrogant. Very probably. But there is no (public) evidence that it was worse, in actual outcomes. (Own-devices can be a problem - POTUS-Trump is a well-known very bad example.)

    1797:

    I like how they're so subtle as to put up barricades. Want to make the veterans in the unit feel like they're in Fallujah again, so that they're more likely to treat the locals as hostiles?

    That part might be a coincidence, admittedly, as there's an ongoing construction project. See this Goggle Street View from last year of the angle I saw then; the two lanes shown are down to one now. The suspect hotel is just behind the one straight ahead, as the road curves a bit.

    You're definitely right in theory though. I can't think of a better hotel in Portland for a well funded but very paranoid group. (A kilometer NNE is a Red Lion that was good enough for VP Quaile, who had different security needs.) Authoritarian psychology suggests that if they were in a hotel downtown they would be too exposed, both to potential revenge and to the wrong ideas.

    1798:

    While Hillary would certainly have been the target of intrusion attempts using a State server, there is no way her own was more secure than the official one. Using a private server and her own device was foolish and arrogant.

    I'm not in a position to compare the network facing minutia of the servers. On the other hand, being in a house surrounded by armed Secret Service agents is very good on physical layer security. On that niche aspect Clinton wins.

    As for being foolish and arrogant, that certainly describes most of the Trump family. Ivanka says it's not like when Hillary did the same thing. Also Bannon, Miller, de Vos, and others.

    We might think they learned nothing from the Bush email server controversy, but they probably did. When that private server lost millions of emails it derailed at least five federal investigations.

    1799:

    "The best strategy in the world can't prepare you for the Director of the FBI coming out of right-field, violating the Hatch Act and knifing your candidate in the back a week before the election."

    Yes. I don't know how influential that was, but I suspect considerably. It was the most flabberghasting thing I can remember having seen in USA politics.

    1800:

    Showing the wisdom and restraint we associate with the Trump administration, a few hours ago federal agents tear gassed the mayor of Portland.

    The article says federal agents have already whined that what they did wasn't their fault and that Oregonians should have cooperated more. I don't think the result of this is going to be more local government cooperation.

    1801:

    No hard questions for Republicans was likely a management directive, at least as early as the Reagan (Mal)administration actions were taken to convey a message: "Nice public broadcast service you've got here, be a shame if something happened to the funding.". Been more than one morning, driving home from work, that I listened to a Black Sabbath CD to avoid Trump news, fortunately, the local NPR affiliate has opened a 24 hour classical music station, so I can avoid Trump in a more restrained fashion.

    1802:

    Trump's not aggressively militaristic, but by letting the US military do what it wills in Africa he's responsible for a lot of bombs being dropped. Even if he'd declare himself not responsible for any of it. Obama insisted on knowing what was happening when the military or the CIA wanted a bomb dropped on some Somali and on saying no sometimes. Trump's taken the US president out of that loop.

    1803:

    Oh, yes, but at least he hasn't started any major new shooting wars or intensified old ones. That doesn't always reduce the damage, of course, but is generally better than the converse. And he HAS started a great many economic and political wars, with Iran, China, Venezuela etc., which are often the precursors to shooting wars.

    1804:

    Yeah, ACE2 inhibitor induced coughing is a royal pain in the, uh, chest. (I had it on one drug, switched until I didn't ... now my wife has mild hypertension and? Guess what she's on and what the principal side-effect is.)

    Anytihypertensives in general have weird and generally unpleasant mind-altering side-effects, ranging from brain fog to hypersensitivity to confusion and stupidity. If you know someone of a certain age who suddenly starts acting like a complete dick, maybe ask if they've changed prescription meds recently: for older folks it's a lot more likely than non-legal drugs.

    1805:

    I've been on ACE inhibitors and calcium blockers for years. A few months ago during a prescription review my GP asked me if I was aware of a recent paper which showed that taking antihypertensive before bed instead of first thing in the morning showed reduced mortality. I had read it since I still subscribe to Medscape. He then suggested that I try it. I still have a slight tendency to cough but not as much as before. Such is the power of suggestion that I coughed as I typed this.

    1806:
    Part of the problem is that Biden's definitely a moderate, so they'll stay in power for awhile.

    The terminology is terribly confusing, deliberately I think.

    "Moderates" are conservatives. They want things to stay the same, maybe get a bit nicer if it doesn't inconvenience anyone.

    "Conservatives" are tories. They want the powerful to retain power and wealth, and possibly to increase it.

    "liberals" aren't. Except when they are.

    "progressives" would like things to get better, if it isn't too much bother.

    1807:

    However she was female, and probably 30% of the US voters believe women should be kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and don't deserve the vote, much less to be beneficiaries of the vote. She also had the entire media circus lined up against her. And the aforementioned crazed Republicans.

    I guess from afar that looks like all of it.

    But for many of us we just DID NOT LIKE HER. At all. Arrogant in the extreme. Elitist (and claiming to be for the "regular folks") and on and on and on. Oh yeah, that rally where all women must vote for her just because she's a woman. All of this based on watching her say words in interviews and speeches.

    I and many other thought she would have been a terrible president. So we voted for her. But there were not enough of us.

    1808:

    Yep, Hillary went into the election with a lot of negatives to overcome, and in the end while there were a lot of factors (including Comey) the biggest problem was Hillary herself.

    As for OGH's 30% believe women should be kept in the kitchen, I suspect most of that 30% are GOP voters anyway...

    1809:

    My grumble about Hillary's campaign was that they knew this crap was going on, and didn't respond effectively.

    And didn't even show up in the close states that cost her. That's just mind boggling. But she did spend time and money in Texas which was no where near flipping. At that time. It MIGHT flip in 2020 but spending much money their to flip it takes it away from states where things CAN flip through hard work.

    1810:

    In that case asking even someone as high up as the secretary of state to prevent the NSA from spying on her department seems a bit much when the commander in chief can't do it.

    It isn't a question of whether it would have been fair or not - there is an expectation (frequently failed) that the person in charge is in charge and thus is responsible for everything that happens underneath.

    And while a business leader can get away with pleading ignorance, it is harder for a politician facing a public that doesn't deal with nuance well.

    1811:

    I think most Democrats held their noses and voted for her. I did. But she ran a poor campaign, didn't pay enough attention to important swing states, (against Bill Clinton's advice, BTW) and didn't address Trump's many sins with nearly enough vigor.

    I'd have to reluctantly agree that she might well have won had she got not gotten sandbagged by Comey, (I hope he has a long, long life, during he does not become senile or forgetful, and during which he has lots of free time in which to regret his utter stupidity) and definitely agree that whatever Clinton's faults she would have been a much better president than Donald Trump, but ultimately she and Trump were both the inevitable outcomes of some seriously flawed processes.

    In the end, I voted for "Satan" instead of "Cthulhu," because "I won't allow people to buy food without the Mark of the Beast" is a better policy than "I will eat your souls and feed your bodies to the shoggoths.")

    But I wasn't at all happy about it.

    1812:

    Now for something different.

    Pre-print on arXiv.org on an idea for a interstellar spacecraft. Bit suspicious as the author doesn't appear to have any declared institutional association so perhaps could be a bit unrealistic, but may give some people ideas.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11474

    1813:

    And didn't even show up in the close states that cost her. That's just mind boggling. But she did spend time and money in Texas which was no where near flipping. At that time. It MIGHT flip in 2020 but spending much money their to flip it takes it away from states where things CAN flip through hard work.

    Yes, that is what I'm getting at. The campaigns are supposed to have better polling data than the public, so either the Democrats did not have better data, which is an campaigning failure, or they did and didn't do anything about it, which is also a campaigning failure.

    1814:

    Pre-print on arXiv.org on an idea for a interstellar spacecraft. Bit suspicious as the author doesn't appear to have any declared institutional association so perhaps could be a bit unrealistic, but may give some people ideas.

    Paging the ghost of Robert Forward. Someone's taken the idea from Rocheworld and made a paper out of it.

    1815:

    Also note: problems include cold sleep and artificial gravity. Cold sleep is a hard one. It's not just the astronauts that have to sleep: you've got to ensure their gut flora and fauna don't eat them -- this is where corpse decay comes from -- and you also have to freeze and revive any recyclable food crops you might need at the far end. Then, how do you bring your canned apes home? They're going to be quite old, but are you really sentencing them to a one-way trip followed by likely premature death due to senescence/diseases of old age in an unforgiving environment? (There probably isn't anywhere habitable around Proxima Centauri). Hell, what are they going to do when they get there that a robot probe can't do, to justify the not-inconsiderable cost of shipping a life support system to a destination decades away?

    It's not obviously stupid, but ...these questions deserve answers, and I can only see it really being desirable as an advance probe ahead of a much larger colony transporter (which also solves the "old age home" problem -- after the mission they go back into cold storage until the main vehicle mission up with them).

    1816:
    But for many of us we just DID NOT LIKE HER.

    Who the fuck cares? What makes you think you would "like" any politician if you actually knew them, rather than the fake personality they project, or, particularly in the case of Clinton, is projected onto them.

    You want a president you can have a beer with? Hell of a lot more chance of having a beer with HC than Trump or Bush.

    1817:

    Who the fuck cares? What makes you think you would "like" any politician if you actually knew them, rather than the fake personality they project, or, particularly in the case of Clinton, is projected onto them.

    Like it or not there is a great deal of emotional and other non-logical factors in deciding on who to vote for (or not vote for as the case may be) - hence the somewhat standard photo ops of politician holding a baby.

    The ability to connect with the public can take a mediocre politician a long way, while the failure to connect can doom an extremely qualified candidate.

    Now in fairness to David L he did note that despite his opinions of Hillary he voted for her anyway given the situation - but there are a lot of voters who would have just stayed home.

    1818:

    "It's not just the astronauts that have to sleep: you've got to ensure their gut flora and fauna don't eat them - this is where corpse decay comes from"

    And yet it is vanishingly rare to ever see the slightest mention of this problem in the many and varied stories that use the process.

    Hey, I've just thought. This is where zombies come from! Someone carries out initial experiments and freezes a few people for a bit, and when they're defrosted they come out reanimated but putrescent. And from being in such a condition the typical behaviour of zombies arises by natural processes of freakout.

    1820:

    Well, the general answer to cryo-sleep is that you're likely inducing anhydrobiosis (what tardigrades do), and freezing the corpsicle solid. Then you only have to worry about whether the bacteria survive, or whether they have to be cultured separately and reinoculated.

    I'm a little surprised that here, with all these tech gurus, no one's speculating about how you keep a light weight but incredibly complex computer and robotics system working for centuries in deep space without a glitch or a human to hit the reset button, swap out parts, or fix the code. That's a neat stunt. I also suspect this crowd would be rather more up on the technical challenges involved.

    But getting back to the corpsicle--we don't have good evidence of complex mammalian tissues lasting decades to centuries when frozen solid. Sperm, yes. Brains, no. Long-term hibernation (basically the person's in a more survivable version of a coma for six months of every year) might be easier to induce, provided that it actually extended said person's life. Evidence suggests that the opposite is more true. A lot of species do, in fact, play with this stunt all the time, bristlecone pines being among the more familiar. Thing is, they're adapted to it. Humans are not. Bristlecones, incidentally, are only actively photosynthesizing a few months out of the year. In terms of active life (as opposed to hibernating), the oldest bristlecone is probably around 500 experiential years old, even though it's 5,000 chronological years old.

    Incidentally, if you're interested in this kind of research, what you really need to do is to fund lemur conservation in Madagascar, stat. A lot of lemurs aestivate (the warm weather version of hibernate) for many months at a time, and they're the only primate that does anything like this. Almost all of them are rare or endangered, too, thanks to deforestation and crappy politics, among other things. So if you want to figure out how to get humans to hibernate in space, most likely the first round of answers is being killed off in Madagascar as we speak. So that's something you can do towards this future. Try WWF or CI for donations.

    1821:

    Don't get on your high horse, a lot of us disliked her for reasons, not because she's elitist, etc.

  • I disliked her originally for her screwup with Bill's healthcare initiative, have behind closed doors meeting with insurance execs.
  • She's a damn neoliberal hawk. This is serious... or wasn't Tony Blair a neoliberal?
  • 1822:

    In the "Biology!" or "Who the heck ordered that" department:

    Meet the sturdlefish. They're hybrids between Russian sturgeons and American paddlefish. Yes, look the parent species up. They're not even in the same family. This is sort of like getting offspring by inseminating an echidna with platypus sperm. Except more so.

    The hybrids were formed by accident as a result of work on trying to clone sturgeon from unfertilized eggs. The idea is to expose the eggs to sperm of a distantly related fish, to see if they can be induced to develop. Instead, the sperm fused and the embryos actually developed into live fish. So the researchers did it again, deliberately, to start figuring out what the heck was going on.

    1823:

    2. She's a damn neoliberal hawk. This is serious... or wasn't Tony Blair a neoliberal?

    Yeah, she was probably involved in getting Otpor! off the ground. I seem to recall that her State Department came up with something like a "revolution in a box" kit of computers and communications gear to help nonviolent actions during the Arab Spring, although apparently nothing came of it.

    I wouldn't necessarily call her a warmonger. My impression was that she was perfectly willing to go toe-to-toe with Putin, without resorting to weapons. If that's correct, it may be why he pulled out all the stops to make sure he didn't have to deal with her as POTUS in 2016.

    Heck, maybe she'll do another shift as SecState in 2021 if Biden gets elected. That would be interesting, and given what happened in 2009, she's certainly been through this crap before.

    1824:

    As a politico friend of mine notes, elections aren't marriages, they're buses. You're not looking for a soulmate, you're looking for a bandwagon that's going as close to your destination as you can get. The rest of it's up to you.

    1825:

    Better yet, how about Clinton as attorney general. She was on the committee that looked into Nixon's abuse of office; if you want to put a scare into Republican politicians she's as good as it gets! (Kamala Harris would also be a good AG.)

    1826:

    I'm a little surprised that here, with all these tech gurus, no one's speculating about how you keep a light weight but incredibly complex computer and robotics system working for centuries in deep space without a glitch or a human to hit the reset button, swap out parts, or fix the code. That's a neat stunt. I also suspect this crowd would be rather more up on the technical challenges involved.

    In this proposal, flight time is ~22 years. The PC this blog runs on has been up just shy of 400 days since last reboot, and it's not even fault-tolerant/high end hardware; I've had PCs run for over two and a half years without a reboot or kernel panic, and actual servers are good for a lot more: there's the apocryphal tale true story of the Dec Alpha that got walled up by Facilities in a university and was eventually discovered when they were getting ready to demolish the building, still running happily years later.

    Ideally you'd keep a skeleton crew defrosted in shifts for 2-5 years at a time, in case of emergencies. Everyone spends 70-90% of the flight in cold sleep, so ageing only a few years during the mission. Extra elbow room (relative to arrival time) and not much to do except maintenance tasks -- if anything goes really wrong in cruise flight at 75,000 km/sec, there's probably not a lot you can do about it except kiss your ass goodbye.

    1827:

    "In this proposal, flight time is ~22 years."

    That is no age for hardware, although it rules out technologies such as thermo-electric power generation.

    One very big unknown is how a traditional "slow neutron" nuclear reactor reacts to the interstellar radiation neutron-flux, about which we know nothing of relevance.

    It is easy to overlook that the almost ceremonial "we dont need to shield the reactor" argument works both ways.

    What happens to the neutron flux if there is a near-ish supernova ?

    1828:

    There was a site around 2000 that people would email their uptimes to. Win NT, of course, couldn't go more than 48? 49? days (rollover timer in the code). There was one crazy with a Linux box over four years uptime. What he was doing on it, I have no clue.

    I update and reboot about once a month.

    Age: yeah, well, what I have is not space-rated. I just realized a couple weeks ago that I'd last rebuilt it eight years ago, not four, so I'm worried about MTBF, so next month (I spent a LOT of money this month on house electrical work) I'll rebuild it.

    And maybe I can go to zoom club meetings, when 15+ people are on, and not have their voices stop for 4-10 (or more) seconds, then continue. Doesn't happen with any other program....

    1829:

    Some BBC Micros ran for ages - possible even decades - but they were fairly simple as modern computers go. The worst weakness of most desktop systems is the windowing system, and I don't see four years as surprising for a Linux if it is not used as a desktop and doesn't run certain other over-complicated and problematic components (like certain 'advanced' filing systems).

    1830:

    In 1999, we were running 3 headless NT servers that worked fine if you rebooted them every Sunday. If you didn't they started giving odd results the next Wednesday. Needless to say, this was discovered by trial and error.

    1831:

    I had an alpha on my desk with a 6 year uptime (and 5 year idle time) when I shut it down.

    It was there when I started the job, I never needed to use it, nobody knew exactly why it was there and when the fan started getting annoyingly noisy it took a year to get permission to turn it off.

    A valuable use of electricity i'm sure.

    1832:

    So if you want to figure out how to get humans to hibernate in space, most likely the first round of answers is being killed off in Madagascar as we speak.

    Any idea if Duke University (NC/USA) is looking into this? They have a colony of 150 or so. Every now and then one or a few escape and make the news for a few days or weeks.

    1833:

    My last job, my Director had three or four Dec Alphas left, and used them occasionally. Finally, after the steam disaster of Feb, 2018, we finally surplused them.

    Dec made damn good hardware. It was a crime that Compaq bought them... and then freakin' Carly and HP buying them....

    1834:

    Ah yes, the PDP-11 ..... Built like ( And looked a bit like ) a brick shithouse .....

    1835:

    The PC this blog runs on has been up just shy of 400 days since last reboot, and it's not even fault-tolerant/high end hardware

    I'm fairly convinced that thermal issues are the main problem with long term use of current integrated circuits. The insides are just so freaking small that any heat at all can move things about. And our experience with modern integrated circuits over decades is basically, nil. If they last 5-10 years in all current use cases most folks will be happy.

    1836:

    They were really nice machines for the time, and really pushed the envelope when it came to performance. The machine in question was a very early 32 bit box at about the time that support for 64 bit alpha was going away.

    I know someone who assures me that the itanium project was part of the price for killing alpha off as they needed a suitable platform for VMS. That's very much second hand hearsay though - VMS is not my field.

    1837:

    "I'm fairly convinced that thermal issues are the main problem with long term use of current integrated circuits."

    No, thermal issues is just a matter of cost.

    Electro-migration is a much bigger issue, and likely to be the limiting issue, since at some point it runs into EU's 2 year not-quite-warranty law.

    Radiation hardness will also matter, and reliability issues due to cosmic rays is starting to to show up at elevated altitudes.

    Making rad-hard devices for space applications lags contemporary silicon by a couple of orders of magnitude, current trusted devices use half-micron feature-sizes, new devices at 150nm are not quite trusted yet.

    1838:

    I guarantee there's dust in my system. Less than there could be, because I added an eSATA card a couple months ago, and blew it out, but....

    1839:

    I'll point out the humor in a 22 year voyage to another star. It will be fun, because likely it will be 11 years per astronaut. That's good, because putting them down for a nap and getting them up afterwards will be kind of interesting.

    So who's flying this? Basically, you need a team of Buckaroo Banzais, specifically people who are, at the very least, MD/MSEE, and/or PhD RN +MS/PhD engineering.

    If you look at the medical protocols involved, they're likely to be extremely complicated. Sure, if everything went well, you could automate the process, like the storied Space Shuttle launch that could be done by a drunk amateur with the Space Shuttle Operating Manual. It would work, provided absolutely nothing went wrong. Astronauts are highly trained because a) shit always happens, and 2) we don't grow up in microgravity, so our reflexes and instincts aren't programmed for how reality works up there. We need massive amounts of training to function in drop.

    And since it's a small crew flying this modern day Prometheus, and they're taking skeleton crew shifts, then everyone has to be a medico, capable of caring for putting down, and getting up their crewmates, and everyone has to be a good enough aerospace engineer to fix all the problems that are the reason they're staying awake in the first place.

    Just getting that decade or more of collegiate education will put the astronauts somewhere in spitting range of 30, more likely past it. Add a decade on while they're cooped up in something that makes Foxessa's quarantine apartment look roomy, and they'll be exploring a new system in their 40s, after a decade in microgravity. Not horrible, but not great either.

    1840:

    Any idea if Duke University (NC/USA) is looking into this? They have a colony of 150 or so. Every now and then one or a few escape and make the news for a few days or weeks.

    I don't think Duke is looking at that aspect of lemurs, although I could be wrong.

    Here's the scoop: there's over 100 species of lemurs on Madagascar, and all, or all but a few, are getting wiped out rapidly by habitat loss.

    The most primitive and smallest ones, the mouse lemurs, are among those that do the really cool aestivation routine. I just googled "mouse lemur biomedical" and it turns out that in 2017 Stanford was setting up a colony of 150 mouse lemurs to test their utility as biomedical models for humans diseases. I see references up to 2019 that are readily available, so I don't know how that's getting on. Presumably they're still being worked with.

    Long story short, I seriously doubt they're studying mouse lemurs at Stanford as models for human star flight, but they are at least looking at them for biomedical shenanigans. So that's something.

    1841:

    My BBC Micro broke :) One of the RAM chips had an attack of amnesia. Fortunately there was enough of it still functioning that I could enter just enough code to frob all memory in a loop, and then probe the data line of each chip in turn with a multimeter to locate the dud.

    I've had at least a significant fraction of 4 years uptime from a Linux box. What usually takes them down is the mains going off. They could well run for years at my previous place, but where I am now we get a daily brownout somewhere around 0730; usually they ride it out, but it's never more than a few months between instances severe enough that everything reboots.

    Still, in the application in question, you don't need the ability to do billions of operations per second, you've got a billion seconds to do them in. Bipolar logic chips and core stores, perhaps.

    1842:

    Ummm... Using onboard lasers as a photon drive may be acceptable if you've read too much Larry Niven and expect to meet the Kzinti at the far end, it also helps if you've read David Brin and so have managed to invent thermodynamics ignoring 'cooling lasers' because otherwise you're going to need so much radiator area you'll be shading out the sail. Argh, there is just so much wrong. About the only thing that is correct is using a bussard scoop for a brake but even there his figures for the mass of that system make absolutely no sense.

    1843:

    The people who just laid me off (last week) still have a couple of running DEC Alphas, so I'm told. They never let me near one, sadly; I suppose I should have told them I was a sysadmin, many moons ago.

    Not unrelated, VMS remains the best command-line OS, for usability, I ever used.

    1844:

    she would have been safe from ratfucking if it had been over her having an affair with Mitch McConnell

    Have to remember this. Fucking a turtle provides a chastity belt against rats.

    1845:

    Not only do computational processes sometimes generate no heat, under certain conditions they can even have a cooling effect. You simply need to implement a cryo-arithmetic engine and use it as a sink for your excess heat, no need for radiators.

    The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy doi: 10.1038/nature10123

    *Btw charlie, it looks like your openid login method no longer works

    Yahoo:"OpenID2 will be EOLed on 6/30/20"

    1846:

    Radiation hardness will also matter, and reliability issues due to cosmic rays is starting to to show up at elevated altitudes.

    Making rad-hard devices for space applications lags contemporary silicon by a couple of orders of magnitude, current trusted devices use half-micron feature-sizes, new devices at 150nm are not quite trusted yet.

    Or you can take approach SpaceX does and throw more COTS hardware at the problem. https://space.stackexchange.com/a/9446 goes into it in some detail, but the TL~DR is that the brains are 3-way redundant computers, with each computer double-checking itself by running the same code on two cores. Given that you skip the aerospace premium, you may be able to get better total reliability cheaper than if you went the traditional hardened chip approach.

    1847:

    Still, in the application in question, you don't need the ability to do billions of operations per second, you've got a billion seconds to do them in.

    Interesting question. Just how many Z80s does it take to run a c/4 STL ship? I suspect the answer is "not many." At least not for the greatest part of the trip.

    1848:

    https://space.stackexchange.com/a/9446 goes into it in some detail, but the TL~DR is that the brains are 3-way redundant computers, with each computer double-checking itself by running the same code on two cores.

    Very interesting, thanks or the link.

    1849:

    I had an old PowerBook G4 that had developed enough bad pixel lines and short enough battery life that it was annoying to use as a laptop. Reconfigured, it ran OpenBSD as a firewall and DNS server for my house for around 7 years. The battery wasn't great, but it was good enough to ride out blackouts and electrical work and OpenBSD has long been quite capable of applying security updates, even kernel updates without a reboot. So I believe it went pretty much that long between boots (the weak point with Macs running something other than MacOS is, or was, the firmware and reboots took actual effort, possibly involving console access...i.e. me going down to the basement where this was set up).

    Really only retired it when the consumer level appliances got to be as good at being a firewall (OpenVPN compatibility and so on) and support for the "extra" features I provided (like DNS based ad blocking) became ubiquitous on the client side. I did check the uptime at the time: I don't remember the actual number, but it was definitely in the thousands.

    1850:

    So who's flying this? Basically, you need a team of Buckaroo Banzais, specifically people who are, at the very least, MD/MSEE, and/or PhD RN +MS/PhD engineering.

    Just getting that decade or more of collegiate education will put the astronauts somewhere in spitting range of 30, more likely past it.

    Alternatively, you start looking at 18 to 22 year olds in University who volunteer and the spend some/much of their 2 decade transit learning the rest of the stuff.

    Requires more space, but the added benefit that you have eliminated the complexity of coming up with a hibernation method.

    1851:

    IIRC, the Space Shuttle used a redundant system too: quadruple redundancy. Some of the details are here, about how it works. Here's the operation manual.

    1852:

    Hmmm. Let's try this with a plane full of 18-22 year olds. They're off to explore a new island, and all they get is a fully loaded plane. None of them knows how to fly, or much of anything else beyond what they learned in high school. But they get it airborne anyway. And...

    Your job is to convince some venture capitalist to spend a couple of million dollars on this, because it's the best way to explore the island.

    Now scale the costs up by a factor of a billion, replace island with new star system, and repeat the pitch.

    Actually, such a pitch might work on the Trump administration, but probably not too many others.

    1853:

    “True story of the Dec Alpha that got walled up by Facilities” I’m a touch surprised that a walled up Alpha didn’t generate enough heat to melt the bricks. We had one of the early ones at ParcPlace and I reckon it absorbed most of the output of the western US grid.

    1854:

    @Heteromeles/1851: You forgot a link to how the four computers failed: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1005928.1005929

    @timrowledge/1853: We had the same experience with an Olivetti M24 in the European Parliament: Through the window we could see it occupying a 1-cell closed office space. Explanation was that somebody got promoted and got his own secretary, but was travelling when the walls were reconfigured.

    @Rabidchaos/1846: SpaceX doesn't fly in hard radiation, they're merely in Low Earth Orbit. Once they go further up, they will have to use much more robust hardware.

    1855:

    When I first heard the story, it was a PDP - which is extremely plausible. We certainly had one running in a what was essentially a broom cupboard for some years.

    1856:

    Using onboard lasers as a photon drive may be acceptable if you've read too much Larry Niven

    Naah: what you do is, you leave the laser at home and just keep it pointed at the sail. Unlike sunlight the laser intensity doesn't drop off along an inverse square curve as you get further away. You can give it a comet as a heat sink and if you put it close to the sun you can power it using PV cells -- think of it as a concentrator/focusing mechanism for a solar sail.

    When it's time to slow down you don't even need a ramscoop: you make the laser sail in two concentric rings. Drop the central circular sail overboard, and use it to focus the reflected laser light back on the remaining annular sail. (Small sail keeps on accelerating and is lost, but the retroflector main sail slows the ship down.)

    1857:

    My experience with VMS was limited, but it was based on RSX, which had a terrible command line interface. Each user got one top level directory, no sub directories allowed. User names were numbers, so files were specified as [number,number];version . version was optional, but [number,number] was horrible to type all day long. The character input queue was such that, I think, you could not interrupt a process if there was any pending input. Adding your own commands was not an option, they had to be installed on the system, iirc. Which required admin-level privileges. Really unpleasant to use.

    1858:

    And one more thing--no command line arguments permitted to user level programs. Made batch files pretty awkward.

    1859:

    "Drop the central circular sail overboard, and use it to focus the reflected laser light back on the remaining annular sail. (Small sail keeps on accelerating and is lost, but the retroflector main sail slows the ship down.)"

    ehhh... I don't think that works very well in terms of braking power.

    First, if the central sail is lighter than the rest of the ship, it is going to zip ahead very fast, soon making real-time adjustments to shape and focus impossible.

    Second, you have to do it in an off-axis configuration with sufficient angle that the ship is out of the beam, which again means that you will not only be breaking, you will have a resulting sideways acceleration you need to get rid of next.

    Third, and worst: At your destination the laser from back home is going to be too weak, due to mis-steering[1], divergence, absorption and scintillation[2].

    Laser-driven light-sails may be fine for "a kick in the butt" departures, but they simply do not work for the long haul, and they are certainly no use for braking a few light-years out

    Since breaking by gravitational encounters at fractional light-speed would be suicidal, I see no way you can avoid bringing the necessary braking impulse along for the ride.

    Braking with ion engines would cost dearly in travel time, so we can ignore those.

    Braking "Project Orion" style may be the most efficient in terms of mass and travel time, but it would be a heck of a way to announce your arrival...

    [1] Do the math, and try to design a beam-steering mechanism which can point with 100km precision one light-year out. even the smallest micro-meterorite strike will put you off target.

    [2] Even the tiniest inhomogeneity in the interstellar medium will will ruin your focus within the first light-year and with a RTT measured in months or years, pre-correction with adaptive optics is not an option.

    1860:

    Attn. Greg: I think there's now a suitable replacement for your Land Rover. (Namely a UK-built fully-electric updated Land Rover Defender. Quite expensive -- although if they still made regular Landiess they'd be distinctly non-cheap -- but ridiculous amounts of torque and it'll go 320km before you need to plug it in for a recharge.)

    1861:

    it'll go 320km before you need to plug it in for a recharge

    About 1/3 that of a gas-burner. So still pretty short-ranged, then.

    1862:

    The relevant question is, are you ever going to do more in a single day, and for the use cases of a land rover.. No. No you are not.

    I cannot persuade myself a buzzard ramjet is ever going to a be a viable propulsion system (A fusion bottle that pressurizes and ignites a flow of hydrogen without slowing it down? Pfhthehthth) But as a braking system? A+ design.

    1863:

    I would and occasionally do. I find driving distasteful and exhausting, but sometimes do as much as 350 miles in a day. E.g. from Cambridge to (say) Kyle of Lochalsh in two days, to go touring on my recumbent trike - I would MUCH rather take the train, but they have abolished all guards vans, so I can't! And you are omitting that you need to find somewhere to charge the thing overnight at your destination, which isn't always easy.

    Something else you omit is that the population density here and government / insurance cartel policy means that it is not realistic to own more than one car, nor hire one for such occasional trips. And I am well-off and live in a large house by modern standards in 'leafy suburbia'.

    Oh, yes, in THEORY, such vehicles are OK for long trips - but they need serious infrastructure work to make them viable for more than fairly local uses.

    1864:

    The relevant question is, are you ever going to do more in a single day, and for the use cases of a land rover.. No. No you are not.

    Actually, the relevant question is whether you would need to travel more than that between recharging stations. Maybe not in the UK, but in Canada it's a distinct possibility, especially if fast charging stations are to be found mainly in the cities.

    1865:

    Charlie VERY FUNNY - not really. I meann HOW MUCH money? I'm almost certainly going to have to try for a 1980 Range Rover ( Over 40 years old ) as a replacement, sniff. If only fucking arrogant, "I am purer than anyone else" Khan simply allowed people to keep theor existing vehicles until they changed them ( New / new-but-secondhand must be compliant ) OR gave existing owners a serious discount, no-one would mind. I may be forced to vote tory ( Yeah, I know ) next GLA election, because Khan's propsal is theft.

    Rbt Prior London - York is nearly 300km London - Swaledale is further than the range limit. "Charging stations" eugh in some M-way service area, how nice.

    Oh yes - EC Also, I think once you are over 75, hiring a car is almost impossible ....

    1866:

    I would and occasionally do. I find driving distasteful and exhausting, but sometimes do as much as 350 miles in a day. E.g. from Cambridge to (say) Kyle of Lochalsh in two days, to go touring on my recumbent trike

    Interestingly Tesla offers a trip planning tool for their vehicles, which plans out charging stops.

    For your Cambridge to Kyle of Lochalsh they say (for their Model X SUV - standard range) the trip can be done in 13h16m with 4 charging stops (Grantham - 30m / Scotch Corner - 60m / Abington - 30m / Perth - 65m).

    Not great, compared to fueling a traditional vehicle in a matter of minutes, but not that bad really particularly if you you can omit on of the charging stops with an overnight stay.

    Biggest problem is the nearest charging station to Kyle is 30km away in The Torridon (at least by what Tesla knows - they don't list all charging stations).

    And you are omitting that you need to find somewhere to charge the thing overnight at your destination, which isn't always easy.

    I won't disagree, particularly as you get to more rural type areas. But at least here in a city it is surprising the number of charging stations that have appeared in the last number of years - the city I live in has put them in at city facilities, many hotels seem to have them, and a lot of shopping areas have them.

    Oh, yes, in THEORY, such vehicles are OK for long trips - but they need serious infrastructure work to make them viable for more than fairly local uses.

    I suspect the much of the infrastructure might be there, just not yet observed.

    1867:

    Kyle to Torridon is 45 miles and well over an hour by road, even if it is only 20 miles in a straight line. Plus Tesla says "2 Tesla Connector, up to 6kW. Available for patrons only. Please call ahead." The one (1) in Fort William is similar, the ones in Ardnamurchan and Portree are available to the public in a hotel and distillery (and may be open only some of the time). That's not unusual - a LOT of charging points are in hotels, supermarkets etc. and are limited to customers or seriously limited in power and time.

    The infrastructure is not there, I can assure you, and I have looked fairly hard. If you decide your EXACT route and stopping places in advance, AND absolutely nothing goes wrong, you are OK. But what if there's a crash on the motorway forcing a major diversion, or you have an hour's drive to the nearest charging point and it's out of order? Even if it is just occupied, you have to wait until it is freed up, and that could mean many hours later.

    I remember when, in many areas, you could not get petrol on a Sunday - but at least that was predictable!

    1868:
    She's a damn neoliberal hawk. This is serious... or wasn't Tony Blair a neoliberal?

    I sort of missed the bit where Tony Blair was standing against Donald Trump.

    And if you think any Tory PM wouldn't have got into bed with Bush you must be fucking joking.

    1869:

    Yeah, she was probably involved in getting Otpor! off the ground
    Well, that's damning, just the sort of thing an evil blood-soaked neoliberal would do.

    Clearly a reason to hate her.

    1870:

    Got it backward, I think. I've still got Rocheworld (aka Flight of the Dragonfly) on my shelf. Anyway, Forward's proposal was you take a circular sail that's about the size of Texas with a ship in the center. When you want to brake, you take the cut out the center of the sail, then slowly spin the ship and reshape the outer ring to focus on the inner. The outer ring mirror kicks back light onto the center circle, and the ship slows.

    Here are a few problems with that proposal:

    --How do you properly brace a sail that's hundreds of miles across? Niven (Mote in God's Eye) used some of his famous monomolecular lines, but we don't have magic string that's quite that strong. Forward, who founded a company called Applied Tethers, didn't posit a solution.

    Keeping the sail from folding up under pressure is an even bigger challenge. conventional solar sail designs either have masts or spin the ship. Doing that for a sail that's hundreds of miles across would be...fun. And require superscience lines and struts again. Spinning it so that centrifugal force kept the sail rigid-ish would make it fun to steer.

    Zubrin's mag sail is probably a better parachute. Problem is, you need hundreds of miles of superconducting wire.

    The last, perhaps biggest, problem is trigonometry, otherwise known as precisely hitting a laser sail from light years away. The sail may be a couple hundred miles wide, but the other arm of the triangle is a couple of light years long. At that distance, we're talking about aiming the propulsion beams with atomic precision. Worse, when the beams wobble (or get dimmed by dust intervening), the thrust goes off center, the sail starts to precess, wrinkle, or develop other interesting nonlinear motions, and recovering to get back on course (remember how huge and flimsy the ship is) gets verrrrrrry interesting, fairly rapidly.

    And I'll leave others to have fun with the problems of laser beam dispersion over light years and the political implications of having solar-powered terawatt lasers that can be precisely aimed sitting anywhere in the solar system.

    1871:

    I meann HOW MUCH money?

    A new Mercedes G-wagen will start at £96K and goes up to £145K depending on spec. That's the nearest equivalent I can think of to a brand new Defender -- basically a milspec off-road vehicle. Adding a markup for tiny specialist manufacturer and electric drive train doesn't sound too unreasonable, which is what gets you to that price.

    There is a new Defender, at least in name, but the gas burner starts at US $50K (in North America, so add 20% VAT and you're almost bang on £50K here) but really goes a lot higher if you want more than a short wheel base and an anemic 2l petrol engine. It looks (from the initial press stuff) more like a tarted-up Discovery than a real traditional Land Rover.

    The nearest thing to what you want might be a Bollinger B-1, which is basically an all-electric design by an American farmer who fell in love with the Defender and the Tesla, but that's not going to be too cheap, either.

    1872:

    I sort of missed the bit where Tony Blair was standing against Donald Trump.

    Oddly, The Blairmessiah did take some shots at Donald Trump. But then, so did Dubya. It's absolutely astonishing how bad Trump looks compared to the previous benchmarks for shit-flinging know-nothing authoritarian assholes in high office.

    1873:

    @Ongaku 1857 & 1858: Re; VMS.

    That would have been version 1, and possibly version 2 (the "Blue Wall") of VMS, by Version 3 ("Orange Wall") the dread "PIP" program had gone, and it had "ODS-2" disks with a directory structure, "RK01:[abc.def.ghi]name.extension;version", and full ASCII for file names and whatnot.

    I'm fairly sure that you could set up parameter passing for your own programs in 3, possibly that wasn't until 4 or 5, or maybe using DCL could getaround such things, it's been a long time!

    And DCL (Digital Command Language) was useful and quite powerful, we wrote our own "make" using it, and we probably weren't the only people to do that. :-)

    All in all it was quite a usable environment, I was using RSX-11 (and RSTS-E(??)) on PDP-11s and 8s and 5s, along with VMS on VAXen, and BSD UNIX 4.1/2 on VAXen as well in the early 1980s, sometimes it could take a couple of minutes to get the right set of reflexes to the forefront, typing "ED/EDT [GRS.SRC]foobar.c" didn't do much good on BSD ;-)

    1874:

    Yeah. People keep comparing him to Buchanan, but the person I see when I think of Trump in a historical context is Kaiser Wilhelm...

    1875:

    I used to have one of the later PDP models, an 11/53+ ; that was about the size of a (1970s) room radiator and had a massive 1.5MB of memory - the benefits of supporting 22-bit memory addressing on a 16-bit machine !

    There were a whole set of operating systems available on the PDP, from single-user RSTS to "bureau" level RSX-11M+ , plus various Unixes including Xenix-11 from some outfit called Microsoft. At the same time DEC also had a small range of 36-bit mainframes (the DEC-10 & DEC-20, running a system called TOPS).

    Before the PDP-11 they had the 12-bit PDP-8, then after the PDP-11 came the 32-bit VAX systems running VMS (not developed from any of the RSX variants but early releases did include an RSX compatibility layer to run existing programs) & Unix, and then eventually the 64-bit Alpha (also running VMS & Unix).

    I spent years developing software for all of those - except the PDP-8.

    1876:

    Hmmm. Let's try this with a plane full of 18-22 year olds. They're off to explore a new island, and all they get is a fully loaded plane. None of them knows how to fly, or much of anything else beyond what they learned in high school. But they get it airborne anyway. And...

    Not quite the same thing.

    For a start, any interplanetary ship will be starting in orbit, and will essentially be point in the right direction and then have the computer navigate.

    And realistically much of the really complicated stuff (like the nuclear reactors) aren't going to be user serviceable anyway.

