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Because I am bored ...

While Bitcoin was originally proposed as a currency, it has most of the attributes of a commodity bubble, including a huge halo of swindlers and scam artists working to exploit it. It's also horribly energy-inefficient and contributes to the current global semiconductor shortage, neither of which are desirable. Even worse: attempts at fixing Bitcoin mostly revolve around tweaking the "proof of work" required to add a transaction to the blockchain. Currently, BtC and relatives are computation-intensive. Other paradigms exist, including the new fad for Chiacoin, currently big in China, which is storage intensive — this is what happens when the designer of Bittorrent brings his own personal obsessions to bear on the problem of manufacturing scarcity, and if you want to upgrade your SSD or hard drive in the near future you'd better get right to it before this catches on.

(And about NFTs, the less said the better. Grift, 100% grift, and exploitation of artists as well. Oh, and it appears to be mostly used for money laundering. So fuck off and die if you own any, and especially if you thought pirating some of my work and turning it into NFTs would be a good way to milk the gullible.)

However, these aren't the only options.

It occurs to me that if you want a blockchain secured by scarcity and diminishing returns, you might consider other options that don't totally fuck our lived environment and that can't be gamed trivially by, say, running Chiacoin (the storage-space coin protocol) as part of the burn-in for new consumer grade drives your employer has you shoving in racks at Amazon S3 or maybe Arsebook. (Who totally have a first-mover advantage on that brain-damaged currency in the "phone my customer account manager at Western Digital, tell him I want another ten million terabytes of non-shingled platters" stakes.)

For example, to Elon Musk, a modest proposal:

Hork up a bunch of space probes going somewhere of interest to JPL or NASA or ESA, as both a tax write-off and an apology to the international astronomical community whose night skies you just vandalized with Starlink. Order, say, a dozen. For energy where they're going and for what's coming next they're definitely going to need RTGs, but you're not as fussy about maximum launch weight as the US government (you have Falcon Heavy and, soon, Starship to launch them with) so you can order up something running on, say, Strontium-90: it'll be heavier, but who cares. You're also going to use some of the power from it to run ion rockets for positioning and slow long-term acceleration (hint: Starlink uses ion propulsion for station keeping/reboost: presumably SpaceX have got quite a bit of experience with this tech by now).

So, you kindly donated a couple of dozen probes to Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, and the rest of the gang (and the dwarf planet wonks are ecstatic).

But you're not going to be using much bandwidth for sending back data, most of the time. So what to do with those radio transmitters you just kicked out at something above solar escape velocity?

Code signing, that's what you do.

Each probe has a dedicated crypto processor and a very VERY private key. It receives a constant uplink from the ground, and replies by signing and echoing back to Earth the blockchain transactions it receives. The further away from Earth it gets, the longer the delay. Also, the higher demand for the currency rises, the longer the delay to get your transaction into the queue for uplink and signing via the big dishes. You might be able to make an end run around the queue by bribing someone, but gambits based on building hardware are going to run into the wee problem that Deep Space Tracking Networks aren't off-the-shelf commodities and even if they were, you couldn't force the receding space probe to listen to your transmitter and reply (presumably the uplink is secured by the coin owner's own PKI system).

Upshot: it's a cryptocoin system with a big up-front setup cost (as in, billions), which is good (it deters low-end me-too systems), guaranteed scarcity of signing resources, and absolutely no advantage accruing to anyone buying up earthly power or material resources. So it shouldn't drive scarcity in hard disks/GPUs or unreasonable power demands. Flip side: there's a centralized chokepoint (the deep space network) that can be throttled by governments. But some might see this as an advantage ...

PS: my preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography: totally illegal, possession a strict liability offense, choke off interoperability with real currencies at the credit agency/bank interchange level, and make them useless for non-criminals, at which point only criminals will bother with them. And India is going down this route. Let's hope other governments follow suit rapidly and we can say goodbye to this Trump-grade lunatical grift before it degrades our lived environment any more.

PPS: I despise libertarianism. Just in case you were wondering ...

1202 Comments

1:

It's unfortunate that a coin that enforces scarcity by being mined only on Itanium hardware isn't feasible.

2:

You know, treating space probes as a tax write off isn't a bad idea, probably better than spending it on a $500 million Yacht (although not as good as investing in malaria vaccines). Or if you want to really annoy people, charge $1500 for each image you send back. The probe would be able to pay for itself pretty quickly (particularly if you had say, other instruments that scientists could use in the journey to the Outer Planets).

3:

Another horrible part about Bitcoin is how it poisoned what was a burgeoning decentralized tech space a decade ago. There's useful exploration to be done, various proposals and projects; variants on digital LETS, Chaumian cash, etc.

Now the whole space is consumed by the Bitcoin paperclip optimising machine.

4:

BTW, how would people know that (a) the probe is actually in space, rather than in Taklamakan or something, and/or (b) that a copy of the private key doesn't also exist on Earth?

5:

Yes, I know that is off-topic, but it is the first remotely plausible way that I have heard of to sell the turkey that was the Itanic. Congratulations.

6:

I don't have any suggestions but, for a long time now, I have been saying that we need to abolish Money - not as a token of exchange, but as a tradeable commodity. In other words, I entirely agree, but doubt that the UK or USA will start down that direction in our lifetimes. See also Piketty!

7:

How can you abolish money-as-a-commodity when all transactions for anything are simply trading one commodity for another? The only difference that money has is that it's a highly standardized commodity with a (generally) well-known value for your next transaction. It has fungibility, whereas accepting x bushels of wheat and y kW-h of electricity for your paycheck has very low fungibility.

By its very nature, money is a commodity.

8:

Does your PS even work though? Surely one of the supposed advantages of these things is that they are, or can be, robust against that kind of adversity, and the principal effect would merely be to cause people to devise new variants which maximise that robustness. And it seems to me that they already are useless as currencies because of the reasons in your first sentence - you can't depend on them to simply pay for things because in the time between you converting real money into crapto and you spending the crapto its equivalence with real money might have shrunk by a few orders of magnitude, so they are only any use to people who want to use them for playing silly games where that kind of behaviour is an actual advantage. To knock the legs out from under the silly games crew seems to me an aim which depends on global cooperation, and in practice will sooner or later run up against problems of the nature of "if you can't trade with any organisation that handles crapto you can't trade with China, oops".

Also, I would be very unhappy about the "strict liability" thing. I'm already unhappy that you can get an automatic five years for some criminal chucking away a gun into your garden when you didn't even know it was there; but the opportunities for that to happen are extremely rare, whereas crapto artists using unsuspecting website visitors' browsers to play their silly games in javascript is already an established problem. Similarly, it would vastly increase the ease of doing that to someone deliberately because you didn't like them, and make that possibility much more readily available than is the case when it requires a physical gun.

The real problem is not that people can play silly games with crapto, it's that they can play silly games with anything. Tulips, for instance; or a nation's membership of the EU. One could argue that at least with crapto the effects are largely confined to a more or less isolated domain that normal people don't have to care about, and the effects that do leak out, such as energy consumption, are probably less damaging overall than the unconfined effects of playing silly games with normal people's stuff in the conventional manner; so if they have that option available to devote their attention to instead of to the conventional options, it may restrict the real damage they can do. This is probably debatable enough to be argued over inconclusively until the cows come home, but it's sadly also more realistic than the preferable solution of eliminating the possibility of playing any silly games with anything.

9:

BTW, how would people know that (a) the probe is actually in space

There's more than one deep space tracking network: I'm pretty sure the Russian and Chinese ones would be willing to sell you some observation time (at a price).

10:

By its very nature, money is a commodity.

No it isn't: when money stops moving it has no value, much like the current in a copper wire goes away when the electrons stop moving.

The best metaphor for money (disclaimer: all metaphors are approximations at best, that break down in edge conditions) is that money is a current flow like electricity, not a substance like coal. (You can burn coal in a power plant and generate electricity, but ...)

Hence, incidentally, the lethality of liquidity crises in macroeconomics. The money is still present in the system in theory but it ain't flowing, and when it stops flowing, all economic exchanges mediated by money grind to a rapid halt.

11:

To knock the legs out from under the silly games crew seems to me an aim which depends on global cooperation, and in practice will sooner or later run up against problems of the nature of "if you can't trade with any organisation that handles crapto you can't trade with China, oops".

Apply that argument to child pornography, or heroin. I think you'll find that most countries, most of the time, taking a highly negative view of these commodities have successfully driven them way underground. They still exist but they're largely excluded from the general economy, the kiddie porn in particular (it's something that doesn't appeal to most people). In particular, China is fairly cooperative on persecuting drug smugglers and, as far as I know, child rapists.

crapto artists using unsuspecting website visitors' browsers to play their silly games in javascript

Problem goes away with strict liability: the BtC miner javascript malware comes via ad exchangers which are going to suddenly pay attention to what they're serving up if it results in the FBI/SOCA breaking down their doors and hauling them off in chains.

12:

I think all economists will disagree with you :

Textbook definitions normally list the following three properties of money:

- A medium of exchange - A unit of account - A store of value

I however agree that money should not be hoarded too much, as it damage the economy.

13:

Agreed about fiat money. Commodity money does exist. That was the first version of a coin, a stamped weight of silver or gold where the king who ordered the stamping was theoretically guaranteeing that said lump was the correct weight. Many of the subsequent features on coins were designed to keep people from scraping and scamming on the weight, until we got to fiat money, where the best way to avoid resource scams was to get rid of the resource and keep the value guarantee. Incidentally, the Aztecs, who ran with cacao bean money, also had to deal with scammers making fake cacao beans out of avocado skins and pebbles.

Anyway, the one problem I don't think you raised with the deep space signing system is that satellites are routinely designed and operated by people reprogramming them from Earth, to deal with bit rot, unexpected situations, etc. I'm not sure that having a computer that needs to be remotely reprogrammed to do part of its job is the best place to put a cryptocurrency signer...

14:

Actually, I had the Bright Idea for an alternative: someone creates a transparent cryptocurrency creator that people can use to quickly set up Local Exchange Trading Systems. The transparency part is that the encryption system for the blockchain running the LETS needs to be robust against state or big company hacks, which means AIUI that it's got to sit out there and get bashed on regularly so that everybody is reasonably confident that it's not worth hacking.

A bit of googling turns up that some block chain-head already thought of it, but it hasn't caught on. Yet.

Still, I'd love to see a killer LETS app that allows people to use LETS readily enough to make them worth something outside college towns and similar. A big part of the proof of work is time currency, where both the contractor and the client agree that the work was done, and can register it on the blockchain.

Hell, here's another one: a blockchain carbon registry, where the demonstration that the greenhouse gases are out of the air counts as a plus in the blockchain, while the re-emission of said GHGs counts as a deficit. The problem here is that carbon offsets are hugely problematic. In my limited experience, the data are easy to fake or hack, because it's far more profitable not to care. The blockchain guaranteeing the record is the easy part. The hard part is making sure that the data going in both accurately reflect reality and are resistant enough to the vagaries of politics that people can trust them at some level. But it's to dream of us getting serious about climate change and not just dicking around to make money off it.

15:

apology to the international astronomical community whose night skies you just vandalized with Starlink

If you think Starlink's been bad, just wait for Kuiper and OneWeb!

That said, Musk is the most likely of the three to both want to do this sort of thing and actually make it happen. He's certainly been doing enough damage with crapto (Thanks, Pigeon!) already.

16:

How about Solarcoin. Coins guaranteed to be generated with solar energy (or wind.) Once the bubble bursts the solarcoin facilities get added to the grid.

17:

Came across this yesterday: a private equity firm bought an idle power plant for the sole purpose of driving its entire output to powering data centers to grinding Bitcoin.

It doesn't sell any power to the external market, so it's largely unregulated by the state as a power plant. It makes it a Conservative ideal of externalizing costs (pollution: air and hot water plumes) and internalizing profits.

Last year, February '20 to '21, it mined 1200 Bitcoin at a cost of just under $2900 a coin.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-firm-revives-zombie-fossil-fuel-power-plant-to-mine-bitcoin/

18:

The first two categories are the original use of money, though (once coins had been invented), it was used as a STORE of value and, to a letter extent, value that could be rented out.

However, what large amounts of it are now used for is a commodity that can be speculated on and, in various ways, money owners can use it to create money with nothing behind it, thus devaluing the money owned by other people. It is those actions which cause most of the harm, but those properties are most definitely NOT required for its primary purpose.

As OGH said in #10, the only benefit money provides to society is when it is moving. This is not a new observation. What I am saying is that we need to block its abuses, which have started to dominate its actual uses - and Ecurrency would be a good place to start.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/05/muck/

19:

Charlie NFT ?? Uh?

Pigeon CORRECT "Strict Liability" for ANYTHING AT ALL is a really bad move ... There will always be something that slips through the cracks & some poor innocent schmuck will get jailed & ruined through no fault of their own.

P.S. I still can't get my head round how "Bitcoin" actually works, probably because I know it's a scam, so it "can't be worth it" ... or something like that.

20:

NFT ?? Uh? It stands for New Formation of Technoshit, where people wrapped an old idea ("I'll sell you London Bridge") in new technospeak. It has two uses: fleecing rubes and laundering money.

P.S. I still can't get my head round how "Bitcoin" actually works, probably because I know it's a scam, so it "can't be worth it" ... or something like that. The basic theory is simply that a thing is worth what people it is, so if you make something scarce that people want, it will be considered valuable. Bitcoin has designed-in scarcity due to how it works, and people started wanting it because it "is the future of currency", "evades government surveillance", showed up in a bunch of paid or unpaid ads, etc. It's a bubble / pyramid scheme, just with enough techno-wizardry to keep popping back up.

21:

Greg, NFTs are Non-Fungible Tokens.

Essentially a blockchain-notarized certificate of uniqueness/ownership of a digital asset such as an animated GIF of a nodding dog. At vast expense and environmental damage.

The new hotness in cryptocurrency circles, circa March 2021.

22:

The original idea of NFTs was that artists should be able to prove ownership of their digital art, as such art is frequently stolen and the artist is then not compensated. This would have been a useful thing, but the scum-element of the finance community turned it to shit very quickly.*

  • Yes, they're all dangerous greedheads, but some of them are much scummier than others.
23:

Y'know, Charlie, your proposal starts to sound like in-(solar-)system slow money.

24:

Ah, so here's a way to fix things: tax money that is stored (in a bank, etc), or if it's not being used in a certain amount of time for goods or services (and financial services are explicitly excluded).

25:

Ah, so here's a way to fix things: tax money that is stored (in a bank, etc), or if it's not being used in a certain amount of time for goods or services (and financial services are explicitly excluded).

Sorry, interest does get taxed. For the rest of it, check out Scrips, especially stamp scrips. They're systems to get money moving faster within a community, by instituting a use-it-or-lose-it feature. One common form we see now are gift cards.

Actually, "blockchain scrips" is one of those match made in heaven/hell/??? ideas that might be worth exploring, in a science fictional way. Can blockchains be used as a way to get money to circulate within a system faster? I have no idea, but it's backasswords enough that it might conceivably be useful.

26:

Our host: when money stops moving it has no value, much like the current in a copper wire goes away when the electrons stop moving. Michel2Bec: I think all economists will disagree with you...[one property of money is] a store of value.

Since the water is already muddy I'll jump in with both feet and splash around. I think Charlie's point was that money isn't a commodity, and in support of that notes that its value vanishes if it's not moving. Michel2Bec's counterargument is, I think, that "all economists" say that in order for something to be money it must act as a "store of value," implying that money can stop moving and yet retain value.

Re the need for "movement" and use of money as "store of value," I would suggest that its value isn't dependent on whether or not the money is actually presently engaged in a transaction, but rather, it is dependent on society's general expectation that dollars will continue to be useful for exchange in the future.

So I can store value by hoarding dollars, but only so long as there is a large pool of people willing to accept dollars later. And people will only be willing to accept dollars if they believe that they will be able to use the dollars themselves for their own future transactions.

So I think the movement metaphor is not quite precise, though it's a common one. Value of money comes from the expectation of ability to use the money for future exchanges. In that sense it is the societal expectation of movement, rather than the actual movement, that determines present value of money. If the issuing government collapses, or if there is a general fear that it will or might collapse, the value of the money will decrease rapidly (inflation).

Re "commodity," there's already abundant literature demonstrating that money is not per se a commodity. See chartalism, modern monetary theory, functional finance, etc. Money can be treated as a commodity certainly, and people may behave as if it were one, but to say that money "is" a commodity is not true. Money can be linked to a commodity by the issuer decreeing that the money will always be exchanged by the issuer for X quantity of Y commodity. For example, the United States Treasury could say that it will always provide one ounce of gold in exchange for $1,000. Or it could be fiat money, like the U.S. Dollar currently: the U.S. Treasury makes no promises that it will provide any actual commodity in exchange for dollars.

Combining the two to state the obvious--a commodity that isn't money can still be a store of value. "Value" is slippery and there is a huge distinction between value coming from an immediate practical use versus value coming from a socially-designated importance. Wheat in a silo is a commodity, and a money/currency can be issued by an entity backing it by that wheat. If other people won't accept the money then the money has no value even if it's theoretically backed by the wheat. The money's value is solely determined by social construction, not by the commodity itself. The wheat's value, in contrast, is more than social construction.

27:

Rabidchaos I'd worked out the designed-in-scarcity aspect of Bitcoin, that's easy. I said I don't understand how it works ( The Blockchain, if you will )

"NFT" Euw ....

whitroth and if people are deliberately saving stuff up for a big purchase or particularly swish holiday, before they die, or .... Agree that, "usually" money is only really useful if it's circulating. But there is a difference between Hoarding & Saving ... with a very thin & probably wobbly dividing line.

By the way ALL money is "fiat" money - even in the "good old days" Gold was still fiat money - it wa worth what people decided it was worth. I think, perhaps we need to re-read ( Or in my case read for the first time ) : Graeber

28:

The only non-awful cryptocurrency I've seen so far is Filecoin, which uses "proof of space-time", really proof of file storage. Not just using up storage space arbitrarily, but storing files for other people. The files get stored in some kind of munged up way that allows relatively inexpensive proof of "yes I still have the whole file" at any time.

29:

As I have pointed out before, that sort of thing has been tried before and it does not work; all it does is cause truly epic evasion and (as Greg says) harms the innocent. A much more radical solution is needed.

I can think of some things that would help, a bit, but even they are WAY more radical than mere variations on what we already have.

30:

I still don't understand what bitcoin is supposed to do and what it purpose it serves THAT IS NOT A SCAM ???. Everything I read about bitcoin takes me back to that old WC Fields quote, "You can't cheat an honest man."

31:

whitroth @ 24: Ah, so here's a way to fix things: tax money that is stored (in a bank, etc), or if it's not being used in a certain amount of time for goods or services (and financial services are explicitly excluded).

What are you going to do about low-income/low-wealth people who have a savings account against the proverbial "rainy day"?

Just tax away their life savings?

32:

I think that Bitcoin and NFTs were originally Not Intended to be scams. The utility of an artist being able to prove that they were the originator of a piece of art is obvious. The utility of a unique identifiable piece of digital currency is also obvious.

But they've both become scams. Bitcoin (and similar currencies) became scams over time. By the time NFTs arrived they were instantly co-opted as scams. The process by which these things have become scams, and the lack of governmental regulation allowing them to become so scammy... I'm not sure whether they say something about our current systems of government or about the character of current human-beings, or both, but they don't say anything good.

As for OGH's scheme above - someone would find a way to make it into a scam just about instantly if it ever came into being.

But I have an idea by which we might all become rich. I've invented the idea of "Blogcoin." It's produced by Charlie and all of his merry men/women writing and commenting on this blog. The proof of work product is yet another discussion of why Libertarians suck or how canned apes are easy/hard to ship, and what's wrong with Brexit, how Tories/Republicans are arseholes, how religion sucks, or content free but verifiable-by-writing-style posts from She of Many Names. Every secondary post on the thread is hashed with the hashes of every preceding post, and the original post by Charlie or one of his guests provides the initial hash for a given series of Blogcoin.

It will make millions for all of us, and I think we should start the project right away.

Praise "Bob."

33:

If the probe only signs things it's told to sign by the 'owner', then I don't think this is very different from just trusting certain people/organisations to sign blocks of transactions for you (proof of authority - enterprise ethereum, and some others do this).

It is true that a seriously distant probe can be used instead of proof of work though - the original blockchain paper envisaged it as a 'time stamp server', and you could have a system including blocks into a merkle root at each point in time, sending the hash to the probe and the probe then publicly broadcasting the signed root back to earth, which would then be fed into the next block, would work like a timestamp server - showing X probe-hash returns since a return that included the hash of the data proves in a publicly verifiable way that you had the data at a specific time which is the key property. There's still an enormous amount of trust that Elon didn't keep a sneaky copy of the private key himself.

All of this while fun, doesn't seem to be anywhere near as efficient as Proof of Stake however. And I'm much less negative on blockchain technologies (at least ones that don't use Proof of Work), because our financial systems are games the elite play with each other, and it's super hard to break into them. All the new blockchain based systems allow bedroom programmers access to electronic scarcity without gatekeepers, something that they didn't have before. I think there's opportunity for people to use this approach to solve the big problems facing humanity, which are mainly collective action problems.

34:

I'll just say that NFTs remind me of Yves Klein's Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle

35:

Personally I don't care if people want to buy strings of numbers. What I hate is the fossil fuel burned to find them.

So maybe just set a minimum price per kWh for mining. Say 5 dollars. (or actually set the price for all electricity at 5 dollars, and provide discounts if you're not mining coins) If you use grid power you have to have a separate meter. If you're not paying it's treated just like any other electricity theft, like bridging the meter. The laws are all there already.

We should already have a carbon emission tax (obviously) and that takes care of people who build their own FF power station. If you want to build a renewable power plant, knock yourself out. As Troutwaxer suggested, when the bubble bursts, it's a good thing, plus it adds to the demand for solar, which as the Germans demonstrated, improves efficiency of supply.

36:

Actually, what I wonder is whether the work for cryptocurrency is something that can be sped up by quantum computing. If so, spend those Coins sooner rather than later.

In any case, I agree that getting the carbon footprint down is critical.

37:

Or Moore's law, or a really good Assembly programmer, or a better algorithm... and so on.

Goldman Sachs creating a crypto-currency desk is really all you need to know to see where it's going. Create a form of current Goldman Sachs fights against and I'm all in!

38:

JBS @ 31 Which describes me (retired) exactly .....

Actually None of us should be bored. Today's "Queen's Speech" was, quite frankly - terrifying. Individually, some parts might have made sense - but - taken together, even I can see that they are definitive steps towards establishing fascism, or, at the "best" fascism-lite in this country: [ Crapping on the Courts, not being able to challenge the guvmint, not being able to challenge the Home Office' incompetence, requiring ID, stamping on peaceful protest, etc ... ] And, of course the Shires "think" it will never, ever apply to them don't they? It's those awful elite lefties ( like me! ) who live in the big cities, who "deserve" it. Niemöller strikes again

39:

@27, @29, @31:

JEZUZ H. Christ, standing on a streetcorner, wearing a lime-green leisure suit, eatin' a watermelon an' spittin' out the seeds!!!!!!!!!!

WTF is wrong with all of you? You're giving me the bullshit of the white wing, "oh, socialism means I get half your cow".

Why would you even begin to think that it would hit, say, bank accounts that are (in the US) insured by the US... which is under $250k? Have you ever read me suggesting a thing that would attack the 95%?

Tax would START at the 2021 equivalent of, say, $500k, and get high the higher the account.

40:

Have you considered actually tweeting this at Musk? I feel like he's done crazier things lately; he might just take you up on it.

41:

So? My point stands. As I say, I remember such things in the UK. No, I am not arguing against higher taxes (and I already pay 40% on some of my income) to increase public funds from those who can afford it most, but against the much-disproved but still-believed myth (dogma?) that taxation is an effective way to solve abuses or extreme discrepancies. It isn't.

42:

Your proposal to ban cryptocurrency might run into 2 problems, 1 big 1 little.

  • China. I don't know the extent to which the new Chinese currency is a cryptocurrency, but any ban would have to have an exemption for that project.

  • You'll hear countless stories about how the ban is hurting Venezuelans. The crypto folks in the US are still using that as a plus point. But this brings about the bigger problem: drug cartels, North Korea, and Mafias have learned how useful a cryptocurrency can be used to launder money. I wonder if it's even possible to put THAT genie back in the bottle?

  • 43:

    Re: 'Money can be treated as a commodity certainly, and people may behave as if it were one, but to say that money "is" a commodity is not true.'

    Suggest you look at the GDP contributions from the Financial Sector for pretty well any of the G20s.

    Money is THE commodity!

    44:
    Local Exchange Trading Systems. ... A bit of googling turns up that some block chain-head already thought of it, but it hasn't caught on. Yet.

    The most prominent of these, the timeline goes the other way: he started with a digital LETS, then several years later pivoted away, reusing the name and directing most of his attention to the new project(s). The LETS project was semi-abandoned, although it stayed running for existing users and even shows signs of recent activity now.

    Still, I'd love to see a killer LETS app that allows people to use LETS readily enough to make them worth something outside college towns and similar.

    Same. As someone wrote on twitter, "imagine what could have been done with the time, media coverage, and hardware that's been pumped into this set of pyramid schemes"

    45:

    I've been considering of building a small web service where you would put an URL (well, any relatively short string), and it'd calculate a digital signature for a hash of that URL. I'd like to put on a Paypal button or something to make it be a business. This would be an art project for basically doing the same thing as NFTs, just not using blockchain or too many resources on doing basically the same thing.

    I'd use my own certificate authority, and have a database saving all signatures. Perhaps it could even have a mechanism for checking if a certain string has been signed already and fail to sign the same thing again.

    Of course the users would be completely on my mercy on keeping the CA on-line and having the database. Also there'd be no way to check if the URL being signed belongs to the signer. However, that's the case with NFTs, they just use more smoke and mirrors and blockchain to seem more respectable.

    This'd need some serious throttling and limiting, though - if I went public with this, some asshole would try to crash it and drive up my hosting costs.

    46:

    Charlie @ 11: Apply that argument to child pornography, or heroin. I think you'll find that most countries, most of the time, taking a highly negative view of these commodities have successfully driven them way underground. They still exist but they're largely excluded from the general economy...

    Not really on illegal drugs. The illegal drug trade in the UK in 2007 was estimated by the Home Office (actually some consultants they hired) at between £4e9 and £6.6e9 per year. That was between 0.13% and 0.22% of GDP. During the financial collapse the following year it is believed that some banks were effectively rescued by drug money because it was the only liquid finance available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade#Profits

    Large banks are routinely being fined for money laundering. They seem to regard it as a cost of doing business. Drug money is certainly not excluded from the general economy.

    47:

    Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 45: I've been considering of building a small web service where you would put an URL (well, any relatively short string), and it'd calculate a digital signature for a hash of that URL.

    It already exists; https://www.globalsign.com/en/timestamp-service

    One application is digital code signing. If you get an installation file for a Windows program it is probably digitally signed, because if a signature is not present Windows puts up dire warnings about malware. Code signing certificates come with an expiry date, so the code has to be countersigned by a digital timestamping service to prove that the code was created before the certificate expired.

    If you get a Windows installer you can check for the signatures by right-clicking on the file. Look for the "Digital Signatures" tab. Drill down into the signature and look for counter-signers. There is a short list of these that Windows is set up to trust.

    48:

    It's likely not news here, but not all cryptocurrencies are equal in intent. I do see the 'pure "monetary" store' coins (eg. bitcoin) as being extremely damaging without redemption ('blockchain tech' is nothing new), but the "smart contract" ilk provide something new and genuinely useful: distributed, (broadly) trustless, conditional exchange.

    I can encode the ownership of my home in a contract (using local law), then issue a conditional exchange ("Alex will own the contract to my home, if they have transferred X money into this account before Y date"). Where, today, ESCROW uses their business reputation as collateral for ensuring such an exchange is honest, a future with (environmentally sound) smart contract cryptocurrencies allows this to happen using the collateral of "the cash staked by all entities who have offered equal or greater amounts to make not lying in their mathematical validation of such exchanges financially undesirable".

    ESCROW which (can be) more trustworthy than human-run equivalents and can operate at any distance or (lack of) connectivity; a domain-name system which doesn't depend upon central ownership and management, and can work across the stars; these are the kinds of things that give me hope enough to let me wade through the collosal shitstorm that is NFTs, GPU farms and similar horrors.

    49:

    I may have mentioned this before, but if so then its dropped off my account history. So...

    The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp by R.A. Radford is worth reading. Radford was captured by the Germans in WW2 and watched his fellow prisoners with an economists eye. He saw that a gift economy rapidly gave way to barter, and then to the use of cigarettes as currency. Prisoners who spoke both Polish and English were able to arbitrage goods and services between the British and Polish prisoners. Eventually a paper currency was established backed by tins of bully beef (I suspect Radford may have had a hand in this, although he doesn't claim credit).

    People who want to abolish money or banks (generally on the Left), or fractional reserve banking (generally on the Libertarian Right), or whatever other part of the modern economy they don't like, never seem to explain what is going to stop people from simply reinventing it.

    A case in point: back before the Reformation the charging of interest ("usury") was outlawed because Jesus said so, so loan contracts were disguised as commodity futures contracts with payment up front and delivery in one year. The commodity was never intended to be delivered (and the delivery terms and price were written to make sure of that), but the contracts also had penalty clauses for non-delivery along the lines of "the amount I have paid, plus 10% penalty". The "penalty" was the interest on the loan.

    50:

    Heteromeles @ 14: I'd love to see a killer LETS app that allows people to use LETS readily enough to make them worth something outside college towns and similar.

    In a way, that was how things worked a couple of hundred years ago. "Money" meant gold or silver coins minted by the Royal Mint or other national authority. But carrying large amounts of money was difficult and dangerous; £100 in silver coins weighed 100 pounds because that was the definition of a pound. So banks invented "notes"; what today we would call "bearer bonds". A bank would take your £100 in silver and give you 100 notes, each of which said "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of £1, signed, The Trumpton Bank". As long as you trusted the Trumpton Bank you would be willing to take these notes instead of the real money. But fifty miles away in Borcester the Trumpton Bank was an unknown quantity, so their notes traded, if at all, at a discount. Your best bet would be to take them to the Borsetshire Bank and change them for local notes or specie (at a smaller discount) because the Borcester Bank made it their business to know whether the Trumpton Bank was sound and what it's bank notes looked like.

    Of course this decentralised system invited fraud and counterfeiting. Part 3 of The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling has an entertaining history of the American version. Eventually the system was centralised; only the central banks were allowed to issue notes, they became much harder to counterfeit, and that is where modern fiat money comes from.

    But getting back to modern LETS, having them used more widely would actually defeat the purpose of LETS. The point of a LETS is to introduce extra liquidity into a local economy which doesn't have enough (see the Capitol Hill Babysitting Circle for a story about lack of liquidity). If the liquidity can spread through the national economy then the impact is the same as if the national bank just printed some extra money.

    Another story; in Guernsey in 1822 the local government ("The States") wanted to build a big market building. Rather than borrow the money to pay for it, they printed the extra money (Guernsey issues its own pound notes to this day) and over the following years ceremonially burned some bank notes each year until they had destroyed the same amount of money they had originally printed.

    51:

    The point is that our legal and social systems developed such controls to limit the abuses of money, in the ways that it was used before modern telecommunications. But the latter (and secondarily automatic computation) meant that new abuses were developed, but we have not developed mechanisms to control them properly.

    The limited controls that have been created are primarily there to ensure that only the 'proper' people can take advantage of them (see a recent case in the USA where an outsider did so, causing a furore). Worse, the mechanisms and controls have the effect of fuelling galloping monetarism, which is catastrophic for the planet and society.

    Ecurrency is another new mechanism, and has brought its own, new abuses - but with, so far, inadequate controls.

    52:

    Paul AIUI, "islamic" banking uses an almost identical fraud to cover their arses

    53:
    Large banks are routinely being fined for money laundering. They seem to regard it as a cost of doing business. Drug money is certainly not excluded from the general economy.

    Nobody wealthy actually cares about money.

    Instead they do care a lot about one thing that money cannot buy for them: Time. That is why they never go to prison, they simply cannot afford it. It is literally cheaper for them to pay off entire countries to make the laws and legal systems so that they don't have to go to jail!

    The key concern with the drugs is keeping the wrong sort from entering the billionaire set with the money they made from the drugs trade.

    54:

    EC @ 51: I'm not sure exactly which bit of my posts you are replying to, but it sounds like a very rose-tinted view of economic history.

    Greg @ 52: AIUI the Islamic sharia banking thing is a bit more complicated. Unlike the Catholic church the Islamic world does not recognise any central religious authority; every mufti (islamic jurist) is assumed to know the Koran and related material, and hence to be competent to make judgements ("fatwas"). Every institution offering financial products to muslims has to appoint a Shariah Board to keep its products halal. Some muftis appointed to these boards seem willing to take a broader view of what is halal when the money is right.

    55:

    From another blog (original poster was tagged Robert Pearson)...

    The 2 main forms of money we use currently are credit money and currency. Credit money is an IOU from a bank that promises to deliver to the holder, on demand, currency. And currency, issued by the state, is a promise to reduce a debt to the state (usually a tax liability) by an equal amount.

    Money in the form of a pure physical asset or commodity has rarely been successful. Successful monies tend to be financial instruments – IOUs.

    Dogecoin and other crypto assets are not financial instruments. There is no issuer that creates his own liability, or promises to do something at some point for the holder. They are, in effect, virtual physical assets (if that makes sense), valued or ascribed a worth in the same way as other physical assets such as art, commodities etc.

    56:

    But getting back to modern LETS, having them used more widely would actually defeat the purpose of LETS. The point of a LETS is to introduce extra liquidity into a local economy which doesn't have enough (see the Capitol Hill Babysitting Circle for a story about lack of liquidity). If the liquidity can spread through the national economy then the impact is the same as if the national bank just printed some extra money.

    Thanks for clarifying that, because I was unclear. I actually meant the situation you described previously--larger numbers of local currencies with a reasonable level of fraud protection.

    Your points about local fraud and trust are extremely well taken. The converse problem is what we have now, with a few people getting enormously rich off of exporting wealth out of communities that can't defend it, impoverishing them and forcing them to downsize. I'm interested in finding ways to keep community trade a bit more within the community. To me, that's the purpose of a well-running LETS, to get people helping each other more through transactional relationships. As you point out, it's very far from a perfect solution, but it might serve as a counterbalance to having billionaires who have more resources that the bottom hundred countries on the planet. Arguably, the political side effects of having a few score billionaires running the US GOP, the UK, Russia, the House of Saud, and China are increasingly untenable for the other seven billion people on this planet.

    57:

    PS: my preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography

    A ridiculous equivocation. Will any computing process that relates to one-way hashing be considered illegal? Does it only become an illegal computation when someone else wants the result? Or is it only when there's a distinct value exchange? And what constitutes an 'exchange' exactly? Do you want mandated code in compilers to ban this sick filth? Or PSUs that determine suspicious cache activity? What if a decentralised crypto currency is the only support a political dissident or citizen journalist can rely on?

    I'm no fan of crypto currencies, and in their current form they fail by most definitions of a working currency, but you're falling into the same trap that all reactionaries do when new things are scary. You might as well declare a war on $thing, where $thing is something in a long list of notable successes like: 'drugs', 'poverty', 'terrorism', etc. It's a concept that's here to stay. To mangle an aphorism: the internet will interpret restrictions as damage and route around any attempt to regulate it.

    58:

    Will any computing process that relates to one-way hashing be considered illegal? Won't that make most forms of codes and cyphers, including one-time pads, illegal?

    59:

    From what I understand of Musk, he'd call it CentauriCoin and launch a probe that would outlive humanity. But it strikes me that he's ideally placed to farm Bitcoin, Doge, whatever, much closer to home. If energy and processing power are the two requirements, he's now got a mass production pipeline and a reliable launch platform for pumping small coin-mining platforms into a place where the energy never runs out, at a relatively low cost. Starship will only make the process faster and cheaper. It may even be possible for the tens of thousands of Starlink satellites to mine bitcoin in the background. He did say that Starlink would pay for the Mars project. He didn't say how.

    60:

    They can take my hash tables from my cold, dead hands. And they'll never catch up with them anyway because they are O(1).

    61:

    It would have been a nice idea.

    For example, on my authorial website, and my fecebook page, in the header, one of the two pictures is one by the (DAMN IT!!!) late Robin wood, who was a friend of mine. In the nav-bar, I have an explicit statement that she personally gave me the right to use it, and that it may not be copied.

    Having some kind of token would be great for limited edition prints that are digital.

    62:

    The problem is that trying to regulate starts to trying to regulate everything... and then you might as well have public control of all businesses, except for small ones.

    Which, in fact, is not something I have huge issues with.

    63:

    Which reminds me of the ultimate American business that I came up with in the eighties or nineties: I sell artistic stock certificates. There is no product or service (no costs), so that the only employee is the CEO (me, so pre-downsized), I print them on a nice color printer (pre-amortized), and if any buyer wants to sell them to someone else, I get a cut (10%? 25%?) of the sale price.

    64:

    There is an answer to that: stop pretending that being a corporation, only the corporation is guilty. I mean, did this huge building grow arms, and decide to launder money?

    No. CEOs, company presidents, and the appropriate exec - CFO, for example, for money laundering - need to go to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200M, for 10 years, and are banned from ever working in the industry ever again.

    JAIL time.

    65:

    It may even be possible for the tens of thousands of Starlink satellites to mine bitcoin in the background. Not bitcoin. The bitcoin network is currently using about 16.5 GW. (Divide by oh say 250 watts per square meter to get solar panel area.) https://cbeci.org/ (There are other estimates, most roughly similar) My back of the envelope calc (hopefully slightly better than a Fermi estimate, but the arithmetic is easy to check) is about 25 human lives per day for a gigawatt coal plant, roughly 400 per day for bitcoin (if all coal, which it is not) at current rates and climbing rapidly. (Assuming RCP6 levels of fossil carbon in the atmosphere, and that the net will be a 50 percent reduction in human global population. some notes here.)

    Re the proposal, it might be better if signing key generation were done once the probe was a ways out, say 10s of millions of kilometers. Initial key would be used to identify the probe itself. Could get fancier, e.g. with multiple independently supplied hardware RNG generators contributing, with multiple independently supplied hardware instances combining key bits with voting, and perhaps multiple independent signing hardware implementations. (A lot more analysis and design required. :-)

    66:

    If you're looking for crypto that isn't bad for the environment, proof of stake exists. Those kinds of cryptos, unlike proof of work ones like bitcoin, don't guzzle electricity like a hog. Ethereum, the second biggest crypto around, is in the process of transitioning to that model.

    67:

    @Crack The Safe (26)

    That's the general idea.

    In fact, money should not be a commodity:

    One of the reason why gold was eventually selected over previous other kind of primitive money (ox-pelt-shapen bronze or iron ingots for example) is that it is basically useless for anything else; too soft to be useful for anything but oh shiny display stuff.

    If money is a commodity, using for example these ingots to make something useful is intrinsically deflationary and deflation was as bad then as it is now.

    I also vaguely remembered that a roman emperor created a financial crisis by "restoring the state coffers" and here it is:

    https://themillionhistory.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-first-financial-crisis-rome-in-33-ad.html

    Tiberius was initially as idiotic as the German dominated BCE.

    Money supply should closely track the state of the economy, and as deflation is much worse than inflation, and precisely measuring the state of the economy is still currently out of our grasp, it's better to be somewhat inflationary (with the added side benefit of undercutting hoarders, forcing them to invest, hopefully in something useful).

    Gold bugs are dangerous morons, bitcoin (designed to be deflationary) is not only environmentally criminal, but also economically deeply stupid.

    68:

    @Ederly Cynic

    When money is no more a store of value, you should get rid of it as fast as possible for anything else that has value.

    It's called hyperinflation.

    69:

    They are, in effect, virtual physical assets (if that makes sense),

    Yes: bitcoin in particular seems to have been designed by somebody who mistook "money" for "commodity (precious metal) struck into coins", in other words, a gold bug. (And let's not get started on the inherent deflation built into the blockchain.)

    70:

    I think you misunderstand. The way the post I replied to was written, the possession of any form of one-way algorithm, including hashing tables, one-way pads, bytecoin mining software etc would be illegal as I read the OP.

    71:

    I've seen that claimed as a feature, because the effort required to "mine" (or quarry, or compute) bitcoin rises roughly as an exponent of the number of bitcoin already mined.

    72:

    So, you kindly donated a couple of dozen probes to Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, and the rest of the gang (and the dwarf planet wonks are ecstatic).

    Though scientific knowledge is valuable in its own right, how about kick starting space industry. Use what you've learned about automated tunneling from your Boring company, Elon, and put it to work - on Mercury.

    Mine out Mercury to create a Dyson Swarm of solar power satellites.

    Given Mercury's total mass, that is 70% metals and 30% silicates (almost like the core of a larger planet), and assuming that only 50% of the metals (35% of the total mass) is recoverable through mining operations (done by robots digging tunnels through the planet lie a giant anti-hill):

    3.30E+23 kg total 2.31E+23 70% kg metals 1.16E+23 50% kg recoverable

    Further assume that each SPS is a simple, easy to construct, rugged solar collector, essentially a giant mirror concentrating sunlight on a power generator instead of fancy-pants photo-voltaic cells (which wear out in a few decades anyways), and conservatively assuming that the a mid range material density is equivalent to steel (though many metals will be used in construction) , and for the sake of long term rugged durability the mirrors are 1 cm thick - they can cover a sphere with a surface area 237 time greater than the surface of the sun:

    8.00E+03 kg / m^3 density of steel 1.44E+19 m^3 total volume of metal 1.44E+21 m^2 mirror surface area at 1 cm thick

    6.09E+12 km^2 surface area of the Sun 6.09E+18 m^2 surface area of the Sun 237x the area of the sun

    Assuming I didn't do a bone headed math mistake, that is amazing.

    Put the SPS swarms in orbit at the same distance from the Sun as Mercury and their mirror area can cover 3.4% of the orbital sphere

    5.79E+07 km radius orbit 4.21E+16 km^2 area of sphere 4.21E+22 m^2 area of sphere 0.034

    The Sun generates 3.8E+26 j/sec. Assuming that we can capture 3.4% of that and the entire energy producing process is only 50% efficient:

    3.80E+26 J / sec 1.20E+34 J / year 2.05E+32 J / year recoverable

    Currently, Humanity uses 4,00E+20 j/year of energy. A Dyson swarm as described can increase that by a factor of 500 BILLION:

    4.00E+20 J / year current Human energy use 513,700,653,207 x

    Then again, blocking out about 3% of the sunlight reaching earth could trigger another ice age.

    It's going to need one heck of an environmental impact statement.

    But it beats a useless colony on Mars.

    73:

    Troutwaxer @ 32: Praise "Bob."

    Howard? Or Dobbs?

    74:

    whitroth @ 39: @27, @29, @31:

    JEZUZ H. Christ, standing on a streetcorner, wearing a lime-green leisure suit, eatin' a watermelon an' spittin' out the seeds!!!!!!!!!!

    WTF is wrong with all of you? You're giving me the bullshit of the white wing, "oh, socialism means I get half your cow".

    Why would you even begin to think that it would hit, say, bank accounts that are (in the US) insured by the US... which is under $250k? Have you ever read me suggesting a thing that would attack the 95%?

    Tax would START at the 2021 equivalent of, say, $500k, and get high the higher the account.

    Go back and read what you actually wrote and don't blame us for taking you at your word and not knowing what you meant instead. If you meant to exclude some minimum, you should have written that in the first place.

    PS: Do you know what "Structured Transactions" are?

    PPS: Fuck you and your casual "white wing" racism! Scheisskopf!!!

    75:

    A ridiculous equivocation. Will any computing process that relates to one-way hashing be considered illegal?

    This is your YELLOW CARD for whataboutism/sealioning.

    Read the moderation policy. If you do it again, your comments will be unpublished and you will be banned.

    76:

    whitroth @ 63: Which reminds me of the ultimate American business that I came up with in the eighties or nineties: I sell artistic stock certificates. There is no product or service (no costs), so that the only employee is the CEO (me, so pre-downsized), I print them on a nice color printer (pre-amortized), and if any buyer wants to sell them to someone else, I get a cut (10%? 25%?) of the sale price.

    My sister is/was a big fan of the game Monopoly. I once tried to find stock certificates for the four Monopoly railroads. I was going to frame them along with a Monopoly game board for her birthday. The plan fell apart when I found out that only three of the railroads had actually existed & I wasn't able to forge a certificate for the fourth one.

    Actually, it just hadn't occurred to me to forge such a certificate to make the set complete, although at the time I hadn't yet started using Photoshop.

    77:

    Definitely Dobbs. He is my ShorDurPerSav.

    78:

    Little peer moderation here... I think that whitroth's post is certainly capable of being misinterpreted, but I've read some of hia fiction and we've discussed his politics privately a little, and I can guarantee that for all the unfortunate phrasing he certainly didn't mean it the way you interpreted it. I think you two should apologize to each other and maybe ask if one of the real moderators can remove the offensive language, or maybe substitute "apple" for offensive fruit in whitroth's post.

    I'll note for the record that in all the time I've been here, under both my real name and my nym that I've never seen a thread get ugly as quickly as this one has. Maybe everyone should calm the f--k down a little and realize that this is only one more debate on cryptocurrencies* and the stakes aren't actually that high.

    So everyone take a chill-pill... Duuuuude!

    • Personally, I think that both Cryptocurrenies and NFTs were invented in good faith. So was the idea that someone could buy stocks with borrowed money in 1929... But good faith isn't enough to overcome a poorly thought-out commodity, and those without good faith are making a sub-optimal situation much, much worse than it has to be.
    79:

    King's Cross, Marylebone, Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street are the names of 4 real London railway terminii! Although not also the names of companies which owned said stations.

    80:

    Troutwaxer @ 78: Little peer moderation here... I think that whitroth's post is certainly capable of being misinterpreted, but I've read some of hia fiction and we've discussed his politics privately a little, and I can guarantee that for all the unfortunate phrasing he certainly didn't mean it the way you interpreted it. I think you two should apologize to each other and maybe ask if one of the real moderators can remove the offensive language, or maybe substitute "apple" for offensive fruit in whitroth's post.

    Not my job to figure out what he really means when he posts something. I can only respond to what he writes.

    He shouldn't have got on my shit about it.

    81:

    "blocking out about 3% of the sunlight reaching earth could trigger another ice age"

    If you're collecting over 3%, and assuming efficiency of 50%, then that means you're sending over 1% of the sun's radiative output to Earth. Which then has to be reradiated out from earth as waste heat. Since the surface area of earth is less than 1% that of the sun, in order to radiate more than 1% of the sun's energy it would need to be hotter than the sun.

    I don't think triggering another ice age would be much of a worry.

    That's unless you're using all the energy in space. To mine bitcoin?

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

    82:

    paws4thot @ 79: King's Cross, Marylebone, Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street are the names of 4 real London railway terminii! Although not also the names of companies which owned said stations.

    Since we're in the U.S. I was looking for the certificates from companies that had actually served Atlantic City, NJ as represented on the game board. But just out of curiosity, could you find printed stock certificates for the stations represented on the U.K. game board?

    83:

    Money as commodity: President Coolidge speaking of the 1920's stock market boom -- "After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world." It's only gotten more so, without the producing and investing parts. It's the buying and selling of money that is The business.

    In the old south slaves functioned as money, as well as credit, as they literally were embodied units of value. From the moment they were born they increased the owner's credit by $50, and incrementally every year of their lives, until they were no longer able to reproduce and their ability to labor unceasingly began to fall off. Their bodies within the contained credit economy of the south, which had neither specie nor currency, slaves were the ultimate form of value, which could be used to pay off gambling debts or almost anything. But only within the south. One could not exchange a slave for a carriage at a New York carriage factory.

    This is why with Abolition the south suddenly had no financial assets at all. Except land, which was valueless w/o labor, so hey yay the KKK to the rescue, followed by buddy, Jimmy Crow.

    84:

    Upshot: it's a cryptocoin system with a big up-front setup cost (as in, billions), which is good (it deters low-end me-too systems), guaranteed scarcity of signing resources, and absolutely no advantage accruing to anyone buying up earthly power or material resources. So it shouldn't drive scarcity in hard disks/GPUs or unreasonable power demands. Flip side: there's a centralized chokepoint (the deep space network) that can be throttled by governments. But some might see this as an advantage ...

    I fail to see how it differs in any way from ordinary fiat money. Or was that the point?

    85:

    bought an idle power plant for the sole purpose of driving its entire output to powering data centers to grinding Bitcoin.

    That can easily be generalised, and solar forums regularly get people asking for advice on building their own private solar powered crapto mining setup. The answer is that it's hard, but doable, with the primary requirement being careful choice of battery and experimentation to get the right throttling rates as solar input changes (it's an MPPT optimisation problem where the variable is mining rate, which drives power consumption, which is determined by power availability. AFAIK no COTS option).

    Which means that banning mining, or trying to charge miners a high rate for electricity, would just make those private power plants even more profitable. But I suppose at least solar panels are easier to spot than cannabis plants.

    86:

    Relevant to this thread[1], a shift in Tesla's public position re Bitcoin:

    Tesla & Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/YSswJmVZhP

    — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2021

    The text is in an image, and it says (typed by hand from the image): Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel. Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment. Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy. We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin's energy/transaction.

    Interesting move...

    [1] That tweet was "Wed, 12 May 2021 22:06:14 GMT" (using https://oduwsdl.github.io/tweetedat/ - useful tool if one is using a VPN and/or Tor )

    87:

    How does proof of stake work? There are assertions that proof of stake based coins trivialize the power consumption issue. I didn't see an obvious flaw.

    Seems easier than satellites.

    For digital currencies, I don't hate them intrinsically. They do appreciably simplify small financial transactions internationally and provide a relatively low cost swap into a currency not tied to a central bank that is liable go into hyperinflation. That's good for moderately poor people, as wealthy people can keep wealth in property.

    Bitcoin.... Big energy waster. Deflationary.

    Probably well structured, though I hate to admit it, to get adoption.

    But, overall, a lousy implementation. Just not a great currency.

    88:

    Who invented the term "fiat money? Wikipedia is strangely silent on this.

    89:

    Interesting question. Here's a usage of "Fiat Money" (Cato Institute) from 1982: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa017.pdf

    90:

    The term "fiat money" may have been first used in 1876: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fiat%20money

    The concept goes back to 11th Century China, as does hyperinflation by printing too much paper cash.

    91:

    Better yet, limit cryptocurrency mining to space w/ solar power. Keith Lofstrom's http://server-sky.com points the way to moving computation into orbit, a most reasonable proposal.

    92:

    Michel2Bec and as deflation is much worse than inflation, NO I remember a year where we had between 20 & 25% inflation in a year ( About 1972? ) ... and then there was the inflation in Germany in the 1920's or Venezuela right now. Try again?

    Charlie @ 69 Is the no way of simply crashing Bitcoin, permanently? Surely governments couild do something, since it's so obviously harmful?

    @ 76 At the risk of getting a warning myself .. what's the problem? Probably a complete lack of understanding by me? What's the problem or alternatively "value" of one way hashtags? Can someone explain, as I'm lost.

    Troutwaxer Disagree on one point .. I think cryptocurrencies are a massive scam ( As Charlie says - "Gold Bug" ) - I don't know enough about NFT's

    Paws All owned by the (real) LNER, which realised that using only their names on the Monopoly board would be good free advertising.

    Moz "The government of $Country simply enacts: "The posession of &/or mining of any cryptocurrency carries a proportional fine in $Real_Money of a minimum of £10 000 per unit ... " Would it work?

    kiloseven NAH Just trash the whole rotten system

    93:

    Cryptocurrencies are certainly a massive scam NOW. I think the people who invented them had some relatively benign ideals... I think it's a case of doing one thing that has a relatively benign inspiration, then a second thing which had a relatively benign inspiration, and so on, then discovering that you've built a badly planned piece of crap - and then sighing "Oh well, I might as well get rich."

    94:

    Heteromeles @ 90 Bill Arnold @ 89

    Thank you! Wikipedia has a long page defining the concept but it does not say when the term first appeared and who might have invented the term.

    95:

    think the people who invented them had some relatively benign ideals.

    Most people who invent "big ideas" tend to be shocked when they see how the greedy / power hungry latch on and use said idea to further their own goals.

    "But that's not what I intended ..."

    96:

    No, because they were (and are) not companies.

    97:

    and as deflation is much worse than inflation, NO

    Actually yes. But hyper either way beats non hyper either way.

    There are a lot of stats in the US (and I assume elsewhere) about periods of deflation. The economy was terrible and many people lost everything. Most of this happened over 100 years ago in the US. And in the US the 1930s are so far off the charts to make it hard to analyze in comparison to other times.

    98:

    I fail to see how it differs in any way from ordinary fiat money. Or was that the point?

    Well, yes.

    "Ordinary fiat money" has been finely tuned to function as money usefully over a period of millennia. Cryptocurrencies are barely a decade old at this point. I suspect if they eventually settle down into a stable currency (ahem: NOT a so-called "stablecoin") they'll exhibit most, if not all, of the attributes of fiat currency, because those attributes are what makes money useful.

    99:

    I have by my arm a packet of banknotes, of various denominations of one particular currency.

    The smallest is 5,000 The largest is 500,000,000,000

    That's 8 orders of magnitude, for the Serbian Dinar, all from 1993.

    100:

    Greg, we have no lived experience of severe deflation in our lifetimes, but reading the history books, we're talking mass starvation events. Inflation is usually driven by an overheated economy (exceptions: the central bank is running the presses until they smoke, as in Weimar Germany, when they tried to pay off the Versailles war debt in a hurry and cratered the real economy as a side-effect). Plenty of food, just problems matching supply and demand. In deflation, there is no money: investors get a bigger return by stuffing it under the bed than by investing in buying stuff (including the raw materials factories run on). But workers still need to eat, so there are pay cuts and layoffs, and then starvation, as the price of a loaf of bread stays the same or even rises (the bakers have little or no cash to buy flour with, etc) but the ordinary folks took a huge pay cut and can't afford it.

    No, really, the only reason you think inflation is worse than deflation is because you've only lived through one of them.

    101:

    If you read Satoshi Nakamoto's original rants, the guy was a paranoid goldbug and libertarian who despised governments and wanted to make it impossible for them to raise revenue via taxation (which he thought was their main source of funding, rather than bonds).

    Bitcoin was designed on the basis of a whole shitload of weird misunderstandings of macroeconomics, with a side-order of Ayn Rand on top. And it has a baked-in agenda. As Karl Schroeder observed, technology is not value-neutral, it always comes with political strings attached. If you want automobiles, you end up with drink-driving laws, drivers licenses, and often jaywalking laws. Similarly, bitcoin was designed to promote bugfuck libertarian goldbuggery, with the physical metal replaced by a virtual commodity.

    102:

    Somewhere around here I have two Zimbabwe 500,000 dollar notes. They have expiration dates on them. (Long since past.)

    I guess that made it easier to redefine the money and not have to deal with adding 3 to 6 zeros every year.

    103:

    Charlie @100 (Greg @96) :

    Yes, and we sort of have working recipes how to get out of excessive inflation.

    But to get out of the 1929 deflation, nothing worked, even the new deal was not really enough. We needed a world war and a lot of rebuilding after. Not a sane risk to take.

    104:

    Charlie @ 100/101 I can see how severe deflation would be really bad ... incidentally, didn't we have deflation, here, 1932-6, which was not a good time? Agree re.Nakamoto being a goldbug, so the whole thing has "evil intent" And should therefore be stopped, yesterday(!) [ Even without the GW effects of overheating cough the power-stations. ] So, why are governments not doing anything about it?

    105:

    Charlie Stross @ 101

    Thank you. This make things a bit clearer.

    106:

    Yes. But we still haven't dealt with the problems caused by fast communications and (later) automated trading, which supercharged various long-standing abuses related to speculation. The former is over half a century old, and the latter about half that.

    107:

    incidentally, didn't we have deflation, here, 1932-6, which was not a good time?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#United_Kingdom

    108:

    then that means you're sending over 1% of the sun's radiative output to Earth

    Not really, a man like Elon should be thinking big - really, really big, so only a tiny fraction would be beamed as energy to Earth with the rest going to power space industry and mining operations.

    There's a recently developed process from extracting and making carbon nanofiber (stronger than steel and used to build everything from tennis racquets to 747s) from atmospheric CO2.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33998697

    Assuming the process is scalable we have a motherload of CO2 which can be mined from the massive (100x denser than Earth's) atmosphere of Venus located just next door.

    Mercury SPS swarms can provide the power to run the factories floating in Venus' atmosphere and the rail guns that would shoot the finished carbon fiber loads into orbit. Each industrial expansion can proceed apace with more SPS being built to further increase carbon mining operations, and so on...

    The amount of carbon available is truly staggering:

    4.80E+20 kg total mass Venus atmosphere
    96.50% percent CO2 4.63E+20 kg total mass CO2

    44 molecular weight of CO2 12 molecular weight of C
    32 molecular weight of O2

    1.26E+20 kg total mass of C
    2.00E+03 kg / m^3 density of carbon fiber
    6.32E+16 m^3 volume of carbon fiber

    And we would want to remove as much carbon/CO2 as possible for the side benefits of terraforming.

    What to build with all that carbon nanofiber?

    How about Bishop Rings, space structures that make O'Neal Cylinders look like tool sheds? With a radius of 1,000 km and a width of 500 km it creates an inner surface are equivalent to the land area of India. Raised side walls only 3 km high contain the atmosphere (it does not need top containment, so the interior of the ring is open to space).

    1.00E+03 km radius 6.28E+03 km circumference 5.00E+02 km width 3.14E+06 km^2 area

    Assuming for radiation protection, rugged long term durability and resistance to tensile forces created by its gravity inducing spin the wall thickness is a solid 10 m. We could build 0ver 2,000 of them:

    3.14E+12 m^2 area 10 m thick 3.14E+13 m^3 volume 2,011 each

    Together, they provide the equivalent total living area of 12 new Earths

    5.10E+08 km^2 earth surface 6.32E+09 km^2 bishop rings total area 12 each

    That still leaves you with a massive atmosphere of mostly oxygen (put up the "no smoking" signs) just right for a massive dump of frozen hydrogen to create world spanning oceans.

    However, that still leaves us with a mostly nitrogen atmosphere 3x denser than Earth's total atmosphere. But since nitrogen = fertilizer the next stage can be a seed dump of genetically optimized plants, algae, etc.

    Also save some carbon fiber for a partial sun shield at the lagrange point and orbiting mirrors to create an artificial day/night cycle.

    100 years ago both science and SF pictured Venus as a wet swampy planet. Ironically, mining and seeding would terraform Venus to look just like that - though it would take over a 1,000 years to finish the project.

    P.S. In going to Mars Elon is choosing the one piece of solar system real estate with little or no economic value.

    109:

    Actually, speaking of hyperinflation and Dyson swarms. Well, we aren't really, but I had a Brain Flash (tm), so I'm going to trot this out before #300 and then try to bring it back into the Cryptocurrency mess.

    I'm intrigued by Duffy's idea of turning Mercury into a Dyson Swarm to mine bitcoin, or whatever. Sounds great. I mean, there's nothing like working on rapidly decompressing, really hot iron ore (iron plasma by that point?) to just make my heart skip a beat or two.

    Anyway, what happens to a Dyson Swarm when it dies? Nothing's immortal, least of all computers in solar orbit. Eventually there's just a cloud of lumps floating in orbit. What I'm wondering is how much gets flung off into deep space by the masochism tango that is the gravitational interaction between Jupiter, the Sun, and the swarm, and how much of it coalesces back into a new planet in the fullness of time.

    That's where our planets came from in the first place, after all.

    Anyway, that set me thinking of all the SFF scenarios one could set in a collapsing dyson swarm. There's also the scenario of the anomalously young planet orbiting the very old star (relic of an ancient, dead dyson swarm) and so forth. Has anyone explored this in science fiction, or are megastructures presumed to be stable over hundreds of millions of years?

    Hard to pull this back into a discussion of cryptocurrency, but I guess the theme is: what's the dead hulk of cryptocurrency going to look like, since nothing lasts forever? If it follows social media, a few big companies will take over a majority of the system (BiteCoin, and Ether-dumb, perhaps?), while the rest of the world gets into fighting for rare metals and balsa supplies to build huge wind turbines and solar farms, because nothing will say 2030s Nouveau-Riches like your very own renewables latifundium, with immigrant labor keeping it running.

    110:

    Great idea - wrong location.

    You want to set up massive computer facilities for mining bitcoin (or perhaps even doing computations) try Saturn's moon Titan:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdpRxGjtCo0

    Titan has a built in cold reservoir for cooling computer operations as defined by a Carnot heat engine efficiency (start 8:00 into the video). A heat engine on Titan runs 3x more efficiently (75%) than a heat engine on Earth with a room temperature cold sink (25%). Isaac Arthur also references the Landauer limit which allows twice as many computations at half the temperature for the same amount of energy.

    Creating a cold sink by refrigeration on Earth costs more energy than you save and in space you can only get rid of heat via massive radiator panels.

    Titan is where you want to build your bitcoin mining operation.

    111:

    But if you are a gold bug why not take the energy from a Dyson Swarm that creates 500 billion times our current energy usage to power particle accelerators? These atom smashers can cause nuclear transformation and create gold from base metals.

    https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2014/05/02/can-gold-be-created-from-other-elements/

    Gold is the chemical element with 79 protons in each atomic nucleus. Every atom containing 79 protons is a gold atom, and all gold atoms behave the same chemically. In principle, we can therefore create gold by simply assembling 79 protons (and enough neutrons to make the nucleus stable). Or even better, we can remove one proton from mercury (which has 80) or add one proton to platinum (which has 78) in order to make gold. The process is simple in principle but hard to do in practice. Adding or removing protons from a nucleus are types of nuclear reactions. As such, no series of chemical reactions can ever create gold. Chemical reactions change the number and shape of the electrons in an atom but leave the nucleus of the atom unchanged. The ancient alchemist dream of creating gold by simply reacting chemicals is therefore impossible. You have to use nuclear reactions to create gold. The difficulty is that nuclear reactions require a lot of energy.