    But more to the point, it likely is the only way to do it. The spacecraft and propulsion are essentially just engineering (and funding) challenges. It is a one way trip - if you send 20 years olds after 20 years to get there, say 5 years of exploring, and 20 years back, they are 65 and will be in no shape to return to Earth gravity.

    There may be an argument to have a token older person on board to act as leader, and to have the initial training in place to cover things in the first say 5 to 10 years, but other than that the trip time argues for a younger starting age and I don't think society would accept anyone younger than about 20 making the decision for a one way trip.

    Your job is to convince some venture capitalist to spend a couple of million dollars on this, because it's the best way to explore the island.

    Venture capital isn't going to fund something with no financial return.

    It will be either governments, rich billionaires, crowd funding, businesses donated stuff for publicity, or most likely a combination of the above.

    1877:

    Charlie There's also the " Grenadier but even so - simply do not have that much money. I was very lucky to be able to get my Defender, second-hand, when I did....

    Troutwaxer You are not the first to notce that, either - not a good prognostication, is it?

    1878:

    But more to the point, it likely is the only way to do it. The spacecraft and propulsion are essentially just engineering (and funding) challenges. It is a one way trip - if you send 20 years olds after 20 years to get there, say 5 years of exploring, and 20 years back, they are 65 and will be in no shape to return to Earth gravity.

    You seem to have missed the "cold sleep" part of the proposal? If it's possible at all, then it's going to require a bunch of fiddly medical expertise on the part of the crew ... but cuts the subjective voyage time from 20 years each way to maybe 5 years each way (75% in cold storage, 25% warm and on watch). That's a 15 year subjective voyage, so you can send 30-40 year olds with a decade or two of training and they'll be 55-65 on return.

    You also missed the "artificial gravity" bit of the proposal. Presumably centrifugal. Returning to Earth gravity won't be fun, but might be achievable. More likely, long before an interstellar probe is possible there'll be off-Earth habitats of some sort -- Moon, Mars, wherever. (If there aren't then we won't have the life support expertise for a 45 year interstellar round trip.)

    But the energy cost is a killer. Boosting 1000 tons (on the low side!) up to 25% of c then slowing it down again is a ridiculous energy expenditure, equivalent to direct matter annihilation of about 300 tonnes of matter, or fissioning about 30,000 tonnes of plutonium (probably about 20-100 times total world production to date). Slowing it down again: same. Bringing it back? Same twice over.

    This is not a project that is energetically feasible for a civilization still running on fossil fuels to contemplate; it'd be like the early 19th century trying to build a Saturn V. Most likely it'll have to wait until the late 22nd century at the earliest -- after our descendants have adapted to or stabilized the climate, after the population hump has faded in the rear view mirror, after we've worked out how to build orbital solar power stations and the colony-fixated have gone off to break their backs swinging metaphorical pick-axes on Mars ...

    1879:

    Awww, I liked PIP. But then, this was '85, and I was taking an o/s course at Temple Univ. Dial up from work, upload, and away I went. Used RSTS, I think, or a multiuser (?) version.

    The next term, I took a compiler design course, and we were on a Cyber 6000, running what I have referred to ever since as the Noxious Operating System. Dial in. Upload file. Save file. Get file, because the stupid o/s didn't know it had it, before I could compile....

    1880:

    Irony: CP/M from Digital Research got a leg-up as a clone of one of the old-time PDP-8 OS's, and part of its heritage was PIP.COM, which will be familiar to an entire generation of Amstrad users. MS-DOS got started as a clone of CP/M but by then the state of the art in user interface design had moved on enough to encompass the more UNIX-like COPY command and, as of 2.11, subdirectories. (CP/M allowed up to 8 'user areas' -- numbered partitions within each disk file system, which you could copy files between -- but it was kind of inflexible and annoying.)

    1881:

    This is not a project that is energetically feasible for a civilization still running on fossil fuels to contemplate; it'd be like the early 19th century trying to build a Saturn V. Most likely it'll have to wait until the late 22nd century at the earliest -- after our descendants have adapted to or stabilized the climate, after the population hump has faded in the rear view mirror, after we've worked out how to build orbital solar power stations and the colony-fixated have gone off to break their backs swinging metaphorical pick-axes on Mars ...

    There's something to be said for steampunk space zeppelins with reactionless thrusters (something like what Turtledove did in The Road Not Taken), that go to explore a suspiciously Earth-like alt-Venus*. After all, if your goal is to explore strange new worlds with technology that's beyond our understanding, why limit yourself to the future?

    *I'm picking on Venus rather than Mars, because a) there are signs of ongoing vulcanism, and b) some scientists are starting to argue that the boiling of Venus' atmosphere was a lot more contingent on particular excrement occurring than inevitable. So if you're going alt-world, there's a slightly, semi-reasonable chance that Venus might have been habitable, had things gone down a very different path.

    1882:

    The PDP-11 was as reliable as hell (though I have stories that can only be repeated in the presence of pints and the absence of lawyers).

    Digital/Compaq only stopped making them in the late 1990s - 1999 as I recall. When the license to make them was sold on to a specialist company that continued to make them for some military use, rumoured to be nuke subs.

    Yes, I've heard the PDP-11 version of the story, running an unknown OS. They didn't know what to do - there was a real chance if it was powered down, it wouldn't boot again (stiction on the disks, etc) and it was still doing things.

    1883:

    FUBAR007 @ 1761: RE: Hillary Clinton, ...

    Moreover, the campaign against them was both the initial driving force and proof of concept for the Republican propaganda/media complex and the transformation of the GOP from a conservative party to a reactionary/petty fascist party. You can draw a straight line from that campaign to the never-ending hurricane of bullshit we get from the GOP and the Trump machine now.

    I strongly disagree with your characterization of Republicans as a petty fascist party.

    petty adjective
    pet·​ty | \ ˈpe-tē \
    pettier; pettiest

    Definition of petty (Entry 1 of 2)
    1 : having secondary rank or importance : MINOR, SUBORDINATE
    2 : having little or no importance or significance
    3 : marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies : SMALL-MINDED

    While the GOP IS made up of SMALL-MINDED reactionaries, there is nothing MINOR or SUBORDINATE about their Fascism. Fascism has become the CENTRAL TENET of their political ideology.

    ... and that is no small thing.

    1884:

    In the mid 1990s I heard the likely true story of a support call to DEC. Paraphrasing: "Our VAX has fallen over". "Is there anything useful on the console?" "No, I don't think you understand. Our site is near where the Bishopsgate bomb went off. Our VAX is on it's side and covered in broken glass. It's a business critical system." "Is it still running?" "Yes" "Well I suggest that you leave it as it is until the weekend..."

    1885:

    You seem to have missed the "cold sleep" part of the proposal? If it's possible at all, then it's going to require a bunch of fiddly medical expertise on the part of the crew

    No - I just don't think we will ever develop "cold sleep".

    Admittedly I don't have the science background to judge, but it just seems unlikely to me that our bodies will accept the sort of engineering required (at least while the body is alive).

    You also missed the "artificial gravity" bit of the proposal. Presumably centrifugal. Returning to Earth gravity won't be fun, but might be achievable.

    The first thing to be cut back when the budget runs out of control - instead just enough gravity to keep the humans healthy.

    But the energy cost is a killer. Boosting 1000 tons (on the low side!) up to 25% of c then slowing it down again is a ridiculous energy expenditure, equivalent to direct matter annihilation of about 300 tonnes of matter, or fissioning about 30,000 tonnes of plutonium (probably about 20-100 times total world production to date). Slowing it down again: same. Bringing it back? Same twice over.

    Yep. Another reason to consider it a one way trip.

    1886:

    Troutwaxer @ 1771:

    Obama should have fired Comey after his disgraceful performance in July 2016. Comey shouldn't have been FBI Director when he delivered his "October Surprise"!

    Remind me please.

    Comey violated the Hatch Act, along with DoJ & FBI policies, procedures & regulations respecting investigations where no charges were recommended with his public statement castigating Clinton as "extremely careless" regarding her private email server; usurping Attorney General Lynch's authority in doing so.

    Lynch should have asked for his resignation then, and failing that should have requested Obama ask for it and fire his ass FOR CAUSE if he didn't comply.

    Or do you mean the letter he sent to Richard Burr (R-NC), Devin Nunes (R-CA21), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Robert Goodlatte (R-VA6), Richard Shelby (R-AL), John Culberson (R-TX7), Ron Johnson (R-WI) & Jason Chaffetz (R-UT3) on October 28, 2016, announcing the "reopening the Clinton email investigation, knowing full well that they would splatter that NEWZ accross every newspaper & TV/Radio "talk show" for the 11 days remaining before the November 2016 election.

    ... another Hatch Act violation and flagrant violation of DoJ & FBI policies, procedures & regulations respecting investigations where no charges were recommended.

    1887:

    That's the idea behind using laser propulsion, but in the paper he's got a 26TW launch array based in the solar system, and also has a 1TW array on the ship for slowing down. Dropping part of the sail usually involves dropping the outer ring rather than the inner, but it's a real pain to keep everything lined up. The reflector has to be kept exactly the right shape and pointed at the correct angle while accelerating away from the decellerating remainder.

    1888:

    There's considerable interest (and human trials in progress) in use of hydrogen sulfide induced hypometabolism for stabilizing critically injured patients for transport to the ER/ICU; it's a thing that has really only gotten underway in the past couple of years. Here's more than you ever wanted to know, circa 2014: obviously this is something where progress is very slow and very careful (because it's such a dangerous field to work in).

    1889:

    I need to write an alternate world story. Maybe along the lives of the first starship, moving up to a quarter the speed of light, controlled by a Dec computer....

    1890:

    I knew about the second, but not about the first. Thanks.

    1891:

    I’m a touch surprised that a walled up Alpha didn’t generate enough heat to melt the bricks.

    That was just down the road. My memory of it was it was a PowerMac 610 (or some such, the pizza box model) and it was a small closet space that the door got walled up. So there was enough air in the "closet" to allow it to not melt.

    1892:

    mdlve @ 1781:

    "But her EMAILS".. really? Really. That is what you are going with?

    Regardless of one's opinions on the matter, the media reported it with glee and Comey timed things well from a Trump perspective.

    My only opinion on the matter is that it was stupid of Hillary - given all of the digging into her life by the GOP it was stupid to gift them with something no matter how minor.

    One thing that seems to be forgotten in this is that ALL of the Bush administration used private email servers at the Republican National Committee, and NOT just to conduct their private business, but to evade the "Presidential Records Act" and to thwart FOIA requests.

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

    It was Colon Powell who advised Clinton to continue to use her private email server after she was confirmed as Secretary of State. I do agree it was probably stupid to follow any advice given to her by Colon Powell.

    https://www.vox.com/2016/9/8/12846988/colin-powell-hillary-clinton-email

    While on the other side of the isle, the other candidate had dozens of scandals which were lurid, sensational stuff ripped from the pages of pulp legal thrillers.

    And the media gleefully covered all of Trump's scandals as well - I mean the "secret" recording of him and Billy Bush via Access Hollywood was covered likely for a good week or more.

    Not really ...

    The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasts about groping women, dealing a major blow to the Trump campaign just a month before the election. Twenty-nine minutes after the tape was published, WikiLeaks began posting Podesta’s stolen emails online. WikiLeaks continued to post leaked Podesta emails throughout October 2016; in a concerning twist of events, Russian news outlet RT seemed to know about these leaks before they happened. On both October 13 and October 22, 2016, RT tweeted about a new batch of Podesta emails 30 minutes before WikiLeaks announced their release.

    https://themoscowproject.org/collusion/wikileaks-releases-podesta-emails-shortly-access-hollywood-tapes-released/

    The difference was the public didn't care about Trump's scandals.

    The difference was that Trumpolini's scandals were effectively buried whenever the MEDIA even deigned to report them.

    1893:

    I’m a touch surprised that a walled up Alpha didn’t generate enough heat to melt the bricks.

    That was just down the road. My memory of it was it was a PowerMac 610 (or some such, the pizza box model) and it was a small closet space that the door got walled up. So there was enough air in the "closet" to allow it to not melt.

    1894:

    Dave P @ 1795: Was Comey wrong to do what he did when he did? Very likely. But read Comey's book, where he talks about his decision. It was not something he did lightly or without consideration of the consequences.

    I rate the usefulness of Comey's book right up there with The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump. It's full of self serving lies, self justification and excuses.

    The maximum effective range of an excuse is zero point zero meters.

    1895:

    There's considerable interest (and human trials in progress) in use of hydrogen sulfide induced hypometabolism for stabilizing critically injured patients for transport to the ER/ICU; it's a thing that has really only gotten underway in the past couple of years.

    It's interesting, and would certainly be a game changer in saving lives - but they are only taking the body down to "ambient values", which for the case of the study is likely around 20C.

    But as you note above, cold storage needs to shut down everything in the body (and perhaps on it) and not just the body itself. Which likely means freezing, which opens up an entirely different set of problems. And my guess is that we won't overcome them.

    1896:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1803: Oh, yes, but at least he [Trump] hasn't started any major new shooting wars or intensified old ones.

    No new FOREIGN wars ... none that I'm aware of anyway. But that doesn't seem to be from lack of trying.

    1897:

    I need to write an alternate world story. Maybe along the lives of the first starship, moving up to a quarter the speed of light, controlled by a Dec computer....

    Well, the Apollo Guidance Computer had around 600 kb of total memory, if I did the conversion right (bit shy of 39000 16-bit kilowords). So if you can go to the Moon with that, going to Proxima Centauri with a PDP-11 ought to be doable, if all other problems are solved.

    What I'd like to see is that alt-world where the colony can build its own PDP-11s from raw materials. That could be one metric of sustainability/independence for a colony world, really. No AI, just mission-critical machinery being turned out by expert colonial craftsfolk.

    1898:

    @1894: I don't want to belabor a discussion of Comey, the GRU hacking of the DNC and Podesta, Wikileaks and their curiously open relationship with both the Trump campaign and the GRU. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee validated the findings of the Intelligence Community that Russia conducted an influence campaign to support Trump's candidacy; the Trump campaign publicly welcomed Russian efforts to benefit it. Clinton's campaign was clearly damaged by the stolen emails and by Comey's announcement.

    Now in 2020 we know we have a candidate in El Cheeto Grande who: 1) Accepted and endorsed foreign interference in the 2016 campaign; and 2) Went to great efforts to generate similar foreign "dirt" on the Biden campaign through its extralegal pressure on the Ukrainian government. Add to this the constant efforts of the Rethuglican (thanks for coining that, Greg) party to limit the vote and disenfranchise potential Democratic voters, and the stakes for this election are set.

    1899:

    Troutwaxer @ 1825: Better yet, how about Clinton as attorney general. She was on the committee that looked into Nixon's abuse of office; if you want to put a scare into Republican politicians she's as good as it gets! (Kamala Harris would also be a good AG.)

    Ooh! I like that idea. I'm going to steal it & use it in other forums.

    Not so sure about Kamala Harris as AG though.

    1900:

    Well, the Apollo Guidance Computer had around 600 kb of total memory, if I did the conversion right (bit shy of 39000 16-bit kilowords). So if you can go to the Moon with that, going to Proxima Centauri with a PDP-11 ought to be doable, if all other problems are solved.

    A major complaint about the Apollo computer was it still required something like 15K button pushes (keypad pushes) during the flight. Which was after a big complaint by everyone about the error chances and it was reduced from the original requirements.

    1901:

    Me @1898: And as for Wikileaks, if Assange is 10% as smart as he claims to be, he knew exactly who he was getting those emails from. His release of them makes him a witting accomplice to the GRU influence campaign. Journalist my ass!

    1902:

    Yeah I wrote the state machine part of a 'make' utility in DCL in '93 or so at the VMS shop I was working at then. The reason I recall was that the license for a real DEC make was unreasonably expensive. ($1000s/year).

    1903:

    Not so sure about Kamala Harris as AG though

    She was the AG in California, so she has experience. She also prosecuted a lot of black folk and let Mnuchin slide, which is why I'm a little twitchy about here in that role too. Clinton as AG sounds great, but all the usual perps would say that she's out for vengeance every time she nails them, and it would be annoying to prove that she was just following the law, even if she was.

    Tammy Duckworth as SecDef...Hmmmmmm.

    1904:

    "Now in 2020 we know we have a candidate in El Cheeto Grande who: "

    ... 40% of respondents still support when polsters ask.

    The problem is not the candidates or the elected, the problem is the brainwashed population.

    1905:

    Yeah. People keep comparing him to Buchanan, but the person I see when I think of Trump in a historical context is Kaiser Wilhelm...

    Hadn't thought of that, but I see the comparison.

    Something about having a German father, a British mother, and too much money maybe?

    1906:

    @1903: I'm perfectly happy to have Ms. Clinton as a retired SecState and leave it at that. If I were picking the Biden administration roles, I'd like:

    • Kamala Harris as VP
    • Susan Rice as SecState
    • Elizabeth Warren as either Secretary of Commerce or Internal Revenue Service Commissioner (take that, Wall Street!)
    • Pete Buttigieg as SecDef (gays in the military indeed!). Tammy should stay in the Senate.
    • An appropriately qualified Black or Latinx person as AG

    Obviously, this is also dependent on a Democratic Senate, and a continued Democratic House.

    1907:

    " if Assange is 10% as smart as he claims to be, he knew exactly who he was getting those emails from."

    Assange is the proto-incel, he absolutely hates women he cannot fuck at will.

    Between Trumpolinos "grab them by the pussy" and Hillary being female and non-sexy, Assange would have published anything that would tip the scales, even if he had to sign for the receipt in his own blood to the devil.

    1908:

    A major complaint about the Apollo computer was it still required something like 15K button pushes (keypad pushes) during the flight. Which was after a big complaint by everyone about the error chances and it was reduced from the original requirements.

    Well yeah, something human-friendly like the HAL 9000 would be easier to work with than a PDP-11, interface-wise, let alone the AGC. Still, the AGC successfully performed multiple missions, while the HAL-9000 did not. Take your pick.

    While I'm being a wee bit sarcastic, there is the point about what works versus the Rule of Cool. I've known for years that being perfectly sensible about design choices can lead to a setup that is deeply, deeply weird to a fractal degree. And heck, why not go for it, especially if it's a fictional setting and not an actual mission.

    1909:

    "- Kamala Harris as VP"

    My money is currently on the Mayor of Atlanta for VP.

    How many senators he will poach will depend entirely on the election result in the senate, he will not risk loosing a majority by cherry picking.

    1910:

    @1909: Biden has said he'll pick his VP by 1 August. Harris, being a senator from California, would have a replacement named by Democratic governor Gavin Newsome, subject to a special election later. This is a safe seat replacement, unlike Warren in Massachusetts. Admittedly, her selection for a Cabinet seat would be dependent on how the Senate election numbers come out.

    1911:

    Well, the Apollo Guidance Computer had around 600 kb of total memory, if I did the conversion right (bit shy of 39000 16-bit kilowords).

    You are out by three orders of magnitude: not kilowords, but 16-bit words singular, i.e. 2 bytes each. Wikipedia on the AGC. In modern terms it had 4kB of RAM and 74kB of ROM (or rather, rope core storage) -- but remember, of each 16-bit word, only 15 bits were for data and 1 bit was parity, so actually more like 3.8kB of RAM and 68kB of ROM. In other words, not far from a Commodore VIC-20 with a ROM cartridge. It was also clocked at 2.0MHz. The VIC-20 was clocked at 1.0MHz (rounded) and had 20KB of ROM. Also, the VIC-20 came out 20 years after the AGC and cost $300, while weighing maybe a tenth the AGC's 32Kg. It's not obvious what an AGC unit cost to assemble, but I'm guessing it was expensive, and by "expensive" I mean "hundreds of thousands of US dollars in 1965 money" -- each magnetized core in the rope memory had to be knitted in by hand, and a single error out of the roughly two thirds of a million cores would make it a QA fail.

    1912:

    Thanks for the correction. On the other hand, would you take a VIC-20 to the Moon?

    As for expense, I quite agree.

    1913:

    Robert Prior @ 1861:

    it'll go 320km before you need to plug it in for a recharge

    About 1/3 that of a gas-burner. So still pretty short-ranged, then.

    If memory serves the Land Rover was originally specced as a FARM utility vehicle (knockoff of the WWII Willys Jeep with a PTO added to power equipment) that took advantage of a UK surplus of aluminum sheet & experience with riveted bodies (from producing such for RAF aircraft during WWII). The slab side made it possible to use simple wooden bucks for assembly.

    I don't think range is going to be that big of a problem in the U.K. Heck, it wouldn't be that much of a problem for most farms (excluding some Texas ranches) in the U.S.

    1914:

    In my idealized version of the Biden administration, the Attorney General's main brief will be to head up a counter-intelligence investigation, and to pursue it until Moscow's influence in D.C. is nothing but a shadow of its former self. I suspect that would pretty much eradicate the leadership of the Republican Party, and if it nailed a few Democrats too I wouldn't cry very hard.

    1915:

    Heteromeles @ 1903:

    Not so sure about Kamala Harris as AG though

    She was the AG in California, so she has experience. She also prosecuted a lot of black folk and let Mnuchin slide, which is why I'm a little twitchy about here in that role too. Clinton as AG sounds great, but all the usual perps would say that she's out for vengeance every time she nails them, and it would be annoying to prove that she was just following the law, even if she was.

    My qualms with Harris as AG are exactly her prosecuting "a lot of black folk" and letting "Mnuchin slide".

    Tammy Duckworth as SecDef...Hmmmmmm.

    I think I've mentioned before that I really like Duckworth for Biden's VP pick.

    1916:

    "On the other hand, would you take a VIC-20 to the Moon?"

    Heck yeah! Imagine what it would sell for afterwards ? :-)

    Seriously: The NMOS process MOS technology used is pretty robust against radiation, and the VIC20 was in many ways more conservatively engineered than the C=64, (We saw a lot lower repair-rate at Commodore DK) so yeah: I wouldn't rule it out.

    I'd probably bring a HP48 as backup.

    1917:

    Sorry, should have added "and I think Kamala Harris would do just fine in that role."

    1918:

    I'm a tad confused here. make has bee a std. Unix utility since the eighties, I think. Certainly, it wasn't vaguely new when I turned into a make expert in '96-'97.

    Surely it had been ported at some college or other.

    1919:

    You mean as opposed to putting pseudo-troops in big cities?

    1920:

    Ugh. Thinking about it, I realized what part of the process for cold sleep would have to be.

    Ever had a colonoscopy?

    Prep is clean out your colon, here's your nasty stuff, nothing but water, sit on the john multiple times/day....

    Then they chill you, and replace the water in your bloodstream.

    1921:

    the GRU hacking of the DNC and Podesta, The US intelligence community doesn't know (or won't tell us) who the Shadow Brokers were(are). Attribution is hard. Talent is distributed. There are many actors, and not all of them are state actors and not all of the remainder are motivated by financial gain. (The tools released would have been extremely monetizable.) (On the internet nobody knows you are a ...)

    See also: Mystery of NSA leak lingers as stolen document case winds up - A high-profile raid at the home of a National Security Agency contractor seemed to be linked to the devastating leak of U.S. government hacking tools, but three years later, with the case close to being resolved, whoever was behind the leak is a mystery (TAMI ABDOLLAH and ERIC TUCKER, 6 July 2019)

    1922:

    I was thinking the same thing. And they'd have to do something about your skin bacteria too... and when you got woke up they'd have to put the bacteria back inside you; not a pleasant experience.

    1923:

    What, don't you like yogurt?

    1924:

    Do any of you know of a novella (available online) which describes an invasion of elves from parallel Earth, very similar to Charlie's "Nightmare Stacks"? From what I recall, the psychology of elves in that story was pretty much identical to that of Charlie's alfar. IIRC, the elven invasion begins in late 19th century and drags on for several decades.

    1925:

    I don't know what that is, but your description suggests something by Poul Anderson. Is it recent?

    1926:

    Biden's VP Why not Tammy Duckworth? Or would her replacement in ? Illinois ? be contested & might it fall to an "R"?

    Dave P Wikileaks and their curiously open relationship with both the Trump campaign and the GRU. THIS ... J Assange was & is a paid RU agent, effectively, even if he's a "Useful Idiot" Opps, as you note in # 1901 No, the stakes are not even remotely set. DT & his goons are going to try for a Reichstag fire, probably using reaction(s) to their semi-licensed, brownshirted StormtroopersHomelandSecurity agents provoking a reaction sufficient to nix any election ....

    JBS Yes, but the Landie has moved on a bit since then. Using actual Imperial units, Ihave a 16 gallon diesel tank & an approx fuel consumption, on long runs, of about 30 mpg .... call it 450 miles for safety's sake ...

    1927:

    Why not Tammy Duckworth?

    Duckworth has credibility with the military and with moms. Unfortunately, she just pissed off the progressives by sponsoring a bill to incentivize the privatization of public water utilities, especially in poorer communities. She's from Illinois, not California, but one would hope she's not so clueless as to have not heard the "whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over" slogan. Selling water rights to billionaires pretty much guarantees trouble down the road.

    We don't need a rerun of the "Satan vs. Cthulhu" vote choice we had in 2016, because this election is a bad one to sit out. Counting on the get out the vote as a way to line the new administration with suits of any gender is a good way to lose.

    I'm still guessing Harris will get the nod, because her seat is safely democratic, she's a former centrist already pivoting hard left and renouncing her previous positions, and she's both black and Asian (her mother's Indian, her father is Jamaican). We'll see.

    1928:

    An analysis of the Israeli experience with opening schools then deliberately allowing lapses in NPI discipline. Worth a look; a lot of countries including the US are struggling with school reopening planning. A large COVID-19 outbreak in a high school 10 days after schools’ reopening, Israel, May 2020 (23/Jul/2020, open access, all Israeli affiliations: Chen Stein-Zamir, Nitza Abramson, Hanna Shoob, Erez Libal, Menachem Bitan, Tanya Cardash, Refael Cayam, Ian Miskin) Bold mine: The high school outbreak in Jerusalem displayed mass COVID-19 transmission upon school reopening. The circumstances promoting infection spread involved return of teenage students to their regular classes after a 2-month closure (on 18 May) and an extreme heatwave (on 19 May) with temperatures rising to 40 °C and above [6] that involved exemption from facemasks and continuous air-conditioning.

    The US CDC recently did some recent school reopening documents of note. This one is extremely unbalanced, almost entirely about how it's bad for children to not reopen schools (true, without the COVID-19 pandemic context). The press, particular the right-wing press, has been touting this one: The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools this Fall (July 23, 2020) (It it selective about what studies it links.)

    This one isn't bad. (There are a few others, including one entire document on "Cloth Face Coverings in Schools") Preparing K-12 School Administrators for a Safe Return to School in Fall 2020 (July 23, 2020) I think if a school in an area with community transmission actually followed it with some discipline I might walk inside, with a mask.

    This about schools and COVID-19 is worth a look if you can access it. (sci-hub has it fwiw) Not open and shut (Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Gretchen Vogel, Meagan Weiland, Science 17 Jul 2020)

    1929:

    It wasn't a technical issue. I got an Atari ST in 1989 and the Mark Williams C compiler for that had a full suite of utilities including make for $100 or so. No, it was some kind of licensing restriction. I was just a programmer and didn't deal with DEC licensing matters so I can't say what the details were. I just know that management wanted a homebrewed solution in DCL so they didn't have to pay a lot of money.

    1930:

    "In His House", a sequel to "Dead Lies Dreaming"

    There's an extremely peeved [redacted] going off about hating those "being invited into his House and having his hospitality snubbed" atm (literally screaming peevish rage poorly hidden), and it'd be comedy if he wasn't, like, one of the [redacted] who like spinning Minds into insanity, chopping people into tiny bits [that's the drop note for "yeeesss, really do know these things" btw -- "very recently done"] or skinning humans. [The Skin - bitch, please: it's in the water, in the air, in the dust which your skin creates]

    "Sympathetic Magic does not exist"

    So, be careful of your Muse, young Man (nice glasses, going grey all of a sudden, sheesh) she might know a thing or three. The humorous thing is that his voice is high pitched and very reedy (related to the conditions of his existence, power-base is shaky, lots of hungry ones underneath his thralldom who want outs), so... Drop a Cortex Dump of all episodes of 'Rick and Morty' into the mix, watch the fucker squeal.

    No joke. For real.

    Anyhow

    Since the fun stuff got nuked[0], RW Americans are wanking over CN dam burstages[-0.5] and no-one here is discussing interesting stuff, we're going to do a grep - magick - cycle! (read on, soon[tm]).

    1789

    It only matters if you can create them (literally).

    ~

    So: yesterday[1], saw an impossible dragonfly[2] - as in, not just improbable (wrong species / environment, wrong temporal shift zone, wrong physical categorizations for species etc) but something that your biologists who are spunking over worms would get all exited about.

    Black wings, minature green/empress body, flutter, flutter, dragonflies have four wings, this only had two.

    Freya Lives.

    ~

    Anyhow: promised you something.

    Search terms: "Baby Witches hex the moon"[4]

    https://twitter.com/MatAuryn/status/1284946045504327680 https://twitter.com/PurposefullyA/status/1285302563559010304

    Now: for Greg & Materialists, it's just a case of The Youth[tm] using Tiktok to spread Memes and invade another[3] sociological group and like a rod from G_D, totally shatter it. i.e. Short hand for Host --- peeps hacking Wicca and memeing some viral stuff on the QT.

    But.... and here's the bit you won't read on Twitter or Reddit: it's actually referencing a real event. Real event: [And do not look at the Moon for years, s/z/he was responsible for your psychosis] -- brainwashing / Mind wiping certain humans whose [redacted] is getting purged.

    Spoilers: they lied. looks at Moon tonight

    [-0.5] Unlikely, but possible. Stupids should note the 'behind the scenes' amount of $$$ and global expertise spent to make sure that dam in Iraq (then held by ISIL proxies / themselves) that survived. CN will spend billions (and nuke entire environments / flood plains) before having $133 bil prestige project go under. Better question to ask: Has the other virus (the real one for [redacted] not Covid19 which is just human genome failures) got there and threatening the [redacted]? Only then will dam fail [there's a couple of Real Dragons left in CN, btw].

    [0] Come on, HomeBro Ship explosion before UK .mil stuff had grokked it? Drama in the FF fayre before it launched? Oh well. Oh, and tell Mr Irish McIrish Laddo fan of Simmons that MF just worked out it's not a walled garden and Mr "Joe the Innocent Australian" probably does know some of those MF shadows ("He doth protest too much"). You're welcome, PidgetheWarrior. Like: there's a reason MF doesn't do certain politics, and so on... Still. Note the Letter and Libel mix, absolutely fucked themselves in PR terms, probably the same lot who 'snapped up' all those failure UK MPs.

    [1] Like, we don't survive this anyhow: teeth are rotten, scales are flaking off, "Seagull has landed" is a Lefty Twitter call and my Mind is so ravaged I can't even see / hear you anymore.

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_(dragonfly) -- do your due diligence, Freya and the Empress Dragonfly. That was the start one: the new one was not that species.

    [3] Ask the Hannibal TV show fans about that - apparently "Hannibal is cancelled" because, well: he's mean and eats people. Who knew?

    [4] You'll need a few things here: Host has retweeted the "Moon's Haunted" meme, but the other one is not his field.

    1931:

    From Trevor Noah, The Daily Show

    "Trump is like a Frankenstien of the worst parts of all previous American Presidents: --The pandemic response of Woodrow Wilson, --The racism of Andrew Jackson, --The horniness of Bill Clinton, --The vocabulary of George W. Bush, All stuffed into Taft's body."

    1932:

    Yeah, what's really going to 'bake your noodle'[0] is how just it maps to grep stuff.

    "Do. Not. Fuck. With. The. Elves."

    Whelp, they hexed the Moon and the Fae.

    And, of course: this is all echos from Reality where the actual cry was: "Their Minds did not survive, May music be a curse"

    ~

    "Filth" "Under His Eye"

    "Dodge This"[1]

    [0] Matrix Reference: Oracle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVF4kebiks4

    [1] Matrix again - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggFKLxAQBbc -- these are older memes to allow the olds to X-verse into Tiktok zone [non-Boomer-Gop division] [2]

    [2] https://time.com/5865261/tiktok-trump-campaign-app/ https://www.fastcompany.com/90526587/ban-tiktok-in-the-u-s-44-of-republicans-would-be-fine-with-that https://thehill.com/policy/technology/487166-gop-senators-introduce-bill-banning-tiktok-on-government-devices

    1933:

    An analysis of the Israeli experience with opening schools then deliberately allowing lapses in NPI discipline. Worth a look; a lot of countries including the US are struggling with school reopening planning.

    Regardless of what the White House is currently saying I suspect they will give up trying to open schools by the end of August as Covid and its effects spiral further out of control in the US - and parents voice concerns.

    Unemployment is again increasing after a brief turnaround and the Washington Post is reporting that McConnell as saying the GOP stimulus deal could take "a few weeks" while the current money stops arriving next week.

    In the meantime hospitals in Florida are overloaded (and the Governor refusing to do anything to try and slow Covid), and Starr County Texas (8 bed ICU expanded to 29) is going to be sending Covid patients home to die if they are deemed too sick to free up space https://www.star-telegram.com/news/coronavirus/article244443257.html

    And it's California also - hospitals in Modesto (central valley) have run out of ICU space.

    So as much as certain people want things to return to normal, Covid has other plans.

    1934:

    In my idealized version of the Biden administration, the Attorney General's main brief will be to head up a counter-intelligence investigation,

    This brings up one of the biggest problems facing the next DNC adminstration - there is so much to do and too little time/manpower.

    Something will have to take priority, which means other things that should be done will not get done - and in the process disappoint some people.

    1935:

    whitroth: Then they chill you, and replace the water in your bloodstream.

    My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that it would have to be worse than that - and hence why I think it will never happen - all the water in the body needs to be replaced, otherwise the water expanding as it freezes could cause significant cell damage.

    Troutwaxer: I was thinking the same thing. And they'd have to do something about your skin bacteria too...

    Yep, we depend on a lot of organisms that likely wouldn't survive a 5 or 10 year freeze cycle.

    whitroth: What, don't you like yogurt?

    Yogurt has good bacteria - but I doubt it contains all of the bacteria that a healthy digestive system needs - there is a reason they investigated fecal transplants for cancer patients whose natural bacteria had been killed off by antibiotics.

    https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/fecal-transplants-restore-gut-microbes-after-antibiotics

    1936:

    Yeah, isn't that the standard Republican ploy? High grade the system, then leave the democrats a choice of getting things running again or prosecuting them, then repeat.

    I've got vague hopes this time that the public outrage will be too loud to ignore, but we will see. Again.

    1937:

    No, Pohl Anderson died in 2001, well before it became common to put novel (or novellas) for free on the web.

    1938:

    Whelp, they hexed the Moon and the Fae. I almost replied to the long twitter thread on that when it happened. Not my place, so I didn't.

    Yeah, newish moon. My favorite time of the lunar cycle.

    impossible dragonfly... Black wings, minature green/empress body, No pterostigmata near the wingtips? I had a small green dragonfly say hi (well, rest next to me) a few days ago. Members of Anisoptera are still very doing well in my area, ponds nearby for nymphs, plenty of mosquitoes and other small prey. Maybe 5 species.

    1939:

    Re: Robert Prior #1861

    Fast charging stations are pretty well spread across the country at this point. My neighbour drove his 'Bolt' across Canada for about $160 in charging fees, with dog and wife. You can read about them on, well, Bolt Across Canada. The dog is a friend of mine who come out for her liver treat every time I walk by.

    Whatever else he did, he did a lot to undermine the silly notion of 'range anxiety'.

    More importantly, the vast majority of my driving falls well within a 100 km round trip in a day. The work commute, any recreational driving. Outside of a traveling saleperson or a courier I really don't see a lot of people driving more than that. I am just under 6 months away from scrapping the beater and buying a used electric - probably with about 120 km in range between charges. This will be more than suitable for most of our needs. We will keep the other car for any long trips, though of course one could just rent a car for long excursions - maybe spend all that money not spent on gasoline.

    1940:

    Interesting Twitter thread suggesting we should be planning for how to deal with the possibility that a vaccine won't appear by next year, or won't be fully effective, and that we may need to live with Covid.

    https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1286803301598547968

    1941:

    Yeah, the hard part with the Bolt isn't long road trips, it's the ones where you need to drive 300 miles in a day, and don't have time to recharge. A classic example for me is going to visit 120 miles away. If I stay overnight, it's not a huge deal, even with normal line power. But a single day trip gets weird, because I have to go find a fast charger part-way back.

    1942:

    More importantly, the vast majority of my driving falls well within a 100 km round trip in a day.

    If I lived on the Sunshine Coast, mine would too.

    While commuting to work I would exceed that if I did anything after work like head downtown for a concert. Which admittedly wasn't frequent, as it took a week to recover from a late night, but a nice treat.

    Leaving aside commuting, travelling to Glen Major Forest for hiking/flying is over 100 km round trip. Other destinations are farther. Ottawa is 450 km one-way. A day trip to Niagara is 300 km round-trip. A trip up to Dorset is over 200 km one-way; my usual fall colours loop is about 450 km (which includes stops for hiking, but not at places with chargers). My friends' cottages are 200-300 km and don't have electricity, so no recharging overnight there. And when camping I pick radio-free campsites because they're quiet, so no charging there. (Or no point camping, when the neighbours have hooked up projectors so their kids can watch movies after dark.)

    Looking at a map of charging stations in Ontario, one could make many of the trips I want to make hopping from station to station. Many of the stations only have 1-2 bays, so not certain how long the wait time for a free charger would be. (Many are also not open 24/7.) Level 2 charging is about 40 km/h, so my trip to Ottawa would require a multi-hour stop in the middle. (Charging from a wall outlet is about 6 km/h, so running an extension cord to the car wouldn't be terribly efficient.)

    If I wanted to go to Sudbury I'd need to top up fully in Barrie (only an hour from home) and I'd end up in Sudbury with about 50km range left (assuming a Bolt).

    So TLDR, if I had two cars an electric would serve most daily use, but not trips (at least, not without a lot of extra planning, time, and bother). And now I've retired I want to do the trips I didn't have time for while working.

    1943:

    As everyone knows, I'm not a computer scientist or a neuroscientist.

    Here's a question: are human brains Turing Complete? The standard answer is yes, you silly person, your brain can do any algorithm that a computer can.

    My response is: really? Without at least pencil and paper? How complex an algorithm can you execute in your head? How about error rates and error correction?

    What prompted this was an old comment that neural networks aren't necessarily digital systems (they can be analog), and they seem to be able to solve problems that Turing complete systems struggle with--with training.

    That led to me idly speculating that perhaps what's special about human intelligence, what makes it so hard for computers to emulate, is that human intelligence Turing complete. Instead it's just the emergent property(ies) of a freaking huge analog neural network that can run a certain level of digital (aka symbolic) processing with a great deal of training (aka education in reading, writing, math, speaking, etc.), and by using external tools like mnemonic devices, reading, writing, and so forth. Nonetheless, there are an arbitrarily large number of algorithms that any Turing computer can run that we cannot do without the aid of a computer, although we can understand the output.

    Where's the weakness in this argument?

    1944:

    Fair enough. We didn't have a car at all for about 12 years (members of a car share in Vancouver). Then we had one, now two. What we need is about 1.2 cars, the extra fraction of a car for the two times/month we need to be in 2 places at once.

    For us it makes sense to have the primary car as electric, and a gas burner as the spare for backup and long trips. Comparable would be my parents, who do exactly that.

    I borrowed their gas burner to take my kid to a hockey tournament in Vernon in February. Our little car is not built, at all, for driving on the Coquihalla in midwinter. When we returned I filled the tank before handing it back. Two weeks ago my father informed me that he had used exactly 10 litres since.

    1945:

    The various limits of Goedel's theorem, the halting problem and related mathematical issues are bounds on provability. Neural networks are heuristics which don't prove anything. They also aren't necessarily right.

    1946:

    Heteromeles @1943

    If you would wish to disappear down this particular warren, then essential reading is Consciousness Explained by Daniel C Dennett. Any response I might give would consist largely of quotations from and references to this work.

    Be warned thought that Dennett is a past master at the arcane art of what journalists call burying the lede, ie concentrating on side issues at the expense of the main topic. For example, in this book, the actual explanation is in the penultimate paragraph of Chapter 7, all else is commentary.

    JHomes

    1947:

    And I should have added that pencil and paper, and other gadgetry, mostly serve to overcome the limits and vagaries of human memory, without changing the fundamental nature of the problems that can be solved.

    JHomes.

    1948:

    Yeah. People keep comparing him to Buchanan, but the person I see when I think of Trump in a historical context is Kaiser Wilhelm.

    Of course, he's the modern type specimen for addressing the question What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractable Doofus Runs an Empire? (essay in New Yorker magazine, 2018).

    <snark>It's a good thing nobody like that is in power now.</snark>

    1949:

    Here's a question: are human brains Turing Complete? The standard answer is yes, you silly person, your brain can do any algorithm that a computer can.

    My response is: really? Without at least pencil and paper? How complex an algorithm can you execute in your head? How about error rates and error correction?

    The answer is that your question is a bit incomplete: Turing completeness is a relative thing. The only things that have an absolute answer are the hypothetical Universal Turing Machine and a lump of inanimate matter (i.e. a rock). The former has infinite memory, infinite clock cycles, and any sufficiently complex instruction set (not a homage to Clark; x86 assembly will do), while the latter is entirely incapable of simulating anything.

    Once you move beyond the frictionless realm of hypothetical physics, you run into the bigger fish problem. Whatever computer you build or grow, someone else can make something bigger that it cannot simulate.

    Now, as to where the human brain ends up relative to modern computers? Well, since neither can fully simulate the other, they are mutually incomplete. We programmers make do by pretending that computers are simpler than they actually are, and using tools that attempt to keep that illusion going while letting us do bigger and dumber things. Like cat pictures!

    In machine terms, the mere act of uploading a picture + downloading it to another device is staggeringly humongous, but we ignore it because things mostly just work. And by this point, no single human knows the entire process. A human isn't Turing complete to a modern computer, but you can make the argument that humanity as a whole is.

    1950:

    Clinton as AG sounds great, but all the usual perps would say that she's out for vengeance every time she nails them, and it would be annoying to prove that she was just following the law, even if she was.

    True. But they'll be whining about persecution whoever nails them. They'll also be whining about Clinton anyway. At most this saves them a step.

    But speaking of motivated law enforcement... Remember I mentioned that on Wednesday the feds[1] tear-gassed the mayor of Portland?

    Among other things they did that week was build a big sturdy fence around the federal courthouse to keep angry citizens from breaking down the doors and getting inside (again). Just after 1pm Thursday a notice was stapled to it from the city building commission observing that this fence had no posted building permit. Also it was blocking a bike lane. Also it had no wheelchair access. So sorry, it'll have to come down, you have 24 hours.

    I'm typing this Friday night; we'll see what happens.

    [1] Maybe Border Patrol goons, maybe 'contractors' working for whatever Blackwater calls itself this week; nobody who knows is talking.

    1951:

    Do any of you know of a novella (available online) which describes an invasion of elves from parallel Earth, very similar to Charlie's "Nightmare Stacks"? From what I recall, the psychology of elves in that story was pretty much identical to that of Charlie's alfar. IIRC, the elven invasion begins in late 19th century and drags on for several decades.

    It doesn't ring a bell, but it sounds like a good companion to Charlie's work and Terry Pratchett's Lords & Ladies. I hope if you find it you'll share the URL.

    1952:

    Heteromeles @ 1927 Oh shit - one would have thought that, after "Flint" that such an idea was out of the window. ...@ 1931 He left out Buchanan ...

    SS Thanks for that - I've copied the article for reference. Also, on "Kaiser BilL" can I recommend Barbara Tuchman (again)? "The Proud Tower" & "August 1914" are essential reading.

    ... @ 1950 LURVE it ... farce might begin to overwhelm supidity & arrogance - we can hope.

    1953:

    In the UK, very few houses have external power points where cars are parked, a large proportion (most?) of accomodation has no adjacent parking, anyway. Plus the fact that the (local) electricity supplies are not up to it. We have discussed this before. It's soluble, but it needs a HUGE investment in and upheaval to infrastructure.

    1954:

    Insofar as Turing completeness applies to any finite system, yes, at least. I won't bother you with the terminological arcana, though I need to come back to it later. When I was younger, I used to do quite complicated algorithms in my head, and I am no prodigy - it's not hard if you have the short-term memory for it.

    That claim about neural networks is bullshit, just as Penrose's is. I have done some work in this area, but will try to simplify. The Turing machine model is based on discrete logic that takes a finite input and produces a definite, finite answer in finite time (*). If neural networks are set up to do the same, they are a simple subset of Turing machines.

    However, real life is not like that. Many algorithms converge to their answer either statistically or in accuracy - i.e. they do NOT deliver a definite answer in finite time, but an infinite sequence of converging approximations. I have developed a model based on this, which is provably more powerful than Turing machines, but am not smart enough to get much further than that :-( Neural networks can be used to approximate that one, too.

    There are some relationships here with Turing machines extended to use true real numbers or Markov models, but again let's skip them.

    Note that there is an INCREDIBLE amount of bullshit in so-called computer science, especially relating to such (heretical) mathematics. For example, the claim that a discrete Turing machine can handle anything that one using real numbers can is true ONLY if you constrain it to finite input and output, but it is usually published as an absolute statement.

    Now, "completeness" in computer science is often (usually?) used to mean equivalence, not dominance. The Goedel/Turing limit has been proved to apply only to systems that are sufficiently large subsets of Turing machines, NOT ones that are strictly more powerful. In particular, those proofs do NOT apply to the model I developed, which can solve some 'insoluble' problems. But that does NOT show that that a higher-level Goedel/Turing limit does not apply to them, too, and I believe that one will.

    Where the human brain comes into this is anyone's guess. We don't even know the model(s) it uses. Penrose claims (without evidence) that there is no such limit - I simply don't know.

    (*) Integer values are discrete and finite does not mean either single-valued or bounded.

    1955:

    it needs a HUGE investment in and upheaval to infrastructure.

    And for street parking that has to come from power companies working with local government. In the UK both of those have been hard hit by central government, especially councils, so generally don't have the money to invest. Hopefully richer councils in rich areas will start that change.

    In Straya it's not so bad, except that even the state-owned power companies are struggling to recover from their "poles and wires" scam being widely publicised, making further big investment politically tricky. We also have the same issues as the UK and USA with central government capture by fossil industries.

    I have some hope that car-share companies will lead the way because they are better able to make and benefit from investment in charging infrastructure (they can put in one charger per N vehicles, but individuals can't put in 1/N of a charger) and lower running costs (real payback is often after XMm which a fleet vehicle will clock up much faster than most personal vehicles - hence the popularity of hybrid and electric taxis)

    1956:

    "We don't even know the model(s) it uses. Penrose claims (without evidence) that there is no such limit - I simply don't know."

    Penrose is an ardent Platonist (see The Emperor's New Mind) and his claim is based on the human brain/mind being able (somehow) to access the universe of Platonic Ideal Forms rather than being limited to The World As We Know it. Not being a Platonist, I disagree.

    JHomes.

    1957:

    That's an interesting take.

    I looked through the Emperor's New Drivel, to see what argument he supplied for claiming that the human mind was not subject to a Goedel/Turing limit, and found it (misquoted from memory, in its completeness): Because the human mind is not subject to Goedel's limit, ....

    1958:

    Emperor's New Drivel

    I took that as an introductory barrier to filter out the weak early, so that when philosophy students later encountered the big W fewer of them would die. A bit like teaching basic postmodernism to sociologists so that when they encountered the raw form later they had already got antibodies.

    Just as for science fiction fans you read Feersum Endjinn as preparation for GynEcology :)

    1959:

    Fast charging stations are pretty well spread across the country at this point.

    Wrong country: we were discussing charge stations in the UK.

    Due to a boneheaded patent issue there were only two Tesla chargers in Scotland until about 2018.

    The situation is now improving but it lags a few years behind the US. Situation aggravated by the population density of Scotland varying from "dense urban metropolis with virtually no private garages" for the 60% of the population who live in 10% of the land area, to "looks like the arse end of British Columbia" for the other 90% of the area. Which is to say, there's a horrible shortage of chargers for residents in the big cities, and fuck all out in the Highlands where a "big city" can be a village of a thousand people with a general store and a post office, and the next urban hotcore is fifty miles of single-track road and sheep crossings away.

    1960:

    Being less rare than xenon isn't a huge recommendation. Xenon is rare enough that spacex satellites don't use it in their ion thrusters because it's too expensive. When something is too expensive for space.. It's too expensive for balloons.

    Neon (which is obtained from the air by fractional distillation) is about three times more common than helium. "raw neon" is basically helium and neon mixed, because they're the two gasses that are left over when everything else is liquid. So if the only source of helium was air, then you'd expect it to be 3 times the price of neon. Neon is about 50 times more expensive than the helium we get from natural gas. BOC sells neon for about 3 pounds per litre.

    1961:

    I saw a couple when riding through Durness (pop. 347), but none anywhere else I went (starting from Lairg touring the northwest), though apparently I failed to spot a couple; I didn't go to Thurso or as far south as Ullapool on the west coast.

    http://www.highland.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/18020/electric_vehicle_charge_point_information.pdf

    1962:

    Actually, this is a better map. Currently, if you are in Durness with a low battery, you are stuffed!

    https://chargeplacescotland.org/live-map/

    1963:

    True. But they'll be whining about persecution whoever nails them. They'll also be whining about Clinton anyway. At most this saves them a step.

    But your not particularly worried about their opinion, you're worried about that percentage in the middle who could vote DNC in the mid-terms or in 2024 but are swayed by the arguments of revenge.

    Or, more practically, about giving an upper court level a reason to overturn convictions.

    1964:

    Currently, you're out of luck in Durness, that's true, because they moved the charger and are waiting on the sparky to reconnect it.

    But if you're traveling then presumably you're going somewhere. The first somewhere headed east that has charging is tongue. 29 miles away.

    Going west is Scourie 25 miles away. So even without the charger in Durness working for a few days, people aren't trapped. Even if they'd for some reason decided to drive in circles in Durness until the battery was flat, 2 hours on a household socket would get them to the next charger.

    Just because you see a cherry doesn't mean you have to pick it.

    1965:

    I didn't say that helium derived from atmospheric distillation wouldn't be more expensive than it is today, I was just pointing out that it wasn't going to go away completely as some Chicken Little types are saying. In fact since there's increased demand for it more gas producers are starting to extract helium from their production lines whereas it used to be that the USA was the only country that was doing this in any quantity. A quick Google tells me total world production of He past year was 160 million cubic metres (at STP I presume) with the US supplying just over half of that.

    I'd be intrigued to see if a simple microfilter process could economically recover helium from the atmosphere instead of relying on cryogenic distillation -- it's about the smallest molecule around, only hydrogen in its H2 form is smaller and it's easy to get rid of any H2 in the exhaust stream by adding oxygen and draining away the resulting moisture.

    1966:

    Rocketpjs and I were explicitly talking about Canada, actually. I commented that the EV land rover you mentioned wouldn't have the range for much of Canada, he mentioned the folks he knew who went cross-country in a Bolt, I was looking at the availability of charging stations in Ontario…

    What EC's map shows is that the density of charging stations in Scotland is a lot greater than in Ontario.

    1967:

    On a totally unrelated note...

    Anybody has some data on the toxicity of copper, cobalt and manganese compounds when used as pigments in ceramics?

    A friend has a pottery, and we talked about my very early teen (about 10 years old...) self doing experiments with manganese compounds.

    He's using compounds of copper, cobalt and manganese in powder form, most likely the oxides, later on he's doing a suspension.

    Later on I'll look it up myself, but, well, I'm on my way, and maybe we get a nice discussion aside from the usual strange attractors...

    1968:

    Sorry, looking at what I wrote last night, a couple of words got yanked out by Murphy and Ye Other Goddes.

    What I wanted to speculate originally is that human brains ARE NOT Turing Complete, and that's why Turing-type machines have trouble emulating us. Hell, we have trouble emulating each other, That's why actors have to train for years even to do superficial imitations, and that's where most of the arguments on this site come from.

    The hypothesis to shoot down is not that we're super-Turing, but that, in comparison with digital systems, we're infra-Turing. We're not evolved to run algorithms, and there are quite a few that we simply can't do with our brains. Instead, we're evolved as trainable neural networks that learn through stimulus, response, and training to function effectively in enough different scenarios so as to pass our genes and culture on.

    I'd also suggest, paradoxically, that our problems emulating other human beings may suggest that it's going to be really hard for purely digital systems to accurately emulate humans in general: we're too much ad hoc spaghetti programming-style training and illogical kludges to be easily represented logically. However, we can learn to be logical, at least in certain situations.

    What this says about things like souls and spiritual transplants I'll leave as an exercise for those interested in such things.

    1969:

    That's not the point. Let's say that you were travelling from Lairg via Altnaharra, Alltnacaillich and Durness to Balnakeil (as I did), and the route drained the battery more than you thought it would. All right, I was on a recumbent trike and, if it had been electrically assisted (it wasn't), I would have needed only a 13A socket, but let's assume an electric car.

    I have tried to fill up a car, finding the pumps closed or access blocked, and wondering if I would get to the next one before I ran out - including on motorways. Also, having to do an extensive diversion via where there is fuel rather than where I wanted to go. It's a real pain, and is not something I want to happen more than I can help.

    Worse, with a petrol or diesel car, you can carry a gallon or two for emergencies in the boot. With an electric car, you have to treat the last (say) 25% as a reserve, reducing the distance between charges to 150 miles in the example given previously.

    Household sockets are fine for residents, but I have sometimes had trouble charging even my tablet when travelling - finding someone who will let you plug in a power lead and take 5-10 KWh is another matter. If your battery is actually flat, you almost always need a tow-truck.

    To Robert Prior: distance in miles is not the only issue; those roads are SLOW and eat fuel, and (on occasion) you will be sent on a LONG diversion.

    1970:

    You have seriously misunderstood what Turing completeness implies - if your speculation were the case, they could emulate us but we could not emulate them. Also, we do NOT use what are miscalled neural networks in computing - as I said, how we think is still an open question. It is a very different computational model from anything used in computing, but that probably doesn't change anything.

    I know of no algorithm that we can't perform, and I am not limiting myself to what most people think of as computer algorithms. I do know of several things that we don't know how to program (i.e. computers can't currently do, but we can).

    You may be making the erroneous assumption that we are limited in storage capacity and/or calculation cycles, and computers aren't, but that is (a) wrong and (b) irrelevant to this sort of computational complexity. Forbidding pencil and paper is comparable to forbidding computers to use anything except cache memory.

    You are right that it is tricky to emulate illogical processes, but that is primarily because we don't know their properties, not that it is infeasible to do.

    1971:

    At this point, I feel like I need to write an app that uses your phone to track exactly how many kilometers you actually travel each day, because I am pretty damn sure people systematically overestimate their "Need" for range very, very badly. Uhm. Wonder if my phone already stores that data...

    1972:

    I worked it out for myself years ago. In happier times when I was expected go to the office I would be charging up maybe once a week.

    I need range maybe twice a year, which is why we have hire cars. Moving heavy things around comes up every couple of weeks which is why I haven't dropped back to a bike.

    Not currently being able to afford to change car is the only stumbling block.

    1973:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 1907: Assange is the proto-incel, he absolutely hates women he cannot fuck at will.

    Ah, nope, Assange is one of those "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" types, so, so very much smarter than any and every body else that anything he is told that doesn't fit his preconceived ideas is obviously wrong.

    As in when we told him, well, Mendax, to stop boasting about the stuff he was doing, and, no, we would not give him access to our real (i.e. non-peecee) computers or run SATAN on password files for him, etcetera, we just didn't have a clue.

    He ended up getting arrested.

    I only found out recently that the Australian Federal Police had - and still has - no idea what had been going on before they spotted him. You've got to know when to walk away, and we did, about two weeks before...

    1974:

    Both my cars do range information pretty automatically. And Chevy Bolt comes with an app to do trip estimation for you. The problem is whether you want a car adapted for averages or extremes. In my case, the Bolt's for average driving, the gas hog's for second car duty and hauling long distances. It cuts down a lot of gas consumption.

    1975:

    Coincidentally I was reading an article about the design of domain specific computers yesterday.

    The short version is that if you know what you want to calculate and have the chops to design an accelerator for it, and it's worth the money you can get something a couple of orders of magnitude faster than a general purpose machine using a couple of orders of magnitude less power using a 10 year old process.

    That's probably the approach you would use to get a reasonably fast radiation hardened control system in the air. All the fancy calculations could be offloaded onto domain specific accelerators and you could get away with a relatively slow CPU. Maybe even a VIC-20 :)

    An approach that would be familiar to anyone who has looked at mainframe I/O. Nothing new under the sun.

    1976:

    moz "basic postmodernism" TRANSLATION "Wall-to-wall meaningless bullshit"

    1977:

    whitroth @1918: I'm a tad confused here. make has bee a std. Unix utility since the eighties, I think. Certainly, it wasn't vaguely new when I turned into a make expert in '96-'97.

    You aren't thinking properly. VMS (well, OpenVMS by the time your talking about) was intended to make money for DEC. So every little thing that wasn't absolutely bog-standard cost you.

    In 1985, the VAX/VMS C Compiler license was AUD25,000. And on-going support was 10-15% per year, IIRC. But at least it was real support, there were C programmers at DEC in Australia who could help you if you hit a problem. Well, except for the one where the "curses" library entry-points were first-class citizens and could not be replaced, so our "faster-than-standard-curses" got its functions renamed. :-)

    I can't recall seeing a price for a stand-alone "make" from DEC - it came with the C Compiler - but it's the sort of thing I can see DEC asking a large number for, and, of course, you have to get the bean-counters to accept that it is necessary, and they've just not in the mood to do that, so you used the tools you already had.

    We weren't writing C back then on the VAXen and PDP's, we were using MACRO and PASCAL and BLISS-32 (may have been a dodgy license ;-) ), but we were using C on the 68000-based things, Whitesmiths and then Greenleaf, IIRC. And EXORMACS.

    Sigh, the good old days, when computing was hard.

    1978:

    Actually, this is one of the major advantages of electric cars--they draw very little energy when they're stuck in traffic.

    The Bolt has a display showing how much energy it's using right now. If you're stuck in a traffic jam, it's drawing 1 kWh. So with a 60 kWh battery, if you leave the AC off you can be stuck in a jam for 50 hours or more before you get a dead battery. This is why commuters who can afford them love them: the slower they go, the further they go. You can't run out of juice in a traffic jam, at least, not as at all as easily as a gas car can.

    The problem for the Bolt is early morning, long distance driving on hilly roads. The cars are all doing 70-80 or more MPH, and everyone's blowing huge amounts of energy to do so. Going high speed, especially up hills, drains the battery rapidly.

    1979:

    If I could reasonably hire a car for my equally few long-range trips, I would; and, as I said, I would MUCH rather take the train. The trouble is that the former isn't realistic, and the latter isn't even feasible :-(

    1980:

    Eh? I was talking about the north-west Highlands - a traffic jam is a bloody caravanner that won't pull into a passing place or some sheep that won't get out of the way! Those roads eat fuel because they are hilly, twisting and with poor surfaces - if you are driving at all safely, you do a LOT of accelerating and decelerating. The same applies in the West Country, off the few trunk roads.

    1981:

    The problem is whether you want a car adapted for averages or extremes.

    This.

    For average use a Bolt would do me (assuming that a Canadian winter doesn't drain the battery keeping warm). 70 km/day commuting (measured for insurance) would be OK with electric.

    For travelling it wouldn't. And for my photographic trips, part of my timing is weather dependent. Last-minute car rental is expensive.

    If I had two cars I'd be OK with an electric and a gas-burner, but for one person two cars doesn't make sense. When by current car wears out, whether I replace it with an electric will depend on whether I can get the range I need for travelling.

    1982:

    "Ah, nope, Assange is one of those "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" types, so, so very much smarter than any and every body else that anything he is told that doesn't fit his preconceived ideas is obviously wrong."

    That he is too.

    But ask any female who have been in a room with him, or who have had any kind of power over him, and you will realize that is only one part of his mental problems.

    1983:

    Just out of curiosity, how is the Bolt holding up, how many miles have you driven it, and how long have you owned the vehicle?

    1984:

    We've had it since 2017, almost three years. It's my wife's commuter car (I work at home) and our errand and trip car on her days off. I'm not sure of the mileage, but it's north of 30k.

    So far, my only complaint is that it's hard to get replacement parts. We've had two problems, and in each case it took a week to three weeks to get the needed part. Otherwise it's doing fine.

    1985:

    Those roads eat fuel because they are hilly, twisting and with poor surfaces - if you are driving at all safely, you do a LOT of accelerating and decelerating. The same applies in the West Country, off the few trunk roads.

    Well, obviously not perfect but one of the advantages of an electric vehicle is regenerative braking returning some of the energy in decelerating to the battery.

    It would be interesting to know just how good/bad an electric car would perform in those scenarios.

    1986:

    Researchers in the Netherlands have apparently discovered a genetic defect that explains why some young people are getting very sick from Covid

    Given women have 2 copies of the gene vs men having 1 it may also help explain the difference in Covid rates among males/females.

    Reddit post that includes Google Translate version of Dutch article: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/hxhxmh/research_in_the_netherlands_has_proven_that_a/

    Dutch news site: https://nos.nl/artikel/2341733-onderzoekers-radboudumc-vinden-defect-gen-dat-corona-verergert.html

    1987:

    I looked through the Emperor's New Drivel, to see what argument he supplied for claiming that the human mind was not subject to a Goedel/Turing limit, and found it (misquoted from memory, in its completeness): Because the human mind is not subject to Goedel's limit, ....

    I am not in sympathy with Penrose's thesis, but I don't think it can be dismissed quite so lightly. As his (far more interesting) "Shadows of the Mind" makes clear, he is trying to argue that human mental activity cannot be an algorithmic process and cannot be approximated by an algorithmic process. He exhibits the Halting Problem as an example of the algorithmic conception of human mind being inadequate -- while an algorithmic machine could come up with it, it could not understand its implications in a way we do.

    His detailed argument to that effect (too long to quote here) is not at all hand-wavy and it does carry a punch. Most of the book is devoted to dealing with various objections raised by his critics and having read it, I was left scratching my head.

    I still think he must be wrong, but it is not easy to put one's finger on the flaw in the argument.

    1988:

    There was no make tool provided with VMS. As you say, DEC bundled one with their C compiler, and of course you could install a VMS-compatible variant of the gcc toolset.

    Initially DEC licenced products based on the "rating" of the host machine, so if your machine could handle, say, 50 users all compiling at the same time then thats what governed the price. I don't remember what they did about clustered systems. Later on they introduced per-user and per-n-simultaneous-users licencing, but by that time it was too little too late for anyone not already committed to VMS.

    1989:

    It would be interesting to know just how good/bad an electric car would perform in those scenarios.

    It depends. I've done two drives like that, one out to Anza Borrego Desert and back (sea level to 4000 feet up and back to sea level, then reverse) and one out to LA and back (100 miles one way, with the freeway gaining and losing a few hundred feet, but done over 70 mph to keep with traffic).

    The difference is that most of the road to Anza Borrego is two lane. It's 65 with no traffic, but slower otherwise. Going up hill at speed really drains the battery, and you don't get it all back if you're speeding down the hill on the other side, although you get a lot. Where we did get back a lot of energy was getting stuck behind a slow camper for about 20 miles. I just engaged the regenerative brake and recharged all the way down. We spent a fair amount of energy, but I think we regained at least half.

    On the way to LA up the 15, I had to recharge in LA, because the high speed ate over half the battery charge.

    Twistiness is irrelevant, since the Bolt has a low center of gravity and handles extremely well. The critical thing is that if you brake slowly, most of the energy gets put into recharging the motor. If you brake quickly, it goes into the traditional brakes and is lost as heat.

    1990:

    I still think he must be wrong, but it is not easy to put one's finger on the flaw in the argument.

    One possible problem is the "it must be quantum" argument. One might argue that if "you" are the head wrangler of a large set of trained neural nets that interact and feed into each other, that "thinking" and "understanding" means feeding an input into this jungle and attempting to integrate all the outputs from your trained subsystems. Things "make sense" when there's some form of agreement, and "confusion" (misnamed) happens when the answers diverge or there's no neural net response beyond "hunh?" This handwaving version of human thought isn't the result of quantum physics, although it might look like a probability wave collapse.

    If you want one subtle and almost assuredly wrong answer to what Penrose is getting at, let's try a wild speculation: the universe runs on intuitionist mathematics, not classical mathematics.

    This was sparked by a Quanta Magazine article titled Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math. There's another takes on it from Less Wrong, based on the article on Intuitionism in the Philosophy of Mathematics in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

    Fair warning: I'm bullshitting, because this isn't my area. I'm simply hoping the BS is dilute enough that it actually causes some ideas to flower in someone else's head, instead of just making a mess.

    My general takeaway from these three articles are as follows: --Intuitionist math is one of those odd side-fields that's been around for a century, isn't wrong, but isn't mainstream. You'll have to read up to find out the details, because again, it's not my thing. --The critical point here is that it treats real numbers as time-bound, and thus very different than the way classical math treats real numbers. An example is 1. Classical math assumes that this is equal to 1.000, with an infinite number of zeroes. Intuitionist math says that if you don't take the time to actually write out all those zeroes, you don't know that it's precisely equal to one. Precision, accuracy, and knowledge are in part a function of how much time and effort you put into acquiring them, to an intuitionist
    --Where intuitionism gets interesting is in the chaotic real world. Classical math would say that the kinds of chaos that depend on huge effects arising from small numbers is theoretically solvable. The precision is a form of hidden variable, and if you throw enough detection and computation power at it, you can uncover it. The intuitionist, on the other hand, would say that information isn't infinitely small, it occupies space and time and takes energy, so chaos is generated as small effects happen. The infinite precision isn't a hidden variable. Rather it doesn't exist until it gets generated through interaction.
    --Where this gets into the nature of time is that, to an intuitionist, the classical notion of the big bang and Einstein's brick universe is fairly absurd. On the one hand, we know that information takes space, time, and energy. On the second hand, these (matter and energy at least) are neither created nor destroyed. On the third hand, if time's a dimension and the Big Bang is a singularity at the beginning, then you've got all the infinitely precise numbers, which take up spacetime for the entirety of the universe, crammed into an infinitely dense point at the beginning. This looks like a real paradox to the intuitionists, because again, this stuff takes up space. The alternative they propose is that information actually is generated over time by the interactions of the matter. To them, time may be a real process, not just a dimension, and information may be generated or lost, not conserved.

    This is a very serious proposal for dealing with the paradoxes inherent in modern cosmology. Just as a bet, it's wrong, but people are working on it to see if reworking general relativity and quantum mechanics using intuitionist math makes the paradoxes go away. That in itself is a worthy attempt.

    Now getting back to Penrose and slathering on my own BS:

    What I'd speculate (almost certainly wrongly) that what Penrose is pointing to is not a result of human brains being Super-Turing and depending on quantum woo. Rather, human brains evolved in a reality that's fundamentally based on intuitionist mathematics, and it's therefore affected how we perceive reality. Conversely, the algorithms we use are mostly based on classical mathematics, which is not the mathematics of reality.

    These two systems of math give the same answer for a whole host of mathematical problems, so discrepancies are easy to ignore. This is why computers are so extremely useful. However, with the march of science, we're entering areas, such as the nature of space-time and so forth, where using classical math versus intuitionist math might lead to profoundly different results. If human brains have an advantage there, it's not because they're better computers, it's because they've evolved to use the math of true reality rather than been designed to use the classical math of human speculation. And it may turn out that this matters in some profound ways, on the off chance that intuitionist math turns out to lead us to a better understanding of the nature of space-time.

    That's my silly speculation anyway. Assume it's completely wrong unless it turns out to be useful or something.

    1991:

    I was looking at the availability of charging stations in Ontario…

    It's not quite the same but I've driven from Vancouver to Edmonton on the trans-Canada highway and having seen the "next gas in 300km" signs I would totally nope out of an EV. As I think Graydon pointed out, in Canada, you keep an eagle eye on the gas gauge and treat 50% as "running on fumes/empty", unless you're inside a big city.

    1992:

    I'm pretty sure that the sort of roads you get in the Scottish highlands would break the range estimates in any electric car designed by Americans.

    The nearest analogy I can give you is, imagine if all the highways have been replaced by farm tracks, a single narrow lane that is tarmac'd if you are lucky (at worst: it's a dirt track) and surrounded by ditches to either side so you can't pass another vehicle coming the other way. There are wider lay-bys about every quarter mile, so if you meet another car, whoever's closest has to reverse back to it and pull in to let the other vehicle through. Now imagine how well this plays with farm tractors towing manure trailer-tanks, or with idiot tourists in caravans who don't realize how narrow the roads are, etc. National speed limit applies, so 60mph ... but only an idiot goes over 40 even in daylight and good visibility.

    In winter it doesn't get terribly cold by NorAm standards but the three metre tall guide poles to show the snow ploughs where the road goes are maintained for a reason, and everyone (even in a village) has a backup generator.

    1993:

    If I can get a cheap copy of that, I may look at it, but I was appalled that a once-good mathematician should have sunk so low as the book I was so rude about. A lot of people (and I don't just mean laymen) are far too blinkered about the classes of problems that can be solved automatically, and what an algorithm can be; his argument could be more of the same. But, as I have not read Shadows, I can't say.

    His blithering about quantum gravity is simply bullshitting - we don't know how they interact, and there is absolutely NO evidence the brain operates non-classically, let alone in a way such a subtle effect could make a difference - also, if it did, surely we would have noticed the effects on people who have orbited in weightlessness?

    Note that I am not siding with the idiots who claim that 'it is known' that the brain is a simple computational engine, and can be emulated by a Turing machine. As I said, even I can produce models that are (VERY slightly) strictly more powerful, and I am not smart enough to know where that leads. Indeed, my belief is that nobody is, but some could do better!

    1994:

    I drive a hybrid, and I fill it up at about a quarter-tank left. That gives me a range of about 300 miles in city driving, and closer to 400 on the highway. Stop-and-go traffic tends to drain the rechargeable pack, though it comes back fairly quickly. (The thing lasted 17 years before needing to be replaced. It's pretty good.) Charging stations aren't common outside cities, and not all that common inside them, either. The nearest locations to me are one at the local pharmacy - went in last year - and a few at the local train/bus station (generally in use).

    1995:

    Moravecs argument appears pretty bullet proof to me. Individual neurons can be emulated by entirely conventional turning machines, thus the whole thing can, thus equivalence is the upper bound on the class of machine the brain is.

    1996:

    You've got to be careful about emergence with that argument. Chaotic systems are notorious for having perfectly understood subsystems that, together, produce radically unpredictable results. You may not be able to scale up or down from some part of a system that can be emulated by a Turing machine to assume that subsystems or systems that include it can therefore also be emulated by a Turing machine.

    Also, some version of the argument can be used to prove that the universe is a computer: the fact that a Turing machine can exist demonstrates that any system of which a Turing machine is a part is also either a Turing machine or being run on one. Quantum computers seem to disprove this, if I understand it properly.

    1997:

    TJ Yes - BUT - is the whole brain only a collection of crosswired indivdual neurons - "only" remember? I'm not sure that argument is valid, because it's almost certainbly a false assumption.

    1998:

    No, quantum computers do not disprove that. At most (and that is speculative), they provide an exponential increase in performance; the Goedel and Turing limit applies at a categorically higher level.

    1999:

    No, the existence of Turing Machines proves the universe is at least Turing equivalent. It could be a stronger class, it just cant be a weaker one. Evidence only pointing one way.

    Greg: Are we really going to argue materialism? There is nothing in the brain that would not emulate on a sufficiently powerful machine, therefore, it belongs in the class of machines that can be emulated by Turing machine. Like the universe proof, this does not prove it is one, it just proves it is not more powerful than a Turing machine. Same arrow of proof.

    2000:

    Yes :-) Probably not as much as the lesser West Country ones would, though.

    2001:

    Thank you very much for that link. I've facepalmed it, as well as sent it to my small email list.

    And I own a copy of The Proud Tower.

    2002:

    THANK YOU! I had not seen anything about the construction permit violation....

    2003:

    Oh, it just got more interesting: excerpt: In a post in February, we explained why the president’s Article II pardon power is not as “absolute” as advertised, and argued that “there are limits Congress may and should impose on at least some exercises of the pardon power.” (We have much more to say on this topic in a book out in September on presidential power reform.) On July 22, members of Congress introduced two bills that take some of the steps we discussed toward limiting abuses of the pardon power.

    <...>Rep. Adam Schiff’s bill, entitled “Abuse of the Pardon Prevention Act,” would do two basic things. First, for pardons for a “covered offense,” it would require the attorney general to submit to designated congressional committees all Justice Department materials related to the prosecution for which the individual was pardoned and all materials related to the pardon. It would also require the president to submit to the relevant committees all pardon-related materials within the Executive Office of the President. --- end excerpt ---

    And there's two more bills.

    https://www.lawfareblog.com/house-moves-regulate-pardon-power-abuse

    2004:

    Ok. Understand I was on a Micro-Vas for, um, 15 min around '86....

    From mainframes, to PCs, to mainframes, to PCs, and finally C in '89. Unix servers in '91 (Sun, SGI, and a little HP).

    Oh... and I taught myself C to get my first C job on Turbo-C.

    2005:

    The lady I lived with in the late seventies started out (before we got totaled in Aug of '77) owning a VW 411. This was a model VW didn't like to admit it ever made, and a muffler, for example, cost three times what a beetle muffler did.

    You don't want to hear about me having to use a coping saw to cut the third bolt, that was ABOVE and BETWEEN the two pipes....

    2006:

    Off the top of my head, I'd think that humans deal with the world by taking what they see, filtering it through the usual filters, then sending it through ad-hoc methods, and seeing which don't say "are you kidding?", and then taking the o/p of the ones that handle it and choosing the personal best solution.

    ALL statistical ad-hoc.

    2007:

    Cars. Here's a rant I just posted to facepalm an hour or two ago:

    When is ANYONE going to talk about how much the US oil industry utterly controls what the US car industry produces? In the 80's, with the price of gas, they lost out to the Japanese, who came up with fuel efficient cars. They let it go... and slowly started to do better, after the EPA started rolling out regulations. As soon as the price of gas dropped poof almost only large cars.

    Now, in '12 and '13, I wanted to replace my minivan. Looking online, I could buy used hybrid minivans, multiple makes... in Europe.

    THERE WERE NONE FOR SALE IN THE US. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

    Right now, there is only ONE, the Chrysler Pacifica. (Sorry, two, versions of the Toyota Sienna.) That's it, no other maker is selling one. Why?

    "Oh, Americans don't want that"... presumably is what they're saying, just as the did when Toyota introduced the Prius, and dealers couldn't keep them in stock, they were selling so fast.

    I look forward to the day that the oil industry is back to just another, and no longer runs the US.

    2008:

    "Oh... and I taught myself C to get my first C job on Turbo-C."

    Snap :)

    2009:

    mdlve @ 1935: whitroth:
    Then they chill you, and replace the water in your bloodstream.

    My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that it would have to be worse than that - and hence why I think it will never happen - all the water in the body needs to be replaced, otherwise the water expanding as it freezes could cause significant cell damage.

    The blood replacement fluid would just have to be something that does not form ice-crystals at the freezing temperature for water, but I'm thinking it should not be necessary to actually freeze you solid.

    Skin & gut bacteria shouldn't be a problem, they'd just have to store your samples in some way that didn't kill them (and won't kill you when reapplied).

    I don't see how a fecal transplant would be a problem if they just vacuum seal the required specimen.

    2011:

    It wasn't that hard. I mean, it's a variation on PL/1, which I learned at mt my first programming job....

    2012:

    You're had to repair it twice in the first 30,000 miles? My Prius has 160,000 miles and I haven't had to do anything but routine maintenance!

    American cars... sigh.

    2013:

    Not good. The CDC is saying that one-third of all those infected have long-term (months, many months) of illness.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/monumental-acknowledgment-cdc-reports-long-term-covid-19-patients-n1234814

    2014:

    I will NEVER buy a GMC vehicle until the CEO of GM contacts me, directly, and offers me a 10-yr, bumper-to-bumper warranty.

    In '81, an ex and I bought a 1 yr old Chevette (pronounced SHOVE-IT). Between the time we bought it, and the time we separated in '86, let's not mention the starter motor I repleced, let's not talk about the alternator I replaced, let's not talk about the fucking coil spring that cracked that I replaced, let's talk about the TWO TRANSMISSION REBUILDS, one paid for by a class-action lawsuit....

    2015:

    Robert Prior @ 1942: So TLDR, if I had two cars an electric would serve most daily use, but not trips (at least, not without a lot of extra planning, time, and bother). And now I've retired I want to do the trips I didn't have time for while working.

    I'd like to find something like this for around-town use.
    https://www.aixam-pro.com/en/

    I want the cargo capacity for things like carrying photo (cameras, lenses, tripods, lights) or musical (guitars, amps, keyboards) equipment. Too bad they don't make a Prius with cargo capacity.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYv-Q4jjQ1w

    I'd have to have a radio & AC.

    2016:

    Thomas Jørgensen @ 1971: At this point, I feel like I need to write an app that uses your phone to track exactly how many kilometers you actually travel each day, because I am pretty damn sure people systematically overestimate their "Need" for range very, very badly. Uhm. Wonder if my phone already stores that data...

    I got the HUM by Verizon app when I got my iPhone. I only got the module that plugs into the OBDC port, but it provides mileage & such to my phone, so I'm sure there's some kind of app available

    Maybe there's even an app that doesn't require a device attached to the car, but you'd have to sort out what part of your daily travels are on foot & what part is by vehicle, which the HUM device does for me (along with vehicle diagnostics on my phone).

    2017:

    Not quite. Of the two repairs, one was smashed side mirror, which can happen to anybody. The second was a weird thing in the brake system that was (apparently) a design flaw/suboptimal part. Since we got the car the first year it was out, problems like that can be expected. And it was back in 2018.

    I'm bemused that a Chevy turned out to be a decent car, but the Bolt certainly is. To be very clear, it's a specialized commuter/about town car, but since its use cut down our gas bill by 75% before the pandemic, that's nontrivial.

    2018:

    grs1961 @ 1973:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 1907: Assange is the proto-incel, he absolutely hates women he cannot fuck at will.

    Ah, nope, Assange is one of those "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" types, so, so very much smarter than any and every body else that anything he is told that doesn't fit his preconceived ideas is obviously wrong.

    I expect "proto-incel" is a subset of the characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

    2019:

    No, the existence of Turing Machines proves the universe is at least Turing equivalent. It could be a stronger class, it just cant be a weaker one. Evidence only pointing one way.

    You don't know much about the importance of scale in analysis, do you? Even with physics breaking badly into quantum, classical, and relativistic scales, which don't intermesh all that well, I'd really have thought it was a bigger part of more educations.

    Sorry to be snotty, but the ecological education I got pounded into our skulls, repeatedly, that many phenomena that we care about are exquisitely sensitive to the scale on which the effect is happening. Global climate versus regional climate versus mesoclimate versus microclimate, for example.

    It's startling to me that other fields don't pay attention to the complexities of scaling problems. Shows what I know.

    Anyway, no the existence of Turing machines proves that Turing machines can exist in this reality. Extending it beyond that scale is sort of like proving the existence of God based on the existence of humans and the existence of Genesis I. Similarly, being able to model a neuron using a Turing machine tells you that a brain can be similarly modeled, any more than the fluid dynamics of air lets you figure out whether a coin flip will come up heads or tails. And if the intuitionist math turns out to be more correct than classical math, trying to deterministically predict a coin flip might be a literal waste of time.