    The nucleus of a stable atom is very tightly bound together, so it is hard to get anything permanently into or out of the nucleus. To induce a nuclear reaction, we have to shoot high-energy particles at a nucleus. We can get such particles either from radioactive decay, from nuclear reactions in a reactor, from the acceleration of slow particles, or from a mix of these techniques. For example, Sherr, Bainbridge, and Anderson created gold in 1941 by shooting neutrons at mercury. The neutrons were generated by a series of nuclear reactions that were kick-started by the Harvard cyclotron particle accelerator.

    There' gold in them thar Dyson Swarms!

    112:

    But why stop at covering the surface of Titan with a computer complex devoted to bitcoin mining?

    Once our Dyson swarm expands to utilize a full 100% of the sun's energy output we can create a Matrioshka brain.

    And have it do nothing but mine bitcoin.

    Which also suggests a way to protect mankind from aggressive AI and hostile Terminators bent on wiping out humanity.

    We program them to be greedy.

    And so they will voluntarily spend their existence mining bitcoin instead of killing us.

    Eventually they will get rich enough to buy and sell us, but they won't exterminate us.

    Instead of "Kill All Humans!", their motto will be "Mine All Bitcoin!".

    (Seriously though, has there even been an SF novel examining a system of independent AIs forming their own economy, exchanging cyber currency for goods and services among themselves?)

    113:

    I was thinking that the reason we don't see Matrioshka brains lying around, aside from the improbable physics of making the damn things*, is that once they're dead, they strongly resemble planetary nebulae in both form and function, and gravity will recycle them.

    Heck, it would have been amusing if 'Oumuamua was a shard of an old Matrioshka, dead for a few hundred million years before it got booted by the ignition of a new star, condensed in part from the debris of the old system. This even gets into the fate of galaxies, when the material for making new stars runs out. Can making Matrioshka brains out of system recycle planetary systems and make more stars and planets?

    That would be cool and ironic, if the ultimate unintended consequence of intelligence and greed is to recycle planets into planetary nebulae, so they can make another generation of stars and planetary systems and continue the cycle a bit longer.

    *Stripping a planetary core and launching into space in a controlled fashion? Do know the heat and pressure those things are under? That's like using a model rocket or quadcopter drone to retrieve molten steel from a blast furnace so you can replace your loose screw.

    114:

    (Seriously though, has there even been an SF novel examining a system of independent AIs forming their own economy, exchanging cyber currency for goods and services among themselves?)

    I'm pretty sure James P. Hogan did something not unlike that in "Code of the Lifemaker", but it's decades since I read it and Jim was a full-bore crazy by the time he died and I'm trying to expunge those memories. (Also, it wasn't very good.)

    Mind you, "wouldn't it be a good idea to build a Matrioshka brain to mine cryptocurrency" is one possible solution to the Fermi paradox if it turns out that currency as a demand signal and scarcity-based economics are universal side-effects of technological civilization. (Spoiler: I think this is unlikely.)

    115:

    Seriously though, has there even been an SF novel examining a system of independent AIs forming their own economy, exchanging cyber currency for goods and services among themselves?

    Orion's Arm and Dan Simmon's Hyperion series do come to mind.

    116:

    Greg Tingey @ 104: Charlie @ 100/101
    I can see how severe deflation would be really bad ... incidentally, didn't we have deflation, here, 1932-6, which was not a good time?
    Agree re.Nakamoto being a goldbug, so the whole thing has "evil intent"
    And should therefore be stopped, yesterday(!) [ Even without the GW effects of overheating *cough* the power-stations. ]
    So, why are governments not doing anything about it?

    My guess is it's because of the same reasons governments don't do anything about a lot of the problems that plague us. There are "people" who expect to profit & they have enough political power to thwart government action.

    117:

    Solar forums... building their own solar-powered crypto-mining.

    ROTFLMAO!

    I assume everyone here knows that day trading is a good way to lose money, given that you're competing with people with clustered computers co-located in the same datacenter as the stock exchange, and the micro/nanosecond difference that makes (speed of light) between your home network connection and their 10G? 25G connections that are meters away beat you, buy, then sell to you at a higher price?

    Home crypto-mining is, of course, the same, since you're competing on your gaming pc against purpose-build rackmount servers, with 512G or 1T or 2% cores. Go ahead, use your little red wagon to try to beat that Formula 1 race car.

    118:

    Other than the White Paper, I've not found any original rants by Nakamoto other than this list of quotes here:

    https://quotefancy.com/satoshi-nakamoto-quotes

    Please note that I'm that I'm not arguing with you, just noting that my own 20-minute search hasn't found anything. Also, for the record, I'm definitely not a Libertarian. (They seem to be correct in about 10 percent of their philosophies, and anywhere between wrong and not "even sane-enough to be wrong" about the rest of their ideas.) What I did note in my research that a lot of Libertarian looniness seems to have accreted around the idea of cryptocurrencies, and that might be what you're noticing.

    Anyway, if you could post a couple URLs I'd be quite grateful.

    119:

    Greg Tingey @ 92: I remember a year where we had between 20 & 25% inflation in a year ( About 1972? ) ... and then there was the inflation in Germany in the 1920's or Venezuela right now.

    Now imagine if the currency appreciated by the same amounts as it depreciated in those events. If money is worth 25% more, then your labour is worth 25% less in monetary terms (i.e. you have to take a 25% pay cut). Everyone with money in the bank or other £-denominated assets is 25% wealthier. Everyone who owes money now owes 25% more value compared to everything else they can buy, and 25% more than they were previously set up to pay.

    So if you have a mortgage, you are stuffed.

    The bank demands money you don't have. You can't pay, so they foreclose and sell your house. But the sale doesn't cover the mortgage because the house now brings 25% less pounds than it used to. So now the bank is losing money. It can't cover its liabilities (which are also denominated in pounds), so it goes bust.

    Now we get into the difference between M0 and M2. M0 is the money "printed" by the government. M2 is the money that everyone thinks they have (including bank balances, short-term savings and shares), so its the important number. M2 is several times M0 because banks take deposits and loan them out, and the loaned money winds up in someone else's account, from where it gets loaned out.... When a financial institution goes bust a lot of that money evaporates and M2 shrinks. So now lots of people have even less money to pay the mortgages. Those that can, tighten their belts and send more money to the banks. The rest go bust, lose their homes, and their banks go bust too, ensuring that the vicious cycle continues. M2 drops even though M0 remains the same. Because M2 drops, there is less money in the economy, so what there is becomes worth more. And so it goes on.

    The modern solution is "quantitative easing" (QE): the government "prints" money, thereby increasing M0, and lends it to banks who then lend it out, thereby increasing M2. As the economy recovers and M2 starts to increase to the point of causing inflation, the government can call in those loans of printed money and thereby keep M2 stable.

    (I've been saying "print" money. In reality the money is virtual; AIUI the central bank just increments its own balance with itself. The banks all have accounts at the central bank, which is where they keep the money they hold on customers behalf. So the central bank can loan the money by just transferring it to those accounts).

    Actually, increases in M2 don't cause inflation; as Charlie said earlier, its the circulation of money that matters. A change in £/year is much more important than a change in the absolute number of pounds in either M1 or M2. This is important because wealthy people spend less and save more, so the money supply in £/year decreases as more money goes to wealthy people instead of poor people.

    The weird thing is, governments have been doing QE since 2008, and inflation has stayed stubbornly low. Meantime the return on invested capital has also been very low; there seems to be a lot of money floating around looking for returns above 1% and not finding it.

    My private theory is that every time the government injects liquidity into the economy it gets mopped up by the wealthy, who stash it in offshore accounts, trusts, whatever, out of the way of the tax man. Because there is now so much of this money it can't find productive investments, and so the available returns have dropped. This is why governments are finding it so cheap to borrow money; they are effectively borrowing back money they printed and lent out via QE. The problem is; how do we get that money back off the people who now own it? (Realistic suggestions only please: lynching people you don't like is generally frowned upon and is bound to get you talked about).

    By the way, if you are ever in the London Science Museum, do go and see the MONIAC. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "cash flow". Videos are on YouTube and various simulators can be found around the Net.

    120:

    David L @ 107:

    incidentally, didn't we have deflation, here, 1932-6, which was not a good time?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#United_Kingdom

    Just to give a little taste of what deflation does.

    Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession.

    So if you remember the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the Great Depression was 15 times worse.

    Think about why the fascists and the Nazis were able to come to power. Think about what might have happened if the 2008-2009 financial crisis HAD been worse.

    In the U.S. we got Trumpolini as a delayed after-shock & y'all got Bozo the clown & wrecksit Brexit.

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

    121:

    The problem is; how do we get that money back off the people who now own it? (Realistic suggestions only please: lynching people you don't like is generally frowned upon and is bound to get you talked about).

    This probably would escalate to the cyberwar equivalent of world war 3, because the richest of the rich have wealth on the scale of Kenya. So we're talking about making the equivalents of a few hundred middle-class nation-states disappear.

    That said, if the US and the EU decided to go this route, for instance because the super-rich are the major road block in fighting climate change, then I'd start with the following four steps:

  • Hire as many wealth managers as possible by quintupling (or more) their salary, and put them to work in very permanent government jobs tracing wealth management of your targets. Wealth managers are (last I read) paid on the scale of pharmacists, not investment bankers. Give them more money, protection, and job security to do their jobs for you. Since loyalty is their primary product, you need to treat them like the knights they are and keep them loyal to your cause, which is saving civilization.

  • Once the critical weak points in the wealth management networks are known, hack the hell out of them, physically and electronically. One good way might be to do faux ransomware attacks where the material never comes back.

  • Mount global legal attacks on the super-rich who were targeted, demanding proof of ownership (produce the actual paper trail demonstrating ownership, which you already stole) to claim control over assets. The assets they cannot demonstrate control over get seized and broken up.

  • Have a really good follow-up plan to win the war you've just started, including rapidly iterating the cyber, financial, and legal arms of the attacks so that they continue to work, and possibly dealing with a global physical war too.

  • The problem with this is that some of the wealthiest players aren't just billionaires, they actually run rather large states, some of which are nuclear powers. This isn't a game of kill the rich, it's a power struggle between a growing anarchist plutocracy and democratic powers. If at the end there are no more billionaires, that will mark a radical shift in power towards bureaucrats, politicians, and the military. Decide whether that's a good thing before unleashing these particular war dogs.

    122:

    The New Deal, in the US, was halping... but then, of course, the "deficit hawks" that cut it back, and fought tooth and nail against anything that helped those who weren't rich, the exact same way that they did here in 2011 and 2012, and like they're doing now.

    123:

    OK I did what I should have done to start with & "wiki'd" S Nakimoto ... [ Bonkers, but really dangerously bonkers ] AIUI a "blockchain" is a one-way one-time pad with (effectively) irreversible cod/reading. [ Though I suspect that, say GCHQ could probably brute-force read it if they felt they had to, maybe? ]

    OTOH, since it is acknowledged that there is a fixed upper bound ( 21 million )to the amount of Bitcoin that is ever going to be available, so it really is a goldbug ... then ... Why are national governments & more directly the Central Reserve Banks doing theor best to Crash_-&-Burn it??? In spite of JBS' comment at 116, I think the question still stands.

    Paul Ah yes, MONIAC - I knew of this, but had forgotten its name> MANY THANKS for defining M0 & M2 in comprehensible form.

    JBS The utter disaster of Brexit has only just started. It is not going to be pretty.

    H Your point #2 - do this to Bitcoin, while you are at it - again, why is this not being done? [ Thought - maybe governments are biding their time? Because, if a strike is authorised against Bitcoin, you need to get them all. No prisoners, no survivors to be allowed. Um. ]

    124:

    OTOH, since it is acknowledged that there is a fixed upper bound ( 21 million )to the amount of Bitcoin that is ever going to be available, so it really is a goldbug ... then ...

    Except that it's not. The opposite side of the problem is that you can't allow an infinite amount of money either,* and of course it's possible to create as many variants of Bitcoin as anyone can imagine - you just need to install the software on a computer, provide enough randomness that it doesn't duplicate another form of cryptocurrency and start mining, which is exactly what people who start other cryptocurrencies are doing.

    The idea that Nakamoto didn't understand this is ludicrous, so claiming that the structure of Bitcoin is evidence that he's a goldbug is very dubious unless you have some statements of his to back that up. Hopefully OGH will post some URLs and we can all see for sure - my own research may well be at fault here - but I couldn't find anything in my own searches that indicated anything other than hubris on Nakamoto's part.

    Barring the possibility that I somehow attain Elon Musk-like levels of wealth, I wouldn't touch cryptocurrencies with someone else's ten-foot pole, but I do think accuracy matters when we discuss the problem.

    • My understanding from a friend who mines currencies is that you can make the algorithm harder or easier to solve, thus allow either more or less total coins of your cryptocurrency to me mined. The possibility that Nakamoto chose a number which is much too small is certainly something worth speculating on - that may very well be the case.
    125:

    BTW, not trying to sealion or anything. I'm just not seeing the path from the Nakamoto quotes which I have read to "he's a crazy Libertarian goldbug." I'd be very happy to change my mind if someone has some material I haven't read.

    126:

    once they're dead, they strongly resemble planetary nebulae in both form and function, and gravity will recycle them.

    I'm afraid that doesn't really make sense. Planetary nebulae are expanding shells of hydrogen and helium, surrounding (and ionized by) the hot-but-starting-to-cool core of the star, which is turning into a white dwarf.

    If you built a Matrioshka brain around the Sun, it would have at most slightly more than the mass of Jupiter (i.e., if you also used Saturn and all the other planets to construct it), which is far less than you'd need to form a new star, and far less mass than is in a planetary nebula, so you'd never mistake one for the other.

    If the Matrioshka brain dies before the star leaves the Main Sequence, then the various pieces will start colliding (traffic control for a Dyson swarm would be a bitch) and a fair amount of it will end up falling into the star; the rest will probably end up as a slightly extended cloud of pulverized dust. The smaller particles will be blown out by radiation pressure from the star; larger particles will have decaying orbits due to Poynting-Robertson drag from the same radiation, and will fall into the star. Whatever might be left will then be swallowed by the star as it expands to form a red giant.

    127:

    That was a shame. The Genesis Machine, IIRC, is a brilliant book, and the actual excitement in it is doing actual science.

    128:

    "Not finding returns above 1%"? Really? Try investing in real estate (some hedge funds did it, esp. in rental properties). Also high-tech firms.

    129:

    Its more complicated than that. If you want a steady income by lending money at interest to AAA borrowers then 1% is the best you will get. You can go for other things which might give higher rates, but with higher probability of loss.

    You can always look retrospectively at prices and see that investors in GooBook made out like bandits over the last 15 months, but that is 20/20 hindsight. Figuring out where the big money is going to be in the next 12 months is a lot harder.

    130: 82 - Ok, I'd have to do some research, but I could find the names of the real railway companies who owned those 4 terminii. 92 - Not when first built for sure, as you already know. The Late and Never Early Railway wasn't founded until Grouping in 1923.
    131:

    "In particular, China is fairly cooperative on persecuting drug smugglers and, as far as I know, child rapists."

    Yes, but they don't like those things, whereas they seem to love crapto, governmentally, to the extent of building dedicated coal power plants to mine it with. "Don't trade with any financial institution that handles crapto" could well come to be (if we're not there already) a superset of "don't trade with any financial institution in China", and China is big enough that they could stick to their position and cause the initiative to fail before it got started.

    "Problem goes away with strict liability: the BtC miner javascript malware comes via ad exchangers which are going to suddenly pay attention to what they're serving up if it results in the FBI/SOCA breaking down their doors and hauling them off in chains."

    The problem only goes away for that particular class of vector, so it just requires them to switch to other methods, for instance compromised servers (all those wordpress sites...), "traditional" viruses, and getting patsies to do the actual pushing of buttons instead of taking the risk themselves.

    132:

    Paws Marylebone: Great Central ( Nee: Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire ) railway King's Cross: Great Northern Rly Liverpool St: Great Eastern Rly Fenchurch St also GER, but with a lot of traffic from the London Tlibury & Southend ( LTSR ) As you know, but others may not, all were amalgamated, with others ( Notably the NER, NBR & GNoSR ) to form the LNER in 1923

    133:

    You're talking legit stock, not, say, hedge funds, nor are you talking about real estate (had your rent go up lately? How about your taxes or insurance?)

    134:

    For the US version, the Pennsy, the Reading, the B&O, and the "Short Line"*.

    • "The standard railroad of the world", as they billed themselves. Not too unreasonably, given that... was it in the twenties, or during WWII, that I've read 20% of ALL GOODS TRANSPORTATION IN THE WORLD at some point went over the Pennsy's tracks.

    ** Not a real railroad.

    135:

    I'm afraid that doesn't really make sense.

    Fair enough. I think we both agree that disassembling planets and turning them into huge orbiting clouds of computronium probably does not end up with a system that runs for the rest of the history of that stellar system. Even assuming it's possible, which I doubt. It's one of those ideas that's great if one assumes that space is really empty and stars are really stable, and not so good if either of those assumptions are violated.

    136:

    Are you sure it's safe to risk giving Musk ideas?

    Then again, so far as I'm aware he hasn't tried fuelling one of his rockets with FOOF and dimethyl mercury, so it's unlikely he's one of your fans.

    137:

    As I understand it part of the problem is scale. Sure, one multi-billionaire can pump a few billion into Apple, a few billion into Google and so on, but when all hundred of them want to do that things get tricky. This is why countries like Japan and Saudi Arabia have "all of the above" investment strategies.

    Part of the reason the likes of Gates and Koch start meddling in politics is that it's a way to spend money. When you have staff actively looking for ways to deal with that spare billion you found down the back of the couch politics is a cheap hobby. The step from buying politicians/laws because it's cheaper than complying with them to buying them because you have an interesting idea is small.

    In that sense we might even conclude that democracy* works... there's a lot more fossil money than green money around, and democratic governments reflect that.

    • I can't think of a democracy with limits on political donations, or the use of money to influence elections. At the brutal end you have the loss-making Murdoch media in Australia... no-one even tries to treat that as the blatant purchase of political influence that it is.
    138:

    This, in fact, fits right in with the conversation. https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2021/05/13

    139:

    Seriously though, has there even been an SF novel examining a system of independent AIs forming their own economy, exchanging cyber currency for goods and services among themselves?

    And then they chase the last remaining humans out to Saturn, where the mere humans live in floating habitats and bicker with robot cats? Yeah, I think someone did something like that.

    As for Code of the Lifemaker, I've said before that it's one of the best prologues in the entire corpus of science fiction literature, tacked onto an otherwise forgettable novel.

    140:

    As for Code of the Lifemaker, I've said before that it's one of the best prologues in the entire corpus of science fiction literature, tacked onto an otherwise forgettable novel.

    Brilliantly accurate summation of "Code of the Lifemaker". Hogan should have just written the prologue as a short story and left it at that.

    It would have worked even better if he invited other SF writers to write sequels, i.e. shared universe. But I don't think shared universes were really a thing yet in 1983.

    141:

    Canada briefly had strict limits on political donations. In the early 2000s we had a law limiting donations to $200. Some got around it by donating $200 to each of the candidates in all 308 ridings. Also, donations of <$200 were not separately tracked and only reported in aggregate. When the NDP (Dem-Soc) demanded that loophole be closed, the governing Tories were strangely disinterested.

    The same law had parties receiving funding to the tune of about $1.75/vote/year. This was a big boon for the Greens and NDP, who have much less efficient votes in our FPTP system, and hurt the Liberals and Conservatives. Unsuprisingly this was unceremoniously dumped when the Conservatives took power.

    [[ HTML fix - mod ]]

    142:

    It would have worked even better if he invited other SF writers to write sequels, i.e. shared universe. But I don't think shared universes were really a thing yet in 1983.

    For what it's worth, Thieves World started in 1978. I'd go back to Lovecraft, Howard, and probably much further (the Bible? Sumeria) for the concept, but the term AFAIK goes back to Thieves' World.

    143:

    This is some hilarious news from Aotearoa today. Cancel culture is out in force, the company is losing outlets and suppliers even as we speak (well, up to a point... but that point might well be nothing left to lose)

    https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/lifestyle/2021/05/kaiapoi-s-eagle-brewing-owner-david-gaughan-says-comment-labelling-m-ori-scourge-of-nz-was-misconstrued-as-racism.html

    144:

    whitroth @ 128: "Not finding returns above 1%"? Really? Try investing in real estate (some hedge funds did it, esp. in rental properties). Also high-tech firms.

    You're cherry-picking with hindsight again.

    Mounting commercial real estate losses threaten banks, recovery

    The 10 Biggest Hedge Fund Failures

    Theranos, and lots of other hi-tech companies that looked promising but didn't go anywhere for one reason or another.

    We can play this game all day. You can point at people who got lucky and won big, and I can point at people who got unlucky and lost big (note: with Theranos I'm not talking about Elizabeth Holmes, I'm talking about the investors who believed her).

    The consensus view is that the safest and most reliable investment on the planet is a US treasury bond. Yields (i.e. the interest rate) on 10-year treasury bonds have been running at around 1% above inflation for years, although they have recently started to tick upwards because investors are expecting inflation to rise due to Biden's spending plans (aside: that will be a test of my theory, which predicts that inflation won't rise, or not for long, because all that liquidity will wind up in the savings accounts of the very rich).

    Anything with a higher yield than US treasuries carries a corresponding level of risk; you make more money on average, but you stand a higher chance of losing a big chunk. The trouble is that the more you put into higher risk investments, the more you increase your risk of losing everything to a run of bad luck. You can spread the risk over lots of investments, but that just drags your average return back down.

    145:

    Didn't some hedge fund employee lose $US20B in a week recently?

    146:

    Greg Tingey @ 123: AIUI a "blockchain" is a one-way one-time pad with (effectively) irreversible cod/reading.

    No. Not even close. A one time pad is ... well, something else. Google it. It has nothing to do with blockchains.

    Money started off as a barter commodity that then became a medium of exchange because lots of people wanted it (e.g. silver, gold). Kings started stamping uniform coins as a mark of standard weight and purity because that made exchange easier; you didn't need to assay the payment for every trade. Then fiat money was invented in the form of paper and metal tokens; the "intrinsic" value went away. Then bank balances started to be used and money went virtual during the industrial revolution.

    When money goes virtual the central artifact is the ledger (or possibly multiple ledgers, but lets keep the model simple for now).

    The ledger is simply a record of every transaction. Alice paid Bob £5. Charlie paid Dave £10. Dave paid Alice £3. By totting up all these transactions you can work out the current balances of Alice, Bob, Charlie and Dave.

    Everyone has to agree that the ledger is correct, and everyone has to agree to abide by what it says. If Alice thinks Dave paid her £3 but Dave disagrees then the answer is on the ledger by definition. The ledger is an append-only structure; if it turns out that Alice's payment was made by mistake then that payment isn't erased, instead a new payment is added in the opposite direction.

    This only works if you have a single authoritative ledger. The traditional solution has to been to appoint a trusted organisation (a "bank") to hold the ledger and record all the transactions. To pay someone some money you give the bank an instruction to add an entry to the ledger. In the old days this was called "writing a cheque". These days the message and signature is usually electronic, but its the same concept.

    But you need the bank. This is both a single point of vulnerability and a single point of control. Libertarians hate that, and Satoshi Nakamoto's blockchain is a way around it.

    The blockchain is simply a ledger of bitcoin transactions. Transactions are chunked up into blocks, with each block linked to the previous one. Nakamoto's innovation was to make it hard to add new blocks, but to include a payment for succeeding. Let me explain how.

    A "cryptographic hash" is a kind of checksum; you take a big chunk of data and put it through the hash algorithm, and you get a small chunk of data called the hash (typically 512 bits = 64 bytes). This hash depends very sensitively on the input data; change one bit and you get a completely different hash, and there is no way other than brute force search to find a different input that gives you the same hash. So if anyone changes the data you will get a different hash, so if you have the hash you can depend on the data being unaltered.

    To add a new block to the bitcoin blockchain you compute the hash of three things:

  • the hash of the previous block in the blockchain (which is what links your transactions to all the ones already on the ledger).

  • the list of transactions you want to include in this block.

  • a random number chosen by you.

  • The thing that makes this difficult is a rule about the allowed value for the hash you compute; it MUST start with a lot of zeros. The whole 512 bits is interpreted as a number, and that number must be less than a certain value, known as the "Difficulty". To find a hash that meets the Difficulty the only way is to try lots of random numbers, compute the hash of the whole block, and see if the new hash beats the Difficulty. If it does then you broadcast your new block and everyone adds it to their local copy of the blockchain. If not you pick another number and try again, and again, trillions of times.

    The Difficulty is what stops competing versions of the ledger; if Alice wants to repudiate her payment to Bob she needs to come up with a list of blocks which doesn't include her payment. To do that she needs to generate and broadcast new blocks, complete with hashes lower than the Difficulty, and to do this faster than the whole of the rest of the world. She can only do this if she controls more than 50% of the computers that do the hashing.

    The difficulty gets adjusted every few weeks to keep the average block rate to one every 10 minutes.

    The people who do the hashing are called "miners". They get paid to do this in two ways: one is that new bitcoins are included as a payment in each block, with the amount declining over time. The other (meant as the long term payment mechanism) is that each transaction includes a payment for the miner. Miners can pick and choose which transactions to include in each block, so the motivation is to include the ones with the highest payment.

    Unfortunately as bitcoins have become more valuable this has meant that it is increasingly economic to throw more energy into computing hashes. Hence the problem.

    Satoshi Nakomoto was a computer science giant and an economic midget.

    147:

    Talking about gold bugging and mining... My cousin (a miner) is convinced that a better way to do gold is to sell grams still in situ. You save all costs of digging while being more secure (you try to steal my 5 cubic meters granite with 5ppm gold 150m below ground). The problem is obviously how much do you trust a geologist (to which the answer is always the same).

    148:

    The Difficulty is what stops competing versions of the ledger; if Alice wants to repudiate her payment to Bob she needs to come up with a list of blocks which doesn't include her payment. To do that she needs to generate and broadcast new blocks, complete with hashes lower than the Difficulty, and to do this faster than the whole of the rest of the world. She can only do this if she controls more than 50% of the computers that do the hashing.

    I'll just point out that it's quite difficult to know who owns the other computers doing the hashing, and that's kind of one of the points of the whole thing.

    So, there's really no way of knowing if somebody has that 50% of computing power for the blockchain, in one arranged as for example Bitcoin is. So, you basically have to trust entities you have no idea of, who they are, where they are, what they want.

    I still don't know how this is better than the banks.

    149:

    I think the point is that it is "not" the banks.

    150:

    I am pretty sure Bitcoin was designed to be a scam, because of the inherent transaction limits - You cannot update a blockchain more than single-digit number of times per second. Globally. Across all entries in the ledger.

    This obviously means no blockchain is ever going to be a viable currency, and the likelihood the designer of the blockchain missed this little problem is.. Low. If incompetence is not a likely explanation, the back edge of Hanlons Razor implies Malice.

    So the various rantings of the originator was likely establishing bonafides for the affinity fraud.

    Not sure if said originator died or the monster they created has grown so large they dont dare cash out. - Its one thing to steal a few million from US gold bugs. Cashing out the Satosi coins at this point would make you the kind of enemies that result in very well funded attempts to kill you.

    151:

    Krugman opinion on Bitcoin : "a fresh infestation of monetary cockroaches"

    (can be read in anonymous browser mode)

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/cryptocurrency-inflation.html

    152:

    Mikko Paviainen @ 148: So, there's really no way of knowing if somebody has that 50% of computing power for the blockchain, in one arranged as for example Bitcoin is.

    Actually we have a fairly good idea, and 75% of it is in China...

    153:
    Mikko Paviainen @ 148: So, there's really no way of knowing if somebody has that 50% of computing power for the blockchain, in one arranged as for example Bitcoin is.

    Actually we have a fairly good idea, and 75% of it is in China...

    Even if we take the public information at face value, and the entities with different names are actually separate with no common points of control, it'd take the collusion of... 3-4 of them?

    In practice, multiple hours of the Bitcoin blockchain have been wound back over the years, notably in 2010 and 2013.

    154:

    China has a weird economy. Somewhat middle ages in many aspects. The party rules the country. And there are many issues for which there is no variation of rules allowed. But in many other ways there is all kind of local windage allowed.

    I suspect that power plant is proposed and build in province so and so to allow them to raise the standard of living and add more factories for widgets which are in high demand in the area. Then while it is being built or afterwards but before the power is allocated elsewhere someone(s) notice they can make more return building a data center (small enough to avoid the central planning debates) and divert much of the power there.

    As to how much collusion there is between province A and B, I suspect it varies a LOT with lots of suspicion in all directions.

    155:

    Knock yourself out, neckbeard.

    (Moderator: RED CARD. Don't let the door hit you on the ass.)

    156:

    Moz: newshub.co.nz is blocked in the UK (and on a VPN into Canada), presumably because of regional rights issues. (I VPN'd into NZ and eventually got to read ... something trivial. In future maybe just summarize or quote for us non-natives?)

    157:

    I think your quote is a little unfair. Let me put it into context:

    "And while it took a while, my sense is that by 2014 or so the great majority of economic commentators had accepted that looking at the money supply in the U.S. context offered basically no information about future inflation.

    But now we have a new crop of financial types, especially, as I said, people associated with crypto, who don’t know about any of that and, as so often happens with money people, assume that they already know everything. So we’re having a fresh infestation of monetary cockroaches, and everything has to be explained again."

    So what he's really saying is that cryptocurrency types represent a recurring problem of economic misunderstanding, that is, people who don't understand what history says about inflation.

    158:

    Some more thoughts on currency.

    Bitcoin is "mined" by proof of work (meaning, proof of running a hash function many trillion times). Pretty much every form of currency except fiat is proof of something. Gold and silver are proof of digging, which varies from moderately to very environmentally unfriendly. Wampum was proof of time spent fiddling around with quartz drill bits and small shells, until European settlers introduced metal tools and mass production, and Wampum underwent hyperinflation.

    In the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy the Golgafrincham "B" Ark crash-landed on Earth, and the survivors adopted the leaf as currency. But since leaves weren't proof of any work they weren't worth anything (three major deciduous forests to one ships peanut IIRC).

    Fiat is probably proof of something too. Some combination of trust and authority maybe. Why is fiat currency valuable? The standard answer is "Because you have to pay your taxes in it". But that doesn't answer anything. Suppose that dollar notes were worthless for any other purpose. People getting a tax demand would go and buy the necessary dollar notes for the equivalent of a few seconds wage in whatever currency they were using and ritually hand them over to the government. That still wouldn't make them worth anything.

    For that matter, why is gold valuable? The standard answer is that you can make jewellery and electronics out of it. But that doesn't make sense either. Electronics takes up about 1% of world gold production, so the value of the other 99% still needs to be explained. Why gold jewellery? Answer: because gold is a shiny yellow colour and that makes it pretty and therefore desirable. But shiny yellow plastic is even shinier and yellower, so why don't people make jewellery out of that? Answer: because plastic is cheap and nobody wants cheap stuff. So does that mean that people make gold jewellery because gold is valuable, not the other way around? Answer: I suppose so. So why is gold valuable?

    What it comes down to is that value is a consensus hallucination, like government. Governments are in charge because everyone expects them to be in charge, until one day that expectation goes away and suddenly the government isn't in charge any more. Terry Pratchett had a nice take on it in "Making Money" (which is a really fun deconstruction of all this BTW). On a desert island potatoes are more valuable than gold, because you can eat the potatoes to stay alive. But in a city gold is more valuable than potatoes because you can use the gold to buy potatoes or anything else you need. What makes the difference? The city.

    Incidentally "Making Money" had postage stamps being used as convenient currency. What makes a penny stamp worth one penny? You can put it on an envelope and get a penny's worth of postage. Proof of work again.

    Gold is valuable because everyone knows its valuable. Same with dollars and pounds.

    159:

    [...] cryptocurrency types represent a recurring problem of economic misunderstanding, that is, people who don't understand what history says about inflation.

    I think their position is slightly more sophisticated. Their argument is more along the lines of:

    Never mind all the monetary theory, the real problem is that sooner or later along comes a government that decides to just print money to spend, and wham, hyperinflation, and all your money is worthless. Could happen here any day now. Yup, could easily be some time this month, or maybe later this year. Next year probably, if it isn't the year after. Or next decade. Some time in the next century for sure, all those millions you have stashed in the bank are going to be worthless! So only commodity money can be relied upon, because the government can't print more of it.
    160:

    This comes to mind. (And it's gotten worse in the last couple of weeks.) I Need to Explain to You Just How Dire America's Pokémon Card Crisis Is (Jason Koebler, April 30, 2021) Pokémon cards aren't just expensive. Card grading services are being completely overwhelmed in an “avalanche of cardboard.”

    161:

    So what he's really saying is that cryptocurrency types represent a recurring problem of economic misunderstanding, that is, people who don't understand what history says about inflation.

    Based on the lead in to the article, Krugman seems to say to me that absent of a study of economics and history, people tend to not realize the past exists before their memory and just maybe they don't fully understand what they think they do.

    My, now gone off the rails, brother who is 6 years younger than me and thus has no personal recollection of the 60s and Nixon and ... spouts all kinds of things to prove he has no idea ....

    162:

    Paul SO - I'm wrong. Which doesn't actually surprise me (!) However, I DID look up "blockchain" on wiki & I do understand the idea/motivation behind cryptocurrencies, just not their modus operandii And I DO UNDERSTAND "real" money. Perhaps you would care to actually explain how a cryptocurrency based on a blockchain you know WORKS? [ SO I have skipped all of you noddy stuff from: "Money started off ... down to S N' blockchain is a way around it" ] So, "the hash" is a set, but complicated known routine? The whole thing is dependant upon not being able to crack the hashing code, yes?

    Satoshi Nakomoto was a computer science giant and an economic midget. - Agreed, but WHO THE FUCK IS HE - or "they" of course? I assume various large guvmint agencies would LURVE to find out the answer to that.

    Where you are wrong is @ 158 You still don't get that all money is "fiat" even, or maybe, especially, Gold. Or maybe, you do?

    "Commodity Money" Hence the English/US quite-realistically-based concern (obsession?) with "property", especially land itself. "they aren't making any more of it" ( Mark Twain? )

    TJ Not so sure. If you cashed out the Satoshi coins, would not only lead to a very amusing ( for certain values of .. ) crash, but you would be so rich that you can afford to keep your enemies at bay, because you can hire better, more efficient thugs. Or, if Paul is correct, you can total the PRC's economy, which is, maybe, why "5 Eyes" have not (YET) done anything about it?

    163:

    I see someone mentioned Thieves' World. GRRM's Wild Cards was around '86 or so.

    164:

    Right, making it harder to be taxed, and easier for money laundering and other crimes, like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware, and today's report of the ransomware attack on the Irish health system.

    On the other hand, if you get people really po'd... "The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.

    “Servers were seized (country not named), money of advertisers and founders was transferred to an unknown account,” reads a message from a cybercrime forum reposted to the Russian OSINT Telegram channel."

    https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/darkside-ransomware-gang-quits-after-servers-bitcoin-stash-seized/

    165:

    I look at Krugman's op-ed column every weekday, not in anonymous mode, though I do have noScript running. I think that the regular op-ed columnists, who aren't paid for their columns, are free to read.

    166:

    "Suddenly, the government is not in charge"? Is that before the coup? Because, millinarians and Communists to the contrary, humans need a government, because that's how you deal with other humans, esp. when one or more groups decide they don't like you, or want what you have.

    167:

    I think Graeber got it more right: in the history of finance, debt came first, taxes came second, money came third, and much of what we think of as barter is stuff that happened when people who grew up with money made do without it.

    That last is critical: if you throw people into a prison and they spontaneously start bartering stuff and using things as money substitutes, they didn't spontaneously regress to the neolithic and reenact the development of economics. They're trying to get by as they know how.

    We're quite clear that taxes came early on, because the history of writing, at least in the Fertile Crescent, revolves around tax accounting: what people are giving to the kings and temples. Debt came along well before that, in the "IOU" sense, but it doesn't have to be quantized, merely fair.

    Credit pretty definitely came around before money, because it's necessary to farming: you help the farmer while his crop's growing, you get a share of the crop when it comes in. That's a credit transaction, mediated by whatever (portion of crop, weight of precious metal equivalent). Precious metals stayed in treasuries mostly and were denominated by weight (talents, shekels, etc), while people of good account used credit documents based on the faith that the metal was there to trade against it.

    Then (at least in the Mediterranean) we get warlords sacking temples as they build their evanescent empires. Now nobody in their right mind would give an invading soldier, or worse, an invading mercenary, credit for even a beer, so there arose a clever solution: standardized lumps of metal, stamped with the warlord's logo. When the warlord starts collecting taxes only in lumps, perforce his newly conquered subjects had to do their trade in lumps so that they had enough lumps to pay off their new lords and masters. If a mercenary was paid in lumps and paid the barkeep in lumps, then the barkeep could pay off his taxes. Money's an anonymous solution for taking credit-worthiness out of the equation, useful where lack of trust and anonymity are getting in the way of the riches and power.

    And yes, I'm ignoring that the first attempts at money in Greece were stylized skewers. Why let a complex history get in the way of a good story?

    The really cool fun part is that money in China and Central America didn't exactly follow this course, so it's actually even more complicated than Graeber made it. It's almost as if humans don't have one way to do economics, but that one culture's predilections have largely won out. At least for now....

    168:

    And now A knuckle-dragging religious primitive, incapable of rational thought becomes "leader" of the DUP, one: THIS throwback if you really want to know ...

    169:

    "Suddenly, the government is not in charge"? Is that before the coup? Because, millinarians and Communists to the contrary, humans need a government, because that's how you deal with other humans, esp. when one or more groups decide they don't like you, or want what you have.

    Not really, when we're talking about a government of incestuous god-kings, as in most pristine states. However...

    The best case study we have of a pristine civilization arising from non-state ancestors is actually: Hawai'i (yes, I'm going to rattle on about that again). It's interesting because it cuts across the grain of a number of assumptions, including that you need grain to get a civilization. Another one is the idea of the Malthusian trap and Boserup's ratchet (people get hungry, then innovate new food production intensification strategies). In Hawai'i, as elsewhere in Polynesia, competition between farmers about who was the most productive led to rapid increases in productivity which were then followed by population growth. If this is generally true around the world, waiting until the crisis hits to innovate more productive systems is probably a bad idea. The systems you need to weather the crisis are better built when you can afford to experiment...

    But about the development of states in Hawai'i. The classic Polynesian voyager model is clan based, with people ranked by birth order. This is good, in that it theoretically allows you to know who's entitled to what, and it's why genealogy is so important across the Pacific. At low population densities, it's entirely possible to know who's entitled to farm which plot and fish which beach or reef, based on who their parents and ancestors are. The inevitable disputes can be settled by the seniors getting together and hashing it out, possibly with a side order of violence if the junior partners are more numerous and better armed. But it's workable without a government, because everything's owned by clans.

    There are two problems with this. One is that the people on the lowest end (the last-born children of the last-born children, going back generations) have no incentive to remember their genealogy, because it doesn't give them anything worth having. So over time, the number of people who aren't cleanly linked into the clans grows, and they still need to be fed. Simultaneously, the number of ancestors grows (you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and so on, doubling each generation), so when the islands are filling up, people have 2^5 or 2^6 possible ancestral claims on where to farm, swim, and fish. The possible and actual disputes were endless, and according to the stories passed down, people spent way too much time dealing with them.

    Enter the high chiefs, who are typically senior anyway. They start instituting more state-like structures, because it's easier for a chief to rule than it is for families to endlessly bicker over who did what wrong. Eventually, the chiefs made it illegal for anyone not of the aristocracy to remember their genealogy, and made sure each peasant living in their districts had a plot of land to farm and a way to get access to the sea, all controlled by low-ranking chiefly bureaucrats who used food taxes to feed the king's core cadre of professional soldiers.

    While I don't think each pristine state in world history followed exactly the same path, I suspect that the key point was where non-state political solutions broke down, and an authoritarian strongman stepped in with a good-enough alternative to make things work. This doesn't mean that governments are necessary. However it does mean in practice that non-government solutions to solving collective problems have to work as well or better than the government's solution ones do, or the government is going to gain and retain power.

    I'd also add that if you've got a theory of state formation, you need to run the history of Hawai'i through it to see if still works. Thanks to Cook and others, western observers got to see the final unification of the islands as it happened, and the Hawaiians wrote down their previously oral histories as soon as they got writing a few decades later. You don't get better evidence than that.

    170:

    whitroth @ 134: For the US version, the Pennsy*, the Reading, the B&O, and the "Short Line"**.

    * "The standard railroad of the world", as they billed themselves. Not too unreasonably, given that... was it in the twenties, or during WWII, that I've read 20% of ALL GOODS TRANSPORTATION IN THE WORLD at some point went over the Pennsy's tracks.

    ** Not a real railroad.

    That's where the idea fell apart. There was no "Short Line"1. I have the Pennsylvania, Reading and B&O Railroad stock certificates, but no "Short Line", which NOW appears to have been based on the Shore Fast Line, the trolley operating between Atlantic City & Ocean City.

    This must have been almost 20 years ago. I got the idea while visiting a model train show here in Raleigh.

    I know I searched on the internet & I don't think Wikipedia had that information back then. It was still fairly small & not the trusted resource it is today. I still have the certificates in the file cabinet here next to my desk.

    Maybe someday I'll finish it if I can find a certificate of the trolley company stock.

    1 Actually there were (and still are) a bunch of "short lines", just none I could identify with Atlantic City during the early thirties when the Monopoly Game came into being.

    PS: Paws @ 130 - Thank you, but it's not necessary. I was just idly curious. For my project I'd still need to find a certificate for a U.S. railroad that served the Atlantic City, NJ area back in the 1920s or 30s.

    171:

    Certainly there are any number of reasons to distrust the banks, but I'm not sure that a cryptocurrency is the answer.

    172:

    JBS "Central Railroad of New Jersey" ?? "West Shore RR"??

    173:

    Er, this still misses a step, the "gold standard". Under this "1 unit" of paper $currency drawn on AnyBankLtd is backed by a certain mass of actual specie in AnyBankLtd's vaults.

    Exactly when nations left the true gold standard is a matter for historians; I've seen a variety of dates from about 1915 to 1965.

    174:

    Well it has changed sometime last year, where you tend to get the paywall if you are not using NoScript, porn mode or Firefox "reading mode".

    And to get the graphs linked in the column to work, you need Javascript active.

    ¯_(ツ)_/¯

    175:

    I freely admit than I'm less than impartial when crypto is the subject.

    176:

    Cryptocurrencies are definitely a shit-show. We're only arguing about the history and motivations of that shit-show.

    177:

    I think the first experiments with unbacked paper cash were in 11th century China, followed closely by the first experiments in hyperinflation caused by printing too much unbacked cash. Nixon pulled US money entirely off the gold standard in 1971 IIRC, although I'm not sure that was the end of it. For what it's worth.

    I'd also add, in reference to fiat money not being proof of anything, that it is indeed proof of the "Full Faith and Credit" of the United States, meaning that the US makes a dollar worth a dollar. I'm not sure whether a "government that's small enough to drown in a bathtub" could guarantee that the dollar was trustworthy, and that's one of those interesting paradoxes in libertarian thought that I very happily have too little time left in my life to explore in any depth.

    One of the amusing things is the seeming convergence between money and carbon on this planet. In the normal course of things, the Earth cycles carbon a bit too slowly, so it builds up in the soil and rock. This isn't a bad thing, and indeed it's part of what has kept the planet habitable. Problem is, when you create titanic amounts of virtual money, it starts building up like coal under a swamp, surplus to the financial biosphere, until someone comes along and figures out a way to make more entropy with it, as humans have done with petrochemicals.

    It's not an exact analogy, because the amount of virtual money does provide a proxy for political power even if it isn't used. But that's the interesting problem: if money disappears into unused long term savings, it means that there's no inflation (it's inert money). On the other hand, deflation (taking money out of the financial-sphere) pulls this money out and makes those who control the stockpiles that much more powerful, as noted above. And that's a bit of a problem.

    178:

    PS - No problem; the whole (serious) point was that generalisations about Monopoly (game) real world squares don't really map from location to location. I was aware that all 4 London stations had been owned by the Late and Never Early Railway when the game came out.

    BTW King's Cross Station was originally built by the great Northern Railway; Marylebone by the Great Central Main Line; Fenchurch Street shared by the London and Blackwall Railway and the London, Tilbury and southend Railway ; Liverpool Street by the Great Eastern Railway! Just to prove I could do it! :-)

    179:

    Greg Tingey @ 172: JBS
    "Central Railroad of New Jersey" ?? "West Shore RR"??

    "Central Railroad of New Jersey" did not serve Atlantic City.
    "West Shore RR" did not serve Atlantic City and was absorbed into the NY Central Railroad in 1886; forty plus years too early even if they had served Atlantic City.

    "Atlantic City Railroad" served Atlantic City in the correct time period, but was a subsidiary of the "Philadelphia and Reading Railroad", which became the "Reading RR" in 1923. The "Camden and Atlantic RR" was a subsidiary of the "Pennsylvania RR" from 1852 to 1896 when the "Pennsylvania RR" consolidated its New Jersey subsidiaries into the "West Jersey and Seashore Railroad".

    In turn, the "Atlantic City Railroad"and the "West Jersey and Seashore Railroad" were consolidated into a joint venture between the "Reading RR" and the "Pennsylvania RR" in 1933 (after the rail-lines on the Monopoly Board had already been set) to become the "Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines".

    As I noted earlier, I have the certificates for the Pennsylvania, Reading and B&O railroads.

    Some of the research I did back those many years ago indicated the Short Line RR was based on a "Seashore Bus Company" serving Atlantic City in the 20s & early 30s, but I was never able to find anything else about it; no stock certificate.

    And at the time I didn't turn up anything about the trolley line connecting Atlantic & Ocean Cities, which Wikipedia NOW says may have been the prototype for the Short Line RR.

    But I've had some interesting reading the last couple of days.

    One of the things I did turn up is the Atlantic City Line between Philadelphia and Atlantic City was revived by the NJ Transit Corporation as a commuter passenger line in 1989. So, TODAY, there IS an Atlantic City Short Line RR.

    180:

    Sorry!

    This content is not available in your region

    182:

    This comes to mind. (And it's gotten worse in the last couple of weeks.) I Need to Explain to You Just How Dire America's Pokémon Card Crisis Is

    Well, that's a thing.

    I don't play any form of Pokemon myself but I do think Pokemon cards would make a much better de facto currency than Bitcoins. Indeed, like all commodities used as currencies (cigarettes, cellphone minutes, etc.), they would retain value even outside the marketplace; if there's no trading to be done, you could sit down and play Pokemon.

    I suppose it's harder to do money laundering or illegal drug purchases in Pokemon cards, which is not factor sending me over to Bitcoin.

    183:

    people tend to not realize the past exists before their memory and just maybe they don't fully understand what they think they do

    The socialist governments of Saskatchewan ran the province in the black from its creation all through my childhood. A small amount of tax revenue put by for a rainy day, but most spent on the people. Got us Medicare and other good things. Worked fine up until people with a personal memory of the Dirty Thirties lost influence, at which point two terms of a Conservative (right-wing) government managed to run up the highest per capita debt in the country.

    My personal memory is why I don't view right-wing pro-business parties as fiscally responsible — and why I know socialism can be fiscally responsible.

    184:

    Effectively a small brewery owner decided to go full retard on social media, and then complained about the backlash, then insisted the comment was "misconstrued", and is now arguing that he was really trying to make a statement about domestic violence. He's basically destroyed his business overnight, the entire craft beer scene has rejected him and the retailers have been returning product.

    The quote:
    "Ok let's speak the truth. Maori are the scurge of New Zealand. The quicker we put them in prison the better. I'm talking about the majority of the male population. The ones who beat their missis. Who don't give a fuck about society. Yeah you who will Rebel against these words. But truth be told you are NZ biggest problem right now."

    The company (presumably him) came out with:
    "We are aware of a comment circulating that may be misconstrued as racism. Firstly, Eagle Brewing totally denounces any form of racism and promotes a multicultural environment within its team of employees,"

    And then he came up with a complete non-apology and weird digression while insisting he was absolutely not racist and his comments were taken wrong. Yeah.

    "I am aware of one of my comments posted on a NZ news page which is misconstrued as racism. I woudl like to apologise for the way in which this post has been perceived. I denounce all forms of racism and I am in no way biased to any one culture.
    My intention was to highlight the unacceptable issue of violence against women, which is statistically higher in some cultures. I have always promoted multiculturalism in the workplace as well as equal opportunity for all genders and I will continue to do so. Shortly I will be taking a break from Facebook, not sure how long for and I am considering my position within the business. My health is currently not the best and I need some time to reflect on how the pressure of the last few years has impacted me. My wife, staff and good friends have all been outstanding in their support of me. Thank you. The business and its stakeholders need to be confident that it will continue to flourish and it will. Love and kindness makes the world a better place for us all"

    185:

    I get the impression that he is a politically capable knuckle-dragger, both in stronger form than otherwise identical opponent, which is going to be 'interesting'. We were on course for a SF victory next year which, courtesy That Bliar, would be a recipe for a Six Counties solution the other way round. However, he just MIGHT reverse the DUP's fortunes, probably by turning it into the TUV, which would be no better. There is a glimmer of light, in that Alliance are also gaining ground (probably due to "a plague on both your houses" viewpoint among many younger people). I wish we still had DavetheProc's insight.

    186:

    EC Agree What happened to DtP, incidentally?

    187:

    The gold standard is just a promise made by the ledger holder that's supposed to inspire trust in them. It's not a necessary step, it's just how we happened to establish trust in banks as ledger holders in the West - they promised that if you ever stopped trusting them to hold an honest ledger, you could get gold out of the system and either find a different bank to hold the ledger for you, or do your own thing.

    The important move is from currency as some form of physical object you move around, to notes in a ledger held by an entity you trust.

    How the entity gains your trust in that migration is a side issue - in our history, it was via a promise that you could always get the old style physical objects back and stop trusting the ledger holder, but it's possible to imagine other ways to get there from money as a physical object.

    188:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 187: The gold standard is just a promise made by the ledger holder that's supposed to inspire trust in them. It's not a necessary step, it's just how we happened to establish trust in banks as ledger holders in the West - they promised that if you ever stopped trusting them to hold an honest ledger, you could get gold out of the system and either find a different bank to hold the ledger for you, or do your own thing.

    The important move is from currency as some form of physical object you move around, to notes in a ledger held by an entity you trust.

    How the entity gains your trust in that migration is a side issue - in our history, it was via a promise that you could always get the old style physical objects back and stop trusting the ledger holder, but it's possible to imagine other ways to get there from money as a physical object.

    Can you say BANK RUN boys 'n girls?

    189:

    He got sick of being abused, and gave up.

    190:

    I freely admit than I'm less than impartial when crypto is the subject. Frankly, the terminological appropriation of the word "crypto" by crypto-currency greed-addicts[2] sets me off. :-) It is (also) short for "cryptography" or older, "cryptology"[1], which is part of the foundation of block chain technologies used by cryptocurrencies. As sabik #3 says (very loosely restated), cryptocurrencies have poisoned captured and occupied an intellectual space which included a wide variety of technological ideas with transformational potential, like e.g. descendants of (anonymous) Chaumian cash. This may sound like "get off my lawn" to (often young) greed-addicts. It is not. :-)

    [1] https://crypto.iacr.org/2021/ - deadline has passed, but: Original contributions on all technical aspects of cryptology are solicited for submission to Crypto 2021, the 41st Annual International Cryptology Conference. Submissions are welcomed on any cryptographic topic including but not limited to: - foundational theory and mathematics; - the design, proposal, and analysis of cryptographic primitives and protocols; - secure implementation and optimization in hardware or software; - and applied aspects of cryptography [2] First google is this sort-of-amusing pop piece: Greed: The Ultimate Addiction (Leon F Seltzer, October 17, 2012). Greed is OK as one of the spices motivating real world productivity/creation. (Cue the people saying that proof-of-work(or state, for that matter) blockchain techs are good because they foster economy of scale efficient improvements for their raw inputs.)

    191:

    I’m more sanguine about crypto-currencies than Charlie. They are suitable for financing illegal transactions, but then criminals usually find ways to finance their dealings regardless.

    Here’s how I see things playing out in a world were crypto-currencies become pervasive: We live in a world that has a glut of capital, where wealthy people suck up profits and don’t spend it but turn it into even more capital. If you don’t believe there's a glut of capital, just look at the rates of US government bonds and 30 housing mortgages. They are down in the dirt, a sure sign of oversupply. To cure this problem economically (I’m not talking morally here), the surplus capital needs to be converted into demand (it needs to be spent.)

    We have so little demand in the developed economies that governments, having run out of cutting interest rates, have now taken to printing money as a way to stimulate demand. The current Biden administration sending checks to the poor is a good way of doing this. They government of course issues bonds to pay for all it, running up the national debt, but the Fed is still doing Quantative Easing to the tune of about 100 billion a month, which basically conjuring money out of thin air to buy these bonds back. (It's a nice little dog and pony show.)

    Crypto-currencies suck up surplus capital taking the money out of circulation, which enables the government to print replacement money with very little inflation. As crypto-currencies become more pervasive (and the government doesn’t tax the wealthy heavily), you’ll get following. The government will issue new money. It will do a couple of laps of the economy, before been sucked out of circulation as profits and turned into capital. If a lot of wealthy people think crypto is wonderful, it will finish up there.

    So what happens if everybody decides to spend their crypto. Well, if they all successfully converted it back to the working currency and spent it, there would massive inflation equivalent to all that money printed, but if there was a large run on bitcoin or whatever, the crypto-currency will crash, since there is not floor of usefulness as with gold or the need to pay taxes as with fiat currencies. Nor is the country’s central bank likely to bail people out, so holders of the currency will all lose their shirts.

    The net effect of all this then will be a large transfer of wealth from crypto-holders to the government for expenditures i.e. taxation

    192:

    Sorry, never occurred to me that newshub would block people outside Australia/NZ. And I thought the link text would be enough for most people to go off. "comments labelling Maori scourge of NZ misconstrued as racist"...

    193:

    Seems like maybe access to the queue becomes the chokepoint... which maybe boils down to the most powerful radio signal aimed at the probe.

    Not that I feel I understand all this very well.

    I suppose giant radio transmitters is at least cooler than warehouses full of gpu's.

    194:

    Chased away by the Many Named One's doxxing a year ago.

    195:

    While cryptocurrency is the topic, here's something fairly depressing- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-firm-revives-zombie-fossil-fuel-power-plant-to-mine-bitcoin/

    Private equity eh? What a bunch of rascals they are.

    196:

    From reading the article it's a too-small-to-be-economic-to-run coal-fired power station that was converted to burn pipeline gas so it's about as polluting as regular gas-fired electricity generation that provides about 40% of America's electricity right now.

    It indicates there's a market opportunity for the gas turbine generator manufacturers to build smaller Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants (CCGT) in the 10MW region specifically to provide crypto miners with cheaper electricity.

    197:

    Bellinghman @ 194 & EC @ 189 That is so depressing ... And indicates why I am openly not-very-tolerant ( to say the least ) "her" insertions.

    198:

    We're all doomed -- apparently investigators have discovered a security hole in the Universal Turing Machine, the basis of all modern digital electronics and computers.

    https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-32471

    It appears to be based on arbitrary code execution due to a buffer overflow.

    "At this time there is no patch or workaround."

    199:

    A few new developments in the world of space news

  • The Economist finally confirms the following rumor about SpaceX: SpaceX charges $62 million for a new rocket, and $50 million for a reused rocket. That rumor has been around since 2019. Note that Block 5 has been around since 2018. This explains why the only new first stages built in 2020 were: 2 GPS launches, 2 human Dragon launches, and 1 ESA climate satellite.

  • Of the 6k active satellites in orbit, about 1.5k are Starlinks. https://www.economist.com/business/2021/05/13/spacex-a-tesla-for-the-skies

  • Musk announced the orbital profile of the Starship test. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/rocket-report-starship-orbital-flight-details-ariane-5-may-delay-webb-launch/

  • China is either the second or fourth successful lander. The reason this is disputed is because the 1 USSR lander which survived on the surface survived for a few seconds. In Beagle 2's case, the solar panels didn't fully deployed, meaning the antenna couldn't be deployed.

  • Since April 22, SpaceX has had a launch on a 9-day interval. It's almost headed to the holy grail of 50 launches a year.

  • Right now, the Inspiration4 flight is scheduled to launch Sept 15. This is the mission that will launch Tom Cruise. Russia will launch its own actor in October.

  • 200:

    Moz @ 192: "Sorry, never occurred to me that newshub would block people outside Australia/NZ. And I thought the link text would be enough for most people to go off. "comments labelling Maori scourge of NZ misconstrued as racist"...

    FWIW, they apparently don't block it everywhere, only the UK & Canada. I had no trouble accessing it here in the U.S.

    I think the link text may be a bit misleading. The comments were not misconstrued. They clearly were racist.

    201:

    They released the latest Chinese census.

  • According to the Chinese government, the difference between the projected and census total population is due to an under count in Guangdong. That's the province which contains Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and the rest of the Pearl River Delta. The province's population rove from 106 million to 125 million, instead of the 112 million predicted.

  • The provinces that comprise Manchuria declined by 17%, 12%, and 2% respectively. That's China's Rust Belt, and home of any supposed Siberian invasion.

  • Other than the coast and the Northern Bank of the Yangtze, China's population pretty much declined North of the Yangtze. Short explanation: before 1000 AD, China used to fracture into Warring States. After 1200, it fractured into just 2 states - North and South China along the Quinling Huaihe Line (the split of the Song Dynasty follows this pattern, but isn't as clear-cut). In 2010, North China was 370 million people, 109 million of which were in Manchuria. It's interesting if this uneven population reduction signals that the line is becoming less significant.

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/nanqkg/oc_annual_population_growth_rate_in_the_2010s_by/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_and_southern_China

  • Right now, Mongolia is the only country in East Asia with a TFR above replacement, close to 3. This is a reversal from the below-replacement level it reached after the collapse of the USSR. But as the chart in the article below shows, it may be starting to reverse since 2016. The geopolitics of Inner Mongolia should get interesting.
  • https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/11/analysis-chinas-ageing-population-predicament-global-implications-east-asia

  • According to the official numbers, China has a TFR of 1.3 "In 2019, only five countries had lower rates – South Korea, Singapore, Malta, Ukraine and Spain – according to World Bank data." To be fair, it's on par with Italy, Moldova, and a few other countries.

  • The gender gap is narrowing: "Data from Tuesday showed the practice was starting to decline. Among newborns, males outnumbered females from 111.3 to 100. Ten years ago the ratio was 118.1 percent."

  • Finally, 15% of the working-age population has some tertiary education, compared to 39% in the OECD and 345 in the US.

  • https://www.thebharatexpressnews.com/key-takeaways-from-the-chinese-census-results/

    202:

    6. Right now, the Inspiration4 flight is scheduled to launch Sept 15. This is the mission that will launch Tom Cruise. Russia will launch its own actor in October.

    Right on the Inspiration 4 date, wrong on it being the Tom Cruise flight. He's currently expected to be on the second Axiom flight next year. Inspiration 4 is a 3 day free flight that isn't going to the ISS, not least because the docking mechanism is being replaced by an observation dome.

    The Starlink launch last night had uninterrupted footage of the first stage landing back on OCISLY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdgg_qwj-hI is the SpaceX coverage, touchdown is about 24:30 in.

    203:

    You're right, my mistake.

    204:

    Yeah, a splendid opportunity to add yet more carbon to our upcoming bill. Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be.

    205:

    I think you missed something: NOTE: the discoverer states "this vulnerability has no real-world implications."

    206:

    NOTE: the discoverer states "this vulnerability has no real-world implications." Yeah, it's pure joke. (Made me laugh when I first read it though.) Apply patches promptly, everyone. If you can't (and even if you can), strengthen whatever other measures you can, like firewalls, script blocking, be extra careful about attachments, etc. (Fighting a home WiFi router for the last week or two, possibly compromised, certainly misbehaving with a sometimes-broken web console. Need to build another tool.)

    207:

    Vulch @ 202:

    6. Right now, the Inspiration4 flight is scheduled to launch Sept 15. This is the mission that will launch Tom Cruise. Russia will launch its own actor in October.

    Right on the Inspiration 4 date, wrong on it being the Tom Cruise flight. He's currently expected to be on the second Axiom flight next year. Inspiration 4 is a 3 day free flight that isn't going to the ISS, not least because the docking mechanism is being replaced by an observation dome.

    Is he going up there to meet Xenu?

    208:

    I hope not. I'm a xenu-phobe.

    210:

    My dumbass nephew made the news...

    In the dark?!? Damn, he is never going to hear the end of that.

    (My dad and some friends exploded minor parts of their college campus, but nobody was hurt and they didn't get caught.)

    211:

    It does rather sound as though there's more to the story and in time someone will publish a summary of events and some recommendations.

    I hope the nephew comes out of it ok.

    212:

    I want to get him a plaque which reads "Darwin Award, Second Place."

    Can anyone translate a couple things for me from the paragraph which reads, "Officials say the incident all started when the first climber led the route and lowered off. The second climber then followed “and after climbing the route was cleaning the top anchors when [the 1st climber] said he saw his partner free fall from the top” and land in a large bush."

    What does it mean that the first climber "lowered off." Also, what does "cleaning the top anchors" mean?

    213:

    "lowered off."

    Got to the to then abseiled back down to the bottom.

    "cleaning the top anchors"

    As you climb you attach anchors to the rock and link your rope to it. Then the last climber will remove those anchors as they go past them. They're tied to a rope that goes all the way to the top then back down to the person on the ground, so they don't need any other anchors.