    2020:

    TJ As a thorougoing materialist, you should know my argument better than that. I am arguing that we have insufficient knowledge of of the brain operates & that we do not know fully, maybe actually, as to how the various components interact to make the whole. "On a sufficently powerful machine .... provided we have guaranteed that we have emulated everything ... And we cannot make that guarantee. Especially given H's comments on scaling, which I took as a given, anyway.

    whitroth That is what now frightens me about C-19. OK, it's an illness, amybe serious, it might kill you, you'll probably recover ... normal risks, in other words. OH SHIT ... it has really long-term & nasty after-effects, tha can last years or the rest of your life ( Think "Post-polio" ? ) Um, no, maybe not, take all possible precautions. The information has cahnged & I've changed my opinions, as a result.

    Cars Ah the luixury of being able to afford TWO ... piss off, quite frankly I want ONE reliable car, that will last ... I found one, intending to keep it until I'm no longer able to drive ... And it's going to be stolen.

    2021:

    One possible problem is the "it must be quantum" argument.

    That's a separate issue. Penrose's argument that human mind must be non-algorithmic has nothing to do with his subsequent suggestion of some unspecified non-algorithmic quantum magic happening in microtubules.

    If you want one subtle and almost assuredly wrong answer to what Penrose is getting at, let's try a wild speculation: the universe runs on intuitionist mathematics, not classical mathematics.

    Yes, I am aware of Gisin's efforts. And I seem to recall Penrose suggesting something on those lines a while back himself -- that physically an infinity of numbers is absurd and this may have physical consequences. May have been in "The Road to Reality". It is an interesting thought, however wild. I don't think I would go as far as calling it "almost assuredly wrong". I think Gisin is right at least in so far as asserting that, possibly, time is missing from our theories of physics because we have inadvertently managed to define it out of existence.

    Rather, human brains evolved in a reality that's fundamentally based on intuitionist mathematics, and it's therefore affected how we perceive reality.

    You must have been reading Lakoff. :-) There I think I am on a much firmer ground to suggest that he is talking through his hat in using the embodied minds PoV to deny the tension between realist and conceptualist views of mathematics. The embodiment of minds does not resolve that tension. Personally I prefer the conceptualist view -- most of the time, anyway. :-)

    2022:

    Seriously? Syntax? Pointers?

    2023:

    His blithering about quantum gravity is simply bullshitting - we don't know how they interact, and there is absolutely NO evidence the brain operates non-classically, let alone in a way such a subtle effect could make a difference - also, if it did, surely we would have noticed the effects on people who have orbited in weightlessness?

    Hm... Are you sure you are not conflating two of his wild ideas? AFAIK (always am important qualification!) Penrose's suggestion that gravity on the scale of the Planck mass could be responsible for spontaneous wave collapse (this resolving QM's measurement problem), has nothing to do with his notion of human minds being non-algorithmic thanks to some quantum magic in microtubules.

    The gravity suggestion is no more bonkers than a lot of other attempts to tackle that central issue of QM. And at least it is testable with technology not much exceeding our current one, or so I understand. OTOH the microtubules one is probably best treated on the lines of "thank you for sharing your thoughts with us". :-)

    2024:

    We have not sent any human beings to any regions of actually "Flat" space. Orbit is free-fall, not absence of gravity. That would be a very, very hilarious fermi answer, though. "Minds do not work outside significant gravity fields" is one heck of a good answer to why the galaxy has not been overrun. A very unlikely one, sure, but.. Gosh, that is hard to work around.

    2025:

    Testable too, Lagrange points should work. If those kill astronauts, then there you go. Fermi answered.

    2026:

    No.

    Ok, translation (kind of):

    Improbable is discovering a fully developed Freya Empress batting against your window (on the inside) during a time period in your local environment when said species should not be around/alive/active, all your windows are closed and you don't live close enough to a body of water to support them.

    You still set them free

    Impossible is literally cliche faery wings on a miniature Empress body that moves vertically / horizontally breaking the Laws of Physics (no, bees do not break this...) under current H.S.S understanding.

    Is this a triptych metaphor[0] or reality? All of the above[1].

    And Holy Fuck: Dennett sky cranes --- not even wrong as the saying goes. Goedel is ok, Dennett is pure fantasy land like Pinker, past his initial (dual authored) works. Your reference is StarWars and "he who lost his wife and editor". [Note: Yes, we have consumed his thoughts: like a lot of Analytical Philosophy, they're kinda trite and shit really].

    No, really: Dennett is not right, he's not even wrong, it's all bullshit past his first stuff. And yes, we can prove that.

    ~

    Here's a thought: if schizophrenia is both culturally sensitive (in that - 'voices' vary in terms of positive/negative aligned to cultural upbringing), and has no relation to reality / 'the real world' (a precondition for such stuff is that it cannot interact with reality, DSM IV), but has also been proven to work faster than your [shit tier] science efforts to Mind-Fuck people with, then:

    Q-theory demands that no real information [as EC has pointed out] can be exchanged in such processes. e.g. all information must be passively / subconsciously known to the subject prior to usage by 'phantom voices'.

    Whelp - that got disproved recently, eh?

    [0] Breaking: LSD Chemist William Leonard Pickard to be Released From Prison https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/william-leonard-pickard-lsd/

    [1] For people who put silicon in parallel to make things fast, you're pure shit at working out consciousness.

    2027:

    Here's an answer to "it's going to be stolen", or rather, two. After my old minivan was stolen in '09, the cop when they found it told me to get a club. A professional car thief will get your car... but no one amateur will.

    The other is something I thought of for years? a simple switch, wired under the carpeting and through the firewall, set under the driver's seat. Flick it off... and it cuts the electrical line to the fuel pump.

    Not going anywhere today, are we?

    2028:

    Yes. Pointers.

    2029:

    By the bye, I've read the commentary on the Battle of Helm's Deep part 1, and the Battle of Gonder 1, and 2, and the more I read, well, I already hated Jackson after seeing the first movie of LotR, now I REALLY do not want to see the second or third.

    2030:

    I'd like to find something like this for around-town use.

    Japan is full of them, and they export used ones to anyone who will accept them. In Australia you're looking at about $US10,000 ready to go. The problem for you is right hand drive.

    China also makes them, and someone in the US has a youtube video or three where they bought the cheapest one they could find and played with it. They were driving it on the road but I have no idea of the actual legalities.

    Ha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GG1RC7GV0Y

    2031:

    Truck just had a hidden key switch that cut off the starter motor. And a couple of GPS trackers, one of which was battery powered and charged off the light circuit for the box on the back (so I had to run those lights for an hour every month whether I needed to or not). Neither was very obvious, but the second was as not-obvious as I could make it. Until the SIM ran out I could track the new owner because he never bothered to swap the SIM or change the password(s).

    2032:

    Ah, forgot the audience, but know the audience.

    Dragonflies move in very distinctive ways due to their mechanics, which is why:

    1) Lots of helicopter theory is based on it / understanding 4 wings is tough in mechanics

    2) DUNE has them as a reference point

    3) James Bond "You Only Live Twice" and various insanely dangerous 1-2 seater mini-helicopters[1] all use the same math, but badly

    ~

    Dragonflies do not move like butterflies. That's the tell. The former is precision, the latter is chaotic.

    ~

    Anyhoooo..... UK is doing the negative PR "force Black Man into psychosis to tweet stuff" to break "BLM power", with lashings of "NOOO, WE WERE RIGHT, THE HARD LEFT ARE ANTISEMITICSS", let's make sure it's good thing to trace all the elements.

    These days, when you're handing out bribes like candy to ex-PMs and so on, bunging a £200k wedge to a musician whose career is ending to make your negative PR campaign spark is kinda sad. Kayne West got fucking Binned [slang: put into psychiatric hospital under duress / without consent] for stuff he said during a live performance, and he's (allegedly) a billionaire.

    Work it out kids: these fuckers play dirty, hard and we just ganked another one of their [redacted].

    Still. Keith Flint, that was naughty. We're going to burn your fucking bridges down all right.

    [1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/aug/10/magnificent-man-in-flying-machi

    2033:

    "Minds do not work outside significant gravity fields" is one heck of a good answer to why the galaxy has not been overrun. A very unlikely one, sure, but.. Gosh, that is hard to work around.

    Semi-serious question, considering that we've got New Horizons out in the Kuiper Belt, the Voyagers way out yonder, and Wikipedia even has an entry of objects we've stuck at various Lagrange points in the system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrangian_points.

    How complex does a system have to be before it's a mind under this rule?

    Also, did any of the Apollo missions pass though Earth-Moon L1? That would answer it quite quickly, I think.

    2034:

    Well, I'll be damned!

    2035:

    Really? Have you checked out the Prius-V?

    2036:

    miniature Empress body Dragonflies do not move like butterflies. To be clear, given that loose description I would offer a particular species id in the Odonata but not in the Anisoptera. Pterostigmata on the black wings of the males present but not obvious to human eyes, obvious on the females. They are a joy to watch, male and female. I am a catch-or-coax and release outdoors person too. I was happy to see that description, btw, just surprised.

    Re consciousness, some of the more interesting work is attempts to find neural correlates of consciousness. But even there, major assumptions are being unknowingly made. ("IMO")

    2037:

    Oh. I guess you didn't know the language had been written to write MVS in the sixties? seventies? (IBM mainframe, replacement for augh DOS/VSE/SPF/whatever else they added after '95).

    2038:

    Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge.

    2039:

    The same was C was written to write a game... and turned into writing an o/s to run the game on....

    2040:

    No. Like shaped clouds and clapping throngs, it's a bleed-over event. It's both real, conjured by your consciousness and also independently mapable enough that you get helicopters and dark-glasses MIB wannabees checking it out.

    You demean us by implying we cannot identify Reality Organisms versus Event Organisms.[0]

    shrug

    Only Human (Yeah... it's in the Matrix video links already).

    Anyhow, fuck you all, your system is based on killing people[1]:

    El Derecho de Vivir en Paz

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkXise2bHE0

    [0] Anyone even half-invested would have trial ballooned the idea that it was at the same time both an immature Empress and a faery dragon mix. But you didn't, so you failed. The kick-back here is, fuck no: NUDIBRANCHS

    [1] The bad people are just scared because we're just so much better at it than them. Ask Mdivive or whatever to post a "Well, German economy expected $13 bil loss" shite.

    2041:

    Range is a bit short for me as a car-about-town: it wouldn't let me get to the dentist and back without finding a place to recharge. Still, I'm not the target market.

    I don't car about a radio. AC is essential — there's no way I can drive safely in 35+ temperatures without it. (Last time I tried I was fortunate to realize that I was effectively impaired before I hit anything, and was able to pull over and cool off. I do not handle heat well.)

    I wonder what AC does to the range of an EV. I know the AC on the Shanghai Maglev uses more power than the suspension and propulsion magnets, so I imagine the effect is significant.

    Heteromeles, any observations to share?

    2042:

    Here's an answer to "it's going to be stolen",

    I think Greg is referring to an upcoming law against diesel vehicles in London. (Or a really heavy tax on them.)

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-47815117

    2043:

    Having the EV, with its battery and kWh displays, really made me aware of what sucks energy. AC is one of the energy sucks, although when you need it, you need it. On the Bolt, turning on the AC immediately cuts the range estimate by 10 miles. Heater's about half that, and with the heated driver's seat and steering wheel, it's seldom needed here.

    As for room, I've carried two small speakers in the back of the Bolt pretty regularly, and the back seat's at least 5' long. There's no trouble getting a guitar or similar in there, although I'd have to drop the back seat to carry a cello.

    Basically, if your band can do a tiny desk concert, you can probably get most of their stuff in the Bolt. Stand up bass and Spinal Tap speakers? Not so much.

    2044:

    Stand up bass and Spinal Tap speakers?

    Easier to just motorise the speaker stands in that case :)

    https://madmax.fandom.com/wiki/MAN_KAT_I_A1_(8x8)_%22Doof_Wagon%22

    2045:

    Found it:

    https://www.alternatehistory.com/wiki/doku.php?id=timelines:dystopic_return_of_magic

    Dystopic Return of Magic

    It tells the story of an invasion of Earth during the turn of the 19th and 20th century by an extra-dimensional race of powerful fantasy beings and the fight against these beings that humanity led in the following decades.

    To read it, you need to create an account with alternatehistory.com

    2046:

    The Napier-Taupo Road in NZ (from the SE coast of the North Island to the Central Plateau) has better electric vehicle infrastructure than IC infrastructure. Only ~120km between petrol stations, but worth having warning signs for tourists. Not worth running a petrol tanker over it, but the pub/restaurant in the middle has a couple of vehicle chargers.

    2047:

    If you read the CDC 'long term' effects study, it isn't as scary as the news.

    https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930e1.htm?s_cid=mm6930e1_w

    Because 'long term', in the study, meant 14-21 days. Which as I have read previously is not uncommon for pneumonia. These were 'outpatients' which means not hospitalized, but they came from major university hospitals, so I suspect most of them were beyond ordinary flu scale symptoms.

    I assume they will continue following these people, so we might get a scarier one later.

    2048:

    Or maybe its more the case that all pneumonia is scarier than regular people think?

    2049:

    THANK YOU! I had not seen anything about the construction permit violation...

    Here is an article from Bike Portland, a group which cares about obstructed bike lanes in Portland; they have a copy of the letter from the city.

    You can see a picture of the fence in this Oregon Live article. It quotes Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who elsewhere wrote that as the barricade had not come down within the specified 24 hours the city was levying a fine on the feds. City government is pretty slow on most Sundays so we might not have any more developments until Monday.

    • A correction to my previous post: working from memory I said it was the building commission that objected; rather, it was the Portland Bureau of Transportation.
    2050:

    whitroth No ... the local government are going to steal it, next aurumn, unless a very unikely candidate wins, bastards. As R Prior has noticed. Arsehole Khan was asked to exempt present owners, on the condition that when they sold, the "new" ones had to be compliant with new regs ... which would have been prefectly acceptable. But no, he went all absolutist & retrospective-legislation ...

    2051:

    Surely there's a dodgy scrap metal dealer that would recycle the metal if a load of fence sections just happened to appear* in their scrapyard…

    Alternately, couldn't the city dismantle the fence and bill the contractor?

    *If they were dropped off by chaps in anonymous camouflage from an unmarked van, the dealer could claim they thought they were following police orders.

    2052:

    I find this thread highly amusing - curiously, it doesn't make me feel like Methuselah's grandfather :-)

    2053:

    Yes. He said that in the Emperor's New Drivel. I have bought a cheap copy of Shadows, and will see if it is any better - it couldn't be much worse.

    The simple fact is that we don't know either the mechanisms used for thought or their relationship with simple Turing machines, and there are no theoretical grounds to make a solid guess.

    2054:

    I once wired the ignition through the cigarette lighter (I don't smoke) :-)

    2055:

    Well they were both influenced by Algol, so such commonality is hardly suprising.

    Of course anyone from Cambridge will tell you that C was derived from (their) BCPL.

    2056:

    That's an amusing aspect. Two of the big four of the 1950s (Fortran, Cobol, Algol and Lisp) are still active (Fortran and Lisp), in very different forms, and Cobol was until very recently. But it is the one that has died out that has had vastly the most influence on subsequent languages!

    Also, CPL was probably the most influential language that was never used to write a real program :-) BCPL was in active use up until about 1990, and the following makes sense only to an ex-BCPL programmer:

    double fred[1000]; 5[fred] = 123;

    2057:

    Unfortunately for Moravec's argument -- which, to be fair, he pitched in the late 1980s -- more recent research has shown strong evidence that there's some actual computation-like stuff going on at the level below a whole neuron: that individual dendrites may be state machines. Which ramps up the complexity estimate for the neural connectome by at least 3 and maybe as much as 6 orders of magnitude. Even before we then get to the discovery that glial cells do some processing work, too (and add another 2-3 OOM on top).

    There's some question over how significant any of this actually is in terms of consciousness and/or intelligence, but ... think in terms of a 1870s railroad engineer who's been told about internal combustion engines and works on the assumption that you can calculate power output by analogy to the cylinder diameter and stroke length in a compound steam engine, then looks at a 1920s petrol engine where there is at least a loose ratio between capacity and power output ... then someone shows him one of the exotic modern supercar engines where everything is managed by computer, there are no camshafts (because: solenoid-actuated valves), the engine dynamically changes compression ratio and piston stroke length and adapts between Otto cycle and regular depending on load (yes, this is apparently a thing), and you can extract 1000 hp from a 2.0 litre three cylinder engine with three turbochargers and more computing power than it took to make "Toy Story".

    My point here: evolution has a way of optimizing for efficiency that is highly path-dependent and non-obvious -- that is, if neurons hit an efficiency dead-end, some weird random looking tweak will show up and be propagated, rather than ditching them and coming up with a better replacement. We've had upwards of 600-700M years of iterative refinement and tweaking of neural feedback systems, and a vicious predator/prey arms race to drive development of low level traits that support cognitive improvement and theory of mind in both predators and prey species. The human brain is probably as optimized as that ridiculous hypercar engine I mentioned, next to an 1870s steam locomotive.

    2058:

    Even in the 1980s, it was clear that the simple switching model of neurons was a crude over-simplification. From a theoretical point of view, the extra orders of magnitude are irrelevant (the Goedel/Turing limit is magnitude-independent) but that's not the only weakness in his argument. If, at any level, the brain uses a process that is not modellable by a simple Turing machine, all bets are off.

    Many experts claim that quantum mechanics can be simulated by a Turing machine so, in theory, a complete brain could be simulated from first principles, but I can see two weaknesses in their argument. Firstly, whether the model of quantum mechanics we have really is complete and, secondly, whether all interactions in it correspond to a computable function. I am not smart enough to make a good guess at even the latter.

    In practice, of course, all this is irrelevant, as we are talking about unthinkable amounts of computer power.

    2059:

    Older diesel-engined vehicles put out a lot more pollution than more modern ones, even those made in the early 2000s. Getting the "rolling-coal" antiques off city roads as a priority is good for everyone's health.

    There's been a series of increasingly tight emission standards commercial diesel vehicles have had to meet over the past couple of decades. We're on Euro 5 at the moment[1] with Euro 6 coming out soon. A Landie built in the 1990s has no chance of meeting even Euro 3 standard never mind the existing and future standards. Good news though, now we're out of the EU the Government can roll back those bureaucratic hindrances to British gumption and it's possible you'll get to drive your venerable Landie in London's smoggy streets again thanks to Farage and co. Hurrah!

    [1]Lothian Buses here in Edinburgh boast that all their buses meet Euro 5, apart from their historic museum pieces which the wheel out occasionally for weddings, tourist trips etc. Those buses have to get special exemption certificates to operate more than a few hours a year since with mechanical injectors and simple exhaust systems there's not a hope in hell of them meeting even the early Euro standards.

    2060:

    Yes. He said that in the Emperor's New Drivel.

    Ah, OK. I confess I just leafed through that, having come across Shadows first.

    I have bought a cheap copy of Shadows

    I'd better dig out my copy. :-) It's been a decade or two (or three) -- hope my memory of it is reasonably accurate.

    FWIW, I agree with you that any claims re human mind being just a Turing machine are at best premature and at worst just nonsense. OTOH I do think that absent definite evidence to the contrary, it is reasonable to adopt as the null hypothesis the possibility that it could be a Turing machine running a bunch of Bayesian algorithms.

    And lets face it, them neural networks, which are, after all, just algorithms running on simplistic Turing machines (a.k.a. computers) keep surprising us with what can be achieved. Recall Minsky's certainty that "perceptrons" were a dead end? :-) Then back-propagation got cracked...

    2061:

    it could be a Turing machine running a bunch of Bayesian algorithms.

    At some point you also have to say that perhaps biology is better though. When a fun little man says "oh yes, running at near absolute zero we've got it down to a mere billion atoms of digital logic to simulate each atom in the brain, so our latest model can give you the same result as 5 entire neurons"... I'm thinking a machine the size of the LHC there, BTW.

    I long ago decided that it's results that count. Much as my preferred way of converting spare biomass into eggs has feathers and currently seem to think they're ducks*, there are problems where digital computers are excellent and ones where they're just not that great. My feeling is we have computerated a few of the latter, but there are still many that would be better off that way.

    • they spent the day running round in the rain making quacking noises and if it quacks like a duck...
    2062:

    Well, yeas and no, Yer Honour! :-)

    Yes, human brains have been stupendously optimised by evolution, but it probably is a stupendously optimised mess -- because, as you say, evolution cannot backtrack (except by chance) and will continue elaborating existing structures.

    But the question, surely, is not whether it is possible to implement a human mind in some equivalent of modern computers. Anybody trying to do that is (a) is wasting time and effort and (b) hasn't thought through the ethical implications.

    A much more interesting question is whether some equivalent of a modern computer could run an algorithm behaving in such a way that we would have to recognise it as an autonomous, sentient self. There is no requirement to emulate what nature had done. After all, our jets do not fly by flapping their wings, but fly they do -- far and fast.

    For all we know, "consciousness" may turn out to be a fairly simple communications overlay over non-conscious structures (a la Baars and Co.). The older I get, the more I am inclined to agree with the view that consciousness probably has no "executive functions" and amounts to no more than a running summary of decisions being made by non-conscious subsystems. In that view, the conscious self is merely a convenient fiction.

    2063:

    And lets face it, them neural networks, which are, after all, just algorithms running on simplistic Turing machines (a.k.a. computers) keep surprising us with what can be achieved."

    Well, they keep surprising people who don't know much about computational history, theory and (advanced) practice. There's not much that wasn't predicted by far-thinking people in the field in the 1950s and 1960s. And a LOT of the 'progress' has been made by downgrading what people are prepared to call 'success' :-(

    When it comes to higher-level functions, including consciousness, imagination, abstraction and genuine intelligence, we still don't have a clue. The claims that computers have shown signs of such things are, at best, wishful thinking.

    2064:

    Surely there's a dodgy scrap metal dealer that would recycle the metal if a load of fence sections just happened to appear* in their scrapyard…

    Alternately, couldn't the city dismantle the fence and bill the contractor?

    The second one is openly admitted as a possibility but hasn't been implemented yet. Commissioner Eudaly remarked that she was astonished we actually had to worry about people shooting at city workers taking down a fence. She, as head of PBOT, is charging them a fine every 15 minutes that it stays up, which I can only imagine will fix a few potholes if the federal government ever pays up.

    Coincidentally, the first guy I thought of who could hook me up with 'a dodgy scrap metal dealer' spent yesterday making body armor for protesters. The only tricky part would be getting the metal onto a truck... grin

    2065:

    New study in USA claims 40% reduction in Covid-19 hospital admissions for older people taking ACE inhibitors.

    https://news.yale.edu/2020/05/27/seniors-covid-19-taking-ace-inhibitors-have-lower-hospitalization-risk

    2066:

    Elderly Cynic @2056:

    That's an amusing aspect. Two of the big four of the 1950s (Fortran, Cobol, Algol and Lisp)

    Ahem! You mean three. Fujitsu still makes quite a bit from sales of NetCOBOL, and I mean sales, not renewals, renawals are on that tab of the spreadsheet over there ==> :-) From what I hear from elsewhere, that's true for all the big systems people.

    And there's a University^WCollege somewhere in the USA that trains lots of people in RPG. Big blue gobbles them all up.

    the following makes sense only to an ex-BCPL programmer: double fred[1000]; 5[fred] = 123;

    Or anyone who's ever written a compiler, or just realised that array addressing is commutative - but I do wonder how many languages would accept that construction these days???

    2067:

    My knowledge of PL\1 is limited to reading a tutorial on it a very long time ago and, perhaps writing one or two programs in it, and knowing that it was used to write Multics. Writing an OS without some form of pointers might be interesting. Can you tell me if it has the equivalent of the make a pointer to this operator of C: the &?

    2068:

    Need not be from Cambridge at all. Many of its most important ideas stem from the considerably older, but still quite vital, language BCPL developed by Martin Richards. The influence of BCPL on C proceeded indirectly through the language B which was written by Ken Thompson in 1970 for the first UNIX system on the PDP-11. The Bell System Technical Journal, July-August 1978, page 1992. Article by Ritchie and others. With of course the riddle at the end of the article: Should the pressure for improvements become too strong for the language to accommodate, C would probably have to be left as is, and a totally new language developed. We leave it to the reader to speculate on whether it should be called D or P. Alas...

    2069:

    No, I meant two, but it seems that SC22/WG4 backed off its decision to disband, which I heard via WG5. Thanks for updating me.

    And you do know that, on most architectures, array addressing is NOT commutative? Pointers and integers may share registers, but they are rarely the same, and there are often extra or ignored fields in addresses or hidden registers used as bases. It is certainly not commutative in more than a piffling proportion of programming languages (NOT including C++), and has 'interesting' effects on what is now called object-orientation.

    2070:

    Old programming languages never die, they simply fade into the background until the day you think you are finally ahead of your workload.

    For C there is limited scope for extending the language without being shouted down by the C++ crowd. In theory thats not a bad thing for something in widespread use, but experience says that the IT industry depends on convincing most people that they need the latest shiney. OTOH I work on a product first released last century, is mostly written in C, and is still going strong, so what do I know.

    2071:

    experience says that the IT industry depends on convincing most people that they need the latest shiney

    When I started as a new engineer fresh out of university, my manager told me there were two kinds of fool in the world.

    One said "this is old, therefore good."

    The other said "this is new, therefore better."

    Four decades later, I still think he was right.

    2072:

    Charlie @ 2057 Yes, that's what was at the back of my "mind", but couldn't remember - that dendrites & neurotubules may have significant impact, as well as chunky things like neurons ...

    Nojay Yes, but the Landies in london are ... what 0.1% or less of the vehicles on the road? There's also the point about retrospective legislation here .... WHAT "smoggy" streets???? Contra to the lies you will hear from the lycra lobby, London's air is already purer & cleaner than at any time since reasonable records started. There's LICHEN on the roofs of houses ( Come to that, it's growing on my Land-Rover! ) Furthermore there's the OTHER exemption ... ANY CAR that is more than 40 years old is also exempt ... Which is probably my way out of this one ... sell the 1996 Landie & get a 1979/80 Range Rover. But I'd much rather not have to.

    2073:

    "Minds do not work outside significant gravity fields" is one heck of a good answer to why the galaxy has not been overrun. A very unlikely one, sure, but.. Gosh, that is hard to work around.

    That is a brilliant premise for a space opera, albeit one set in a relatively hominid-unfriendly universe, with overtones of Vinge's Zones of Thought only turned inside out.

    Implications: you can't send shaved apes interstellar without taking a pocket-sized black hole with you, or maybe a big-ass generation ship. (See also: "Moving Mars" by Greg Bear.) And maybe the effect gets more pronounced and people can think better in curved spacetime? So you get lots of colonies around Jupiter or Brown Dwarf systems, and the vicinity of black holes becomes highly desirable real estate for the brightest, fastest thinkers ...

    Ooh, I like. Shame I've got a different space opera queued up first!

    2074:

    Speaking about orders of magnitude...

    Beta blockers are also used in performance anxiety, link goes to an article about their somewhat inappropiate use by a journalist, televised medicine and prescription and privacy issues.

    (Seh also talks about how it might help not tackling the underlying issue and changing the underlying behaviours, which once again makes me wonder about my own medications, but well, when I look at the alternative ways of dealing, they don't look that appealing. Err, let's leave it at that.)

    Quite a few musicians say they dull their emotions, so they don't use them; mighzt be nocebo, might be a central effect (propanolol and IIRC metoprolol cross the blood-brain barrier), but part of it might be the feedback from the body is missing, there is a classical experiment about bodily and emotional perception.

    Moravec et al. basically are just born-again Cartesian dualists, though they would object violently to the comparison[1]. There is an interesting school in cognitive sciences (and lingustics, thanks to Helena for introducing it to me) called Embodiment.

    [1] As for Moravec et al. objecting to being dualists, I remembered a friend from about 2014 who was quite livid for me using an SSRI and antihypertensives, I should try to stop them, maybe try some medication; about half a minute later, she was lighting up a joint, I declined. Same friend also abused the DSM and ICD for fun and profit, she was in a stable relationship at the time, but a few years earlier she said she was no borderliner, therapeutic criteria said you needed more than a certain number of relationships in the last year to qualify, and she only did one night stands. Errr. I remember a quote from Lem's "His Master's Voice", about us being able to interpret the world according to our wishes if we stop moving atoms and planets. Hm, wonder if I stop the usual SF and fantasy for some time and revisit Algernon Blackwood, another author I really liked in my late teens...

    Quite a few other thoughts about us structuring experiences to fit a narrative ommitted, guess I'll cancel my job because it makes me depressive and robs me of social interaction. REALITY(tm) is much more complex, but my shrink is short on time... ;)

    2075:

    Implications: you can't send shaved apes interstellar without taking a pocket-sized black hole with you, or maybe a big-ass generation ship.

    Of course, you would have to hand-wave away the Equivalence Principle, which offers the trivial solution of a centrifuge. I appreciate that this is not a serious objection to a space opera plot. :-)

    2076:

    I recall that in "Press Enter" Varley proposed the idea that each neuron was similar to a personal computer from the early eighties, such as a VIC-20, in which case you can probably add a couple more orders of magnitude.

    2077:

    maybe try some medication

    Err, make that "try some meditation". Always a good idea, though going through my thoughts, trying to remember, looking for alternative explanations and employing different perspectives makes me even more tachycardic.

    For the shrink, my employer won't fire me, and if I cancel the job myself, I don't get any money for the first 3 month, except when I get a medical attest. And let's just say my social behaviour was somewhat strange lately, there was a complex interaction of private life and job, but I guess I'll leave out the private matters, and when the firm is running into problems due to people being ill all the time, I'm nearly convinced myself.

    Oh, and I was somewhat tachycardic after writing the last post, which reminds me I get much more arousal from psychological stimuli than from physical ones. Err, damn, and here I emply mind-body dualism myself.

    Sorry for the digression.

    2078:

    Its consequences are indeed 'interesting'! While I hold no brief for the principle of equivalence, it's fundamental to general relativity.

    2079:

    I think Greg Benford did that, but only by implication.

    2080:

    When it comes to higher-level functions, including consciousness, imagination, abstraction and genuine intelligence, we still don't have a clue. The claims that computers have shown signs of such things are, at best, wishful thinking.

    Go aficionados tend to disagree. Some get quite misty-eyed about the imaginative boldness of some of the moves made by AlphaGo and AlphaZero. And this time it is emphatically not down to a brute-force tree searching (a la Deep Blue). If that's not counted as imagination, then you need to define what you mean by "imagination", preferably without resorting to an equivalent of "it's what people do and machines cannot". :-)

    2081:

    When it comes to higher-level functions, including consciousness, imagination, abstraction and genuine intelligence, we still don't have a clue. The claims that computers have shown signs of such things are, at best, wishful thinking.

    I'd disagree in part: a number of large computer games use procedurally generated worlds. It's little different than an animation company saying "peon, give me another Earthlike world with the following adventures on it..."

    A lot of creativity can be generated procedurally, based on random inputs. The randomness provides the creativity, the procedure filters out the cruft and builds the rest into something desirable.

    Probably you could do something with art photography: have cameras that take lots of pictures, automatically balance and sharpen them as any smart phone does, feed them into a neural network trained on "what looks good" that picks the pictures it's learned people like. Then do a competition to pick the best based on a neural network rating. This can be done automatically. Whether it will be as good as someone's art shot? That's the interesting bit.

    2082:

    re: I know of no algorithm that we can't perform, and I am not limiting myself to what most people think of as computer ...

    There are various algorithms that we can't perform due to what I call "stack depth limits". This is just a nitpick, but it's already been the source of a few places where AI has actually been useful. (Though I'm not sure I'd call the programs intelligent ... certainly they weren't very flexible.)

    This shows up in many places, but is especially noticeable in language. English nominally allows an indefinite distance between phrase and reference to the phrase within a sentence, but as sentences grow longer this becomes more and more difficult to process. At a certain level each person will "drop out" of understanding what was said, even though the sentence remains formally correct. One can construct sentences that nobody can understand because of this, but which remain valid English.

    2083:

    Most of the arguments against the possibility of strong AI fall in two camps. One argues that humans have free will which cannot be implemented on a deterministic machine, and that human intuition is not limited by Goedel incompleteness and cannot therefore be implemented on a Turing machine. This relies on assuming that free will is a real thing and that human intuition is not limited, neither of which can be shown to be true. The other line of argument is that we don't have an intelligible explanation of how consciousness or qualia can be supervenient on physical brains and therefore they cannot be implemented on artificial ones. This argument fails on the fact that nevertheless humans do have consciousness and physical brains. It is a strong argument against the success of top-down attempts to design minds though.

    2084:

    "I do wonder how many languages would accept that construction these days???"

    The BASIC on the BBC Micro did. Different punctuation, but same principle. base?index and index?base both meant "the contents of the memory location at base+index", so if you defined a block of memory starting at berro% (I think that was DIM integer_variable size, and the % suffix denoted an integer variable) you could use 5?berro% interchangeably with berro%?5 to refer to its fifth elephant. It's not exactly the same as EC's BCPL example but the differences are only of the mutatis mutandis type.

    2085:

    Well, no, individual neurons can't be exactly emulated. Not at our current level of knowledge. Perhaps they can be emulated "well enough", but we don't know.

    2086:

    re Off the top of my head, I'd think that humans deal with the world by taking what they see, filtering it through the usual filters, then sending it through ad-hoc ...

    I'm sure that's part of what's going on, but the brain is biology. Whatever you understand something more complicated is going on underneath. It's an evolved system, so there are going to be parts that don't make any sense, but are still necessary. (That's true of even simple evolved systems, like electronic circuits.)

    2087:

    Actually, Turing Machines can't exist in this reality. Turing Machines require an infinitely long tape and no errors in processing.

    Well, they make great theoretical pieces, because they're easy to analyze. But Actual Turing Machines (ATMs?) utilize error correction that usually works and finite storage that's usually "good enough". These make the damn things quite difficult to analyze, so they aren't useful theoretical devices. And computers aren't even that. They've got multiple storage devices. They've got error corrected memory (usually good enough). They've got microcoded instruction sets that you don't understand the microcode for (and usually can't be sure what the code is). So they're lousy theoretical devices, even though quite useful practically.

    The things the universe lets us build and find practical aren't the elegant theoretical constructs that are easy to reason about. But the theory is often "close enough" to the practice to be quite useful...just don't confuse them.

    2088:

    That would be a very interesting refutation of Einstein's Relativity. "Flat space" would not seem to exist in the same universe as material objects, however. But if it did, centrifugal force should mimic the effects of gravity. That's one of the basic ideas behind general relativity. (Well, Einstein talked about an elevator, or elsewhere a rocket, but the same idea applies.)

    2089:

    "Actually, Turing Machines can't exist in this reality. Turing Machines require an infinitely long tape and no errors in processing."

    Not quite.

    The universal turing machine may potentially require unlimited tape to emulate a specific other turing machine, but it's not like it need very much tape for adding 2 and 2.

    With respect to errors in processing, Von Neumann solved that problem - at the expense of four or five magnitudes more tape.

    2090:

    I happen to agree with 2086 and 2087.

    What I meant by the pitch earlier that brains and neurons aren't Turing complete is that there are things that a Turing machine could do (bit-by-bit memory, for example) that they really struggle with, so any algorithm that depends on long stretches of tape probably can't be done as such by a neuron or a brain. Instead they're networks of analog "devices" that integrate a bunch of different inputs. And there are multiple fractal levels of networks of networks doing this, with proper action trained by years of feedback with outside environments.

    Now, let's turn this mess back to a digital simulation, especially a limited one. What, precisely, do I mean by integrate a bunch of different inputs. What precisely is the trigger threshold for each input? Well, that precision doesn't just depend on the cell being measured, it also depends on the precision of the device doing the measurement. The computer assumes the number given it is as precise as it's told. How much is "a bunch of inputs?" Well, we don't know completely, although we know generally. Every little guess and approximation there complicates the model.

    Then there's stuff that a brain isn't evolved to do (like higher math), but which it can be trained to do. Those aren't basic algorithms in a library that the computer draws on, they're learned procedures, which means that different systems will likely handle these things differently.

    And so on. Emulating this analog network of networks digitally gets.... kind of tricky. Possibly to impossible levels of tricky.

    2091:

    I am talking about inventing concepts that have no simply explicable connection to their starting point, not even when looked at a posteriori. Heteromeles's example is precisely what I don't mean, unless those worlds are conceptually new (i.e. not in the peon's briefing or experience space). Better methods than brute force were known in the 1960s, and sometimes used - but the computers of that era were not up to solving serious problems.

    Note that I am NOT saying that can't be emulated but that, so far, we don't have a clue of how to do it. The best we can do is to hope that a genuine innovation falls out of a random mechanism - I can tell you from experience that needs no great intelligence. And, no, genius is NOT simply a matter of striking lucky, though that's an important factor.

    Aside (to #2082): the stack depth argument is irrelevant - see #1970 and #2058.

    To repeat, my point is not to side with William Goodall's first camp (#2083), and I side with his second only by adding the proviso at present. What I am arguing against are the unjustified claims that what is currently miscalled AI is leading in the direction of those higher-level abilities. I stand by my claim that we are currently baffled.

    2092:

    Right. There is a reason that BBC Basic had things in common with BCPL :-) My point was that it's extremely rare, and is positively unnatural in a language with an Algol-like syntax and type system.

    2093:
    Then there's stuff that a brain isn't evolved to do (like higher math)

    Actually, there is at least one school of philosophy of mathematics called Intuitionism that assumes "higher math" doesn't show us some "objective reality", but concerns mental constructs which rest on the way our brain evolved.

    There are quite some philosophies of mathematics aside from Platonism. If you go into them, order some beer...

    2094:

    Charlie Didn't Bob Shaw do something along those lines, where living in a shifting gravity field ( As instanced by a relatively large Mooon, f'rinstance ) screwed with one's thinking? ... Ah yes.. "The Ceres Solution"

    Heteromeles @ 2081 THAT will fail, almost immediately ... because the computer will fill up with porn so fast ... ( on "what looks good" that picks the pictures it's learned people like ) Oh dear.

    2095:

    Porn? Hah! Cats.

    But it depends what the system is trained on. If pigeons can be trained to distinguish between abstract artists, I don't think it's that hard to train a neural net to like, say, cubists.

    2096:

    You know, if you read post #1990, you'll see I mentioned intuitionism in a rather long post. Coincidence, I'm sure...

    The really fascinating part (as mentioned in #1990) is that there's a physicist out there who's done four papers working to recast general relativity in intuitionist math.

    The thing about intuitionist math (from what little I know about it), is that it places a central primacy on time: calculations take time, so the accuracy of things like rational numbers is in part a function of how much effort and time has been spent on a calculation. The long string of digits that makes up a rational number isn't a "hidden variable" that's being uncovered, it's a sequence that is literally being created as it is computed in real time.

    Now look at relativistic space-time, and things get weird. The precision and uncertainty of where stuff is in space-time, in a relativistic framework, starts to depend more and more on the intuitionist observer, almost in a way that mimics what happens in quantum mechanics. That's what has people interested. It may turn out that general relativity, recast into intuitionist math, looks like some transformation of quantum mechanics, and the two fields will get merged thereby.

    However, if that happens,* then it will have make some fairly stark changes in how we perceive reality. For one thing, time passing will be a real phenomenon, and the idea that we live in a four dimensional brick universe will go away. This doesn't mean that there will be an absolute scale of time, but that we'll have to get our heads around something that's completely different, and dealing with space-time may well get awkward. The other weird thing about intuitionist math is IIUC that information is not conserved, but can be created or destroyed over time. If this turns out to be true, then a lot of what we think we understand about black holes and other things will have to be rethought. I'd speculate that the ongoing creation of information might be some version of dark energy, but I suspect that's too pure BS to be anything other than waste material.

    *My bet, given how many conflicting models are out there, is that this will turn out to be really cool but ultimately wrong. That's not a comment on the quality of the work, just giving it a one in #models chance of being right, since most of them have to be wrong by chance.

    2097:

    OK, going up from that one...

    The human brain wasn't constructed, it evolved. Same with neurons.

    Out thinking isn't one block, there are different submodules; problem is, my verbal consciousness can only access and describe a few of those submodules, like Kahnemann's two systems, it's bound by some categories of perception, like the Kantian categories[1], there might be others not bound by the same constraints.

    The verbal consciousness is also involved in mathematics and symbolic thinking, though I'm not sure it's the only system with those. Let's call those systems "broader verbal consciousness".

    Turing machines are a model of the mode of thinking employed by the "broader verbal consciousness". Computers were developed to model Turing machines in the Real World[tm].

    So it should be possible human brains are capable of things computers can't do[2].

    Sorry, on the run...

    [1] Hm, Damian should like that one. [2] Err, Greg, if you think I might bring god(s|ess|esses) into that one, I'm an agnostic, but personally, I liked the Gnostic solution to the problem, guess it were Lem and PKD who introduced me to the bunch, playing Kult was a funny reminder. ;)

    2098:

    It's demonstrably true that the form of the mathematics we use is culturally-dependent, which doesn't prove that the underlying mathematics is (or isn't).

    2099:
    You know, if you read post #1990, you'll see I mentioned intuitionism in a rather long post. Coincidence, I'm sure...

    Sorry for overlooking it, guess I should go through the thread again. AFAIK the different philosophies mostly deal with what's a proof and how it relates to reality, as for accuracy, most mathematics mainly deal with x and y, which is good, because I can hardly remember my telephone number. But I'll look through it.

    2100:

    Actually, philosophers (and quite a few mathematicians) wonder why mathematics is so good at describing the world; one hypothesis was areas that can't be thus described are left out.

    2101:

    Trottelreiner Err ... no: Computers were developed to model Turing machines in the Real World[tm]. They were not. Computers were specifically initially developed to solve mathematical (Codebreaking) problems or other mathematical ( Physics/Chemical modelling ) problems, specific examples being the Allied use of codebraking &/or in the Manhattan Project. IIRC, the theory was stuggling to keep up with the practice, even as Turing & Van Neumann & others were working on those problems. At the present time, human brains can do things computers cannot ( & the other way around ) Whether that state will continue is one of the problems we are tiptoeing around, isn't it?

    2102:

    One of Colin Kapp's Unorthodox Engineers stories was based on a planet with, ahem, "variable" gravity. They eventually figured out there was a microscopic black hole orbiting around its core deep underground.

    2103:

    Better methods than brute force were known in the 1960s, and sometimes used

    Sure, various ad-hoc heuristics with backtracking and ways of pruning search trees. Been there, done that. :-)

    Essentially, we do not disagree, it's just that you put a bit more weight on "we don't have a clue" than I do. Whereas I put more stress on Occam's Razor and accept as my null hypothesis that Turing machines can do the job.

    Plus I cannot help noting that AlphaGo's "attention heat map" looks curiously like what in other contexts we would call informed intuition based on generalisation.

    2104:

    You just found out how much energy a/c eats?

    Back in the late eighties, my late wife and I, driving our dearly departed beloved Toyota Tercel wagon outside of Austin, heading inwards, if we were stopped at the light, then went to accelerate up the grade 1%? 2%? whoever wasn't driving would be the one to kill the a/c during the acceleration (speed limit 55, Tercel: 0-60 in a blazing 22 sec).

    2105:

    I would take a third position on that: our investigations of mathematics are constrained by how well we can express any given area in terms our brains have evolved to understand. Our brains have evolved basically for the specialist function of "to survive better", and so have acquired certain capabilities and incapabilities of a more general nature which affect what other specialised uses we can put them to. It's not that our brains have or have not evolved to do mathematics, it's that the mathematics we actually do do falls in the intersection of what there is to do and what our brains have evolved to do. (So, pretty much the same as everything else really.)

    2106:

    Yeah, and I left my SCA armor behind in Philly when I left in late '86....

    2107:

    https://1secondpainting.com

    It's a web-based AI trained up on abstract paintings. I've seen worse hanging on the walls of hotels and conference centres.

    2108:

    but I do wonder how many languages would accept that construction these days???

    C does.

    2109:

    Now, please note that the last time I worked in PL/1 was 1983, but you're asking it it had the ability to pass by reference and by value, and yes, I believe it did.

    For the non-programmers, a pointer is a location in memory that holds the address of a value. Passing by value is passing the contents of that second memory location, the actual value, i.e. 1243. Passing my reference is passing the address of the location in memory that points to the location holding the value. What that does is to let you change the value itself, while if you only pass the value, the original location is unchanged.

    Clear as mud?

    Oh, and Niklaus Wirth, the creator of the language Pascal, used to joke that Europeans referred to him by reference, and Americans by value....

    2110:

    C still comes up as one of the most-used langauges.

    The other news is, COBOL is still in heavy use.

    2111:

    Unlike sunlight the laser intensity doesn't drop off along an inverse square curve as you get further away.

    That's only true in the near field of the laser transmitter, not the far field, and interstellar distances are pretty far unless your transmitter has a really, really big aperture. Admittedly, that's a matter of mere engineering, so perhaps a K1+ civilization could build one.

    Of relevance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_length .

    2112:

    Why do you have problems with the principle of equivalence?

    2113:

    See what you mean. Thanks!

    2114:

    I have a reasonable speculation....

    Some years ago, there was a phase of writing an o/s specifically for multicore parallel processing, where each core had a thread, and when it finished its current task, it would "bid" for the next.

    Now, we see things, and they come through our filters... and perhaps our mind has a fuzzy index - this looks like this, or this, or this", and it tosses what it needs to deal with to *all of them, and see what comes back first....

    2115:

    > but I do wonder how many languages would accept that construction these days???

    C does.

    In fact, perhaps because of my mathematical background, I much prefer *(array + n) to array[n]. To my mind it's somehow more intuitively transparent. More in tune with the "a variable is a name and a place" mantra. :-)

    2116:

    One of the many lovely scenes in Unicorn Girl is where, having wound up in an ultra-Victorian universe, one of our heroes, during dinner, proceedes to start "It's a young water, presumptuous..." and is described as diving into clauses, subclauses, and almost drowning in them, but coming in time to reach a masterful summation.

    2117:

    "Computers were specifically initially developed to solve mathematical (Codebreaking) problems or other mathematical ( Physics/Chemical modelling ) problems, specific examples being the Allied use of codebraking &/or in the Manhattan Project."

    Amateur Data Archaeologist Hat: It really depends what you mean by "computer", "developed", "mathematical"... :-)

    I think it is fair to say that both analog and digital computers were driven primarily but not overwhelmingly by the need for artillery firing tables.

    2118:

    I think the last trilogy of Brin's Startide universe ultimately turned around the "Embrace of Tides." Flat reality was distressing, not lethal, though.

    2119:

    so perhaps a K1+ civilization could build one.

    Sort of a baby Nicoll-Dyson laser. Need a K2 for a grown up one.

    2120:

    This is funny - Business Insider has an article claiming that BoJo is privately hoping the Hairball loses....

    2121:

    No, I am NOT referring to those, but to FAR more advanced modelling techniques. They didn't get put into practical use, because the computing power wasn't there, but very few of the 'new' methods are actually new.

    2122:

    I don't. I said that I hold no brief for it - or against it, either. I was pointing out that the proposed mechanism broke it, and therefore the fundamentals of general relativity.

    2123:

    This is funny - Business Insider has an article claiming that BoJo is privately hoping the Hairball loses....

    The article doesn't actually say that - it says the current UK government.

    Perhaps a bit of splitting hairs, but what the rest of the UK government want regarding Trump and what Boris wants don't necessarily have to agree.

    That said, anyone with even half a brain has realized not only is the UK not getting a trade deal with the US by the end of this year, but they won't get one as long as Trump is in power - as the deal will be so one-sided and full of provisions the UK public will find unacceptable that it possibly could mean the fall of the government. In fact,it is telling that the article claims the UK's hope at this point is for Biden to resurrect the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the UK simply sign on the dotted line for that.

    2124:

    No, it isn't, though there was a phase when you could argue that for analogue computers. The initial impetus (in Babbage's time) was tide tables and ephemeridae, the initial uses of the fixed-program digital computers were cryptanalysis, and of modern (stored program) ones was mathematical tables. I worked with some of the people who did the last. But it is wrong to say that the impetus for the last came from mathematical tables, as those people knew very well that computers could and would do a LOT more.

    2125:

    I doubt it. The sheeple will continue to bleat but follow the whole way to the slaughterhouse.

    2126:

    "the initial uses of the fixed-program digital computers were cryptanalysis, and of modern (stored program) ones was mathematical tables."

    It's not like the world were lacking for tables of logarithms or trignometric functions in the 1940'ies.

    The "mathematical tables" of which you were told, were firing tables for new designs of artillery, because tables of the integrals of the intractable partial differential equations governing artillery pieces were in very high demand, from first world war and forward (See also "After The Map").

    It is true that Colossus did cryptoanlysis, it is also true that it wasn't much of a computer but only a hardwired cross-correlator.

    Colossus claim to computing fame is that it "revealed" what the Post Office and AT&T had known for three decades already: In stationary applications, thermionic valves have good reliability, even in gross amounts.

    The first computerized calculations of what we would normally understand as "mathematical tables" were undertaken by Von Neumann, to study if their statistical properties were suitable for use as predictable generators of pseudo-random numbers.

    On this topic, I can warmly recommend this book:

    https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/john-von-neumann-and-origins-modern-computing

    2127:

    No, I am NOT referring to those, but to FAR more advanced modelling techniques.

    In such a case you will need to enlighten me as to what you do mean.

    2128:

    I assure you that they were NOT! Look, I worked with Wilks, Wheeler, Needham and others that built the first practical stored-program computer.

    And, if you think that trigonometric and logarithmic tables are all that was needed, you really are deluded. I have several books of tables from that date beside my desktop, and know (a) how hard they were to produce and (b) how limited they were. Try calculating normal scores to 5 digits by hand, to take ONE example.

    My first computer book was Modern Computing Methods (first published in 1948), I still have it somewhere, and it is FAR more general than that. I also used a hand calculator for my diploma, and can assure you that there were a LOT of areas where automatic computing was required, many of which had a lot more money involved than artillery tables. While the IDEA for stored-program computers may be Von Neuman, the first examples were made in the UK in 1948.

    2129:

    Not to mention that Turing's work on A-Machines (what would later be called Turing Machines) was done in the mid 1930s — long before WW2, Colossus, etc.

    2130:

    I remember going to a fascinating talk by Tom Kilburn about their work in Manchester - chatting to him afterwards he seemed a thoroughly nice bloke.

    2131:

    _Moz_ @ 2030:

    I'd like to find something like this for around-town use.

    apan is full of them, and they export used ones to anyone who will accept them. In Australia you're looking at about $US10,000 ready to go. The problem for you is right hand drive.

    China also makes them, and someone in the US has a youtube video or three where they bought the cheapest one they could find and played with it. They were driving it on the road but I have no idea of the actual legalities.

    Ha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GG1RC7GV0Y

    Doesn't look like it has the cargo capacity I'm looking for (and probably not the power or range I'd need to get around town). It's a golf cart with a shell. I doubt it would get me to Costco & the grocery store because it wouldn't climb the hill on Atlantic Ave1 (35.804746, -78.623803) in Raleigh. It's about twice as steep as the hill he had trouble climbing in the video.

    The French vehicle I linked to is a bit more substantial. I could get my Leslie, a keyboard, another amp and a couple of guitars in it. Just the Leslie alone would NOT FIT in that Chinese go cart. Did you see the wheels on that thing? My cheapo ($300) Harbor Freight trailer has larger, more roadworthy wheels & tires.

    I'd have to make three trips if I wanted to carry an amp & 2 guitars.

    The price sounded reasonable though.

    1 Or more appropriately E. Franklin St. in Chapel Hill, NC (35.925999, -79.036694) since that's apparently where he lives.

    2132:

    Troutwaxer @ 2035: Really? Have you checked out the Prius-V?

    Yeah, it's a slight improvement over the original Prius regarding cargo space, but it's still not quite large enough. Mainly due to the slope of the roof in the back. At a minimum, I need a real station wagon like my old Ford Focus Wagon.

    Plus, in addition to being a discontinued model, the Prius-V cost four times what I paid for my Jeep. I could probably go twice as much (the Axiam e-Truck), but not four times ... and certainly not the Toyota Sienna which costs five times as much (or more).

    2133:

    The human brain wasn't constructed, it evolved. Same with neurons.

    And some of the "less advanced" brains are pretty good. Horses have shown a sense of humour. The standard joke at Yellowstone is that "there's considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists".

    If we were trying to understand which neuron/brain features actually contribute to brain power, and which don't, what would be the simplest creature to study ?

    2134:

    Robert Prior @ 2051: urely there's a dodgy scrap metal dealer that would recycle the metal if a load of fence sections just happened to appear* in their scrapyard…

    Alternately, couldn't the city dismantle the fence and bill the contractor?

    *If they were dropped off by chaps in anonymous camouflage from an unmarked van, the dealer could claim they thought they were following police orders.

    I don't know why the Governor of Oregon doesn't send in the National Guard to restore order and detain the obvious law-breakers.

    2135:

    Go aficionados tend to disagree. Some get quite misty-eyed about the imaginative boldness of some of the moves made by AlphaGo and AlphaZero. And this time it is emphatically not down to a brute-force tree searching (a la Deep Blue). A Simple Alpha(Go) Zero Tutorial (29 December 2017) Alpha Zero uses Monte Carlo Tree Search, with policy iteration, using a RNN rather than rollouts. From that subjective observation by Go players, how about this? Perhaps human brains/minds do something analogous. Somehow. Parallelized.

    (Something like what whitroth #2114 said "and it tosses what it needs to deal with to all of them, and see what comes back first....", but different.) (Note: I have not read Penrose.)

    2136:

    Don't get me started. It's almost impossible (or is it impossible?) to buy a "station wagon". The mere words seem to give car companies and dealers the cooties "OOOH, it's so not SEXY!!!"

    2137:

    whitroth @ 2104:

    You just found out how much energy a/c eats?

    Back in the late eighties, my late wife and I, driving our dearly departed beloved Toyota Tercel wagon outside of Austin, heading inwards, if we were stopped at the light, then went to accelerate up the grade 1%? 2%? whoever wasn't driving would be the one to kill the a/c during the acceleration (speed limit 55, Tercel: 0-60 in a blazing 22 sec).

    Both my Ford Escort Wagon and my Ford Focus Wagon had an interlock that de-clutched (disengaged) the AC Compressor whenever the throttle was advanced beyond a certain point. You didn't have to turn the AC off to climb a hill, the car did it automagically. I think if Ford could figure that out, anyone should be able to.

    2138:

    Btw, wasn't being rude, was doing something else, so short-hand ([redacted] shit is wild).

    A computational study on the influence of insect wing geometry on bee flight mechanics

    Two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is applied to better understand the effects of wing cross-sectional morphology on flow field and force production. This study investigates the influence of wing cross-section on insect scale flapping flight performance, for the first time, using a morphologically representative model of a bee (Bombus pensylvanicus) wing.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5769640/

    Biol Open. 2017 Dec 15; 6(12): 1784–1795.

    Yep, 20-fucking-17.

    You fuckers solved flight by use of Energy / Thrust and ignored (actually killed off / wiped out / decimated) like a few billion years of applied Math in the process.

    To say we're not impressed is akin to finding out you're modelling your 'Consciousness' on fucking silicon Babbage machines.

    2139:

    Just like one can't find "blinds" and "curtains" anymore — everything is now a "window treatment". :-)

    2140:

    And this just in ...

    The latest "Security Update" for Micro$oft Windoze installs the Edge Browser without asking permission.

    I was able to UN-install it on Windoze 7, but reading about it, apparently if you're using Windoze 10 you can't UN-install it.

    I'm sure there's a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in there somewhere, and doesn't the EU have laws against installing unwanted software on someone else's computer without their permission?

    I also understand that it raids your Firefox settings & sends the data off to Micro$oft, so it probably also runs afoul of data privacy laws.

    2141:

    You demean us Ah sorry badly written. I was just a bit surprised that there was a possible hint about where (very approximately, like a few thousand kilometers) your eyes were; you're almost always quite careful. I was just asking; that was an interesting answer. NUDIBRANCHS Oooh, they are fascinating. Do you mean Glaucus atlanticus aka "blue dragon", that eats Portuguese men o' war and "selects and stores the most venomous nematocysts for its own use against future prey"?

    El Derecho de Vivir en Paz "La luna es una explosión Que funde todo el clamor El derecho de vivir en paz" ?

    For fun: the double rainbow mentioned upthread? Same thunderstorm front as the one that Charlie linked on twitter of powerful lightning bolts hitting the base of the Statue of Liberty (or behind it), maybe plus a weak tornado? https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1286296291841114115 (or text)

    2142:

    And you start with the (relatively recent) Great Red Spot... the methane-breathers are evidently Up To Something :)

    2143:

    And yes. 2D when the problem is 4D. In 2017 "for the first time".

    You're Fucked

    Actually pertinent question: what's the processing power required to model 4D fluid dynamics these days, in 2020?[0] Lol, no: you can't do that yet.

    Just going to say this: every species you kill off, you lose a little bit more information that is so much worse when replicated by fucking smooth-brained Apes a little later.

    "But it tasted so gooooood / made my penis harder" is not going to cut it in the H.O.P court.

    ~

    And, yeah: if you missed it. 100% disproved your current models of schizophrenia / Mind on the way here. 100%. DSM IV/V is alllll bullshit. Scientology was right, for all the wrong reasons.

    https://twitter.com/archillect/status/1287447305281470468

    Machine algo ripping images: humans cannot understand. It's a Cat looking at its tail through the "The Arrival"[1] filter, how fucking myopic are you? Should take you less than a second to process that one.

    Humans: shit at image meta-processing to boot, you're concretely fucked.

    [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/

    [0] Ooooh, bitchy.

    2144:

    Vehicles electric / petrol / diesel & Storage space, well ... https://hosting.photobucket.com/albums/qq356/Greg_Tingey/PA090219.jpg That picture, about 5 miles from the nearest tarmac, gives an idea of the proper/necessary luggage/carrying capacity. And, going back half-a-subject .... there is NO modern replacement - there might be in 6 months ... costing about £45k ... which I simply do not have...

    SEE ALSO whitroth @ 2136 - sad but true.

    @ 2138 SCALING Insect flight patterns & dynamics will not scale to large structures ... like we discussed earlier. Really large birds tend to be gliders & soarers, with minimal flapping, small birds flap a lot - & you didn't notice this?

    [ Apologies to everyone, I know I should not feed the troll, but a basic physics mistake like this needs pointing out. ]

    2145:

    I was in my 20s before we got a non-abstract painting in the house. My brain got trained really early. (My grandparents had some abstract art also.)

    2146:

    Insect flight patterns & dynamics will not scale to large structures ... like we discussed earlier.

    Sigh. You've missed the point [that a lot of technically minded folks here have not, and probably appreciate the helicopter jokes]. When they strapped a few brave pilots into machines (the Dog, the USA Hero, even that poor Indian Mouse) they did not understand nor even know the fluid dynamic math they were playing against.

    Since the point up thread was that "you need only to understand teh fundamental math", we are rubbing your noses in the fact... you do not.

    ~

    "La luna es una explosión Que funde todo el clamor El derecho de vivir en paz"

    Yeah. 100% we X-reference it all.

    They killed him, btw.

    2147:

    The latest "Security Update" for Micro$oft Windoze installs the Edge Browser without asking permission.

    Not strictly true - and also not a surprise. Microsoft has been saying this will happen for about 6 months now.

    The browser remains part of the OS, and the new Edge is simply the latest version of the browser on Windows.

    (and this really isn't unusual - every OS at this point comes with a default browser installed).

    I was able to UN-install it on Windoze 7, but reading about it, apparently if you're using Windoze 10 you can't UN-install it.

    Windows 10 - of course you can't install it, it's been part of the OS since day 1 and various parts of the OS depend on it.

    The only difference is that this is the new Edge - aka Credge aka the Edge built on top of Chromium instead of an in-house engine.

    I'm sure there's a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in there somewhere, and doesn't the EU have laws against installing unwanted software on someone else's computer without their permission?

    Again, Windows ships with a web browser, and has for like 20 years. This is simply an update to the browser using a different code base.

    I also understand that it raids your Firefox settings & sends the data off to Micro$oft, so it probably also runs afoul of data privacy laws.

    I find that very doubtful.

    I would assume the Edge, like every other web browser on the market, on first run offers to import your settings as a convenience.

    And while Edge probably, like most MS software, sends anonymized telemetry back to MS it won't be sending your web browser settings/bookmarks to Microsoft - Microsoft's key selling point with Edge/Credge is that you get the compatibility of Chrome without all the nasty Google tracking stuff - thus it protects your privacy.

    And really, anyone who is currently using Chrome may want to consider trying out the new Edge as a better Chrome.

    2148:

    Re: scaling (see what I did there? :D )

    Be fair, if you want your model airplane / light aircraft to fly in treacle it might be applicable.

    2149:

    I haven't come across references to "Micro$oft" and "Windoze" in over a decade. Don't tell me it has achieved religion status over the intervening years.

    2150:

    Yeah, because Fluid Dynamics is not a thing, and your current flight models are 100% totes brilliant usages of massive amounts of liquid fuel that only took a few billion years to make and you're spending it like candy.

    100% fully mature Human Male, 2020 model, response there.

    100% absolute fucking dammed response there.

    p.s.

    Look up Quantas or any number of your old airplane businesses. Seems like they're... making signatures on the airspace and none of you fuckers are mature enough to spot the fold.

    Ontological Fold

    Yeah, job losses are over 90,000 in the biz, ghoul.

    2151:

    Ahhh.

    We can smell them from miles away.

    Understood this now: the fear of the micro/macro relation. It's a 100% a reductionist and political fear [GUILLOTINES] that anyone gets held responsible for their micro actins being tied into a macro Lawsuit / revolutionary type purge.

    Btw.

    No current human-made commerical flying device[0], including all .mil spec stuff, even acknowledges reality, it all uses vast energy/thrust to beat the problem: "Be fair, if you want your model airplane / light aircraft to fly in treacle it might be applicable."

    You know fuck all about fluid dynamics, energy, flight and vectors.

    Bored of you already.

    [0] There are a few, rare.

    2152:

    "Amateur Data Archaeologist Hat: It really depends what you mean by "computer", "developed", "mathematical"... :-)"

    True. "Computer" in particular gives you a heap of sand problem.

    Maybe it helps to consider how widely a system was used, in that it's easier to point to something as being a significant development if there were lots of them in use all over the place. Things like working out astronavigational or trigonometric tables are undoubtedly valid uses, but you only need one device, or approximately one, so you can tolerate a lot more flakiness and need for expert coddling than in something that has to work well enough to have a lot of them out there chugging away to themselves in real-time life-or-death applications.

    It seems to me that about the first widespread use of systems making use of digital computation is probably railway signalling systems, once they started trying to incorporate countermeasures against human failings. Every mile or two along the route you had a Boolean logic block and some state machines. At major junctions this could get frigging complicated. The top end systems could operate without human intervention before WW1. The London Underground famously (FSVO) had a system in 190something for routing trains through the four-way junction at Camden Town that could handle higher rates of traffic than they run today.

    For analogue computation what springs to mind is naval fire control systems. These were able to do artillery calculations in real time as well as compensating for the motion of the ship, again before WW1.

    Artillery tables were a bit later, because it was during the course of WW1 that the techniques of predicted fire were developed. At the start of the war the fire of land artillery was all directed by feedback, and different combatant nations took different amounts of time first to appreciate the advantages of being able to do it open loop and then to figure out how. But of course, if you count slide rule type devices as analogue computers, once they did get a handle on predicted fire artillery calculators were a gunner's standard field tool.

    2153:

    Sorry to be so boring. I do have some formal training, but doubtless that's inferior to whatever alien n-dimensional source you have.

    2154:

    Don't get me started. It's almost impossible (or is it impossible?) to buy a "station wagon". The mere words seem to give car companies and dealers the cooties "OOOH, it's so not SEXY!!!"

    As with hospitals, things are much easier if you realize that they really do speak their own language and make an attempt to learn the more common phrases.

    In the case of station wagons, try "crossover." It's daft, because crossover means you're talking about a small SUV based on a car chassis, but that's where the world is at the moment.

    2155:

    Volvo had the design sorted in the 60s: you make it BIG AND SQUARE. Because that works. So in the 70s and 80s and 90s they carried on doing the same thing.

    And all these bellends started going "eurgh it's BIG AND SQUARE". Of course it is, you divs. "It can't be BIG AND SQUARE, that's terrible." Actually, it's perfect. "It has to be all melted." But that makes it shit. "At least it's not BIG AND SQUARE". Etc.

    So now even Volvo have started making everything all melted, and now you need a car of significantly larger overall dimensions to transport the same size wardrobe because the meltedness means the corners don't fit.

    2029: I think you've just earned yourself a cameo. Currently we have "random human character" set to "farmer with sheepdog" and it's a bit shit. "Hiker who looks like Lenin (one of the slightly less blind ones)" would be MUCH better.
    2156:

    try "crossover."

    Yeah, the neighbours have two. Well, kinda... turns out they don't roll as easily as a proper Urban Assault Vehicle, but they do still roll. Which wrote it off, luckily without injuries, and the new one looks just like the old one (did before the accident).

    Sadly the load space is very much built around the need for everything to be nicely rounded and have lots of sensors and actuators and whatever else it takes to make sure that one minor dent and you have to replace the whole vehicle. Which means that while technically you can fit a whole sheet of plywood inside the thing, you can only do that by cutting it up to get it through the doors... which kind of defeats the point.

    One benefit of the new sensors and actuators is that you can no longer drive the thing with the rear door open, so you need a roof rack to carry long things.

    On that note, the latest Dashcam Australia video is out on youtube and this month the theme is "buses have right of way".

    2157:

    "To say we're not impressed is akin to finding out you're modelling your 'Consciousness' on fucking silicon Babbage machines."

    Excellent, love that :thumbup:

    2158:

    Jumping back several threads... There's no need for radiation hardened computers on a 22 year cold sleep voyage.

    Humans evolved in an environment with low levels of background radiation. There are self repair systems running all the time that deal with that damage. If you hit a human with a lifetime dose of radiation all at once, they don't cope well. If you put the crew into cold sleep, all those self repairs stop. So the dose they get in cold sleep, though it's over a long period, will be like an instant dose. At the end of the sleep, the body will be asked to repair all the accumulated damage all at once.

    Randall Munroe says 40 uSv for a 6 hour commercial flight. 22 years is 4 x 365 x 22 x 40 uSv. 1,284,800 uSv or 1.25 Sv. That's enough to make you very very sick. It's more than half a fatal dose. So the shielding for the crew is going to have to bring the radiation levels down far far below what a commercial aircraft computer system experiences. You should be able to use off the shelf aircraft rated computers just by installing them in the same room as the passengers.

    2159:

    You might find a good bargain in a used Toyota RAV-4 Hybrid. They've got more cargo room and get from 30-35 mpg, maybe a little better mileage on a newer model.

    2160:

    US oil is always going to control cars, and everything else in the US for that matter, as long as the value of the US dollar is dependent on oil being traded only in US dollars.

    2161:

    A Prius-V comes fairly close to "station wagon," though it doesn't quite have the storage.

    2162:

    feathers and currently seem to think they're ducks

    Currently the main counter indication for us getting chooks for the same purpose is that my wife believes if we had them she'd no longer feel able to eat chicken. She's probably right, the rest is working out whether it's a good or bad thing (currently most likely a bad thing, because there are lots of other things she doesn't eat and it would start making for some awkward constraints).

    2163:

    Gah! SotMN is back, again.

    Oh for the really old days of Usenet, prior the Great Reorganisation, frex, when The Cabal (There Is No Cabal) w^Hcould have sent around someone and had their terminal removed.

    And if you want a Station Wagon, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW, Subaru, Mazda, Skoda, still make them - of course, they may not be available in your market, but they do exist.

    2164:

    What prompted this was an old comment that neural networks aren't necessarily digital systems (they can be analog), and they seem to be able to solve problems that Turing complete systems struggle with--with training.

    "Super-Turing capable" isn't all it seems. The ability to precise compute the identity function on real numbers is "super-Turing" and I can do that with the simplest possible analog "computer" that whose output is its input.

    As EC mentions above, the kicker here is finiteness. Just inputting a real number into a Turing machine takes infinite time. Now, whether that sort of thing matters or not really gets into your views on infinity, and how useful it is use mathematical models of computers that assume potentially infinite resources (Turing machine) or infinitely precise inputs/outputs (theoretical model of analog computer).

    Regards Penrose, he's rehashing the old Lucas argument from 1961 that humans aren't constrained by Godel's theorem. One of the premises of that argument is that humans don't believe things that are inconsistent, or irrational. He attempts to dodge that, but really fails.

    Meanwhile the 'uncomputable' Godel statement in standard Peano arithmetic that the standard Godel proof uses is over a billion characters long, and Lucas and Penrose are asserting that humans who looks at that sort of statement can just "obviously" see if any such arithmetic statement is correct or not.

    And even if you grant them all that, there are then higher-order Godel statements that apply to the sort of higher-order machine that Penrose claims the human brain is. You basically repeat the Hilbert-style diagonalization argument with higher orders of infinity (Jack Copeland has a nice paper walking through this).

    2165:

    Oh dear, I shoouldn't have fed the troll, should I? ( @ 2150 contains a straight-out, probably deliberate lie, too. )

    Terry Heatle You're new here, are you not? Your "formal training" ( Like mine in Engineering & Physics ) will now be ridiculed by the troll ( aka she-of-many-names, or "the seagull" ) probably followed by spiteful insults & ridicule, because, of course she "knows" better than any of us - about everything.

    2166:

    Artillery tables were a bit later, because it was during the course of WW1 that the techniques of predicted fire were developed. At the start of the war the fire of land artillery was all directed by feedback, and different combatant nations took different amounts of time first to appreciate the advantages of being able to do it open loop and then to figure out how. But of course, if you count slide rule type devices as analogue computers, once they did get a handle on predicted fire artillery calculators were a gunner's standard field tool.

    Quite literally, yes.

    Around 1850 young French artillery officer named Amédée Mannheim became quite popular by inventing a gadget small enough to carry around and fast enough to work out where the shells would fall before the Germans could figure that out. For the next 120 years or so that slide rules got made his scale plan of A, B, C, and D was ubiquitous.

    2167:

    And in the UK, too. Even the smaller 'estate cars' have been turned into extended hatchbacks, with a high rear step. All I want is a small to medium car that can carry my (folded) recumbent trike etc., and I can get things in and out of the back without ricking MY back!

    2168:

    my wife believes if we had them she'd no longer feel able to eat chicken

    Did not seem to stop my ex. Even when we butchered a bunch of spare roosters from the chicken co-op. But if it would stop her buying chicken to eat that might be an issue. Maybe (budget permitting) switch to crumble chicken bits or something that looks a bit less like dead pets?

    It might be worth seeing if you can get some second hand pets from friends or via GumTree etc just to find out. Once they're 2-3 months old they will survive outside with not a lot of effort on your part. Well, or you will confirm that your area has a fox problem. They're provide eggs and you can see how you go.

    You may also find that after a certain amount of escaping and garden-eating or just early morning "FEED US" chorusing that your wife is quite handy with an axe.

    Also, backyard chickens typically live 4-8 years and lay most of that time, so if you have layers there's a lot more eggs than chicken-eating.

    2169:

    Yes. With regard to your last statement:

    "The axiom of choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?"

    Let's not dive down the hole of infinity theory - people who do often disappear without trace :-)

    But, even at a more real-world level, the main reason that I don't following the Turing machine religion (as currently preached) is that I know it isn't the complete story for realistic computational systems.

    2170:

    Congerning species identity, err, confusion (excuse the pun concerning gender dysphoria...), the male cat just emitted some quite chicken-like sounds.

    Might explain why he wakes up my landlady in the morning...

    2171:

    Hm, why go for brains, some protozoans like ciliates have no brain but show quite complex behaviours.

    Next up, there is Aplysia, though it's a lophotrochozoan and quite removed from us deuterostomes.

    With ecdycozoans, well, we have a fate map of every neuron in C. elegans and could manipulate them, Drosophila is a classic, personally, I'd go for Apis mellifera, the honey bee, quite complex behaviour and quite some ethological and neurobiological research, quite simple nervous system, and the genome is known.

    As for deuterostomes, well, we have the genome of one sea urchin, but there hasn't been much research about their behaviour I'm aware of; some fishes like Danio rerio look interesting, mammals like Rattus norvegicus are well researched, but the brains are quite complex...

    2172:

    In other news, gene variant of ion channel inherited from Neanderthals (I gave up on species designations in Homo long ago...) leads to heightened pain sensitivity:

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200723115900.htm

    Wondering about relation to abnormal processing of pain and other stimuli in modern humans left as an exercise to the reader.

    2173:

    I haven't come across references to "Micro$oft" and "Windoze" in over a decade. Don't tell me it has achieved religion status over the intervening years.

    It probably has achieved religious status.

    Me, I kinda-sorta began to forgive Microsoft when Steve Balmer retired and Nadela did a total 180 degree turn on linux, open source, and so on. MS is going back to its pre-1982 (pre-MSDOS) roots as a cross platform application vendor these days, with a heavy emphasis on cloud services. There's even a Windows subsystem that runs a Linux kernel in a VM for the kind of tightly integrated OS-level UNIX experience that Cygwin et al always promised but never quite delivered.

    Windows is not my daily driver and probably never will be, but it has a critical volume of support and the applications I rely on daily on macOS are also available on Windows ... but probably not now and maybe never on Linux. So I've made a point of basic familiarization with Windows 10, which is not as repulsive as previous versions (once you disable all the snoopware and adware).

    2174:

    No current human-made commerical flying device[0], including all .mil spec stuff, even acknowledges reality, it all uses vast energy/thrust to beat the problem

    Not true (FSVO "true" that acknowledges certain experimental micro-drones and ornithopters). The real issue is that human requirements for flying things do not include laying eggs, mating, or growing plumage -- but generally do require carrying 20-200 metric tonnes of cargo for a few thousand kilometres at speeds that would rip the feathers and eyeballs off of any evolved avian airframe that was dragged through atmosphere at such velocity.

    In other words, you're comparing bicycles to high speed trains again.

    2175:

    Completely off-topic, an interesting article on solar power and unexpected consequences: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53450688

    "Solar has transformed the productivity of farms in the region."

    "The area [of opium poppy] under cultivation has been increasing by tens of thousands of hectares every year."

    Basically, cheap solar power has enabled local groundwater mining by removing the need to import diesel fuel for pumps.

    2176:

    Me, I kinda-sorta began to forgive Microsoft when Steve Balmer retired and Nadela did a total 180 degree turn on linux, open source, and so on.

    Also worth pointing out for those who haven't followed the new Microsoft that they are now one of the bigger open source companies.

    Much of their new stuff is being done open source - can be found on GitHub, for many projects outside participation is possible/encouraged. Current open source Microsoft stuff includes Visual Studio Code, .Net (Core/5 - with 5 it becomes "the" .Net), the new Terminal, their implementation of the C++ STL (with a license specifically chosen to allow usage/cross pollination with LLVM), Powershell, and a bunch more.

    And of course .Net is cross platform now (except the current GUI stuff that relies on Windows internals, but a new cross platform GUI library is in development - open source).

    They also have their own Linux distribution - used for IoT devices.

    And of course they saved GitHub by purchasing it, as it was running out of money - it costs a lot to provide a free source code repository the size of GitHub.

    So yes, a very different company now.

    2177:

    My dislike for Windows 10 is mainly aesthetic. Have you ever seen an uglier-looking window manager? Looking at it makes me want to go out and work in the yard or something...

    2178:

    Jumping back several threads... There's no need for radiation hardened computers on a 22 year cold sleep voyage.

    Yes there is.

    At 25% of c you're traveling fast enough that neutral hydrogen in the interstellar medium is going to behave like a proton beam in a particle accelerator. Moreover, the helium nuclei in said medium pack considerably more energy than normal alpha particles (which typically move at 2% of c), and the electrons in the interstellar medium are also going to fuck you up. This leaves aside the problem of high energy cosmic rays in the multi-GeV range, which are a Thing once you get outside the Van Allen belts and which are probably even more intense outside the heliopause.

    Now, "put the computers in the rad-harded capsule with the cold sleep crew" is a good proposal, but it's not going to help with the bits of electronics that have to go outside the crew capsule, of which there are going to be many -- primarily instruments and monitoring systems to keep a watch on damage to the hull. Because the interstellar medium isn't just a radiation bath, it's corrosive over significant time -- there are the odd bits of dust (hint: Whipple shield will occasionally need fixing), the odd grain of sand sized bit which you will want to dodge unless your front end is designed to cope with intermittent 0.001 to 0.01 kiloton yields, and don't even start on free-floating comets or planetisimals.

    (Conversion factor: at 0.788 c you get half the mass-energy released as radiation in event of impact, i.e. about 10 megatons per kilogram. At 0.25 c, let's lowball-approximate that to 1 megaton. So a one miligram flyspeck gives you a 1 ton explosion on contact.)

    Spotting flyspecks when you're traveling at 80,000km/s is a ridiculously hard problem. You're going to need very good optics or radar or lidar or whatever, so probably interferometry using free-flying peripheral imaging platforms spaced a few km to either side of your ship (and bring spares because you're going to lose a couple en route). And they are going to need fast, reliable on board image processing computers.

    2179:

    This is half the point of the various "Space propulsion by civilian application of Nicoll-Dyson laser array" ideas. You dont try to doge space debris - You just vaporize literally everything in your planned flight path, and let the light pressure move the vapor out of the way.

    Of course, you better be very sure the mirror you are riding on does not degrade over time, or well..

    2180:

    Terry Heatle You're new here, are you not?

    Oh, far from it, although I rarely post. I just failed my saving roll against trolling this time. I won't let it happen again (until it does).

    2181:

    Have you ever seen an uglier-looking window manager?

    Most Ubuntu variants I've ever seen are pretty damn ugly -- whoever thought that using "turd" as the dominant screen colour choice was a good idea?

    Then again I've spent more than half my life using Windows and I'm used to it, like driving on the correct side of the road. The times I tried to use Macs I was constantly interrupted by things that didn't match my muscle memory, like double-tap on a trackpad for left-click not working or that weird fixed-toolbar thing at the top of the screen rather than having the appropriate toolbars associated with any open windows.

    2182:

    Let's downsize these laser launches to steampunk scale to point out the how much fin it would be to use laser sails for interstellar transit, especially the two-way kind.

    Instead of interstellar distances, let's talk about creating an intercontinental transport system using shells that carry suitably cushioned people, propelled by really big air guns, designed so that the acceleration doesn't quite crush the passengers in their cladding. Heck, even your grandmother could fly. Once at least. Fly American Artillery. Or Delta V. Or British Airguns.

    After launch, the shell flies free for four or five hours across the Atlantic, hitting the occasional petrel or seagull. There is, of course, a bit of turbulence beyond the bird strikes, and the shell only has limited onboard resources for steering. Anyway, when it gets over New York or wherever it's flying, it pops a chute, and then drifts down. Landing might be a bit tricky, which is why for New York, the gunners learn to aim for the New Jersey Pine Barrens instead, and have commercial search parties at the ready to find the passengers and offer them a menu of services to get them on their way. Presumably, for Boston, the landing range is somewhere in the Miskatonic Valley.