    Are called "protection" in this diagram.

    https://www.fix.com/blog/moving-from-the-climbing-gym-to-the-outdoors/

    214:

    The tricky part is often that top anchor - you have to leave it there. Generally you drop both ends of your rope to the bottom and the bight at the top runs through the anchor. You abseil down on that doubled rope, then when you are unhooked at the bottom pull one end, the other end goes up and through the anchor then falls down.

    If the rope is clear both ways (common on short climbs), often the belayer will lower the climber rather than swapping over to a climber-controlled abseil. It's a bit of effort to swap without ever disconnecting from the anchor completely, and requires climbing carrying an abseil device.

    Many climbs in popular areas have bolted-in top anchors so climbers can use those for lowering off. These days anywhere remotely popular will have those, or possibly just one lowering off point for a whole row of climbing routes. Of not it's common to carry a short length of old climbing rope, or just sacrifice a sling. Tie that off as an anchor, leave it in place.

    There are several common mistakes made that lead to people falling as you describe.

    • the person at the top assumes that the belayer still has them, while the belayer assumes the climber will abseil down using the doubled rope. If the climber does not check that they have resistance before stepping boldly backwards off the top... splat.

    • less commonly the climber will set up for the abseil but make an error, or overestimate the amount of resistance that their gear will provide. They step back, can't hold tight enough and travel rapidly downwards while attached to the rope.

    • less commonly the anchor fails. But again, the climber should check the anchor before stepping off.

    • very occasionally some other bit of gear will fail. Did I mention checking your gear? You should check your gear.

    215:

    Just to make sure I have this right, the top anchor could have broken, my nephew might not have checked the resistance on the rope, or might have attempted to abseil down and failed to hold the rope with which he was lowering himself tightly enough, or some other piece of gear might have broken.

    Alternately the climbing spot was popular-enough that there was a permanent anchor and it broke

    216:

    Or something else went wrong that my quick summary didn't think of.

    But almost always the problem is human error.

    217:

    Right. Thanks very much for explaining all this, I now feel I have some understanding of what might have happened.

    218:

    There are other ways, for example this abomination: http://www.alpinist.com/doc/web19c/ms-beal-escaper

    I found that the prospect of retreating with it motivates climbers to keep moving forward.

    219:

    Greg @ 162:

    So, "the hash" is a set, but complicated known routine? The whole thing is dependant upon not being able to crack the hashing code, yes?

    Yes. Hashing is a standard part of cryptography which existed a long time before Bitcoin was invented; Nakamoto merely used it as part of the system. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 algorithm which was one of a set developed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. It gets used everywhere. If you click on the little padlock in the URL bar for this web site and drill down into the certificate details you will see that the SHA-256 hash for the public key of this website is

    96:0B:6C:00:22:97:C8:9E:1D:C6:9F:F1:6D:30:FF:AC:81:E7:41:BA:BE:5E:02:2D:6A:FB:AC:0A:3A:1B:28:DE

    Another example use: when you install software on Windows it has to be "signed" by the publisher, otherwise Windows puts up scary warnings about not trusting it. What gets signed is not the actual file, its the hash of the file. This is because the signature algorithm would take too long if it had to do the entire file.

    (In my earlier post I said the Bitcoin hash was 512 bits. I was wrong; Bitcoin uses the 256 bit variant).

    If SHA-256 was cracked then a lot more things than Bitcoin would break. However that is not how things generally happen in practice. The design goal of SHA-256 is that it will take 2^256 (about 10^77) attempts to find an input which generates a given hash (known as a "collision"). The nightmare scenario is that someone finds a shortcut that lets them do it with only a few days of computer time. In that case I could create a website which masquerades as this one, or the UK government, or anything else. I could sign my malware to make Windows think it was a genuine Microsoft update. And I could also earn lots of Bitcoin :-/

    But in practice that tends not to happen. What actually happens is that some cryptographers publish a paper showing how to knock a half a dozen zeros off the number, which makes it a million times easier, but still needing 10^71 attempts. Then someone else knocks another dozen zeros off a year later. Eventually it gets to the point where Google throws a few hundred GPU-years at the problem and publishes an actual collision, and everyone agrees that the algorithm is officially broken. You can see the story for the SHA-256's predecessor here.

    But there is plenty of warning so anyone using that hash for anything important can migrate to a new improved algorithm. Cryptographers have been doing this for decades now, and the computer industry has the routine down fairly well.

    And I DO UNDERSTAND "real" money. Perhaps you would care to actually explain how a cryptocurrency based on a blockchain you know WORKS?

    OK OK, no need to shout, I can hear you perfectly well.

    I'd be happy to explain more if you can clarify the question (I just lurve geeksplaining). Do you want the technical details of how a signed transaction ends up being recognised as valid and placed on the blockchain? Or do you want to know how Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is useful in day-to-day commerce? Or something else?

    If its about day-to-day use in commerce then the answer is simple: they aren't.

    Satoshi Nakomoto was a computer science giant and an economic midget. - Agreed, but WHO THE FUCK IS HE - or "they" of course? I assume various large guvmint agencies would LURVE to find out the answer to that.

    All this is speculation of course, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that 1) they already know and 2) Nakamoto destroyed the keys to his early stash of bitcoins precisely so that it couldn't be used to destabilise the market. I read Nakamoto as a geek idealogue; the kind of person who thinks hard, reaches a (to him) logical conclusion, and then follows that conclusion to its logical end. Very Vulcan, in its way. I think he released Bitcoin because it seemed the logical thing to do. If so then destroying his initial wallet keys to protect it would also be the logical thing to do.

    (I'm saying "he" because Satoshi Nakamoto is a male name and it's easier than saying "he/she/it/they" every time)

    Suppose that large guvmint agencies find out who he is. What would they do with the information? Even if they managed to get Nakamoto's early keys and used them to crash its value, what would that achieve? There are plenty of other cryptocoins around, and the technology can't be uninvented.

    Where you are wrong is @ 158 You still don't get that all money is "fiat" even, or maybe, especially, Gold. Or maybe, you do?

    I think I do, if I understand you correctly. I was using the term "fiat" in its usual sense: currencies that are issued by governments without being "backed" by something that has "real" value (like gold, silver, or tins of bully beef). My point was that ultimately all these things are only valuable because everyone believes them to be valuable. Is that what you meant?

    Paul

    220:

    There are other ways, for example this abomination: http://www.alpinist.com/doc/web19c/ms-beal-escaper

    The inventor isn't called Sam Gamgee by any chance?

    221:

    Re: '... males outnumbered females from 111.3 to 100. Ten years ago the ratio was 118.1 percent'

    Glad this was mentioned: that the strong cultural preference for a male child when the one-baby rule was imposed ultimately resulted in approx. 1-in-7 males of the affected generation not able to find a female mate/wife thereby reducing overall reproductive rates into the future ... and so on.

    Also a few single female co-workers who had left China because the corporate ladder climbing over there is more sexist than here in the West and made even worse because of the government mandated early retirement age imposed on women (approx. 50 yo). The few women I know are unlikely to move back to China. Anecdotal - yeah - because I've no idea what the past 40 years' official emigration by gender is.

    222:

    Re: '... if you want a blockchain secured'

    I'm wondering how/whether distance somehow figures into this:

    1- The farther away the funds are (off-planet) the longer the delay to (re-)accessing your funds. This seems at odds with the line that financial instrument traders are apt to move their offices as close as possible to trading exchanges in the hopes of providing their trading AI with a one or two nanosecond advantage.

    2- If all these funds are kept off-planet, what is the risk that the data string (funds) get broken or lost via some natural (magnetic storm) or even a man-made event (weird combo of magic techie waves and/or particles) during transmission.

    3- How can you check/verify that your e-funds still exist: what type of independent audit system is there? (Half wondering whether this ends up as Heisenberg's either you know how much money you have at a point-in-time or you know where it is but you can't know both simultaneously.)

    223:

    I skimmed the article. Gosh, I had never realized how friendly plants are. Why, this says that the large bush was able to break his fall, presumably rushing over from wherever it was....

    224:

    Yeah. Not terribly well-written, was it?

    225:

    Paul ( 219 ) Do you want the technical details of how a signed transaction ends up being recognised as valid and placed on the blockchain? - Yes Oh & thanks, so far .... I realise that for "normal" commercial transactions, Bitcoin is not the preferred option, shall we say?

    "Real" as opposed to/being the same as "fiat" money. Gold is only valuable, because people agreee that it's valuable - ditto Bully-Beef in a p.o.w. camp (!) And the difference between that & people agreeing that a US$ is actually worth something ... is ... - yes, precisely. So yes, that was exactly what I meant. ( 220 ) No: Galadriel

    226:

    Most of us with a brain and who think about it for a few minutes realize that $$$/£££/€€€ are just a way of equating how many chickens are the equivalent value of a flat screen TV or a day of labor me digging ditches for you. Everything else is a derivation of that concept.

    227:

    I realise that for "normal" commercial transactions, Bitcoin is not the preferred option, shall we say?

    I think the blockchain cryptocurrency part inherently isn't why people don't do business with it, because you can in fact use it to pay for stuff. As an outsider, I see two problems that keep me out of it:

  • The value is hard to predict. Strict stability isn't necessary, because if you have a reasonably good idea of how much something will be worth when you exchange it, that's good enough (full faith and credit, really). With Bitcoin, my impression is that you can guess the value within an order of magnitude, which is not good enough.

  • Because of the blockchain, a lot of other entities know that the transaction exists. Moreover, a majority of the entities approving the transaction are in China, and again, that's not that great, especially if you're outside China. While there are many things I admire about China and many things that I despise about that vast country, the key factor for me is that I don't want to move my finances closer to the front in a potential China-US cyberwar than they already are.

  • 228:

    Troutwaxer @ 217: Right. Thanks very much for explaining all this, I now feel I have some understanding of what might have happened.

    If you get a chance to talk to him, maybe he'll be able to explain what happened. I hope he gets better & you do get to talk to him.

    229:

    It finally crystallized in my mind: paying with cryptocurrency is like paying with a stock certificate... based on the value this hour.

    230:

    I want to get him a plaque which reads "Darwin Award, Second Place."

    My oldest cousin died in a climbing accident. Sea stacks in Anglesey.

    He was an instructor leading the climb. Apparently his student didn't belay so when my cousin fell he pulled both of them into the sea and they drowned. No idea who made the decision not to belay. Doesn't really matter now.

    Nearly eight years now, but it still hurts.

    231:

    Greg asked for the gory technical details of Bitcoin. OK. This is going to take a bit of background. Satoshi Nakamoto didn't invent this all out of thin air; most of the components for Bitcoin were already in existence. Nakamoto just put them together in a novel way. I've already covered hashing algorithms. The other important bit is public key cryptography.

    In a traditional "symmetric" key system, if Alice wants to send Bob a secret message she encrypts the message with a secret key, and Bob decrypts it with the same secret key. They know that nobody else can read it, and (less obviously) Bob also knows that Alice must have sent it, because nobody else has the key to encrypt it.

    But how do they share the secret key in the first place?

    Also, this means that if you have 100 people who want to communicate then each of them needs 99 secret keys to talk each of the others. There are ways around this with a single trusted authority handing out keys on demand, but that gets us back to the single point of failure.

    Public key cryptography works like this: Alice and Bob both have two keys; a public key and a secret key. Each of them keeps their secret key secret, but publishes their public key to the whole world, including each other. Alice encrypts her message with Bob's public key, and Bob decrypts it with his secret key.

    Each "key pair" of public and secret key is obviously related. The original scheme involved a public key that was the product of two very big (hundreds of digits) prime numbers, and the secret key was the individual primes (very roughly, and skipping over lots of number theory detail here). Multiplying the prime numbers is easy, but factoring the product is known to be a very hard problem.

    Modern systems use something called Elliptic Curves (don't ask), but the underlying idea is the same; the public key and secret key are related by some bit of number theory that is easy to do forwards but practically impossible (exact words) to reverse.

    Going back to Alice and Bob; they know that nobody else can read the message but they have lost the other property; anyone could encrypt a message ending "yours sincerely, Alice" with Bob's public key, so he has no way of being sure that Alice sent it.

    The solution is to turn the encryption around. Alice "encrypts" the message with her private key. Anyone getting it can now decrypt it with her public key, and be sure that Alice sent it. So now instead of a message that only Bob can read you have a message that only Alice could have sent. When you hear computer people talk about "digital signatures" this is the process they are referring to.

    Obviously you can also combine the two processes to send messages that are both secret and signed.

    Actually when Alice signs a message she generates a hash from the message and encrypts that, because that is faster than applying the encryption algorithm to the entire message. To verify the sender Bob decrypts the hash with Alice's public key, generates a new hash from the alleged message, and compares the two. If they match then Alice must be the sender.

    Likewise when sending a secret message you don't encrypt the whole message using the public key. You generate a random "session key" for a traditional symmetric cypher, encrypt the message with that, and then encrypt the session key with the public key. As well as being faster, this means you can send the same long message to a list of different people by just encrypting the session key once for each recipient, instead of encrypting the entire message for each recipient.

    OK, back to Bitcoin. Bitcoins don't use the secret encryption part of this, but the whole scheme depends on digital signatures. If Bob wants to receive some bitcoins he generates an "address". This is actually a newly generated public key. The secret key is of course kept secret, but Bob can now send the address (aka public key) to Alice by whatever means he wants.

    Alice meanwhile already has some bitcoins. She generates a message saying "Pay to {Bob's new address} 1 bitcoin, signed {Alice's bitcoin address}". (Actually the message is a bit more complicated; I'll come on to that later). Alice then transmits this message on a peer-to-peer network. Each peer ("node" in bitcoin-speak) checks at the transaction is valid, meaning that it is signed by an address which has that much bitcoin to spend, and then forwards it on to all of their peers. So the message spreads around the world in a few seconds, including to Bob.

    Most nodes just validate messages and pass them on, but some nodes are miners. Each miner accumulates a list of valid pending transactions and assembles them into a "block" which is going to be added to the ledger. Different miners may have slightly different blocks; that doesn't matter. As I explained previously, a valid block has a random number appended along with a hash code. The job of a miner is to find a random number that gives a hash code for the whole block less than the "difficulty". The difficulty is adjusted every few weeks to keep the average block rate to 1 every 10 minutes. Alice's message gets incorporated into the draft block by all the miners, and so when one of them wins the race to find the right random number the new block is broadcast to the peer-to-peer network, and the mining race begins again. At that point Alice's message paying 1 bitcoin to Bob has gone onto the blockchain (i.e. the bitcoin ledger) and is said to be "confirmed", so Bob can now see this and know that he has in fact got 1 bitcoin from Alice. Bob can now spend some or all of this bitcoin himself by sending his own message in the same way, signed with the secret key he generated at the beginning.

    I said earlier that the payment messages are a bit more complicated. Lets say Alice has 3 bitcoins in address A1 and wants to pay one to Bob. She actually generates a new address which I will call A2 and sends a message saying "Pay 1 bitcoin to {Bob's address} and 1.99 bitcoins to {A2}, signed {A1}. The remaining 0.01 bitcoin goes as a payment to the miner that wins the block containing the transaction. So there is a kind of bidding system for space in the blockchain; miners pick the messages that pay the most and leave any other messages for later, or perhaps never. So paying bitcoins is always an interesting exercise in guessing how much you need to pay to get into the next block. If you guess wrong your message could stay in limbo indefinitely (there is now a system for retransmitting it with a higher payment).

    To check that Alice's message is valid each node merely (!) has to look through the whole blockchain for any message sending bitcoins to or from address A1 and add them up. That is the balance in A1. If the signature checks out and the balance is equal or greater than the amount spent in Alice's latest message then the message is a valid transaction.

    When a miner finds a new block they transmit it over the peer-to-peer network. Each node in the network verifies that all the transactions are valid and the hash of the block is less than the current difficulty. Once the block is accepted it gets added to the node's copy of the blockchain and forwarded on to that node's contacts.

    Simples!

    232:

    Oh man, I am so sorry.

    233:

    If Bob wants to receive some bitcoins he generates an "address". This is actually a newly generated public key.

    You forgot the most exciting part. Bob uses a bit of software to generate a private key/public key pair. If Bob chooses the right software their new private key will be a long random string of bits. But if not the new key might be as little as 32 random bits padded with a lot of zeros.

    Someone made more than $US20M by watching for those 8M public keys (4M 32 bit numbers, with the zero padding on the front or the back) and immediately sending a "pay the balance to me" transaction every time money went into one. Apparently the bug existed in more than one "crypto wallet' program.

    234:

    Back on topic, I came across this interesting article about the energy usage of Bitcoin mining:

    "The authors estimated the energy consumption of the entire bitcoin network at 113.89 terawatts per hour - 99% of which comes from operating mining machines. To contrast, Cambridge's Centre for Alternative Finance estimated bitcoin's energy consumption at 128 terawatts per hour as of March 2021.

    Based on their calculations, bitcoin's energy consumption is only half of the traditional banking system's 263.72 terawatts per hour and gold mining's 240.61 terawatts per hour.

    The authors also said that many don't realize how much less energy bitcoin uses because of how limited transparency can be into gold and financial-system data.

    Read more: 'Wolf of All Streets' crypto trader Scott Melker breaks down his strategy for making money using 'HODLing' and 100-times trade opportunities - and shares 5 under-the-radar tokens he thinks could explode Comparing energy consumption of bitcoin, gold, and traditional banking system."

    https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-traditional-banking-mike-novogratz-galaxy-digital-2021-5-1030437709

    I'd be wary of this study for now, since it only looks at Bitcoin, not the combined energy usage of all cryptocurrencies. However, it does seem plausible. Below are the numbers for cloud computing globally

    "To the Editor — Data centres account for 200 TWh yr–1, or around 1% of total global electricity demand1. While their energy usage has been stable in recent years as efficiencies increase, it may grow to between 15–30% of electricity consumption in some countries by 2030 (ref. 2)."

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0837-6

    235:

    Based on their calculations, bitcoin's energy consumption is only half of the traditional banking system's 263.72 terawatts per hour and gold mining's 240.61 terawatts per hour.

    I don't think I'd ever wondered about banking but it's not surprising; just keeping an ATM running on every street corner adds up when they cover continents. But turn that around: half the energy of keeping untold millions of small computers running is used up by wanking about Bitcoins? Yikes.

    Mining likewise uses a lot of power but we expect mining to be a high-energy undertaking and we get metals at the end of the process.

    236:

    Yeah, but the total net worth of all bitcoins right now is $160 billion, give or take. I'm not sure what the size of the banking sector is, but from XKCD's now-dated Money figure, back in 2011, world GDP was $62.9 trillion, or about 400 times bigger than Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin's using as much energy as the banking sector right now, it's around 100 times less energy efficient. I'd suggest shutting it down until someone comes up with a way of producing cryptids (or whatever the generic unit of cryptocurrency is) that's at least 100 times more energy-efficient than Bitcoin. No point in wasting so much for so little owned by so few.

    237:

    Depends how you measure it - if high speed trading counts then those trades alone are bigger than GDP. They trade multiples of their capital every year, which is why market trading isn't included in GDP.

    Also, not all bitcoin changes hands every year. Even excluding the 20% or so that is thought to be lost (ie, it has been mined but the private key is no longer known)

    Trouble is that if you exclude market trading from your measure... you should also exclude craptocurrency trading. Albeit I suspect that crapto trading is actually very low energy compared to mining, so long as you exclude mining from trading (mining is how trades get confirmed, but continues even without trades)

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading

    238:

    The Business Insider piece is just embarrassing; writers should be punished for stuff like "terawatts per hour".

    The actual pdf, from github, is a seriously wild free-for-all estimation spree[1], comparing huge hordes of hamsters, small bags of apples, and small boat loads of stony-iron meteorites. https://github.com/GalaxyDigitalLLC/Financial-Industry-Electricity-Balance/blob/main/out/main.pdf (For instance, if all financial transactions were bitcoin-based, then bitcoin would pick up the most of the banking energy usage in their analysis, at a very minimum.) Yeah, gold mining sucks. I like gold (it doesn't tarnish), and wish my cables had slightly thicker gold on the contacts.

    Galaxy Digital, the cryptocurrency firm of bitcoin enthusiast Mike Novogratz released the study on Friday, accompanied by open-source access to its calculations. Sure. As of April 23, 2021, the reported annualized usage of the Bitcoin network is 113.88 TWh/yr, which is taken to be E Miners in Eq. (1.1). And they go with that number. Which is near the bottom of a dip in the graph(or csv) at the https://cbeci.org/ that they cite. If they went with May 13 2021, it would be 151.16 TWh/yr. 151.16/113.88 = 1.33. (Is their choice of a dip a finance joke about buying the dips? Yes, curiously, they accessed the data "May 13, 2021", and then cherry picked the history.)

    [1] Even by my standards of wild, which are ... high. :-) (Seriously, estimates used for comparison should be precise enough that the results are useful for comparison.)

    239:

    Ioan @ 234: Based on their calculations, bitcoin's energy consumption is only half of the traditional banking system's 263.72 terawatts per hour and gold mining's 240.61 terawatts per hour.

    Of course gold mining is environmentally unfriendly in a long list of ways. Energy consumption is the least of it.

    The problem with bitcoin energy consumption is that mining bitcoins is paid in bitcoins, so if the bitcoin price doubles then its worth spending twice as much on electricity to mine them, so the electricity consumption goes up in proportion with the price. If the price increases by another factor of 10 then it looks like bitcoins will be taking a substantial fraction of the electricity supply of the planet.

    In fact in some countries this is already an issue. These tend to be badly run countries where electricity is either subsidised or widely pilfered. Some people have figured out that they can make money by mining on cheap household electricity; the electricity board pays the extra cost in subsidies, and the neighbourhood pays in increased brownouts and power cuts. Having bitcoins instead of the unstable local currency is a nice bonus.

    Set against this are two things:

  • Every few years the number of bitcoins paid per block halves, so the electricity consumption will halve periodically too. Its a race between price increases and the reward cuts.

  • Even if the price doubles, miners still need to buy extra mining machines. So in reality the electricity consumption increase isn't quite so high. Nevertheless the guy who is using an old coal-fired power plant to generate electricity for mining is a harbinger of the future. This also means that one way to limit the environmental damage of bitcoin mining is to ration the supply of mining hardware. Bitcoin mining chips require chip fabs to make and are no use for anything else, so that looks like a plausible pinch-point for government control.

  • (You need specialist hardware to mine bitcoins because the process is a race to compute as many SHA-256 hashes as possible. This has made it economic to produce specialist chips that do nothing except compute SHA-256 hashes. Using anything else for the job is so slow in comparison that its just not economic.)

    While I'm talking about mining hardware, has anyone tried to buy a graphics card recently? Its difficult, and you will pay a lot more than you should. The reason is that the designers of other cryptocurrencies looked at the CPU-bound mining process of bitcoin and decided to use hash algorithms that were limited by memory instead of CPU, in the hope of shifting the cost of mining to memory. This worked, but it means that a graphics card with sufficient on-board memory is an efficient mining machine, so the rise in prices of other cryptocurrencies means that everyone is trying to hook up a dozen high-end graphics cards in parallel to make a mining rig. If this is done in a cold country then the actual electricity cost drops because the mining rig generates heat which would otherwise be produced by running the same electricity through an electric heater.

    240:

    The reason people dont use Bitcoins for regular commerce is that it is literally not possible to do so.

    Remember that long explanation of the technical innards? Transactions are part of new blocks. New blocks are limited per week. Each block only contains so many transactions. You can literally only carry out under ten transactions per second across all bitcoins in existence. This suffices when the only trades are speculators holding onto their coins for months on end, but if significant numbers of people wanted to actually get paid in, and promptly spend bitcoins... They would simply find it impossible. Bidding on getting into the next block would mushroom until sufficient numbers of would-be traders gave it up as a mugs game.

    The designer of bitcoin put a poison pill at the heart of it guaranteeing that it could never, ever replace fiat currencies. Hence, regardless of their public statements, I presume they are/were either a scammer, or literally a NSA working group wanting a tracking tool for the underground economy.

    241:

    You can literally only carry out under ten transactions per second across all bitcoins in existence.

    Actually that is no longer true. The Lightning Network is a way to move bitcoins without adding a new entry on the blockchain for each transaction. Its complicated and there are some distinct disadvantages, but it does offer a couple of orders of magnitude improvement for small payments.

    Warning: the underlying details make the blockchain look simple; I don't think I'm up to geeksplaining it.

    242:

    Does it boil down to "Let us hold your bitcoins for you. Here's some technobabble. Trust us!" ?

    243:

    Yes. It is straightforwardly a bank issuing notes "backed" by bitcoin, with much technobabble to disguise that fact, because the overwhelming majority of "investors" in bitcoin have.. let us say Issues with banks.

    244:

    Does it boil down to "Let us hold your bitcoins for you. Here's some technobabble. Trust us!" ?

    No it does not. To set up a channel the node at each end puts some coins into a transaction which is locked to a future time (actually, a future block on the blockchain). When one side sends money to another they can update the copy of the transaction and send it to the other end. Finally the transaction can be closed out so they each get the right amount back. It needs one entry on the blockchain to set up, and another to close it out. If one side tries to cheat the other can simply let the whole thing time out.

    There is also a way of setting up a chain of transactions across the network so you don't need a direct link to the party you want to send the coins to. Like I said, the details are complicated, but you don't need to trust anyone.

    The major risk is that your counterparty nodes can't tell the difference between you trying to steal coins and just going innocently off-line due to a network failure, so if you can't stay on-line you could lose your coins. Also the coins in the channel are on-line all the time, so they are more vulnerable if your node gets hacked.

    I have to confess my brain went cross-eyed when I tried to understand the details, so please don't ask me for a geeksplanation that is any more detailed than that. The Wikipedia article is a good place to start.

    245:

    Any thoughts on this? My take is that some SUPERSECRET guvmint agency ( DARPA? ) is playing games & the left hand is deliberately not telling anyone else AT ALL. Where the Gripping Hand might be & what it's gripping, is anyone's guess.

    246:

    The problem with the "secret government agency" theory is that they have access to a number of huge missile ranges that can be certified free of aircraft with cameras. Why be seen?

    247:

    I see three possible reasons for this:

    It's aliens and the government is getting us ready for the big reveal. (Unlikely, to say the least.)

    Someone has MUCH better tech than the U.S. Navy/Air Force/etc. and the problem has become too big to hide.

    There was some kind of procurement SNAFU involving video displays which allows this to occur as an unwanted "special effect" and that story is expected to break soon.

    So I'm guessing either the second or third, though I'd love to hear that we're not alone.

    248:

    I'll get to the really cool Laundryverse version at the end, but here's my take, at least for the UFO/USOs (submerging UFOs) around Catalina, which is near San Clemente and in the middle of the big Navy test and practice range around San Clemente and out to San Nicholas.

    One thing to realize is that Catalina's been the center of weird stuff for a very long time--pre Contact, it was a major religious center for Southern California Indians, and there have been UFO/USO sightings off there for going on 70 years or more, along with all sorts of supernatural stuff (and one day I'll finish that book I set partly out there). So it's a great place to have sightings of the Unknown, whatever's causing the phenomena.

    The second thing is that this is all off the Port of Los Angeles, so there are LOTS of ships in the vicinity--pleasure boats, fishing boats, military craft, and commercial boats. It's crowded waters, not the back end of beyond like the North Pacific. That makes a bit of a problem for someone trying to sneak in and out.

    What does this all mean?

    Well, it could be Chinese/Russian drones, flying from commercial vessels tracking into or out of LA. Problem with that is that if they get caught, the repercussions are rather enormous. But it would be easier to confine an operation to a commercial vessel or a yacht than to launch it from the shore. It's also not being launched from Catalina, unless the Wrigley Family are Russian or Chinese spies (which I strongly doubt). The island's visited by a lot of tourists, and it would be hard to set up the operation without someone noticing, except possibly at the Wrigley Ranch. And as with a UFO drone flying off a boat, noticing that the UFOs are flying onto the island, or onto boats in the water around it, would spoil the operation. One thing I should note is that Catalina, in fact that whole area, is really, really quiet, to the point where you can hear boats miles offshore. So flying a drone in and out without someone noticing demands really quiet technology and a fair amount of luck.

    It could be civilians goofing around. Same problems as with the foreign operations, really. The only thing I'd add is that people have been flying RC UFOs around the LA area for at least a decade (I wanted one when I read about it), so I could believe that someone was being a dick and flying their RC or autonomous drone around a military vessel. Not getting caught is the hard part with this story.

    To me, the most likely scenarios are video SNAFUs and US military operations, and it's probably a mix of both. I'll ignore the SNAFUs, which others understand better than I do, and focus on the military stuff, which others understand better than I do...Contrary to what you might think, the US has a long history of running tests on its own forces to check their readiness. Back in the day, pretending to be terrorists and infiltrating bases to test security was one of SEAL Team 6's missions, and there are still Red Hat forces at Area 51 to give pilots experience against Russian planes. Given how much they invest in base security around here, I'd expect them to test it occasionally.

    If I had to bet, I'd guess that there's a counter cyberwar outfit somewhere in the Specwar community flying UFOs against conventional military, to see how they react to stuff that makes no sense and screws with their sensors. These fine lunatics then (possibly) debrief the captain and command crew over how the exercise went, but don't read in the rest of the crew, because they don't want them to get complacent.

    Another possibility (not mutually exclusive) is that the Black Ops community using US military crews to test bleeding edge technology, and they're leaking some of the tests now for a reason. This is something they've done before (the trio of dorito chip planes over Texas about 5 years ago), so I wouldn't be surprised. The dorito chips leak was pretty clearly a pointed gesture to the Russians that we have stuff in our arsenal that they don't have the doctrine to handle, so throttling down their jets might be wise.

    And finally, we have the possibility that there is an alien base in the California Bight, the poor sods. If so, then one could make a really interesting Lovecraftian B-story over why the US chemical industry dumped such huge amounts of DDT and other toxic stuff in the waters off Catalina. (e.g. https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground/). It's really a horror down there, with thousands of leaking cans. Perhaps it wasn't just what it looks like, a colossal act of environmental damage and hubris. Perhaps they were trying to poison Them, whoever They are. If so, it didn't work.

    The fun part is that none of these explanations are mutually exclusive. Someone could right a gonzo story where they're all partly true. Paging Bruce Sterling....

    249:

    That particular one?

    Looks like a balloon that's lost its helium gradually sinking until a wave hits it.

    250:

    If it was deflating, how did it keep its shape then suddenly disappear? There's enough in the video to show that the ocean wasn't calm beneath it. If it's a partially inflated balloon, it's bizarre that it would hold its shape and apparently move in an environment that wasn't still.

    I forgot to point out one reason for doing UFO tests off Southern California: Hollywood. It's a good place to hide/hire special effects companies to come up with stuff to test military systems and crews. This is well-known: there's a company that specializes in faking traumatic attacks for the combat medics training at Pendleton, for example (they hire amputees, and I'll let you figure out how they're made up to train the medics). There's also a lot of industrial shops scattered all over the basin, some working for Hollywood, some for the military. It's an easier environment to come up with and deploy some weird effect than elsewhere, because both industries can be very secretive.

    As for the putative balloon, it was hot on IR. So perhaps it was set up to be really visible on IR, then rapidly disappear, perhaps using a bit of seawater to cool off? While it's circular in cross section, I'm not sure what about the shape of the rest of it. Perhaps it was some sort of RC plane, like Superman here or this commercially available octocopter. That's the point, that it's hard to identify unknowns from sensor videos. Someone setting out to spoof sensors with known properties in a known area could have a lot of fun with the crews manning the sensors, especially if the latter are new to the area and rotating in for training.

    251:

    I didn't see any movement. The camera jiggled a bit while it got a lock on it. Then you could see the background moving, which is what you get when you look at a floating object from a moving aircraft.

    Being foil is only going to reflect IR, so you'll see reflected light. The moment it's swamped by water you're not going to see it in IR. Water will block any reflections, like dipping a mirror into milk.

    I'm not sure it was a balloon, but it didn't do anything that I wouldn't expect a balloon to do. Maybe it's an Alien spacecraft cunningly disguised as a gender reveal balloon. "It's a BOY" (no, it's an alien).

    252:

    H If I had to bet, I'd guess that there's a counter cyberwar outfit somewhere in the Specwar community flying UFOs against conventional military, to see how they react to stuff that makes no sense and screws with their sensors. Seems the most likely, doesn't it? With this the Black Ops community using US military crews to test bleeding edge technology, and they're leaking some of the tests now for a reason. a close second

    253:

    Meanwhile ( Deliberate separate posting ) What are the USA-ians take on this possile horror? Bets as to which way they will jump?

    254:

    Well, it's an interesting lose-lose-win scenario.

    There's been a fuss for decades that sweeping abortion rights allowed by a court ruling is a problem. IIRC, even the late Justice Ginsburg had reservations.

    So it gets struck down, then what?

    Well, most Americans want access to abortion, so if it's suddenly illegal across much of the US, that's a problem for the Republicans, not the Democrats. If the Supreme Court strikes down abortion, the outcry is probably going to force the democrats in the Senate to do something drastic, like kill the fillibuster, make abortion the law of the land, and expand the Supreme Court so that it's less capable of doing stupid, destructive things.

    At the very least, I don't think the Republicans are going to make bank off this. Right now, the Democrats are too busy trying to repair the damage of the last decade to deal with electoral politics. Striking down abortion will definitely put electoral politics, along with wiping out the MAGAts as a political force, front and center on a huge number of radars, including mine.

    We'll see how stupid and doctrinaire the new justices are. My uninformed take is that they'll keep the law standing. That will piss off Republicans and energize them for the 2022 election. We'll see.

    255:

    My take on the UFOs is a natural phenomena, akin to the Hessdalen lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hessdalen_lights I remember reading somewhere theories about naturally occurring mirrored plasma spheres, unfortunately I can't remember where. But something like this, caused by geomagnetic effects or some such. I think the reason we are seeing all these videos etc is that they have determined that whilst they don't necessarily know what they are; they are not aliens, Russians etc. I also think if they were "red team" tests they wouldn't publicise them either. Alternatively any other option. I would love it to be something more exciting, parallel world incursion or something!

    256:

    I'm not clear what a natural mirrored plasma sphere is, although I agree that I'm not clear on what a will o' the wisp is either. That said, some of the stuff the sailors saw in 2019 was thought to be drones, not natural phenomena (e.g. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39913/multiple-destroyers-were-swarmed-by-mysterious-drones-off-california-over-numerous-nights). As for the US government and UFOs, it's pretty clear from Project Oxcart (forerunner of the SR-71), that they're perfectly happy with letting unknown projects be seen in public as UFOs, at least on some occasions.

    That doesn't mean that what the ships experienced off my coast were Red Team exercises. But given that they're both heavily traveled by many vessels and used as military training grounds, it doesn't make a lot of sense for a foreign government to launch a drone swarm. It would be like the US Air Force launching a small flight of drones against some Russian Destroyers training in the Black Sea. It's not clear what they'd learn, and the chance of a diplomatic incident or worse seems rather high. Why bother? Even though a Red Team exercise seems less likely, it makes more sense in the area. They could fly the drones off another ship or even off San Clemente Island, and they'd have access to the reports from both the UFO side and the ship side, which would be useful.

    257:

    dpb @ 242: Does it boil down to "Let us hold your bitcoins for you. Here's some technobabble. Trust us!" ?

    You can't cheat an honest man, you can only rob him.

    258:

    Mentioned this before, but I think the US military is working on post-stealth doctrine. Sensors are getting better, and past a certain point, stealth is just not going to work - if "radars" sense air-flows for example, literally anything that flies is going to show up as an out-of-place airflow, because without that, you fall out of the sky.

    Once hiding becomes impossible, how do you avoid getting shot out of the sky on a regular basis? Well, Filling the sky with lots of false positives is the next best thing.. So a lot of this is likely various mad-science schemes to do that, being tested against team blue.

    259:

    Greg Tingey @ 245: Any thoughts on this?
    My take is that some SUPERSECRET guvmint agency ( DARPA? ) is playing games & the left hand is deliberately not telling anyone else AT ALL.
    Where the Gripping Hand might be & what it's gripping, is anyone's guess.

    The thing to keep in mind about UFOs is the 'U' stands for UN-identified. If it had been identified, the government might try to cover it up, but even the U.S. military isn't so stupid they'd keep posting videos that make people ask questions after they know it's some SUPERSECRET defense project.

    If it was some secret organization somewhere in the bowels of the U.S. Defense establishment, by now they would surely have had a quiet word with the Navy to COOL It! with declassifying UFO videos.

    They might not tell what it is, but they would tell them to keep their noses out of it ... and stop making waves.

    You classify the shit out of it and stop talking about it.

    And DARPA is no supersecret. Anyone with half a clue knows who they are and what they do, especially anyone with half a clue & an internet account, since the internet is the result of one of DARPA's "blue sky" funding schemes from half a century ago.

    Hell, they even have a website where you can go and find out how to apply for DARPA funding today if you want to get in on the action.

    260:

    Heteromeles @ 248:

    [ ... ]

    Well, it could be Chinese/Russian drones, flying from commercial vessels tracking into or out of LA. Problem with that is that if they get caught, the repercussions are rather enormous. [ ... ] So flying a drone in and out without someone noticing demands really quiet technology and a fair amount of luck.

    [ ... ]

    Couple of thoughts on that.

    The Russians & Chinese are not the only nation states that spy on the U.S. And there are plenty on NON-nation state actors as well.

    Almost all of the videos I've seen are some kind of "thermal images". They show a spherical area of something that is much hotter than the surrounding area. And that's ALL they really show. There's no range data, no size data, no course data, no ground-speed data ... just a blob of heat moving across the field of view.

    So what is it? Nuclear powered flying saucer? Or a weather baloon with a railroad flare dangling from a string?

    If I put my mind to it, I could probably figure a way to create something that would produce that kind of image on a thermal sensor with COTS hardware. I don't have the resources of a nation state or non-state actor, but for those who do, a deniable operation wouldn't have repercussions that great.

    Hell, we've never identified who was responsible for this?
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/915059.stm

    How many "repercussions" have they faced? Note: That's the one they found. Was it the only one? Or have there been others that were completed and haven't been caught.

    261:

    Heteromeles @ 250: If it was deflating, how did it keep its shape then suddenly disappear? There's enough in the video to show that the ocean wasn't calm beneath it. If it's a partially inflated balloon, it's bizarre that it would hold its shape and apparently move in an environment that wasn't still.

    It's a thermal image. All you can tell is it's something with a sufficiently higher temperature than the background that it was detectable in a thermal image. The shape is simply a "hot spot" against a cooler background. And if it went into the water, it's not at all suspicious it suddenly became cool enough to no longer stand out against the background.

    262:

    Greg Tingey @ 253:Meanwhile ( Deliberate separate posting )
    What are the USA-ians take on this possile horror?
    Bets as to which way they will jump?

    Brett Kavanaugh’s latest decision should alarm liberals

    It's no secret that Republicans intend to impose Theonomic Fascism on the U.S.

    Republican "leaders" will, of course, be above the law and exempt from any inconvenience caused by those rules.

    263:

    I know multiple people around the US who work for "I can't tell" doing "I can't say" and are fairly adamant about not speaking about it. All of them are VERY smart people.

    I can imagine all kinds of odd reasons for the various UFO sightings.

    What's interesting is they are dumping all of this out now. I wonder a small bit if this big dump isn't to push something else off the news cycle.

    264:

    Oh, yeah. DARPA it isn't.

    There are multiple places where the US does all kinds of hidden research and such that are 3 or 4 levels removed from anything spoken about in public.

    It would be hard to do today but the A-12 was designed in almost total secrecy. Ditto the F117. But there were lots of reports during later testing stages of odd lights in formation over Colorado or similar that turned out to be the F117 testing flights.

    But harking back to my comment on the Mississippi River bridge. It's hard to do almost anything with people around and some bit NOT get on a camera picture or video.

    265:

    The Gripping Hamd is around your neck, always.

    266:

    Republican "leaders" will, of course, be above the law and exempt from any inconvenience caused by those rules.

    It's worked for Cuban cigars, call girls, drugs, bribes, corruption… why wouldn't it work for abortions too?

    (Actually, IIRC it worked that way when abortion was illegal too — those in power had no trouble finding discreet doctors when necessary.)

    267:

    In news that I am sure will warm the hearts of readers of this blog, Bitcoin has now fallen below $40,000 (from a high of just over $60,000).

    268:

    JBS Thanks (!) for confirming my worst suspicions

    What happens if the Rethuglican "supreme court" goes all C17th-catholic ... Does the Biden admin, either/both: Appoint extra Justices &/or "simply" pass a new Act that makes abortion legal across all states?

    269:

    I really don't see what is unlikely for one branch of the USA military-spook industry to test out the 'stealthness' of a new toy by seeing whether they could fool another branch. It's such an obvious method :-)

    270:

    Because that is how you wind up with blue-on-blue friendly fire incidents.

    271:

    "The shape is simply a "hot spot" against a cooler background. And if it went into the water, it's not at all suspicious it suddenly became cool enough to no longer stand out against the background."

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_lantern

    Not much wreckage when a tissue paper balloon lands in the sea.

    But it doesn't even have to be actively emitting heat. It can just as easily be shiny mylar reflecting the sun.

    272:

    I didn't explain very well about the mirrored plasma spheres. I read about the in context of explaining UFOs, as supposedly they'd look like metallic spheres. I couldn't find any reference to it with a quick search, but there are plasma mirrors http://iramis.cea.fr/LIDYL/Phocea/Page/index.php?id=175&ref=168 This is not exactly support for my idea though!

    273:

    If it is a drone being tested, so what?

    274:

    What happens if the Rethuglican "supreme court" goes all C17th-catholic ...

    One of the unpleasant aspects of abortion in the US is that in some states it is becoming a luxury. If a rich woman (or a young woman with rich parents) gets pregnant in Missouri then they can travel to the state's only abortion clinic, stay in a hotel for the days legally required for her to "reconsider", and also pay for the procedure. For poor working single mothers these things can present an insuperable obstacle already. The courts have pretended that the practical difficulties are not an issue. The reality on the ground is already different.

    If Roe-vs-Wade gets reversed, even in part, well that just puts more pressure on poor people. The rich can still take a flight to California, where things are going to stay more liberal. The poor will just have to bear the child. After all, its their fault for getting pregnant, isn't it?

    275:

    Re: 'If it is a drone being tested, so what?'

    Depends on whose drone it is ...

    I'm adding Mexican/Colombian drug cartel into the mix of possible owners/operators - maybe some alternative or supplementary delivery scheme to that tunnel mentioned below. After all - about a year or so ago, there was some news about a cartel using small auto-piloted/remote-controlled submarines somewhere around the Caribbean/Atlantic so maybe they've decided to expand their options.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51304861

    'US officials say they have discovered the longest smuggling tunnel ever found on the border with Mexico.

    Stretching for 4,309ft (1,313m), the tunnel had a lift, rail track, drainage and air ventilation systems, and high voltage electrical cables.'

    A couple of questions:

    1- Is there any way to 'tag' a metallic/ceramic/plastic - or whatever material this balloon/ship is made of - electronically or via light or acoustic signature? If yes, then it'd make sense for the authorities to watch where it lands.

    2- If this is drug smuggling and whoever is sending it accepts writing off a few losses whenever this 'UFO" is sighted by the public/authorities - by ditching the carrier and contents - as part of doing business and then these drugs end up spread out on the terrain or in the ocean - what's the environmental impact? I'm guessing that most animals - reptiles included - would be affected but have no idea to what extent. I'm also guessing that there would be a multiplier effect when a predator or scavenger eats the first animal that succumbs to the drug - as happens with poisoned rats and pigeons/crows.

    276:

    If Roe-vs-Wade gets reversed,

    What many not in the US may not realize (and a non trivial number who do live in the US), RvW set a national standard that prevented outlawing abortion. Implementing a nation ban is very very unlikely. SCOTUS can't do it. It would require an act of Congress or an amendment which is a huge lift. 60 votes in the Senate for sure just now and not all R Senators would be on board.

    I think that someone like 60% or more of the US population lives where abortion is and would be legal no matter what happens with RvW.

    And the current analysis of Congressional seats and polling leads many to think that a SCOTUS overthrow of RvW would lead to some major R losses in elections. Public sentiment is not for such a thing at this time.

    277:

    I'm a bit confused here. Its a thermal IR image and the cold sea is dark. Does that not mean the representation being used is dark-is-cold? It will depend on the wave band being used, but the sea haze above the surface is often brighter - depending on atmospheric conditions (wind/humidity/time of day).

    I wondered about a defective cool pixel in an image that has had a positive going noise reduction/smoothing applied. IR sensors are notorious for the numbers of duff pixels the cameras "correct" for. Some cameras run a calibration at start up. If after that a pixel goes wonky, the calibration will be out to lunch.

    278:

    While I'm talking about mining hardware, has anyone tried to buy a graphics card recently? Its difficult, and you will pay a lot more than you should. The reason is that the designers of other cryptocurrencies looked at the CPU-bound mining process of bitcoin and decided to use hash algorithms that were limited by memory instead of CPU, in the hope of shifting the cost of mining to memory.

    Nvidia is on iteration 2 of trying to lock their cards out of crypto mining. Sort of. Kind of.

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/nvidia-will-add-anti-mining-flags-to-the-rest-of-its-rtx-3000-gpu-series/

    Workstation graphics card suitable for CAD are getting hard to buy. Now toss in the chip shortage and system that were on a 3 week lead time a year ago are now on a 6 months lead time.

    279:

    @255

    An invasion from New Britain? Or is that a spoiler for "Empire Games"?

    280:

    @279: Oops, I meant "Invisible Sun".

    281:

    The current GPU card shortage is sort-of artificial in that it's only the new super-hot video cards which are scarce and over-priced. There are plenty of older cards around even if the second-hand prices have risen somewhat but last-generation CAD/AI workstation cards are not that difficult to find. Those older cards can't mine crypto the way the new cards can or play the latest games or handle VR but anyone doing visual modelling or CAD can make do with a 3GB Quadro K4000 (eBay price £60-70) for most purposes. That was a £1000 card back when it was first offered for sale in 2013. Higher-spec cards like the 8GB Quadro M4000 can be had for £200 today.

    282:

    The problem is for those of us want to NOT build custom systems but buy somewhat standard setups so offices aren't a mismash of custom setups.

    I suspect that the school cycle of North America and Europe is a factor here. HP and Dell and such are going to prioritize shipping a few 10,000 at a time to school districts and upper ed over filling one at a time orders for folks like me.

    But when I check with re-sellers the US distributors are running very lean. Take what is on the shelf or wait a week or few.

    283:

    On the subject of UFOs I'd like to note that with enough thrust, even a brick can fly. And today we have huge amounts of very lightweight high efficiency thrusters, limited only by the capacity of their batteries/fuel tanks. We also have the high speed electronics to control batshit-insane numbers of props or jets pointing in weird directions and aerodynamically unstable configurations.

    To put it in perspective, the Royal Marines have been releasing video of them testing out boarding vessels in motion using jet packs: not the crappy 1960s James Bond popularized peroxide bottle rockets, but real jet backpacks, with clusters of fuel-burning microturbines at wrist and shoulder. If you think about it, this is quite impressive: the turbines can't in aggregate weigh more than about 10kg and they're able to lift a fully-equipped soldier (at least 100kg) against gravity and fly at upwards of 60km/h for, reportedly, minutes (not seconds, as with the peroxide packs of yore).

    Take that tech and remove the shaved ape and you can turn it into a drone with quite a range -- or use the microturbines as electrical generators to power clusters of electric fans on a big-ass quadrotor or octarotor frame.

    There's no reason for such drones to be axially or radially symmetrical, aerodynamically stable, or even rigid: changing shape in flight is an option. So is submersibility, making for a hybrid submarine/helicopter drone.

    If the objective is recon, we have insanely high resolution sensors these days, and can stash a terabyte of images on a micro-SDXC card the size of my little fingernail.

    Upshot: your hypothetical Black Ops adversarial team is entirely plausible, but there are even wilder possibilities out there even in the civilian sector, using COTS tech rather than the usual military cost-plus procurement which isn't cleared to start building hardware until the weight of paperwork exceeds the fully fuelled-up launch vehicle.

    284:

    Sensors are getting better, and past a certain point, stealth is just not going to work

    It has been noted that in the modern era, the life expectancy of a military airframe is 30+ years. However, a generation in radar signal processing is 10 years at best. Stealth is a function of the airframe, and usually requires compromises that impair its aerodynamics (as witness the "low observable" B-1B that could barely go supersonic, because the redesign to reduce its radar cross-section reduced the air intake ramps supersonic performance). So "stealth" planes usually progressively lose effectiveness against air defenses during their service lifespan.

    "Low observability" (ie. airframes that don't have honking great big radar reflectors on every surface) is normal these days, everyone does it. The Eurofighter Typhoon II or the Su-36 would be considered stealthy by 1970s to early 1980s standards. But "pure" stealth designs are probably best left to drones, which are cheaper and can be obsolesced/replaced faster than expensive crewed aircraft.

    285:

    Greg: bear in mind that although the US Supreme Court is about 80% Catholics by declared faith, roughly 80% of US Catholics are okay with abortion and contraception per opinion polling.

    The real anti-abortion/anti-choice center of gravity in US politics is with the Southern Baptist Convention, i.e. the bonkers snake-fondling Protestants.

    Nor can you predict how an SC justice will jump from what they said or did before they were appointed to the bench. It's a lifetime post, they have tenure, they can do what the hell they want -- much like the Pope (except there's only one Pope, not a squabbling committee of them). Appointment to the Supreme Court is highly politicised but the justices tend to be more independent-minded than the politicians who appoint them would like.

    Flip side: some of them turn out to be much, much worse than anyone expected. And others -- Kavanaugh in particular -- may be vulnerable to blackmail (someone paid off about $200,000 in credit card debts for him before he made the court; he also somehow bought a $2M house in DC on a lower level judge's salary, which is just not plausible).

    286:

    Oh, I agree (cf the RC superman I linked to above). There are a couple of problems though. One is that there's a lot of SIGINT equipment around that part of the ocean: two of the four southern Channel Islands (San Clemente and San Nicolas) are military reservations, and the Navy likes to practice in the surrounding waters. That's where these UFOs are popping up. Your hypothetical enemy actor would not just have to fly a drone in there (or worse, let an autonomous vehicle in there), they'd have to do it without feeding a lot of telemetry straight to the US Navy. If they're really having a bad day, the Navy gets to zero in on the controllers, and then they get to be miserable.

    The second problem is that it's entirely possible, if a drone repeatedly buzzes the deck of a ship, for the captain to send a squad up there with M-4s to see if they can shoot it down. If they succeed, then some sailor gets to pull the pieces out of the water, and the investigators get to do their thing. Who'd take that risk?

    That's the problem for me, and why I think UFOs off San Clemente are Red Hat tests and not enemy action. While admittedly it's possible that the US Navy's SPAWAR division had* its head up an orifice when those videos were shot, I kind of doubt it, which means that someone flying a drone around a ship or plane in that part of the ocean, right next to SPAWAR and SEAL headquarters, is just begging for trouble, unless they already work for the US military.

    The other thing is that popping up UFO videos and claiming that the pilots don't know what they are is a great way to whip up a little innocuous xenophobia, at a time when the military is sucking funding to pivot from fighting terrorists to fighting China and Russia.

    *SPAWAR's moving out of downtown San Diego. They're trying to figure out what to do with the site, probably along the lines of a transit stop and a lot of affordable housing. Hopefully. I'm trying to stay out of that particular environmental debate, since it's not really in my field.

    I'm wondering if SPAWAR folding up shop has something to do with the US Space Force getting their assets. And speaking of the USSF, I also wonder if one of their covert missions is UFO emulation? It's a goofy notion, but most of their assets are admittedly classified, and I could see them getting the Men In Black just because no one would think a bunch of satellite jockeys had active agents on the ground, let alone a Red Hat element.

    287:

    MY big take on the whole "UFO" thing is that they know what's happening and they expect it to come out one way or another, otherwise they'd be either mocking the idea or classifying it.

    No special idea about what "it" is. Could be an adversary, could be glitchy sensors, etc.

    288:

    The real anti-abortion/anti-choice center of gravity in US politics is with the Southern Baptist Convention, i.e. the bonkers snake-fondling Protestants.

    The "problem with the Baptists," as I understand it, is that it's sort of like Discordianism. You can have a revelation or five, set up preaching without going to seminary like most of the other denominations require, and thereby develop a congregation.

    Before I go any further, I want to stress that this IS NOT where most Baptists get their religion, but from what little I know, it's where some of the more problematic ones got their noses under the tent flap. I'd also stress that various and sundry non-denominational and evangelical churches get started the same way, worldwide. God talks to a lot of people, it seems, and for some reason They don't say the same thing to each one. That's religion for you.

    I'm not sure if the snake handlers are all Baptists (actually, I'm pretty sure many are not). But I strongly suspect that many of the ones we would consider to be problems eschew reading the Gospels and go for the kind of religion where they consult their adrenal glands to determine what's right and proper, and therefore they are anti-abortion and generally misogynistic.

    289:

    Greg Tingey @ 268: JBS
    Thanks (!) for confirming my worst suspicions

    What happens if the Rethuglican "supreme court" goes all C17th-catholic ...
    Does the Biden admin, either/both: Appoint extra Justices &/or "simply" pass a new Act that makes abortion legal across all states?

    They'd need 60 votes to get it through the Senate. They don't always have 50.

    I think we're headed for a future out of the "Handmaid's Tale"

    290:

    The Daedelus jetpack has a duration of around 10 minutes for the current design and the inventor, Richard Browning, is a Royal Marine reservist.

    I'm not sure how useful the jetpack would be for boarding hostile ships, much of the manoeverability comes from the turbines mounted in sort of gloves (well, structures that the pilot puts his hands in) so an inbound Marine isn't going to be able to use their weapons until they're on the deck. They'll be able to dodge about, but suppression will have to come from elsewhere.

    291:

    I think the "snake handlers" are Pentecostals.

    292:

    gasdive @ 271:

    "The shape is simply a "hot spot" against a cooler background. And if it went into the water, it's not at all suspicious it suddenly became cool enough to no longer stand out against the background."

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_lantern

    Not much wreckage when a tissue paper balloon lands in the sea.

    But it doesn't even have to be actively emitting heat. It can just as easily be shiny mylar reflecting the sun.

    If the sun was in the sky, they could view the object in visible light ... in which case, if it was a Mylar balloon, they would have identified it and it wouldn't be classified as a UFO

    The reason so many of these are Thermal Images is they happen at night. The one Greg linked in his comment happened at 11:00pm local time.

    293:

    the bonkers snake-fondling Protestants.

    Great comment. You blew it with this absurd tack on.

    The number of snake handling churches in the US is likely fewer than the number of unique visitors to this blog month to month.

    They tend to be a few families who have issues with organized anything, much less churches. So store fronts or home churches. (Which I suspect is a somewhat alien concept to many outside of the US.) Finding one with more than 30 people involved would be hard.

    But they are a great news filler when someone needs a "Man bites Dog" story. Especially when someone winds up dead or nearly so.

    294:

    Thing is, I watched a mylar balloon go hundreds of feet over my head yesterday when I was out hiking. The string was readily visible, the shape was readily visible, and it was moving in the wind, not sitting still. I've also been out sailing in the area where those UFOs happen many times, and I don't remember it ever being calm enough for a balloon to sit still while the ocean under it moves.

    So please try again, and be real. These are not party balloons or fire lanterns blown offshore by a Santa Ana wind, and if you don't get that, please google Santa Ana before going any further.

    295:

    The "problem with the Baptists," as I understand it, is that it's sort of like Discordianism. You can have a revelation or five, set up preaching without going to seminary like most of the other denominations require, and thereby develop a congregation.

    A vast number of electrons can be spend writing about the variations of US religious groups. And has been. Along with a lot of trees.

    There are the mainlines (RC, RO, EO (all 3 flavors), CofE (3 more flavors now), Lutherans (4 flavors), and many more. Then there are the non mainline like Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists, Presbyterians, and so on.

    Now within the Baptist there is the biggest block which are somewhat loosely or closely aligned via the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC for a long time was mostly here's our creed, follow it and you to can use the name. They also got together and had (somewhat have) a cooperative missions program that was well run. (No one getting rich and most of the money going to the stated purpose.) There is also the American Baptist association which is where the SBC came from and split off due to slavery. Plus you get a lot of Baptist oriented but not associated churches. But over the last 30 years they have been acting more and more like a governing body and expanding what you must do to use the name. Which is slow walking them toward all kinds of legal headaches.

    The mainlines and some of the bigger associations run seminaries to train up pastors. But there IS a big collection of "called" preachers who've never gone to seminary. And many who go to a specific seminary wind up as a pastor in another denomination.

    Clear as mud? Good. You get it.

    Churches getting into US politics in many ways started with Billy Graham who begat Jerry Falwell. Who led to Newt who led to where we are now. And based on a great history of Billy a few days ago on "American Experience" he seemed to regret what he spawned later in life. But not according to his son, Franklin, is is full on MAGA and seems to want to re-write the history of his father's last few decades of life.

    There are a non trivial number of very religious USA folks who are totally fed up with the current state of religion and politics in the US. But they are a minority. And tend not to be fire breathers looking for a battle.

    I guess my point is that almost any generalization of a particular religious group in the US that is applied broadly to cover other religious groups over here is almost always a fail.

    As an example the main CofE association here is very much liberal by most any definition of the term. But the other two are not. And after 15 years of warfare over the breakup these 3 groups have mostly decided to quit trying to win and just go their separate ways. But that fellow at Canterbury still gets weekly heartburn over the situation.

    The SBC is seeing the beginning of such trouble. Numbers are down and some big names are basically saying "SBC is wrong and we're taking our ball and going to find another game."

    296:

    David L @ 278:

    While I'm talking about mining hardware, has anyone tried to buy a graphics card recently? Its difficult, and you will pay a lot more than you should. The reason is that the designers of other cryptocurrencies looked at the CPU-bound mining process of bitcoin and decided to use hash algorithms that were limited by memory instead of CPU, in the hope of shifting the cost of mining to memory.

    Nvidia is on iteration 2 of trying to lock their cards out of crypto mining. Sort of. Kind of.

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/nvidia-will-add-anti-mining-flags-to-the-rest-of-its-rtx-3000-gpu-series/

    Workstation graphics card suitable for CAD are getting hard to buy. Now toss in the chip shortage and system that were on a 3 week lead time a year ago are now on a 6 months lead time.

    I have an 8GB Radeon card in this computer (so I can play games on a 4K monitor). There's a bad chip somewhere on the card, because certain highly intense graphics will cause the Video Driver to stop responding & the game crashes. I'm pretty sure it is the card & not system memory.

    I'd like to get the card repaired, but that's not likely going to happen. My only option is probably going to be to replace the card. I need to take the computer apart to figure out exactly which card I put in there (it's been several years) & what interface is on the motherboard (I think it's PCIe 2.0).

    Cheap 8GB cards are running well over $800 right now.

    297:

    There are a non trivial number of very religious USA folks who are totally fed up with the current state of religion and politics in the US. But they are a minority. And tend not to be fire breathers looking for a battle.

    Agreed, and thanks for the "clear as mud" approach. For the atheist techies, think of religions as tech companies. They go through a similar cycle of growth, the biggest ones becoming standards, then becoming bureaucracies and getting ossified, then getting hit by the "New Big Thing" and struggling to keep market share. Except it's slower with religions, goes back around 500 years, and has involved genocides and wars at the worst.

    Anyway, the one point I'd argue with is the "fed up" category. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_States

    Although 70% of Americans consider themselves as belonging to a religion, only 47% belong to a congregation. 30% do not consider themselves as belonging to a religion, of whom over 70% consider themselves not religious (around 35% of the US population, accounting for the non-congregated practitioners). That suggests that over half of Americans have a problem with the current state of religion in the US. "Doesn't work for me" is the biggest sector of religious belief in the US at the moment.

    Thing is, politics in an democracy is all about organization, so a small, well-organized minority has considerably more power than a vast, unorganized majority. This is the key problem for any political movement in a democracy, and it's not an easy one to solve.

    298:

    On and off, for the last few years, I've been considering (if I can rope in a few friends who are lawyers) of writing my own amicus curae to submit for just this kind of case.

    They keep fighting it on freedom of speech grounds. It is NOT - it's "Congress shall make no laws regarding... religion...". Abortion bans are religious laws, and so unConstitutional.

    Want to argue? I had a Hasidic rabbi tell me Jews were ok with abortions. Most Pagan and atheiests are. So... it is Christian-sharia law.

    299:

    Ah, yes, COTS. Someone noted it does not show either distance or speed.

    Unmanned hot-air balloon? Or, for that matter, one of those Asian lantern-type things, with a candle of some kind in it?

    300:

    So, you mount the weapons on the gloves, or shoulders, and aim and fire with a heads-up display.

    At that point, we're getting to anime giant robot fighting.

    301:

    Not just Kavanaugh - Barrett should be required to recuse herself, based on her stated religion, and school background.

    302:

    Charlie Stross @ 285: Greg: bear in mind that although the US Supreme Court is about 80% Catholics by declared faith, roughly 80% of US Catholics are okay with abortion and contraception per opinion polling.

    Yeah, but 80% of the Roman Catholic Supreme Court justices comes from the 20% of Roman Catholics in the U.S that wants to overturn Roe v. Wade and outlaw ALL abortion. They strongly intend to have their way on the subject.

    303:

    If it can lift a man for 10 minutes, I wonder what it can do with a man plus 50 kg of warfighting gear.

    304:

    Heteromeles @ 288:

    The real anti-abortion/anti-choice center of gravity in US politics is with the Southern Baptist Convention, i.e. the bonkers snake-fondling Protestants.

    The "problem with the Baptists," as I understand it, is that it's sort of like Discordianism. You can have a revelation or five, set up preaching without going to seminary like most of the other denominations require, and thereby develop a congregation.