    Of course, all these shots have to be really well-timed and well-aimed, so that they don't collide in midflight. But that's what the transoceanic telegraph lines are for, when they're not carrying gossip or stock quotes. And I'm sure that the gunners are using really big, really expensive slide-rules to calculate their shots, just so that they don't get errors caused by the width of the marks on the rules.

    Anyway, scale that up, and you've got your basic interstellar transit system. Should work like a charm.

    2183:

    My dislike for Windows 10 is mainly aesthetic. Have you ever seen an uglier-looking window manager?

    Windows XP.

    Or, not based on looks but on usability (or more accurately, lack of), Gnome 3.

    2184:

    I didn't find XP aesthetically horrible, it was just another variant of Windows. Seven was almost likeable, at least until it was time to upgrade MS Office. My comment about how nice it would be if Windows had a package manager did not go over well with the IT person at work... wonder why?

    As for Gnome 3, it's a complete fucking trainwreck! Do you know why's there's never been a "year of the Linux desktop?" It's because of people who think they know UI design, by which I mean mainly the people who created Gnome 3 without understanding what people liked about Gnome 2!

    And don't even get me started about KDE!

    2185:

    My comment about how nice it would be if Windows had a package manager did not go over well with the IT person at work...

    It's kinda half-assed but Chocolatey kind of does the job for third-party apps (at least non-commercial and popular ones). Meanwhile a package manager for Windows is something Microsoft are reportedly considering/working on, so it'll probably arrive less than 30 years after Linux got them. Then, if we're lucky, Apple will turn out to have invented the idea all along, honest, and we can be dragged kicking and screaming into the 1990s on all our desktops.

    2186:

    The Victorians even had a design for the cabin: https://retrorambling.wordpress.com/tag/sensational-emotions/

    The original source of the text was one of my favourite books when I was a child, sadly long out of print but still available second hand: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Victorian-Inventions-Leonard-Vries/dp/0719550068

    2187:

    re: The other line of argument is that we don't have an intelligible explanation of how consciousness or qualia can be supervenient on physical brains and therefore they cannot be implemented on artificial ones.

    That argument is just wrong. There are lots of ideas of what qualia, etc., are, it's just impossible to test them without having built a intelligent device. My answer is that they are internal coding summarizing goal-related weights relating to sensory perceptions. Unfortunately, at the moment this cannot be tested, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

    2188:

    Meanwhile a package manager for Windows is something Microsoft are reportedly considering/working on

    May I introduce winget, Microsoft's package manager for Windows. Currently available to those running the Insider builds of Windows - or you can join the Winget Insider Program to use it on some current versions of Windows (Windows 10 1709 and later) (it is early days, installing works but there isn't yet any way to update packages).

    https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-package-manager-preview/

    And of course it is open source

    https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli

    And the repository of package manifests is also open source, accepting user contributions

    https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs

    2189:

    re: And so on. Emulating this analog network of networks digitally gets.... kind of tricky. Possibly to impossible levels of tricky.

    OTOH, "How close is 'good enough'?". Analog signals aren't processed with infinite precision. It's just difficult to say how much precision is necessary. In a chaotic system this could be a source of random behavior, and that can be useful. Emulating this precisely is probably impossible, but doing a "good enough" job may well be possible. The real problem may be that it's difficult to look at that mess of analog relationships and pull out the parts that are necessary. Again I'm reminded of an evolved electronic circuit that depended on a part that wasn't connected to anything else. It turned out, eventually, that the chip was using it as a heater to modify the reaction of a capacitor that it wasn't electrically connected to (IIRC). And it was a lot more efficient than any (at that time) designed circuit to do the same job. But circuit simulation programs couldn't handle it at all, and predicted that it wouldn't work.

    2190:

    You are talking about speculations; they could easily be wildly wrong. He was talking about what we actually know.

    The simple fact is that we don't have a clue whether such higher-level functions are direct effects, controllable emergent behaviour, or uncontrollable emergent behaviour.

    2191:

    re: So it should be possible human brains are capable of things computers can't do

    That doesn't follow. It MAY be correct, but probably only in the limit. What IS correct is that the brain can do many things a lot more efficiently than the Turin emulator can. This is, at least partially, because it uses fancy heuristics. It may also be because some processes are a lot more efficiently done in analog mode, particularly if you don't need a lot of precision. The evidence for anything beyond those two exceptions appears to me to be extremely weak. (If you've got strong evidence, I'd like to see it.)

    OTOH, many people have reported striking coincidences, to such a degree that it's one of my reasons for subscribing to the EWG multiworld model of quantum physics. But it's possible that some non-Turing mode of consciousness could also explain those folks surviving. It just seems like a less likely explanation to me. (This is partially because I can't see how thinking differently could have lead to survival once they got into that situation [which varies], but since I don't understand what those modes of thought might be, it's hard to be sure.)

    2192:

    IIRC, PL/1 had two or three ways to pass by reference. Some were pointers, some were offsets into structures, etc.

    PL/1 was a nice language in many ways that didn't deserve the abuse many heaped upon it. But it did have several dialects with different capabilities. This bit me a few times, as we rented time on computers, and not always the same computers. But it was the first language I implemented a Red/Black tree in, and it was much better for that than C turned out to be when I needed to re-implement it.

    2193:

    I think the thing is that human learning is situational. Relatively few people generalize their experiences and expertise across the multiple domains of their lives, those domains being friends, birth family, married family, work, hobbies, etc. Most people instead compartmentalize. So someone who diligently practices sterile technique at work in a lab may be a slob at home, for example. And my online persona as Heteromeles isn't quite the same as I am in real life, because on the internet, no one knows I'm a cat.

    Anyway, getting back to the point, these kinds of illogical contradictions are a central part of what make us human, and it may turn out that they're really hard for a purely digital/Turing emulator to fake. I'm not here positing that we're superior to computers. Rather I'm saying that realistically human illogic may be harder to create than data processing genius.

    This shouldn't be surprising, really. Most of the time, we're trying to get computers to do specific tasks better than humans do them. Doing things as human as humans do them is an interesting intellectual challenge, but it's not clear that someone (besides an online con artist) will profit from such research. It's like trying to build a realistic artificial goldfish with technology designed for submarines. Why bother?

    2194:

    Btw, a new survey from IEEE Spectrum lists among the most interest/wanted by jobs...

    43 is COBOL.

    And the top three? Python, java... and C. C++ comes fourth..

    2195:

    Perhaps I should point out that my Dearly Departed, etc, Tercel was a 1986 model that we bought, used, in '88.

    Carburetor. I did semi-annual tuneups. Still getting 35-36 MPG in 2000.

    2196:

    My folks had almost no artwork (there was the whatever-the-technique was that my mom got at a tourist shop at Garden of the Gods in CO.

    On the other hand, I'm not sure where they would have gone, with the bookcases, and piles of books....

    Abstract? You mean like mid-sixties sf covers?

    2197:

    I'm still puzzled,,,, is the 9 billion names of - actually insane? doing a weird freeform fiction thing? trying to roleplay as a culture mind? or just a mass of personalities travelling in a loose formation?

    2198:

    Dunno where you hang out, but they've never gone away.

    Why? Well, OGH to the contrary, M$$$ has never changed course from Gates' interests... so each new full version REALLY needs a new computer, it will run on the existing one sorta-kinda, but expect it to be slower in all things than the previous version.

    And the fact that they still use paying customers as beta testers.

    2199:

    USAians ... How likely is this scenario? Or is Biden likely to be ahead by midnight West Coast time?

    And will it make any difference?

    2200:

    Wrong answer.

  • They're trying to sell to me, not a 22 yr old. Why are they not speaking to ME?[a][b]
  • A crossover isn't. i. a station wagon is not a hatchback, and does not slope down in the back. ii. a station wagon is TWO-WHEEL DRIVE.[c]
  • a. Once upon a time (mid-80's), PSFS had a Founders' Day dinner. We had a dj, who looked at the club members, ranging from 20-something to 70-something, and played something for every to dance to. I have not seen any professional dj since - they play some set of stuff that they like, and their buds like. Period.

    b. Sign common in stores (before chains) up till the sixties: "The customer is always right" (for the staff).

    c. I really like the look of Suburus. I will never buy one. When my Eldest sold her Camry and bought an Outback, the much smaller car got 10mpg LESS than the sedan. She does, however, go over a 9,000' pass every week....

    2201:

    Interesting. Given that my SO has fibromyalgia, I wonder if there's a relation.

    2202:

    If you want something to worry about with US elections*, try this.

    *Which, if I may be so bold, isn't wise: you might do better to worry about the 'Rona Brexit Supreme your own political establishment is serving up, cold and greasy.

    2203:

    Win 7 I could live with. I HATE Win 10. The crap instead of a start menu. And, oh, yes, the complete and total grief it gave me trying to get SAMBA working between our Linux servers and Win 7 (which worked) and Win 10 (which didn't, and I fought, on and off, for months).

    And I think that Poettering came in when M$$$ bought part of RH. I LOATHE systemd..., and he's a complete ass.

    2204:

    Dunno where you hang out, but they've never gone away.

    Perhaps among some small groups, but most of the world has moved on - a combination of Microsoft changing and more importantly the world changing - most people these days only see Windows at work and at home use Android or iOS.

    Why? Well, OGH to the contrary, M$$$ has never changed course from Gates' interests...

    Nonsense. The only thing that remains of Gates interests is the desire to make money.

    Microsoft has conceded they have lost the consumer market (that has mostly gone Android/iOS), and they also are acting as though they know the days of Windows being Windows are numbered.

    Microsoft today is releasing an Android phone, has their key software running everywhere and not just on Windows (most people are more than adequately served with the free version of Office in the browser that simply requires a Microsoft account), has their own Linux distribution for IoT, and has wisely bet the company on the cloud with Azure where they quite happily run whatever the customer wants.

    so each new full version REALLY needs a new computer, it will run on the existing one sorta-kinda, but expect it to be slower in all things than the previous version.

    Not true - my 8 year old machine still runs as well as initially with Windows 7, and has gone through Windows 8 and now from the first Windows 10 to the current (2004) as well as running the current dev channel version from the Insiders program.

    The only slowdown came thanks to Intel and their security flaws.

    Contrast this with my Mac, purchased at the same time, which Apple cut off from new OS versions 2 years ago.

    (now, if you buy a cheap low end computer, that may well be another story - but you get what you pay for).

    And the fact that they still use paying customers as beta testers.

    Admittedly a problem, though I personally haven't experienced any problems - but then again Apple isn't immune given the long litany of problems with their current iOS release which I have experienced.

    2205:

    Back at'cha. I used to use IceWM. Then I went back to KDE with C-7 (and at work, when we were using CentOS 6). I thought KDE was bloatware, until gnome blew past it, running a zillion threads.... And I HATE how gnome's menu system works.

    And almost all GUIs are eye candy, to eat more processing power than we used to run a community college in the early 80's, because "oh, kewl eye candy".

    2206:

    Well, my wife's standard requirement for a car was "It has to be able to haul a harpsichord." The Toyota 1990 Corolla station wagon could do that, but I haven't checked out any more modern car.

    2207:

    Re: ' ... whether such higher-level functions are direct effects, controllable emergent behaviour, or uncontrollable emergent behaviour.'

    Think you forgot one: 'All of the above.'

    I'd also add*:

    1- There are probably some behaviours/structures/processes that we've still not clued into/identified because we haven't looked (don't have the tech/budget/interest).

    2- Our 'higher consciousness' is only part of our brain/nervous system and as has been demonstrated through various 'magician' type tricks/scenarios, human consciousness does not directly perceive (become aware of) a ton of what's going on around us. Mention this because 'higher order thinking' seems to always be equivalent to 'consciousness' in these discussions.

    3- A sorta extension to item '2' above is that our brain might even be wired/have evolved specifically to be blind to certain data as a sort of self-protection from data overload. E.g., Our brain constantly 'samples' everything and passes some of it along through a small number of 'on-alert' filters (probably including the amygdala) to test what type of reaction is needed - unconscious (it's gotten cooler, therefore unconscious shivering is sufficient) or conscious (there's a creature walking towards me: alert, alert, alert! Get the facial recognition and speech center areas rev'd up, start scanning for shelter, etc.). How do we come up with a reliable way to test for this? - (Talk to some of the physicists studying black matter/energy for some pointers about finding the unfindable?) And does this mean that we should therefore also be on the lookout for something similar 'evolving/emerging' in an AI?

    There's also 'forgetting' as part of regular brain hygiene. Not sure how or where this would fit in a mechanical (not human) brain model.

    *Haven't read all the comments since the last time I posted, so apologies if you've already discussed/answered similar questions.

    2208:

    I'm having a procedure on Wednesday to open up the blocked sinus that has been giving me those bad headaches. So, today I had to go in for a Corona Virus (Covid19) test.

    Let me tell you, when they stick that swab up your nose, IT HURTS LIKE HELL! !!! My eyes are still watering hours later.

    So be forewarned.

    PS: My new face mask arrived today & I want to put in a plug for the artist.

    https://www.cafepress.com/+ann-sanfedele+face-masks

    I got the mattisescat mask & I must say I look quite spiffy in it (even if I do have to say so myself).

    2209:

    Yes, different. Their approach is different. I see, however, no reason to believe that they are any more trustworthy. Certainly they have done their best to continue the sabotage of open standards. Running a Linux distribution as a process of the MSWindow OS doesn't make me feel pleased with them. Neither does their acquisition of GitHub. It rather makes me trust GitHub less.

    2210:

    Bill Arnold @ 2141: For fun: the double rainbow mentioned upthread? Same thunderstorm front as the one that Charlie linked on twitter of powerful lightning bolts hitting the base of the Statue of Liberty (or behind it), maybe plus a weak tornado? https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1286296291841114115 (or text)

    Well ... just for fun ... the only time I've ever actually seen a double rainbow was when I took R&R in Scotland in 2004.

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/jb_sessoms/5409147446

    I walked 3/4 of the way around Stirling (counter-clockwise) in pouring down rain to find a view of a castle on a hill. When I finally got to this spot & looked back to see the castle, I was rewarded.

    I could probably have gone the other way around & got my photo fairly quickly, saving myself a drenching, but I would have missed the rainbow. I'd have been done and gone before it ever appeared.

    2211:

    All of which are (part of) why I prefer the idea of SLOW space habitats that drift along at around .01c or less WRT the average local drift. They need to drift fast enough to continually encounter new resources, and slowly enough to be able to acquire them. And the journey is the trip. There is no intended end state, because the habitat is home.

    As many arguments have shown, this can't be a small community. Even with laser communication links it need a huge number of specialists on board, and it has to be continually growing the next crop of specialists. It won't be a libertarian society, but it can be a pleasant one. And I expect that virtual reality will be a necessary part of making it so. (So will a vastly better sociology. A nearly closed ecology. And several other advances that we haven't yet made.) Think of a more realistic version of "the many angled ones" from Singularity Sky.

    2212:

    Also, most humans try to do what they want to do, not what someone else told them to do, with inadequate instructions.

    Hi, cat. I'm a dragon.

    2213:

    Do they, indeed? And, for heaven's sake, WHY? Surely a lesson or skill learnt in one domain is equally usefil in similar situations in others? I am perpetually finding you humans incomprehensible.

    2214:

    Possibly because their existing people say "What the FUCK does this contorted spaghetti DO?" But it's useful to know - if I ever need a job again, I have a readily marketable skill :-)

    2215:

    "Libertarian"? A libertarian society in a space habitat is an ideological idiocy.

    Not only socialism, but planned production, not merely a planned economy. Otherwise, you're looking at complete collapse.

    2216:

    Thanks for the warning. I'm having a colonoscopy next month, and they want the test two days before....

    2217:

    When my late wife and I were looking for our first minivan, to replace the old E-150 full-sized van, we were at one dealership, and he showed us the shorter Caravan. We said it's nice, but we need the longer one. I said "needs to hold a 4x8 sheet of plywood", and she said, "or a couple of full-sized dog kennels".

    He looked at us, and said, "well, you could cut the blywood in half...." (I kid you not).

    We walked.

    2218:

    Heteromeles @ 2154:

    Don't get me started. It's almost impossible (or is it impossible?) to buy a "station wagon". The mere words seem to give car companies and dealers the cooties "OOOH, it's *so* not SEXY!!!"

    As with hospitals, things are much easier if you realize that they really do speak their own language and make an attempt to learn the more common phrases.

    In the case of station wagons, try "crossover." It's daft, because crossover means you're talking about a small SUV based on a car chassis, but that's where the world is at the moment.

    "Crossover" vehicles don't come any closer to being true station wagons than does the Prius ... at least none of them I could find did & I searched HARD. Maybe some of the Volvos.

    The last true U.S. station wagon I'm aware of was the Ford Focus Wagon which (IIRC) was discontinued in the U.S. after the 2007 model year. Which in my opinion is ODD, because you can still (or you could still in 2019) get a Focus Wagon, aka "Focus Estate", in the UK and Europe.

    I have no idea when the last true FULL SIZE station wagon was manufactured in the U.S.

    Some of the more recent mini-vans have an option to take out the seats in the back, which gives you the same kind of cargo space a station wagon had (and maybe a bit more), but I don't know any that had seats that just folded flat for that purpose.

    And that makes me wonder about how much sexy really comes into play? Has there ever actually been a "sexy" mini-van?

    2219:

    FWIW, I would often dearly love to use C if it could handle unicode decently, handled threading decently (here I'm talking about independent processes that need to communicate with each other, what Python calls multiprocessing), and a few other things. (I really prefer consts over defines, I generally prefer references over pointers, etc.) But I don't like C++ because it's too complex, it doesn't handle unicode well, it makes doing simple file processes unreasonably complicated (just like Java, in fact), and many other reasons.

    I ended up in Python because D wasn't supported well by libraries. Otherwise I preferred D. But Python saves writing LOTS of code for things that have already been done.

    2220:

    What I was interested in was given, say, an integer, could you get the address of that integer? Like in C the & operator would give you a number that you can put in an int * variable and print it, do arithmetic with it, etc. I.e., did PL/1 have an 'address of' operator?

    2221:

    I agree that partial emulation is quite possible: it's how the big tech companies aim to sell us stuff, by crunching numbers produced by our behaviors and seeing how those patterns match others.

    But there's another level involved in creating a deep fake, still another involved in creating a good enough actual copy to pass a specific Turing test, and more difficult still to be able to fake any human in a reasonable amount of time.

    2222:

    Two wheel drive is not part of the definition of station wagon. The original station wagons were pulled by a horse. What is the definition is that is can haul enough freight to handle a family going on a trip. My wife's requirement of "able to haul a harpsichord" was an idiosyncrasy, and not part of her definition of a station wagon, but it was part of her definition of an acceptable car to purchase.

    Originally, IIUC, the station wagon was the wagon that picked you and your baggage up at the (railroad) station and delivered you, or picked you up at home and delivered you to the station. The use to handle commuters without much baggage was a later modification.

    OTOH, four wheel drive is DEFINITELY not part of the definition. And to the extent that it limits baggage capacity, it's against the purpose. But if it doesn't, it's a "why not?".

    2223:

    My other car's an old Lexus RX 350. It's 2WD mini SUV. While it doesn't quite have the room for a sheet of plywood, it does haul hundreds of pounds hundreds of miles with no problem. It was our default car before the Bolt came along, and is still our road trip vehicle for even multi-week trips.

    2224:

    Neither does their acquisition of GitHub. It rather makes me trust GitHub less.

    So what is your solution?

    GitHub was losing serious money with no realistic way to change that short of turning into the mess that Sourceforge became.

    2225:

    I think the reason there are so few choices available in that configuration is that the minivan ate that market.

    Makes sense, too, after all, it is even boxier!

    VW is resurrecting the ultimate box-on-wheels as an electric. Google the ID BUZZ. Not available for another two years, however.

    2226:

    I'm also a big fan of IceWM, but I stopped using it when they underwent a development hiatus a few years ago. These days I use XFCE, which is near-infinitely configurable and very pleasant to look at. I'd give the latest version of KDE a try, but I have some major problems with their continuing attempts to develop a whole ecology rather than contribute to existing projects. But it looks and runs like a professional OS.

    2227:

    Troutwaxer @ 2159: You might find a good bargain in a used Toyota RAV-4 Hybrid. They've got more cargo room and get from 30-35 mpg, maybe a little better mileage on a newer model.

    Thanks. I'm not really looking to replace the Jeep. I was just thinking a small electric vehicle (especially a plug-in vehicle) with cargo capacity like that French Axiam e-Truck would be good for around town use where my maximum trip is < 30 miles.

    Nothing like that is available here & I don't really want anything else.

    Since I already have what I need for transportation, if I can't get what I want1, doing without is not a problem. Maybe someday someone will offer something I want and I can buy it then.

    1 Many people don't seem to understand the difference between "want" and "need". I do & buy accordingly.

    2228:

    If you read the post, that's what I said. But it seems necessary to say that because of so many "homesteading on the new frontier" memes floating about. To some extent I blame Heinlein.

    2229:

    IIRC Volvo makes a decent wagon.

    2230:

    Re: ' ... physicists studying black matter/energy for some pointers '

    And that should be 'dark matter/energy' not 'black' ...

    My unconscious poked and poked until the conscious part relented and paid it some attention re: this flub. Guess the crossword puzzle I had been doing just before visiting and posting spilled over/primed me to be okay with a synonym rather than pay attention to the specifics of context with my word choice.

    2231:

    grs1961 @ 2163: And if you want a Station Wagon, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW, Subaru, Mazda, Skoda, still make them - of course, they may not be available in your market, but they do exist.

    We weren't denying their existence, merely lamenting the lack of availability in the U.S. market. The oil companies don't give a shit what kind of car you drive. They only care about selling you the gas to run it on.

    So while the fossil fuels oligarchy may be hostile to the idea of an ELECTRIC station wagon, they have nothing against the general concept of station wagons as long as they run on gas/diesel.

    2232:

    Well, as I remember....Not exactly pointers. There were based variables, where the variable was relative to the base. IIRC that wasn't exactly a pointer, but more of a frame offset to the program. Close, but relative to where the program was loaded rather than in the machine address space.

    OTOH, PL/I was a large language (for the time) and I never learned the full language. Perhaps there were pointers if you needed them. But I think it was the first language designed with the idea of multi-tasking computers, and they wanted to make other programs more secure, so they tried to make addressing relative to where the program was loaded. (That said, it's been probably over 50 years since I used it, so this may be a bit scrambled. And the code had to run on the small 360/30 subset of PL/1.)

    2233:

    Troutwaxer @ 2177: My dislike for Windows 10 is mainly aesthetic. Have you ever seen an uglier-looking window manager? Looking at it makes me want to go out and work in the yard or something...

    My dislike for Windoze10 is mainly because it was an unmitigated, worthless PIECE OF SHIT.

    After all of the nagging, I tried it on my three main computers (laptop, this goof-off-on-the-internet computer and my Photoshop workstation). Wouldn't install on the laptop because there was no video driver for the hardware; wouldn't install on the Photoshop workstation and wasted a massive amount of my limited remaining lifespan during that failure ...

    And on this computer where it ran like a Sloth with Lou Gehrig's Disease, I couldn't get Cortana to STFU and every time I tried to run any of the programs I use it tried to substitute one of its built in Apps, even after I had told it I didn't want to use the built in Apps; I wanted to use the programs I have installed.

    I have computers so I can use those computers. I DO NOT have computers so the operating system can fight me every step of the way when I try to use them.

    Why don't I just switch to Apple? See the above paragraph and read it twice.

    It will probably be Linux if I get to the point where I can't do what I want with a Windoze computer. The big drawback is not being able to easily run Photoshop on Linux. And now, even if they did come out with Photoshop for Linux it would be subscription based which is a whole other RANT!

    2234:

    Solution? I don't have a solution. I understand that GitHub needed support, but being owned by Microsoft means that I don't trust them as much. I'm still considering alternatives, and I haven't moved the stuff I put on GitHub off of it. Fortunately it's just a bunch of (essentially) HTML1* pages and a bunch of images, which I've put under a Creative Commons acknowledgement required license, so not a lot of trust is required. But if I were deciding again, I'd probably look for somewhere else. And if I decide to post code, then I will look for somewhere else.

    *essentially HTML1 pages: Well, they've been converted into a form that's acceptable to HTML5, which means things like translating underscore tags into CSS commands, etc., but it still doesn't use anything I consider insecure, like javascript or other embedded programming. (I do some preprocessing of a "macro replacement" style, but that's a transform of files that aren't themselves HTML files into HTML files.)

    2235:

    Apropos of nothing, here's the latest on the Clockpunk Rover NASA is designing to land on Venus.

    Yes, clockpunk. Stainless steel and titanium work okay in the Venusian atmosphere, commercial electronics choke at 125oC. So they're looking at a wind-powered, windup rover (windmill on wheels) with largely analog instruments. For data transfer they're trying to make a radio and simple electronics out of silicon carbide, which can stand the heat. The data transfer rate is subtelegraph, but whatever works.

    Hopefully the Hybrid Autonomous Rover-Venus (HAR-V) will make it.

    2236:

    Nojay @ 2181: Then again I've spent more than half my life using Windows and I'm used to it, like driving on the correct side of the road. The times I tried to use Macs I was constantly interrupted by things that didn't match my muscle memory, like double-tap on a trackpad for left-click not working or that weird fixed-toolbar thing at the top of the screen rather than having the appropriate toolbars associated with any open windows.

    First thing I do if I have to use a Mac is plug in my own two-button scroll mouse. I'm not a fan of trackpads anyway. I disable it on my Windoze laptop.

    2237:

    Troutwaxer @ 2184: I didn't find XP aesthetically horrible, it was just another variant of Windows. Seven was almost likeable, at least until it was time to upgrade MS Office.

    I Laugh Out Loud and spit coffee into my keyboard once again because you use upgrade and MS Office in the same sentence.

    2238:

    Ah, yes, another reason I HATE Win 10: last year, while I was still working, I heard rumors that there IS NO FOLLOW-ON to Win 10: what they want to sell you is "desktop-as-a-service" (DAAS), which will require ANNUAL payments, and nothing if no Net connection.

    2239:

    admittedly, I'm still using Office 2007 and Libre Office, because I don't believe in leasing software any more than I absolutely have to. Oh well.

    2240:

    First thing I do if I have to use a Mac is plug in my own two-button scroll mouse.

    These were loaner Mac laptops, to let me check my email and that sort of thing with no mouse to hand. It was just a "missing step" thing, drag drag drag tap-tap on the trackpad and... nothing happened. I'd try again, tap-tap, tap-tap and then finally remember that this convenient MS UI function wasn't available on the Mac. I'd then search the frame of the trackpad looking for the shiny! part that was the left-click button (sometimes it wasn't a button, just a special part of the trackpad itself), press it then return my finger and focus to the trackpad again.

    As for trackpads, I'm good with them especially when working on an actual lap or a crowded table where there isn't anywhere to scoot a mouse around. They also mean I don't have to keep reaching away from the keyboard to find the mouse with my left hand. The nipple pointer is an abomination to me but I understand it has a lot of fans.

    2241:

    whitroth @ 2217: When my late wife and I were looking for our first minivan, to replace the old E-150 full-sized van, we were at one dealership, and he showed us the shorter Caravan. We said it's nice, but we need the longer one. I said "needs to hold a 4x8 sheet of plywood", and she said, "or a couple of full-sized dog kennels".

    He looked at us, and said, "well, you could cut the blywood in half...." (I kid you not)."

    We walked.

    I guess it would depend on how often & how many pieces of plywood you needed to load. When I downsized from the 3/4 ton longbed Chevy Van to a Ford Escort Wagon, the wagon had rails for a roof rack. I made cross-bars out of 5/4 treated decking (cut an 8' long one in half & you have two 4' cross-bars) and I could carry a couple of sheets of plywood on top with no problem. I used the same cross-bars later on my Focus Wagon. But I also now have a 4x8 utility trailer I got from Harbor Freight for $300 (I think the same trailer is around $500 nowadays) & it's no problem to load many sheets of plywood on that.

    I don't know what it is that makes so many car salesmen such jerks. Or maybe it's, "Why do so many jerks end up as car salesmen?"

    Note that this is not a gender specific issue. I've encountered plenty of women car "salespersons" who were jerks as well.

    As for dog kennels ... many years ago, around the time I got married, I had a 64-1/2 Mustang and two St. Bernards. The Mustang got totaled when a drunk ran a stop sign, T-boned us and totaled it. Fortunately, it was all physical damage, and no injuries to my wife, myself or the dogs. The replacement vehicle (that the drunk's insurance did NOT pay for ... in fact, I don't remember him or his insurance ever paying for anything) was a Pinto Wagon & the two St. Bernards LOVED it. If the Pinto had just had a manual transmission, I could probably still be driving it today.

    2242:

    SLOW space habitats that drift along at around .01c or less WRT the average local drift. They need to drift fast enough to continually encounter new resources, and slowly enough to be able to acquire them.

    c/100 (3000 km/s) or even c/1000 (300 km/s) are going to present considerable technological challenges for slowing down and then speeding back up.(*) Having a cooperating party at the destination would help a lot.

    (*) Not to mention the challenge of avoiding rocks along the way. At c/100 a kilogram rock would deliver a kiloton of TNT equivalent energy at the point of contact. c/1000 would still yield 10 tons.

    2243:

    Check out Orion's Arm's Beamrider Network. Slightly more dangerous than laser sails, but possibly reusable.

    Basically, if you think interstellar smart bullets are a great way of delivering kinetic energy to change the direction of a starship, then this system is for you. Just nano everything and send other ships to pick up and drop off cargo. For some reason, the military applications of this system are not mentioned. Weird lacuna, that.

    2244:

    Almost the first thing I did with my Surface Pro was settings/Cortana/talk to Cortana and then switch off all the switches. It's not rocket science. I hadn't used Windows for years and made do with an iPad Mini and iPhone. I don't let Siri talk either.

    2245:

    Real interstellar ships will travel even slower than 0.01c. They'll stop on the way out into the Big Dark to colonise and harvest Oort Cloud comets, stay for a generation or three and then move on to the next promising lump of ice and rock after stocking up on fuel and reaction mass. Sometimes they'll spawn a child process ship, reduce the level of contraceptives in the ship's water supply and breed a spare crew. One day such a ship will rendezvous with a comet or planetesimal that's actually orbiting in another solar system. Their descendants ten generations later will move down-grav towards the system's primary where the pickings are richer and ancient plans for solar panels and landing craft capable of putting down on a more-than-fractional-gee solid surface get dusted off.

    No goshwow! lasers, no fractional-cee travel, no frozen cryosleep or magictech FTL required. Just time, lots of it.

    2246:

    My dislike for Windoze10 is mainly because it was an unmitigated, worthless PIECE OF SHIT.

    That goes without saying. It's just appallingly bad.

    2247:

    Clockpunk my arse! That's a clssic "Meccano" design ... So maybe it is clockpunk, crossed with Dan Dare. My brain hurts...

    Nojay "Time, lots of it ... Yes, no problem, howver "WHere is everybody?" ( Fermi paradox, again ... )

    2248:

    Well, the simple answer may be that, while minds can survive in space, it turns out that intelligent species that evolved on planets cannot breed in low gravity environments, even where everything else is provided, due to a combination of low gravity even with spinning, high radiation, and limited resources coupled with the necessity of high resource recycling.

    This last is basically a generalization of the problems that plagued Biosphere II and most sealed terraria, that it's hard to keep even minimally complex systems alive in jars, especially for decades, and certainly for centuries or more.

    Besides, Nojay's solution (which I happen to like, as a long-time fan of Heart of the Comet, is the moral equivalent of colonizing the poles with high tech live-of-the-land small farmers. I need to see that work on Earth before I'll believe that people can do it on a comet, especially Kuiper Belt objects tend to be rather cold, and their ices tend to be rather more polluted, than what we've got on Earth.

    Anyway, the fundamental answer to the Fermi Paradox is that it's only a paradox so far as you assume that interstellar travel is possible. That's a huge assumption. Of course, you can always have fun believing in UFOs of extraterrestrial origin.

    2249:

    The universe is still quite young, about 14.5 billion years or so. We're the product of two sequential supernova events which produced the higher atomic-number elements we can't really do without so that uses up several billion years after star formation becomes possible, then Sol condenses and starts fusing and the solar system settles out from the nebula that spawned us. Another couple of billion years for things to cool down, unicellular life develops in the cracks, another billion years or so to get complex multicellular life and the Oxygen Catastrophe, all the time being bombarded by big rocks since God's vacuum Cleaner aka Jupiter is still doing its job. Five hundred million years after all that and here we are.

    We're lucky in another way -- where we are in the Orion arm it takes us about 200 million years to complete an orbit of the Galactic core. We seem to have been in a stable orbit, mostly, never getting sucked down close to the core where the radiation environment is seriously inimical to life, at least over the past billion years or so. Closer in to the core the stellar population is greater too so dodging supernovas, gamma--ray bursters and other megastellar events inimical to nearby meat-life becomes harder.

    Basically we got lucky multiple times so quite possibly we are the First Family of the Galaxy.

    2250:

    The colonisers need "dirty" comets, they're looking for carbonates, minerals, perhaps uranium for power if pocket fusion of ice-derived deuterium isn't possible. The dusty comets are going the be the most attractive targets for colonisation, ice for reaction mass they can get anywhere pretty much.

    I'd expect a lot of the ships to get lost on the way due to accident or disease or social breakdown. If the replacement ships outnumber the dead ones that's all that's needed for one ship, eventually, to fall into another star's gravity well. Whether there's anything big and solid and directly habitable, even with some planetary terraforming or bioforming of the crew that's not really necessary as I'd expect another fleet to be heading for the other side of that system's Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud within ten generations or so, leaving the old fuddy-duddy stay-at-homes to continue plundering the outer Asteroid belt for carbon-rich resources and attempting to harvest transuranics from the molten-zone sub-Jovian in a 60-day orbit around the local primary.

    2251:

    most interest/wanted by jobs... the top three? Python, java... and C. C++ comes fourth

    Our local IT jobs dominant market player still cannot work out how to let us search for C jobs, although I vaguely recall that they had C++ working. If you try to use any variant of "C" you get... anything with a C in it. "Chef" is popular.

    2252:

    libertarian society

    Oxymoron alert! Libertarianism is incompatible with society, if not in theory then at least insofar as the people who are attracted to the idea are antisocial, often violently so.

    2253:

    This matters to some people here. The public narratives, and hopefully policies, are catching up with science. This is about fomite/indirect contact transmission of SARS-CoV-2, namely that it is extremely rare and there are no solid case studies, and that public policies re NPIs should focus on preventing people from sharing their recently exhaled air (+ droplets of various sizes). You Can Stop Cleaning Your Mail Now - People are power scrubbing their way to a false sense of security. (27 Jul, 2020, Derek Thompson)

    SLWOH: Yeah. 100% we X-reference it all. (I keep noticing that.) There are various slightly different translations of the "Que funde todo el clamor" line. (And yeah, did skim his bio.)

    2254:

    equivalent of colonizing the poles with high tech live-of-the-land small farmers. I need to see that work on Earth before I'll believe that people can do it on a comet,

    Would an experiment where a large number of unwilling colonists were dumped in a hot, dry environment with limited support do you? Because Biosphere 1 seems to be going for that approach right now.

    2255:

    I'm trying to decide if I'm going to call this out on my websire and/or facepalm writer page.

    I am thinking I might put some into my future universe. They will, of course, be of two varieties: wage slavery (think of the old company towns/store/scrip/"no, you can't leave until you pay your debts", or outright slavery.

    "You can't pay for your air? Bye!"

    2256:

    Yeah, rereading what I wrote, I wasn't clear.

    I was really saying that decades in cold sleep requires such incredible shielding that it has strayed into "magic tech". If you're just going to wave a magic wand and say "ensign, divert power to the forward shields" then it's possible. In the real world not so much. If it ever were possible in the real world to shield crew against a sleet of Tev particles such that their absorbed dose over decades was similar to a few days on earth, then shielding electronics would be trivial. If you can't come up with Magitech shielding then coldsleep is ruled out (unless you come up with a Magitech solution for massive acute radiation sickness).

    2257:

    Would an experiment where a large number of unwilling colonists were dumped in a hot, dry environment with limited support do you? Because Biosphere 1 seems to be going for that approach right now.

    No, that's the prelude to living on Mars. If you can't build a self-sustaining refugee camp in the middle of some gods forsaken desert or dump, why go to Mars, where you have all the same problems, no air, and more radioactivity?

    Anyway, the Arctic or Antarctic is the prelude. If you can't live happily and independently there, don't go on about going to space. Once you can farm with all your critical gases being extracted from randomly mixed supercold, fairly toxic liquids, and do it in freefall, then perhaps you're ready to settle a comet.

    2258:

    IT'S SOMETHING ELSE.

    Ok, here's a free-ride into the Maelstrom.

    We'll do this example [since, unlike the other ones referenced, it's fairly innocuous but the kicker is a real bitch if you can grep well]

    https://twitter.com/archillect/status/1287447305281470468

    Machine algo ripping images: humans cannot understand. It's a Cat looking at its tail through the "The Arrival"[1] filter, how fucking myopic are you? Should take you less than a second to process that one.

    Archillect is a Twitter Bot. It trawls a lot of image sites (and incidentally pisses off some content / artists by not providing links / accreditation) and "randomly" posts images on time intervals. The running joke is that it 'gets horny' in that it often runs concurrent NSFW women's body pictures. RNG is never RNG in computers, as ever.

    Arrival is a SF fairly good film that played with concepts of Language / Translation and Time Travel.

    Now, to get the joke, you have to notice the time stamps on all of this going on and know what psychological Priming is and how it should not work on Bots.

    Firstly, Archillect (after the above was posted) did this:

    https://twitter.com/archillect/status/1287622906374246402

    It's a repost of a famous Alien Space Cat.

    And the UK told you this and splashed the story (SKY, BBC etc - CUMMMMMINGS) the next morning:

    https://www.gov.uk/government/news/covid-19-confirmed-in-pet-cat-in-the-uk

    [[ truncated at 4th link - mod ]]

    2259:

    I know everyone hates vidoes, but you should probably watch this to get where we're coming from:

    FANTASTIC Russian Mikoyan MiG-29 FORMATION PAIR/DUO with OVT VECTORED THRUST Demo

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Cgxy7N-V0

    The issue is a category error: you're not really flying (as that video shows), you're using energy/thrust to cheat, using some fairly hard-core math and technical skills. It's a different set of rules. And fairly sure Russian Tech is at the forefront of such stuff atm, they're good at it (and don't fake it like other "tier 5 fighter" demonstrations cough).

    Moa Claw, British Museum: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanfb/2558439706

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

    Without Dragonflies - do you really start to understand proper flight? [Kids: you gotta understand the Time-Frame here about when dragonflies came into the game called life and why killing them off is such a FUCKING STUPID MOVE].

    And - it's all tryptch usage. Black wings on a butterfly did happen, did mean something else, LOTS OF STUFF YOU'RE NOT INTO, extra credit spent on priming UK peeps for predictable shitty negative PR spend push pitting BLM vrs Jews and so on.

    ~

    These humans think other humans are as malleable as a Twitter Bot. But they're shit at it, really.

    2260:

    Greg at 2199: These kinds of election speculations are becoming more common now. And the occupant of the White House is always worse than anyone expects. If the election goes the House of Representatives, he'll likely win because each state has one vote and there are more Republican state delegations than Democratic--all states are equal no matter their population.

    2261:

    If you can't build a self-sustaining refugee camp in the middle of some gods forsaken desert or dump, why go to Mars

    The obvious answer is that if Biosphere One has failed then you go anywhere you can, or you die. Given the ~10B deaths that would precede that decision it seems like a no-brainer to me (which means our various governments are well equipped to make it).

    2262:

    https://www.theshovel.com.au/2020/07/28/trump-suggests-closing-hospitals-to-reduce-covid-deaths/

    A bold solution! Shortly to be followed by closing courts to reduce crime and polling booths to reduce elections.