    The "problem with the Baptists" is the same as with all evangelicals (including evangelical Roman Catholics) in the U.S. ... this time around the money changers have thrown Jesus out of the temple.

    See also:
    "Christian" Reconstruction and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology

    305:

    Troutwaxer @ 291: I think the "snake handlers" are Pentecostals.

    Some of them are.

    306:

    @234 says,

    "The authors estimated the energy consumption of the entire bitcoin network at 113.89 terawatts per hour - 99% of which comes from operating mining machines. To contrast, Cambridge's Centre for Alternative Finance estimated bitcoin's energy consumption at 128 terawatts per hour as of March 2021."

    Running my microwave oven draws a thousand watts, costing about ten cents an hour. The hundred trillion or so watts cited above, ten to the fourteenth, divided by a thousand watts, is a hundred billion, ten to the eleventh. So supposedly Bitcoin miners use the same amount of energy as running a hundred billion microwave ovens, or more than twelve ovens going continuously for every human on earth, which would cost at least ten billion dollars an hour at retail prices, maybe around half that much for wholesale energy producers. I think there's a mistake somewhere, possibly in my arithmetic although I suspect it's in the article. Please clarify.

    Maybe they meant gigawatts instead of terawatts, but even that would cost ten million dollars an hour, or a quarter billion per day, nearly a hundred billion dollars worth of electricity per year. Seems too high to make sense, burning off that much actual existing wealth just to turn around and say, now we've got bitcoins worth that same amount; why not just hold onto the existing forms of wealth you'd need to spend in order to create those digital coins in the first place? I could understand the attraction, sort of, if you ended up with more than you started with, but to just take it out of one pocket and put it in another sounds like, dare I say it, an exercise in futility. What a stupid waste. Must be like an optical illusion, with the quoted value for one bitcoin more like a tulip bulb during the Dutch mania of the 1600s than any reflection of energy consumed. Way overinflated by hype. Well deserved losses ahead, with nothing to show for the effort but a huge cloud of CO2. Thanks a lot guys, you really are geniuses.

    Oops, read a little further, Bill Arnold explained what they really meant was a hundred trillion watt hours per year, not watts per hour. Roughly ten thousand hours in a year, that means instead of twelve microwave ovens per human, it's more like one for every thousand people, so eight million microwaves running nonstop. Yeah that sounds about like the power consumption of Ireland, another comparison I've seen. A hundred and sixty billion worth of bitcoin in total means twenty thousand worth of bitcoin per oven. Sorry, still sounds like the Madness of Crowds. I'd add a thousand bucks on my power bill to run a microwave oven for a whole year, how many years would it have to have been going to claim my twenty thousand worth of bitcoin, ten years? Not interested. If we're supposed to be so worried about inflation, why can't someone just buy gold eagles, pandas or krugerands, sounds about the same level of fuss and bother. Talk about reinventing the wheel.

    307:

    Good news on the semiconductor race:

    https://www.verdict.co.uk/tsmc-trumps-ibms-2nm-chip-tech-hyperbole-with-1nm-claim/

  • TSMC has made progress on the 1 nm chip. This sounds more like a successful prototype than a finished model, but at least it's out of the "we can only demonstrate it in a lab under VERY controlled conditions"

  • TSMC is abandoning the Moore's Law convention. Rather than staying with 5 nm since late 2020 and then switching to 3 nm in 2022, they're jumping to 4 nm this year.

  • 308:

    JBS @ 394: "evangelical Roman Catholics"

    Isn't that a contradiction? If someone is an evangelical I don't see how he or she can follow the Roman pope at the same time, much less follow a RC cult of the saints.

    309:

    Then you are back into peroxide rocket territory.

    In this role it doesn't matter though. A civilian ship is under the guns of a dedicated warship and being boarded in a visually impressive manner. Any action that requires the boarders to have full war fighting gear would be ill advised.

    310:

    JBS @ 394: "evangelical Roman Catholics"

    Isn't that a contradiction? If someone is an evangelical I don't see how he or she can follow the Roman pope at the same time, much less follow a RC cult of the saints.

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

    311:

    "Although 70% of Americans consider themselves as belonging to a religion, only 47% belong to a congregation. 30% do not consider themselves as belonging to a religion, of whom over 70% consider themselves not religious (around 35% of the US population, accounting for the non-congregated practitioners). That suggests that over half of Americans have a problem with the current state of religion in the US. "Doesn't work for me" is the biggest sector of religious belief in the US at the moment."

    Actually, your dataset contains an even more important data point: Noes were 16% of the US population in 2007 and 23% in 2014. So it grew by 7 percentage points in the preceding 7-year period, and has grown by a further 6 percentage points since then.

    Latin America is also becoming less Christian, with 47% of Uruguayans, 42% of Mexicans, and 40% of Cubans identifying as irreligious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_Latin_America

    312:

    This is an important point because the assumption of Evangelical Christians since the Bush Administration has been that Latino Immigrants will keep the US as a highly religious nation. I can't find the study right now, but I remember reading that immigrants kept the overall number of Catholics consistent since the 1980s, while mainline Protestants have lost parishioners to Evangelicals and Atheists. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/catholicism-declines-latin-america-u-s-parishes-still-count-latino-n866986

    313:

    David L @ 295: Churches getting into US politics in many ways started with Billy Graham who begat Jerry Falwell. Who led to Newt who led to where we are now. And based on a great history of Billy a few days ago on "American Experience" he seemed to regret what he spawned later in life. But not according to his son, Franklin, is is full on MAGA and seems to want to re-write the history of his father's last few decades of life.

    The two words you need to know why Billy Graham should burn in HELL for all eternity! are ... Franklin Graham.

    314:

    Here's a case where a civilian ship was boarded by military forces but not from a warship alongside:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRme_HlPN-Y

    Pro tip: if you are stowaways who decide to take over a ship, don't do it on the doorstep of the Special Boat Service.

    315:

    I don't know the numbers, but I know evangelism in Latin America is growing. I also know that both Presbyterian and Catholic churches are importing ministers/priests from other countries.

    In any case, your points are well-taken, and I appreciate them.

    It's unclear what value Christian religion provides to many people in many cases. It's frustrating to listen to a sermon that sounds basically like a sales pitch for an insurance policy: pay us regularly, and we'll make sure your soul goes to heaven. What about acting here and now on the problems everyone is experiencing?

    316:

    Interesting analysis. Which leads me to wonder at what point does the cost in unamortized hardware, space, and power cost more than the value of a cryptocurrency?

    317:

    There may not have been warships alongside but "winning" against the first wave of boarders would still have gone hard for them.

    318:

    whitroth @ 299: Ah, yes, COTS. Someone noted it does *not* show either distance or speed.

    Unmanned hot-air balloon? Or, for that matter, one of those Asian lantern-type things, with a candle of some kind in it?

    If they knew what it was it wouldn't be UN-identified.

    319:

    If someone is an evangelical I don't see how he or she can follow the Roman pope at the same time, much less follow a RC cult of the saints.

    Decades ago I did two of my four teaching practicums in Catholic schools.

    The first was a cool place. The nuns who also acted as counsellors were 'hip', talked to the kids where they were not 'where they should be', did things like explained the Church's position on premartial sex and birth control but made certain that the students knew exactly where their public-school friends were going for good medical advice on birth control and STDs.

    The second was… not cool. Very doctrinaire with the kids, insisting on following all Catholic doctrine etc — while the main topic of conversation in the staff room seemed to be about extramarital sex and the best methods of birth control (for teachers, not students).

    All the teachers at both schools were good certified Catholics — no way to get hired without a letter from your priest and regular attendance at Mass was a job requirement. None seemed particularly hung up on what the pope said, although the first school seemed much more in touch with the teachings of a certain Jewish carpenter…

    320:

    "It's unclear what value Christian religion provides to many people in many cases. It's frustrating to listen to a sermon that sounds basically like a sales pitch for an insurance policy: pay us regularly, and we'll make sure your soul goes to heaven. What about acting here and now on the problems everyone is experiencing? "

    It provides a sense of community, and a communal experience. Some people need both psychologically.In other words, it creates a network for people who may not be as good at creating their own. Christianity sounds a lot more consistent than a rock concert or a sports game. That's why so many Christian churches rebelled against online worship; it can't replace the communal experience of the church itself.

    321:

    Niala @ 308:

    JBS @ 394: "evangelical Roman Catholics"

    Isn't that a contradiction? If someone is an evangelical I don't see how he or she can follow the Roman pope at the same time, much less follow a RC cult of the saints.

    I don't really understand it either. But somehow ...

    There's nothing in the New Testament that says Roman Catholics can't be evangelical

    adjective
         1 Also e·van·gel·ic. pertaining to or in keeping with the gospel and its teachings.
         2 belonging to or designating the Christian churches that emphasize the teachings and authority of the Scriptures, especially of the New Testament, in opposition to the institutional authority of the church itself, and that stress as paramount the tenet that salvation is achieved by personal conversion to faith in the atonement of Christ.
         3 designating Christians, especially of the late 1970s, eschewing the designation of fundamentalist but holding to a conservative interpretation of the Bible.
         4 pertaining to certain movements in the Protestant churches in the 18th and 19th centuries that stressed the importance of personal experience of guilt for sin, and of reconciliation to God through Christ.
         5 marked by ardent or zealous enthusiasm for a cause.

    noun
         6 an adherent of evangelical doctrines or a person who belongs to an evangelical church or party.

    In fact, I think the New Testament requires it of Roman Catholics (and Orthodox Catholics)

    Matthew 28:19-20
    19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
    20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

    Mark 16:15-16
    15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
    16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.

    And looking at #5, I don't think you even have to be a christian or even believe in god and cause doesn't have to be religion for someone to be evangelical about it.

    322:

    Interesting in relation to the OP: "China all but bans cryptocurrencies".

    https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/china_cryptocurrency_crackdown/

    323:

    Nojay: Pro tip: if you are stowaways who decide to take over a ship, don't do it on the doorstep of the Special Boat Service.

    Except that's not actually what happened.

    324:

    Haven't had time to keep up with this thread, but skimming in particular Paul's comments my thought was he really needs to read that Graeber book (Debt). But I see you had a similar thought, and time to expand it properly, and I'll defer to that. But definitely yes: debt (or credit) first, then taxes, then money and you can't really have money without taxes (otherwise it's just a kind of credit).

    325:

    Beyond that, in some fraction of teachings of some churches, you'll find relatively productive advice on, eg, mindfulness. For in-group people, religion often has net positive value - well beyond any of the actually religious teachings.

    @322 Damian Albeit, China bans crypto in conjunction with setting up Digital Yuan...

    Even though Bitcoin has many scammish aspects, the core notion of a decentralized exchange medium seems to have some value. I could see some sort of 'proof-of-stake', mildly inflationary digital currency co-opted as a means to get the world off of the dollar standard. There's real value there for everyone except the Sith.

    326:

    Well bugger me sideways with a broken bottle. I thought China was so in love with the stuff they were building power plants just to run hash farms and one of the problems with it from everyone else's point of view was the likelihood of over 50% of the hash farms being under Chinese control so the anti-fudging feature stopped working.

    327:

    China is not monolithic. Wasn't even at the height of Mao's power.

    Lots of local development happens without central government involvement, or even knowledge. Rules are selectively enforced. Large facilities can be built totally without official approval and run for years without being shut down. Different branches of the government have different and sometimes contradictory goals and policies.

    So it is entirely possible that the central government wants to crack down on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, while local governments (or more likely government officials) are cooperating with Bitcoin miners.

    328:

    "...an inbound Marine isn't going to be able to use their weapons until they're on the deck."

    Doesn't matter, because they can't anyway. To get to the deck without one of these doobries they either have to climb up something from the level of the sea or climb down something from a helicopter, so whatever they do they have to spend an uncomfortable amount of time being a target with both hands otherwise occupied. The Mercury bracelet things probably mean they spend the least amount of time in this vulnerable position, and probably also give them some freedom to jig about a bit and not approach in such a predictable and targety manner.

    329:

    In news that I am sure will warm the hearts of readers of this blog, Bitcoin has now fallen below $40,000 (from a high of just over $60,000). Yeah, that drop ($37.5K ATM) has been fun.(And profitable for some. (Not me. (personal rules).) Hearts warmed. IMO cryptocurrency people need to perform a tactical retreat, with actually solid (not bullshit) arguments including social/environmental costs/benefits (and shifts away from proof of work), but they, well many of them, won't. In news that I am sure will warm the hearts of readers of this blog, Bitcoin has now fallen below $40,000 (from a high of just over $60,000). Yeah, that drop ($37.5K ATM) has been fun.(And profitable for some. (Not me. (personal rules).) Hearts warmed. IMO cryptocurrency people need to perform a tactical retreat, with actually solid (not bullshit) arguments including social/environmental costs/benefits (and shifts away from proof of work), but they, well many of them, won't. Some (politically stupid ones) will even attack, overtly and (they'll arrogantly believe) covertly.

    Interesting in relation to the OP: "China all but bans cryptocurrencies". We'll see if China can (or does) make it stick. There are other methods that Chinese can use for money exfiltration. Is there a decent accounting/guesswork on how Bitoin and other cryptocurrencies are used/etc in China, and of the Chinese politics involved, including regional politics? Google translate of the statement works well enough to get the gist: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Zpl0MWesUp2E8R23fNJf_g (in Chrome, or using translate.google.com) [google translate!!!] 2. Relevant institutions shall not conduct business related to virtual currency Financial institutions, payment institutions and other member units must earnestly strengthen their social responsibilities. They must not use virtual currency to price products and services, underwrite insurance businesses related to virtual currencies or include virtual currencies in the scope of insurance liability, and must not directly or indirectly provide customers with other services. Services related to virtual currency, including but not limited to: providing customers with virtual currency registration, trading, clearing, settlement and other services; accepting virtual currency or using virtual currency as a payment and settlement tool; developing virtual currency exchange services with RMB and foreign currencies; Develop virtual currency storage, custody, mortgage and other businesses; issue financial products related to virtual currency; use virtual currency as investment targets for trusts, funds, etc.

    Interesting in relation to the OP: "China all but bans cryptocurrencies". We'll see if China can (or does) make it stick. There are other methods that Chinese can use for money exfiltration. Is there a decent accounting/guesswork on how Bitoin and other cryptocurrencies are used/etc in China, and of the Chinese politics involved, including regional politics? Google translate of the statement works well enough to get the gist: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Zpl0MWesUp2E8R23fNJf_g (in Chrome, or using translate.google.com) [google translate!!!] 2. Relevant institutions shall not conduct business related to virtual currency Financial institutions, payment institutions and other member units must earnestly strengthen their social responsibilities. They must not use virtual currency to price products and services, underwrite insurance businesses related to virtual currencies or include virtual currencies in the scope of insurance liability, and must not directly or indirectly provide customers with other services. Services related to virtual currency, including but not limited to: providing customers with virtual currency registration, trading, clearing, settlement and other services; accepting virtual currency or using virtual currency as a payment and settlement tool; developing virtual currency exchange services with RMB and foreign currencies; Develop virtual currency storage, custody, mortgage and other businesses; issue financial products related to virtual currency; use virtual currency as investment targets for trusts, funds, etc.

    330:

    Oops, sorry about the doubled text.

    331:

    If the sun was in the sky, they could view the object in visible light ... they would have identified it and it wouldn't be classified as a UFO

    True to first approximation, certainly.

    There are edge cases where people see something and still don't understand or believe what they seem to perceive. Consider the case of Lawn Chair Larry, who was spotted by several pilots legitimately using Long Beach Airport and did not expect to see some loony dangling from balloons in their airspace.

    332:

    I think you're right. I'd also suggest, from reading that article, that China wants to replace Bitcoin and company with its own blockchain-based virtual currency, where every transaction is tracked. If so, that might explain the major crackdown. Perhaps they're automating the STASI approach?

    333:

    China wants to replace Bitcoin ... where every transaction is tracked

    I thought that was one of the major benefits of bitcoin over cash - every transaction is tracked and published, so everyone knows what happened, and those with a detailed view of the internet knows who was involved? We keep seeing amazingly cunning criminals caught that way...

    Meanwhile we see fewer drug busts where the criminals are sitting on bags and bags of cash that they haven't been able to launder yet.

    I'm not saying that Satoshi Nakamoto definitely works for the NSA but it's not out of the question.

    334:

    True to first approximation, certainly.

    There are edge cases where people see something and still don't understand or believe what they seem to perceive. Consider the case of Lawn Chair Larry, who was spotted by several pilots legitimately using Long Beach Airport and did not expect to see some loony dangling from balloons in their airspace.

    Silly thing is, this is a good argument for Red Hat UFO exercises. Show troops an "edge case" that makes no sense, and both collect data and figure out how to deal with these things. After all, we're in an era when innovation is a fundamental warfighting strategy. So if you're in combat, especially with another power, you're likely to be exposed to the unexpected.

    The other thing is that it's a good test of mimicking the classic UFO tropes to gather intelligence, which I know (from articles publihed) that some pundits have latched onto as something to worry/bloviate about.

    335:

    "These are not party balloons or fire lanterns blown offshore by a Santa Ana wind, and if you don't get that, please google Santa Ana before going any further."

    So I Googled. Wikipedia has this caption under a photo of stuff being blown into the area being discussed.

    "The Santa Ana winds sweep down from the deserts and across coastal Southern California, pushing dust and smoke from wildfires far out over the Pacific Ocean. Los Angeles is in the upper left of this image, while San Diego is near the center."

    Sounds exactly like the sort of wind that every day would blow hundreds of toy balloons out into this area.

    336:

    A pyromaniacs club with which I was associated as a kid executed an impressive multi-day UFO event with dry cleaning bags lofted with customized candles ("power sources") made with tightly rolled up paper towels soaked in melted paraffin wax. At least one report had the bags flying silently in formation at hundreds of miles per hour, paraphrased. :-) People are usually lousy observers, reporting their interpretation of the observation as fitted to their priors, rather than the observations, or the observations carefully separated from any interpretations. Re the round UFO sighting at hand, what was the wind direction/speed relative to the sight line?

    337:

    This spurt of UFO sightings remnds me of the only UFO abduction movie I've ever liked, Flight of the Navigator.

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

    338:

    I have seen "credible" reports that resulted from old school RC model aeroplanes. People mistake the small size for great distance and get very excited by the extreme speed and high-G acrobatics those can do. These days with electric drive and folding props I can only imagine that people fly weirder things even more dramatically.

    In case you're wondering, youtube has videos of people causing all sorts of weird stuff to engage in more-or-less controlled flight. I suspect there's no spacecraft, fictional or otherwise, that has not been flown in model form.

    339:

    Vulch @ 290: I'm not sure how useful the jetpack would be for boarding hostile ships, ...

    None at all. That isn't the point. The Royal Navy doesn't board hostile ships, it sinks them. For hostage rescue situations they will use helicopters and ropes.

    AIUI the jetpack trial is about the practicalities of actually getting on board in the middle of the ocean for a routine inspection, for example in fishery protection. The idea is that the Marine with the jetpack is carrying a ladder which can then be let down for the rest of the boarding party to climb up. Presumably they sometimes have conversations along the lines of:

    Navy ship: "Let down a ladder for our boarding party".

    Fishing boat: "We haven't got a ladder".

    340:

    Charlie @ 285 Yes, but the "SC" catholics will be & are extremists, as was seen last year ... oops - someone else (JBS) has noted this, lower down. Can Kavanaugh be ejected, for previous corruption, etc? ( And, as whitroth says, Barrett - who gives me the creeps. )

    H I think UFOs off San Clemente are Red Hat tests That's the "Occams answer" isn't it, after all?

    297 - STILL involves war & genocides ( Taliban / Da'esh / Myanmar / PRC persecution - though the last is mostly Han racism )

    whitroth Congress shall make no laws regarding... religion... THIS, yes Someone needs to do it. ( p.s. "Christian-sharia law" - keep using that one, the penny might drop! )

    "Evangelical" catholics: OSD & the crusades are where you start .... mind the blood puddles.

    341:

    Heteromeles @ 167: I think Graeber got it more right: in the history of finance, debt came first, taxes came second, money came third, and much of what we think of as barter is stuff that happened when people who grew up with money made do without it.

    I don't agree. Gift economies work when the population is below Dunbar's Number. In these societies everyone knows everyone else, and a system of reciprocal favours and obligations develops. There are notions of obligation to others and to the community, and there may even be a commodity that somewhat resembles money (e.g. wampum), but all this is so bound about with custom and ceremony that you really can't isolate bits of it and say "that bit is money" and "that bit is debt".

    (Aside: the limit of Dunbar's Number doesn't limit you to 150 individuals. If men deal with men and women deal with women then that gets you to 150 families, and if you have large households where the paterfamilias represents the household to the rest of society then you might be able to get to 1,000 individuals. But at that point the strains are going to be showing.)

    Once you get above Dunbar's Number you start needing to keep track of ownership and obligations in some way because human memory isn't good enough any more. Writing develops as a way to track who owns what in the village granary. Then the local chief decides that everyone owes him and his henchmen a portion of the harvest in return for their protection, so clerks are needed to keep track of who has paid. Egypt got a head start on geometry thanks to the need to re-survey all the fields after the annual floods so that each farmer knew where he was supposed to plant and harvest.

    So I think it more accurate to say that debt, money and tax developed in parallel, along with other technologies such writing, mathematics, pottery, metallurgy and farming. All of these enabled larger communities, which then needed more of the same technologies to organise, which meant having specialists, which in turn let them get bigger, and so on until you get the great Bronze Age civilizations. Trying to turn this into a chicken-or-egg question of whether money or debt or writing or pottery or metal came first isn't a useful exercise.

    Going back to the WWII prison camp, yes the inmates recapitulated this rather fast because they already knew how it was done, but the primary driver was the size. The German POW camps housed thousands of prisoners, so a gift economy was impossible. Hence a trade system was inevitable. Had a prison camp only had 100 inmates they would not have needed trade.

    you help the farmer while his crop's growing, you get a share of the crop when it comes in. That's a credit transaction [...]

    Only if you extract that transaction from the society it exists in. Gift economies don't do that. The people doing this are more likely to see it as a natural obligation to provide labour when it is needed, and an equally natural obligation to provide food when when you have it. We, with our economic background, see a debt obligation created by the labour and redeemed by the food, but that's probably not how the farmer and his neighbour see it.

    Many years ago I read a couple of books written by a journalist who had moved to the Welsh border to become a farmer. It was very much in the James Herriot tradition of anecdotes strung together into a book, but one of the things that struck me was the extent to which the local farmers worked together in a kind of gift economy, lending tools and labour where necessary to help each other without any formal payment or agreement beyond a general expectation that you would do likewise. It wasn't exactly an ethnologist's report, but the overall pattern was pretty clear.

    These farmers were embedded in the formal economy; auctions and meat prices were absolutely central to their lives. But they also ran their own informal gift economy without needing to be told how. So I think that humans will naturally operate with money or gifts depending on the circumstances, and the main circumstance is the size of the community.

    342:

    I think that humans will naturally operate with money or gifts depending on the circumstances

    That matches my experience, for the most part. There are inevitably always-defect players and I have run into a few of those too. But very few, and interestingly they've almost all been devout hypochristians.

    It's quite possible to run the exact same setup with two sets of books, I have a couple of friends who owe me favours and my last "new" (repainted) bike cost me no money despite coming from a business who makes bikes. "you have enough shop credit" was the phrase used. But that bike was a complex arrangement of he made a bike for someone who later gave it back then I asked for something very similar so it was modified, repainted then shipped up to me. It kind of cost money, in reality it was mostly opportunity cost. But I suspect the tale told to the tax office is different to the one I just told :)

    You see this a lot on neighbourhoods, when I had chickens I gave people eggs because I had lots and hoped it might make people happier about any noise or smells (and the occasional marauding chicken). Neighbours on one side just collected my mail and mowed my front lawn while I was away for a month. And they used to give me bunya nuts (well, they grew the nuts and the cockatoos gave me the bits they didn't want.. same thing, really). And so on up and down the street. Or round and round my friendship circle. Etc.

    343:

    Also, one that has come up a few times recently: men too often gain enormous credit by assuming the woman they are dealing with is competent. No amount of eyerolling can convey just how stupid this is, but it just happened again.

    I wandered into a local trade supplier today to buy some bits and bobs for a project. Woman behind the counter was very helpful and advised me that actually I wanted different bits, then found them for me. I thanked her and paid, then she thanked me for accepting that she knew what she was talking about because "most men don't".

    344:

    Oh, and another thing.

    The South American civilisations (Inca etc) didn't have writing, metal tools, the wheel, or money. Records were kept on quipus: arrangements of cords with knots in them. Mostly the knots recorded numbers, but some of them seem to have been symbols or identifiers of some sort. We can read the numbers but not the symbols. My guess is that a quipu was the equivalent of a notebook: an extension of the owner's memory rather than an independent record that could be read by someone else, and each official would have their own private system for tracking which cords represented what. But that's just a guess.

    Those South American civilisations would make a fascinating counterpoint to our standard narrative of stone-bronze-iron ages based on the civilisations of the Fertile Crescent. Unfortunately too much of the information about how shose societies actually worked is now lost, partly because of the conquistadores, but mostly because they didn't write anything down.

    345:

    while local governments (or more likely government officials) are cooperating with Bitcoin miners.

    More likely the local "party" owns all or a major part of the mining operation. Or the local party heads do so.

    How do you think all of the 3rd and 4th generation decedents of the "Long March" got to be so rich?

    346:

    Yeah, I think you should really just read that Graeber book. Separately there are a few things I think you're a little skewed (not biased, just off kilter) on in these comments, but I think the underlying issue is about epistemology and I'm undermotivated to go into that so won't. I also think your intuition to talk about non-literate means of accounting is a good one, but to me it lends more weight to "credit" than to "money". In particular it pours cold water on the Dunbar number argument you make above. But it's a rich tapestry, it'd be dull if we all thought the same thing.

    347:

    OK, I'll go and read the Graeber book. Though having looked at the list of books by the same author I do have to wonder if he is only grinding one side of his axe.

    348:

    a system of reciprocal favours and obligations

    An obligation looks a lot like a debt, at least to me. How do you define the boundary between them?

    349:

    Its a small distinction, but to me "debt" is one kind of obligation; one which is enforced by formal law and can be discharged in the form of money. "Obligation" is a more general term for actions enforced by religion, custom, community pressure and so forth as well as by legal force. A Christian feels an obligation to go to Church on a Sunday, but that is not a debt. For that matter, when I order a gizmo from Amazon I would say that Amazon is obliged to supply the gizmo or refund my money, but I would not describe it as a debt unless they failed to do either.

    Looking through dictionaries I can see that this distinction isn't always there, and "debt" can also be used more figuratively for obligations. But that is the distinction I am making here.

    350:

    Damn: hit submit too soon. I just want to add:

    Going back to Heteromeles example of the farmer with a helpful neighbour; we might consider that the farmer owes the neighbour some food in return for his labour. But we might just as easily say that the neighbour owes the labour in return for the food given last winter. The language of debt and transaction fails to capture this relationship.

    351:

    I think the underlying issue is about epistemology and I'm undermotivated to go into that so won't.

    OK, I can respect that, and I promise not to come back on this, but can you give me some pointers? Any keywords I should go and look up?

    352:

    example of the farmer with a helpful neighbour; we might consider that the farmer owes the neighbour some food in return for his labour. But we might just as easily say that the neighbour owes the labour in return for the food given last winter. The language of debt and transaction fails to capture this relationship.

    When/where I grew up we always had friends and neighbors who helped each other out. (Not all neighbors were of this mindset.) No one kept a ledger except to skip the folks to "took" but never gave back.

    And I don't mean trimming the hedge. Things like digging up the sewage drain field when clogged or repairing a washing machine when it broke. Those of us in the "group" had garage privileges. We could go into each other's garage to get a needed tool if the owner wasn't home.

    It wasn't till decades later I found out my mother hated this setup.

    No one in my current neighborhood operates this way. There ARE "boundaries".

    353:

    Gift/obligation (small-scale) "economies" ... I am part of such a set-up, that also uses actual money. My local Allotment Association, where we use money for some transactions, but there's an awful lot of plant-&-product swapping, shifting of surpluses & know-how exchange going on. In fact, trying to reduce it to a "money-only" set-up would crash it in pretty short order.

    354:

    "debt" is one kind of obligation; one which is enforced by formal law and can be discharged in the form of money

    By this definition you can't have debts until you have money.

    Graeber uses 'debt' in a broader sense. So do many people.

    Citing the Oxford English dictionary: "That which is owed or due; anything (as money, goods, or service) which one person is under obligation to pay or render to another"

    Examples dating back to the 1300s refer to things like a 'dette' being an obligation to help the king. (Literally: "We ere in dette, at nede to help þe kyng")

    I understand that words shift meaning, but I remain unconvinced that in common usage "debt" refers solely to certain types of monetary obligations.

    355:

    Graeber uses 'debt' in a broader sense. So do many people.

    I'll see when I read the book, but it sounds like equivocation is going on here.

    356:

    In other news, malware is going meta:

    The Microsoft security team has published details on Wednesday about a malware campaign that is currently spreading a remote access trojan named STRRAT that steals data from infected systems while masquerading as a ransomware attack.

    Because pretending to be your bank is just so last year.

    357:

    First off, I agree about Graeber. He definitely breaks hard left, and a lot of his writing isn't well-structured. Debt's the best of his books that I've read, and it can be annoyingly vague at times.

    That said, I think the key is that what you're calling obligation he calls debt. The basic description of the book is that he started by trying to trace the history of money, and realized as he did his research that it did not develop from barter as popularly supposed (I'll get back to this), and that it was more useful to look at the history of debt as a basic human condition (what you'd call mutual obligations that tie people together) and look at how money came out of it. He starts with non-quantized debts (your obligations) before getting into how obligations became quantized (credit) and then alienated (money that anyone could spend, where credit requires people to have a relationship of some trust), and then manipulated (usury, finance, capitalism).

    This all started because you trotted out the old story of money coming from barter. Per Graeber, that's been shot down any number of times, but then the dead myth dutifully is picked up again and carried along. I'll let you read Graeber's thinking about why it's so important to capitalism that money came from barter and credit came from money on your own, because it's an interesting read. He came to the conclusion that the reverse was almost certainly true.

    358:

    On a parallel to the idea of gift economics, people who get into alt-economics (raises hand) tend to get all excited about potlatching. While forcing people to accept gifts they don't want is a thing I've experienced (cf white elephants), the more I read about potlatches and competitive feasting from indigenous writers, the more I realized that wasn't what was going on. Starting to get a clue can be nice.

    Potlatches are ceremonies around business deals, where the recipient is supposed to pay back what they get with interest. This has been described as competitive gift giving, where chiefs give more and more until someone defaults.

    However, that's not exactly what was going on. Let's say there is no legal system, and you want to make a business contract with someone. How do you enforce that contract? The potlatch solution is that you throw a huge feast, drag in some entertainment to get people motivated to show up, then very publicly give the loan, ideally with everybody in the audience knowing what the conditions are. Since a festival of this size is a pain to put on, have a number of deals witnessed by the audience, with food, magic performances, giveaways, etc. in between to get people through the boring business part.

    Then, if someone doesn't do a potlatch later on to publicly pay back the loan with interest, everyone knows they blew the deal, and their reputation suffers as a result.

    Now obviously only rich people can do deals on this scale, and certainly the PNW tribes were pretty socially stratified. And also, I'm pretty sure this wasn't all the potlatches were about (they're quite multifunctional). Still, it's an interesting way to do business, when you don't have a system of courts and lawyers to enforce deals.

    You can also see how a system like this could be overwhelmed if the society grew too big. This in turn would allow the most powerful and authoritarian chiefs to step in, rearrange things so that only they and their people could ratify deals, and declare themselves god-kings, thereby forming a state. Something kind of Trumpian about that last step, except that Trump would have failed miserably trying to create a state out of too many competing chiefs.

    359:

    "Can Kavanaugh be ejected, for previous corruption, etc? ( And, as whitroth says, Barrett - who gives me the creeps. )"

    Personally, I would very carefully look into every high official Trump appointed. Some of them will be relatively clean evangelicals, appointed to make his allies happy, but others will be very, very corrupt, and possibly owned by Putin. And yes, I suspect that Kavanaugh is someone's wholly-owned, fully-blackmailed creature, but so far nobody has proved it.

    360:

    The problem is that impeachment of a justice requires a two-thirds vote of Congress, and that's not going to happen any time soon. While some people can be shamed into resigning, I get the feeling that shamelessness is baked in to the MAGAtry at this point. However, conviction of a felony (lying under oath, for example) might be an interesting burden for them to bear.

    361:

    You're not getting the world off the dollar standard until you've got one large country's currency to use... or until there's a meeting, say, of the G21 (or whatever), and create an international currency.

    Presumably with more control and flexibility than the euro.

    362:

    Agreed, but a judge can be convicted of a crime, which is an alternate path to removal, and it puts someone like Kavanaugh into the position of having to compare threats...

    I'd also be very, very curious about how Justice Kennedy ended up stepping down.

    363:

    Potlatches could be a loan, of sorts. Or they could just be weaponized charity. Likely they were both from time to time. I wonder what sort of resentful behaviors you would have seen in the recipients of the latter. Imagine the bank dropping by to loan you $100,000 and you not getting any real opportunity to pay it back until 3 months later. Certainly if you had enemies with no real means, you might just outspend them and keep them in perpetual shame.

    364:

    Let me note that I've read in Celtic regions, and maybe in some Native American regions, if someone wrote and sang a satire of you, you might as well kill yourself then.

    365:

    Let's say there is no legal system, and you want to make a business contract with someone. How do you enforce that contract? The potlatch solution is that you throw a huge feast, drag in some entertainment to get people motivated to show up, then very publicly give the loan,

    Intriguing. A lot like a wedding, in fact. There is definitely a competitive edge to weddings, but I believe the original purpose of throwing a big bash was to make sure that the entire community saw that the couple were legally married. Partly so that everyone knew it was legitimate, and partly so that if either ever tried to marry someone else there was a good chance that a witness to the current marriage would be there to stop it.

    Aside:

    My wife and I were invited to a Hindu wedding some years ago. We turned up at the given time. There were rows of seats in a semicircle around the bride, groom and priest, who were sitting on some ornate cushions under a canopy and talking quietly. Some people were already sitting down, but most were milling around. We didn't know anyone except the bride and her parents, so we sat down and waited for things to start.

    After we had been waiting about half an hour it slowly dawned on us that things had already been under way for some time, but this wasn't an audience participation event (I later found out that things had already been under way for 2 whole days; this was just the climax). The 300 or so guests weren't just milling around at random; the reception and ceremony were happening in parallel, so everyone was looking up relatives, renewing friendships and generally networking like mad. After a while food was served (Cardamom ice cream is a thing? Yes, tastes good!). Eventually the ceremony finished, we had a few brief words with the newlyweds (300 guests, 15 seconds per guest, do the arithmetic), and left.

    366:

    Oh, I agree that being forced to take unwanted charity is deliberately demeaning. This is where the notion of the white elephant comes from.

    The thing to highlight is that the anthropologists studying the PNW First Nations highlighted the competitive nature of the feasts, while the modern indigenous writers highlight the business aspect. One focuses on the barbaric exoticism, the other focuses on the essential role the system played and still plays. Since the "barbaric exoticism" happened well after contact, I might guess that the business aspect was older, but it's hard to disentangle without a deep dive.

    That said, for people writing fantasies, it's yet another use of Ye Olde Feast. Since Medievals used celebrations for similar purposes, I'd suggest the upshot is that exotic people aren't as exotic as some might hope.

    367:

    "Let me note that I've read in Celtic regions, and maybe in some Native American regions, if someone wrote and sang a satire of you, you might as well kill yourself then."

    The inuit would make up on the spot a satirical song about their opponent. The opponent would do the same. The one with the funniest song won the argument.

    368:

    You might find this interesting:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/473205107/potlatch-a-card-game-about-coast-salish-economics

    The link to buy the game no longer works, but you can find it on DriveThruCards:

    https://www.drivethrucards.com/product/182080/Potlatch-A-Game-About-Economics

    I backed it on Kickstarter, and it's a neat game. Not so thrilled with the card design — for some reason I find the designs busy and hard to read — but the game is cool. And the PDF is only a dollar :-)

    369:

    Come now, it's not worth killing yourself just because someone's satire raised a few boils… :-)

    370:

    Doing the dozens? Or more like a rap battle?

    And to the older point, Stephan Colbert would have made an decent Celtic bard, I think. If he could raise a boil off Trump, then he would be great.

    371:

    Thanks! I'll look into it.

    372:

    Scott Sanford @ 331:

    If the sun was in the sky, they could view the object in visible light ... they would have identified it and it wouldn't be classified as a UFO

    True to first approximation, certainly.

    There are edge cases where people see something and still don't understand or believe what they seem to perceive. Consider the case of Lawn Chair Larry, who was spotted by several pilots legitimately using Long Beach Airport and did not expect to see some loony dangling from balloons in their airspace.

    Wasn't reported as a UFO though, was he?

    373:

    I'm in a shit mood this afternoon. I had to do some work on my computer, which entailed shutting it down and disconnecting it (and taking it into the other room where I have a work table).

    After putting it all back together I'm having some trouble with the speaker system (5.1 Dolby).

    Why can't manufacturers just label the damn inputs? Or at least write it down in the manual?

    Simple. 1. front speakers, 2. rear speakers, 3. center/sub speakers.

    How much would it cost to stencil that on the case? All of the speaker OUTPUTS are labeled that way.

    OTOH, I found a power extender for the DVD drive (power cable wasn't long enough before) & relocated the DVD drive to the top bay, ABOVE the front USB panel.

    Now I don't have to worry about damaging USB inputs while trying to play a DVD & I can get to the DVD tray without all the USB sticks being in the way.

    374:

    Greg Tingey @ 340: Can Kavanaugh be ejected, for previous corruption, etc? ( And, as whitroth says, Barrett - who gives me the creeps. )

    Supreme Court Justices can be impeached & removed from office. The same rules apply as for impeaching & removing a President.

    375:

    In case you're wondering, youtube has videos of people causing all sorts of weird stuff to engage in more-or-less controlled flight. I suspect there's no spacecraft, fictional or otherwise, that has not been flown in model form.

    Proof of concept should be Snoopy's doghouse, which is about as un-aerodynamic as anyone can ask. (And yes, someone found a Red Baron.) As you say, given the power-to-weight ratios available to small RC aircraft pretty much any shape can be made to fly and has.

    376:

    Supreme Court Justices can be impeached & removed from office. The same rules apply as for impeaching & removing a President.

    So, not possible as long as the impeachee is Republican?

    377:

    Scott Sanford @ 375: "Proof of concept should be Snoopy's doghouse, which is about as un-aerodynamic as anyone can ask. (And yes, someone found a Red Baron.)"

    I note that in the Red Baron video the Red Baron takes off perfectly in his Fokker triplane and is soon followed in the air by Snoopy, piloting a perfectly circular wing instead of a doghouse. The two then start a dogfight.

    I didn't know that you could make a perfectly circular wing do aerial stunts like that!

    378:

    Part of the way the president can be so immune is that presidents (nixon and then trump) and their lickspittle attorney general's have put presidents above the law with regard to prosecution while in office.

    Any other official, yea, its impeachment with 2/3 of the senate to remove them from office, but they could just be put in prison by the regular justice system and that would pretty much stop them using the power of their office until they were pardoned by the next republican president (its a whole interlocking web of bugs in the US constitution).

    Kavenaugh, maybe. I think he put himself on the federalist SC list. He wasn't supposed to be on it. He's too dirty (because he did stuff like run the federalist society judge grooming operation). Might be actual crimes in his past that he could be convicted of. Of course the supreme court majority might decide to make republican judges also immune to prosecution.

    Barret, I would assume, has been well insulated from all that as part of her grooming by the society. She was supposed to be on the list.

    379:

    US - SC The whole thing is broken, isn't it? I suspect if they jump the paleochristian way, Biden will simply appoint 4 more judges Meanwhile, BoZo has just been given an opportunity to smash something else - the BBC. OF COURSE he will take it, it's so depressing ....

    380:

    Paul Krugman, on bitcoin again, he is not a fan : "Technobabble, Libertarian Derp and Bitcoin"

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/opinion/cryptocurrency-bitcoin.html

    381:

    Part of the way the president can be so immune is that presidents (nixon and then trump) and their lickspittle attorney general's have put presidents above the law with regard to prosecution while in office.

    Not so surprising, given that if you follow the office back to its constitutional roots, it's designed along the lines of British executive monarchy circa 1775, only elected and non-hereditary.

    Today's British monarchy is very much watered-down on the executive powers side of things, but still has some embarrassingly mediaeval hold-overs such as being vested in the head that wears the crown, which in turn represents the powers of the abstract Crown™, the constitutional conceit that exists eternally (independent of the identity of the current monarch) and acts as the wellspring of legal authority. That is: there's a crown (actually several) that is a lump of jewellery, but there's also the Crown, which is a legal/constitutional abstraction. And the Crown is by definition above the law because it's what the law comes from. With the embarrassing side-effect that the monarch (the person in whom the power of the Crown is vested) is, uh ...

    Well, let's just say it's a good thing Lizzie Windsor doesn't drive any more (she's 94!), and has no embarrassing habits like shoplifting or murder. (The former could be dealt with discreetly by having her trailed by a minion with a Coutts debit card, but the latter ... just look at Prince Mohammed bin Salman for an example of how badly that goes down these days.)

    Anyway: POTUS is extremely insulated these days, so doesn't have many opportunities for petty crimes like shoplifting or homicide (I trust that in the latter eventuality, the Secret Service would intervene). Instead, going by recent behaviour, it seems to be all about bribery, self dealing, share pump'n'dumps mediated via twitter, and New Jersey Mafia-scale tax evasion. Of which the latter might eventually catch up with Trump, but it'll take years.

    382:

    And the interesting side effect that Monarchy can be shown to travel faster than light.

    Witness:- It is around 6000 miles from Windsor Castle, where George VI died, to Kenya where Lizzie Battenburg was on holiday. At the exact moment of his death, she ascended the throne and became Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor, regnal name Elizabeth II (at least in Englandshire; it's less clear that that regnal number should be applied anywhere else in the Commonwealth). The transfer of Monarchy is instantaneous, therefore we get a speed of transfer of 6000 / 0, which is an infinite velocity by definition, and clearly greater than C at a mere 186_000 mph.

    383:

    Of which the latter might eventually catch up with Trump, but it'll take years.

    I'm fence sitting on this. As best I can tell the AG of NY has used the nonsense he did while in office to bootstrap the investigations for things going back years. And apparently the AG (US and NY) feel they have real meat to bite into.

    I figure it's going to blow sky high within 12 months. And it all be about things from 2016 and prior to avoid all the issues you discussed.

    Then things will get interesting. For various weird definitions of the term.

    384:

    "Monarchy can be shown to travel faster than light."

    More prosaically, when they changed the rules about the succession recently, the relevant legislation had - at least as a legal fiction - to be enacted simultaneously in all the countries affected. Otherwise if the first 27 (approx) in line had all died while the laws were changing, the Commonwealth might have some kind of Schroedinger's Cat superposition of King Tāne and Queen Senna as head of state.

    385:

    "With the embarrassing side-effect..."

    Eh... the capitalised abstraction may be, but the actual person in the silly hat isn't. And they know what happens to them if they start thinking they are.

    386:

    It is around 6_000 miles from Windsor Castle, where George VI died, to Kenya where Lizzie Battenburg was on holiday.

    As a practical matter did this occur much or at all more than 200 years ago? Was there much that got stuck on hold while the new monarch was retrieved from somewhere remote in the age before telegraphs?

    387:

    As some chap with a rather different kind of silly hat also pointed out, of course.

    Except it's one of these things that's a bit like pointing a torch at a distant planet and gently turning it from side to side. The lit-up patch may move faster than light, but you can't actually use that to send information. Lizzie could not in reality even start putting her crampons on until someone got on the phone and told her using normal sub-c communications.

    However, you could still really bugger things up - given a susceptible combination of succession rules and currently eligible potential claimants - by, for instance, arranging for both the monarch and the heir to be equidistant from the same exploding nuke. The succession, in the postulated pre-existing circumstances, could go either of two ways depending on whether the monarch or the heir dies first. But now you are in a position where one of them, fundamentally, must have died before the other, but equally fundamentally it is impossible to make a single correct statement stating which one it was.

    388:

    With regard to Trump and his life of crime and lack of consequences one must keep in mind that the US justice system is also broken more generally in that when a rich old man is caught in prosecutable crime it will operate slowly enough that he will be dead or ready to go to a nursing home by the time he is actually sentenced, unless he stole money from other rich people.

    389:

    @375 & 7 - Snoopy’s Doghouse is a perennial favourite when my club (pdqflyers.com) does a public show. The practical problem is that the current model is an old fashioned glow fuel powered thing that too often takes ages to get started. I’ve flown electric powered models since about 1975 so this always baffles me.

    One SF aircraft I haven’t seen flying is Thunderbird 2. I suspect the lift/drag ratio is bit problematic.

    As for the sped of regnicity, I now want to see a story about the world with Regnal Drive ships.

    390:

    With regard to Trump and his life of crime and lack of consequences one must keep in mind that the US justice system is also broken more generally in that when a rich old man is caught in prosecutable crime it will operate slowly enough that he will be dead or ready to go to a nursing home by the time he is actually sentenced, unless he stole money from other rich people.

    The main breakdown is around $600/hour, or whatever the attorneys are charging their radioactively orange and default-prone clients. Ignoring Trump's wealth, liquidity or lack thereof from prior to 2016, he raised several hundred million dollars off the MAGAts in 2020, to launch his campaign. And so far he has a...blog? It's reasonable to ask where that half million to million lawyer-hours in funds has gone.

    And that's the problem: it's not that he'll get the best lawyers available, because many of that class value their reputations more than his money. But even if he gets the legal equivalent of a room full of chimpanzees typing up motions, the prosecutors have to deal with every single one of those documents they excrete. And that sucks up resources.

    So I don't think it's kid gloves and politesse, I think it's more the problem of dealing with of sloppy sheets thrown around by roomsful of virally infected chimpanzees, who are getting paid to go apeshit, so as to keep their bananas supplier out of prison and feeding them. In a manner of speaking, of course. Comparing Trump or his lawyers to virally-hijacked chimpanzees unfairly insults at least one member of the comparison, so I must be careful and point out that this is all hypothetical. Ook.

    391:

    chortle Thanks for Snoopy.

    392:

    One of my daily look-ats. Yeah... his argument, as politely as possible, is "what problem does it solve?"

    Other than tax evasion, money laundering, and ransom... and Ponzi.

    393:

    Pigeon @ 387: However, you could still really bugger things up - given a susceptible combination of succession rules and currently eligible potential claimants [by arranging for simultaneous deaths]

    This is already an occasional headache for non-royal inheritance cases. See for example https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/103859

    So I think the UK Supreme Court could come to a conclusion based on precedent without too much difficulty.

    394:

    Potus insulated - yeah. Remember, after he took the election in '16, he and Melanoma were both complaining they couldn't drive, or go anywhere.

    395:

    Oh, yes, weird. And nasty. And, if it takes nearly a year... why, that's right in the first part of the main running for the '22 elections. Watch the GOP defend "innocent until proven guilty"....

    396:

    Oh joy. Just read that the federal Tories have hired the same political consultants that BoJo used to win a majority and who worked the Leave campaign for Brexit.

    https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2021/05/21/erin-otoole-has-hired-the-uk-consultants-who-helped-boris-johnson-and-brexiteers-win.html

    Truly my cup runneth over. And by "cup" I mean a porcelain vaguely-goblet-shaped object firmly fixed to the floor.

    397: 384 - Indeed. Equally (and those who know my real name will get this) I am potentially second in line for the throne of Ireland, after my big cousin's firstborn. 386 - Well, it actually sort of did as recently as 1952CE, because it did take several days to communicate her father's passing to Lillibet, in the safari lodge. 389 - I've seen claims that Thunderbird 2 could fly (sort of; they're based on assumptions that:-

    1) The fuselage with pod is a lifting body section. 2) When the pod is deployed, the cockpit, booms and tail have a lift thrust to mass ratio greater than 1. I suspect that both of these are beyond the present state of the art in aerodynamics and building small aero engines.

    395 - As a Scot, I feel it incumbent on me to point out that I'd pronounce "GOP" as "gaup", a Scots word for vomit.
    398:

    I figure it's going to blow sky high within 12 months. And it all be about things from 2016 and prior to avoid all the issues you discussed.

    Then things will get interesting. For various weird definitions of the term.

    Doesn't that put it firmly into the midterm elections? If the Democrats lose the House and/or Senate that's going to be very interesting…

    399:

    Yeah, I know. But a court procedure is based around the idea that there is a unique correct answer on which all hypothetical fully-competent and fully-informed eyewitnesses would agree if only there had been any there to see the thing they're deciding about, and the decision they come out with is supposed to be the result of a best possible effort to determine what that answer would be. So I was trying to postulate a scenario where there would not be a unique correct answer, and of the hypothetical cloud of witnesses, half would come down one way and half the other, with equal validity and correctness.

    400:

    Wait, you're a Scot, and in line for the throne of Ireland?

    And, re "gaup", thank you! Perfect translation.

    401:

    The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.

    Pterry- Mort

    402: 400 - Yes. Great grandfather on my paternal grandfather's corner of the family tree was born in Ulster, back before partition. 401 - I actually:-

    a) Thought of the idea first b) Never told Pterry about it, so he thought of it independently c) Didn't actually develop a whole extra chain of sub-atomic physics about it.

    403:

    William the Bastard died near Rouen, and Richard Gare de Lyon near Limousin.

    404:

    Other than tax evasion, money laundering, and ransom... and Ponzi. Also money exfiltration. (Or as mentioned above, direct bitcoin mining and exfiltration, as long as there is proper internet connectivity.)

    405:

    In Norman times the monarchy was still technically elective as it had been for the Anglo-Saxon kings, so it was more a case of the crown condensing out of a probability cloud. Up until Henry II the procedure was roughly "Go to Winchester, occupy the Exchequer, head for London and get appointed King". Kingons didn't really start making an appearance until the later Plantagenets.

    406:

    And then, you're suggesting, that they planted the seed of kingons, or was it that they spun it all around, then slammed it into the cloud, and some of the target ejected kingons (and queeons)?

    407:

    https://www.rt.com/usa/524392-pentagon-ufo-hunter-exotic/

    My immediate reaction was that the exotic materials were two nipple tassles and a sequined G-string.

    408:

    paws4thot @ 382: And the interesting side effect that Monarchy can be shown to travel faster than light.

    Witness:-
    It is around 6000 miles from Windsor Castle, where George VI died, to Kenya where Lizzie Battenburg was on holiday. At the exact moment of his death, she ascended the throne and became Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor, regnal name Elizabeth II (at least in Englandshire; it's less clear that that regnal number should be applied anywhere else in the Commonwealth). The transfer of Monarchy is instantaneous, therefore we get a speed of transfer of 6000 / 0, which is an infinite velocity by definition, and clearly greater than C at a mere 186_000 mph.

    Divide by zero error

    409:

    EC That's Rt.com - Putin's mouthpiece And, remember that he ( like Trump) believes politics is a zero-sum agme

    410:

    David L @ 383:

    Of which the latter might eventually catch up with Trump, but it'll take years.

    I'm fence sitting on this. As best I can tell the AG of NY has used the nonsense he did while in office to bootstrap the investigations for things going back years. And apparently the AG (US and NY) feel they have real meat to bite into.

    I figure it's going to blow sky high within 12 months. And it all be about things from 2016 and prior to avoid all the issues you discussed.

    Then things will get interesting. For various weird definitions of the term.

    An interesting thing I noticed today is the new "criminal" investigation is directed at the Trump ORGANIZATION. How do you put an ORGANIZATION in jail?

    That's where HE belongs, but I'm not getting my hopes up yet.

    In other newz!

    Trump's election "audit" should be treated as a trojan horse, Arizona secretary of state warns

    In her letter, Hobbs wrote: "I have grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised and election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas' control."
    "[M]y office did not reach this decision lightly," she continued. "However, given the circumstances and ongoing concerns regarding the handling and security of the equipment, I believe the county can agree that this is the only path forward to ensure secure and accurate elections in Maricopa County in the future."
    Earlier this month, the Justice Department expressed concerns about certain audit practices that were being carried out by Cyber Ninjas, issuing a formal warning that they could be in violation of federal law. "We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss," the department wrote at the time. The letter was shortly rebuffed by Arizona Republicans.

    There's no way to be certain the machines have not been infected with malware while under the control (lack of control) of the Cyber Ninjas. They've broken the chain of custody.

    It's likely going to cost Maricopa County taxpayers millions of dollars and the Arizona Senate won't pay for it.

    A spokesperson from Dominion, whose voting systems were used in the election, told Insider: "There are real concerns about what the unaccredited 'auditors' have done to Maricopa County's voting equipment, and whether the machines remain useable for future elections. What we do know, without a doubt, is that the secure chain of custody has been broken.".
    411:

    paws4thot @ 397: #384 - Indeed. Equally (and those who know my real name will get this) I am potentially second in line for the throne of Ireland, after my big cousin's firstborn.

    One semester back when I was in college I had a roommate who was 614th in line of succession to be the next King of Greece. Came up in conversation about 2/3 of the way through a fifth of Ouzo.

    412:

    Robert Prior @ 396: " the federal Tories have hired the same political consultants that BoJo used to win a majority and who worked the Leave campaign for Brexit"

    That's the only way the federal Tories could find ignorant fools willing to rush into a Canadian Constitutional Crisis (tm) without looking.

    413:

    Not relevant to your point, but ITYM 186,000 * 3600 mph.

    414:

    Alas for the joke, death is a process, not an instantaneous state change. Even if your heart stops, your brain takes some minutes to die, and your cells longer still, hence the ability to transplant organs.

    So unfortunately, kingons have too low an exhaust velocity to be used in transport.

    415:

    You've forgotten the quantum component. The exact time of "real" death is of secondary importance to the observation that death has occurred - kingons travel faster than light because something has been observed!

    416:

    JBS IF ( Big "if" ) I'm reading that rightly, then "cyber ninjas" MAY have screwd with AZ voting machines & they are a Rethuglican-front, or thought to be? Yes/No?

    417:

    And since Bitcoin is nothing if not an efficient way to lose money quickly and stupidly, here's I Forgot My PIN: An Epic Tale of Losing $30,000, wherein a tech journalist for Wired poorly secures his Bitcoin stash.

    418:

    ... then "cyber ninjas" MAY have screwd with AZ voting machines ...

    Maybe they did and maybe they didn't; Arizona has no budget for checking for this kind of sabotage. The group's name certainly implies they think they have the kind of expertise to do that, even if they're just posers or script kiddies. Too, the company owner is well known to be a Trumpist and rumor monger, so it's plausible to consider them being willing to try something crooked.

    419: 408 - Divide by zero error

    Not so; the code actually reads more:-

    If time = 0 then Speed := Infinity ; Else Speed := Distance / Long_float ( time ) ; End if ;

    -- If Infinity is a numeric, it may be assigned as Long_float'last.

    414 - That's a different philosophical argument; The medical profession have long held that death is brain death, or the instant when the determining physician signs the death certificate. 418 - Wired's story was posted some years after there was a similar story line in The Big Bang Theory.
    420:

    You seem to have suffered a sense of humour failure.

    Personally, I find the antics of the Rockwell Triangle (*) very funny. The delusional claims of the aliens-are-with-us, the pomposity of the USA military, and the desperate attempts of the media not to offend enough to lose customers.

    (*) Of which the vertices are the three camps I mention.

    421:

    As an aside, I find it an interesting reflection on human psychology the way that the New Aether has become established - i.e. that no forces and similar can take effect without the transmission of a particle.

    I feel that the strongest evidence for kingons is the way that they can split into two particles, causing an interference pattern. Sometimes that coalesces into a single king; at other times, the separations creates two lesser ones.

    422:

    And sometimes into a Kingon and a Queenon; witness The Anarchy (1125 to 53)

    423:

    "A Solution looking for a Problem"

    " Like a shark suspended in formaldehyde, it has value only if we believe it does. "

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-21/bitcoin-is-more-modern-art-or-religion-than-money

    (but honestly this can be said of any monetary instrument, because the root of any monetary system is trust and reputation as Heteromeles said in his post about Potlatch)

    424:

    The circumstances that permit both kingons and queeons to be generated simultaneously from the same regimortem event also lead to the generation of bishons (woof!), nighons (aka navons) and castlons (aka rookons, although that's a geolocal pronunciation and many might just say rockons).

    425:

    the root of any monetary system is trust and reputation

    Not quite. Money is what the king gives his soldiers, and also what he requires you to give to him as taxation. This arrangement motivates you to make things the king's soldiers need, so they will give you money for them.

    Trust and reputation are important factors in a credit system, you might say they are its root but that could be putting the cart before the horse to some extent. And you could stretch it a bit to say you trust the king not to have his soldiers kill you if you pay your taxes, but really it's in the category of things that work a certain way whether you believe in them or not (like the soldiers). In general money is what you have when you can't rely on trust and reputation (but can rely on some soldiers somewhere).

    426:

    This gets at another idea, that when you've got forces competing for control of a polity, the one that tends to win offers more predictability and a broader range of services. Bandits go with "give me the money or die," which is predictable, but kings say "give me the taxes or go to prison, and I'll use the money to build a road so you can market your crops." Similarly predictable coercion, but more services offered.

    The key thing is this situation is that the money has to be predictable. That's the whole full faith and credit part of a fiat currency like the dollar: you may hate the US, but you know what the dollar is doing. Compare that with a Zimbabwean dollar or bitcoin, both of which fluctuate wildly and rapidly.

    427:

    You've forgotten the quantum component. The exact time of "real" death is of secondary importance to the observation that death has occurred - kingons travel faster than light because something has been observed!

    Ah, so there's a whole family of particles. I think kingons may be among the less useful of them.

    Before I get into that, I'll point out that the US has a kingon-based system that's superior to what the British use: The Presidential Line of Succession. There's not just the obvious crew, there's two whole secret backup sets. Moreover, the authority gets passed fairly routinely, when presidents go to the hospital and such. And it's mechanized.

    But so what: kingons are only useful for signalling a certain kind of information. The more useful part of this system is the medichirographon.

    What's a medichirographon? Well, the instant the doctor signs the death certificate is the instant the kingon goes from zero to superluminal. However, the kingon is non-physical. A doctor instantaneously signing a death certificate is emitting ink faster than the speed of light. These ink particles--medichirographons--are physical objects with infinite velocity but limited mass. Therefore, we can create an FTL drive consisting of doctors emitting medichirographons: death certificates, prescriptions, doctor's letters, and so forth. While it would be a rocket running on ink, paper, and illegible handwriting (and doctor salaries), the exhaust velocity is infinite.

    428:

    That's a quite interesting theory, but the results you're discussing relate to the tendency of non-successors or secondary successors to claim that they have intercepted a kingon when in fact they have not. On the other hand, sometimes a single individual is the recipient of multiple kingons from multiple ancestors, which might function as a sort of secondary proof for your theory. Also, are kingons particles or waves?

    Modern royalty does seem to wave a lot...

    What's more interesting is that when a Princess intercepts a kingon it changes polarity and becomes a queenon.

    It occurs to me that in addition to these physics that the line of succession is like a series of capacitors, each charging up with potential kingons which might be discharged in the direction of possible successors.

    429:

    If the exhaust velocity is infinite, we only need to emit two particles; one to accelerate and one to decelerate. The problem is that we would need to position the successor quite carefully in a spot directly opposite the desired direction of travel.

    430:

    AZ voting machines & they are a Rethuglican-front

    Doesn't matter if it is R's, D's, or Boy Scout Troop 493 from the East End of London.

    By US federal law voting machines have to be purchased from vendors who have passed a level of certification, then stored, updated, used, in a manner where there is a chain of custody about every detail. Sort of like crime scene evidence. Federal law set down minimums after the Florida 2000 fiasco.

    The folks doing this AZ thing have NOT followed any process which could be called a valid chain of custody or examination process which meets any of the required procedures.

    So the county vote officials (4R,1D) have said you just trashed over $1mil of equipment from the point of view of using it in the next election. Where do we send the bill for the replacement gear.

    So the issue of them modifying the equipment is moot. They could turn them into PacMan consoles and it wouldn't make any difference at this point.

    431:

    I wonder - why not?

    The dollar standard is effectively a tax on the world. While beneficial to the US, it doesn't seem likely that other nations are glad to pay that tax.

    Other currencies are less trustworthy than the dollar, so there is no impetus to use them.

    But, some sort of open exchange ledger with algorithmically controlled supply could be more predictable than the dollar and allow bypassing the dollar tax for China, the EU, the Middle East, and Russia. It wouldn't be a grassroots coin, more something originating in the central banks of major powers. Main issue is it probably won't happen until the US successfully alienates the EU.

    Given the fairly clear evidence that US politics have become unstable, not setting up an alternative looks like a bad choice...

    432:

    David L., but the important part is it's Republicans wasting the taxpayer's money. /s I'd suggest sending the bill to "Drumph!", not that it'll do any good, except, perhaps to raise his blood pressure.

    433:

    An interesting thing I noticed today is the new "criminal" investigation is directed at the Trump ORGANIZATION. How do you put an ORGANIZATION in jail?

    Trump as a company is really over 3000 LLC's. All kinds of interlocking ownership relations and such. So first you have to figure out which companies did illegal things. Then go after the people who initiated such.

    It is broadly assumed the reason for so many companies is to made it so damned hard to figure out "Who's on First"[1] that no one every gets caught. But now the NY AG is determined and has a staff dismantling things. Plus it appears that Trump's head accountant has agreed to help out the AG.

    [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sShMA85pv8M

    434:

    Yeah. I'm probably wrong, but that's one catch. If IQ.45 was spinning off LLCs for business ventures, AFAIK (and IANAL), that's fine. The point of each LLC is to limit liability so that he can't be sued into oblivion when a deal goes bad. Only the assets in the LLC are at risk from forfeiture(again AFAIK). Presumably, if I was playing his kind of games, I'd be doing the same thing as a matter of course.

    Now if he has a trust structure of some sort, it would be more interesting, because then trust owns the assets and he's simply the beneficiary. They'd have to prove that IQ.45 was using the trust(s) for things that it was illegal for them to do (he was acting as the owner, not the beneficiary), as when the IQ.45 Foundation was taken apart because it wasn't acting as a nonprofit but as an untaxed bank account. That's harder, especially if the trust was in a place (like the Cayman Islands) that has laws that "accidentally" make it harder to bust their trusts.

    I'm hoping that IQ.45 wasn't bright enough to take full advantage of the modern wealth management apparatus, but simply spun off LLCs and shuffled assets among them. So long as most of these are in the US and he's the ultimate owner and not an offshore trust, he's quite vulnerable.

    I'd also add that he's been under investigation for over a decade, so it's bureaucratic ineptitude if they don't have his financial setup mapped out in some detail. I'd hazard a guess that they need the witnesses as much to officially say what the investigators already know, because the investigators used methods to get the data (like counterintelligence) that won't stand up in court. The FBI, being both a criminal and counterintelligence operation, purportedly has to do stuff like this on occasion, so that knowledge can officially flow from the black ops counterintelligence wing to the white ops criminal investigation wing. Getting the correct people to say under oath what some hacker learned via illegal wiretap years before is fairly important in their criminal procedure.

    435:

    Back in the seventies or early eighties, Somtow Sucharitgul was something like 218th or 223rd in line for the Thai throne.

    436:

    Yes. Open door, no security, co. run by a Trumpist and conspiracy theorist.

    I suspect the county will sue the state... though it might work better if they sue the state GOP.

    437:

    It may go further back. Consider that the oldest countries we know of, that is, city-states, the biggest, most important thing was the ruler's grainery, for times of bad harvest. I'd think it was reasonable to assume that in the first towns, you had craftspeople, who did fabric, and bows, and spears, and so didn't grow grain. They had to pay their share....

    438:

    Greg Tingey @ 416: JBS
    IF ( Big "if" ) I'm reading that rightly, then "cyber ninjas" MAY have screwd with AZ voting machines & they are a Rethuglican-front, or thought to be?
    Yes/No?

    The owner of the "Cyber Ninja" company is a QAnon kook, but the basic problem is the "Audit" did not follow proper procedures for securing the machines & maintaining a chain of custody. They voided the manufacturer's warranty.

    The manufacturer will not re-certify the machines after the chain of custody was broken. There's really no way to know if the machines have been tampered with or not. The local election board will have to replace them & the Arizona Senate won't reimburse them for the cost.

    439:

    whitroth @ 435: Back in the seventies or early eighties, Somtow Sucharitgul was something like 218th or 223rd in line for the Thai throne.

    Did he drink Ouzo?

    440:

    "Therefore, we can create an FTL drive consisting of doctors emitting medichirographons: death certificates, prescriptions, doctor's letters, and so forth."

    I guess it's the kind of drive system you tend to evolve naturally when you start with the Bistromathic drive and then have to deal with a botulism outbreak.

    441:

    The local election board will have to replace them & the Arizona Senate won't reimburse them for the cost.

    This gives the Republicans a way to 'punish' counties that vote Democrat — just audit them after every election and force them to spend millions repurchasing equipment.

    442:

    It may go further back. Consider that the oldest countries we know of, that is, city-states, the biggest, most important thing was the ruler's grainery, for times of bad harvest. I'd think it was reasonable to assume that in the first towns, you had craftspeople, who did fabric, and bows, and spears, and so didn't grow grain. They had to pay their share...

    "If you want to build a canoe, start by planting a garden." That's 20th Century advice from a Melanesian chief, and it gets at the way this works. If you don't want your crafters to farm or hunt to feed themselves, you have to feed them.

    What and how much do you feed them? That's where you get these interesting measurements, like shekel, koku, and talent. These are either a standardized amount of grain needed to feed someone for a period (a koku is a year's worth of rice for one person). That food is the surplus you use to hire your crafters to do your projects. You're right, it's quite old, but it involves logistics and rationing, not money or credit.

    Credit is what you get when a farmer needs pots to store the grain he's harvesting. So he goes to the potter and promises him either an amount of grain or a share of the harvest (CSA style) in return for the pots he needs. He gets the pots, then owes the potter part of his harvest. If his harvest fails or he doesn't repay his obligation, stuff happens and he doesn't get to do it again. This is crucial, because crops only mature once or a few times a year, so the farmer needs credit to get through the time when the crops are maturing. Herders have similar arrangements that don't involve money, again to help balance uncertainty and risk.

    Again this is pretty ancient, because you don't necessarily need to quantize the deal in much detail to make it work. Where you need accounting and language is when you're taking tribute of all sorts of random stuff and you need to make sure you, God-King that you are, are getting what you need to do your thing.

    443:

    but kings say "give me the taxes or go to prison, and I'll use the money to build a road so you can market your crops."

    That's exactly wrong. It's what kings say, but they're lying. It's what the governments of the world tell their citizens all the time: "your tax dollars at work" but it's the polar opposite of the reality.

    Governments take dollars out of an infinite supply of dollars. They spend them to make roads by paying them to road builders. The dollars are worthless until the government says everyone must pay tax. Now people need the dollars that the road builders (soldiers) have to spend. When the taxes are collected they're not spent to do more road building, they're put back into the infinite supply. As you know, when you add a finite quantity to an infinite quantity, the finite quantity disappears. Effectively wished out of existence.

    Tax is not theft. It's the exact opposite. It's what creates the value of the dollars in your pocket.

    Damien is exactly right.

    444:

    "I wonder - why not?" (switch off the dollar as the world standard for currency)

    Because you need dollars to buy oil. This is the same in essence as the road building example I gave above. You need the King's Coin to pay taxes. That gives the King's Coin value. Substitute "oil" for "tax". You must pay tax or the King's soldiers will make you miserable. You must buy oil or the lack will make you miserable.

    But why do you need US Dollars to buy oil? Because the USA says so and will bomb the shit out of you if you start trying to trade significant volumes of oil in another currency.

    445:

    the Bistromathic drive

    Ohh! I know this one! It's where we try and convince Charlene that, if she ordered the king prawn boonah, I ordered the chicken jalfrezi and Feorag ordered the vegetable rogan josh, Charlene should pay a larger proportion of the bill, right?

    446:

    Heteromeles, the Trump Organization is much crazier than that. Largely because no banks would deal with him otherwise (not even Deutsche), Trump is personally liable for at least the debts incurred by the swarms of LLCs in his (dis)"Organization". And hundreds of millions of dollars of it are coming due. Some of that will be covered by the money conned out of his supporters late last year, but not all...

    447:

    Yes. It turns out that numbers are not absolute. Just as space and time depend on your movement through them, it turns out that numbers depend on your movement through restaurants. If the numbers represent your position in space then you can exploit this to change your position in space by moving through a restaurant. https://alienencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Bistromathic_Drive

    448:

    Could the move to criminal investigation of the Trump Organization be a prelude to a RICO act prosecution?

    I'm specifically thinking of the bits about money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, and bribery.

    (And wouldn't it be hugely ironic given one Rudy Giuliani's history for bringing RICO charges against New York Mafia families?)

    449:

    That was sort of my point. All of those LLCs were to try and hide what was really going on. And MOST of what any one did was "legal". But the aggregation was illegal.

    As to RICO Under RICO, a person who has committed "at least two acts of racketeering activity" drawn from a list of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering if such acts are related in one of four specified ways to an "enterprise." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act

    What they did was things like ownership of estate A was transferred to company B. Company B hired companies C, D, E and F to manage it, take care of the grounds, advertise it, handle the money etc... It was used to take a tax dodge by making it historic. That process was handled by company X and X paid Ivanka a consulting fee as a part of the deal. But Ivanka was also employed by company "E" above and getting a salary. Which means that her consulting fee should have really been booked as payroll or it was illegal as a tax dodge. Now company F rents out part of the now "historic" estate to some of the Trump family as one of their "other" homes. But the tax laws don't allow this for historic things. But since it is done by renting out to company Q who then charges a nominal rent to the Trumps it becomes almost impossible to trace unless you have ALL the paper work in front of you and are looking for it. And you don't even know to look until someone points you at it.

    450:

    Possibly, but see https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-dammit/

    RICO only applies to a specific list of crimes, and it needs to be a pattern. So you would need to show that the Trump Organisation makes a habit of at least one of these things: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961

    451:

    Agreed. It's not RICO. This is also the opinion of a federal lawyer with the online handle Bmaz at Marcy Wheeler's blog ( https://www.emptywheel.net/ ) which is probably the best place to follow all things Trump.

    It's also worth noting that the laws in play in the current Trump investigation are the laws of the State of New York, not federal laws. RICO is a federal law. (New York might have some equivalent to RICO, but it's almost certainly called something else.)

    It's also unlikely that Trump's crimes against the U.S. Government are (legally) treason. This crime is very narrowly defined in U.S. law.

    452:

    I'll go out on a limb and point out that offenses covered by RICO include money laundering, especially for Russian interests. People have been publicly speculating on this for some time (Google "Trump Money Laundering")

    Whether international money laundering happened and is provable in a US court...? That I can't say. But if I had to guess RICO, that's where I would go. The general pattern is shady money going into questionable real estate deals, where profits get skimmed and others deal with the fallout.

    That said, the thing they need to do with Trump is to nail him first with a really obvious felony that precludes him from ever holding public office again. That will defang him. So if they decide to go RICO on him, there's not going to just be a smoking gun, there's going to be a smoking artillery emplacement and well documented craters where the shell companies exploded.

    453:

    "The local election board will have to replace them [the election machines] & the Arizona Senate won't reimburse them for the cost."

    Well, that's the kind of lawsuit that the county would probably win against the state. But it kind of doesn't matter. Breaking the election in that county is the point and having to file that lawsuit and replace the machines is a stress on that election, so "mission accomplished".

    Destroying is just so much easier.

    454:

    That said, the thing they need to do with Trump is to nail him first with a really obvious felony that precludes him from ever holding public office again. That will defang him.

    I wish that that were true. His supporters will say the conviction is 'fake' or 'rigged' and it won't bother them a bit. Unless he goes to jail I can't see it affecting him much.

    455:

    JF You just go back to paper-&-pencil forms for the voting ...

    456: 451 - A "Juan" Act perhaps? :-) 455 - There again, I can see Trumpolini trying to require some sort of photo id that Rethuglicans have and Democrats don't, following the precedent that Bozo is trying to set in the UK.
    457:

    "You just go back to paper-&-pencil forms for the voting ..."

    And you don't have to go far for examples on how to do it. We still have paper and pencil voting in Canada.

    458:

    Another irrelevance - I think that the next UK entry for the Eurodrivel Nong Contest should be:

    http://www.lyricsondemand.com/miscellaneouslyrics/childsongslyrics/nobodylovesmelyrics.html

    459:

    Well, back in the 1960, 70s and even early 80, you had actually good pop stars and groups competing, eg Dana, Pet You too Lips, Brotherhood of Man, ABBA... Since about 1990, Lordi are one of the few acts that I wouldn't classify as a "no hit wonder".

    460:

    Charlie Stross @ 448: Could the move to criminal investigation of the Trump Organization be a prelude to a RICO act prosecution?

    I'm specifically thinking of the bits about money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, and bribery.

    (And wouldn't it be hugely ironic given one Rudy Giuliani's history for bringing RICO charges against New York Mafia families?)

    The RICO act is FEDERAL law (Giuliani was a Federal Prosecutor - Southern District of New York - back then). The current investigation is being conducted by the New York State Attorney General and the Manhattan (New York City) District Attorney.

    As with the federal law, New York law also criminalizes the offense referred to as "enterprise corruption." The enterprise corruption statute is New York's version of the federal RICO Act and was added to the Penal Law by the Organized Crime Control Act of 1986 to combat the "diversified illegal conduct engaged in by organized crime," including the infiltration and corruption of legitimate enterprises.

    New York Penal Code Article 460, et seq.

    Under current interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, any evidence the state comes up with that indicates a violation of Federal Law can be used to charge a Federal Crime, but AFAIK, there is no current RICO investigation against DJT or the "Trump Organization".

    I hope New York State does convict him of racketeering, because that would mean he'd most likely have to serve his sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, although it's named after Clinton County, NY, not Hillary. Still ...

    461:

    Niala @ 457:

    "You just go back to paper-&-pencil forms for the voting ..."

    And you don't have to go far for examples on how to do it. We still have paper and pencil voting in Canada.

    Pencil smears if handled improperly and it can be erased. Most places I know of use quick drying ink for marking paper ballots - doesn't smear and can't be erased.

    The ballots from Maricopa County are paper ballots. The machines are programmable tabulators.

    I think several others have pointed out the problem was not with the ballots or the tabulators, it's with the Republican dominated Arizona Senate deliberately breaking the voting system in those counties that gave Biden the victory in Arizona. The whole damn AUDIT is a FRAUD!

    A Gerrymandered Supreme Court has told Republicans it's Ok for them to rig elections for PARTISAN political purposes as long as they don't mention race in doing so. Doesn't matter what kind of ballots they use. It's all about who gets to cast one.

    462:

    But her emails!

    463:

    Meanwhile .. It appears that another of the USA's diseases is spreading, though it was already here in a small dose. Now, it seems to have escaped

    464:

    Could the move to criminal investigation of the Trump Organization be a prelude to a RICO act prosecution?

    As others have observed, it's not a direct link - but it's in the general neighborhood of a RICO case. There's an AP story about a RICO expert involved and a BI story about how Trump's business is suspiciously mafia shaped. But we've seen this before; Trump University went down in RICO flames but The Donald waddled out with only minor burns.

    465:

    I hope New York State does convict him of racketeering, because that would mean he'd most likely have to serve his sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, although it's named after Clinton County, NY, not Hillary. Still ...

    Enthusiastically agreed! The correctional facility is named after the county, named in turn for the first governor of New York (and later vice-president), but these days who really cares? It would be delightful and appropriate to incarcerate him there.

    It's also occurred to me that if the SDNY gets him he will go into the same building, likely the same Special Housing Unit, and even possibly the same cell as his friend Jeffrey Epstein.

    466:

    paws4thot @ 459: Well, back in the 1960, 70s and even early 80, you had actually good pop stars and groups competing, eg Dana, Pet You too Lips, Brotherhood of Man, ABBA... Since about 1990, Lordi are one of the few acts that I wouldn't classify as a "no hit wonder".

    There have been a few Eurovision songs I liked enough to add them to my playlists. I don't think this years "winner" will be on there, but I liked the UK entry.

    There have been a few others. And although some of them may be "no hit wonders" here in the U.S. or there in the U.K. they're still fairly big in their home countries.

    467:

    Greg Tingey @ 463: Meanwhile ..
    It appears that another of the USA's diseases is spreading, though it was already here in a small dose.
    Now, it seems to have escaped

    Nope. Not ours. He was born in Northern Ireland, which is still part of the U.K.

    468:

    We still have paper and pencil voting in Canada.

    So does Arizona and almost all of the rest of the country. Only a few idiot states left using touch screen voting.

    Plus it's paper and INK.

    The machines are for counting. And we have way too complicated ballots due to electing so many people in various jurisdictions. You CAN count by hand. You'd really not want to though.

    469:

    we have way too complicated ballots due to electing so many people in various jurisdictions.

    That's a choice, though. There are many ways that could be simplified, although apparently the easiest option is use in some places (voter feeds their ballot through a scanner which says valid/invalid and optionally displays how it thinks the user voted).

    But most of this founders on: first make the USA more democratic, then tinker with the details. Right now movement is in the other direction... focus really should be on a: get everyone to vote and b: make sure all the votes are counted.

    470:

    As you say. Parts of Europe (most definitely including the UK) exported our loons to you quite a while back, but we kept our Northern Irish ones.

    471:

    I have never listened to it, as I don't listen to such things, but I noted that it became more of a political popularity contest than a musical one a very long time ago.

    472:

    A friend of mine reckons the UK won but the votes are all held up by customs.

    473:

    Clearly next year’s entry should be a performer/performers from Scotland. That way if they do well the uk media can report it as “British performer does well at Eurovision”, whilst if they do badly they can report it as “Scottish performer fails at Eurovision”!

    474:

    "Somtow Sucharitgul ... in line for the Thai throne. Did he drink Ouzo?"

    Footnotes required, I think.

    btw, does anyone know where I can get a copy of Jasmine Nights in Thai? I know it's a thing but the only likely source, the Bangkok Opera shop in the BACC, was never open when I visited and I don't think it even exists now.

    475:

    Re: 'I thought that was one of the major benefits of bitcoin over cash - every transaction is tracked and published, so everyone knows what happened, and those with a detailed view of the internet knows who was involved?'

    A question:

    Can this tech/software be used to untangle a web say for instance DT's quasi-legal finances, biz and legal partnerships? That is, can it trace a string of relationships from and to any point or does it only work from a set starting point?

    Half wondering whether this tech could also show exactly how such things as mutuals get pumped specifically whether trading activity is just an increase in the frequency of 'trades' being executed by the same X number of financial institutions: when their 'portfolio returns' start looking low, they just rev up the rate of trades, add their commissions/fees - which further boosts the final price paid by the customer and who then needs to get/set a higher 'ask-for' price next time ... repeat until this 'fund' hits its interim goal. I've also been wondering whether this type of trading is a reverse salesman-problem as in what is the longest route you can take within a prescribed number of points because a too obvious pass-the-hot-potato would probably be illegal/quickly detected by gov't financial oversight groups.

    Re: Eurovision - UK

    Maybe the UK could do what Switzerland did in 1988 when they hired a Canadian (Celine Dion) to do a song written/composed by two Swiss nationals. Although reading the Wikipedia article about how the voting went maybe the UK could consider playing nice with France. Nope - ain't gonna happen!

    Re: DT & lawyers

    I'm half-wondering whether DT didn't deliberately try to hire as many lawyers as possible so that he could use lawyer-client privilege to make sure they couldn't talk.

    Re: Favors/gifts impact on the 'real economy'

    I moved to a much smaller city a couple of years ago and it seems that the size of the central/hub city has a direct and inverse relationship v-a-v the neighborliness of its urban and suburban areas. This is most apparent with services like snow clearing where once it stops snowing everyone comes out with their shovels, and after clearing their driveway often amble over to help clear one of their neighbor's driveway, chat, and move on again. The result is that hardly anyone hires a snow clearing service. So if you're an economist, you'd probably say that neighborliness is bad for the economy and who cares that you're getting some fresh air, an aerobic workout, establishing/renewing social connections, using fewer environmentally unfriendly products, etc.

    476:

    Ridiculous planning consent is a bit of a strange attractor here. Feast your eyes on CJP Grey's latest video, "Sharks!"

    477:

    I'm half-wondering whether DT didn't deliberately try to hire as many lawyers as possible so that he could use lawyer-client privilege to make sure they couldn't talk.

    Very few "name" lawyers will take his call. True for a long time. He is well known for not paying if the work doesn't produce the result he desires.

    And if the talk involves committing a crime (present or future) then lawyers have to talk. At least when asked.

    478:

    But her emails!

    Putting a mail server in her home and using it for State Department business has to rank up there with one of the most stupid acts of hubris for an elected official at the top level of the US government. And it was against the rules. Maybe not a "crime" but against the rules.

    She created that gift that keeps on giving. It will likely be an R fund raising item long after she's dead and gone.

    Which is one reason I thought she would be a terrible President. (the hubris bit). But being just terrible is why I voted for her.

    479:

    "The real economy" Don't make me have a sick laugh. My ancient ( 40+ years ) "panasonic" FM radio is getting wobbly - I think a capacitor/resistor is slowly dying. Can I actually get a simple FM-ONLY radio? No. Got to have "DAB" & often fucking bloody useless bluetooth as well. Far too many radios, now, have push-buttons only, which require the dexterity of a well-trained ferret, because, after you've pushed a button, it's 1.5 seconds before you press the next one ... & you require an M.A. in S Korean "English" to read & understand the destructions, anyway. Grrr ... "We are going to make the product expensive & complicated, whether you want it or not"

    481: 466 - I picked some sample acts who have an international profile for more than "that one song", and who also did well in Eurovision. You may like to note that I did not, for example, cite David Hasselhof who is big in Germany as a rock star rather than an actor. 468 and #469 - OK, comment on the UK system based on having been a Count Agent (party actor, witnessing but not performing an actual count).

    The ballots are manually counted three times by the Count Clerks; once, face down, to confirm that the number of ballots in the box from $polling_station is as per the records from the Polling Clerk(s) at that station; a second time face up to split the ballots by candidate (it is possible, and quite likely at some levels, for an individual to stand as an independent rather than as a representative of $party) and a third time to confirm the number of ballots cast for each candidate. During the second and third counts (and at least in principle any subsequent recounts) any Count Clerk or Count Agent can challenge the validity of an individual ballot and it will be accepted or rejected by an ad hoc congress of available Clerks, Agents and in some cases the candidates and/or the Returning Officer for the seat.

    In the event that $voter votes for candidate1, and, before placing their ballot in the Ballot Box, things "I meant to vote for candidate2", they can show their ballot to the Polling Clerk and request a replacement. The original ballot will then be recorded and marked as a "spoilt ballot", and accounted for but not counted.

    473 - The "English Broadcasting Corporation" do this already in sports, irrespective of how the actual athlete(s) self-characterise. 479 - Well, a Roberts Radio R9993 seems to fit the bill - FM/MW/LW, with no flounder, sorry DAB, or azure dentition.
    482:

    Your counting process is similar to how an AZ official described the law there. But it is NOT how this crazy "audit" is being done.

    483:

    Mainly a plaintative, sarcastic cry on my part.

    On one hand, Clinton is just another person in senior management who doesn't understand why computer security is important. On the other hand, Clinton vs. Trump is a nadir for both parties, a vain, corrupt CD apparatchik vs. a vain, corrupt DC insider... sensible people voted for Clinton because a Democratic nadir is less bad than a Republican nadir. On the gripping hand, tear it all down!

    484:

    Sorry, what?

    Somtow Sucharitkul, aka SP Somtow, is an sf author, also a composer and conductor. He used to be on the East Coast back in the eighties (he once (jokingly) offered to buy my Eldest for a wife when she hit 18).

    He is Thai, and the claim was actual. Haven't seen him in forever.

    485:

    sigh Did someone steal your password? This sounds like gold-bug/libertarian crap. There is no "infinite supply of money".

    I suggest readings from a Nobel prize-winner in economics, Paul Krugman. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/opinion/money-federal-reserve-deficit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/cryptocurrency-inflation.html

    486:

    So, you're saying no one trades petrochemicals via euros?

    487:

    Well China has announced that Crypto currencies need to stop operating in China. Or somewhat. Sort of.

    And this time they really really REALLY mean it. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/china-advances-its-war-on-bitcoin-cracks-down-on-mining/

    Well. Maybe.

    488:

    We don't nkow what's going on in the DoJ.

    On the other hand, if a state convicts him and sends him to prison, a GOP President cannot pardon him.

    And it's clear he's been guilty of money-laundering for decades, and may have picked up from his father.

    489:

    Since we're past 300....

    Last year, the virtual Balticon was maybe the second virtual con... and for the rest of that year, with zoom and discord, we were the gold standard for a virtual con.

    This year, hopefully for the last time, we're virtual again. The con starts next Thursday, and ramps up Friday. It's free to attend, so please come. balticon.org

    And... in the (zoomed) con suite on Friday night, at 8:30 PM EDT, there's going to be a book launch for science fiction book (not Y/A, not military sf, not space fantasy) called 11,000 Years, by some guy who's writing under the name of mark roth-whitworth.

    Please come. My book's being published by Ring of Fire Press, and comes out Thursday, 27 May, ebook or Amazon trade paper.

    490:

    Back a hundred or so posts various people recommended I read "Debt: The First 5000 Years". So I am doing.

    The foreword I got half way through and mostly skipped the rest. It seemed to be an unstructured rant rather than leading to any point. OK, its just the Foreword.

    Then on to the first few chapters. The Myth of Barter, started by Adam Smith and still being propogated by economics textbooks in spite of over a century of evidence. I decided to check by looking at the samples from some current textbooks on Amazon.

    AQA GCSE Economics textbook: barter doesn't even appear in the glossary.

    "The Economics Book" from Dorling Kindersley's Big Ideas series: a page or three on every significant economic thinker. One of the sample pages was Polyani, whose big idea was that economics is embedded in culture.

    Another of the DK "Big Ideas" books was "How Money Works: The Facts Visually Explained" which had one sentence on barter as a stage in development, but then jumped straight to the idea of money as IOUs (rather than commodities). Coins, seashells and lumps of gold are explained as IOUs, initially used to time-shift barter (e.g. "I'll give you a cow now, and you give me corn when you harvest it").

    "Economics 12e (UK Higher Education Business Economics)" does not mention barter.

    I also went back to "Connections" by James Burke, published around 1980 (since I happen to have the book of the series). He talks about the invention of coins, but does not mention barter. He sees the central development in money as a technology being the "touchstone", which allowed gold to be quickly assayed for purity by the colour of a scratch mark. Up to that point a mark on an ingot "probably meant no more than that the man who issued the ingot would accept it back at the same value for which he had offered it in the first place".

    So it seems that money-as-credit was sufficiently well established back in 1980 for James Burke to include it in a popular book.

    Graeber then describes the Sumerian economy, where "money" was a bureaucratic construct used to pay workers in a centralised economy, but where markets also existed that basically ran on credit, with the tab paid at harvest time. Silver was mostly used as a unit of account; the actual metal stayed in treasuries.

    Possibly. But how did that system evolve? It seems unlikely that such a sophisticated operation spring into form overnight. More likely they started with money, or a money-like commodity such as grain, and evolved the credit system in parallel.

    Graeber himself does no better in his book: the most he can actually find is some counterfactual exercises where the student is asked to imagine a world of barter, the better to appreciate the importance of money. But Graeber can't find anything beyond an occasional throw-away sentence which actually supports his allegation.

    So I think that Graeber is tilting at a mostly-straw man. I don't think any modern economist thinks that barter-land was ever a real thing; any such practice is clearly unstable and evolves so rapidly into some mix of money and credit that it is barely worth mentioning.

    BTW, I would recommend the Dorling Kindersley "Big Ideas" series. DK is best known for factual books aimed at primary school and infants, but the Big Ideas series are aimed at adults. They are written by teams of experts (generally University professors in the relevant subjects) and they do provide good clear explanations of the key ideas. I've got the Philosophy one, and its an excellent reference whenever someone refers to some philosopher.

    491:

    Republican talking points aside, I'm highly doubtful that Hilary Clinton would know an email server from a hole in the wall -- at least, before the manufactured scandal over her private server erupted in 2015 (or was it 2016?).

    Politicians of her vintage frequently didn't even use a keyboard: Tony Blair was famous for having a secretary print his emails out, writing his replies longhand, and having them copy-typed back in.

    To most politicians of a certain age and social class -- the beige oligarchy, as I used to call them -- email was something that at best you read and replied to: running it was something you hired a minion to sort out, because they were basically recruited from the same caste as senior management and CEOs.

    (Today things have loosened up a bit: but then, the internet has been part of the mass communications landscape for 20-30 years now. AOC is young enough to be HRC's granddaughter, for example. But back in the day? My money is firmly on HRC not having had a clue about where her minions installed her email server until it bit her on the ass.)

    492:

    David L It has bluetooth - unnecessary & unwanted I've just found an updated version of my old one, but it took a lot of looking ....

    Paws Thanks, will look that one up! Ah - battery power only ...

    Charlie @ 491 I'll buy that explanation - all too plausible, in fact!

    493:

    Agreed. Hillary is of the generation where managers didn't do keyboards, that's for secretaries.

    494:

    Well, your original spec just read "a trad radio with no unneeded and unwanted interwebby bits".

    495:

    Richard H @ 474:

    "Somtow Sucharitgul ... in line for the Thai throne. Did he drink Ouzo?"

    Footnotes required, I think.

    Tracing it back, At #384 you asserted that a change in rules of succession had required simultaneous enactment by the affected countries so that there wasn't a "Schroedinger's Cat superposition of King Tāne and Queen Senna as head of state"

    To which Paws4thot responded that indeed, he was "potentially second in line for the throne of Ireland," (which to the best of my knowledge no longer exists)

    I added that I once had a college roommate who was "614th in line of succession to be the next King of Greece" (another monarchy that no longer exists, although it had not yet been abolished at the time), but more importantly, this factoid ...

    "Came up in conversation about 2/3 of the way through a fifth of Ouzo."

    Too which Whitroth responded at 435: "Back in the seventies or early eighties, Somtow Sucharitgul was something like 218th or 223rd in line for the Thai throne."

    I naturally wondered if Ouzo had played any part in the revelation of this factoid as well?

    496:

    Agreed re: the email server. She was almost certainly clueless.

    497:

    Re: 'virtual Balticon ... (zoomed) con suite on Friday night, at 8:30 PM EDT, ... book launch for science fiction book .. called 11,000 Years, by some guy who's writing under the name of mark roth-whitworth.'

    Congrats!

    Will definitely try to make it to your book launch. Any idea whether any of these sessions will also be uploaded to YT?

    498:

    I will definitely be there!

    499:

    It has bluetooth - unnecessary & unwanted

    Then ignore it. But I only looked for about 20 seconds before I sent the reply.

    But getting almost any bit of electronic without Bluetooth is likely looking for a car without a downdraft carb on the engine. Incredibly rare. As 99.9999% of the general population who have metered electricity to their home also have a bluetooth speaker for few. I have such earbuds and over the ear. Plus a few I can sit out somewhere.

    You have become an edge case in your old age.

    500:

    'm highly doubtful that Hilary Clinton would know an email server from a hole in the wall -- at least, before the manufactured scandal over her private server erupted in 2015 (or was it 2016?).

    ...

    I'll call BS on this one.

    She (and Bill) knew exactly what they were doing and why. They didn't want to deal with separate email systems for personal and official email. And they hired "a guy" (very much like what I do) to run it and other such things for them. And the evidence shows they were told it was against the rules and why and they decided to do it anyway. And she and Bill knew about the record keeping rules and that everything was to be preserved. And they flat out didn't do it.

    Again, not that they broke any hard laws. Just some rules. That many Rs wanted to treat as laws.

    It wasn't manufactured. It was wrong. Flat out wrong. She knew it and did it anyway. Basically by giving herself a waiver. Which in itself was wrong.

    501:

    ikely looking for a car without a downdraft carb on the engine.

    Well I said that backwards.

    is like looking for a car WITH a downdraft carb on it.

    Anyway my point is that Bluetooth allows the size of the speaker system to be separated from the sound generating device.

    I wear ear buds when working outside as in the several hours I was cleaning out/up my store room. Then I switch to an Apple HomePod while sitting out chilling watching my bird feeders on the back deck. All while playing music and podcasts from my iPhone in my pocket or sitting nearby charging. (I ran the battery down after 10 hours or more of such use and not starting with a full charge.)

    And while walking around the house I can set all of my speakers to have the sound follow me or just stay in one room.

    502:

    SFReader @ 475: Maybe the UK could do what Switzerland did in 1988 when they hired a Canadian (Celine Dion) to do a song written/composed by two Swiss nationals. Although reading the Wikipedia article about how the voting went maybe the UK could consider playing nice with France. Nope - ain't gonna happen!

    I dunno. Y'all managed to get together to produce the Concorde. I wonder how much Brexit affected the voting? Has the U.K. ever come in dead last with zero votes before?

    (2003 Cry Baby - Jemini ... she was singing off key, flat as hell during the live performance)

    Like I said, I considered this year's U.K. entry a better song than the one that won.

    I also liked the entry from Iceland. Seemed to me like someone might be a big David Byrne/Talking Heads fan.

    503:

    David L @ 478:

    But her emails!

    Putting a mail server in her home and using it for State Department business has to rank up there with one of the most stupid acts of hubris for an elected official at the top level of the US government. And it was against the rules. Maybe not a "crime" but against the rules.

    She created that gift that keeps on giving. It will likely be an R fund raising item long after she's dead and gone.

    Which is one reason I thought she would be a terrible President. (the hubris bit). But being just terrible is why I voted for her.

    I would like to point out that she had the private email server before her appointment as Secretary of State and she continued to use it in accordance with the protocol established by her predecessor, because the State Department's servers couldn't handle secure email from mobile devices (like her private server could).

    At least that's the excuse Colon Powell used when HE was using a private email server (at the Republican National Committee) ... and he wasn't the only one.

    504:

    FM band broadcasting in the UK was supposed to go away last year, replaced by DAB which crams a lot more channels into the same bandwidth but it didn't quite happen. As long as the broadcasters provide a digital version of their FM content they can still get licences to broadcast on the FM band (88 to 108MHz in the UK IIRC) as well. It all goes away in 2030 though in the UK. Most other countries in the world are planning or have already done the same to recover that irreplacable over-the-air bandwidth so making new FM-only receivers is getting more and more pointless.

    I remember when the older British B/W 405-line TV broadcasting was switched off in late 1984. it resulted in a remarkable number of folks reporting that their TV had 'suddenly stopped working' to repairmen and the like.

    505:

    I remember when the older British B/W 405-line TV broadcasting was switched off in late 1984. it resulted in a remarkable number of folks reporting that their TV had 'suddenly stopped working' to repairmen and the like.

    Sort of like here (US) with analog to digital. Both for cell phones and TVs. My mother in law's personality precluded her from being told something at times from us "young'ns". So we got these emergency calls for both the TV switch and the phone switch. After we had told her many times she needed to "deal". Plus mailings. Plus PSAs on the TV she was watching. Plus ...

    506:

    Colon Powell

    Rules were written due to what he did. Clinton ignored them.

    As to others, saying HC (and BC) were technically inept is a big stretch. You're talking about people in the 99th percentile of IQs who had been using mobile email devices since day 1.

    As to having the hubris to not believe bad things could happen to them or they get in trouble for breaking the rules... I'll buy that every day of the week and twice on Saturdays.

    507:

    Greg Tingey @ 479:

    "The real economy"

    Don't make me have a sick laugh.
    My ancient ( 40+ years ) "panasonic" FM radio is getting wobbly - I think a capacitor/resistor is slowly dying.
    Can I actually get a simple FM-ONLY radio?
    No.
    Got to have "DAB" & often fucking bloody useless bluetooth as well.
    Far too many radios, now, have push-buttons only, which require the dexterity of a well-trained ferret, because, after you've pushed a button, it's 1.5 seconds before you press the next one ... & you require an M.A. in S Korean "English" to read & understand the destructions, anyway.
    Grrr ...
    "We are going to make the product expensive & complicated, whether you want it or not"

    Have you ever looked inside it? Forty plus years old may make it old enough it still has a tuning capacitor rather than a PLL chip tuner. I think they were still manufacturing a few of them using the old technology back in the late 70s.

    IF it does, you can do a whole lot to improve the operation just vacuuming the dust out of that tuning capacitor. Be sure to unplug it and let it sit for a while before trying to do that.

    The new car radio I had installed in my Jeep has touch-screen controls. There's no volume knob. You have to take your eyes off the road and look down at the radio to find the little +/- spots on the screen.

    The original radio it replaced didn't have a volume knob either, but the +/- buttons were a little bit larger, so you didn't have to spend as much time looking down searching for them.

    The radios in my prior vehicles all had volume control knobs I could find with my hand without taking my eyes off the road. The Mazda I bought when I got home from Iraq also had a little control doohickey mounted on the steering column I could control the radio settings without looking down OR taking my hand off the steering wheel.

    508:

    The "her emails" thing has become something of a litmus test. Sadly for all the people who would like law-abiding leaders, you can't have one. But what you can do is look at the people to whom it is vitally important that everyone focus on Her Emails! and ignore everything else. Then you can decide: am I one of them?

    In descending order of importance: are Her Emails really one of the most pressing issues in US politics? And is Hilary Clinton one of the most egregiously law-breaking people in US politics? And is the most important thing about Hilary Clinton that she had a non-approved email server?

    When you find yourself fighting with Nazis and fascists against liberals and democrats... you need to really thing about the path you've chosen.

    509:

    As I said. I voted for her. I feel you're lecturing me. If so, go away. Please.

    510: 499 - I only looked for about 20s too, and found one that met the use case in every respect except mains power (which wasn't actually a mention in the original spec I received).

    As for likening to a "car without a downdraft carb on the engine", most European cars, irrespective of age, have 4 or 6 vertical cylinder engines, which can comfortably accept sidedraft carburation or fuel injection. Downdraft carburation is not an advantage here the way it usually is on a V engine.

    504 and #505 - I'm still looking for the aledged "advantages" of "digital" broadcasting. Its main effects to date seem to have been requiring me to retune my receiver every few months in order to keep receiving the channels I do get, and allowing the broadcasters to give me 2 opportunities to ignore soaps, unfunny US "comedies" and artificiality TV, 1 hour apart from each other. 507 - {marketing idiot} "but touch-screen controls are better because touch-screen"{/end} and never mind tactile usability whilst driving.
    511:

    Wasn't following the thread that way, and no, I knew Somtow, back in the day. I'd see him at cons, like Philcon.

    512:

    I went and asked a member of the BSF Board (she's in the next room), and I'm told that some of the programs - the panels, etc, will be, but no things like kaffeeklatches, and I wouldn't expect the book launch to be.

    Here's the link: https://schedule.balticon.org/?fbclid=IwAR3oRL1BtaUI7t-I_CT6C9nf5c5QNte94H2JfJnNw5P-FoD3D2fWnnKP39s#prog/id:216

    I have to say it's gotten intense, and working with a small press... yesterday, I got the copy-edited file, and had to go through, accepting/rejecting changes, deleting cmts, yesterday....

    513:

    "bluetooth" IIRC ( And quite deliberately without looking-it-up! ) b-tooth is an semi-internet-connected thingie that "allows" you to control various devices within a limited area ( like your home ) & get information back ... But is horribly vulnerable to outside attack, merely for a few seconds "convenience" No thanks Same as I refuse to have "IoT" in my house. Nothing to do with being old or non-techie, it's a basic security issue

    and to David L .. shudder. There are people on the plots with 'phones or earbuds in .. I prefer to hear the birdsong!

    Nojay @ 504 Carefully ignoring that DAB is LATE - discernibly several seconds late in transmission. And, even at my age, I can tell the difference in a Radio3 live concert, because the sound quality in digital is NOT as good as analogue FM ( Issues with signal aliasing at the higher-frequencies, & it really does show up! )

    JBS It has a physical tuning capacitor ( Semi-circles (ish) of parallel plates, moving in-&-out of coincidence as the tuning knob is rotated, yes? ) Um, what's a "pll-chip-tuner"? Agree re, volume & other knobs - that is both stupid & dangerous for any in-car device. [ See also paws post on this .. ]

    514:

    I'm half-wondering whether DT didn't deliberately try to hire as many lawyers as possible so that he could use lawyer-client privilege to make sure they couldn't talk. Yes. One of Trump's early lawyers/associates/mentors, Roy Cohn, used to do this for the NY City crime families. Rudy Giuliani worked out how to destroy this gambit while damaging (as a US Attorney) these crime families for incoming the Russian mafia newbies, and amusingly lately has been trying to use it himself. (That's sort of from memory, but here's partial confirmation.) Barrett: It wasn’t just Genovese. The heads of all five crime families, according to federal files, used to meet in Roy Cohn’s office, because they could all claim lawyer-client privilege, and the feds couldn’t eavesdrop on any of the conversations. So Roy was pivotal with all five crime families in New York. Absolutely, totally the fact that I reported in my book is that the head of the Genovese crime family at the time, Fat Tony Salerno—who only got 100 years in prison, subsequent to this; he died there—met with Donald in Roy Cohn’s offices, and Donald winds up using a concrete company that Fat Tony controlled, at Trump Plaza.

    515:

    paws4thot @ 481: #468 and #469 - OK, comment on the UK system based on having been a Count Agent (party actor, witnessing but not performing an actual count).

    The ballots are manually counted three times by the Count Clerks; once, face down, to confirm that the number of ballots in the box from $polling_station is as per the records from the Polling Clerk(s) at that station; a second time face up to split the ballots by candidate (it is possible, and quite likely at some levels, for an individual to stand as an independent rather than as a representative of $party) and a third time to confirm the number of ballots cast for each candidate. During the second and third counts (and at least in principle any subsequent recounts) any Count Clerk or Count Agent can challenge the validity of an individual ballot and it will be accepted or rejected by an ad hoc congress of available Clerks, Agents and in some cases the candidates and/or the Returning Officer for the seat.

    In the event that $voter votes for candidate1, and, before placing their ballot in the Ballot Box, things "I meant to vote for candidate2", they can show their ballot to the Polling Clerk and request a replacement. The original ballot will then be recorded and marked as a "spoilt ballot", and accounted for but not counted.

    How many different races would be on that ballot?

    https://ballotpedia.org/North_Carolina_official_sample_ballots,_2020

    This is the only 2020 sample ballot I could find on-line (from Buncombe County). My ballot was similar except for the Congressional District, Courts & County or "non-partisan" races [they're not really NON-partisan, they just don't identify party affiliations on the ballot]. There are 33 separate races to be decided on that ballot.

    I suppose it would be possible to have five different ballots - Federal (3), State (20), District (2), County (3) & Non-Partisan (5) - which would require five separate sets of vote counting equipment.

    Note that this is ONE ballot unique for the voters at this polling place. In Wake County there were over a hundred different ballots. At my polling place there were actually two different printed ballots because we're split between two Congressional Districts (2nd & 4th). Gerrymandered to pack as many Democratic voters into the 4th District as possible.

    Statewide there were 2662 polling places ... do you see where this is going?

    I think you just don't understand the logistics of holding elections in the U.S. Hand counts on the scale required would be far more error prone than what we do now. There were 155,485,078 votes in the 2020 Presidential Election (or at least there were 155,485,078 votes COUNTED). Biden won that vote 81,268,924 to 74,216,154 votes for Trump.

    The PROBLEM with the ballots in Maricopa County is not errors in the vote count. The problem is that Trump LOST and the Republicans in the Arizona State Senate won't accept that. The sole purpose of the AUDIT is to throw out ballots marked for Biden and advance Trumpolini's BIG LIE.

    It's about rigging the next election; stealing that election and stealing the one after that and every election forever from then on.

    516:

    Bitcoin is much better than cash, it's, um, internet-based, and more secure, and stuff...

    https://kizafair.com/man-who-cant-remember-bitcoin-password-says-hes-made-peace-with-220m-loss/

    Man who can’t remember Bitcoin password says he’s ‘made peace’ with $220M loss

    A computer programmer is locked out of a digital wallet containing an estimated $220 million worth of Bitcoin with only two chances left to figure out his password before its contents are encrypted and placed out of reach forever. German-born Stefan Thomas, who now lives in San Francisco, told the New York Times that he was gifted 7,002 Bitcoins by an early cryptocurrency fanatic in 2011 after creating a ‘What is Bitcoin?’ explainer video.

    ... While Thomas has kept hold of Bitcoin in other wallets that have already made him rich, he still joins the many cryptocurrency holders who have lost the chance at adding to their wealth – all because they cannot remember their passwords.

    517:

    p>whitroth @ 484: Sorry, what?

    Somtow Sucharitkul, aka SP Somtow, is an sf author, also a composer and conductor. He used to be on the East Coast back in the eighties (he once (jokingly) offered to buy my Eldest for a wife when she hit 18).

    He is Thai, and the claim was actual. Haven't seen him in forever.

    Next time you see him, ask if he drinks Ouzo? Tell him I want to know.

    518:

    Point arising, for all, but raised by Greg:-

    I agree about the internet insecurity of azure dentition. Unsurprisingly the "gee new shiny" brigade can't see the point as to why, say, being able to lock your car, disable the brakes and open the throttle fully may be a baad thing even if they can play the digital musac collection from their "smart" phone on their car stereo (if the car will even "sync" with the phone today).

    Also people using ear plugs in an area where other people may be using power tools is a genuine health and safety nightmare, much more so than playing a radio on an agreed (even if agreed is same second or third choice for all) station.

    Agreed about DAB (and interwebnet broadcasting generally). Case in point a few days back. I was watching Pointless with sound off and closed caption subtitles, whilst someone else was watching over wireless internet with sound on. I was seeing the result of contestant_n's answer on my screen before I heard them give that answer on the wireless latecast.

    519:

    "but touch-screen controls are better because touch-screen"{/end} and never mind tactile usability whilst driving.

    Touch screen control SHOULD be paired with (mostly) thumb oriented SANELY laid out steering wheel controls. My car has such. I can operate most things I might want to while the car is moving via thumb action without looking. And most of the rest via finger tips extended to the stalks on each side.

    I don't mind touch controls for the rest. Except, yes, at times I do reach for the volume knob (which does not exist) and adjust the cabin temp up or down.

    As to why digital? It frees up huge amounts of frequency space so it can be SOLD to huge companies to extract more money from us for various things. (Did I say that out loud?)

    520:

    whitroth @ 486: So, you're saying no one trades petrochemicals via euros?

    I'm pretty sure Saddam Hussein tried, and you see what that got him.

    521:

    which would require five separate sets of vote counting equipment.

    In Australia the AEC manages to count multiple different ballot papers with the same equipment. Possibly because they don't use mechanically fixed mark-sense gear with single photosensors in fixed locations on the page, instead they just fire everything into a giant page-feed scanner and use OCR-style recognition. I suspect they'd be willing to help the USA election people work out how to obtain that sort of equipment or even run the whole election (they have a commercial arm that runs stuff like union elections)

    It's worth noting that they start the process using shaved monkeys, because those are much easier to program. And for the most part even the more complex ballots are simple 90% of the time (you have two ways to fill it out: a single "1" in a box for your party of choice, or you number every box below the line for all 20 to 200-odd candidates. The latter is tedious to do so not many bother... and it's even more tedious to verify that all numbers are present. That's where the OCR comes in)

    523:

    Also people using ear plugs in an area where other people may be using power tools is a genuine health and safety nightmare,

    How are earplugs worse than earmuffs? Or are you only talking about "hearing protection that also plays music"?

    These days a lot of tradespeople seem to prefer the "also plays music" because they link their phone to them so they can receive or at least detect incoming phone calls. Not everyone on the jobsite can afford a receptionist...

    524:

    There are people on the plots with 'phones or earbuds in .. I prefer to hear the birdsong!

    When I'm in a store room cleaning the mouse turds off the bench and putting the unused oil away, bird songs are not an option no matter what.

    When mowing, I listen to pod casts.

    My earbuds let outside sound in so I can hear someone talking to me even with the mower running. As much as I can without them.

    Over the ear are great in planes. But not for a while.

    As to the birds if the weather is right and I'm not in the middle of something I end the day watching my bird feeder attract them from all over. Typically 10 to 20 species in an hour. While listening to my music via a HomePod speaker.

    While I understand your learyness a bit over BT, at some point we have to get over it. I keep my phone locked down. It doesn't accept random connections unless I tell it to listen. And yes a 0 day might hit me but it's less likely than a wreak on the way to the grocer.

    525:

    "But to get out of the 1929 deflation, nothing worked, even the new deal was not really enough. "

    Actually, the New Deal was working great, as graphs of the time will show. What blew it was that they decided to go into 'austerity' in 1937, which cause damage.

    From 1933 through 1936, there was a great trend.

    526:

    paws4thot @ 494: Well, your original spec just read "a trad radio with no unneeded and unwanted interwebby bits".

    IIRC, he did specifically mention "fucking bloody useless bluetooth".

    527:

    David L @ 500:

    'm highly doubtful that Hilary Clinton would know an email server from a hole in the wall -- at least, before the manufactured scandal over her private server erupted in 2015 (or was it 2016?).

    ...

    I'll call BS on this one.

    She (and Bill) knew exactly what they were doing and why. They didn't want to deal with separate email systems for personal and official email. And they hired "a guy" (very much like what I do) to run it and other such things for them. And the evidence shows they were told it was against the rules and why and they decided to do it anyway. And she and Bill knew about the record keeping rules and that everything was to be preserved. And they flat out didn't do it.

    Again, not that they broke any hard laws. Just some rules. That many Rs wanted to treat as laws.

    It wasn't manufactured. It was wrong. Flat out wrong. She knew it and did it anyway. Basically by giving herself a waiver. Which in itself was wrong.

    Yeah ... I'm going to call bullshit in turn. The scandal was manufactured.

    Politico, 30 Sep 2016 seems to have a fairly balanced take on how the whole thing came about.

    https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton-emails-2016-server-state-department-fbi-214307/

    Politico seems to lean somewhat Republican Lite, so they're not generally seen as pro-Clinton.

    Using her private email server wasn't even against the rules. She was following procedures established during the prior administration. The State Department didn't HAVE any rules for it to be against. The email setup was a completely ad hoc arrangement, making do because the State Department didn't provide official support.

    As noted in the article, the aids who arranged computing & email for Clinton tried to get the State Department to issue her an OFFICIAL secure Blackberry, and the State Department wouldn't do it.

    528:

    485 I read the first link you gave and he's saying the same as me, but with more words. The second link "you've used all your free views"

    486 Crude oil, not petrochemicals. You can trade as much petrochemical as you like in whatever currency is convenient. Trade oil in euros, and as JBS says (paraphrased) "see what happens".

    529:

    paws4thot @ 510: #507 - {marketing idiot} "but touch-screen controls are better because touch-screen"{/end} and never mind tactile usability whilst driving.

    Have I ever mentioned that I absolutely dispise touchscreens. Even though I have to accomodate myself to them in the 21st Century. There are things I do want to do that unfortunately now only come with touchscreens.

    I came to hate them when I was running a mini-photolab. The kiosks where customers could input orders were touchscreens and I spent more time cleaning the crap off of them than I did actually processing orders. They're also inextricably linked forever in my mind with stupid people who can't be bothered to read the labels & stick the wrong memory card in the wrong slot and then break the damn kiosk trying to get them back out when if they'd only said something I could have opened the kiosk, removed the card reader and taken the card out from the inside WITHOUT breaking the damn kiosk!

    Tuck Fouchscreens. They're an abomination.

    Plus, I have FAT FINGERS. I hate texting because I can't always touch the letter I need and don't get me started on auto-INCORRECT!. Fortunately I found a stylus that works with my phone that didn't cost so much it required me to mortgage my soul. (Yes, APPLE, I'm talking about you!)

    I ain't real happy with the way the 21st Century is going and I DO know how to use email.

    PS: Hillary Clinton is less than two years older than I am. I don't know why she's not keyboard savvy. I guess her dad didn't make her take typing in high school.

    530:

    Plus, I have FAT FINGERS.

    Which was the major reason I didn't buy a Toyota back in 2016. Their touch screen was designed for smaller fingers than mine and all against the bezel which tended to push me away from the "buttons". Way too much aiming to make things work. Even when stopped/parked.

    531:

    Greg Tingey @ 513: JBS
    It has a physical tuning capacitor ( Semi-circles (ish) of parallel plates, moving in-&-out of coincidence as the tuning knob is rotated, yes? )
    Um, what's a "pll-chip-tuner"?
    Agree re, volume & other knobs - that is both stupid & dangerous for any in-car device.
    [ See also paws post on this .. ]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop

    Late 70s was when the first all solid state "digital" consumer electronics on a chip were beginning to replace older discrete devices and Phase-Locked Loops were the Buzz Word de jure.

    You could get a FM radio on a single chip (with a few additional chips to amplify the audio). PLL tuning ensured the receiver LOCKED EXACTLY on frequency.

    The problem was the stations at that time still used analog equipment in their transmitters and the signal sometimes drifted a bit. The receiver might be locked to 91.5 MHz, but transmitter might be wandering a bit.

    Great reception when the transmitter was exactly on 91.5, but not so great if it happened to wander off by a few Hz as analog transmitters were wont to do.

    My first MOS (JOB) in the Army was Radio Repairer & Aircraft Electrician.

    532:

    Re: 'One of Trump's early lawyers/associates/mentors, Roy Cohn ...'

    Interesting read - thanks!

    Also interesting that these seasoned reporters understood that DT was a fiction (brand) as well as how he achieved his popularity and winning image among a large population segment yet didn't think he'd become POTUS. Pretty classic case of denial given the recent decades of the GOP's preference for image-over/in-lieu-of-substance in their prospective POTUS.

    533:

    I was somewhat surprised when I got my new phone to discover that a screen with the same diagonal but ~8mm narrower made the keyboard unusably small. It took a couple of weeks for me to adjust, and it still feels cramped. I suspect I "need" to switch to swipe-typing the 80% of the words I use that the phone can autocorrect, and just suck up the pain of switching back to tap-typing the other 20%

    534:

    Almost certainly for the reason I never learned to touch-type (or learn shorthand for that matter): because as a female you would be automatically pigeon-holed as a secretary not whatever job you were actually doing or applying for, As far as I could work out, in the 80s that was the usual reason for employing a female,

    Even now I don't touch-type; in fact, because I have a tendency to RSI, it's far better for me not to.

    536:

    Another perspective on bitcoin, which I am presenting without either comment or endorsement:

    https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-privilege

    537:

    Pretty classic case of denial given the recent decades of the GOP's preference for image-over/in-lieu-of-substance in their prospective POTUS. 2016 was a very close US presidential election, won in the Electoral College by small margins in a few battleground states, with a large popular vote loss. Though it remains an unpopular opinion, the election was lost in the last few months with a confluence of ops, some rather well-timed for maximum political damage, that collectively dominated near-election news cycles and pushed Trump over the top. The Comey letter, the Podesta emails/wikileaks frequent dumps, the US press's focus on "Her Emails" (not just RW propaganda media) while ignoring abundant evidence that Trump was amoral scum, the earlier DNC leaks (still irritated about that) and more. These weren't even collectively orchestrated, at least not by those directly involved. His defeat in 2020 took 4 years (with global heating prospects made much worse) and was very expensive.

    538:

    Those are both interesting pieces. Thank you. It's sad that the populations of so many countries have to deal with the combination of thoroughly corrupt kleptocratic leadership and an unstable currency/very high inflation rates.

    539:

    The "her emails" thing has become something of a litmus test.

    Indeed. If someone cares deeply about Hillary Clinton's email server but not Colin Powell's private email server, the RNC email server (over 5 million emails "lost" as soon as Republican VIPs started getting investigated), or Ivanka Trump using private email for government business (that's 'different') then we all know they don't give a rat's ass about emails and just hate Clinton.

    540:

    JBS Sometimes, I have "fun" with touchscreens, as about 20-35% of the time, they refuse to work when I try to use them - either my hands are too dry or my capacitance is low, or something grrr .... My fingers are decidedly not fat, but one reason I have my nice expensive phone is that it has a KEYBOARD, yay! - later Oh, that's what it's supposed to mean - OK, got you.

    David L Well there's a dubious "explanation" for that .. though I'm not sure it's acceptable on this forum cough To do with "Nips" having little tiny fingers, oops - yes it's racist, but I do wonder, sometimes about some Japanese kit being made for use by "others"? [ Mods - delete this section if unacceptable? ]

    MaddE There's a very interesting book on that called "Never Learn to Type" by Margaret Anstee. Wiki article on her here Here

    541:

    I love the idea that poorer countries can afford to burn huge amounts of coal in order to bypass broken currency exchange systems. What could possibly go wrong with a system that needs $US40 worth of electricity to process a single transaction?

    Rough numbers for BitCoin, since that's what the article talked about: ~200TWh/year to support 300k transactions a day or ~100M a year. Or 40MWh per transaction.

    I keep thinking... have I fucked up the maths? That can't be right. But then I think... nope, 200TWh/year is 3.8GWh every 10 minutes, which gets you 10 BitCoin and thus about $100,000. Apparently about 2800 transactions per block so about $30 worth of electricity each.

    Someone please tell me how I have fucked up these numbers.

    542:

    I think there's a difference between mining a bitcoin and performing a transaction with it, and at that point my expertise ends. Maybe someone who knows the territory better than I do can help us here.

    543:

    Oh, there is. It's just that transactions are currently a side-effect of mining. But mining has to stop when they run out of coins, and transactions will apparently keep going. So at that point those using it for transactions will have to come up with the cash to make mining continue.

    In the meantime it's just a tiny question of whether poor countries really want to commit to making the climate catastrophe worse.

    544:

    I keep thinking... have I fucked up the maths?

    I think it might be the other way around. The block reward is currently 6.25 BTC (ignoring transaction fees), so about $240,000 per block at present (used to be considerably higher, like $350,000 last month). A block contains around 2,000 transactions, so yes, that is (depending on the current price) around $120 to $175 reward per transaction. So that could easily pay for $30 electricity. (Bitcoin transactions vary in size depending on complexity).

    The good news is that this is temporary (for a suitably small value of "temporary"); the block reward halves roughly every 4 years (next one due in 2024), so as long as the Bitcoin price doesn't double more than once every 4 years it won't suck up the entire planetary electricity and silicon supply. The idea is that mining will come to depend on transaction fees rather than block rewards. However there are serious questions about the stability of that scheme.

    I love the idea that poorer countries can afford to burn huge amounts of coal in order to bypass broken currency exchange systems.

    Just for a change, its not the poor countries burning the coal, or even paying for it. From an economic point of view the block rewards are currently "inflating" bitcoin at 1.75% per year, but that is swamped by the increase in "market capitalisation" (for want of a better term) of all bitcoins in existence. So the people paying for this are the people holding bitcoin, in the form of slighlty lower values than it would otherwise have. Though I agree with you about the unwisdom of burning coal.

    Mining is a big bet on the future bitcoin price; you have to buy the hardware, rent or buy space, hire security and secure an electricity supply. Much of this has to be committed up front in the hope of making a net profit in a year or three. If the bitcoin price goes down then miners take a loss, just like speculative buyers.

    I'm betting the real money is made by the people selling shovels to the miners.

    545:

    The big benefits of digital broadcasting accrue to the transmitter operators, not the receivers.

    The cherry for you is more channels - but you've already said that's not a bonus - and consistent quality (at whatever the broadcaster has decided is "acceptable"), even if conditions are temporarily poor (but you can get the same effect with a good aerial setup for analogue).

    However, the broadcaster wins massively; depending on the multiplex settings, DVB-T's minimum acceptable signal level is anything from 3 dB to 31 dB lower than PAL-I, and DAB's minimum acceptable signal is 12 dB less than FM mono, 22 dB less than FM stereo.

    A 3 dB reduction in required signal level halves the power required for a given coverage area; a 12 dB reduction (FM mono -> DAB) is 4 halvings, or 1/16th the power required. A 10 dB reduction is roughly 1/10th the power need, so the 22 dB reduction from FM stereo to DAB means that the broadcaster needs to use under 1/100th the power output to get the same coverage area for DAB as they did for FM stereo - or they can go for 1/10th the power and get better coverage than FM mono allowed.

    For TV, the UK chose settings that are around 9 dB advantage over PAL-I; that means that they can use 1/8th the power of an analogue transmitter and get the same coverage area. If we'd really wanted to, we could have gone for fewer channels of TV, but 1/1000th the transmitter power; that would have been a harder sell to the public, though.

    546: 515 - Just one, but including "vanity candidates" (anyone who is likely to poll under 1000 votes from an electorate of typically around 700000) you may have as many as 40 candidates.

    This doesn't stop us having multiple polls on a single election day, using multiple ballot boxes and different coloured ballots.

    A bit like if the EU president were to be directly elected by the 447 million population. We can understand large numbers. What we don't understand is why "Second Assistant Dogcatcher of Redneck County" is an elected office!

    523 - Did I mention ear muffs? I don't think so!! I've seen near accidents where idiot using earbuds or similar has wandered oblivious into the path of a vehicle so I know they can reduce situational awareness. 526 - I was using a more parliamentary restatement of the spec. 529 - You're preaching to the choir here, with the note that this member actually knows a bit about the Human Factors stuff, and I've yet to meet a marketing idiot who does. 540 Para 1 - Similarly. 545 - And I still need a signal booster to receive a transmission from the nearest mast (which I have line of sight too) why? Because the broadcaster has turned down the transmit power and hoped I don't notice?
    547:

    > people using ear plugs in an area where other people may be using power tools Did I mention ear muffs?

    Sorry, my bad, I just assumed that power tools and hearing protection go together. But you're right, people near power tools without hearing protection is a health and safety nightmare.

    548:

    its not the poor countries burning the coal

    No, they're relying on other people doing that for them.

    549:

    Exactly that. My local TV transmission site went from 500 kW for BBC, 250 kW for ITV + C4 to 100 kW for BBC, and 50 kW for others.

    That should result in slightly better coverage (9dB coding gain from the PAL-I to DVB-T move, 7dB power reduction, for 2dB advantage to DVB-T) , a massive electricity saving for the broadcasters (1/5th the needed power), and no need for changes to your antenna setup.

    If you were already marginal for PAL-I (analogue) reception, and needed a signal booster, and your local transmitter had similar changes made, you'd probably still need the booster - 2 dB improvement is not enough if you previously needed 6 dB of amplification to get decent picture.

    550:

    b-tooth is an semi-internet-connected thingie that "allows" you to control various devices within a limited area ( like your home ) & get information back ...

    No. Bluetooth is a short-range digital radio link with no necessity for any kind of internettery, and is used as such for headphones, speakers and the like. The network topology in that case is just something like (sound source) - Bluetooth - (speaker). No internet at all.

    Granted, Buetooth is often the last link in IoT systems which are horribly insecure, but that's because their network topology looks something like this (much simplified): phone app - internet - server - internet - firewall - your LAN - device controller - bluetooth - IoT device.

    The problem is not Bluetooth but the bit that goes internet - server - internet, where the data path may be unencrypted, the server is at best in an unknown jurisdiction and at worst actively malicious.

    (A less obvious problem is that the device controller is probably a generic Linux box with an unnecessary and unsecured wifi server still running, so a drive-by attacker can get into your LAN that way.)

    DAB is LATE - discernibly several seconds late in transmission.