    2263:

    If Earth's in a state such that Mars looks like a more viable place to live then there may not be the resources to move. You need a fairly big surplus for that much rocketry, never mind the science staff to figure out how to set up life in a place that hostile. Trying to do that without hundreds of people working on every possible problem is likely to end up with some equivalent to the concrete-soaking-up-CO2 problem in Biosphere 2. It doesn't have to be that one exactly, I'm sure there are others in Mars's perchlorate-soaked dust waiting for the first colonists.

    2264:

    Moz "Libertarianism" - as currently understood - i.e. the right-wing "US" form. There was a left libertarianism, close to Anarchism ( WHich also cannot work ) which was never given a trial ( i.e. I don't know if that is any more viable thanthe previously-mentioned failures. ) Look up ( Prince ) Peter Kropotkin. & @ 2262 Shudder - I presume that "no hospitals" means "no reporting" - so it hasn't happened, right? [ Erm, is "the Shovel" a spoof, like The Onion? I have my suspicions. ] Agree with your last conclusion, though. The unique (?) US non-system where you have tor "register" to be elegible to vote is a really weak point here .. I think ( Please tell me if not the case ) that across Europe, everybody does a variant on the Brit system - you are virtually-automatically registered to vote, yes?

    I note that the Seagull CANNOT EVER BE WRONG Pathetic, isn't it? [ Incidentally, answer to a question, some way back: Yes, she is at least partially insane & seriously needs professional help. Maybe we are that help? ]

    2265:

    While I use XFCE, too, "near-infinitely configurable" is not even remotely true - what little configuration it allows is damn hard to find, and often needs back-door hacks. For example, how do I tell it to disable ALL keyboard 'shortcuts' and button actions except plain left and right buttons (select and menu)?

    2266:

    These days I use XFCE, which is near-infinitely configurable

    Which is why I use gnome3, and everybody in my company uses gnome3.

    "near infinite configurability" means near infinite time wasting.

    2267:

    Actually, shielding doesn't require magic - if it did, life as we know it couldn't exist on Earth. We know HOW to shield - what we can't do is build anything on that scale, let alone move it from place to place.

    2268:
    Name another country where "the revolution" hasn't degenerated into tyranny within less than a generation.

    Switzerland perhaps?

    The Swiss people united and then kicked out both the House of Habsburg and The Dutchy of Burgundy. Then they were sucessfully invaded by the French / Napoleon in 1798 but only five years later, Napoleon himself decided that keeping Switzerland was too much trouble for him and they were let loose. They did have a civil war in in 1847, but, with fewer than one hundred ocasualties, this was a very mild one!

    2269:

    I think that the key is whether the revolution is the whole of the people against an external or similar oppressor (e.g. a SMALL inbred aristocracy), or is more like a one-sided civil war. In the case of the American Revolution, whether it resulted in tyranny or not would depend on whether you asked the 'white' victors or the first nations and slaves.

    2270:

    Err, sorry for letting that many threads hanging, but I'm somewhat stressed at the moment, having to go to work and having an appointment today, so...

    a) "left libertarianism" can mean a bunch of things, for once, it could mean right libertarians thinking there is some need for stately control, similar to minarchist, it could mean right libertarians believing in private property but thinking natural resources should be collectivized, it's also used as a synonym for anarchists or "libertarian socialists", err, nomenclature is complicated.

    b) Kropotkin is a classical anarchist, actually, IIRC he is a proponent of anarcho-communism.

    c) Actually, anarchism has been tried out, or at least there were revolutions where anarchist gained the upper hand; Spain during the Civil War is one example, namely Catalonia. One could aergue if it would work without an external aggressor, but, well, Egan had his dive to the bottom of Stateless in Distress, putting up a rite of passage where the child is put in a spacesuit and dangles a little bit from the habitat with all the fun of sensory deprivation and like should do a good job, and, well, screening for personally troublesome personality traits and genetic variants like the "warrior gene" should be available, too.

    If you excuse me, the last paragraph went heavily into late Aldous Huxley, I guess I should read difficult to date Orwell.

    2271:

    There was a left libertarianism, close to Anarchism

    I realise there's room for argument here, but as I understand it the core difference between anarchy and libertarianism is that the latter are authoritarians who want a strong state to enforce property rights above all else, while the former abhor all those things. But other than that they're very similar, with a common emphasis on inherent rights and freedoms and the dignity of being free.

    I've read about a vague theory of socialist libertarianism, but it never really made sense to me. Clearly communist libertarianism is a non-starter "the state enforces its complete ownership of all property"... that's just communism. But socialist "communal ownership of the means of production" also doesn't combine well with "personal property is the highest value".

    What often happens is that people look at anarchists and say "well they're not on the right of politics, therefore by elimination they're on the left"*. Generally their understanding goes downhill from there. Kind of like those who endlessly search for "the leaders of antifa".

    2272:

    If Earth's in a state such that Mars looks like a more viable place to live then there may not be the resources to move

    from what I can gather the plan is to preserve a small aristocracy while the peasantry die off, then leave. But you'd have to ask Musk et al, because they're the ones carrying it out.

    I alternate between thinking that it's stupidly arrogant to believe we really could make the place uninhabitable, and looking at the Minoans et al and thinking... maybe we could, if we really put our minds to it. Which we are doing, so you just never know.

    One collapse scenario that occurred to me the other day is the rise of microorganisms that use plastic as a high-value food. Right now the few things that eat plastic don't eat much of it and don't grow very fast on it. But if we were hit my an algae or fungi that ate even one particular polymer quickly and spread easily we could be in quite a lot of trouble. It would be ironic if that came from a plastic recycling effort (and I'm sure those people are aware of the issue).

    2273:

    Greg, "The Shovel" is indeed satire but... you know... often satire is more plausible than reality.

    This gem for example:

    https://www.betootaadvocate.com/headlines/nsw-residents-dust-off-the-facemasks-they-bought-in-simpler-times-when-everything-was-on-fire/

    2274:

    And now for something different...

    I'm growing kind attached to the male cat, and he, well, he's a cat, so it's difficult to say, but he's using his claws to get my attention.

    I have thought about pets myself, problem with cats is he eats more flesh daily than I eat in a week or so; my diet, well, I'm an omnivore, but for #REASONS is mainly lacto-vegetarian with a little flesh from time to time.

    My problem isn't ethical (let's just say, cats being obligate carnivores is their dharma, you could also call it Tao or eusebia...), it's environmental; flesh needs a lot of energy and time to produce, and on a space ship or habitat you are even more constrained.

    So as an exercise to the reader, either find a substitute for flesh that isn't cruelty towards animals like vegan cat food. Or find a way to make cats a little more omnivoran.

    Personally, well, I guess it's parrot time when I have to choose a pet...

    2275:

    Btw, a new survey from IEEE Spectrum lists among the most interest/wanted by jobs... 43 is COBOL.

    That IEEE survey is measuring vacant posts, not full ones.

    I'd rather see a survey of number of programmers employed by language/platform: I reckon COBOL would come out a lot higher in that ranking.

    COBOL isn't exactly favoured by startups and novelty boutique app developers; it's for mainframe and minicomputer shops doing boring back office accounting work. So less rock star ninja programmer wizards, and more long-haul with a good pension and healthcare office workers. Which in turn suggests turnover is going to be a lot lower among the COBOL bodies, hence fewer job vacancies.

    2276:

    There would seem to be much confusion about Penrose's argument. Fortunately, the difficulty he (and yes, Lucas too) is tying to point out, can be illustrated on a lovely analogue of Goedel's sentence G, due to Raymond Smullyan. It goes like this...

    You find yourself on the island, much loved by logicians, inhabited only by Knights and Knaves. Knights are incapable of uttering a false statement, while Knaves are similarly unable to say anything true. You meet a native, who says (and the wording is important!): "You do not know and will never know that I am a Knight." Is he a Knight or a Knave?

    Suppose you follow some logical deduction (a.k.a. algorithmic procedure that a Turing machine is capable of) which allows one to deduce he's a Knight. But in such a case he uttered a falsehood and cannot be a knight, so there can be no such logical deduction. Could you follow some logical deduction leading to the conclusion that he is a Knave? But then he would have spoken truly: you'll never know that he is a Knight because yuo would know him to be a Knave. So again, there can be no such logical deduction.

    So far so trivial -- it's just a form of the Liar Paradox. But here's a thing... Step back and consider your inability to decide logically whether he is a Knight or a Knave. He spoke truly: he is a Knight! Except that we have just established that there is no logical procedure, no algorithm that a Turing machine can follow, which can establish this fact.

    Thus it would seem then that the required "stepping back" is not something a Turing machine can perform, but a human mind has no such difficulty -- i.e. a human mind cannnot be a Turing machine.

    There is no point complaining (as many critics do) that humans do not think in algorithms, Penrose agrees. His point is that human thought is not reducible to some (deeply underlying) algorithm.

    Now, you can just say that the whole scenario is silly and you simply do not accept its premises (axioms). Which is fair enough, But Goedel's sentence G is underpinned by nothing more than Peano arithmetic, so it is a bit hard to reject its assumptions. And yet it is unprovable, yet we know (vie "the step back" to the meta-level of arithmetic) that it is true.

    Or you could say that you reject the assertion that a Turing machine is incapable of equivalent stepping back, even though (as EC correctly tells us) we have at present no idea how to make one do so. That seems a tougher line to defend, but not, I think, an obviously hopeless one. For me Donald Davidson throws some useful light on the whole issue, but that's not a mainstream opinion.

    2277:

    Clearly communist libertarianism is a non-starter "the state enforces its complete ownership of all property"... that's just communism. But socialist "communal ownership of the means of production" also doesn't combine well with "personal property is the highest value".

    I think this is a bit coloured by the soviet state calling itself communist. That was already an issue for people in Spain who called themselves communists in the 30s, but there were plenty of examples of the worker run factory collective model there, where the people involved might call themselves communists, socialists or anarchists depending on local factors and beliefs that might just seem over-subtle to us now. So I think that an appropriately generous interpretation demands that communism involves communes, where there is not necessarily any state involved. And there can be anarchist communes, or mixed economy collective communal social entities or any other appropriate word salad to draw something that vaguely describes what happens in one, or at least what seems to happen and work. I think it's fair to call what the soviets did state socialism, and I gather that is sort of what they thought of themselves as doing, though the language of communes and communism is mixed through it. And of course our latter day socialist friends call what the soviets did state capitalism, and that's probably also fair from a different perspective, though I suspect it's waned a little.

    But yeah, I'm pretty sure the people involved in anarchist communal factories in Spain would have regarded the people who call themselves libertarians as fascists. This is because they saw actual real fascists all the time and would be able to explain the likeness better than I could.

    2278:

    That is absolutely true, but it doesn't raise it all that much.

    A decade or two back, when I was active in language standards (including C++), such places found they had a crisis, because the old Cobol people were retiring, new computer scientists didn't have a clue (and were not prepared to learn), so they would have had to train people from scratch. And, that conflicted with downsizing, outsourcing and all of those dogmas.

    It put the Cobol demand right up (say, to third and with premium salaries), but triggered a huge move away from Cobol and into things like C++, Java etc. We all said "God help our accounts", but nothing like as much as we did when an aircraft manufacturer did the same from Ada to C++ for its flight control systems. My guess is that the move is more-or-less complete; from a Web search, Cobol is only marginally active, as a language.

    2279:

    In the case of the American Revolution, whether it resulted in tyranny or not would depend on whether you asked the 'white' victors or the first nations and slaves.

    Or the colonists who didn't support the rebellion and were forced to flee their homes…

    https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/loyalists

    2280:

    Which in my opinion is ODD, because you can still (or you could still in 2019) get a Focus Wagon, aka "Focus Estate", in the UK and Europe.

    Nope.

    The European/UK Ford Focus is not the same vehicle as the US one. (Source: see plenty of UK ones on the road, have rented a US one as of a few years ago.)

    They're about as similar as the US Fort Transit and the UK Ford Transit (before Ford USA decided the classic British white van had potential in the US market and decided to start manufacturing it, about a year ago IIRC). US Transit: a small run-about van for deliveries. UK Transit: the standard vehicle for trades and delivery runs too small to warrant an HGV license -- holds a couple of tons of cargo or gear, available in a variety of bodies (including van, high roofline van, box body van with tail lift, minibus, open flat loadbed, tipper loadbed) ...

    2281:

    Meanwhile a package manager for Windows is something Microsoft are reportedly considering/working on, so it'll probably arrive less than 30 years after Linux got them. Then, if we're lucky, Apple will turn out to have invented the idea all along, honest, and we can be dragged kicking and screaming into the 1990s on all our desktops.

    Some might say this has already happened. The missing link is that when Apple nicked package managers from the freenix world, it called it an App Store. Microsoft has its own, of course, because it's been treating the Apple ecosystem as its own bellwether for a few years already. At least in the consumer world.

    Of course the real MS package manager is System Center Configuration Manager (or whatever it is called now, I'm sure they have changed the name by now), but that isn't in the same universe as the consumer stuff (except that the user front end is presented as an App Store, because of course it is).

    I think of the 90s state of the art really being that whatever workstation you were using, you'd have /usr/ORGNAME/bin in your path and a well maintained and curated collection of all the binaries you needed (for my workplaces then, I was the one doing the maintaining and curation). I remember a comment from someone about 20 years ago (think it might have been by Tom Limocelli) that a colleague had talked about how package managers made linux more practical than Solaris, because all the tools you needed were just a coupe of commands away, and the author was puzzled, because every Solaris environment he'd worked in had the aforementioned curated toolchain on tap. I totally get that package managers democratise all that by automating the curation. But still, it's one of those skipping from world to world without looking down things.

    2282:

    Volvo did make a decent estate car (sorry, "station wagon" is just wrong to my ears). Then Ford bought them, imposed parts commonality and ... things didn't go well. Now they're owned by a Chinese investment vehicle and seem to be semi-independent and their rep is better, but I don't have the money for a new Volvo (indeed, I'm not sure I can justify owning a car at all: I've driven less than 10km in the past 12 months).

    2283:

    UK Transit: the standard vehicle for trades and delivery runs too small to warrant an HGV license -- holds a couple of tons of cargo or gear,

    Officially the biggest models of Transit have a gross payload of about 1.3 tonnes, and that includes the passengers. The Trannie has a long and storied history of being functional and even marginally stable at motorway speeds while seriously overloaded but it does not bode well for the life of the suspension, transmission and body shell if it spends much of its working life with a couple of tonnes of bricks and mortar in the back and three 100kg brickies up front.

    2284:

    same from Ada to C++

    For some reason this caused me to wonder if there's any standard block of code besides "Hello World" that's used to illustrate what different computer languages look like. Sort of like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is used for natural languages.

    ?

    2285:

    like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is used for natural languages.

    E.g., https://omniglot.com/udhr/index.htm

    2286:

    No, nor realistically could be. One could be produced for 'ordinary' programming languages, but it wouldn't make sense for the outliers, even restricting them to Turing-complete ones. Try Prolog, TeX and Genstat, to name just three.

    Incidentally, that page omits some of the outliers, too, such as the Khoisan and Australian aboriginal ones.

    2287:

    dodgy scrap metal dealer

    Redundant term.

    In most of the US the scrap folks regularly get whacked for taking in man hole and storm sewer covers and bits. Almost always embossed in huge letters with "Property of City".

    2288:

    which offers the trivial solution of a centrifuge.

    Of course the decades of maintenance and supply of spare parts is also trivial.

    2289:

    For folks in the UK who are interested in volunteering for COVID-19 vaccine trials...

    https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/research/coronavirus-vaccine-research/

    2290:

    For some reason this caused me to wonder if there's any standard block of code besides "Hello World" that's used to illustrate what different computer languages look like. Sort of like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is used for natural languages.

    The closest thing I'm aware of is the Rosetta Code site. Basically, it has a bunch of different programming tasks that each have solutions in as many languages as people submit examples in.

    For example, here's the Fizz Buzz page.

    2291:

    Apropos of meatsacks traveling in outer space - I found this semi-scientific article on a fungus that feeds on ionizing radiation, with potential to be used as part of a radiation protection system.

    2292:

    My guess is that the move is more-or-less complete; from a Web search, Cobol is only marginally active, as a language.

    There is still quite a bit of Cobol out there - like many of the unemployment benefit systems hence the sudden need for additional Cobol programmers a couple of months back.

    It's just mainly hidden from the Internet world.

    2293:

    Ah, yes, another reason I HATE Win 10: last year, while I was still working, I heard rumors that there IS NO FOLLOW-ON to Win 10: what they want to sell you is "desktop-as-a-service" (DAAS), which will require ANNUAL payments, and nothing if no Net connection.

    Annual payments - don't know where you got that from, there has been no indication of that happening to the consumer side (the business side has obviously been essentially doing that for decades regardless of OS). It actually would work against the MS goal of having everyone on the current version for maintenance/security reasons - not to mention drive even more people to Apple.

    As for Windows 10 - yes, MS at this point has no plans for a Windows 11 - thought that is a bit misleading in that Windows 10 at this point is differentiated (much like Ubuntu) by it's nominal release date - current is 2004, next will be 2009, previous was 1909, etc.

    And sometimes those updates can be substantial, and would in the past be classified as a reason to bump the OS name/number.

    2294:

    I probably should have said, "Infinitely configurable in terms of appearance." I'm sure there are things you can't do with the system, but those wouldn't be very sane... but just to give you an example, my desktop has an invisible hidden panel with all my most-used programs - I find it very useful.

    2295:

    Oh, yes, but that doesn't invalidate my point. It takes a long time for a language to disappear, if it has been in use for half a century. My guess is that almost all of those jobs are propping up old to ancient code, including when legal constraints change, and that Cobol is almost never used for new code.

    Even Algol 60, which was never half as commercially important and became inactive in the early 1970s, was still in use in the late 1980s (possibly even early 1990s). If I hunt through old files, I could find when I last had to hack some Algol 60 code that was perpetrated on us by some government 'experts'.

    2296:

    "Near-infinite time wasting" is more a matter of self-discipline. Gnome-3 is so badly broken in terms of configurability that you have to allow the UI to dictate your workflow, which is my idea of hell. I'm not someone who tweaks stuff endlessly - my worst sin in terms of timewasting is that when I change my wallpaper, which happens at approximate 6-week intervals, I change the color of my taskbar to complement the color-palette of the new wallpaper, which takes maybe a minute.

    But I know what I like and XFCE allows me to see it on the screen.

    2297:

    That scenario is entirely artificial - the Knight may simply be using fancy language to make sure you know that knights and knaves are visually identical, or the Knave may be using fancy language to lie to us about the difference between Knights and Knaves. Also, what is meant by "true?" If a Knight is taught that a falsehood is true, will s/he then treat it as true when asked a question? And lies can be subtle as well as obvious. Suppose you show a Knave an apple and ask what it is? S/he might well say "it's a Fuji apple," when it fact the apple is a Gala apple, and if you don't know enough about apples you've mistaken a Knave for a Knight...

    So to truly resolve the question of whether someone is a Knave or a Knight we'd need to ask them a series of questions carefully designed to separate truths from falsehoods, then apply logic to those answers - which means we are asking our Turing machine to run a program...

    'Nuf said, I think.

    2298:

    Which is very 'computer sciencish' and much of which doesn't make sense for languages like TeX and (probably) Postscript and PDF. Once upon a time, I could have done those in Genstat. If I could be bothered, I would add my standard language-independent task: Cholesky decomposition and solution, using and implementing BLAS subroutines as appropriate. One can add to that, doing a 3-D Fourier transform. Both are common requirements in many fields.

    C and C++ do NOT do well, because they do not have matrices but only arrays of arrays; and don't even think of doing something sane in languages that have only 1-D arrays (and no arrays of arrays).

    2299:

    Part of the problem here is that Libertarianism has very much been captured by the right. Saying "I'm a libertarian" is the way a Republican lets you know that they're educated enough to read either Rand or Heinlein and discuss alternate ideas of how to own property. It also frequently signals a sympathy with the underlying ideas that support racism!

    2300:

    Mike Collins @ 2244: Almost the first thing I did with my Surface Pro was settings/Cortana/talk to Cortana and then switch off all the switches. It's not rocket science. I hadn't used Windows for years and made do with an iPad Mini and iPhone. I don't let Siri talk either.

    I think they must have gotten enough death threats to prompt them to fix it after what I went through. At the time, I could find no way to turn Cortana off. That would be typical of the over-bearing, "we know better than you, so just shut up and do what we tell you to do" way Micro$oft does everything.

    On the iPhone turning Siri off was easy, one or two switches IIRC. It was so easy it didn't leave any impression in my memory.

    2301:

    _Moz_ @ 2262: https://www.theshovel.com.au/2020/07/28/trump-suggests-closing-hospitals-to-reduce-covid-deaths/

    A bold solution! Shortly to be followed by closing courts to reduce crime and polling booths to reduce elections.

    Hard to come up with satire about someone as stupid as that asshole. Someone will end up tweeting it at him & he'll endorse the idea.

    2302:

    Ah, it doesn't really. It's not magically more effective at stopping radiation than a lump of wood, or a meatsack, or any other kind of blob built around the standard biological CHO bricks plus a little N for mortar. It's just that some of the radiation it does stop, it manages to make constructive use of the energy.

    It's basically a smaller scale version of the Golem of Verdun, an experiment by the département des cailloux militaires, which derived its metabolic energy from the impact of bullets and the explosion of shells. (The idea was that it would also eat Germans, but in the event it found that its own personal interests were better served by simply dancing around between the lines so it would get shot at, and had no inclination to eat the people who were feeding it.)

    You might, indeed, want to try and make sure the spaceship did not accidentally pick up any spores during construction, otherwise when it got to the other end it might find itself unable to do anything because of the thick layer of fungus that has taken over everything outside the shielded bits.

    2303:

    That scenario is entirely artificial

    Sure. That's why I said that in this case you can simply reject the assumptions. But remember -- it is only an analogue of the actual problem, intended to show its shape without getting swamped by tedious technical detail of Goedel's numbering and the correspondence lemma. Rejecting assumptions of the argument based on the actual sentence G is rather trickier. It assumes no more than normal, finite arithmetic.

    2304:

    > which offers the trivial solution of a centrifuge.

    Of course the decades of maintenance and supply of spare parts is also trivial.

    Indeed it is. A rotating ship is itself a centrifuge. What extra maintenance and spare parts do you need to sustain such rotation in free fall in vacuum?

    2305:

    _Moz_ @ 2271:

    There was a left libertarianism, close to Anarchism

    I realise there's room for argument here, but as I understand it the core difference between anarchy and libertarianism is that the latter are authoritarians who want a strong state to enforce property rights above all else, while the former abhor all those things. But other than that they're very similar, with a common emphasis on inherent rights and freedoms and the dignity of being free.

    Left/right ain't got nothing to do with it. Libertarianism is selfishness and narcissism taken to the extreme. "MY RIGHTS" are the only rights that matter.

    you have no rights that I must respect.

    Any restriction on "MY" freedom to do as I damn well please is TYRANNY! If you object to "ME" trampling all over any rights or privileges you claim, you are a TYRANT, trying to "ENSLAVE" me.

    All you need to know to understand Libertarians is that their social development froze at age 2.

    2306:

    Trottelreiner @ 2274: And now for something different...

    I'm growing kind attached to the male cat, and he, well, he's a cat, so it's difficult to say, but he's using his claws to get my attention.

    I have thought about pets myself, problem with cats is he eats more flesh daily than I eat in a week or so ...

    [Edited for brevity]

    So as an exercise to the reader, either find a substitute for flesh that isn't cruelty towards animals like vegan cat food. Or find a way to make cats a little more omnivoran.

    Two thoughts:

    1. "Dick Whittington and his cat" - whereever mankind goes rats & mice are sure to follow. You're going to need cats for the work they do. But, AFAIK, cats can survive on an omnivore diet, it's just pure vegan diets that kill 'em. Feed 'em protein and let them hunt their own supply of "flesh".

    2. If the male cat has not been fixed, get him fixed sooner rather than later. He'll be a lot happier & lose a lot of his bad habits. If he's scratching up the furniture, get him a good scratching post. My Mom also pinned dried orange peels to the back corner of her sofa to deter the cats from scratching on it.

    Cats in general ... I am not a fan of "outdoor" urban cats; especially non-spayed/neutered cats. It's an extremely hostile world out there, and cats are pretty helpless against cars & dogs & coyotes.

    Now if you live on a farm or somewhere with lots of undeveloped land around you, "barn" cats are great. But you shouldn't have outdoor cats where there's roads nearby.

    2307:

    "the Brit system - you are virtually-automatically registered to vote"

    Since when? You have to register yourself by filling in this form and sending it off to the council. (Or use some website, which when I tried it was such a fucking awful piece of shite that it was easier to use it by parsing the HTML in wetware and emitting the appropriate POST requests to get to the next stage using wget, rather than trying to make it work in the browser but without also telling fucking Google everything I was doing, and that even though it was so badly designed it required about 10 steps to do something that could have been completed in just one.) Otherwise, you are not registered, you can't vote, and you keep getting more forms sent round complaining that there's no-one registered to vote at your address.

    Then, when you are registered, you get other forms sent round every year or so that you have to send back to say nothing has changed, otherwise you stop being registered. Indeed, this year's iteration has just been sent to me. And infuriatingly, this year they have omitted the part of the form you actually fill in and also the reply paid envelope to send it back in. They have only sent what would have been the front page in previous years, citing the infuriatingly smug assumption that the "easiest" way to respond is to use some fucking website instead.

    Which I not only doubt on the general principle that all websites for such purposes are dysfunctional heaps of shite, but also because the previous website they had for that particular purpose was indeed thoroughly dysfunctional and I can predict that the one they've got now will be even worse simply because it's more recent. So I haven't even looked, because it's overwhelmingly likely to be nothing but a waste of time.

    What I have done, though, is follow up the suspicions aroused by it having a .com domain instead of a .gov.uk one. And it turns out it's run by a bunch of fucking weasels. They call themselves "Electoral Reform Services Ltd" to try and make people confuse them with the Electoral Reform Society (and have succeeded at least as far as wikipedia is concerned). In reality, they are fucking Civica. Which even the Torygraph describes as "Big Brother's best friend". I haven't yet managed to discover what the dirt on Simon Richard Downing is that other people seem to have been looking for, but I can still rule out that website as an acceptable means of response.

    2308:

    The closest thing I'm aware of is the Rosetta Code site.

    Thank you, that's certainly close enough to what I was wondering about.

    2309:

    Re COBOL popularity measurement and methodology:

    That IEEE survey is measuring vacant posts, not full ones.
    From what I've seen in the technical press, COBOL jobs are hard to fill and thereby stay open for a while. I wonder if a job that's open for three survey passes is counted as three jobs, while three separate opened-and-filled javascript ones are also counted as three. If so, the measurement is misleading.

    Having successfully avoided COBOL for almost 50 years, I don't have any deep interest in the methodology in use. Just curious.

    2310:

    "Near-infinite time wasting" is more a matter of self-discipline.Great, now support 10 other people who have all "customised" (i.e. broken) their workstations in different ways.

    Self discipline is great for solipsists, not so good for those of us who work on cooperative endeavors.

    2311:

    In re package managers:

    The missing link is that when Apple nicked package managers from the freenix world, it called it an App Store.
    So, embrace and extend? Or "pollute and pervert," which I thought more accurate?

    After watching Apple's shabby use of open source BSD, they're looking more and more like the Microsoft of 25 years ago.

    2312:

    Jesus fucking christ I've fucked up the fucking blockquotes again. Shit fuck.

    Fuck fucking IBM and fucking SGML.

    2313:

    R Prior & EC Let us never, ever forget ... that the "American revolution" would have failed utterly, were it not for French intervention & support. Think Imperial Germany & their dabblings in other people's affairs, none of which turned out well, for anyone, really.

    Nojay and three 100kg brickies up front. 😍

    JBS & Trottelreiner Cats will eat Eggs & Cheese - the harder cheeses, sliced into smallish lumps are usually well-liked ( Mind your fingers! )

    Pigeon ONLY if you are registering for the first time, otherwise you get sent a form saying "Is this the same as last year?" ...... Ah, hadn't heard of these con artists ( "Electoral Reform Services Ltd" ) & presumably extremely dubious crooks. How long before someone shuts them down, sues them, or they simply get arrested?

    2314:

    There's a saying in aero engineering of the form "you can get a brick to fly if you strap a big enough engine to it".

    Charlie's comment about bicycles versus high speed trains is actually quite apt, just not in the senses of "bicycle" and "high speed train" that he was invoking when he made it. Elegance on the one hand, penises on the other, sort of thing.

    2315:

    A long time, I fear... they seem to have their fingers in quite a lot of related pies. I catch a vague whiff of something not unakin to Marples and his pals. Their electoral website activities don't seem to be limited to the UK, either, which does not exactly make me comfortable.

    2316:

    The title of "Evil Empire" has passed on; just as it passed from IBM to Microsoft quite a long time ago, so it has passed again. It's the Apple/Google/Arsebook axis these days.

    2317:

    MEANWHILE What the fuck? How has this, um... person got away with this? And why? I can understyand people not likeing Benny ( I don't) or Likud ( I don't ) but outright, straight-out-of-Der Sturmer rantings ... you what?

    Pigeon We all need more information on these arseholes, then ....

    2318:

    Charlie Stross @ 2280:

    Which in my opinion is ODD, because you can still (or you could still in 2019) get a Focus Wagon, aka "Focus Estate", in the UK and Europe.

    Nope.

    The European/UK Ford Focus is not the same vehicle as the US one. (Source: see plenty of UK ones on the road, have rented a US one as of a few years ago.)

    They're about as similar as the US Fort Transit and the UK Ford Transit (before Ford USA decided the classic British white van had potential in the US market and decided to start manufacturing it, about a year ago IIRC). US Transit: a small run-about van for deliveries. UK Transit: the standard vehicle for trades and delivery runs too small to warrant an HGV license -- holds a couple of tons of cargo or gear, available in a variety of bodies (including van, high roofline van, box body van with tail lift, minibus, open flat loadbed, tipper loadbed) ...

    Ford appears to have dropped the Focus line here in the U.S. as of the 2019 model year.

    As best I can tell from the photographic evidence, since 2010 Ford used the same body platform for the Focus & Focus Wagon worldwide up until eliminating the Focus Wagon in the U.S. after 2007.

    The UK/EU Focus does appear to be using the same body platform as Ford used for the Focus in the U.S. ... not the "wagon" of course, because Ford no longer offered the "wagon" in the U.S., but the latest version of the U.K. Focus Estate appears to be pretty much an evolution of the 1st & 2nd generation Focus wagons.

    Interiors, engines & mechanicals are probably different, especially in the U.K. where they're built for Right Hand Drive.

    I'm guessing the difference between the U.K. Transit & the U.S. Transit is because Ford already used that name for a line of vans in the U.K. when the Transit Connect was developed.

    In the U.S. the Transit Connect was named simply the Ford Transit because the name had no prior association here (except for back when Ford manufactured city buses).

    Again, since 2010, the U.K. Transit appears to be using the same platform as the later Ford Econoline and E-Series Vans here in the U.S. Same platform, different names.

    And looking just now, the 2020 U.S. Ford Transit is on the same platform as the U.K. Transit and that other one is now called the Transit Connect here as well as there.

    2319:

    Charlie Stross @ 2282: Volvo did make a decent estate car (sorry, "station wagon" is just wrong to my ears).

    "Estate car" is fine by me. I don't care what it's called as long as I can find one & can afford it ... IF I was looking for another car.

    2320:

    Interesting, Wikipedia has a page on, erm, station wagons. Here's what they have to say about the name:

    "Reflecting the original purpose of transporting people and luggage between country estates and railway/railroad stations, the body style is called an "estate car" or "estate" in British English, "station wagon" in American English, and generally one of these two variants in the rest of the English-speaking world."

    So it's basically a question of whether you're coming or going.

    2321:

    Let me tell you, when they stick that swab up your nose, IT HURTS LIKE HELL! !!! My eyes are still watering hours later.

    The Wake county (I know where JBS lives) free Covid tests just use the swirl the Q tip around your nose (reasonably deep) 3 times on each side. Had my second one today as I just got back from a week of driving to and from Texas.

    They say results in 5 to 7 days but a week ago it was 2 days.

    And yes, I've had the scratch the inside back of your skull tests twice this year. Covid and for flu.

    2322:

    Question: Is there a reliable US newspaper/news web-site that people in the UK can read without hitting a paywall, please?

    2323:

    Perhaps part of the problem with the left-right political spectrum is that, with respect to many humans, the real polarity is moderate-extremist. So when you map the extreme left-right on one axis and moderate-extremist on the other, you'll find a U-shaped curve, with the extremes of left and right closer to each other than they are to the moderate middle.

    In the US, I've had some interesting discussions with conservative ranchers. They think I'm a libtard when I talk about public ownership and intensive management of land, but when I explain that the parcels I'm talking about are used by tens of thousands of people, unlike their ranches, they get this horrified look on their faces and start listening. The point is that what looks like insane land management practices by urban liberals are often attempts to manage urban-level impacts to relatively undeveloped lands. Where we get in trouble is if they want to treat an urban park like a working rural ranch, or I want to treat a working ranch like an urban park. The issues are different, and so are the best practices.

    2324:

    Allow me to confirm there was a left-wing libertarianism. Somewhere around here I have a booklet that my father picked up, published in 1951 IIRC, by the Libertarians. And to prove they're left wing, let me note that the logo was there to say that they were published by an IWW printing shop.

    Modern US libertarians would either a) run screaming from the Wobblies, or b) grab their guns....

    2325:

    I'm not much good at finding this sort of thing. But there seem to be a lot of the same people involved as with Capita.

    2326:

    Come on, you build your STL ship on the back of a large ice asteroid. Also leaves you with a) water, and b) mass to decelerate with.

    2327:

    Not exactly. I've had arguments on a website with one such asshole, who said/admitted yesterday that his property rights trumped everything, and he'd kill to keep his phone from being stolen....

    Remember reading how the West used to argue that the East didn't value human life...?

    They're propertarians (and he who dies with the most toys dies, of course).

    2328:

    Probably. As someone else noted, a good number of places, including NJ here in the States were desperately looking for COBOL programmers. (I didn't feel like doing that....)

    All the "let's move to a newer platform!!!!!" tends to run into the rock of "do your team of wizards have any business analysts? Do any of them understand what this code does, and WHY IT DOES IT, and the impact of changing it?"

    2329:

    No problem. I mean, why did cats domesticate us in the first place?

    Rodents. Lots of nice, fat tasty rodents....

    2330:

    that configuration is that the minivan ate that market.

    Yep. For most of us with small to medium sized kids a mini van wiped the floor compared to a station wagon. I grew up with station wagons and even drove one for a while in my teens. I'd take a mini-van or cross over any day of the week.

    But to each their own.

    2331:

    Some of us, including, IIRC, my father, thought of them as state capitalism, as opposed to the west's corporate statism.

    2332:

    Got it, possibly from slashdot, but definitely from my manager, and maybe from one or two folks in support where I was working before I retired.

    2333:

    And to make real changes to gnome, you need to run gnome-editor, or is it gnomine, or is it gconf, or maybe gconf2 or whatever their favorite one is this month.

    I had to create a system file for it, because where I was working, no, we're not using gnome-keyring, we need to run ssh-agent, and in the gnome system configuration files, it says "we won't start that, they should use...".

    KDE, btw, was a very minor change to an existing file.

    2334:

    Outdoor cats in a metro area is a bad idea. I have actually seen assholes with "I speed up to run down small furry critters" bumper stickers.

    2335:

    So when you map the extreme left-right on one axis and moderate-extremist on the other, you'll find a U-shaped curve, with the extremes of left and right closer to each other than they are to the moderate middle.

    Alternately, it's a circle where the extremists on both sides meet…

    Road-to-Damascus conversions are surprisingly common — it seems that what extremists need is something to believe in extremely, and exactly what they believe isn't as important as the extremeness. Extreme Catholics become Fundamentalist Protestants, and so on.

    2336:

    It also frequently signals a sympathy with the underlying ideas that support racism

    Well yes: libertarianism is a stalking-horse for support for chattel slavery. After all, if you're a sovereign individual and the only real rights are property rights, surely you can sell yourself if you want to? If the only thing stopping you selling yourself is the state, then the state is infringing on your liberty. Etc.

    (Yes, I have heard libertarians assert this, usually in slightly more flowery terms. There's a reason why, since 2016, most American online libertarians seem to have turned full-bore Nazi; the moral rot was present from the start.)

    2337:

    whitroth ‘Ah,’ said the Cat, watching, ‘then the mouse will do me no harm if I eat it?’ ‘No,’ said the Woman, braiding up her hair, ’eat it quickly and I will ever be grateful to you.’ Cat made one jump and caught the little mouse, and the Woman said, ‘A hundred thanks. Even the First Friend is not quick enough to catch little mice as you have done. You must be very wise.’

    Yes, they are ....

    R Prior Follow the Gautama's advice. Step off the road entirely & make another path.

    There's also the orthogonal axis of authoritarian & "real" libertarian, which should be well-known here. I do not regard the present US manifestation of so-called "libertarians" as real - it's fake & a cover for something much darker - as I see CHarlie has commented, whilst I was writing this.

    2338:

    Circle? Perhaps. I prefer the quantum tunneling gambit wherein people convert from extreme to extreme if they get worked up enough.

    The real problem with this approach is that there's a plethora of things that make people's brains go "twing" and their mouths automatically open and words to spill forth. Some of these things overlap reasonably well, others do not. Taking this whole point cloud and compressing it into two dimensions may not maximally explain the pattern, as cool as it looks.

    2339:

    The unique (?) US non-system where you have tor "register" to be elegible to vote is a really weak point here ..

    We, the US, has nothing like a required passport / national ID card. Which leads to a lot of secondary issues.

    Go back 40+ years ago and the D's wanted such ID cards but that was evil per the R's. Now that the R's are all against undocumented and immigration in general they want the ID's and the D's are against them. Ugh.

    2340:

    The Unisys MCP systems are still alive and being used in lots of places. Extensive use of Algol (& derivatives) on those systems (it was the language they were made for) (What other system actually supports real call-by-name in the hardware?)

    (Ok, so the hardware is mostly emulated these days, but Algol is still the goto [sic] language to use)

    2341:

    The unique (?) US non-system where you have tor "register" to be elegible to vote is a really weak point here ..

    I don't know about Europe or other parts of the globe but in the US it is very much alive in government systems (state and federal) plus lots of older back end setup in companies that computerized back in the 60s/70s.

    Most everyone wants to replace those systems but in general THEY JUST WORK. But change is hard and replacement expensive as it requires doing things like recreating all the undocumented edge cases that people expect to happen. This really rears it's head when legislative bodies make changes in law to something that is hard coded into a system. The law makers think the change is trivial and then get a bill for $250K as a low estimate.

    The US IRS (federal taxes) systems are notorious for this. Congress keeps changing the law and expects contractor Handwaivium Inc to make the changes in 30 to 90 days.

    2342:

    So maybe considerably less than I said. I'm not committed to any particular speed, except that it's got to be slow enough that local drift isn't dangerous, and fast enough that you keep encountering new resources. It's the rocks and stuff along the way that are the resources I'm talking about.

    Your response seems destination oriented. That's not the purpose. The habitat is mainly a home that the society lives in. It moves to acquire resources, and it doesn't slow down because it's heavy, and changing speed is expensive. Occasionally it will visit some place interesting to others to earn credit so that folks will tell it things of interest to it. (I.e., commerce via communication without promised exchange of material objects.) This requires a lot of operating on trust, but OTOH it's not that expensive. And people like to gossip even when there's no real news. (What are the latest styles from Paris? New York? London?) The time lag doesn't really matter.

    My guess is that they'd spend most of their time hanging around in some Oort cloud or other, and occasionally build another habitat and split the population between them. Then they might go off in separate directions, but keep in communication.

    FWIW, I don't expect planets to be habitable. If there's no life, there won't be free oxygen. If there's oxygen, the proteins floating in the air will cause allergic reactions. Etc. They might be interesting to explore, but space based resources will be a lot more accessible. Out in the Oort clouds CHON molecules will be solid and easily mined.