    That's terrible. Just think what you could have done with all those wasted seconds...

    551:

    Actually the time delay is legitimately annoying, as the BBC do broadcast a time signal that used to be quite useful for manually synchronising mechanical clocks, watches and other non networked devices. With the time delay they may as well not bother.

    I agree it's not the end of the world though.

    552:

    Clocks that take their time from the MSF transmitter (which is now in Cumbria not Rugby) are widely available. Any GPS receiver can give you the time accurate to the microsecond. And of course there is always a computer that uses the Network Time Protocol, which is generally accurate to a few milliseconds.

    553:

    Richard H DAB being late is fuck all use for time checks, isn't it? Or anything that involves the same ...

    Paul Thanks for that, now I need to find the tweak on my phone that connects to that & gives seconds, as well as minutes ...

    554:

    That's all fine, but radio stations using DAB should still stop pretending to broadcast a time signal.

    555:

    And I still need a signal booster to receive a transmission from the nearest mast (which I have line of sight too)

    You may be in the mast's "shadow", being too close to it. The antennas up on the mast are arranged to direct most of their radio energy outwards to cover the areas far from the mast's location, they're typically not radiating omnidirectionally in a 360-degree sphere as that would be a waste of radio energy. One fix is to put your antenna on a higher mast -- that worked for us to get better TV reception at home many years ago.

    Your receiver might be buggered, of course. Someone I knew long time back had problems with his 80-metre receiver, stringing more and more antenna wire in his back garden to try and get decent reception of distant stations. The local ham club (of which I was a member at the time) visited and checked his setup with someone else's (modern) receiver and found it good. Some investigation of his ageing receiver revealed the RF pre-amplifier valve was low-emission and needed replacement, after that was done he was able to pick up stations from around the world pretty much.

    556:

    I would just like to note that one of the features of this here Apple Watch that I am wearing is to tell the time. Shockingly, Apple did an embrace-and-extend on NTP so that while the Watch is either on 3G (mine doesn't have 3G) or wifi/bluetooth to an iPhone (mine does that), it's accurate to within 50ms; it gets its time signal from the global GPS signal via Apple's own private NTP system, with connection latency corrections factored in.

    A twentieth of a second -- the maximum clock drift Apple will admit to -- is a little less than the image refresh latency of the human eyeball; if you're watching the second hand, you can't actually notice an interval that short.

    So if you're going to complain about digital time signals, maybe find something more sensible than a buffering delay in a live audio streaming system (that merely echoes a legacy analog time signal that nobody really serious about timekeeping uses any more) to complain about ...

    557:

    "the MSF transmitter (which is now in Cumbria not Rugby)"

    ...so time in the north is now roughly a millisecond earlier than it used to be, and time in the south roughly a millisecond later. And some pairs of events in the affected area now happen the other way round. There is bound to be some arcane tale of some little-known but horribly expensive and critical system that was buggered by that point in an amusing way...

    558:

    It would be nice to believe that such a failure couldn't happen, because the transmit specification for MSF60 only promises accuracy to ± 1 millisecond anyway, and it takes hundreds of milliseconds between ticks to allow you to resynchronise with the MSF signal.

    Anyone engineering a system that depends on that sort of accuracy from a time source that's not guaranteed to meet the accuracy they're after is incompetent to begin with. Unfortunately, incompetence seems to make money :-(

    559:

    I don't really care about the DAB thing TBH, just wish the BBC would cut that bit out of their stream as forcing people to use something reliable would be better.

    Personally I don't use watches, smart or otherwise as I regularly engage in activities likely to break wrist mounted hardware and deglove hands. I find a phone adequate in practice.

    560:

    Well there's a dubious "explanation" for that .. though I'm not sure it's acceptable on this forum cough ... To do with "N*" having little tiny fingers, oops - yes it's racist, but I do wonder, sometimes about some Japanese kit being made for use by "others"?

    Let me expand. I rented cars once a month or so for 5 years in the early 00's. I took whatever the deal was form Enterprise at the time. Unlimited mileage and many weekend deals. Mostly this was to make a trip to my mother in laws empty townhouse to make sure it was OK and take care of any issues. 250 miles each way plus miles around the DC area.

    That was background for I got to drive all kinds of small to mid sized (with a few big ones) cars for a while. So I got to know what I like and didn't like about various brands. Toyota's 5" or so display had a 1cm or higher bezel around the edge of the screen. And all on screen buttons were against the edge. Now the buttons were 1-1.5cm square. But in a moving car watching the road you were as likely to bump the bezel and thus miss the "spot" as not.

    This dash annoyed me more than any other dash except a JMC Jimmy mini-SUV with a 5x10 grid of all silver square adjacent buttons about 1.5cm square. And the only way to tell them apart was to read the lettering on them that was about 2mm tall. Whoever came up with and/or approve that thing should have been shot.

    Anyway when I was looking at new cars in the summer of 2016 and saw that Toyota still had that dash and wanted $5K more than Honda for a less "good" car, I said no thanks. No matter that the Toyota at the time was better rated. I'm very happy with my Honda Civic Touring. Touring is the key.

    "N*" Seriously? Good grief.

    561:

    The power output of the repeater for the local area actually went up. Doing a quick refreshing search, the fucking internet seems to have erased the history of analogue TV now, but when it wasn't history, the output power was given as 200W, which I remember quite distinctly because it was so remarkably low. They got away with it because the transmitter is up on a big hill and its coverage area is mostly a big flat plain at rather lower altitude, so pretty well everywhere had a rather good line of sight to it.

    What it is now is difficult to find quoted in a way that doesn't potentially mean two quite different things, and it also seems to have spent the last few years changing every time the chief engineer scratched his arse, but even the lowest possible interpretation of the ambiguous statements puts the current power as 400W, and the other obvious interpretation works out as 2kW, so +3dB or +10dB depending how you read it. (Other figures implying even larger increases are also around.)

    I suspect this is because most of the receivers it serves are concentrated in one lump at the edge of the coverage area, so going digital brought a hundred thousand people into conflict with the crappy degradation properties of a digital signal as compared with an analogue one, and there would have been too much moaning in one place to just ignore it like they usually do.

    For, after all, this "digital needs less power" thing is a fucking con really. The evidence is all over the rooftops, not just round here but all over the country. Even in good signal areas lots of people have had to replace their originally quite small UHF aerials with massive great high-gain arrays to get the signal level at the receiver back up to something like the level it always used to be. Others have just given up and decided to use satellite transmissions or some other alternative. And no doubt plenty of them initially tried to get away with the cheaper and easier alternative of buying a head amp from Homebase, only to find it made very little difference.

    It's quite obvious from the cavalier dismissal of this problem by those responsible for creating it that what planning was done was carried out by rich bastards who only ever watch TV via a high quality aerial installation, don't even realise how many people relied on a crappy little "indoor" aerial that had to be propped up at a very particular angle to catch enough signal, and wouldn't care about these plebs if they did realise. The number of people with poor reception conditions must have been vastly underestimated because with an analogue signal they could still get a watchable, if a bit noisy, picture, and so didn't feel much need to complain about it; but a digital signal in similar conditions gives a thoroughly useless result. And the want of caring had already been demonstrated by the way it took them so long to bother to even try to do anything about the poor results of the crappy bodge used to provide Channel 5 that it ended up being overtaken by digital anyway.

    562:

    Back when Japanese cars consisted of comparatively reliable mechanical parts wrapped in a bodyshell of paper-thin super-quick-dissolving steel, it was often said that Japanese cars were cramped inside because they were designed for small Japanese people. It never seemed to occur to anyone that they were cramped inside simply because they were small cars, in the same way that non-Japanese cars of similar size were also cramped. Even though the humorous archetype of car/driver size mismatch was a giant bruiser type compressed into a Mini, which of course was as British as they come.

    563:

    That's all fine, but radio stations using DAB should still stop pretending to broadcast a time signal.

    But how many devices in homes of old farts like me would start displaying an error message or a blinking red light?

    564:

    Anyone engineering a system that depends on that sort of accuracy from a time source that's not guaranteed to meet the accuracy they're after is incompetent to begin with. Unfortunately, incompetence seems to make money :-(

    Have you never been in a meeting like this.

    Dev: Here's what we have with the budget. MM:SS.s

    Marketing: Our competition has MM:SS.sss so make ours show the same.

    Dev: Those digit would be meaningless given our design.

    Marketing: I don't care. "Make it so".

    565:

    that they were cramped inside simply because they were small cars,

    A friend bought a Nissan (Datson) new in 1977 or 1978. I doubt the engine could have pushed anything bigger. Tin car body indeed.

    But it was cheap. And a much better car than his 15 year old VW Beetle that his car pool mates refused to ever get in again after the fuel line broke and was spurting gas on top of the engine.

    566:

    Even in good signal areas lots of people have had to replace their originally quite small UHF aerials with massive great high-gain arrays to get the signal level at the receiver back up to something like the level it always used to be.

    In the US the switch to digital meant that the VHF frequencies went away. So most people with big long VHF antennas go to switch to smaller UHF antennas.

    The issue with the move from VHF to UHF here was that many signals that went through walls, trees, and such no longer do.

    As to coverage area. Where I grew up was relatively flat. TV stations had coverage areas up to 100 miles from the antennas.

    567:

    And he can't copy the wallet, and try his passwords against the copy? Or restore the wallet from backup?

    568:

    About six years ago, I had the stereo in my minivan replaced - the original was stopping somewhere between track 0 and track 4 on CDs, esp. filk, and would tell me it couldn't read it.

    So I got a Pioneer. Which I now loathe. The idiots - there's a large knob, controls volume... but it will not turn it off (that's a tiny button, and who would want to turn it off?) Pushing in the large knob, however, gets you the settings menu.

    Try and do this while driving.

    VERY poorly designed set of controls. Oh, and the volume needs multiple rotations to go from, say, upper 20's down to say, 10 (where you can talk).

    569:

    paws4thot @ 546: #515 - Just one, but including "vanity candidates" (anyone who is likely to poll under 1_000 votes from an electorate of typically around 700_000) you may have as many as 40 candidates.
    This doesn't stop us having multiple polls on a single election day, using multiple ballot boxes and different coloured ballots.

    A bit like if the EU president were to be directly elected by the 447 million population. We can understand large numbers. What we don't understand is why "Second Assistant Dogcatcher of Redneck County" is an elected office!

    That one's easy. Prior to the American Revolution the "Second Assistant Dogcatcher ..." was an official appointed by the King. If there was a conflict between the needs of the colonists and the kings interests who did he serve?

    After the Revolution we made all those offices elective positions so they would (in theory) be held accountable to "the people".

    It worked better in an agrarian society where it took days and days to travel even to the state capital (much less to Philadelphia or New York City) and local problems couldn't wait, but inertia ...

    570:

    So, you say that no one in Europe, or eastern Europe, or Russia, trades using euros?

    571:

    Agreed - I hate touch screens. When I was working, and people went to put their fingers on my non-touch monitor to point to something, I noted that the world is divided into two kinds of people: those that put their fingerprints all over my monitor, and those that break the fingers of people that do that.

    And they're unsanitary. And... they suck. I have a Samsung A Tab, just bought some months ago... and at least 33% of the time, it does not recognize my fingers.

    Oh, and I do NOT want a stylus with a soft rubber tip... oh, I see, they don't all work with all screens, you have to get one made just for yours.

    Right.

    In my upcoming book, and in one I'm working on, there's AR... and a keyboard? A virtual REAL keyboard, not something that's squeezed onto a tiny physical screen, that may or may not recognize my fingers, and that is only suitable for someone who wears a ring size of, say, 3, instead of 5 or 7....

    572:

    All this discussion of lower transmitter power, and no one's realized what this means: the aliens looking for us, who were homing in on radio signals from 750,000W transmitters, are losing the signal as they get close....

    573:

    "Second Assistant Dogcatcher"

    That very position is mentioned during the election episode in First Lensman. I always thought it was a joke. I thought that for a very long time. I think it is only since reading the comments on Charlie's blog that I realised it isn't.

    574:

    who were homing in on radio signals from 750,000W transmitters,

    Well then they might wind up in Mexico. Who allowed (with a wink and a nod) those crazy numbers so they could cover the US from south of the border. But those days are long gone.

    Most times those wattage number are ERP. Effective radiated power. Which is a calculated number as if the power was going of from a point source or single vertical pole. (I forget which.) The real antenna is tuned to send the signal out in a flat dish pattern so very little leaves the planet.

    575:

    Depends on how fast they're moving of course, inverse square law and that...

    576:

    Thankfully not. I've been in a similar meeting, but it's ended with convincing marketing that we can tell the customer that we use MM:SS.s instead of MM:SS.sss because unlike $competitor, we spent the engineering budget on something useful, instead of .sss that you can't use.

    577:

    "(VW)...the fuel line broke and was spurting gas on top of the engine."

    Ah, memories... I had that happen once. I saw the fuel gauge dropping unreasonably fast but I didn't realise why until there was so much petrol flying around loose inside the engine compartment that drops of it started blowing out the cracks round the sides and splattering on the windscreen, by which time about 3 gallons had got loose. So I opened the lid to have a look and the cloud of vapour absolutely knocked me back. There were puddles of petrol in the depressions between the inlet manifold runners and dripping over the exhaust, and more puddles anywhere else there was a dip for them to be in.

    So I figured that if it hadn't gone up in the 10 miles or so since I first noticed the fuel gauge dropping, it wasn't going to go up in the last quarter of a mile before I got home; closed the lid, carried on, got home fine and replaced the split tube.

    The tube in question was part of the high pressure side of a fuel injection system. Which was made by Bosch. Obviously this kind of failure must be an undisclosed design feature specific to German car components for the export market, intended to incinerate foreign drivers.

    (Next post) VHF/UHF: we had done that some time before, along with BBC2, 625 lines and colour coming in. VHF transmissions were all 405 line monochrome; UHF was required both to get BBC2 and to get colour. At the time most people had monochrome TVs with dual-band tuners, and a fantastic array of aerials on the roof - Band I for BBC1, Band II for VHF FM radio, Band III for ITV, and UHF for BBC2. The Band II aerials gradually disappeared as the sensitivity of FM receivers improved, and the VHF TV ones became redundant when people eventually got a colour TV, so by the time digital came in everyone was already down to just the one UHF aerial, which had been adequate for years and was supposed to still be adequate for digital... except it wasn't. So the replacement aerial installer folks had a field day, both with installing higher gain aerials and with installing aerials with slightly different sized elements to cope with the digital transmission being in a different part of the UHF TV band from the analogue one. You now see a lot more elaborate high gain setups around than you used to, and also a lot more cheap-arsed flimsy replacements which fail under the weight of a wood pigeon.

    578:

    Greg @ 553: Thanks for that, now I need to find the tweak on my phone that connects to [NTP] & gives seconds, as well as minutes ...

    Android phones by default use NITZ (the cellphone equivalent of NTP), which should be equally accurate as long as your cellphone company's network people are paying attention and making sure that their NITZ clock is synchronised properly with an external time source. I think Android tablets use NTP when they have network access. Either way you get this using the "Use network time" setting in the time & date settings. (NITZ also sets the timezone, which is handy when travelling internationally).

    A quick look in the Google Store found a number of clock apps which would display seconds.

    579:

    David L Very near to me is a very well-known concert & Assembly hall - which used to take a lot of very high-class recording events, including BBC 3rd programme etc .... Some time about 1958, there was one of the first "Western" tours of a high-profile Japanese Orchestra ... at an interval/break, some of the members wandered out for the usual fag ( It WAS 1958... ) comments about the place being full of, yes, well, "Nips" abounded - but: ONE: It was 63 years ago & TWO: The formal translation of the title of Japan was, "The Empire of Nippon" & THREE: Wasn't too long after the end of WWII & many people still remembered - think 13th Army?

    History, eh? Can't get away from it. Said hall still has its superb acoustic, but is not used for recordings, much, now. External road traffic & aircraft noise have screwed that, more's the pity.

    Ah yes, early VW's .. My father actually drove several ORIGINAL VW's ( As in made before 3/9/1939 ) during his time in CivMilGov ... his comments were not for a family magazine. The handling was atrocious. OTOH, he "lurved" driving one of these

    580:

    I suppose the word does have the minor advantage of rhyming with "ships". But it can't be much fun.

    "ORIGINAL VW's ... The handling was atrocious."

    People do seem to have had a bit of a blind spot about hanging big lumps of mass out behind the rear axle. The VW design was copied from Tatra, who went on to do it with a V8... I think they still do. Then there was the post-WW1 Bristol designed by an aero engine company who were getting bored without the war demand (not to be confused with the later Bristol BMW copy and its successors) and decided to do a car to pass the time... with a 3-cylinder radial mounted with the crankshaft vertical above the rear axle. And then wondered why it kept falling over going round corners. I once thought that was a one-off aberration, but it turns out that other people came up with the same daft idea and not all of them had the sense to avoid putting it into production.

    581:

    VERY poorly designed set of controls. Oh, and the volume needs multiple rotations to go from, say, upper 20's down to say, 10 (where you can talk).

    Agree completely. Awful interface. I thought Pioneer would be a safe choice, but ...

    The language choices are English, Turkish, and Russian. Perhaps one more? Fun if you get stuck in Turkish and have to try to navigate your way out of the menu system.

    582:

    I have been taking some new EVs for test drives in recent weeks, as we consider scrapping the wreck. Having made a public and serious commitment to all future vehicles being EVs, I intend to follow through.

    Thus far only two come close to actually being shaped to fit our family. (I am 6'4" 280lbs, eldest is 6'2" and gaining, his brother is close behind). Both of them have touch screen displays, which actually don't bother me much. It is always a case of getting 'used to' where the buttons are.

    What does bother me are windshield and display designs that assume a maximum 5'10" driver. Having to duck my head any time I want to see the speed is not a good design.

    My current laptop is a Dell with a touchscreen, said feature being a solution for a problem that nobody ever had. At no point to I want to touch my screen, much the opposite. I bought it as the deeply discounted sale item it is, but I suspect I'll never buy another Dell.

    583: 547 - You appear to be using a different definition of "power tool" to me, and, indeed a different meaning of "ear muff". 549 - HUH!!? Higher gain normally means less signal. 555 - My aerial is in the loft; the transmitter base is 137m AMSL, so say 130m above the aerial. 564 - I see your point. I get data at work that is generated at 20Hz, but customers want it time tagged to the millisecond. 573 - Yes, I know. I liked the idea in the book, and did some research.
    584:

    And he can't copy the wallet, and try his passwords against the copy? Or restore the wallet from backup?

    Very likely he has some kind of physical "wallet" that is a little crypto engine with a USB interface, rather than actually having any bitcoins of his own. Much as you might have, say, an anonymous Swiss bank account that can only be accessed using a magic ID token they gave you. Lose the token and you no longer have a Swiss bank account.

    585:

    Reminds me of '78, I think it would have been. A buddy stopped by one night, on his way home. His father and he had rebuilt the beetle engine. Thing won't start... and we look in, and it's spitting gas. Not to worry, I went into the apt, got a couple of hose clamps, problem solve.

    Hose was loose.

    586:

    Driving one of them... to which, there is only one reasonable response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qev-i9-VKlY

    587:

    A physical one would be best. I've read, years ago, about having it running, freezing it (I can't remember if they used dry ice or LN^2), and copying memory. Then they could load, try to crack it, reload, until they did.

    588:

    Re: 'But the media is still largely in denial about how much of an effect it had.' (quote from last line of first linked article)

    Agree! Journalism and politics have been linked in a downward spiral for a while now chasing eyeballs via screaming headlines/slogans.

    You'd think that they'd realize by now -- 25+ years since the interweb became an office/home commonplace fixture with people increasingly bombarded with data -- that maybe some folks (esp. those working ever longer hours) might not have time for more than a scan of the news headlines.

    Additionally - given that PowerPoint became a thing around the same time as the interweb in most corporate offices and PPT basically forced everyone to communicate in headlines - I'd say that the media have zero excuse for so utterly and completely screwing up/misusing their 'headlines'. They are probably the only industry that can't plead ignorance re: consequences of their actions/inactions about this because they ARE the communications and people professionals.

    589:

    My approach has always been that if I don't have the private key they're not my bitcoins. I've rented coins before, but only ones I can afford to lose.

    My sympathy for people who lose large amounts of money when crypto scams trigger is very limited. Especially the "exchange hacks"... people, you gave large amounts of money to criminals on the promise that you would get even more money back.

    The worst part is that for non-criminal arseholes the only way to deal in cryptocurrency is by associating with criminals. I kind of feel a bit sorry for amoral speculators and gamblers who just want profit but to get it have to associate with money launderers and drug dealers. Mostly because I have a mortgage and am in the same position... there are very few banking options in Australia for people who try to avoid criminals.

    590:

    Specifically, if some widget has the private key but I don't... that's like burying cash in the back yard of a rented house. Why would I do that when I can just add the private key to my big list of important passwords, or these days shove it in my password manager.

    The whole point of those widgets is that they trade the need to secure one string of random characters for the need to secure a different string of random characters. The latter is shorter, sure, but it adds a major vulnerability (look up 'crypto wallet failed'), and it's not as though I don't have a whole pile of other important secrets to protect as well.

    Offline storage is quite possible - I have a sheet of stainless steel and a set of letter punches that has some really important stuff on it. Plus a will, with a password in that. Said password unlocks a file with a subset of details in it. There's no need to have stuff like my banking passwords there, once I'm dead the executor gains access to that stuff automatically.

    591:

    Re: Cars & tech

    Since folks are talking about car tech issues ...

    Just saw a Consumer Reports alert about MB recalling some cars and SUVs due to a backup camera problem. Apparently when some of these vehicles are put into reverse, the screen (camera) goes blank.

    'Owners who have a “Mercedes Me” subscription, which provides enhanced access to systems and features via a smartphone app, will be able to have the software update performed via an over-the-air (OTA) update.' ... Everyone else has to go to the dealership.

    592:

    Wait, you give them real money, and they promise they'll give you back more?

    Do these folks live in somewhere, say, like Nigeria?

    593:

    In many ways the various {whatever}trading things all work exactly as you describe.

    I believe there are even "cryptocurrency exchanges" and similar scams listed on various sharemarkets around the world. Mind you Deutsche Bank and other money launderers are also listed on sharemarkets so it's not as though blatant and persistent criminality is a barrier to listing or staying listed.

    We've discussed at length in this blog the problems with different "everything grows, forever" scams and in some ways cryptocurrency just makes the problems with the money version more obvious. Yes, really, these tokens have no inherent value and we can create infinitely many of them at almost no cost... but we choose not to do that. Trust us, this "coin" stuff is awesome and you want more of it. At least with government-issued money you can pay taxes, so it's sort of not entirely arbitrary.

    594:

    "And he can't copy the wallet, and try his passwords against the copy? Or restore the wallet from backup?"

    AIUI, and I make no claim to being any kind of expert on the topic, what he needs to decrypt, and has lost the password to, is out there on the blockchain rather than in his possession, and it's the blockchain that counts the attempts. To get a private copy for multiple attempts he would need to copy far more of the blockchain than is remotely practical, possibly all of it.

    There are people around who know more about it than I ever will, so I am open to correction by anyone who knows what the real issue is.

    JHomes.

    595:

    About that guy who can't find the password for his bitcoins:

    There is a saying in the bitcoin world "Be your own bank". The unspoken corollary is that you need to be your own bank security.

    Earlier I explained about public key cryptography. The secret keys you need to access your bitcoins are strings of long numbers, so they have to be stored somewhere. That "somewhere" is the wallet.

    The original bitcoin wallet simply stored these in a file on your computer with optional encryption. Every time you generated a new address (meaning, every time you spent some bitcoins) the secret key got added to the wallet.

    Modern wallets do something cleverer; they start with a single big random number (hundreds of digits) called the "seed". They then generate a sequence of random numbers by adding 1, 2, 3... to this seed and then hashing the results. This produces a sequence of random numbers that can only be reproduced if you have the seed. Call these numbers R1, R2, R3... You can also repeat the trick by taking one of these new values and repeating the same process. So take R2 and get R2.1, R2.2, R2.3.... Each of these random numbers can be converted into a bitcoin address with a corresponding secret key, but knowing one of these addresses doesn't tell you anything about rest. So you can carry on generating an unlimited stream of bitcoin addresses from one seed, so you can regenerate an entire wallet just from the single seed value.

    This means that the seed is the equivalent to the keys to your private bank vault.

    Now think about security. The instant that bitcoins acquired any monetary value malware appeared that hunted for bitcoin wallets and phoned home with the keys. OK, so you encrypt your wallet, but to spend the coins you need to decrypt the wallet and have some software run computations with the secret keys. At that point the malware swoops in and steals the keys.

    You can't trust your home PC with your bitcoins.

    So you need a separate computer that does nothing except store your bitcoin wallet. Some people have repurposed old laptops, but the simplest and most user-friendly method is to have a tiny embedded computer that stores the seed, does the digital signing work and connects to your PC by USB. There are now a bunch of products along these lines. You have to interact with it via your PC, but they have built-in screens and buttons to confirm what you are doing in a way that doesn't involve trusting your PC. So your PC can be riddled with malware, but the malware can't touch your bitcoins.

    Two problems: 1) What if it breaks? 2) What if it gets stolen?

    If it breaks, you need to buy a replacement and get the seed value back into it. So when you set up the wallet you write down the seed (usually as a long list of code words) and keep that some place safe. You can buy a new wallet, enter the seed words, and presto, your bitcoins reappear.

    To stop a thief from accessing your wallet you set a PIN. The device typically gives you a few tries and then locks up, or starts to take exponentially longer before letting you try again.

    When I first read this story I assumed that this guy had one of these gizmos and had neglected to write down the seed. However it turns out he hasn't done that. He has managed to do something completely different; he stored his wallet file on an encrypted USB thumb drive. This works exactly the same as any other USB drive, except that it encrypts the contents and only gives you 10 tries to enter the PIN to unlock it. In the intervening years he just forgot the PIN he used. Presumably hardware bitcoin wallets weren't available back then, or the bitcoins just weren't valuable enough to bother with one.

    596:

    So, in Para5, I could take, say, R2.2 and generate R2.2.1, R2.2.2 etc yes?

    597:

    Gain and signal are separate.

    Signal strength is usually measured as a voltage at the receiver input (equivalent to power, since the receiver input has a known impedance).

    Gain is a ratio between two power levels, and is used to describe how one power level is better than another.

    Coding gain is a way of expressing the idea that the required signal strength for a given signal quality is different in different modulation systems; a 9dB coding gain for DVB-T over PAL-I means that DVB-T can decode to an acceptable quality with 9dB less signal strength that PAL-I needs.

    And then we have a 7dB power level reduction, which eliminates all but 2dB of the coding gain - so overall, you can get away with a signal that's 2dB weaker than for acceptable PAL-I (noting, as Pigeon said, that lots of people were fine with "unacceptable" PAL-I), but not less.

    Amplification provides gain, and is commonly used where the signal at the receiver is too weak to be usable - it adds noise as well. A better aerial also provides gain.

    598:

    When I am world dictator

    ... I will update automotive safety certification rules to outlaw touchscreens and visual entertainment (games, media, texts) within the driver's field of vision. Exception for instrument displays, vehicle status, and navigation, but the displays should be mounted within the driver's peripheral field of vision assuming they've got both eyes on the road ahead and their field of vision is relatively narrow.

    All controls must provide haptic feedback or a voice/speech interface.

    This is a safety concern: I don't like taking my eyes off the road when driving, and having to look down at a display -- anything more than a glance at the speedometer, in a known position with an expected/known range of parameters to read -- is downright dangerous. Using a touchscreen for everything, even the air conditioning, is actively distracting.

    Why speech?

    Well, talking on a hands-free phone or talking to a passenger also degrades attentiveness to road conditions, but not as much as peering down and re-focusing on a near-field screen, interpreting a complex graphical interface, and trying to poke at small points on a vibrating screen in a moving vehicle. So I'll grant an exception for stuff like "hey siri, play some music" or "read that text message to me" or "send a reply: I'm driving, will reply later".

    599:

    #555 - My aerial is in the loft;

    Quick check -- are you one of the Galts Gulch types that have fitted solar panels on your roof recently? Depending on the orientation of the panels and the broadcast mast that would reduce the ability of a tiddly little loft antenna to pick up any kind of broadcast signal even further.

    An external antenna is always going to be a lot better than an internal antenna. Assuming you're getting any kind of a signal at all in the loft with your bent coathanger then even a jobber 9-element Yagi pointed vaguely in the direction of the transmitter mast will boost your S/N ratio substantially.

    600:

    Absolutely, with one minor exception: "So I'll grant an exception for stuff like "hey siri, play some music" or "read that text message to me" or "send a reply: I'm driving, will reply later"."

    The latter two are a bad idea; the last response should be automatic. Listening has two components: actual hearing and cognition; the former requires concentration only by people like me, but the latter usually requires it, and few people can concentrate on two things at once. I have been in taxis and buses when the drivers have received (voice) messages, and have observed how much they lose concentration on the road.

    I am a mere 6'2", but have had similar experiences to Rocketpjs; some (medium) cars are too small even for me to sit in safely, because my head is right against the ceiling.

    601:

    So, in Para5, I could take, say, R2.2 and generate R2.2.1, R2.2.2 etc yes?

    Yes, exactly.

    602:

    In other news, a Grand Jury has been convened to decide whether to indict the Orange One.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57250697

    Looks like the net is closing. A competent prosecutor can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich: it is purely a presentation of the prosecution case with no defence, in order to decide whether the accused has a case to answer. Assuming they indict the actual trial will come later.

    The only scenarios I can see without indictment are if the jurors happen to include a majority of Trumpists (unlikely in NY), or if the prosecution don't really want an indictment but feel they have to go through the motions for political reasons (very unlikely), or if the prosecution is unusually incompetent (very unlikely).

    I'll get the popcorn!

    603:

    The latter two are a bad idea; the last response should be automatic.

    Actually, automating those two has been a feature of Siri (on iOS) for about 5 years now. iOS has a feature whereby if you're moving at more than about 10mph it assumes you're driving and blocks calls/diverts to voice mail. And can be set to autoreply to SMS, IIRC.

    I have this feature turned off because I'm far more likely to be on a train/in a taxi/on a bus than driving, but for a car-centric culture it's ideal, short of all cars having a bluetooth beacon that disables nearby phones while the vehicle is in motion (ha ha, maybe in a couple more decades).

    604:

    Charlie To which should be added ... FUCKING Shat-Nav They are amazingly dangerous & stupid.

    Paul It's all over pages of the "Indy" & Grauniad, too, now! Meanwhile the Rethuglicans criminally-insane female M T Greene has compared vaccinations to Nazism - she needs locking up on public health & safety grounds.

    605:

    if the jurors happen to include a majority of Trumpists (unlikely in NY)

    I dunno. Looking at this by-county map, there's a lot of red there, and this will probably be a political rather than strictly legal trial, given the official Republican Party platform*…

    https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2020/12/10/trump-biden-vote-totals-in-new-york

    *Specifically: RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda; RESOVLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention; RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration; and

    https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2020

    606:

    short of all cars having a bluetooth beacon that disables nearby phones while the vehicle is in motion

    Could that be specific enough to affect only a seat within a car? I've found it handy when passengers can use their phone to check something, call ahead to make a reservation, etc — like having a passenger map-reading in the old days of folded paper…

    I can see blocking the driver, but passengers seems overkill.

    I do like the idea of a built-in "Driving Mode" (like Airplane Mode), that allows some functions (like maps) and not others (like texting).

    607:

    Looking at this by-county map, there's a lot of red there

    Irrelevant. The prosecution will hold the Grand Jury in NY City, which is 87% Biden.

    608:

    Greg: Satnav is a game changer for me!

    My visual acuity is such that I can't read a map (at typical road map scale) in a vibrating moving vehicle, much less in non-optimal lighting conditions.

    The satnav, in contrast, gives me a bright moving map display in my direct sight-line (when mounted centrally on the windscreen) with advisories about traffic congestion and what it thinks is the optimum route.

    The last bit is the one where it falls down ... about 10% of the time. But you rapidly learn to ignore the bullshit if it tries to misdirect you. In which case, once you pass the exit its nagging you about, it recalculates and usually gets back on track.

    What you don't do is uncritically accept directions from a satnav without applying the same bullshit detector you'd apply to a non-driving human mapreader: in other words, if the instructions are obviously silly, you ignore them.

    609: 597 - As I am used to dealing with it, received signal power is the signal level at the receive antenna. Gain is the power level which you require to add to the signal level to obtain a theoretical level of 120dB. This means that they're mirrors of each other, not separate quantities. 598 - Pretty much agreed, at least if we can retain reversing camera systems, including Mercedes Trucks' "Mirrorcam" that replace or supplement conventional mirrors. 599 - No photovoltaic panels, and even if there were, they'd be on the other side of the roof from the transmitter in question.

    Also, "in the loft" is a secure from wind and rain environment.

    601 - :-) , so your explanation is understandable by someone who is a lay person in terms of blockchain processing. 602 - I'd have said "Trumpers" rather than "Trumpists". but otherwise... 608 - And for me, reading a physical map in a moving vehicle risks motion sickness.

    I've also had an issue where a prat-nav has failed to say "Turn left on the A999", and some 20 miles later said "At the next opportunity, turn around" and kept repeating this for several miles whilst I looked for a suitable opportunity.

    610:

    I should have remembered reversing cameras: yeah, those should be (are?) mandatory on all new vehicles. No more backing up over stuff you don't want to squish, or ramming the kerb. No more squinting at a mirror showing a view through a rain-streaked rear window, either.

    Older satnavs tended to be too slow to recalculate in time for my sluggish reflexes to get me into the correct lane for a re-try, but the last one I bought (about five years ago) had improved drastically. If I was going to drive regularly I'd call them a must-have: phone maps are simply too small for purpose.

    No love, however, to the rental Jeep wife and I drove from Vancouver to Edmonton along the Trans Canada Highway, which decided to update its map database over 2G cellular in the middle of fucking nowhere. "This may take a few minutes", it said. The update completed some time the following night, after we had to drive 500km and navigate central Edmonton using cached map tiles on an iPad (the iPad's cellular data had run out and roaming in Canada cost $10/Mb, which was No Fun At all, but we were able to stop in a burger bar and leech off their wifi to read the map online, and the iPad's GPS gave us a location fix and the cached map view once we hit town).

    611:

    Fairly sure reversing cameras are not mandatory, even on vans and trucks with no direct rear vision at all.

    My comment in #609, we were in the correct lane etc, but the prat nav totally omitted to give the direction to take the turning. Reflexes (or lack thereof) didn't come into it.

    612:

    Also worth checking that your satnav is not set to update the displayed route every time it finds an alternative that will save more than one minute, while driving through central London... ...just saying.

    613:

    It sounds like you've been given some TV installer rules of thumb, and not a proper introduction to RF.

    dB is a relative unit - a Bel (the base unit) is defined as log10(a/b), where a and b are in the base units. Adding dB together is equivalent to multiplication in the base units

    Signal strength at a receiver is measured as a power level at the receiver; a common unit in TV systems is dBµV, which is decibels referenced to 1 µV at the system impedance. Because this is a voltage standing in for a power level, you need to divide the dB figure by 2 to get the ratio (P=VV/R). A typical TV receiver wants around 1V at the receiver input, which is 120 dBµV (sqrt(10*12) * 1 µV) - it can cope between 150 dBµV and 100 dBµV, giving you poor quality below 100 dBµV on analogue, or dropouts on digital.

    Amplifiers output some multiple of the input signal from the antenna; a 6 dB amplifier adds 6dB power (double it for voltage, so 12 dB if working relative to V not W) to the signal strength.

    Coding gain is "free" amplification as compared to the old system - if you had 100 dBµV PAL-I, and now have 91 dBµV DVB-T, your experience should be similar.

    614:

    Back before I had a cell phone, I used an older version of HereWeGo to navigate on my old iPad*. Loaded in offline maps for three provinces and I was good to travel:

    https://apps.apple.com/app/id955837609

    *Had GPS location because it had a SIM card slot, although I ended up never getting a SIM card because I only discovered how expensive data was after I bought the iPad.

    615:

    My apologies for this question, but I am a bit stuck. There are quite a few books that I want in Ebook form, but an increasing number are not marketed in the UK, nor does there seem any intention of doing so. Is there a practical way round this that doesn't involve piracy sites or getting a credit card with a USA address?

    616:

    Would a VPN let you buy them from a US web site, maybe using something like Paypal?

    Alternately, could someone in the US (or wherever) buy them for you and email you the files? More complicated and wouldn't work with DRMed books, of course. (Or would require cracking the DRM, which I understand is illegal in the US*.)

    *At least, it was illegal to crack DRM even if you had the legal right to use the cracked file. Struck me as one of those deliberate things in American law that let the authorities prohibit something without actually making it illegal. Kinda like saying you are allowed to be in a building but it is illegal to open a door to get inside if the door is closed.

    617:

    No. Sites like Amazon and Kobo don't support Paypal, and virtually all such books are DRMed.

    618:

    Encrypted USB key? That's mind-bogglingly easy to deal with... and he's clearly too ignorant to have that much money.

    The answer, of course is linux->dd if=/dev/usb1 of=/dev/usb2

    Now, feel free to work at the password on USB 2 as long as you like, duplicating it as necessary.

    619:

    DRM... rant

    What REALLY REALLY REALLY pisses me off is buying an ebook from, say Amazon... that was put out by Tor, or Baen, or (personal thing here) RoF Press... ALL OF WHICH EXPLICITLY DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT DRM.

    620:

    Charlie @ 610: [A SatNav] decided to update its map database over 2G cellular in the middle of fucking nowhere.

    Can I put in a plug for the "OsmAnd+" app on Android? It uses the Open Streetmap database so there is no issue with subscribing to updates, and the maps are available when off-line. You need a couple of spare gigabytes for the maps, but it will happily store its maps on an SD card, and they're cheap.

    We use it all the time.

    621:

    linux->dd if=/dev/usb1 of=/dev/usb2

    First enter the PIN for access to /dev/usb1.

    The IronKey device (AIUI) encrypts the data with a key that it generates and keeps on the device. Before you can access the data you have to unlock the device by giving it a PIN. Once it gets the right PIN it turns on its encryption engine with the stored key. All this functionality is built into the device (apart from the GUI which sends the PIN you type via USB with the unlock request). Once the device is unlocked you can treat it like a normal USB drive. Until then you don't get anything.

    If anyone breaks open the physical device and attempts to read the flash chip directly, well its all encrypted with a random key that is too long to brute-force before the heat-death of the Universe.

    This is not the same as having an encrytped file stored on a normal USB drive.

    622:

    whitroth@618: linux->dd if=/dev/usb1 of=/dev/usb2

    It's not that simple. This isn't a bog-standard USB device containing an encrypted volume, it's an IronKey.

    Initially it presents itself as a single volume containing an application you have to run in order to unlock it. Using dd to copy that will give you a few megabytes of app, and that's all. When you run the app, all it does is to transmit your passphrase to the crypto engine embedded in the chip. Only when you've given it the right passphrase does it decrypt the master key and present a second USB volume containing your data, which it decrypts on the fly. Get it wrong 10 times and it wipes the encrypted volume key and your data's gone for ever.

    To do what you're suggesting you need physical access to the actual flash memory chip behind the USB interface. That might be possible, if you can physically dismantle it without damaging the chip, but it's well potted and mechanically quite tough, so not an easy task.

    624:

    Not even close. I work with radar, radio and telemetry people. The only Tv people that work this closely with signal and transmitters are Tv transmission engineers.

    625:

    getting a credit card with a USA address?

    Yeah. Most e stores want to have a credit card that matches the country's store location. All kinds of issues with contracts and local banking laws.

    Got any good friends in the US? If you know someone who will let you use their address you could get a secured credit card. This is where you must pre-load funds to use it and only up to the funds you load. So there really are not any credit checks to get one.

    Does Paypal have a path for this that doesn't get you afoul of the money laundering laws?

    626:

    Ah, I see. That was the part that was missing.

    On the other hand, at that point, we're back to disassembling and using LN2....

    627:

    Can I put in a plug ....

    If you're willing to have an email address verified by Google (does not have to be a gmail account) you can cache a LOT ahead of time. I do this before road trips to avoid issues like Charlie had. Driving due south from central Pennsylvania through Maryland, West Virginia, then Virginia will take you through a LOT of dead zones where you have no cell service of any kind. Which makes the get the maps as needed hard to do.

    I've cached 1100 mile routes before while holding other regions in the cache.

    And it seems to cache most of the information you'd get in a live situation. Restaurants, gas stations, etc...

    628:

    Turns out that not all of the news from around the world is bad:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J47VmMAOAw

    629:

    In thinking this through since you don't have a US Social Security Number it might be hard to even get a secured card in the US. But if you have friends you can trust they can get one and let you use it.

    And if you try this route find a card that lets you sign up with all (well almost all) communications via email.

    630:

    Slightly disappointed that they weren't travelling by whirlwind! :-)

    631:

    I've had generally good experiences with the android version of navigation (Google Maps) and the directions they provide. The only real problem was trying to return to our hotel from a dinner out in Montreal when my lovely wife, well in her cups, chose to shut it off and insisted on 'just finding it like normal'. Which took some time.

    We've used it to navigate such diverse locales as Vancouver, Athens and many points between without too much difficulty. Occasional strange side trips, at least some of which turned out to be workarounds to get past a traffic issue.

    Suffice to say I am a fan of realtime GPS navigation. I've never yet had it as a part of my car, always based on a phone. I've also almost never had use of a 'backup camera' but I do like them. As long as we don't lose the actual physical mirrors.

    632:

    Is there a practical way round this that doesn't involve piracy sites or getting a credit card with a USA address?

    Yes: there are a couple of ways. They are, however, inconvenient.

    Amazon recognize that people travel internationally, so I just keep my Kindle registered to the US kindle store, with a US street address. UK credit card works fine. If you're worried, feed it with Amazon gift vouchers; however this works for me with a UK credit card. (For the rare UK purchase, I have a second kindle account linked to a different email address and a debit card.)

    Note that your kindle app will only let you read books bought using the account it's registered to. So I'm a pathological completist about saving my kindle purchases in Calibre and stripping the DRM, then transcoding them into epub format. (Your google search terms for how to crack the DRM are "Apprentice Alf DeDRM". I'm not going to explain the process here because I can live without DMCA takedowns pointed at my server.)

    633:

    My Skoda has SmartLink which connects your phone to the centre console screen via Bluetooth or USB and Android Auto, MirrorLink or CarPlay on the phone. That gives me Google Maps on the screen with a simplified display and the Google lady telling me which way I should be going, dipping the volume on the radio each time she does. You have to be stopped to set a destination or to do much else.

    Does the occasional odd bit of routing, most recently wanting me to turn left at a roundabout then first right across the main road rather than going across the roundabout and turning left, but generally it's quite good and does its best to avoid traffic.

    634:

    Whitroth: if you buy a Baen or Tor ebook from Amazon (or anyone else) and find DRM on it, complain to the publisher. They will yell at the ebook vendor, because Amazon aren't supposed to apply DRM to books unless the publisher wants it there.

    635:

    More good news. The National Arts Centre in Ottawa will be creating an opera based on Karel Capek's play, R.U.R.

    https://nac-cna.ca/en/creationfund/project/rur

    637:

    whitroth @ 568: About six years ago, I had the stereo in my minivan replaced - the original was stopping somewhere between track 0 and track 4 on CDs, esp. filk, and would tell me it couldn't read it.

    So I got a Pioneer. Which I now loathe. The idiots - there's a large knob, controls volume... but it will not turn it off (that's a tiny button, and who would want to turn it off?) Pushing in the large knob, however, gets you the settings menu.

    Try and do this while driving.

    VERY poorly designed set of controls. Oh, and the volume needs multiple rotations to go from, say, upper 20's down to say, 10 (where you can talk).

    At least you could FIND the volume control without taking your eyes off the road. I feel the same way about Sony ... but it's because I've never had a Sony consumer electronics product that didn't fail the day after the warranty expired.

    My Ford Focus had an in-dash 6-CD changer that would play MP3 CDs so I could have hours (30+ hours) of uninterrupted music when all six slots were loaded. The Jeep also had an in-dash 6-CD changer, but it would NOT play MP3 CDs. That's why I got the unit I have now, which will play the MP3s off of a USB stick with the bonus of a rear view backup camera and it will connect to my iPhone & use its map function & hands-free telephony.

    The downside I didn't anticipate is not being able to change the volume without taking my eyes off the road to find the little tiny buttons on the touch screen.

    And here's a new one ...

    I have to remove the USB stick to connect the iPhone & I had a thought just now I wonder if I can put MP3 files on the iPhone so I'd still have the music when the iPhone is connected instead of the USB stick?.

    So, I took my iPhone out of my pocket to look at it and there's a strange error message: "This accessory is not supported".

    What accessory?

    I don't have any accessories, and especially no accessories when it's in my pocket. But all it tells me is "This accessory is not supported"

    638:

    Whitroth @ 570: So, you say that no one in Europe, or eastern Europe, or Russia, trades using euros?

    Not that I know of. I mentioned the one time I know of where someone tried.

    639: 598: "I don't like taking my eyes off the road when driving, and having to look down at a display - anything more than a glance at the speedometer, in a known position with an expected/known range of parameters to read - is downright dangerous." 608: "Greg: Satnav is a game changer for me!

    My visual acuity is such that I can't read a map (at typical road map scale) in a vibrating moving vehicle, much less in non-optimal lighting conditions.

    The satnav, in contrast, gives me a bright moving map display in my direct sight-line..."

    There is a contradiction entangled in this lot, excusing the unstated but clearly implied aim of reading a map while driving; but it is the execution of that aim which I consider to be the fucking dangerous bit, especially when the dangers are obfuscated and normalised by the use of an electronic box, and for this reason I share Greg's opinion. It may be that my particular endowment of physiological and cognitive deficits emphasises the dangerous factors in a more obvious way to me than yours does for you, but the acknowledged deficits are not particularly uncommon, and a good part of the problem arises from fundamental deficiencies of whose effects very many people are probably entirely unaware, so I still think the generalised human being should be assumed unfit to use a sat nav without medical certification to the contrary.

    I completely agree with your "anything more than the speedo..." comment, and a sat nav is inherently considerably more than the speedo, no matter how it is dressed up. (As it happens, the speedo in my car seems to have been designed with this sort of difficulty in mind; the indication is a horizontal red stripe which gets longer the faster you go, up to the full width of the instrument panel, and nothing else on the panel looks remotely like it, so the briefest unfocused glance is enough to read it.) (The importance of reading it at all is a whole argument in itself, but not really to the point here.)

    I tried to read a map while driving once, for experiment. Doing about 20mph on a dead straight and completely empty stretch of country lane with a grass verge as wide as the tarmac. That last feature turned out to be important. It was trivial to conclude that there were no conceivable circumstances where such an attempt offered any advantage over pulling over and stopping and doing it properly. The two main difficulties were accommodation time and context switching - one physiological and one cognitive - and since this was rather a long time ago I was a lot better at both of them then than I am now.

    To look at anything inside the car requires me to refocus right from one extreme of accommodation to the other; the road of course is at "infinity", and with my specs on (so I can see the road), anything closer than arm's length is nowadays too close to focus on properly at all. It takes a second or two for the focusing muscles to go from completely relaxed to maximum contraction, and about the same for the lens to flatten out again when they relax. So there is no such thing as a "brief glance" at anything inside the car that (unlike my speedo) needs to be focused on to be interpreted. No doubt many people are well enough habituated to it to not really be fully aware of its extent, but it is well established that this happens to everyone and the effects are significant long before you get anywhere near the doddery stage.

    Cognitively, it is a matter of executing a context switch from immediate interpretation of a dynamic real scene, to interpreting a fixed abstraction and relating it to the static features of the scene on a scale somewhat larger than what you can observe at the moment. It's a very different kind of task and it takes a significant time for the context switch to happen and the sense to start coming through. Apart from the general observation that everyone's cognitive facilities slow down as they get older, I have little idea what the incidence rate is of people being significantly affected by this, but I suspect it is a lot higher than anyone admits to; it is the kind of thing that people tend not only to fail to notice in themselves but to react with denial to any evidence that does catch their attention, and the process of navigation using abstractions seems to give an awful lot of people, even reasonably intelligent ones, noticeable trouble, not only with reading actual maps but with such things as interpreting signage at complex junctions, in a manner that suggests they are trying to give CPU time to both processes at once and end up thrashing the context switch and not really getting decent output from either process.

    Having the thing closer to the normal line of sight may seem to make it more immediate to read, but I am not convinced there is a real reduction in the loss of attention from driving, as opposed to a mere masking effect that makes the loss less noticeable.

    (Also, as far as I personally am concerned, any kind of thing that is brightly coloured, and lit up, and moves, in the corner of my vision, can fuck right off. If I'm driving the car of someone who dangles stupid shit from the mirror, I will take that down, too. (And people in houses, if you've got visitors, ffs turn the bloody TV off...))

    People in general are very bad at processing two different kinds of data at the same time, and tend to grossly overestimate their performance and not realise how little attention they are really giving to the more backgroundable task, particularly when one of the tasks is such that you can get away with doing it hand on cock and mind in China for far too much of the time because the critical moments where that approach has immediate catastrophic consequences are thankfully infrequent; and they also tend to reject any implied criticism of their performance out of hand. Another example occurs with the use of mobile phones when driving: "oh, I use hands free; oh, it's no different from talking to a passenger", case dismissed, not understanding how much of conversation is outside the actual words, in cues that you're not consciously aware of, and flatly denying that the loss or corruption of these cues through things like coding/transmission delays (in a range known to be particularly pathological, too) and noise gating can cause your CPU use to go through the roof to compensate without your being aware of it. (Not to mention that simply talking to a passenger is too much additional cognitive load for not a small number of people in any case.)

    People are also incredibly bad at assessing their own performance at tasks which require continuous attention to maintain an up-to-date context in which to handle infrequent anomalies requiring a prompt and correct response. Adverse consequences of dropping the context through inattention and having to re-acquire it a few seconds later actually come to bite you so infrequently in relation to how easy it is to drop the context that you can be dropping it all the time and not notice you're doing it. Also, people will ascribe their success in handling anomalies that they do respond to correctly to their own competence, but their failure or near-failure when they don't respond correctly to anything other than their own lack of competence.

    So, I contend that if - as you and I both acknowledge - "anything more than the speedo" is downright dangerous, a sat nav not only cannot possibly be excluded from that category but has if anything an unusually secure place in it, and impressions leading to a contrary conclusion are very likely to be illusory, in a manner moreover which frustrates self-diagnosis, and cannot be assumed otherwise without a more rigorous assessment both of the capabilities of the individual concerned, and of the significance of the effects, in terms of observable consequences, for drivers in the mass.

    640:

    In that case I am baffled all to fuck. I cannot understand where you could possibly have come by the definition "Gain is the power level which you require to add to the signal level to obtain a theoretical level of 120dB". It doesn't even make sense in any context I can think of. Gain is quite simply output-over-input (whether of actual signal level or in a more abstract sense as with coding gain etc), and nowhere have I ever encountered any variation from that.

    641:

    Greg Tingey @ 540: JBS
    Sometimes, I have "fun" with touchscreens, as about 20-35% of the time, they refuse to work when I try to use them - either my hands are too dry or my capacitance is low, or something grrr ....
    My fingers are decidedly not fat, but one reason I have my nice expensive phone is that it has a KEYBOARD, yay!
    - later
    Oh, that's what it's supposed to mean - OK, got you.

    When I first encountered the term "fat fingered" it just meant any kind of common keyboard error (teh for the, smrat for smart, fro for for ...)

    When applied to "smart" phone keyboards it specifically denotes the difficulty I have with the letters 'p' and 'q' which are at the ends of the row right up against the edge of the screen. Before I found the stylus I use now it might take multiple attempts ('o', backspace, 'o', backspace, ...) before I could finally get the letter 'p'

    Just today I learned it has taken on an exact meaning in financial markets ... an order to buy or sell is placed of far greater size than intended, for the wrong stock or contract, at the wrong price, or ...

    For me it still just means a typo or the "keyboard" is too tiny. As noted, my anger at touch screens is from trying to keep them clean & functional when I was running the mini-photolab.

    642:

    Moz @ 584:

    And he can't copy the wallet, and try his passwords against the *copy*? Or restore the wallet from backup?

    Very likely he has some kind of physical "wallet" that is a little crypto engine with a USB interface, rather than actually having any bitcoins of his own. Much as you might have, say, an anonymous Swiss bank account that can only be accessed using a magic ID token they gave you. Lose the token and you no longer have a Swiss bank account.

    Speaking of "magic ID tokens" - did anyone else notice this recent article?

    https://www.wired.com/story/the-full-story-of-the-stunning-rsa-hack-can-finally-be-told/

    643:

    Do like me. I study maps intensely weeks ahead of driving in a foreign place like San Francisco or Helsinki. Once I'm driving over there I don't use maps. I've already learned them.

    644:

    SFReader @ 588: Additionally - given that PowerPoint became a thing around the same time as the interweb in most corporate offices and PPT basically forced everyone to communicate in headlines - I'd say that the media have zero excuse for so utterly and completely screwing up/misusing their 'headlines'. They are probably the only industry that can't plead ignorance re: consequences of their actions/inactions about this because they ARE the communications and people professionals.

    I still hold that PowerPoint is the worst thing that ever happened to the U.S. Army and I'm including Col. Custer & the 7th Cav.

    645:

    paws4thot @ 596: So, in Para5, I could take, say, R2.2 and generate R2.2.1, R2.2.2 etc yes?

    What would it take to generate R2D2?

    646:

    Pigeon THIS is why is still have a COMPLETE set of OS 1:50 000 scale maps of mainland Britain & why I'm "notorious" for always having a paper map, wherever I'm going ... [ JBS - Oh, dear. ]

    Niala Something like that I often am "carrying" a mental image of a map, I've looked at, with my position on the terrain/map marked by a moving dot - all in my head. Very useful if mountain walking in "mist" that is - done that a lot in the past...

    647:

    That was a great explanation of why a satnav map is no good in a car, with the tiny tiny tiny exception, that a satnav isn't a paper map with a backlight. You don't read them. They're not a map.

    They're like having a passenger that knows the way and is directing you. Stopping to "do it properly" makes no more sense than stopping to do the passenger properly (dogging aside). When I'm on the motorcycle, it's in my pocket and talking to me via the noise cancelling earbuds. I'm not reading it.

    648:

    Niala @ 643: Do like me. I study maps intensely weeks ahead of driving in a foreign place like San Francisco or Helsinki. Once I'm driving over there I don't use maps. I've already learned them.

    Except if the map you studied before hand was out of date (out of date NOW).

    I carry the paper maps along with me. Whenever I'm driving somewhere long distance the first stop I make when entering a new state is the rest-area/Welcome Center to pick up a new courtesy state map (even if it's one of the few states that SELL the map instead of just giving them away).

    I have used and can use GPS & SatNav, but I never forget the data on the display may not conform to the actual lay of the land.

    I find an integrated approach with advance planning AND having local maps accessible during movement works best. I'm not afraid to pull over to the side of the road while I consult a map. And if I can't find it on the map, or if it's not where the notes from my planning say it's supposed to be, I'm not afraid to ask for directions.

    PS: The best place to ask for directions is at a local fire station.

    649:

    Greg Tingey @ 646: Pigeon
    THIS is why is still have a COMPLETE set of OS 1:50 000 scale maps of mainland Britain & why I'm "notorious" for always having a paper map, wherever I'm going ... [ JBS - Oh, dear. ]

    Why "Oh, dear". I like paper maps. Never had a paper map become unusable because the battery died or because it couldn't acquire satellites in dense woods or mountainous terrain.

    I personally preferred 1:25,000 maps whenever I could get them. Ever use an altimeter in addition to your compass when working with terrain maps?

    650:

    bitcoin's energy consumption is only half of the traditional banking system's 263.72 terawatts per hour

    That's the most damning statistic about bitcoin energy consumption that I've seen yet.

    Because the traditional banking system is the main admin system that runs our bloody planet. Payroll systems, orders, bills, eft-pos transactions, credit-card transactions, weekly and monthly subscriptions, mortgage interest and repayments: the whole Terran economy's daily admin is bank transactions.

    And they're not even what uses most of the compute cycles for banks! It's risk calcs that run up the cpu-time. Because most of what the banking system does is not process payments (though they do process a million times more payment transactions a day than bitcoin), it's borrow and lend. Banks are mainly in the business of managing credit risk. Which means liquidity modelling, credit calcs on mortgages, measuring effectiveness of hedges, etc, etc - that's where people like me end up running systems that use a compute grid for hours every day.

    651:

    When I'm on the motorcycle, it's in my pocket and talking to me via the noise cancelling earbuds.

    When I drive my phone is in the cupholder between seats, talking to me. It's like a passenger that says things like "in 200 metres, turn right on Smith Street" then "turn right on Smith Street" as I get there*.

    The display shows a stylized perspective view of just the road ahead with only a couple of turns and/or intersections. No other details. It's like the old TripTic maps from CAA being automatically scrolled to show only what I need to know — not that I look at it, except maybe if I'm stopped at a red light.

    • Much better than a passenger in that it doesn't also say things like "oh look at that bird, did you see it? what was it?" or fill in silences with what their friend Angie's brother's daughter heard last week so you have to follow a monologue to pluck out the actual navigational instructions…
    652:

    "Much better than a passenger"

    I love standard phraseology. I had an ex who used to say things like "right through the lights" which she thought meant straight or "left at the next" which didn't mean left at the next intersection, but rather, left at the intersection she was thinking about.

    653:

    In that case I am baffled all to fuck. ... Gain is quite simply output-over-input (whether of actual signal level or in a more abstract sense as with coding gain etc), and nowhere have I ever encountered any variation from that.

    This. Since I have an old ham radio study guide nearby, I'll even quote:

    Gain (1) Enhancing an antenna's ability to receive or radiate signals in a specific direction. (2) The ability of a component, circuit, or piece of equipment to amplify a signal. (3) Mic Gain [irrelevant to RF] (4) RF Gain - sensitivity of the receiver to incoming RF signals. (5) AF Gain [irrelevant to RF]

    654:

    I had an ex who used to say things like "right through the lights" which she thought meant straight or "left at the next" which didn't mean left at the next intersection, but rather, left at the intersection she was thinking about.

    That latter one reminds of an old story about my grandfather.

    Many years ago, the whole family of mom, dad, and two sons made a day trip from their relatively small town into the nearest large city, Salem Oregon. The kids were old enough to have their own interests so nobody needed to keep track of anyone else. Headed to Salem they agreed when and where they should meet, then split up do do their own things.

    My future grandfather had some time to think it over and realized that the rendezvous point was inefficient and that there was an obvious better choice. Lesson learned for the next trip, really.

    When the time came to meet everyone else, the other three Sanfords arrived on site and found only each other there. It was hours later and my future grandfather remembered the superior meeting site but not that he'd only figured it out after everyone had split up! He eventually showed up about 45 minutes late, frustrated and livid that nobody had appeared where he'd expected them...

    655:

    Literal lol. Sounds like something I'd do.

    656:

    That's the same kind of thing I do - study the map in advance (something I have always found fascinating anyway) and do as much of the abstraction processing as possible before I come to need it. So when I come to actually see the place I already know pretty well what I'm looking at and how it all fits together beyond where I can see. I may thus be able to achieve a lower navigational error rate than someone of acknowledged competence sitting in the passenger seat and looking at the map as we go. It also helps me recover if they have changed something since the map was printed, because I know enough about what's where to have some idea about what the new stuff might mean and what sort of thing I probably ought to be doing about it, instead of it appearing only as baffling unexpected nonsense.

    657:

    I should have remembered reversing cameras: yeah, those should be (are?) mandatory on all new vehicles. No more backing up over stuff you don't want to squish, or ramming the kerb. No more squinting at a mirror showing a view through a rain-streaked rear window, either.

    A more specific request: for large vehicles (lorries etc) there should be mandatory cameras or mirrors showing the right side of the vehicle properly. This is for seeing that the way is clear when turning right.

    Some background: in Finland, there have been multiple accidents in the last couple of months, where a big vehicle turning right has driven over a cyclist driving straight. Multiple fatalities, also of children. I'd kind of like that nine-year olds wouldn't need to the more aware of the traffic rules and the behaviour of other road-users than professional lorry drivers, and also kind of a world where nine-year olds wouldn't get driven over by cars.

    I think there are some regulations on the mirrors, but not all older vehicles have them, and from the public discussion here I think many drivers have an attitude problem, so that they don't need to see if they are running over somebody if it's hard. I just say that we have the solution, let's implement and enforce it before more people die.

    658:

    for large vehicles (lorries etc) there should be mandatory cameras or mirrors showing the right side of the vehicle properly.

    That would require more than one per segment with semitrailer size trucks. And you'd need them on both sides, because trucks turn left as well as right. It's not impossible, just complicated. My rigid truck I had high and low reversing cameras (so I could look down on things close to the truck as well as horizontally back). The one camera pointing down back left... was less useful than the mirror. Moving it to the top left of the truck was more useful, it meant I could better judge whether I'd hit overhanging trees etc.

    But every truck driver will tell you that often the problem is other road users not accepting that trucks are big. You'll move over to occupy both lanes ready to turn, and someone will drive or ride up one side or the other, and block you from being able to turn. Then, if you're lucky, you'll see them and sit and wait for them to go away. Chance are if they're in a car they can't, and it takes them bloody ages to realise that the only way out is for them to reverse far enough back that you can complete the turn.

    Cyclists is a hard one, because they can move forward around the truck and escape, but often they just sit there watching the side of the truck get closer and closer...

    https://iamtraffic.org/resources/interactive-graphics/what-cyclists-need-to-know-about-trucks/

    https://www.arrivealive.co.za/Safely-Sharing-the-Roads-With-Trucks-Trucks-Make-Wide-Turns

    You can't fix this stuff just by giving the truck driver another 10 things to do while operating the truck.