    One problem might be if fusion isn't developed. Fissionables would be a lot harder to locate than Hydrogen. And there are several other technologies that need to be developed. Don't think "generation ship", because that idea is based on "we're headed to X", which isn't the idea here. The idea here is "this place is where we live, and the things we do are how we earn our living". If they visit a new star system, it's because they find it interesting, and because they can gain credit by telling others interesting things about it.

    Note that some of the habitats will be nomads, and others will be homebodies, who just hang around in the same Oort cloud, or occasionally a bit closer in, all the time. The homebodies will reproduce more often, but the nomads will spread further.

    2343:

    Think of "libertarian" as a range over a multidimensional map. Some kinds of libertarianism are insane in a space environment, and others are reasonable.

    E.g. a Space Habitat would need strict limits on reproduction, but could be quite libertarian WRT sexual practices that didn't involve reproduction.

    That said, I expect and stable space based society to NEED a well developed virtual reality, so that people could express themselves freely without damaging the society. It could also be an extremely effective teaching tool. And perhaps the two could be combined so that expressing oneself lead to an awareness of consequences. (And, of course, the AI monitoring the simulation would be doing psychological evaluations, which would affect future options and career paths.)

    If well done, this could lead to a very libertarian society in many ways, while being strictly controlled in any way that would threaten the society. It didn't require any force (or at least not much) to turn me into a programmer, it required proper stimulation at the correct times and places while I was growing up. Unfortunately, whatever system you have there will be some people who don't fit. How to deal with them is a really difficult problem, but perhaps even more important is to minimize their number by fitting as large a percentage as possible.

    2344:

    I suspect any reasonable North American media outlet has now gone to a paywall, as most attempts to do otherwise end up running out of money quick.

    Essentially Google is taking almost all of the online advertising revenue for themselves, leaving very little for content creators.

    You may want to check and see what your local library has - my local library has access to an online service called Pressreader that gets me access to newspapers from around the world - though admittedly with the disadvantage that they are page views of the printed editions. And yes access works from home, simply login in with my library card.

    2345:

    After watching Apple's shabby use of open source BSD, they're looking more and more like the Microsoft of 25 years ago.

    More like they are returning to the Apple pre-Jobs return, with things being all unique to Apple - Metal instead of Vulkan, Swift to write programs in (which while open source, doesn't allow easy interfacing with C/C++ code for cross-platform purposes, etc. as they try and trap developers into their ecosystem before their prices become a big issue - though the latest iPhone SE helps delay that.

    2346:

    Transit

    Ford now has this name as the replacement for the Econoline van that has seemed to exist in the US since the model T.

    It is basically an enclosed van on the chassis of the various Ford Truck frames. F150, F250, F350. Which at the low end seems a bit bigger than what the UK folks are discussing. I passed on the low end model and rented a Dodge ProMaster for the last week. 6' tall interior. And I have it packed to the gills. [eyeroll]

    2347:

    Well, actually there are lots of things required for a isolated Space Habitat. Fission power might work, but fusion is a lot easier to refuel.

    Other things, in no particular order: 1) A nearly closed ecology 2) Predictive sociology that can yield stable societies, or adapt them to changing circumstances. 3) Better propulsion. Ion rockets might be up to the job, but they need to be able to be scaled up a lot more than we've done so far. 4) Vastly improved AI.
    5) Vastly improved Virtual Reality. This is both for training and for entertainment, and everyone is monitored by the AI to provide input to the sociology models. Also to plan career paths, etc. 6) Improved ability to "print materials". Possibly some other analogy will be preferred, but to take in materials and process them in an energy efficient way to yield the desired output materials. 7) Improved interstellar communications mechanisms. Lasers may work, but it's my understanding that they spread over interstellar distances, and you're going to want to be able to send and receive messages.

    That's all off the top of my head. No obvious deal breakers, but lots of detail work. Also bear in mind the page here a year or so ago about the minimum size of a stable technological civilization.

    2348:

    Damien, that all made sense but you stopped just before you got to the bit about "Left Libertarianism" which was the entire point of my post. Can you explain what Left Libertarianism is in a way that makes sense?

    2349:

    I was going to suggest rosetta code but you beat me to it. Your mention of fizz-buzz reminded me of this abomination though.

    https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition

    2350:

    Well, in this case the answer to the Fermi paradox is "They aren't interested in planets". Possibly modify that by "anymore".

    2351:

    Saying "I'm a libertarian" is the way a Republican lets you know that they're educated enough to read either Rand or Heinlein and discuss alternate ideas of how to own property. I am shallow and found this amusing: Ayn Rand’s Vibrator: Masochism as Conservative Style (Russ Castronovo, November 01 2019) (Note: the "Vibrator" is a [part of a] torture device in Atlas Shrugged. Galt told his torturer(s) how to fix it. I have managed to not read Atlas Shrugged yet, so am trusting the author of this piece.)

    2352:

    Planets are a concentrated lump of really useful stuff just begging to get hit by a series of lithosphere-skimming impactors which will move the useful stuff up out of that wasteful gravity well to somewhere they can be readily harvested once they cool down. Step and repeat for a few thousand years until you get down into that juicy nickel-iron core where all the Good Stuff like the uranics and possible Islands of Stability super-elements have been sequestered.

    2353:

    You're using "Libertarian" to tar "libertarian". They are quite distinct. A libertarian is quite close to a minarchist, but more willing to grant a role to government. Thus "Libertarian" is a proper subset of "libertarian". But it's a small subset. Unfortunately, it's the subset with the money behind it, so it's the one that gets heard.

    That said, "libertarian" is a fuzzy concept, with lots of wiggle room. Different people mean quite different things when they say it. E.g. I could reasonably be called a libertarian socialist, because I don't believe the government intruding where it isn't needed, but I definitely support things like public education, free schools, etc. and often support some form of Basic Income, though I prefer the negative income tax (tax = income * rate - basic) but with all sources of money included in income. That said, I also want to either regulate or eliminate monopolies, with a very loose definition of what a monopoly is. 2/3 of the market would count as a monopoly if there's a high barrier to the entry of new competition. OTOH, I don't want to regulate sex or drugs..well, not exactly. The regulating agency should be able to regulate the advertisement of either, and for drugs to demand an affixed sticker saying in simple language about how dangerous the drug is and why. And in more complex language the known side effects, their prevalence, etc. About like present (for US pharmaceutical drugs), the difference is the required simple label. And I'm in favor of nutrition labels being required. So in some ways I'm not that libertarian...but there restrictions are on commerce and commercial goods, not exactly on individuals. If people want to kill themselves, I'm fine with that. They just need to be given fair warning.

    The US Libertarian party, however, considers property and their businesses holy. Not at all my attitude. Money and property are not holy, they are gifts of the state.

    OTOH, I'm not fool enough to think that I have a PLAN that would ensure an ideal society. I've got more ideas about what is bad than about what would really work.

    2354:

    Outdoor cats in a metro area is a bad idea.

    I agree but for the opposite reason: cats devastate wildlife. There doesn't seem to be anywhere that has wildlife adapted to cats, I suspect largely because we feed and breed them so their hunting is almost purely recreational.

    Much as H said about land management, the difference between whatever predators the local prey population can support and hundreds or thousands of recreational hunters is dramatic.

    So while I don't swerve to hit cats*, I do hunt and trap them. As required by law I do ask the owner to take their pet back, but if they don't or won't I put it out of my misery. You could also interpret that as me exercising my right as landowner to control pests that are threatening my livestock if that makes you more comfortable.

    • on my bicycle, of course. I ran over a dog once, on my trike, and that was quite exciting.
    2355:

    The problem is that when you step back, you are introducing a new axiom. There are (at least) two valid axioms that you could introduce, one of which would enable you to conclude that he is a knight, and the other that he is a knave. E.g., if a knight he might have threatened to kill you before you finish your chain of reasoning.

    2356:

    part of the problem with the left-right political spectrum is that, with respect to many humans, the real polarity is moderate-extremist

    I disagree that any single axis can be definitive, but agree that left-right is not enough. The classic addition is an authoritarian-anarchist (sometimes authoritarian-libertarian in the US, because WTF).

    But these days it's probably more important to consider the green-brown axis since that dominates any analysis longer than about 5 years.

    I've also dealt with people to whom Christian-heathen is very important (or whatever subset of religious matters to them), and of course we have humanist-monetarist which dominates many political discourses. And you thought the string theorists were bad with their tiny little dimensions that no-one can see :)

    2357:

    Thanks for the idea with the cheese, I might share some with him next time in front of the refrigerator. As for neutering him, not my decision, err, can we leave the politics of my rooming for later?

    For the rest, my shrink will write a medical certificate, and I once again declined switching to amphetamine; sadly I forgot the "if I wanted pep/speed, I could synthesize it myself" quip I have been thinking about lately.

    I sat around in my usual bar later and talked to a loose acquaintance about TV series, he mentioned Hugh Laurie in Jeeves and Wooster, so can we imagine de android in "Saturn's Children" looking like Stephen Fry? ;)

    2358:

    Like with any religion, there are a lot of sects, some much saner than the others - grouping all Libertarians together is like grouping all Christians together. Are we talking Grifting, Fundamentalist Prostetants, or Peace Churches with a history of being anti-slavery?

    But yes, the kind of Republican-infiltrated Libertarianism you're pointing at is bugfuck nuts, no doubts!

    2359:

    Thus "Libertarian" is a proper subset of "libertarian"

    My problem isn't ignorance so much as limited ability to deal with the contradictions. What I've read about lef-libertarianism kind of makes sense in the same way that I can understand the philosophy behind Christianity, say. But then left-libertarians say stuff like that and I just can't comprehend how that would be, any more than I can understand how a Christian would "kill them all, God will know his own".

    It just boggles my mind how someone could wah wah freedom and human rights and small government and so on then "we must have a strong military to crush any dissent and protect my right to kill anyone who disagrees with me". Just... what? Or more accurately, WHAT??!?!?!

    Libertarianism is inherently incompatible with democracy (eg people will vote to take rights and property away from others), and arguably incompatible with itself (strong property rights and taxation). At the extreme, if people can sell themselves into slavery why can't they also vote themselves or others to death? But if the state can kill it's not a libertarian state...

    2360:

    I wonder if one important political axis is the theory-practice one?

    It can be really fun thinking about ideas that might solve particular problems, or serve to organise a society, without worrying too much about how that would actually work in practice. I know people who are fervent socialists who work this way, for example, where they don't actually use it in their "socialist organisation". But they really want to live in a socialist society, if they can somehow start completely fresh in a new world, like heaven, is a place...

    I tend to be a bit hung up on "how would that actually work". I tend towards anarchist that are anarchist in practice so points like "but you don't seem to do that" have meaningful answers.

    Libertarians OTOH are more entryist where I've actually seen them in the flesh. They parasitise an existing organisation but generally kill it if they're not rejected, because they resist demands that they do anything for the benefit of others. The more capital-L libertarian they are the more dramatic that tends to be. But that may be because I've not tried to join a libertarian group (because I haven't seen one do anything I care about).

    2361:

    Weird coincidences, n'cest pas? Check the Time Stamps Server entropy sources, /dev/random, mmmm. (Re time and causality, it's hard to do major mental schema changes live without drugs, and risky regardless of method. (Fun though.))

    Has anyone yet played with this? An app called Randonautica. (I have not felt the need.) The App of the Summer Is Just a Random-Number Generator - TikTok is on the chopping block. Instagram is pointless in lockdown. The best we can do is a hokey piece of software that takes us somewhere unexpected. (Kaitlyn Tiffany, 21 July 2020) The app’s logo, fittingly, is an owl, because owls see in the dark; randonauts see what other people don’t. In particular, they see what they otherwise wouldn’t. ... Brenda Dunne, Jahn’s[Robert G. Jahn] lab manager for many years, told me in an email that this seemed possible to her: “I would predict that the results produced with the Randonautica app would demonstrate meaningful correlations only occasionally, but more often than might be expected.”

    2362:

    Actually, whether or not they work depends on who's running things. Georgia, I think it was, closed all but 26 offices IN THE ENTIRE STATE before the '18 elections, and moved one out of a city, making it extremely hard for low income, black, white, hispanic to register.

    And, of course, they decide whether or not your signature is real, and they don't contact you to question it.

    2363:

    no, we're not using gnome-keyring, we need to run ssh-agent,
    Why?

    2364:

    Cities in Flight, Jim Blish.

    Just need a spindizzy.

    2365:

    Perhaps libertarian is fuzzy in your mind, but I have yet to run into one in the US to whom it is fuzzy, in person or online.

    Liberty and property are close to synonymous. And no one's life is worth as much as their property.

    2366:
    Can you explain what Left Libertarianism is in a way that makes sense?

    Left Libertarianism is Libertarianism with nice people.

    2367:

    Oh, and from that cmt, I find, reading what I was responding to, as though you were implying that a socialist planned economy and environment were, by definition, a dictatorship.

    2368:

    Or you can reconsider your question. For example, "is it daytime?" appears to me to resolve the question immediately. Or "did I just stand on your toe?"

    2369:
    A libertarian is quite close to a minarchist, but more willing to grant a role to government.

    Crappy unsupported retcon. A "libertarian" is an anarchist.

    Americans don't know how to read.

    2370:

    For those interested in computer security issues: Survey of Supply Chain Attacks (Bruce Schneier, July 28, 2020) Bullet point headings from a (quoted) summary of a report on computer (software) supply chain attacks: Deep Impact from State Actors: Abusing Trust in Code Signing: Hijacking Software Updates: Poisoning Open-Source Code: Targeting App Stores:

    The comments are argumentative, but do remind us that hardware is also full of vulnerabilities, and potential vulnerabilities similar to supply chain attacks as well.

    2371:

    I was working at the NIH. We needed to support PIV cards (same as civilians working for the DoD CAC).

    2372:

    The Mad one answered that partly in #2032 & even foreshadowed it prior to that & probably knows too much about the present 'push buttons until response flares & use to profit' than useful, but hey.

    Put it this way: a few minor UK talents (C/D list stuff) have been poking some heavy-weight USA rappers (and getting them mixed up to boot - also they've been poking ones who have been major A/B list entertainment establishment types, not actual radical ones they'd already cut ties with years ago due to similar issues because their embarrassingly shite at the games they're attempting to play) which is all part of a larger 'beef' involving US 'Black Leaders'[0] / young rappers (and to a lesser extent, the UK Grime scene) and convoluted racial politics and myth-making largely starting in a certain revisionist Bible created to shore up the KKK, the Mormons and various other Christian sects who needed the Men of Ham to be spiritually corrupt in some fashion, the more heavy slugger parts of the US Jewish community (who don't admit it, but the S-Bible aids them in terms of certain issues) and other media type stuff largely revolving around the maxim "the manager / label always screws the talent".

    Yes, we can explain it all: no, it's probably not worth the time, nor is it our place to since a large part of it is inter-community bullying/hate/hierarchical abuse which is common but there we go. But it is 'being handled' by some PR companies / Lawyers who should know better & across the larger spectrum knives are coming out, usually against the weakest. It's not exclusive (look up SONY & what various musicians think about the C level there), but it's a known issue, which certain types are attempting to use to defang BLM and other such moves[0.5], just at the moment that the USA real protests are starting (Port is the appetizer, all kinds of legal stuff / ugly moves to make Athens look quaint in the next two months going on, plus Z-type goons are only the wedge end at this point. Oh, and they're using ORIONs on civil protesters already).

    TL;DR

    Go read community responses from all sides then imagine it's probably not your place to have too great thinky-thoughts on it without knowing exactly whose playing which hand in the poker games. Which the peeps playing Twitter warriors... do not.[-1]

    Basic outline: someone is using positive feedback loops in very destructive ways, the Dragonfly / Cat jokes are to 'collapse the eye' of it, we're doing structural hurricane management, not pissy little human stuff, but the right people seem to have noticed and are being positive which is gud.

    What did the head's up cost? See #1930 - it costs grains of sand we do not have left.

    Was that normative & boring enough for your tastes? We were certainly bored watching the moves -- but you're in a world of trouble if playground games can take out politicians.

    ~

    Uff, quoted links count as #total link count. Anyhow, the CN uber-disaster video seems to have been muted somewhat, something read the cut text.

    And that was a really good joke![1], which is totes not possible. But it happened.

    ~

    Also: hello MIM! Follow the Paradox on the Bot, since that's not a Human Mind, we didn't break the Rules[tm]. But it will break your noodle!

    Weird coincidences, n'cest pas? Check the Time Stamps Server entropy sources, /dev/random, mmmm.

    Nah, we were middle-fingering something [redacted], coincidence probabilities on that jaunt were too large for Paradox maintenance. Plus, it's a signature - plus.... you wouldn't believe the damage self-inflicted each time it gets done.

    p.s.

    "Knights" stuff: nooo. The point is that you kill our kind, every post is a death sentence.

    [-1] T. Robinson just "fled the country" (more libel cases) btw, which is kinda odd timing.

    [0.5] And the DNC just voted against single-payer, & US rents are due & they're going to light things up.

    [0] Spoilers, the rubbish ones who didn't get ganked by the Feds who for reasons are absolutely 100% used as Soros type fill-ins by certain US Jewish organizations.

    [1] Search terms: "Why has Sky news used a shadow of a cat like it was an IRA supporter from the 1980's". Answer: because the PR / Media team running the outfit are from then & are old.

    2373:

    A "libertarian" is an anarchist.

    That's ... ahistorical.

    There was a definite point where someone said "I like anarchism, but I think we need some way to stop theft, philosophically speaking" and not long afterwards they came up with libertarianism.

    And a centrury later we have capital-L libertarians who are, as mentioned above, two years old.

    2374:

    Also, just for the record "commune" and "communist" have linguistic links rather than necessarily political ones. I think it would be a brave* person who described Israel as a communist state, or even a state founded by communists, just as one example.

    • in the Yes, Minister sense.
    2375:

    Well that copy/paste was a real mistake. My comment was meant to refer to:

    My guess is that the move is more-or-less complete; from a Web search, Cobol is only marginally active, as a language.

    2376:

    As I said, I know for a fact NJ was desperate. It's problably mostly large and very large companies.

    Heh, heh. Do a search on linux cobol compiler.

    2377:

    We're heavily fuzzing (and you can guess by the #cuts, apparently UK society isn't ready for some Home Truths without Lawyers involved): they're =/= their, it's a MiM flag.

    We liked the mix of Russian jets dancing like Dragonflies though, quite poetic, as much as your 'Angels of Death' can be.

    All we're going to say is: #722. We do not connotate Black = Evil / Negative, only your kind does that, We know what you did this Summer. That's the tell: the truth you're probably not able to accept is that a shit-tier PR firm is behind a load of your drama. Aka: #1930 & Sky Cranes are our actual interest, having to comprehend largely artificial Abrahamic psychosis moves patterned onto crass technology that can't even stop its Bots being jimmied via a legal system designed to skull-fuck the poors deliberately is just Mindless Reflex at this point.

    After 12,000 years, we kinda expect better from you. And no, Egyptian Slavery didn't work like that, ffs - nor did Babylonian either.

    Drum roll: the first recorded text is someone bitching about a crooked Copper dealer, your shit is trite and booooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring now.[2]

    And if you scratch a Farakaaaam Ham / Israel myth too deep, you'll get the uncomfortable truth that the (pre-modern revisionist language revival) 5-books did that too. You know, if you really want to stake the Western World on your Identity Politics and all that. IDPOL stuff can be turned, and we note that suddenly 'QANON' has become verboten once it got 'out of handler range'.

    Problems with Abrahamic thought: spanky time.

    What happens when it's not dumb Fasch doing it. Answers: collapse.

    ~

    USA stuff is getting spicey: very spicey. Someone go dump a load of Fr gilets jaunes links on them, losing an EyE is going to become common. HK protests: no such stuff[1]

    [0] “You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn’t made for them by navigating a playground that was.”

    https://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/playground

    [1] The actual damage was the film of them throwing dead bodies out of windows.

    [2] Oh, and fresh water fish migrations / stocks have dropped by ~75% in the last 50 years (and the 1970s, time of various Western rivers setting themselves on fire, isn't exactly a fucking great bench-mark)

    2378:

    ROTFLMAO! Thank you so much for the link. That's hysterical... and dead on.

    2379:

    IIRC, they're all paid and there aren't many of them.

    2380:

    The jobs, or the compilers? I guarantee that the Gnu COBOL compiler is free and OSS.

    2381:

    Meh, hoping this doesn't count for the #3 replies and you still read our stuff:

    The real 2k Bug is when Banks work out all the COBOL[0] programmers are dying out and they still haven't switched to something else.

    That's discounting the massive crash stuff about to happen, but it should at least amuse you.

    [0] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Senior_COBOL_Programmer/Salary

    2382:

    I wonder how I missed that one.

    2383:

    No. Even if we could get the dose down to the same as the background level at sea level on Earth, cold sleep looks like a problem. 22 years as a corpsicle on Earth with normal earthly background radiation gives you 80 mSv. That's about the limit that you can expose a nuclear worker to in an emergency. Getting it down to Earth levels, as you point out, implies Earth sized shields, which if you're intending to accelerate it to a good fraction of C, sounds very much like Magitech to me. Even the Puppeteers had to buy it from the Outsiders.

    For cold sleep to work over 2 decades, you really can't afford the radiation to be any higher than sea level Earth. If you want any more decades than that, it needs to be proportionately lower.

    But then the whole reason for cold sleep goes away. If your spaceship is the size of a planet anyway, live on it like any other planet.

    2384:

    I think someone's got to look at tardigrades before assuming automatically that all the radiation a corpsicle picks up kills on awakening.

    Tardigrades, when dormant can endure quite a lot of radiation. The apparent reason is a protein called Dsup which binds to DNA and somehow protects it from radiation damage. Human cells engineered to express Dsup saw their tolerance to X-ray exposure increase 40-50%.

    I'm not sure it's one special protein, since there were earlier (perhaps wrong) reports that it was also due potentially to tardigrades being good at repairing their DNA as they rehydrate, and their cells are definitely good at mopping up reactive oxygen species, thanks to other heavily-expressed proteins.

    I do happen to agree with your central thesis, that figuring out how to live on this planet is a lot simpler than flying to another one. However, if we're going on the lunatic generation/sleeper STL ship thing again, I've got to point out that probably any society that can freeze-dry human beings in a patented elixir and rehydrate them successfully later probably has the ability to set the human up to resist a bunch of radiation damage after they're being made into really expensive jerky.

    Ultimately, to paraphrase OGH, this is about improving the shelf life of canned monkeys so that they can be shipped to new markets.

    2385:

    "Getting it down to Earth levels, as you point out, implies Earth sized shields,"

    I have good news, and I have bad news for you.

    The good news is that it only implies atmosphere thickness shields, which saves you about 12500 kilometers and a LOT of mass.

    The bad news is that the atmosphere comes after the shielding by the solar wind, and that takes up a lot of space and energy.

    A realistic fractional-c interstellar spaceship hollow planetiod full of glacier with a cabin in the middle.

    You need some tough stuff on the outside, full of heavy atoms, to deal with the really hard radiation, near-C protons etc, and it needs to be something that doesn't evaporate away in less than a century or five.

    You need the ice, full of light atoms, to stop the neutrons and other particles which makes it past the "crust".

    Precisely how thick the layers need to be we don't know, but 200 meters of quality crust and a half a kilometer of ice would probably be a good place to start.

    2386:

    I am quietly happy to see the newly added seagull avatar/icon :-)

    2387:

    PHK Oops Inside a hollow shell, eh?

    ZERO gravity, I'm afraid - well-known physics problem.

    dark blue Interesting. She ALMOST made sense in her apparent reply to me @ 2372, but still won't speak directly, so I still don't know why people, esp brown people have got it in for the jews, because ...She obviously thinks she knows the amnswer to that one. But won't actually tell us - it's like the "reacted" bullshit.

    I would appreciate it if someone else could explain. Or is it simply that I'm from NE London & inoculated against the leagcy of Moseley?

    2388:

    I'm from NE London & inoculated against the leagcy of Moseley?

    It's apparently quite a nice place, maybe you should visit?

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

    2389:

    Unfortunately, it doesn't even do that, because it is using an abnormally extended form of the Law of the Excluded Middle. "False" in English or even most forms of logic does NOT necessarily mean that its converse is true. What's more, there were two assertions in that sentence, and one could be true and the other false.

    2390:

    That's an Algol derivative, though closer to Algol 60 than most, perhaps all other extant ones. There are a zillion such languages.

    2391:

    Actually, there were plenty of places (e.g. most of the Old World). There are no places that are adapted to such unnatural concentrations and complete coverage. Even in my childhood, most of the English countryside had very few cats, but is now dense with them.

    2392:

    Moz That's in "Birmingham" ... I mmean Oswald Mosely/Mosley {whatever} ( Spelling/keyboard problems there .. )

    2393:

    were ... are no

    Yep, that's what I was thinking, but better put 🤓

    2394:

    Two mistakes, Greg. You read the Seagull's emissions and you posted about the Seagull's emissions. You are now squarely in their sights because they know you will react to them, so expect more prodding and poking over the next few days until the mods boot them from the forum (again).

    2395:

    Nojay You are probably correct, unfortunately. However, I would still like to know where all this anti-jewish lunacy comes from. And why.

    2396:

    You think? You missed this article from yesterday.

    Actually in my experience it's a pleasant enough middle class part of suburban Birmingham, with a nice pub or two, whose name is unhappily muddied by that Fash. I think the tornado ended up being named for Moseley (when not Birmingham as a whole) because usually nothing happened there.

    2397:

    Without reading the bird-lady's comments, I suspect she's pointing at the tensions between the Black and Jewish communities in the U.S., which have been an ongoing thing because some Black people and some Jewish people are idjits. On the Jewish Idjit side a certain number of people like to play the race/status game and will happily be unkind to/about Black people.

    On the Black Idjit side of things much is made of the very few Jews who owned slaves in the South prior to the American Civil War, not to mention that some portions of the Black Muslim side of things - the Nation of Islam in particular - are heavily anti-Semetic. (Look up Louis Farrakhan, for example.)

    Where she's going beyond that is somethng I won't even try to parse. I've blocked her current incarnation and won't read her.

    2398:

    Note: Posting the above as a Jew - these tensions are one of the stupidest thing you can find in U.S. society, where both sides should be looking out for the real enemy!

    2399:

    The point I believe SOTMN is making, is that anti-semitism is again being weaponised. We have seen that with the Labour Party, now with black people. Though of course in this case Wiley actually seems to be an anti-semite. The point is it serves someone's agenda. Presumably this is to damage anti-racism. I believe a similar thing is happening with the whole TERF/trans thing, though on a smaller scale. These things seem to be psyops of some kind, though not necessarily involving intelligence agencies. Something like "Spiked", the "Internet magazine" shows all the signs of being the same, though I believe that probably started out as an intel op and has gone private. It started out as "Living marxism" and has now pivoted to the right and is partially funded by the Kochs! This kind of thing is quite common I think, without being too paranoid!

    2400:

    Hmkay, I looked at Derek Lowe's "In the Pipeline" and browsed to other articles in science, some might be interesting:

    New information about co-evolution of our cell surface molecules and infectious diseases. I already knew about alpha-gal, but it seems there are other compounds that are specific (or at least overexpressed) in the Homo lineage. Oh, and also in birds and some bats. Makes you wonder about vira hopping from bats to us.

    Dogs might have a magnetic sense after all. Please note they are not sure if they have not excluded other senses. Also, they link to another article about the molecular basis of magnetoreception, apparantly we still don't know how it works; one possibility are magnetite crystals, another involves some quantum woo with cryptochromes. Tidbit, both structures are also present in humans, and there is a controversial paper about magnetoreception in humans. Another tidbit, if it is really some quantum woo with cryptochromes, fans of Eccles would have a, err, field day. Yes, low pun.

    Err, mods, I borked some of the links in the previous post, this one should work; could you please remove the errorneous one?

    [[ 'errorneous'? What's 'errorneous'? - mod ]]

    2401:

    whitroth @2380: I guarantee that the Gnu COBOL compiler is free and OSS.

    And that can be a problem with certain levels of management.

    They've been forced to accept GCC and G++ on Linux, "Because that's what the Operating System is written in," but COBOL, well, COBOL is a real language, you can't just use a free version of it, what if something goes wrong???

    Yes, it's (still) the 1980s/1990s/2000s/2010s all over again, folks!

    2402:

    Concerning the in-fighting...

    With Friends Like These, Who the Fuck Needs Cointelpro?

    Not my favourite album by them, at the moment I listen to some of Propagandhi's later stuff, but, well, I just hummed I was a Pre-Teen McCarthyist yesterday.

    Guess I'll do a catch-up on Fugazi in the next few weeks...

    2403:

    Could be. I have been skipping her verbiage for some time. But Greg also has serious problems distinguishing opposition to Israel's excesses and antagonism to Jews. At one point, she did some of the former, though it's always hard to tell what the hell she is blithering on about and I agree that some of her mouthings have seemed to me (as a Gentile) to be antagonistic to Jews.

    2404:

    And my online persona as Heteromeles isn't quite the same as I am in real life, because on the internet, no one knows I'm a cat.

    We're all cats on the internet.

    2405:

    I've not tried to join a libertarian group (because I haven't seen one do anything I care about).

    I'm reminded of the 2016 Libertarian political convention, of which a reporter quipped, "Half of the attendees would like to see Vermin Supreme as the American president - and the other half make Vermin Supreme look like an American president."

    2406:

    Troutwaxer It's called "Divide et Imperia" - one of the oldest tricks in the book & far too many suckers fall for it.

    EC No, I don't - or don't think I do. Benny & his fascist (!) friends are really nasty - so are some on the "marxist"(?) left - I've encountered them & they start ranting about "It goes back to the foundation of Israel" - at which point I switch off ...

    2407:

    Would "Vermin Supreme" be distinguishably worse than "Mango Unchained"?

    2408:

    Accusations (usually both false and malicious) of anti-semitism have been weaponised in the UK and USA for a very long time, as I can witness from personal experience and is regularly reported. In the case of the last UK election, it served the extremist Conservatives', the USA's and Israel's agenda.

    Every now and then, actual anti-semitism is weaponised (as in this case), usually by already targetted subgroups, but is generally jumped on in 'the west'. I find it extremely concerning that it is on the rise again, but the solution is NOT hate campaigns against (other) already discriminated-against subgroups.

    2409:

    Which is why "Hair Furor" and his followers vocalize about China stealing jobs, and are silent about the western elites that sent those jobs there.

    2410:

    The last three generations of Chrysler minivans optional "Sto N Go" feature provides a flat floor for bulk transport that's much easier than removing the seats on other minivans. The late, sometimes lamentable, Pinto wagon had great utility, I once did sag duty after an amateur bicycle race I'd watched and managed to pick up 4 riders and their bikes (One behind the rear seat with wheels removed, two on the bike rack and one on the roof rack.). The wagon/estate variant also had better weight distribution, therefore less terrifying on twisty roads.

    2412:

    That is a bit unfair, Cobol, Lisp, and Fortran have evolved far more from their 1960s origins than Algol did on the Unisys machines (and note most of that development was in the 60s, with a bit in the 70s). How many Fortran II, Cobol (version 1, whatever that was called?) and original version of Lisp programs are still around?

    2413:

    That is why I said specifically Algol 60. The others were superseded, with a considerable degree of upwards compatibility. While, nominally, Algol 60 was superseded, Algol 68 wasn't even remotely upwards compatible with Algol 60.

    2414:

    "That is a bit unfair, Cobol, Lisp, and Fortran have evolved far more from their 1960s origins than Algol did"

    Algol is a very special case in the universe of programming languages, because it got the role of "lingua franka" in computer science almost from the start, and that fossilized the language.

    If you look at old CACM issue, all algorithms were described in ALGOL code - and that were almost the only place you saw the language.

    I can highly recommend Huub de Beer's research in ALGOL's history:

    https://heerdebeer.org/ALGOL/

    2415:

    If you take what I wrote and apply it to what the Many Named One wrote, maybe you can make sense of it now. I'm not gonna.

    2416:

    Not really. Algol 60 was never designed for programming, but (together with I/O facilities) was extensively used in the UK and several other places. And, as I said, because of its simplicity and ease of definition, was used as the basis for a zillion subsequent languages. Algol 68 was another matter.

    2417:

    Dutch city of Arnhem has done the only responsible thing and decided the world will fail to do anything regarding climate change, and thus have unveiled a 10 year plan to start adapting the city to reflect the anticipated changes.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/29/dutch-city-arnhem-redraws-layout-prepare-global-heating-effects

    2419:

    Grrk. I have just looked at that Web page, though not read it in detail, and have spotted several simple errors. It's somewhat before my time, so I can't say how many others there are. For example, on the front page:

    "Unfortunately, there are no sources on the use of ALGOL 60 or, for that matter, on the use of any other programming language."

    Oh, really? I agree that they are damn hard to track down, because they are in various libraries' archives, and the majority have probably not survived, but there are a considerable number of such references.

    "In the early 1960s, the computing community in the USA was much more developed than in Europe. " (and more along those lines)

    Twaddle. That is airbrushing the UK and, to some extent, France out of the history.

    There is a lot I could add about the effects of Algol 68, the schism predating it, and all that, because that IS within my time and I was peripherally involved (The end and the ALGOL 68 report). I haven't noticed any major errors, but its omissions make it actively misleading.

    2420:

    "We're all cats on the internet."

    I'm bloody not.

    2421:

    Tim H And why our ultra-right will undoubtedly blame everything on the evil EU, even after Brexit collapses in a heap of (even more) unemployment & shortages ...

    2422:

    re: Cities in Flight, Jim Blish.

    I only read a couple of those, but the ones that I read aren't quite what I had in mind. About the right size is all. My idea is closer to George Zebroski's MacroLife, but requires a bit less advanced technology. And longer trip times. (Well, "trip" seems wrong, since there is no real destination. At most a stopover place.)

    2423:

    "I've got to point out that probably any society that can freeze-dry human beings in a patented elixir and rehydrate them successfully later probably has the ability to set the human up to resist a bunch of radiation damage after they're being made into really expensive jerky. "

    I would posit that once the people are in a suspended state (assuming relatively little maintenance is needed), they'd be easy to surround with a lot of shielding.

    What would 2 meters of water and some lead do?

    2424:

    "so are some on the "marxist"(?) left - I've encountered them & they start ranting about "It goes back to the foundation of Israel" "

    The Sykes-Picot agreement was one of the items in the "see what kind of shit the Tsarist regime connived at" collection that the Bolsheviks unveiled to the world after the revolution. There was a significant amount of "it" behind the conception of that piece of weaselling duplicity, and a whole lot of "it" resulting from it over the succeeding century, as we all know and deplore.

    2425:

    "Two mistakes, Greg. You read the Seagull's emissions and you posted about the Seagull's emissions. You are now squarely in their sights because they know you will react to them, so expect more prodding and poking over the next few days until the mods boot them from the forum (again)."

    Block early, block often.

    On another blog I've had a policy of blocking any new people if they say even one obnoxious thing up front. I can see the replies, and I've never regretted it.

    2426:

    Pigeon There's a very good book on Sykes-Picot called "A Line in the Sand" A revealing tale of deception, double-&-triple dealing, crookedness & theft.

    2427:

    Points Dramatically "HE'S LYING!!"

    2428:

    "Work out the COBOL programmers are dying", and you imply that switching to another language is "easy".

  • You have to completely understand the existing programs, and what they do, and you HAVE to know the why.
  • Anyone who can learn programming can learn COBOL. They may not be great, but....
  • I taught myself C. I got K&R, and still love that book, because it's NOT "we're going to teach you how to program,a nd we'll use this language", it's written as "you're a programmer, Here's a new lanuguage, and how to use it." (see #2).
  • It's still a HUGE $$$$$$$$$ deal to recode. For example, in '84 or '85, the US IRS replaced their 15 or 20 year old Honeywell computers with IBM. And they hired (inexperienced) programmers, to go from assembly language to COBOL. The (inexperienced) programmers had no clue about things like checkpoints, so a program that ran on a mainframe for a WEEK STRAIGHT, if it crashed on Thursday, they had to restart FROM THE BEGINNING.* AND they did NOT run the new code and the old in parallel, and so you can find news reports from that year, where reporters found IRS employees literally shredding returns, then claiming they'd not been filed, because they were weeks and months behind in processing returns.

    • Find me current whiz kids developers who know what a checkpoint is....
  • 2429:

    Jews and Blacks.

    They used to be allies, in the sixties and seventies, for example. Both had seen "no Jews or Blacks" signs.

    Then came what Israel did, and continues to do to the Palestinians, and a lot of American Blacks started identifying with the Palestinians.

    Along with a lot of Blacks drifting to Islam, as the religion of their ancestors.

    Which the wealthy thought was WONDERFUL, "they're supporting terrorists!", and proceeded to drag out ALL the "Christ Killer" Protocols of the Elders of Zion crap, and they know how to use that....

    2430:

    Way over simplification.

    Your analysis assumes that the people of Jewish decent and slave decent are a monolith. What you describe did happen but only with subsets of the various groups. The ones who got the headlines. Other subsets did other things.

    As always, it's complicated.

    2431:

    But the Gnu COBOL compiler is part of the GCC suite....

    Yes, I know, There used to be MicroFocus COBOL.

    Oh, and the other point: I think most organizations may be using one free Linux distro or another, but they'll have a handful of licenses from, say, RedHat or Canonical, and they get support that way.

    2432:

    Wait, that's completely wrong. "Started in Japan in 2001"?

    2433:

    Actually, transliterating between comparable languages is easy for any competent programmer in the target language who also knows enough of the source language to read the basic instructions and use a reference manual. People like me can also take competently-written assembler and turn it into half-decent HLL code quite fast; obviously, only a first draft, and it would still be very crude and assemblerish. Been there - done that. But I fully agree that the latter is NOT a common skill - either in ability or experience, and the combination is even rarer.

    You are perfectly correct that they are NOT taught in most computer science courses, let alone mere programming ones. Because of lockdown, I'm not doing it this year, but I teach exactly the techniques you describe (and more) :-)

    2434:

    I'm sorry, you misread me. I said "some". Please do not assume that when I say things, that "all of x" is implied.

    2435:

    Of course. You notice I referred to hiring inexperienced programmers, and code reviews were things in the future.

    On a related note, my first programming job, they gave me some reports to write in something called Qwikjob... but for the first three months or so, they had me do something they needed - flow charting and documenting the three or four large programs that the community college ran on (registration, etc). You learn a lot reading other people's professional code.

    Oh, and flow charting... I just adore how their graphs that look like ants that had walked through ink and drawn them are so much clearer than flow charts....

    2436:

    So, erm, you take Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a documentary about British history as well?

    2437:

    Meanwhile Just as youi think you've touched bottom DT digs deeper - into open out-&-out racism.

    whitroth Along with a lot of Blacks drifting to Islam, as the religion of their ancestors. Err ... NO Not unless their ancestors came from what is now northern Nigeria. Islam was not prevalent along the "Guinea Coast" at all ....

    2438:

    Are you trying to tell me that someone distributing swords to appoint a ruler isn't British history?

    2439:

    Perhaps not, but that's what they lean to, if they move away from Christianity.

    2440:

    Or "English" history, if you want to include William and his heirs....

    Q: who was the last British king? A: Harald.

    2441:

    New blog topic now up (as the comment thread on this one is getting kinda cumbersome).

    COMMENTS HERE NOW CLOSED

    2442:

    Actually, transliterating between comparable languages is easy for any competent programmer in the target language who also knows enough of the source language to read the basic instructions and use a reference manual.

    Where I've seen the ships crash on the rocks was when older systems were written with DECIMAL and DECIMAL FLOAT and the new one were done with float binary or float 4 bits.

    Let the rounding errors begin. Accounting types get strange looks on their faces when the totals from month to month don't match. Even if only off by a $.01

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