    659:

    Here's a quick sketch of a single-trainer semi with a few of the more useful camera locations shown. Note that with only six cameras and two mirrors there are still a lot of blind spots, and even so the driver is going to have their eyes off the road a lot while checking them.

    https://i.imgur.com/DPQzUfM.png

    The front and side cameras on the tractor are because the driver can't see the ground around the tractor directly. Even an SUV adjacent to the tractor is quite probably not visible. A cyclist, or someone picking up the phone they dropped onto the road... definitely not visible.

    Likewise the rearmost camera. Obviously no visibility there.

    The "wing mirror" cameras on the trailer will help see cars and cyclists going under the wheels of that trailer. But note that the area directly under those cameras is only visible using the wing mirrors on the tractor.

    And those wing mirrors are only visible by the driver turning their head. So not only is the truck driver trying to carefully manage the truck to avoid hitting stationary obstacles like kerbs and signs and street furniture and so on (both ends of the truck - turn as wide as possible but no wider!), they have to be ready for people to approach from any angle at any time, then stop and wait for the truck to run them over.

    People actually do this. It's both nerve-wracking and infuriating. And also why I don't like driving without an observer in the cockpit to help manage everything.

    660:

    That would require more than one per segment with semitrailer size trucks.

    Well, yes. The accidents recently here have been only lorries, I think, so no trailers. Bigger ones are a problem, too.

    But every truck driver will tell you that often the problem is other road users not accepting that trucks are big.

    Yes. The problem is also that other road users are not all adults (who make mistakes, too!) but for example those kids less than ten years old. Their daily routes, to school for example, take their across areas where those big vehicles drive, and in my opinion it's a better world where they can travel by themselves. I think that our routes would need more planning, for example fewer places where that kind of accidents are possible would be good, but it's hard to avoid them altogether.

    So I think saying "yeah the bikers should also be careful because lorries are big" is kind of avoiding the responsibility. You drive a vehicle from which you don't see properly out of, please do something about it other than "yeah, the nine-yeara old kid should've been more careful so as not to be killed by me".

    I

    661:

    Sounds something like a radar reflector for a small boat to avoid being run down by larger shipping. Basically, a wearable reflector for the cyclist or biker (perhaps helmet mounted), which then triggers a HUD alert in the lorry cab if they enter within a certain distance of the larger vehicle.

    662:

    Meanwhile: Another "Red Hat" test described - or something else? I must admit, I incline to the "test" hypothesis, as passing the "Occam criterion"

    663:

    please do something about it

    That job is hard. I don't drive, and it's partly because I think driving any motor vehicle is unreasonably difficult even with the current level of "every road is a toll road" acceptance (in English we talk about "the road toll" meaning people who are killed by road users. Often but only those killed directly, but increasingly also the indirect kills from pollution).

    The problem with any kind of proximity sensor is that pedestrians are going to get really angry every time a truck stops in the middle of the road and the driver yells "you have to stay 5m away from the truck or it won't move". I would quite enjoy that solution, because I think it's hilarious when people demand that essential systems be made unworkable.

    So yeah, feel free to educate yourself on the current state of the art and try to come up with new ideas. Even if those don't work it's better than your current enthusiasm for magic trucks driven by superheros.

    664:

    On lorries vs cyclists:

    The real solution is a transport infrastructure that doesn't put children on bicycles in the same space as giant lorries.

    I have this mental image of a future city in which most short journeys are carried out on small one-person electric "scooters" (for want of a better term; it includes all those self-balancing descendants of the Segway), or plain bicycles if people prefer. The speed limit is 15 mph. Cars and lorries can use the same space as long as they stay below 15 mph, but don't usually do so because the only reason for using a larger vehicle is if you are going on a long journey or have a lot of freight to move. In this world, AI driving is good enough for vehicles to navigate this autonomously without hitting people, so having the car kept at a car park outside town isn't an issue; just call it when you need it.

    I'll be the first to admit this isn't well worked-out. But we're currently stuck with a transport infrastructure designed to solve the problems of 60 to 80 years ago, when technology was different and traffic weren't a major cause of child mortality (because so many other things could kill children, not because traffic was safer).

    665: 657 A more specific request: for large vehicles (lorries etc) there should be mandatory cameras or mirrors showing the right side of the vehicle properly. This is for seeing that the way is clear when turning right.

    This would be the left side, rather than the wrong side, in the UK and Australia, where a lot of the commentariat live. Also, in most or all "squish accidents", whether or not the truck driver has seen the cyclist, the cyclist will have seen the truck, and, hopefully, the truck driver has signalled the turn. So, as long as the signal is used, the cyclist has deliberately placed themself in danger, in the expectation that the truck driver will see them and abort or at least delay their manoeuvre.

    658 - I totally agree. When learning to drive, and in a position where I was about to proceed ahead, passing a truck in a right filter lane on his left and him signalling a right turn, I would delay starting the pass unless I was certain I could reach a position inside his wheelbase before he started the turn and the truck's rear overhang would swing out towards me. 659 - I can't find it now, but I've seen footage from a motorcycle's on board camera of the rider proceeding straight up the left hand windscreen pillar blind spot (where the driver couldn't see him) directly to the scene of the crash at the truck's operating left hand indicator! 660 - Er what we're saying is that you should not blame the larger, less manoeuvrable vehicle with poorer visibility for the situation where the smaller, more manoeuvrable vehicle with better visibility chooses to place itself in danger. 661 - Perhaps people who want this sort of scenario should accept that they can never again buy anything that is delivered by a vehicle larger than a ute? Actually, this also means that they can't buy a ute, unless they accept the idea of utes being delivered (at their cost) by individual drivers, who they also have to pay return fares to the factory for.
    666:

    Thank you. I can probably do something like that, with the extra tweak that the Kindle app doesn't work under Debian 10 wine, so I have to reboot into an old system :-(

    I always use DeDRM, too, because the system I buy books on is not one of the ones I read them on, and none of them are Kindles.

    667:

    The legal situation is still (theoretically) that pedestrians have a right to use the road, but motorist only a priviledge, and the latter have the duty to ensure that they don't endanger other people.

    But, the last time I saw the data, the risk to cyclists from HGVs was NOT with 'sharing the road' - it is with partitioning the road. Cyclists who follow Cyclecraft (HMSO) rather than the appallingly erroneous and anti-cyclist Highway Code do not have trouble. The problem is that a whole generation has been conditioned to believe that the place for cyclists is next to or even in the gutter, and a large proportion of the 'cycle facilities' are designed to encourage that, as well as the illegal and dangerous practice of undertaking. Yes, in the UK, a cycle lane legalises undertaking, but does not make it safe.

    668:

    Errr, Mods?

    I posted something suggesting that we need a system that keeps kids on bikes in a different space than big lorries. paws4thot @ 665 seems to have seen it at 661, but it's vanished. Is this a glitch, or did I break some rule without realising it?

    669:

    Interesting, I drive a 2018 Chrysler product, it will play music from an iPhone as well as displaying maps, I believe it's the same unit as would be in a Jeep or Dodge of the same year. Might there possibly be an issue correctable with a firmware update on yours?

    670:

    I'll confirm that, as part of #665, I answered a post #661 that has now vanished.

    671:

    A more specific request: for large vehicles (lorries etc) there should be mandatory cameras or mirrors showing the right side of the vehicle properly. This is for seeing that the way is clear when turning right.

    Interesting. I have NEVER seen a vehicle licensed to drive on public roads in the US without mirrors allowing the driver to see rearward on both sides of a vehicle. And this is on large older trucks (20+ years) I drove as a teen around 1970.

    672:

    I think it's hilarious when people demand that essential systems be made unworkable.

    Of course with some that IS the point.

    673:

    Might there possibly be an issue correctable with a firmware update on yours?

    In car infotainment systems, at least in the US, are a mess of varying features and lack of updates. Most car companies treat updates as a "part". The 2 iterations back head of Ford was working to change that and come up with a mind set at Ford where electronics got updates, not new parts with updated firmware. He got toss for not building profits fast enough. Same fate for next guy. Current guy, who knows.

    674:

    But every truck driver will tell you that often the problem is other road users not accepting that trucks are big. You'll move over to occupy both lanes ready to turn, and someone will drive or ride up one side or the other, and block you from being able to turn.

    On US roads there is an unofficial thing which some of us use. If you see a truck not too far ahead of you with a turn indicator on to move into your lane, you hang back and keep the lane clear. Then you flash your lights to let them know you're doing it. Most will move over then flash their in a "thank you".

    Not universally followed. At all.

    675:

    I have NEVER seen a vehicle licensed to drive on public roads in the US without mirrors allowing the driver to see rearward on both sides of a vehicle. And this is on large older trucks (20+ years) I drove as a teen around 1970.

    Well, yeah, there are mirrors, but often especially in older lorries there are areas you can't see. I dug up something that in the EU in lorries built after 2006 there should be more mirrors, and some graphs show ( https://www.is.fi/autot/art-2000000981717.html ) that the mirrors show quite a bit of the blind side.

    Considering this, yes, I think the accidents are even more of the lorry drivers' fault - if they can't or won't use the mirrors when driving in cities, they are at fault, in my opinion.

    Anyway, yes, the real solution is to arrange so that heavy traffic and child bikers don't meet on the roads. It's however a long-term solution, and I kind of would be happy if some easier solution could be found - like looking at the mirrors.

    676:

    the road of course is at "infinity", and with my specs on (so I can see the road), anything closer than arm's length is nowadays too close to focus on properly at all.

    You need varifocals, Pigeon. Good, properly configured varifocals give you two focal lengths: top half of lenses are at infinity (eg. for driving), bottom half go down to about 15"-18" from your nose, for reading (or car instrument displays).

    Note that bad varifocals are worse than no varifocals at all -- they need to be properly fitted so that when your eyeballs are in their natural resting attitude they're pointing at infinite focal depth, and when you glance down by 10-20 degrees you're at close-in focus.

    677:

    Are you talking about your post currently at #664? If posts have been resurrected from the spam trap, they'll change the numbering of following ones

    Certainly Paws's reply seems to be replying to #664

    678:

    You need varifocals, Pigeon. Good, properly configured varifocals give you two focal lengths: top half of lenses are at infinity (eg. for driving), bottom half go down to about 15"-18" from your nose, for reading (or car instrument displays).

    There's also what in the US is called mono-vision. You set your best distance eye to be fully corrected for distance and the other eye to be set for decent near vision. It comes from how many with contacts do corrections. I have it on my glasses after getting used to it with contacts (which I gave up a decade or more ago).

    Takes a few days to a week for your brain to get used to switching eyes as needed but after that it's great.

    Not for everyone but way better than what we call bi-focals.

    679:

    Greg I always have OS maps for long car journeys plus a larger print road atlas. My wife is very good at navigating round problems using OS maps. But her eyesight is no longer up to the task. When we ended up being lost after roadworks in the Broads we ended up following my daughter's car. She rarely visits Norfolk but had a satnav. I bought a satnav shortly after this. I like OS maps but I can't read them without stopping the car. Satnav is good. Even if I know the road the (free) apps I use on my iPhone have traffic details and calculate alternative routes. They are usually much more up to date than printed maps. I can also set speed limit warnings and it's not often necessary to look at the display. At night I use the HUD display on Navmii which shows the next turn, speed limits and speed as a mirror image so that when the phone is placed at the base of the windscreen I never need to look at the dashboard. Vice control using 'Hey Siri' allows use of the phone for other functions like telephone calls. Bluetooth links the phone to car audio and, if the passengers are asleep, earbuds. When I go to my allottment on my bike in a few minutes I will be wearing earbuds and listening to a podcast, probably 'The Atheist Experience'. I can hear the 'birdsong' if you want to use that word to describe the calls of wood pigeons and collared doves with the occasional rook. I can also amplify the sound if I need to. The 21st century is quite a nice place if you take a few minutes to appreciate it.

    680:

    My wife likes them, but I can't handle even bifocals, because I need my peripheral (lower) distance vision to avoid falling over. Yes, I can walk by touch alone, but it's impossibly slow or risky (take your pick) except on absolutely smooth ground with not even the smallest obstacle. My guess is that applies to many people with severely compromised semicircular canals.

    It makes using instrument panels tricky, but I can see the only essential device (the speedometer) - at least with analogue ones, because I teach myself where important limits are in advance!

    681:

    It's however a long-term solution, and I kind of would be happy if some easier solution could be found - like looking at the mirrors.

    That is a problem — how do you make the drivers look at the mirrors? Is the problem that they can't see, or that they don't look? I've nearly been hit several times when I could see the driver's face in their mirror, so they certainly could see my car if they looked. So either they didn't look, or they didn't care.

    A lot of them seem to basically assume that everyone in a smaller vehicle will get out of their way, and do things like make right turns in front of cyclists and pedestrians who have the right-of-way. Which has resulted in deaths, but even when charged it doesn't seem to change behaviour.

    https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/05/25/john-offutt-was-killed-while-cycling-when-a-cement-truck-ran-over-him-the-record-of-the-trucker-who-was-charged-and-his-company-raises-questions-about-the-oversight-of-the-entire-industry.html

    682:

    As and urban cyclist and motorcyclist I learned early on to assume that everyone in a car or lorry was a homicidal maniac. I drummed into my children that when on a bike they must assume anyone was out to kill them. Even then you can't avoid everything. I was passing a parked lorry on my Honda 50 and the driver jumped out almost on top of me forcing me to swerve to avoid both him and the bottom of the door. And on another occasion a lorry returning home from a carnival pulled into my lane in front of me and a piano dropped from the back and smashed into pieces on the road in front of me. Another near miss.

    683:

    Unleashed dogs are another "Joy" of using two wheeled transport. A squirt of water in a dog's face seems effective, they can't cough and run simultaneously.

    684:

    Are you talking about your post currently at #664?

    Yes, that's it.

    Paws: I'll be the first to admit that what I sketched out is not anything like a realistic plan. Give me a week to sort out the details. Or maybe two. Should be finished next month, or some time this decade at least, if not the next.

    685:

    As and urban cyclist and motorcyclist I learned early on to assume that everyone in a car or lorry was a homicidal maniac.

    To me that is a concise way to operate under the concept of what has been called defensive driving/cycling.

    It doesn't matter who is "right". Just stay alive.

    686:

    Newer vehicles (emphasis on newer) also have rear-facing cameras. The problem fundamentally is that windshield + mirrors + rear-facing camera + whatever else the driver is doing create information overload. 90% of drivers can deal with it, but a minority aren't built to handle it. A significant fraction can't. Especially since some drivers has to pay attention a few deciseconds to seconds longer to see a bike than a car, depending on road conditions. Idk if drivers are worse to cyclists than other cars, though. Keep in mind that the reduction in driving fatalities was due to improved technology, not due to better driving. In my opinion, the presence of cyclists has in some ways reset the progress technology made in reducing traffic fatalities. There's a saying I've heard: "if it's a problem for self-driving car technologies, then it's a problem for a significant minority of drivers".

    687:

    In most of the incidents where a large vehicle has turned across a cyclist that I am aware of, the vehicle was overtaking the cyclist and didn't get clear in front before turning. The Lothian Buses driver training now emphasises this.

    In my experience there are a proportion of drivers who treat cyclists as stationary objects and fail to take into account that they are continuing to move forwards during the overtaking manouver, in some cases quite quickly. Once the cyclist is behind these driver's eyeline they cease to exist. I've had cars sideswipe me pulling back in because they weren't going that much faster than me, never mind lorries and buses. At lease with a car they will notice when I thump their nearside to point out my prescence.

    688:

    Almost certainly for the reason I never learned to touch-type (or learn shorthand for that matter): because as a female you would be automatically pigeon-holed as a secretary not whatever job you were actually doing or applying for,

    In 1968 or 69 my mother signed me up for a Saturday typing class at a local "business" school. 3 months or so. I despised it. Best time I ever spent. I was 14 or 15 at the time.

    Computers still meant keypunching so it was more she wanted me to have the skill of typing. Turned out to be great that I could type.

    689:

    as a female you would be automatically pigeon-holed as a secretary not whatever job you were actually doing or applying for, As far as I could work out, in the 80s that was the usual reason for employing a female,

    My first engineering job was as an electronics engineer. Company hired two from my class: me and a (much smarter) female friend. A month or so after we started the director held a meeting to welcome all the newly hired engineers. We all get into the room and sit down, then he turns to my friend and orders her to get him a coffee. We were all engineers, and yet his mental view was that women were secretaries and servants. This was in 1985/6.

    I wish I'd said something, but while my brain was still going "did he really say that?" one of our teammates stood up and collected coffee orders for everyone in the room and went with my friend to get them, so it wasn't just the lone woman getting coffee for the alpha male.

    690:

    "right through the lights" which she thought meant straight or "left at the next" which didn't mean left at the next intersection, but rather, left at the intersection she was thinking about. "

    We were visiting a niece in Patra (Greece) who speaks English, but not well (better than I speak Greek).

    Her directions included the statement 'After the bridge, turn left'. She had confused the prepositions 'before' and 'after'. So we passed the bridge and found ourselves exiting the city onto a highway under construction with no functioning exits for another 18 km, most of them in a tunnel, and the fuel below E.

    I had wanted to use the map function on my phone, but was overridden. I think my marriage has never come closer to the rocks than that half hour of tension.

    691:

    Thank you, no, I'd much rather have a passenger in the seat to the right of me as I'm driving, or, as we refer to it, the person in the navigator/copilot/dogsbody seat.

    Months ago, we're coming from one facility to another that we'd never been to. Her phone desperately, desperately wanted to get us onto the interstate, which was definitely out of our way, and she could not get the thing to stop that. She tried dragging the path, and it decided it knew better.

    The thing was useless until we got within a mile of where we were going....

    692:

    Then there was the friend my first wife and I would go with, who had a car. Turns meant telling her "make a driver" or "make a passenger", because otherwise, it would be random.

    Then, when I was a cab driver, I came to truly despise the idiots who, as we're in the middle of an intersection, tell me "I meant for you to turn there!"

    693:

    sigh

    Growing up in Philly, if you were under 14, city regs were ride on the sidewalk. Over, you rode in the street, and FOLLOWED TRAFFIC LAWS.

    When I ride, at the very least, and if nothing's coming, a stop sign means a rolling stop for me. And I make turn signals with my hands.

    694:

    You're running the kindle app under wine? Hmmm... I should see if I can get it running under wine on CentOS 7.

    It does drive me crazy on my table that I got to replace my Nook (will not buy kindle - can you say "1984"?), that the actual book file is buried about 5 or 6 directories down, and never named, just a random number.

    695:

    A more specific request: for large vehicles (lorries etc) there should be mandatory cameras or mirrors showing the right side of the vehicle properly. This is for seeing that the way is clear when turning right.

    Or left, in the UK.

    Hell, it's probably cheap enough these days to mandate both sides.)

    To Moz's reply: Australia is weird (unique, even?) in permitting those humongous multi-segment road trains -- most other countries use railways for that sort of load: AIUI Australia did a lot of development in the 20th century when diesel trucks were available so narrow gauge or freight-only railroads didn't get build: dirt tracks worked better. The rest of the world is mostly limited to single-articulation trucks (either a non-artic with a trailer, or a tractor/trailer rig).

    696:

    It was forever. These days, some asshole states made that illegal, for no reason I can understand. Also, 90% of everyone in a car has never heard of that.

    But then, 70% of them have no idea what the stick on the left side of the wheel is for, I mean, a turn signal, that would be telling.

    697:

    Paul I' seriously thinking of buying an electric Moped, so that I can keep the L-R & only pay Khans' extortion on rare occasions - but. It's almost impossible to get an insurance quote & those I've seen ( I will have another try this weekend ) are ridiculously expensive - other alternative: Battery-assisted pushbike, I suppose. Um, err ...

    Mike Collins Birdsong on our plots Robins, Pigeons, Collared Doves, Crows, Sparrows, Wrens, Green Woodpeckers, seagulls (various), .... No to earphones or buds, simply because I then can't hear the actual audible "clues" in the "landscape".

    698:

    The real solution is a transport infrastructure that doesn't put children on bicycles in the same space as giant lorries.

    We have a winner!

    This is entirely correct. It also requires political willpower because it's a hard problem that requires redesigning a lot of infrastructure -- including actually-existing cities -- in a manner that makes them easier to use.

    See also the ongoing failure of Network Rail (or whatever it's called today) in the UK to finish closing off all the level crossings on the network and replacing them with grade-separated crossings (bridges or tunnels). The actuarial cost placed on a human life is IIRC something like GBP £4M, but pedestrian bridges and tunnels -- never mind vehicle ones -- are horrifyingly expensive, especially installing them around a continuously operating railway (which is not a single track, but 2-4 tracks plus signaling infrastructure and overhead power, in many cases: it's the width of a highway).

    The ideal solution would be teleport booths -- hell, that's the ideal solution to all our non-military personal transport needs -- but the tech (and the science) simply doesn't exist.

    699:

    Too many drivers in the US do not use side view mirrors (you can see they're not aligned, and then there's the ones who don't use their rear view (I can't see their face at a stoplight).

    Then there was the woman that nearly hit a friend, decades ago, doing 70 in her BMW while using the rearview mirror TO PUT MAKEUP ON.

    Cop got her.

    700:

    Another strong rec, for WINE or Windows users: use a version of the Kindle application prior to 1.17. The newer releases changed to a new file format which is still problematic for DeDRM (although it's getting better, ability to decrypt and unlock those files is flaky).

    701:

    My guess is that applies to many people with severely compromised semicircular canals.

    I hear you. I'm increasingly compromised that way: can still walk okay, but can't ride a bike any more, and find it easier to take my glasses off when going down a staircase -- blurry lack of focus but consistent at all distances is better than focus changing between steps.

    702:

    I think I've heard birdsong a tiny bit. Mostly, right now, it's overwhelmed by the freakin' cicadas.

    703:

    will not buy kindle - can you say "1984"?

    Yeah: a year or two later I heard about what happened from an Amazon tech person who'd been there.

    That incident went all the way up to Jeff Bezos' desk in 24 hours flat, and the optics were so wonderful that Bezos' response was to issue a standing order that no books were to be deleted from users' Kindles in response to DMCA issues without clearing it with him personally, in advance.

    (I suspect these days the buck stops with someone at a lower level, but probably a VP/executive who has been told to authorise taking a financial loss in preference to risking adverse publicity on that scale.)

    NB: the copy of "1984" that was deleted from the user's Kindle was apparently a bootleg, put in the store by someone who didn't realize Orwell was still in copyright: the Orwell estate issued the takedown notice and it got nodded through. If you go on Amazon you will see all sorts of bootleg shitware and pirate copies -- for example, some asswipes sell "Accelerando" there because they didn't read the Creative Commons license (which forbids commercial redistribution and derivative works). Luckily they're dumb enough to try and sell the badly formatted ebook for twice as much as Ace (the actual publisher), but this stuff is a constant drain on authors' attention, time, and energy. Unfortunately short of putting a human in the loop to check the copyright on all ebooks -- in what is basically the worldwide public slushpile, thanks to the ease of self-publishing -- it's not gonna get fixed any time soon.

    704:

    The rest of the world is mostly limited to single-articulation trucks (either a non-artic with a trailer, or a tractor/trailer rig).

    Tractor-trailer-trailer is getting more common in Canada. I've only seen them on major highways, so I have no idea how they cope with city streets but extrapolating from regular semi drivers along Dixon Road I'd guess they rely a lot on other drivers getting out of their way :-/

    705:

    Hadn't heard that about it going up to him.

    What I've always said is that Amazon should have paid the royalties, and gone after the jerk who put it there.

    ROTFL - the worldwide slush pile. There are a lot of reasons that I wanted to be published - I had a real editor guide me (Walt, of RoF Press), and they had a real copy editor go through it, not just offering corrections for me to accept or reject, but making intelligent and cogent comments.

    I'm on Amazon, now....

    706:

    Gah. I see two-trailer semis in the east. Out west, you sometimes see three. Never seen them on anything but the Interstates, and I hate them anyway.

    Cheap freakin' bastards who don't want to pay for two people to do the job of... two people.

    707:

    but pedestrian bridges and tunnels -- never mind vehicle ones -- are horrifyingly expensive

    Also a question of how many you need. Part of the problem with rail lines (and highways) is that they require detours to get to safe crossing places, and those are often long detours for pedestrians.

    The rail line that cuts through my neighbourhood has quite a number of desire paths that cut across it. It's a two-track line with both freight and commuter trains that run on it. I measured the distance between official crossings and it's 1.5 km along the track. The desire path closest to the local school shaves about 700 m off the walking distance to the school (and also means walking through residential neighbourhoods instead of along a busy road).

    If I was a kid, I'd be really tempted to cut across the tracks to save 1½ km walking each day (as well as not have to walk beside a busy road with drivers doing 80 km/h in a 40 km/h zone).

    708:

    Charlie @ 698 Sometimes, you simply cannot put a bridge or tunnel in ... the classic example(s) are between Barnes - Richmond - Feltham - Staines They want more trains, including new connections to Theifrow .. but ... replacing the LC's at Barnes junctions, Mortlake, N Sheen - in between all the houses in a built-up area ... um, err ... See also: Wokingham & Higham's Park

    709:

    Rail lines here are generally fenced, and in an urban area the fence will be substantial and inspected regularly, so demand paths are uncommon and will quickly be blocked off. A common problem round East Anglia though is the only vehicle access to a crossing is along the tracks so putting a footbridge in gets to be a major logistical exercise.

    710:

    What I have often done if I am going to a specific place is scrawl a little map on scrap of paper. The map is as much a logical/narrative route listing as it is a spatial map, and the act of writing it down helps fix the route in my head.

    711: 671 - I'm going to guess that you haven't seen just how small (relative term) the fields of view of USian "West Coast Mirrors (actually mandated in all 50 states) are. 674 - Not just on USian roads. 693 - Em, my maternal grandmother had her leg broken by a 13 year old riding on a pavement. She went on to develop severe rheumatoid arthritis in that leg. Just because no-one died does not mean it is a better outcome! 695 - Em, have you never heard of Scandinavia or North America? They do double semi-trailers as well. 698 - You've also never heard of Cumbernauld, and more specifically, of "Gregory's Girl" apparently. 706 - You mean like, oh, anyone why buys stuff?
    712:

    gasdive @ 652:

    "Much better than a passenger"

    I love standard phraseology. I had an ex who used to say things like "right through the lights" which she thought meant straight or "left at the next" which didn't mean left at the next intersection, but rather, left at the intersection she was thinking about.

    My ex gave directions in the form of "You were supposed to turn back there!"

    713:

    Rail lines here are generally fenced, and in an urban area the fence will be substantial and inspected regularly, so demand paths are uncommon and will quickly be blocked off.

    I take it you've never visited the USA (or Canada)!

    714:

    When I first met her, my wife couldn't drive.

    A few driving lessons later, her ability to give me directions improved remarkably: partly by adopting the controlled vocabulary of her driving instructor (their phrasing is designed to be unambiguous) and also by internalizing at a gut level that no, Charlie can't take that one-way street -- a lot of the conventions of road use that are "obvious" to drivers are in fact nothing of the kind and may be at odds with those of a lifelong pedestrian.

    (These days she's a better driver than I am.)

    715:

    Re the de-DRM arms race, you're probably OK up to 1.26. I got pushed 1.31 on my Mac without my express permission, and that's bad for my working set up. I reverted to 1.17, but that seems to have screwed up the collections in my Kindle apps on the iDevices, so I might have to go back to 1.23 or 1.26.

    One trick - don't grant access to the Updates folder in the Kindle folders.

    716:

    Greg Tingey @ 662: Meanwhile:
    Another "Red Hat" test described - or something else?
    I must admit, I incline to the "test" hypothesis, as passing the "Occam criterion"

    I don't know what a "Red Hat" test is, but I'm pretty sure it's not the simplest explanation.

    The simplest explanation is still UNIDENTIFIED; i.e. they (and we) don't know what it is ... was. She's talking about how others reacted to a UFO sighting back in 2004, not about something she's seen recently.

    717:

    Canada yes, but you were originally talking about Network Rail not getting round to replacing level crossings on the UK railways. I am well aware that transpondian rail networks are a nightmare...

    718:

    Paul @ 668: Errr, Mods?

    I posted something suggesting that we need a system that keeps kids on bikes in a different space than big lorries. paws4thot @ 665 seems to have seen it at 661, but it's vanished. Is this a glitch, or did I break some rule without realising it?

    paws4thot @ 670: I'll confirm that, as part of #665, I answered a post #661 that has now vanished.

    I think you might have fat fingered it. Looks to me like Paul's comment is there, but it's at #664.

    719:

    The windows version has a tick box in the options for installing updates automatically, and I think there's an "Ignore this version" box on the dialogue it pops up if it spots a new version.

    720:

    David L @ 671:

    A more specific request: for large vehicles (lorries etc) there should be mandatory cameras or mirrors showing the right side of the vehicle properly. This is for seeing that the way is clear when turning right.

    Interesting. I have NEVER seen a vehicle licensed to drive on public roads in the US without mirrors allowing the driver to see rearward on both sides of a vehicle. And this is on large older trucks (20+ years) I drove as a teen around 1970.

    Still doesn't mean truck drivers don't have blind spots. Particularly for bike lanes

    A lot of 'em can't see you when you're in the adjacent lane even if you CAN see their mirrors. Especially if you're in the off-side adjacent lane (right side in the U.S., left side in the U.K. and other RHD countries).

    I don't know if cameras on the back of the truck (or trailer) would do that much for those kind of accidents where the driver didn't see there was a vehicle (or pedestrian or cyclist) in the lane beside the truck before turning or changing lanes, but they'd help for avoiding obstacles in other situations where the truck has to back up.

    I don't see where having to take your eyes off the road ahead to check the monitor for a side view camera would introduce any more risk than checking your mirrors does now.

    Maybe it would be more effective to put up signs along bike lanes to remind cyclists BEWARE TRUCKS TURNING ...

    721:

    My favorite is the trucking company with the signs that say:

    <--- Passing Side Suicide --->

    On the back of the truck.

    The problem is that people don't read the signs then GENERALIZE from that truck to other trucks!

    723:

    Rail lines here are generally fenced, and in an urban area the fence will be substantial and inspected regularly

    This line is fenced — standard chain-link industrial fencing like a school playground. But there are holes that haven't been repaired in years.

    Fencing on rail lines isn't standard here. For one thing, they're a lot longer than UK rail lines. London to Edinburgh is 500 km, which is a pretty short distance by Canadian standards. Last rail trip I made was 1300 km each way.

    724:

    David L @ 688:

    Almost certainly for the reason I never learned to touch-type (or learn shorthand for that matter): because as a female you would be automatically pigeon-holed as a secretary not whatever job you were actually doing or applying for,

    In 1968 or 69 my mother signed me up for a Saturday typing class at a local "business" school. 3 months or so. I despised it. Best time I ever spent. I was 14 or 15 at the time.

    Computers still meant keypunching so it was more she wanted me to have the skill of typing. Turned out to be great that I could type.

    Yeah, but you and I are guys and didn't have to worry about whether knowing how to type was going to get us automatically assigned to the secretarial pool.

    My comment on Clinton not taking typing in High School didn't really take that into account.

    I was just thinking of the similarity in our ages and how learning to type back high school turned out to NOT be a useless skill later in life when I started having to work with computers.

    725:

    whitroth @ 696: But then, 70% of them have no idea what the stick on the left side of the wheel is for, I mean, a turn signal, that would be telling.

    Using turn signals just makes it easier for THEM to cut you off.

    726:

    a lot of the conventions of road use that are "obvious" to drivers are in fact nothing of the kind and may be at odds with those of a lifelong pedestrian.

    I was once in a car being driven by my boss who was new to the city. My directions were excellent right up to the point where I said "turn right and go over the median barrier". As a cyclist that's obvious and easy. Turns out that not even a company car is up to the task.

    Also: Melbourne might be unique in allowing B quads (two 40' containers, one per very long trailer) inside the city limits. It lets them move containers from the port to the industrial area easily.

    But in most cities there's a plethora of trucks that absolutely have to be in the little streets in the city centre. Construction is the obvious one, you can't make a skyscraper using bits small enough to fit in a courier van. Well, ok, you could, but you'd have so much extra traffic that the pollution alone would kill more people than just using big trucks would. So yeah... semitrailers go just about everywhere that's more than about 4 storeys tall (BicycleDutch and NotJustBikes are two blogs+youtube that are worth while for ideas on how to separate stuff)

    https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2021/05/19/rotterdam-takes-an-important-step-towards-becoming-a-cycle-friendly-city/

    727:

    Robert Prior @ 704:

    The rest of the world is mostly limited to single-articulation trucks (either a non-artic with a trailer, or a tractor/trailer rig).

    Tractor-trailer-trailer is getting more common in Canada. I've only seen them on major highways, so I have no idea how they cope with city streets but extrapolating from regular semi drivers along Dixon Road I'd guess they rely a lot on other drivers getting out of their way :-/

    I've seen them in use out west (U.S.) more than around here, although UPS/FedEx do sometimes use them here.

    728:

    1000% I have been driving for 37 years and and have never got a speeding ticket or a in fraction not because I've always driven perfectly but because of iv driven with the assumption that this is a deadly dangerous position to be in. I think I'm lucky in that my father and uncles while not professional drivers did do a huge amount of driving in the 1950s when it was deadly dangerous given the incredibly crappy quality of the material they were driving with. I also had a sibling die from a combo of bad driving plus bad luck, any one of which would have resulted in a crash-phew

    Operating any form of vehicle is a dangerous activity.

    729:

    Re: Driving. My parents were schoolteachers, but also had a 'driver training' business. That meant the basement of our house was a classroom with road safety posters on the walls, when it wasn't the play room of myself and my sister.

    The upside of having parents that were skilled driver trainers meant that they were very good at teaching me to drive, in great detail.

    The downside was that for 2 years everywhere the family went I had two qualified driver trainers in the car, and I was the driver. We also had a very useful but very infuriating brake installed on the passenger side, which neither parent had any hesitation whatsoever about stomping on if they thought I might exceed the safe speed.

    The net result was that I have never had an accident, 35 years later. The downside is that by the time I was able to drive on my own I more or less hated it and continue to see it as a dangerous chore.

    Now of course I'm trying to inflict the exact same thing on my kid.

    730:

    in an urban area the fence will be substantial and inspected regularly

    Sydney is undulating enough and the rail system old enough that much of the city has good pedestrian access across railway lines. Often stations are close enough together that one or two underpasses/road/bridges between each pair plus the station providing a path is enough. There are still places where you have to ride or walk a kilometre or more to cross the lines, but they tend to be industrial rather than residential suburbs.

    Melbourne is flatter and traditionally much more willing to throw lives at the problem, so they have hundreds of level crossings (including pedestrian-only ones). That's slowly changing but it's shockingly expensive because it means either elevating or undergrounding the rail line. Doing the same to roads is often simply impossible because roads/footpaths are how people access houses and building a car-size lift outside every house now that the road is 5m higher or lower is not going to happen.

    Both have fences next to most railway lines, but in Melbourne the fences are often advisory because the lines are very accessible via the level crossings.

    Actually, in Christchurch the lines were mostly unfenced IIRC, because they were freight-only lines with only a few trains a day. Melbun and Sydney are both busy passenger networks.

    731:

    Then there was the friend my first wife and I would go with, who had a car. Turns meant telling her "make a driver" or "make a passenger", because otherwise, it would be random.

    Back in the days I hung out with SCA folks a lot, we'd give turn directions as "sword" or "shield" on the grounds that this was obvious to everyone in the car. This worked fine until the one day we happened to do it with a driver who fought heavy himself but was also left handed...

    732:

    From a WaPo piece that cannot be linked per Charlie's rules. This made me laugh. Title (searchable) "Chinese businessman with links to Steve Bannon is driving force for a sprawling disinformation network, researchers say"[1][3] (This disinformation network was mapped; there are others that are better hidden. Bold mine.) Guo supporters who help produce and spread the network’s memes and videos are a combination of volunteers and paid workers who refer to themselves as “ants,” working for what Guo has called a movement of “whistleblowers” challenging Chinese government power, Graphika said. The researchers titled their report, “Ants in a Web: Deconstructing Guo Wengui’s Online ‘Whistleblower Movement.’ ” The “ants” appear to coordinate their work on chat apps, including Discord, WhatsApp and Telegram, and to post content across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other sites, Graphika said. The researchers found identical posts appearing almost simultaneously from different Facebook accounts, a sign of tight coordination. But the researchers came to believe this work was not “inauthentic,” a term meaning that those posting content are not expressing their own views — often a trigger for takedowns or other enforcement actions.

    From "A Thousand Plateaus", Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari: A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.

    [1] The actual technical report: Ants in a Web - Deconstructing Guo Wengui's Online 'Whistleblower Movement' (Graphika Report, May 17 2021)- Worth a skim at least. Full of links, to web.archive.org copies; nice to see. No authors named in the report; one might presume due to fear. (I just lightly poked some links as accuracy checks. Their other reports have inviting titles.) [2] Google translate of the article supposedly talking about people calling themselves ants (back to 2018 (Bannon started 2018/08)) only refers to ants once, FWIW. [3] Refresher: "...Guo, a Chinese real estate developer whose association with former Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon became a focus of news coverage last year after Bannon was arrested aboard Guo’s yacht on federal fraud charges." (WaPo)

    733:

    The Mac version does as well. Unfortunately, I think you only get so many goes to ignore an update.

    734: 712 - Or my Mum's "Turn that way!" whilst sitting behind the driver and pointing! 718 - Well, could be, but I'm using a laptop with no numeric keypad, and it's unlike me to do a 3 key horizontal displacement (but my proff reiding is bad enough that I can do a numeric typo and not notice). 721 & #722 - Absol-frelling-lutely! I was making a similar point to this upthread where I sad that "even when legal, I don't get up the nearside of a truck unless it's signalling an offside turn and I can get inside its wheelbase before it turns". 723 - OTOH, I don't think you:-

    a) Have, by law, to fence all railway lines (even in places like the middle of Rannoch Moor where you can be 20 miles from any road or footpath). b) Have passenger trains travelling at up to one hundred miles per hour in urban areas.

    726 Para 3 - To confirm, a B Quad is a semi tractor, trailer 1 terminating in a 5th wheel plate over a rear bogie, and then trailer 2? If so, that's more normally a "B Train" in the UK, North America and possibly South Africa. 731 - :-) I also see potential issues with toxophilites, sword and buckler, or if you ever tried to direct a retarius...
    735:

    You've described a B-double. I'm not quite sure how they're connected up, but it looks like 3 trailers terminating in an arrangement the same as on the back of the semi tractor and 1 full size trailer on the end. Though they're very close coupled so it might be something different.

    Not sure if that's actually what was being referred to is actually a b-quad, but that's what one is.

    https://www.trailermag.com.au/lamattina-scores-critical-mass-with-pbs-b-quad-combination/

    736:

    No, precisely NOT! This is the policy that has been followed for half a century, and it has had the effect of turning cycling into an alternative to walking (rather than driving), and discouraging walking as a method of transport.

    As I said, the dangers from lorries are primarily because cyclists are encouraged to undertake, including by the painting of cycle lanes next to the gutter. Ones in between two all-traffic lanes are no better, of course. The safe approach is to take the lane.

    We simply have no room for a viable, complete alternate road network, and the psychle farcilities that result are probably more dangerous than the roads (yes, some data has indicated that). Junctions are where most accidents are, and 'off-road' cycle facilities make those more dangerous by putting cyclists where motorists aren't expecting them. Also, for many people, simply being knocked off is a large proportion of the danger, and that is more likely on those horrors.

    Pedestrians are discouraged partly because the risk of being run into by cyclists is so high - and that is life-threatening for vulnerable ones. In many cases, they are also discouraged from taking the bus for the same reason.

    Worse, separated 'safety' improvements (both routes and at junctions) generally increase the time and effort for both cyclists and pedestrians by over 50%, often 100%. Yes, I have measured it in several cases. And, worst, they are often infeasible or lethally dangerous for less-than-athletic cyclists, pedestrians and wheelchair users.

    Grade-separated junctions are an example. I regularly cross a few level crossings around here, and the average delay is perhaps 15 seconds (i.e. it's usually closed for 45 seconds, one time in five, and occasionally more). A bridge would add two minutes, each and every time, for no increase in safety. And, what is the primary accident risk for many elderly pedestrians? Falling. Stairs are DANGEROUS.

    To Greg: yes, Foxton should be grade-separated, but it's the only one between Shepreth Junction and Royston that is a problem.

    737:

    paws

    723b - actually you do, but they are behind very secure fences. As on the ex-GNR main line, between approx "Alexandra Palace" ( Wood Green) & Welwyn N N tunnel

    EC Tell those cycling danger statistics to my local council (LBWF) who have gone utterly bonkers & "cycle-friendly" to the extent that the main roads are now permanently jammed the pollution is worse - & occasionally, lycra-louts knock down pedestrians - but that doesn't count of course. In the meantime, I may have to change my bike ( made for me in 1972 ) for a step-through electric-assist job. Um.

    738:

    Regarding the earlier bits of this thread that were about kingons and queenons traveling faster than light: this SMBC makes the case for disinformation being supra-luminal.

    739:

    That was very interesting, thanks. I had heard of this, but not in such detail. I don't know what you think, but I think Guo may actually be a Chinese asset. If so they seem to be taking a leaf out of the Russian playback and expanding on it. Even if it is not the Chinese, it is a very impressive influence operation. I certainly do not believe it is in good faith

    740:

    Victoria has quite specific rules and routes for their ridiculous trucks, but those routes include intersections that have pedestrian phases in the lights... it's not just highways (mostly road trains are not allowed in cities).

    https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/business-and-industry/heavy-vehicle-industry/heavy-vehicle-map-networks-in-victoria/cl2-pbs-hpfv

    Picture of a shiny new one: https://www.vawdrey.com.au/2012/04/02/vawdreys-super-b/

    741:

    Clarification: yes, they are "just" a B double, there's only two trailers, it's just that the trailers are both very long and the whole truck is very heavy. They can't turn tight corners at all, there's no steering on the trailers AFAIK (cf old school self-steering units that are now banned https://www.hcvc.com.au/forum/truck_Chat/3338-self-steering-trailer?start=10)

    742: 735 - I'd never seen one of those before; after a B-double I'd only ever heard of a triple, and a full-on road-train. 736 - And in cases like a lot of Glasgow, where an entire all-traffic lane has been turned into a more or less separated cycle lane for the 3 or 4 cyclists a day who use it (based on my observations and knowing some Glasgow private hire drivers)? 737 Para 1 - Yes, I know. "A bit slower" (but not that much it'll save your life) would be things like the Glasgow suburban lines where 70mph trains are separated by 5-strand wire fences (and I don't mean barbed wire guys). 738 - Worryingly, the maths makes enough sense to explain a lot, like Bozo the Clown, Trumpolini the orange carcinoma and DRoss* for examples... 740 & #741 - Thanks; this stuff is interesting to at least some of us, and hasn't made the UK trucking press yet.
    • D(ouglas) Ross, present leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, and who voluntarily uses "DRoss" as a form of his name.
    743:

    Sorry, I'm not sure what you're replying to, or what software the version number refer to.

    744:

    I haven't ever gotten a speeding ticket. I have, however, been involved in accidents.

    Like the drunk doing 45 in a 35 running the red. Like the asshole in the SUV who cruised around the semi at the stop light, going too fast, who only then saw that I'd stalled out the car at the stoplight that had just changed, and I saw her shocked face, and no indication she was stomping on the brakes before she rammed us.

    On the other hand, some of my kids (that lived with me) got training, because they'd hear me an my partner at the time talking about what we were doing, and why what someone else did was stupid and/or dangerous. And I'd do that a lot.

    745:

    I'm going to disagree about the utility of 'separate' bike paths and routes. Where they exist they are excellent at encouraging/protecting cyclists. Vancouver has done a lot on that front (to much bleating on the part of motorists) and has made great strides in increasing cycling. Mileage may vary in each of the various suburbs - City of Vancouver is excellent for cycling, even downtown. North Vancouver passable, Surrey suicidal.

    They work less well when they are 'mixed use', though they can be handled well with good signage and enforcement. Lycra louts are less likely to blaze through places like the Vancouver seawall (which is ~25km long and fully walkable/cyclable) in large part because the volume of pedestrians makes it impossible.

    My issue on mixed use paths are usually dog related, various persons with small dogs that randomly wander in front of cyclists. Even going slow is is hard to predict.

    As I age I have become much less willing to entrust my life to the focus and awareness of random drivers.

    746:

    And they're unsanitary.

    RE: Touchscreens.

    Why do you say this? I can't see it compared to knobs and such.

    747:

    Usually only a few people use knobs, etc. Touchscreens... everyone wants to point, and insist on doing it by touching the damn thing.

    Thereby leaving figurprints all over, making it blurry, as well.

    Oh, and then there's those of us that many touchscreens DO NOT LIKE, and we have to touch, and touch, and touch before it finally wakes up and goes "oh, you talkin' to me?"

    748:

    "the policy that has been followed for half a century, and it has had the effect of turning cycling into an alternative to walking (rather than driving)"

    I don't see that as a result ascribable to any policy, rather as simply a natural consequence of the inherent characteristics of the three modes which will manifest itself no matter what. Cycling and walking are natural alternatives to each other because they are basically the same thing, the choice between the two being whether or not to use a matching device that aids performance where gravity/slope permit, but canes it on adverse gradients. They both share such major distinguishing characteristics as low speed, local-only range, physical effort, exposure, abysmal luggage handling ability, effectively zero cost, wider choice of routes (not limited to tarmaced highway), all routes covering the entire distance from door of departure to door of destination, and absence of expensive legal hoops which must be jumped through.

    The choice between walking and cycling is over relatively small differences of degree among those characteristics, and a few points of unique relevance such as what do you do with the matching device when you're not actually using it (trivial ease of theft with approximately zero chance of recovery, crappy pack-'em-in trains with no bloody guard's vans). The choice between either of them and driving is a choice between those characteristics and their opposites: complete absence of physical effort, complete weather protection (and a comfortable seat), speed and range effectively unlimited (since both exceed both what you need and what you are able to use in the great majority of situations), luggage handling ability sufficient for the majority of cases, not infrequent compulsion to follow indirect and illogical routes of perhaps many miles greater length, many routes failing to end at the actual destination, expensive fuel, expensive legal hoop-holder emptying your wallet once a year (and minor points of unique relevance like councils etc. assuming that if you can stand that cost you must be a rich get who can be dipped as a matter of course, to the point that the dipping is often well over half the cost of a shortish trip).

    Some of these differences are the result of, or are exacerbated by, one policy or another, but most of them are simply inevitable expressions of the underlying fundamental difference between having an engine and a roof, and not having one.

    Agree completely about the ridiculous amount of unnecessary effort incurred by grade separation schemes. The designers of these things seem to get the differences between having an engine and not having one completely arse about face, and quite obviously have (in some towns) never tried to ride a bicycle up a hill in their lives, or (in other towns) think it's perfectly acceptable to be a tosser about it and suddenly whack the path up some fearsome gradient with a sign by the side saying "Cyclists dismount" as some kind of feeble attempt to excuse the layout, which doesn't wash with anyone and is universally ignored.

    It is galling to see the cycle path network in Milton Keynes held up as one of the great things about the place, when in fact it is one of the biggest pains in the arse about it, largely as a result of being riddled with this sort of crap. A road approaches a roundabout through a deep cutting; a cycle path also approaches the roundabout, drops into a tunnel to pass underneath it, then instead of merely ascending back to the level of the road, makes you haul up some impossible gradient all the way from the subway level up to the top of a fifty foot bank. (Then to add insult to injury divides into two paths, one heading at 90 degrees to where you want to go and one apparently, impossibly, heading back in the direction you've just come from.) This is supposed to be all wonderful and scenic and idyllic and rural and ye olde and blah de fucking blah and therefore the Milton Keynes cycle path network is really super. It's not, it's a knackering pain in the arse and the last thing you need on top of everywhere in Milton Keynes being so far away from everywhere else to begin with.

    749:

    "various persons with small dogs that randomly wander in front of cyclists."

    It's not the dogs themselves that are the problem so much as the five metres of string stretched between them and their owners. This can appear in front of you just as rapidly as the dog itself and is a much larger sudden obstruction to have to dodge.

    750: 745 - You say that now, but I suggest you watch "Gregory's Girl", set in the IRL town of Cumbernauld, for an IRL problem with planners' ideas for separated cycleways and footpaths. 747 - I'm another of the ones whom "touch"screens often ignore. I have, in the past, resorted to asking a stranger to touch the bits of the screen that are ignoring me, or to giving up and asking railway station staff if they will issue me a manually printed ticket because the machine won't work for me.
    751:

    My issue on mixed use paths are usually dog related, various persons with small dogs that randomly wander in front of cyclists. Even going slow is is hard to predict.

    IIRC the Seawall trails in Vancouver have separate pedestrian and cyclist lanes, at least for a good stretch of the way. Am I remembering wrong?

    Ottawa has a decent set of trails along the river, hampered by being mixed-use. They have directional lanes, but pedestrians usually ignore them and just walk wherever, often side-by-side because why shouldn't a family of four have an entire trail to themselves?

    Toronto has nice recreational trails but not much cycling infrastructure downtown. Not helped by couriers and mobile shredders treating bicycle lanes as parking spaces, nor by bicycle couriers making Greg's 'lycra louts' look like the epitome of good manners…

    752:

    Cycling and walking are natural alternatives to each other because they are basically the same thing

    This is amusing, given the social attitudes to cycling when it first started. Small villages aghast at the prospect of strangers from larger centres, pearls clutched at the idea of young people able to escape their elders' supervision, agitation of cyclists for better roads…

    Bicycles started the path that cars later took over. In many cases literally, as cars pushed cyclists off the improved roads that cyclists caused to be built.

    Recommended reading: https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com

    753:

    You have got that completely wrong.

    In relatively good conditions, cycling is 4 times as fast as walking, and driving is only 4 times as fast as cycling (motorways and other roads designed for high speeds excepted).

    Back from the heydey of cycling to the start of the demise, the median cycling speed in those conditions was about 12 MPH, and ordinary people in ordinary clothes regularly rode 5 miles, including for commuting, visiting people and shopping. The last year that the government published any data, the medians were down to c. 6 MPH and c. 2 miles. Most of that is because most psychle farcilities are merely relabelled pavements etc., and are both dangerous at normal cycling speeds and require a lot of stopping and starting (a real drain on energy and time). Median cycling speeds on the roads have dropped, too, but nothing like as much, though the distances of utility cycling have.

    I remember when most ordinary people (including me) cycled medium distances (3-10 miles) for utility purposes, in many areas, and have tracked how that dropped off (and enquired of many people for their reasons). I could give a lot more detail, and specific examples.

    754:

    I am a pretty typical "case where varifocals are indicated", but I'm not convinced I'm typical enough to make it worth the bother of trying to hunt down an adequately competent optician to fit them. I treat my specs as a thing to wear when going outdoors and to take off indoors; outdoors there are no objects which are close enough to see clearly without them, while indoors all objects which I need to see clearly I can do so without them (basically, things I need to handle; I don't really care about most of the room being blurred because I know what everything is already). Shops count as "outdoors", in the sense of everything being out of uncorrected range until I pick it up, and as explained I can read my car's speedo without focusing and there isn't anything else that matters.

    David L @ 678: That wouldn't work for me. I effectively have only one eye, the other one being congenitally fucked beyond all possibility of correction. It does have one tiny spot in its field of vision, at some very particular angle which I can't find by trying, where it will give me a clear image in extreme closeup of the face of a pigeon on my shoulder, but it has never perceived clearly any other object whatsoever, and my visual system basically just dumps all the data from it unprocessed to /dev/null if I don't deliberately think about it.

    755:

    Robert Prior #751

    Some parts of the Vancouver seawall do have separated cycling and pedestrian paths. Sometimes pedestrians actually pay attention to them as well, though enough do not that it is a constant issue. No matter, because one does not ride most parts of the seawall for speed. The rest of the city is laced with dedicated and reasonably well designed cycling routes, or at least roads made attractive to cyclists and unattractive to cars in various ways.

    When I lived in Ottawa for grad school I used to ride or walk along the river path to get to school. I found it excellent most of the time, I could get from where I lived (Lowertown) to Carleton crossing only 2 roads. The cycling across the border in Gatineau was also excellent, and along the river towards the Aviation museum. Note that 2 of those are not commuter routes, as the cycling through the city centre was the usual mix of passable and hazardous.

    756:

    In Vancouver I've only really walked the seawall, and I was careful to avoid the cycling paths as I know how annoying it is to dodge pedestrians (from years of bike commuting in Ottawa).

    In Ottawa I used the trails along the river for commuting, and they weren't ideal — lots of extra stops to cross access roads that pedestrians don't really notice but cyclists do. And on the weekend the trails were frequently full of large groups taking up the full width of the path and not getting out of the way to let anyone else past. I basically cycled Hoggs Back to BNR, and then Bayshore to BNR, as well as both to downtown and Carleton. This was the eighties, so things may well be different now (and my memory is no-doubt selective).

    757:

    Rocketjps & others Look at THGIS picture - in front of Wlathamstow (LBWF) Town Hall - I cross it at least 6 times a week. Reading L-to-R: Pedestrain footpath, cycle lane, NEW unnecessary cycle lane, doual carriagway road, cycle lane. Since that G-street-view was taken, they have put flexi-posts along the line of the cycle lane markers. W.T. F. ?? There was alredy a very good segeragated cycle lane on teh LH ( North) side, why the fuck they had to put another one in is anyone's guess.

    paws Not had that with railway tickets ( I usually book manually at my local station, if I'm going outside the London "zones" ) - but I had it at a Cinema, twice. Fucking touchscreen simply ignored me.

    EC the median cycling speed in those conditions was about 12 MPH, and ordinary people in ordinary clothes regularly rode 5 miles, including for commuting THIS - so true But the zealots like arsehole Cllr Loakes of LBWF & the Lycra-louts are NOT INTERESTED in that. I've been told, having arrived at an "LTN" meeting ( to oppose, natch) on my bike, that: "You're not a proper cyclist!"

    758:

    Oh, it's not just that, it's that they're out getting some air and walking their dog, who they allegedly love....

    AND THEY'RE ON THEIR BLOODY PHONES, IGNORING EVERYTHING.

    759:

    Moz @ 740: Picture of a shiny new one: https://www.vawdrey.com.au/2012/04/02/vawdreys-super-b/

    I don't think that would be legal to operate anywhere in the U.S. Looks like those are at least 40ft (12m) trailers (2x20ft shipping containers). Forty foot trailers would be legal, but not double 40ft trailers.

    I'm not quite sure when double trailer semis became legal in the U.S., but I think it was done under the Reagan Administration ... perhaps in the same legislation that mandated a 55mph maximum speed limit & required all states to raise their drinking age to 21 or lose highway funding.

    Mandating states allow double trailer semis was, I think, done for the same reasons as the "double nickel" speed limit, it was supposed to reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil.

    Before then the double trailer semis were only legal in certain western states. The "new" Federal Law/Regulation required states to allow them on Interstate highways and on state or local roads within one mile of the interstate, for deliveries & such because it's no use to allow them on the Interstates if they can't get off to unload.

    I'm pretty sure the changes came as a result of big trucking companies (and UPS/FedEx) lobbying Congress. Now they can pretty much go anywhere a single trailer semi is permitted.

    AFAIK, current Federal Law/Regulation requires states to permit two 28ft (8.5m) trailers. Some states allow two 33ft (10m) trailers & there was a recent attempt in Congress to make that the nationwide standard.

    Currently 39 states do not permit the double trailers longer than 28ft & the trucking industry (apparently led by UPS/FedEx) want to change that.

    760:

    whitroth @ 744: I haven't ever gotten a speeding ticket. I have, however, been involved in accidents.

    I had a lot of speeding tickets when I was younger; before I found out about cruise control. All but one (the first when I was 16) happened out on the open highway.

    Like the drunk doing 45 in a 35 running the red.
    Like the asshole in the SUV who cruised around the semi at the stop light, going too fast, who only then saw that I'd stalled out the car at the stoplight that had just changed, and I saw her shocked face, and no indication she was stomping on the brakes before she rammed us.

    On the other hand, some of my kids (that lived with me) got training, because they'd hear me an my partner at the time talking about what we were doing, and why what someone else did was stupid and/or dangerous. And I'd do that a lot.

    I've been involved in accidents, but never had one where it was my fault.

    OTOH, I have had a defensive driving course ... where defensive == what to do when someone is deliberately trying to kill you.

    761:

    A long time back when I was starting to ride motorbikes one of the members of the ad-hoc bikers group I hung out with explained it to me, riding a bike on the road was dancing with dinosaurs. Even if you did all the right things you were going to get stepped on because you just weren't visible to most car, van and truck drivers. He was a truck driver himself, someone who spent hours each day on the roads driving a stegosaur for a living and he explained that four hours in to a run what he saw on the road was car, car, TRUCK (flash lights), van, TRUCK, car, car, car, car, TRUCK, van... except there was a motorbike in there between the fourth and fifth car. Didn't spot it? Neither did he.

    Here's an old public information advert that was on the teevee back in the 1970s.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiUdo3biIOA

    A bicyclist is even more at risk dancing with the dinosaurs, even less visible and probably more fragile and saying the other guy is at fault doesn't make the bleeding stop any faster.

    762:

    David L @ 746:

    And they're unsanitary.

    RE: Touchscreens.

    Why do you say this? I can't see it compared to knobs and such.

    When I was running the mini-photolab the order kisoks were touch screen and anyone could walk up & use them without having to wash their hands.

    ... as too many of them did. I was the one who had to clean the screens after they did so.

    OTOH, I can be very, VERY selective about who I'm going to allow to touch my "knobs and such"

    763:

    "I remember when most ordinary people (including me) cycled medium distances (3-10 miles) for utility purposes"

    Yes, I have done things like that at various points (and also the carrying of ridiculous loads, like a fridge), but always, when it boils down to it, for the same fundamental reason: lack of a powered alternative. I was too young to drive, or I didn't have a car at the time, or I needed to go and get a part to make the car work again, or I just didn't have any money for the petrol; there were no trains, or there was no railway, or I didn't have the money for the ticket; but I did have a need to do something or other and didn't have a choice. There was often also a fair amount of trying to find some way to be able to put off doing it until the weather was a bit less shit.

    Sometimes also I found myself having to explain the above to whoever I met at the other end because they thought anyone who would consider doing such a distance on a bicycle must be a looney. I'm struggling to think of anyone I know who would not be aghast at the idea of having to do a 10-mile journey without an engine, although they might be OK with 3. They will drive, they will use the train if there is one, but they won't cycle, or walk. It's simply too much effort; and if it's raining...

    After all, this is perfectly standard human behaviour. If you give a bunch of people the choice of two methods to achieve the same objective, one of which consists of an hour of physical labour out in the cold and wet, and the other consists of a quarter of an hour sat on your arse in the warm and dry... well, there will be some people who voluntarily take the first choice, but there won't be very many of them, and everyone else will think they are loonies.

    There will be even fewer of them if you start off by giving them nothing but the first choice for years, and then start introducing the second choice as an attainable alternative, especially if you let the people who have attained it talk to the ones who haven't about what a difference it is; and the people who haven't will compare their lot to that of those who have, and become less willing to expend the same amount of effort when its poor showing in the comparison increases its perceived burden.

    It's not so long ago that even the bicycle to cover the 10 miles on was a valuable and prized possession for the ordinary working stiff, and a car would be out of the question; it has taken less than a lifetime to go from cars being mostly limited to rich people and work vehicles to being something few people cannot get if they want to (even if they have to put up with a shitty one).

    I see no need to seek any explanation for the reduction beyond the bog standard usual human reaction to the advent of an easier way of doing something. Exactly the same thing has happened over roughly the same period to pretty well every everyday activity that has been affected by mechanisation and increased affluence.

    "People in ordinary clothes" seems to be a different kind of matter, apparently a degeneration of the brain caused by excessive affluence. I've seen plenty of people argue that they can't cycle into work because "there's nowhere to get changed" (no toilets? And why the fuck would you even want to?) or because they "would arrive all sweaty" (so don't pedal so hard then, you moron, you're not in a bloody race). But they all seem to be the kind of people who have at least two rather expensive cars both sat at home in the garage because they commute into the middle of London and so can't use them anyway. People who cycle into work because they're on shit money trundle along looking miserable in their ordinary clothes at a pace which is less likely to raise a sweat than walking, and don't feel a need to invent either problem.

    764:

    "A bicyclist is even more at risk dancing with the dinosaurs, even less visible and probably more fragile and saying the other guy is at fault doesn't make the bleeding stop any faster."

    Very true, and a point which is lost on the youtube arseholes who can't think of anything but IT'S MY RIGHTS!!!!! I mean the arseholes who do things like strapping a video camera to their handlebars, riding down the dead centre of the lane so nobody can get past until they manage to goad someone into a dubious overtaking manoeuvre, deliberately holding the exact same line and the exact same speed to try and provoke a collision while the overtaker is cutting back in a bit soon instead of using the space they've left to avoid it, and posting the recording on youtube with some title like LOOK WHAT THE EVIL CAR DID.

    If you're dancing with dinosaurs, don't piss them off.

    765:

    My sister and brother in law once rode their bicycles from Vancouver to St. John's Newfoundland over the course of a summer (7204 Km).

    Their training involved, of course, riding to work. My brother in law happened to work for Ford Motors at the time, and realized that the reason all his coworkers were looking at him funny was because they had assumed he obviously had lost his license for drunk driving. Nobody sane would ride a bike to work all the way across the city.

    I used to live in South Vancouver and ride gloriously downhill the 8 km to work each morning, followed by a sweaty slog uphill after work in the afternoon. In bad conditions I would walk. Some of my coworkers thought I was insane, but I was/am married to a cycling activist so it was an easy choice.

    Life expectancy significantly increases per minute spent walking or cycling, and decreases per minute spent driving. Yes, the stats account for shortened lives due to rapid ablative deceleration.

    766:

    Oh, round here it's a bit different. They don't have both, they have either one or the other, depending on how old they are. The phone ones tend to be straightforward to anticipate (using Newton's first law) and in areas which are also dogulous there is usually plenty of width to dodge. The dog ones throw out sudden obstructions spanning several metres of width in a manner little more predictable than Brownian motion, and they often either have multiple dogs or aggregate into clusters like nucleons with a halo of probability in which dogs may or may not exist at the moment of interaction, so the anticipation can get a bit tricky.

    767:

    Pigeon What do you do when some local politician, of whom all the other local members of his party seem "frightened" has that attitude to anyone at all, driving a car, anywhere? [ Cllr Clyde Loakes of LBWF, actually ] Thus fucking up local deliveries & local firms, whose essential deliveries & work have to go 3 times as far & sit in traffic-jams that he's created, whilst lying about "reducing pollution"...

    768:

    Regarding the earlier bits of this thread that were about kingons and queenons traveling faster than light: this SMBC makes the case for disinformation being supra-luminal.

    It will not surprise you that I already saw that strip.

    Because the model is wrong.

    Just as the model predicts...

    769:

    Life expectancy significantly increases per minute spent walking or cycling, and decreases per minute spent driving.

    Statistically that's true, and it amuses me to bring it up to people from time to time... as below:

    Nobody sane would ride a bike

    And this feeds into the argument from ignorance* that applies to motorists discussing how cyclists behave. Too often the premise is "I would not do that if I was on a bike, therefore it is insane for any cyclist do do it". Reddit has a "bad women's anatomy" area that deals with the parallel of non-women displaying their ignorance of women.

    The other disturbingly common objection is "cyclists have to obey the same rules as motorists. I wouldn't do that in my car therefore ..." Which makes some sense for things like "I wouldn't park my car next to me in my bed"... and cyclists who keep their bikes in bed are somewhat odd. But "I wouldn't drive in the middle of the lane"... really? Are you sure you wouldn't ever do that?

    • also the variant "I can't imagine wanting to do that therefore no-one else should be permitted to do it"
    770:

    "cyclists have to obey the same rules as motorists"

    Yeah that one has got me buggered.

    Motorists as a group seem to have the perception that cyclists are crazy scofflaws who kill pedestrians.

    The reality is that one of the two groups, one kills thousands of people every year, including lots of pedestrians on footpaths, or even people asleep in their beds, and has millions spent on trying to get them to follow the rules in an attempt to somewhat limit the carnage, and the other group are cyclists...

    The fact that these rules are only there because motorists keep killing people through a combination of lawlessness, over confidence, inattention, rage, stupidity and gross entitlement seems to have escaped their notice.

    771:

    An extra "one" crept into that last rant.

    772:

    There was a furore in Melbourne a few years ago when a cyclist ran a red light and killed a pedestrian. The shock media were all over it, with calls for licensing, registration and outright murder.

    As you might expect no similar outrage occurred about the normal, everyday carnage by motorists.

    Laws are made, interpreted, implemented and enforced by {habitual motorists}. It's no great surprise that they favour {motorists} to the point where many {motorists} are unwilling to even contemplate the level of bias, let alone discuss whether it should be reduced.

    (you can replace the {} by virtually any characteristic by which a group of powerful can be distinguished from less powerful)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2zhs8ZAt1g here's a nice song, Anthem by Tiddas. Australian folk music.

    773:

    The Swedish National Bank just finished its internal testing of a new national, blockchain-based currency, the "e-crown" (Swedish "e-krona"). They're now starting testing with external partners.

    The intended goals, pieced together from second-hand info:

    • The National Bank can take back control of "printing" (for lack of a better term) new money from the private banks.
    • Forgery and scams become harder, if not impossible.
    • Better traceability of transactions.
    • Just like cash, transfers can be made directly between peers, without having to go through a bank.

    It hasn't been stated, but there seems to be an understanding that this will replace cash money.

    774: 757 paras 1 - 5 - Maps haven't been updated, but Great Western Road in Glasgow, west of Anniesland Cross used to be a 3 lane dual cabbageway (sic) where the primary uses of the LH lane were cyclists and service buses. If has now been converted into 2 lane DC, and a dividered cycle lane from that was the old LH lane. The practical results of this are:-

    1) Cyclists encounter a ramp every quarter mile or so because 2) The buses now have to stop in lane 2 of 3, and have a raised platform between the footway and their stopping point, which the cyclists are expected to ride over. 3) I'm not clear whether the cyclists or bus passengers have priority at these points but 4) The capacity of the road is reduced, slowing down all powered traffic, including buses, taxis and Scalex electric vehicles.

    757 paws - Well, BR ticketing "beat 7 colours out of them" screens in Scotland are normally outside. 759 - Back when I was young, say about 1968, one of my favourite "toy cars" was actually a US prototype (based on vehicles operated by an actual company) A-double (tractor, 48' box van semitrailer, jeep dolly and then a second 48' box van semi trailer). 761 - If I'm in a chain of traffic, and a motorcyclist overtakes to a position directly behind me, I will wave left-handed as a deliberate "I have seen you" signal. 764 - Yeah, I've encountered this type, in a situation where they could have an entire lane to themself by moving maybe 8' to their left and I would not make the trip by bicycle because I will be returning from 5 hours dialysis, and that is no sort of preparation for a 15 mile cycle ride.
    775:

    Greg You need to try a lot of tests rides before you buy an electric bike. Sellers rarely mention that although motor assistance cuts out at 15mph the work needed to ride the bikes varies a lot between makes and models. My wife has a G-Tech bike with no gears on which you barely need any pressure on the pedals and the bike accelerates to about 10mph (or 15mph on level two assistance) as long as the pedals are moving the motor is on. My Raleigh/Bosch bike needs proper pressure on the pedals to work and the assistance depends on how hard you pedal. At level 1 of 4 its about the same effort as my racing bike on the flat but so much easier going up hills or against a headwind. I got the bike because I couldn't keep up with my chronic asthmatic wife going uphill. Apologies to OGH for writing about bikes.

    776:

    Hey GH,

    I received a mail this morning that Escape from Puroland has been delayed at Amazon to next March. Is this expected?

    (I have a sadness, because I was eagerly awaiting my Bob/Laundry fix.)

    777:

    I also got that note.

    I would have sadfeels if EfP were delayed. I'm really looking forward to it!

    778:

    https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expose-nuclear-weapons-secrets-via-flashcard-apps/

    "For US soldiers tasked with the custody of nuclear weapons in Europe, the stakes are high. Security protocols are lengthy, detailed and need to be known by heart. To simplify this process, some service members have been using publicly visible flashcard learning apps — inadvertently revealing a multitude of sensitive security protocols about US nuclear weapons and the bases at which they are stored."

    This is hilarious, and so-much-of-the-era. I know it's a cliche, but we're apparently living in satire.

    I've been wondering what war might turn into if secrecy becomes impossible.

    779:

    More on reading "Debt: The First 5000 Years".

    I've got to the bit about primordial debt. This is the belief that our lives are not ours, they are merely loaned to us by the gods. Eventually they will have to be repaid, and in the meantime we owe interest in the form of sacrifices and living good lives.

    I was immediately reminded of this: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3400/fc03306.htm

    780:

    paws @ 774 Points 1-4 at the top of same.. you, that more or less what LBWF have done, the "cycling improvements"... aren't.

    Mike Collins Thanks for the warning. I was considering a "Volt" step-through model, at present.

    Paul Well the entirety of christianity & islam are based on that premise, operated as blackmail, of course.

    781:

    Paul Well the entirety of christianity & islam are based on that premise, operated as blackmail, of course.

    I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but the idea of primordial debt is actually from Hinduisum and modern French economic theorists. Per Graeber, p. 55ff, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Primordial_Debt_Theory (same text quoted online). I'm going to be obnoxious and quote the entire Wiki quote, elisions and all:

    "Primordial debt theory ... has been developed largely in France, by a team of researchers—not only economists but anthropologists, historians, and classicists—originally assembled around the figures of Michel Aglietta and Andre Orléans, and more recently, Bruno Théret, and it has since been taken up by neo-Keynesians in the United States and the United Kingdom as well.

    The core argument is that any attempt to separate monetary policy from social policy is ultimately wrong. Primordial-debt theorists insist that these have always been the same thing. Governments use taxes to create money, and they are able to do so because they have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one another. This debt is the essence of society itself. It exists long before money and markets, and money and markets themselves are simply ways of chopping pieces of it up.

    ...

    At first, the argument goes, this sense of debt was expressed not through the state, but through religion. To make the argument, Aglietta and Orléans fixed on certain works of early Sanskrit religious literature: the hymns, prayers, and poetry collected in the Vedas and the Brahmanas, priestly commentaries composed over the centuries that followed, texts that are now considered the foundations of Hindu thought. It’s not as odd a choice as it might seem. These texts constitute the earliest known historical reflections on the nature of debt."

    Actually, even the very earliest Vedic poems, composed sometime between 1500 and 1200 bc, evince a constant concern with debt—which is treated as synonymous with guilt and sin.

    There are numerous prayers pleading with the gods to liberate the worshipper from the shackles or bonds of debt. Sometimes these seem to refer to debt in the literal sense—Rig Veda 10.34, for instance, has a long description of the sad plight of gamblers who “wander homeless, in constant fear, in debt, and seeking money.” Elsewhere it’s clearly metaphorical. In these hymns, Yama, the god of death, figures prominently. To be in debt was to have a weight placed on you by Death. To be under any sort of unfulfilled obligation, any unkept promise, to gods or to men, was to live in the shadow of Death. Often, even in the very early texts, debt seems to stand in for a broader sense of inner suffering, from which one begs the gods—particularly Agni, who represents the sacrificial fire—for release. It was only with the Brahmanas that commentators started trying to weave all this together into a more comprehensive philosophy. The conclusion: that human existence is itself a form of debt.

    Sacrifice (and these early commentators were themselves sacrificial priests) is thus called “tribute paid to Death.” Or such was the manner of speaking. In reality, as the priests knew better than anyone, sacrifice was directed to all the gods, not just Death—Death was just the intermediary. Framing things this way, though, did immediately raise the one problem that always comes up, whenever anyone conceives human life through such an idiom. If our lives are on loan, who would actually wish to repay such a debt? To live in debt is to be guilty, incomplete. But completion can only mean annihilation. In this way, the “tribute” of sacrifice could be seen as a kind of interest payment, with the life of the animal substituting temporarily for what’s really owed, which is ourselves—a mere postponement of the inevitable.

    Different commentators proposed different ways out of the dilemma. Some ambitious Brahmins began telling their clients that sacrificial ritual, if done correctly, promised a way to break out of the human condition entirely and achieve eternity (since, in the face of eternity, all debts become meaningless.)35 Another way was to broaden the notion of debt, so that all social responsibilities become debts of one sort or another. Thus two famous passages in the Brahmanas insist that we are born as a debt not just to the gods, to be repaid in sacrifice, but also to the Sages who created the Vedic learning to begin with, which we must repay through study; to our ancestors (“the Fathers”), who we must repay by having children; and finally, “to men”—apparently meaning humanity as a whole, to be repaid by offering hospitality to strangers. Anyone, then, who lives a proper life is constantly paying back existential debts of one sort or another; but at the same time, as the notion of debt slides back into a simple sense of social obligation, it becomes something far less terrifying than the sense that one’s very existence is a loan taken against Death. Not least because social obligations always cut both ways. Especially since, once one has oneself fathered children, one is just as much a debtor as a creditor.

    What primordial-debt theorists have done is to propose that the ideas encoded in these Vedic texts are not peculiar to a certain intellectual tradition of early Iron Age ritual specialists in the Ganges valley, but that they are essential to the very nature and history of human thought.

    ...

    If the king has simply taken over guardianship of that primordial debt we all owe to society for having created us, this provides a very neat explanation for why the government feels it has the right to make us pay taxes. Taxes are just a measure of our debt to the society that made us."

    782:

    Escape from Puroland is delayed until next March.

    It is still coming out. (It may do so under a different title: currently waiting on an opinion from Legal at the publisher. Shorter explanation: they decided they weren't too keen on the possibility of being sued by the owners of Hello Kitty. This wouldn't be a problem -- it's easy enough to fix in the text -- except Legal left it until the very last moment to get involved.)

    783:

    Other news:

    We are tentatively aiming for January 11th for "Quantum of Nightmares", the sequel to "Dead Lies Dreaming" -- I have to pull my finger out and finish the final edits. (It's hard and I'm burned-out and this is not a good mental environment for writing.)

    There are also preliminary discussions in the pipeline about a 2nd Edition of the Laundry Files role playing game.

    (The 1st Edn. Laundry RPG gathered a cult following, but was abruptly yanked off sale in 2018, because Chaosium, the owners of "Call of Cthulhu", abruptly cancelled the licenses they'd previously sold to other games companies permitting them to tailor the CoC rule set and sell derivative/spin-off games ... which included the Laundry RPG. Anyway: things are beginning to move again and a new game with new mechanics may surface eventually. But not before 2022 at the earliest.)

    784:

    That's a major bummer. Sorry to hear that.

    785: 782 & #783 - So positive on the whole, except for Legal being unable to get their posteriors in gear.
    786:

    Re: Pigeon & EC’s discussion on whether cycling is more of a replacement for walking or driving:

    I’m now a typical inner-suburb commuter.

    At rush hour my work is 45 mins walk from my house, 15 mins bike, and a 20 minute drive (if I pay for the expensive parking building next to my office).

    So, more like a car.

    But cycling gets me wet when it rains, isn’t a cargo-locker-on-wheels like my car, doesn’t let me give my teenage daughter a lift.

    So, also more like walking.

    787:

    #782 & #783 - So positive on the whole, except for Legal being unable to get their posteriors in gear.

    I'm glad that they're still in the pipeline too. As for legal.... I'll personally give them a break, due to 2020. While having Puroland in the title really should have red-flagged it, I have no idea how many lawyers are actually in Legal and how many were dealing with Covid-adjacent horrors. Horrors, in this case, being either personal or people doing really stupid things that the lawyers really had to get solved ASAP or else.

    I'd also point out that I've gotten in the habit of doing a trademark database search whenever I get a bright idea. I just checked, and per tmdn.org, the only live trademark on Puroland is in Japan. So unless the book is libelous or slanderous to abstracted kitties, or unless it's positioned to become a best-seller in Japan (I hope!) it may be okay.

    788:

    Bit of a mixed bag, but hey... double dose next winter!

    I saw that the sequel had to be renamed on your Twitter. Any word on the title for book 3?

    789:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 778: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expose-nuclear-weapons-secrets-via-flashcard-apps/

    That ain't good.

    "For US soldiers tasked with the custody of nuclear weapons in Europe, the stakes are high. Security protocols are lengthy, detailed and need to be known by heart. To simplify this process, some service members have been using publicly visible flashcard learning apps — inadvertently revealing a multitude of sensitive security protocols about US nuclear weapons and the bases at which they are stored."

    This is hilarious, and so-much-of-the-era. I know it's a cliche, but we're apparently living in satire.

    I've been wondering what war might turn into if secrecy becomes impossible.

    You'd have no defense against all the communists, fascists, christian dominionists, islamists, racists, trumpists ... all the predatory groups who consign "others" to hell & death just for being the "others".

    790:

    Paul @ 779: More on reading "Debt: The First 5000 Years".

    I've got to the bit about primordial debt. This is the belief that our lives are not ours, they are merely loaned to us by the gods. Eventually they will have to be repaid, and in the meantime we owe interest in the form of sacrifices and living good lives.

    Our lives are given to us by our parents. As a debt it can never be repaid. It can only be given forward to future generations.

    791:

    It's trivially easy to litigation-proof the novella: simple search/replace for about four nouns will do it ("Puroland" -> "Kawaiiland", "Princess Kitty" -> "Queen Cat", etc.). I even flagged it as a possible issue when I submitted the manuscript a year ago, and was told it wouldn't be a problem. And it wouldn't be a problem, if Legal had stuck their oar in a bit earlier than a month before publication.

    Sigh. These things happen. (Sanrio has not taken action over mentions of their IP in written fiction in the past; the issue here is that the tone of my novella might be mis-read as negative. And nobody wants to be a test case ...)

    792:

    I was going to try to get some work done around here this weekend (outside), but it's stormy today, so hardly anything got done. Gonna sit here and waste time on this damn computer.

    But the little doggy is happy just sitting here in my lap.

    793:

    No idea what the title for book 3 will be; it's only half-written (on hold while I do edits to book 2, which has an actual publication date now) so it's not critical for another 6-12 months.

    794:

    For what it's worth I also don't think Disney ever sued over The Dickies album "Stukas Over Disneyland."

    795:

    Our lives are given to us by our parents. As a debt it can never be repaid. It can only be given forward to future generations.

    That's the Buddhist version: the "Milk Debt" you owe to Dear Old Mom.

    It's worth reading Debt to see how Graeber attacks the theory of primordial debt. Here's the thumbnail, because I'm wasting time rereading the book:

    One part is that it isn't very primordial as a theory: the French theorists cherry-picked a 5th Century BCE text (e.g. iron age) from a time when India was monetizing and trying to figure out what was going on.

    Meanwhile, you go back to the Bronze Age Fertile Crescent, Ye Olde God Kings did not assert that, due to their divinity, taxes were owed as a debt to them creating the society that gave you life. It was actually the opposite: debts were what free men (and probably women) contracted with each other, but in the normal course of things, what with crop failures and such, this led over a decade or two to a large proportion of the population being in debt peonage to the few rich. To prevent the peons from revolting and/or running off, the God Kings regularly declared jubilees (the word Amargi, translated as "Freedom" more literally meant "return to mother.") to wipe all the debts clear and allow people to take their lands back and reunite with their families.

    That's exactly the opposite of primordial debt theory.

    More damningly, the idea of a nation-state being a unitary society is fairly 20th Century. Before that and even during it, it was normal for many/most people to live outside civilized societies, just as it was normal for people to be members of multiple, often conflicting, societies. Graeber's example is of a Armenian Christian merchant living within Genghis Khan's empire, which empire had been formed during the merchant's life. Where would his primordial debt have been owed? To the Christian God? Armenian people, the merchant society to which he belonged, which had its own complicated norms and rules but was multicultural? Or to the great Khan, who probably had no clue he existed, unless he did something colossally stupid like failing to pay tribute when the Mongols showed up.

    Primordial Debt Theory only works if you assume that people are ultimately a subunit of something greater which makes their entire existence possible. There's only one such subunit (the solar system), and anything smaller than that (nation, state, religion, town, etc.) is only partially responsible for your existence, to the point where you can go elsewhere without ceasing to exist.

    Nice theory, but it doesn't even work for Christianity.

    796:

    Does cycling replace walking or driving? Sometimes it’s superior to both. Long ago when I lived in Greater Manchester I used to cycle 11 miles to work. In the morning I used to take my bike on the train for half the journey and cycle the rest. In the evening I cycled the whole way home. I usually arrived home before my work colleague who lived in the next road to mine. Cycling took 45 minutes and the car journey in rush hour took an hour. I didn’t like getting wet so if the weather forecast said rain I used my car instead. When I moved to Leeds I was only three miles from work but the conditions on the roads were so bad that I used the car instead. But the bike was still faster on the few times I used it. And after I was stabbed in Chapeltown I gave up ever using the bike to work. In Norfolk I never used my bike for the 12 mile journey to work because cycling on winding country roads with high hedges seemed akin to suicide. But cycling can be faster than a car in cities- at least in the UK.

    797:

    a new game with new mechanics may surface eventually

    I don't know where you are in that process, but in terms of game systems Pelgrane Press' Gumshoe is a solid set of rules, concentrating more on drama than 'crunch'. It's even been used for Cthulhu…

    http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/gumshoe/

    If I was going to run a Laundry game (which, honestly, is unlikely, although I do have it) I'd hack it to use the Gumshoe system rather than the CoC system.

    798:

    Aghast at a 10mi ride? When I was in the best shape of my life, back in the mid-seventies, I had a job punching Addressograph plates for my mother's boss for a month. That was in Germantown (a neighborhood in nw Philly), and living in University City, west Philly. 11mi, each way, uphill both ways! (Really - the Schulykill River was in between. I could manage it in 55 min....

    But going to most jobs, like when I worked in a library, no, the head of the library spoke to me privately, and so I wound up changing t-shirts/whatever in the bathroom when I got to work.

    799:

    Idiots.

    But, yeah, search and replace. I have a short I had to do that with - it's partly an homage to CL Moore, and Jirel of Joiry. I only mentioned that name, the story's about her great grandniece, but I changed it when someone advised me to.

    Even though Moore is, damn it, out of copyright.

    800:

    At rush hour my work is 45 mins walk from my house, 15 mins bike, and a 20 minute drive (if I pay for the expensive parking building next to my office).

    That's like me when I moved to Thornhill. 15 minutes bike to work vs. 20-25 drive (mostly because of multiple choke points and restrictions designed to stop people shortcutting using the street my school was on).

    I used to cycle until snow came, but stopped when school management changed policies and eliminated any form of secure bike storage. At the time Toronto was the bike theft capital of North America, and we were a minor hotspot in Toronto.

    801:

    Since this gets to authorial burnout, I'll quote some more Graeber, this from near the end of the book.

    "My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could we be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternate futures."

    ...[two paragraphs of cool stuff I'm too lazy to transcribe. CF also Fair Use]...

    "...there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism's own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine imploded [this was published in 2011], we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

    "To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away.

    "Even if we are at the beginning of the turn of a very long historical cycle, it's still largely up to us to determine how it's going to turn out..."

    802:

    if Legal had stuck their oar in a bit earlier than a month before publication.

    The problem is they are NEVER invited early. To everyone else on a project in almost any industry they are nothing but a downer telling people what they should not do. So management treats them like that foot fungus they keep putting off getting treated until they absolutely must.

    Says he who got to be friends for a time with the lawyer who wound up in charge of ITT's IP legal team. This was in the 80s when ITT was BIG.

    803:

    For what it's worth I also don't think Disney ever sued over The Dickies album "Stukas Over Disneyland."

    IP law and copyright fair use (in the US) is very murky around the edges. So in many situations like this LARGE CORP will send a letter to small fry saying "We own trademarks and rights to XYZ. We notice your use of XyZ. We expressly forbid you to use it in ways contrary to trademark and copyright law."

    Small fry is on notice. BIG CORP has legally staked their claim. Corners have been pissed on and marked. Now everyone can retired to their caves and resume normal business.

    804:

    I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The "Stukas over Disneyland" CD can still be purchased today from the Big Muddy River, under that name. Of course, Passport Records was big enough to afford a reasonable number of lawyers.

    805:

    Small fry is on notice. BIG CORP has legally staked their claim. Corners have been pissed on and marked. Now everyone can retired to their caves and resume normal business.

    As long as they aren't hobbit holes…

    https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/b-c-hobbit-house-renamed-after-threat-of-lawsuit-from-warner-bros

    806:

    For people interested in "Havana Syndrome", this caught my eye a few weeks ago, haven't mentioned it here, researchgate link. (Not for the squeamish; animal research.) Also see the refs, and note there is also a body of clinical work with humans for other purposes (therapeutic). Infrared neural stimulation at different wavelengths and pulse shapes (18 December 2020) The abstract starts with (bold mine): Neural stimulation with infrared radiation has been explored for brain tissue, peripheral nerves, and cranial nerves including the auditory nerve.... Note: The skull and spinal cord are mostly opaque to visible light, but near infrared penetrates ("up to 4 cms"), if i'm reading one of the papers correctly.

    Re debt, there's also the entropy debt that has been referred to by a few here, very approximately (at least as I've used it) [observed] cheating [of probability]. (Many (but not all) religions strongly discourage such cheating, e.g. prohibitions against divination and sorcery in the Torah (Christians say "acts of rebellion"). Prosperity Gospels do theoillogical cherry picking to work around these rules in their scripture to justify their selfish prosperity magic. Closer to the point, see also Heteromeles' outline of the treatment of debt by Hindu and related theologies at 781.(Thanks!) [1] Perhaps it can even be gamed to make over-enthusiastic attackers entropy debt ridden; such debt from attacks is incurred by the attacker. (Perhaps even if the attack is reflected, even if the reflected attack is ... :-)

    [1] This wikipedia section is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma#Causality

    807:

    I increasingly see "Havana Syndrome" as an autoimmune deficiency in the most paranoid part of a dysfunctional and disintegrating police-state.

    In other words: USA's "Sam Hall" (Hat-tip: Paul Andersson)

    808:

    If the skull is opaque to visible light how can the pineal be light sensitive?

    809:

    H Religion & Debt ... "Spell Tokens!" ( The Flying Sorcerers ) yes?

    icehawk Even in my present condition, with my back playing up ( No injections, because everyone's busy with C-19 ) the fastest way for me to get to Stratford, as it was in 1961, is by bicycle. Problem is, these days, if I want to go there, it means specialised shopping, which means bringing stuff back ... as opposed to then, when all I was carrying was a small (good) camera, to capture the end of steam. Yes, the pros & cons. Hence me wondering about an elecric bike & an attached load-trolley.

    JBS Spot on ... But that didn't stop the christians & muslims ( in particular ) weaponising "spiritual" debt, by claiming that we are all evil sinners & can only redeem this fake debt by grovelling, surprise, to the priests. And, as "H" says - doesn't apply the chistianity ( or islam, either )

    Mike C Chapeltown, Leeds, which I don't know at all ( Like the rest of Leeds ) or the other one, NE of Grenoside, in the outer suburbs of Sheffield ( which I do know ) ?? Doesn't sound good, either way.

    Bill Arnold That is the "established" religion trying to make sure they have cornered the market by demonising & persecuting alternatives. Classic religious behaviour, in fact.

    810:

    To everyone else on a project in almost any industry they [Legal] are nothing but a downer telling people what they should not do.

    My experience was different. Some question arose about whether something we were doing would be an IP infringement (it wasn't clear-cut, the IP owner had changed their licensing terms), so Legal were consulted.

    In my innocence I expected them to reply "this and this infringe Section A of the Something Act 1993, and that and that would be contrary to paragraph N of our proudly paraded CorporateEthicsPolicy, so you will need to do x, y and not z."

    What they actually said was "what is the probability of being successfully sued, and what would the damages be?"

    811:

    Er, no. Admittedly, this story comes from in a university with an excellent record of administrative incompetence (Bellinghman knows about that, too). But we asked them in early, they took ages to respond, and basically told us to tear up our draft contract and replace it with their standard one. As this was negotiating with a Very Big IT Company for a one-off supercomputer, their contract was all about fungible commodities bought from very small suppliers, and had a large number of other obviously unacceptable clauses, we looked at each other, and quietly ignored them.

    In OGH's case, it sounds as if it was glanced at when first raised, given a glib and unthinking response but someone unimportant, only passed to a senior person for approval at the last moment, who got cold feet, and thus delayed. I have seen that happen more than once.

    812:

    The civil law version of Primitive Sin.

    813:

    "I'll quote some more Graeber"

    Why? He's awful.

    Every time Graeber writes about something that I actually know about, he gets it wrong. Really wrong: his writing is full of factual errors, logical mistakes, and pure innumeracy.

    I don't know a lot about economic history before the renaissance, but the stuff in his book on Debt that's in the eras of economic history I do know about is riddled with complete factual howlers. Which makes it very hard to take him seriously when he writes about things I don't know much about.

    To see what I mean - this is Graeber on the creation of Apple computers:

    "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages."

    814:

    I think this could have connections to the "Havana syndrome" https://samim.io/p/2019-12-29-microwave-auditory-effects-and-applications-book-by-j/ But I'm still unsure whether it is some kind of mass hysteria as PHK says or a side effect of some kind of microwave device. A sensor system or jamming or somesuch

    815:

    Yeah, I corresponded with him about that particular howler. He was mortified by it: seems his test readers called it out a couple of times, it went through iterative re-writing to fix it ... then a very poor hacked-about early draft ended up in the final draft because (the usual change-merging mix-up).

    816:

    icehawk @813:

    To see what I mean - this is Graeber on the creation of Apple computers:

    "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages."

    That's... That's... Just...

    Words fail me, it's so beyond wrong, did the eejit even consult he public record on anything he wrote about?

    And he may be lucky Jobs'n'Woz didn't sue his arse off.

    817:

    Quick question for Frank…

    What's your professional opinion of Suzanne Simard? Her book popped up on one of my review lists and I'm wondering if it's worth reading — looked interesting, but my ecological knowledge is very patchy and years out-of-date.

    818:

    Well, I can see a gaping flaw in the base research quoted. Monopulse narrow beam tracking radars typically work at 10Hz or 20Hz, not up at 50Hz. Traffic control radars we don't tend to consider transmit pulse frequency so much, because the transmitter head is rotating at usually 1 sweep every 4 to 15 seconds. Phased arrays you'll need a real radar technician with relevant experience for, but they weren't invented in the 1960s anyway.

    819:

    Havana Effect I note the mention of low-frequency signals & remembered French ( & Soviet ) experimentation with Infrasound, back in the mid 60's The problem, from the p.o.v. of those using the devices was directionality & the possibility of it "bouncing back" [ One of the French experimenters managed to put himself in a wheelchair as a result ] IF - if someone/group has managed to "successfully" weaponised this or similar, using maybe a combination of pulsed-microwaves_&-infrasound ... it might go some way towards an explanation?

    820:

    "People" have been trying to make "death rays" since the 1920s or maybe 1910s. The closest they've got so far is radars and microwave ovens.

    821:

    What's your professional opinion of Suzanne Simard? Her book popped up on one of my review lists and I'm wondering if it's worth reading — looked interesting, but my ecological knowledge is very patchy and years out-of-date.

    Well, I'm not a professional mycorrhizast anymore, and I haven't read Finding the Mother Tree yet.

    That said, I liked her early papers, because she was doing something cool: tracing radiocarbon out of one tree, through an ectomycorrhizal mycelium, into another tree. What form is that carbon in? I don't think the question has ever been answered. That's part one.

    Part two: when I was in grad school in the 90s and oughts, we were all chattering about how to determine if plants showed parental care for nearby seedlings. This wasn't about mycorrhizae, but about root fusions in oaks. This is critical point #1: plants root fuse, so if you're one who thinks plants only connect via mycorrhizae, think again.

    Part three: of course plants communicate with each other. They use things like ethylene gas among many other signals. Here's the problem: plants don't have nervous systems, so they use chemicals diffusing through the air, through their tissues, and probably through mycorrhizae (whatever was radiocarbon labeled in part one) to communicate. But the communication could as easily be between different parts of the same plant as between different plants: it's one set of cells broadcasting a message to another set of cells, and those cells may or may not be on the same plant. It's slow, but it works really, really well. So far as I know, plants process information more through something like quorum sensing among different tissues (especially meristems) than in any way analogous to thinking, but that doesn't mean that their collective information processing is simple.

    Part four: Simard's been embraced by the unthinking, along with Stamets. On one hand, I agree that in as profoundly a mycophobic place as North America, getting people to realize fungi are not just cool but critically important is an important task in itself, so bravo for them. Unfortunately, too many people now think forests are superorganisms and mycorrhizae are the internet that connects each plant into a whole (that idiot wood-wide web metaphor from the 1990s). Going from phobic to born-again is a normal phenomenon, and not just in America. But getting people to go from born-again to clued in is much harder, because neither phobia nor born-againness requires much thought, while being clued in does.

    There are parallels between the internet and how plants and fungi interact with each otehr, but the situation probably more similar to the internet of 2021, not the internet of the 1990s. Unfortunately, the all-hype-and-dreams-about-mycorrhizae crowd get furious when you try to interject some science that doesn't support their visioning. And they conveniently ignore the fact that the theory that forests are superorganisms was shot down in the 1950s in the Vegetation Of Wisconsin. It's not hard to look for patterns that indicate the presence of a superorganism, however it's formed, and those patterns aren't present in the forests sampled or anywhere I've ever looked.

    Anyway, I'm not sure whether Simard's another John Lilly and/or drunk on her own kool aid, how good her latest science is (I suspect it's good, but I haven't read it), or whether her public persona is her attempt to get North Americans to get a clue about mycorrhizae, and it's gone perhaps a bit askew. Until I see otherwise, I'm going to assume her science is good and that she's worth reading, but her followers and enthusiasts annoy me. Take this for what it's worth.

    822:

    Yeah, I corresponded with him about that particular howler. He was mortified by it: seems his test readers called it out a couple of times, it went through iterative re-writing to fix it ... then a very poor hacked-about early draft ended up in the final draft because (the usual change-merging mix-up).

    Thanks for reminding me why I use date-stamped version trees with separate files for each major edit, rather than merging documents. Sheesh.

    823:

    Well, Greg's take on Primordial Debt theory was even more wrong, and Graeber at least pointed out the same flaws I'd spotted in the theory.

    I agree that Graeber's screws up sometimes, but Debt's worth reading regardless, even if you don't like the rest of his work (and I don't). Cherry-picking a howler as a reason to ignore someone entirely isn't all that great an operating principle. If we did that around here, this blog would have disappeared a decade ago or more.

    I'd finally point out that the message of the book, that debts are political, that only some people are forced to repay them (the rich often slide) and that people shouldn't let themselves be defined by who and what they are in debt to, is a fairly important message.

    This last point even gets back up Greg's anti-Christian nose: in the Presbyterian version of the Lord's Prayer, it's "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." While the connection between sin and debt is a morass, I'd simply point out that this translation of Jesus' words seems to be making the same point as Graeber. The morality that a good person is one who pays their debts on time may be diametrically opposed to what Jesus actually preached.

    824:

    Charlie Stross @ 791: It's trivially easy to litigation-proof the novella: simple search/replace for about four nouns will do it ("Puroland" -> "Kawaiiland", "Princess Kitty" -> "Queen Cat", etc.). I even flagged it as a possible issue when I submitted the manuscript a year ago, and was told it wouldn't be a problem. And it wouldn't be a problem, if Legal had stuck their oar in a bit earlier than a month before publication.

    Sigh. These things happen. (Sanrio has not taken action over mentions of their IP in written fiction in the past; the issue here is that the tone of my novella might be mis-read as negative. And nobody wants to be a test case ...)

    Is it possible for a publisher's legal department to contact the IP owner's legal department and have them look at an advance copy of the manuscript and sign off on whether the IP owner wants the names changed? If they do object you can "change the names to protect the innocent". But maybe they won't object.

    Probably too late in this case, but that seems like it might be "due diligence" or whatever it's called in the publishing business. Seems like a trivial thing the legal department should have cleared up much earlier in the process.

    825:

    Is it possible for a publisher's legal department to contact the IP owner's legal department and have them look at an advance copy of the manuscript and sign off on whether the IP owner wants the names changed?

    That would cost money and take time. Also: never ask a question you aren't prepared to hear the answer to.

    826:

    H Actually it's yet another example of what the supposed "christian" message is, per Yeshua - & what the churches & christians actually do ... not correspending, shall we say? And yes, the contrast between the rich & powerful evading both their monetary & religious debts, & the rest of us being shafted is also noticeable.

    827:

    Actually it's yet another example of what the supposed "christian" message is, per Yeshua - & what the churches & christians actually do ... not correspending, shall we say? And yes, the contrast between the rich & powerful evading both their monetary & religious debts, & the rest of us being shafted is also noticeable.

    Oh, I agree that most established churches are hypocritical, both in their bureaucracies and in their congregations.

    What I disagree on is that this is a problem of churches. Most established entities, whether businesses, religions, NGOs, governments, militaries, academic institutions, licensed technical fields, infrastructural organizations, or what have you, are hypocritical both in their bureaucracies and their supporters. It's one of the fundamental problems of power politics.

    Where I also disagree, strongly, is that there notion that all religious people are therefore hypocrites. That, I am quite sure, is not only untrue but slanders the good people who are not hypocrites. And yet again, I urge you to start figuring out how to tell the difference, because good people are rare and worth supporting in most contexts.

    828:

    In today's news, police raid suspected cannabis farm, find pirate Bitcoin mine. It's the 21st century and satire cannot keep up with reality.

    829:

    H Oh, I'm quite aware that there are people who believe they are "good christians" - unfortunately, they are (almost all of them ) being taken for a ride. And, of course, the main message: That there's a BigSkyFiary looking out for you. Is complete lying bullshit from start to finish

    830:

    I think there's a very simple way to separate "good" Christians from "truly morally intelligent" Christians. One can simply ask them for their take on the story of Onan, and the answer will be obvious very quickly.

    831:

    I don't know about that. The reason I linked to that was to just to show something about microwave effects on humans, in particular so called "synthetic telepathy". There is a load online about it, I just picked that one as it seemed like an overview. It may not be totally valid, but it seems there can be effects similar to those reported, induced by microwaves. Whether this is an explanation, I have no idea.

    832:

    The deal with Onan was that his brother popped his clogs and this landed him with some kind of tribal obligation to father children on his dead brother's wife, as some kind of fallback sperm donor with a lot of the same genes. Only he didn't want to, so he shagged her but pulled out and spurted on the ground instead of doing it properly, so he could pretend he'd given it his best shot but no soap, oh dear what a shame. His sin was in trying to weasel out of his obligation. Nothing to do with wanking; there isn't even any mention of him wanking in the story at all.

    I dunno whether that makes me "truly morally intelligent", or is just all of a piece with me always having found those "comprehension" exercises in English lessons (read this passage and answer 10 questions on it) so utterly trivial that I was never sure what the actual point was.

    Still, it's kind of amusing that the Catholic church appears to have less of a problem with coitus interruptus than with other methods of contraception. And the standard misinterpretation does at least create occasional opportunities to snigger at diesel engines which would not otherwise exist.

    833:

    Well, as a generalisation, the word "microwave" can refer to frequencies between 300MHz and 300GHz, wave lengths of 1m down to 1mm.

    It's generally advised not to get too close to microwave emitters, but "too close" is a variable distance with transmitter power and how long an exposure a stationary object inside the radiation hazard distance gets. There are entire courses on this stuff, which I've left to the radiation supervisors to actually take and pass. About the only point I've really needed to know was the radiation hazard distance for the transmitters actually at work, so we could draw radiation footprint diagrams.

    834:

    There is an old Cold War story about the American embassy in Moscow finding themselves being bathed in microwaves and wondering exactly why the Russians were trying to cook them. Eventually they figured out that what was really going on was that there was some kind of passive diaphragm effort that gave an audio-modulated return incorporated in the building's ordinary fittings. But the "they were cooking us" interpretation doesn't seem to want to lie down.

    835:

    The Brick Testament version is good. (Brutally literal Bible stories, told with Lego visuals.) https://thebricktestament.com/genesis/er_and_onan/gn38_07.html The spilled seed is LOL, as is Yahweh as a axe-wielding divine storm trooper. (Last frame.) (Yeah, the cultural context was very much of its time, and inheritance was (probably?) involved.)

    836:

    hIf the skull is opaque to visible light how can the pineal be light sensitive? In humans that's more complicated that one might expect, involving some neurons in the retina and a complicated pathway to the (non-light-sensitive) pineal gland. [1]
    Sadly, the pineal gland can become calcified[2] with age, and notably, with water fluoridation! :-) One rabbit hole to go down is the alternative practices for pineal gland decalcification. [3] (The seat-of-the-soul/third eye stuff is not just in western traditions, either. In the west, blame (mostly) René Descartes ) (And I'm assuming you're probably snarking.)

    [1] Physiology of the Pineal Gland and Melatonin (Anna Aulinas, December 10, 2019) "However, a few retinal ganglion cells contain melanopsin and have intrinsic photoreceptor capability that send neural signals to non-image forming areas of the brain, including the pineal gland through complex neuronal connections. " [2] Pineal Calcification, Melatonin Production, Aging, Associated Health Consequences and Rejuvenation of the Pineal Gland (2018 Feb) "The pineal has the highest calcification rate among all organs and tissues. Pineal calcification jeopardizes the melatonin synthetic capacity of this gland and is associated with a variety of neuronal diseases. " [3] The mainstream take: Decalcifying Your Pineal Gland: Does It Work?

    837:

    Bill Arnold @ 835: "The Brick Testament version is good. (Brutally literal Bible stories, told with Lego visuals.)"

    My parents were probably very bad catholics (but good persons) because they never told me about Onan.

    I learned about Onan in the 1980s in an issue of The National Lampoon. It had something called "The Book of Onan" and it exposed Onan as a shameless wanker.

    838:

    There is an old Cold War story about the American embassy in Moscow finding themselves being bathed in microwaves and wondering exactly why the Russians were trying to cook them. Eventually they figured out that what was really going on was that there was some kind of passive diaphragm effort that gave an audio-modulated return incorporated in the building's ordinary fittings...

    In a decorative seal, yes! (The government heraldry not the aquatic mammal.) If anyone here is somehow unaware of The Thing by all means go check that out that writeup or the Wiki article. The Thing was clever and unexpected.

    That it was a brainchild of Leon Theremin whose work contributed to so many cheesy sci-fi movie soundtracks is just icing on the cake.

    839:

    ...in the building's ordinary fittings.

    I may have jumped to conclusions. Were you remembering the multi-element Yagi found in a chimney back in the late 1970s? That prompted some excitement when the Americans finally found it, from what I read.

    840:

    Page has no content, but no, you were right the first time :)

    842:

    Page has no content, but no, you were right the first time :)

    Strange, the https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/thing/index.htm link loads for me.

    Thanks for the Selectric article. The IEEE article mentioned that gimmick in passing but the author cared more about antennas than about espionage. I think I could spend some time browsing the Crypto Museum site.

    843:

    From the King James Bible, Genesis 38:

    7 And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord slew him.
    8 And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother.
    9 And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.
    10 And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him also.

    So it seems to me to be a thoroughly ambiguous story. Onan disobeyed his father, did coitus interruptus, and spilled his seed on the ground. He does not seem to have actually masturbated, unless you count coitus interruptus as masturbation. The bible doesn't actually say which of these things merited the death penalty.

    The bit about "Onan knew that the seed should not be his..." refers to the custom of levirate marriage; in these circumstances Er's property would be inherited by the son fathered by Onan, and not by Onan. By refusing to father a child Onan preserved his own right to inherit once Er's wife was past child-bearing age.

    Christian interpretation of this story has swung with the times. In the past it was assumed that semen was vaguely sacred because it was part of a mechanism designed by God, so deliberately wasting it was a sacrilege (insert obligatory Monty Python reference here). The fact that some wastage was designed into the system, presumably also by God, seems to have escaped the attention of these thinkers.

    Modern thinking has swung to the view that Onan's real sin was one of greed and disobedience. However Catholics still seem to disagree.

    844:

    I have this mental image of a future city

    That future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. (W. Gibson, not me)

    If you are from... I was gonna say north america but basically anywhere else than the Netherlands you're about 5 decades behind our current situation.

    Take a look at this guy's youtube channel about liveable cities. I find it quite interesting. Not just bikes

    845:

    Yes, and that’s the point Shirley. The “sin of Onan” is that he “spilled his seed upon the ground”. No, it isn’t that he himself was wanking, yet every male person who ejaculates, without the sperm finding its way to an egg, or otherwise at least into a women’s uterus somehow, “commits the sin of Onan”. It’s an outcome-oriented definition.

    846:

    As the tale of Onan has been related to me, you can regard any "sin" he commits as being either coitus interuptus, or attempting to subvert his racial inheritance laws by means of "lying with his brother's widow but not siring a child out of her".

    847:

    That gets to a general question I was wanting to raise-- having cryptocurrency that's untrackable permits criminal behavior, but might people need privacy and secrecy for legitimate but illegal behavior?

    848:

    Those are subsidiary aspects of the overall theme, ie. that he was under an obligation, which it seems reasonable to assume is imposed by or sacred to God in some way, but instead of carrying it out straightforwardly, he acted so as to make it appear that he had done his duty while actually ensuring that he hadn't: he tried to deceive God... and he got whacked for it. The exact nature of the obligation, and the precise method of sabotage he used, are there because they are the kind of things you need to include to make a half-decent narrative out of the episode and make it memorable; but if the scribe who originally wrote it down had had a sore wrist or was running out of ink or whatever he could have cut it down to "Onan tried to deceive God so God killed him" and still conveyed the essential point.

    It seems to be a point that people were particularly dense about, and needed to have it made again and again in relation to all sorts of diverse situations to try and get it across: do not fuck God around, no matter how clever you think you are, because he will find out and he will be pissed off with you in unpleasant ways. After all, the Old Testament is positively stuffed with stories of people who did try it on and got their comeuppance, from the Garden of Eden onwards.

    One might cynically assume that the Catholic piece linked above is bound to make a deliberate point of concentrating on Onan's precise method at the expense of the wider picture because they have a vested interest in minimising the significance of acting like a weasel; there's a whole major branch of their organisation (with a liking for fast Mercedeses, possibly) that has become proverbial for their readiness to depend on arguments of which the opponent may quite reasonably take the view "yeah, that's all very clever and intricate, but you're taking the piss, sunshine, and you know it".

    It also seems to me that they fall into a different version of the very trap they complain about of changing attitudes to sexual behaviour, since AIUI the ancient Jewish society was far less riddled with sexual hangups, and far less bothered about them, than what is generally taken as "the norm" by Western moralists, and a lot of the ones they did have were a long way from anything the said "norm" would encompass. The piece explicitly discounts the modern relaxation of attitudes, but it appears also to discount the actual attitudes contemporary with the story and embody a considerable degree of assumption that they were more like what the Catholics think they ought to have been than what they actually were, or at least to fail to acknowledge that they cannot be assumed to have been the same.

    849:

    I don't understand what you mean by "legitimate but illegal" behaviour; it sounds like a plain contradiction to me. Do you mean things which happen to be illegal because of some minority's hangups but ought not to be, like trading in weed; or do you mean things like someone needing to transmit money to trade in some perfectly uncontroversial commodity in a perfectly legal way, but being prevented from doing so by not being able to jump through the legally-mandated hoops placed in the way of being able to do it using ordinary banking methods? Or just the desire to avoid having your everyday purchases snooped on by arseholes trying to shove adverts down your throat and caring nothing for any other possible consequence of their illegitimate scarfing of your data? Or something else entirely?

    850:

    No, the cryptomuseum link was fine, it was the IEEE one that failed to produce anything useful. TITLE attribute of "Full Page Reload" and nothing on it beyond one of those infuriating things that hide the content on purpose, which when I killed it with fire turned out to have nothing underneath.

    851:

    You mean, for example, purchasing a medicinal grade cannabis for use as an analgesic? (sample use being treatment of arthritis)

    852:

    Pigeon @ 834: There is an old Cold War story about the American embassy in Moscow finding themselves being bathed in microwaves and wondering exactly why the Russians were trying to cook them. Eventually they figured out that what was really going on was that there was some kind of passive diaphragm effort that gave an audio-modulated return incorporated in the building's ordinary fittings. But the "they were cooking us" interpretation doesn't seem to want to lie down.

    That's because they were cooking the U.S. Embassy. They knew the harmful effects of ionizing radiation, and chose to do it anyway.

    853:

    Additional information needed to support this - Power of USSR transmitter, range from USSR transmitter to US embassy.

    854:

    But it isn't ionising radiation, and the intensity needed to get a return from the bug was way under what you'd need to do any actual cooking.

    855:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 847: That gets to a general question I was wanting to raise-- having cryptocurrency that's untrackable permits criminal behavior, but might people need privacy and secrecy for legitimate but illegal behavior?

    People need privacy and secrecy for legitimate AND LAWFUL behavior. People just need privacy period.

    856:

    paws4thot @ 853: Additional information needed to support this - Power of USSR transmitter, range from USSR transmitter to US embassy.

    Pigeon @ 854: But it isn't ionising radiation, and the intensity needed to get a return from the bug was way under what you'd need to do any actual cooking.

    Nope. Those are just excuses.

    Consider an analogy ... Drink Driving. Should drink driving not be considered harmful (i.e. not a crime) if you don't actually run over anyone or get into a traffic accident. After all, you didn't hurt anyone.

    Or did you?

    857:

    Sorry, but the radar equation deals in facts. To prove a capability to microwave people at $range requires a minimum transmit power, call that Pmin.

    If the set being used for the surveillance can only deliver Pmin/2 watts, there is no intent to harm.

    858:

    Ancient Hebrews must have been a confident bunch. If a promise to pull out had really been any kind of effective contraception at all, then sex would have been much more freely available for centuries. Think of the behavioral, psychological, cultural and economic differences that would have made all through history.

    And apropos of Memorial Day, the Vietnam War protestors came up with a funny picket sign, too: "NIXON PULL OUT! LIKE YOUR FATHER SHOULD HAVE!"

    859:

    I don't understand what you mean by "legitimate but illegal" behaviour

    Imagine you have a job in the UK that is illegal in the US. Sex work, for example. Many, many US companies will refuse to have anything to do with you unless they find themselves able to steal from you. Especially payment processing companies.

    This is a real problem that affects a lot of people.

    On a bigger scale the US is also prone to stealing things from countries it dislikes, often committing crimes in the process. This is why, for example, there's so much enthusiasm for trading oil without using US dollars (and why, just as enthusiastically, the US considers doing so to be an act of either war or terrorism)

    860:

    Not at all a microwave physicist, but if you're trying to boil an embassy, that's a fair amount of energy going in. And you're probably not using a maser, so probably the cone of effect is rather wide... So water glasses are heating up, various metals might be sparking, random items that resonate to the right wavelength are melting...It's kind of obvious, no?

    That's the thing that's bothering me about this mysterious anti-diplomat weapon thingie. If it's a microwave effect, someone's stationed nearby with a microwave emitter, and probably a maser, aimed at the target long enough for them to get the reported effects. Doing that while unnoticed is a neat trick. Not that it can't be done, but it's a neat bit of tradecraft, especially in a building.

    Now, if you want goofy ideas...google ototoxicity. Apparently some chemicals are thought to cause hearing damage, although the evidence seems to be not much stronger than the mysterious ray beam we're talking about here. But supposedly the chemicals' effects are made worse by sound. An attack in this manner would involve dosing someone with a particular ototoxic chemical, then hitting them with sounds that maximize the effects of said chemical. Oddly enough, this would be a lot easier to pull off than a maser attack inside a building.

    861:

    JBS Supporting your point about legitimate & lawful behaviour still being kept private. Hypothetical: Fuckwit politico goes "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" - OK mate & your teenage daughter's private tele-number & email addresses are ..... OOPS. As you say, people need privacy.

    862:

    your teenage daughter's

    Way to make it gross and offensive, Greg.

    863:

    All of that and much more. Anything can be made illegal. Censorship can keep people away from information. Sanctions can block people from harmless trade.

    Part of what got me on to the subject was that a crucial part of gay rights is a lot of gay people breaking laws to have to be able to have the sort of sex they wanted.

    Privacy was essential. Enough slack to break laws was essential.

    We probably don't know all the ways people are just taking harmless freedom, and there's probably more they need access to.

    And it gets to me that there seems to be a consensus on the left-- please tell me if I'm being unfair-- that preventing crime is so important that the risks of that much control aren't even worth talking about.

    864:

    Consider an analogy ... Drink Driving.

    First, the onus is on you to explain how it's an analogy. I don't think you have done so. We're talking about the simple physics of heating via non-ionising radiation, not the statistical relationship between intoxicants, cognitive impairment and its probabilistic consequences.

    Please clarify something: do you actually understand the difference between ionising and non-ionising radiation? If you don't, it's not surprising that you are arguing at cross purposes with the facts.

    If I bombard you with alpha or beta particles, or gamma or X rays, you may have an increased probability of developing cancer at some later date but it's impossible to predict with certainty.

    If I shine a multi-kilowatt floodlight on you from close quarters it might be quite unpleasant. If I shine a torch bulb on you the effects are qualitatively just the same, but you might not even notice, and it will have no future consequences. So should the latter be considered harmful (i.e. a crime) or not?

    865:

    there seems to be a consensus on the left-- please tell me if I'm being unfair-- that preventing crime is so important that the risks of that much control aren't even worth talking about.

    I don't really think Putin and Xi count as left in any meaningful way, they're both capitalist authoritarians. Putin on the oligarch team, Xi on the ethnonationalist one (not the same ethnonationality as Trump, obviously, but same idea).

    If you look at "countries to the left of the US that want privacy for their citizens" the list is almost as long as "countries to the left of the US" (ie, almost every country). Remember the furore when the GDPR came in? That wasn't "glorious citizens of US fight for freedom", that was terrorist scum resisting legitimate actions of US corporations.

    Worth keeping in mind that in the USA you have all sorts of rights to be free from state oppression, but you've gained those in exchange for a combination of near-fascist control of other parts of your lives, and a series of explicit decisions to make your population subject to the whims of corporations. And most of those rights are conditional, your secret police lawfully ignore them.

    Outside the US it's much more common to see corporate control restricted (the GDPR, right to unionise, consumer protection laws and so on), and citizens having more and stronger rights to resist state control of their lives. In Aotearoa and Australia we have seen a whole series of US-style laws passed at the instigation of the US, allowing for detention without trial or access to a lawyer, secret abduction of citizens by the state, extensive surveillance powers and so on... all things that people in the US take for granted but to people in other countries those are horrifying changes.

    (you may well object that those things are not done to people like you in the USA... much (Snowden is white and wealthy, yes?) which is another subtle difference between the USA and free countries... we don't have the apartheid-level state racism that you have. I mean, Australian aborigines get shafted by the state for sure, but our "deaths in custody" problem is not within an order of magnitude of yours (yours are literally uncountable!) And we don't have your lawless Bantustans either).

    866:

    Also, a lot of the things you need privacy for because they're illegal in the USA are legal in other countries. Aotearoa has no restriction on owning sex toys, for example, but in many parts of the US a horrifying combination of laws restricting ownership and use of sex toys makes privacy essential.

    In NSW we just passed a law making it more explicit that explicit consent is the requirement, not any stupidity about what can be consented to (although the limitation on future consent is problematic). The USA is not even close to being able to have that discussion. The USA did not even make it to the list of comparable countries at the end of this article:

    https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/may/25/affirmative-sexual-consent-what-the-nsw-law-reforms-mean-and-how-other-states-compare

    867:

    (you may well object that those things are not done to people like you in the USA... much (Snowden is white and wealthy, yes?) which is another subtle difference between the USA and free countries... we don't have the apartheid-level state racism that you have. I mean, Australian aborigines get shafted by the state for sure, but our "deaths in custody" problem is not within an order of magnitude of yours (yours are literally uncountable!) And we don't have your lawless Bantustans either).

    Um. US has 332,381,430-ish people right now. Australia has somewhere north of 26 million, or about 20% more than Los Angeles County and about the same as southern California (California is currently around 39.5 million).

    In the US, around 23% are non-white, so that's around 76.8 million, of whom over 44.5 million are black. In Australia, the population of Aboriginal and Torres Straits natives is around 800,000.

    So yeah, if the deaths in custody numbers are two orders less, that's about on par with the US, and nothing to brag about. If you're talking per capita rate, that's worth bragging about, I suppose.

    My personal take is on population density: California's running at 99.7 people/km2, while Australia is running at 3.4 people/km2 (per Wikipedia). With that level of land and resources available, being non-sustainable is a crime, as is having a bunch of species going extinct due to habitat loss. In a place like urban southern California, it's understandable, but in the Outback??? With 30 times fewer people per unit area, one would think that koalas shouldn't be in trouble.

    868:

    It's more of an observation, and yes I meant per capita. Raw numbers we have tens of deaths in custody per decade, it's just that per capita 1/800k per year is not even subtly different to the US rate... but standards are different here. That was my point.

    "uncountable" is also an observation... my understand is that your legal systems have decided that those numbers should not be counted, so all we have is a lower bound. Again, this is not something that would be acceptable in most liberal countries.

    As far as sustainability goes, I think you and me both agree that Australia was farmed differently in the past before we got invaded by morons who decided to trash the joint. No argument there. But OTOH I believe Australia still runs second to the USA in emissions per capita, but we're possibly overtaking you in the state that is the biggest obstacle to mitigating the climate catastrophe race.

    869:

    Oh, I forgot to mention that Snowden wasn't particularly wealthy or educated. Just smart.

    Anyway: As far as sustainability goes, I think you and me both agree that Australia was farmed differently in the past before we got invaded by morons who decided to trash the joint. No argument there. But OTOH I believe Australia still runs second to the USA in emissions per capita, but we're possibly overtaking you in the state that is the biggest obstacle to mitigating the climate catastrophe race.

    The conquest of the Americas was no better. I'd say that racking up a higher per capita body count of conquered peoples than the Aztecs did is nothing to brag about.

    Anyway, I'd say you're wrong about Australia being the biggest obstacle to mitigating the climate catastrophe race. You're not even in the running, because it's a political battle, not a citizen's emissions battle. So we've got the US, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia comfortably ahead. Hell, Canada might even be ahead of Australia. Please enjoy being second rate in this regard. Also, try to figure out how to unsubscribe from this free new pest-of-the-week service that both Australia and California seem to be subscribed too. The novelty wore off some time ago.

    870:

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-10/australia-talks-data-explorer-2019/12946988#/responses/how-much-more-would-you-personally-be-willing-to-spend-each-year-to-help-prevent-climate-change

    The overwhelming majority of Australians either don't think the climate catastrophe is real, or think it can be solved at trivial cost to themselves. Or are just selfish wankers who want it fixed but don't want to pay for it.

    I think where I fell out of the norm on some of those was where I answered based on the theory that the current commitments on climate change are likely to be met, and will have the consequences predicted by the IPCC. Thus, "the future will be terrible" because I think 3 degrees of warming and billions of excess deaths from that is likely to be bad. Most Australians think the future will be just fine. And so on.

    We're getting to the end of our tax year and if I just consider my annual donations I put more than $2000 into "less climate change please" every year. As well I put about $1000 just into buying emissions certificates and retiring them (and to show just how fucked the 'carbon market' is, that's more than 10x my actual emissions. Hollow laugh).

    871:

    Snowden wasn't particularly wealthy or educated. Just smart.

    Relatively wealthy - not in the 1% but top quartile for sure. I'm not familiar enough with the US wealth distribution to place him more accurately than that.

    Point is that a nice, educated white boy is now experiencing the bad side of your secret police.

    Same deal applies to countries, BTW. Another way think about freedom is whether we're free to have our own laws. Look at the Nuclear Free New Zealand saga for example.

    the United States felt that it was important to punish New Zealand quite severely to stop any other allies from following suit

    Some of us "nice white wealthy" people have experienced the very polite end of the USA big stick approach to world affairs. A lot of Australians think the USA changed the government here when we elected one they didn't like. It's not plausible to argue that the USA would not do that, but people argue that in that particular instance they didn't. Either way the mere fact that it's plausible makes the whole "independent country" notion a bit fraught. But don't worry, 11% of us trust you...

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-10/australia-talks-data-explorer-2019/12946988#/responses/how-much-do-you-trust-the-following-countries-to-act-responsibly-in-the-world-united-states

    872:

    Moz Get lost ... But, it's a classic example, isn't it, because if you really have "Nothing to hide" then it doesn't matter, does it? Which is so plainly WRONG that it should hit even the most arrogant authoritarian in the face. The amount of control & list of "forbidden" things in the US, particularly as it varies from state to state is ridiculous. Yet they still swallow this "freedom" shit. Brainwashed?

    873: 860 - Since you're prepared to accept that I am at least honest and have worked with actual footprints, a Plessey Watchman (actual search/traffic control radar) has a hazard radius of about 100m against persons in the open, rather less against those in a building. (My original source being qualified and experienced Radiation Officer who wanted charts of the hazard areas for the sets he was responsible for. I had a CAD application with a Geographical Information database of the areas of interest. 865 - If I was going to classify them, I'd describe Putin as "authoritarian kleptocrat" and Xi as "authoritarian geriontocrat". 868 - I'd have said that "uncountable" meant "unable to be counted for reasons of magnitude" rather than "choose not to count". You see the distinction I'm drawing?
    874:

    I meant it as in "it is illegal to count", because IIRC at least federally there is a law preventing whoever is supposed to count them from doing any "firearms research" that has been taken to include counting firearms deaths.

    But yes, also the pragmatic "there are hundreds of different police departments and no means to get them to report even the raw number of people they kill, let alone useful statistics".

    The "too many to count" interpretation... I'm pretty sure it's a countable number, but the above rule out the actual counting.

    It's sort of like classifying authoritarians... it's not as if I can buy an album to stick them all in with little labels and descriptions.

    875:

    To a mathematician, the idea that the USA has an uncountable number of guns is amusing ....

    876:

    Yes. And detecting hazardous levels of microwave radiation is trivial, even without special equipment. The fact that the USA at least once had specialist teams explicitly looking for such beamed radiation, and failed to find it, should tell one something. But the report(s?) that said so were quietly suppressed, because they conflicted with the dogma that it must be all the fault of Those Evil Russians. Whatever it was that caused the illnesses, was almost certainly imported into the embassies by their occupants.

    I really do find it baffling how the USA and its vassals can simultaneously think of it as being technologically and militarily dominant (which is close to the truth), and threatened by the overwhelming technological and military dominance of countries like Russia (down to even, God help us all, Iraq). Yes, the invasion of Iraq was said to be needed to prevent Saddam Hussain from conquering the USA. Go figure.

    877:

    The ideal solution would be teleport booths

    For some reason we suffer under the same set of physics rules as the good people in Brexitland.

    Therefore another solution was chosen by the people who designed the Hovenring to separate cyclists and pedestrians from motorized traffic. It really is a work of art IMO.

    878:

    Bird's eye view of the Hovenring

    879:

    Moz: doxxing relatives (including children) of targeted individuals is A Thing on the internet these days (mostly in the less salubrious parts of it). Greg's description is quite accurate, but not really nasty enough to reflect the actual thing accurately. (Think: flash mob of hangers-on who, given details of said teen-age kid comb their Facebook or Pinterest for signs of vulnerability and eg. try to induce suicidal depression over weight, acne, breakup with boyfriend, etc.)

    880:

    Charlie.
    Thank you. Though I hadn't realised it has got that bad, that fast, already. Incidentally has Patel yet trotted this "nothing to hide" bollocks out, yet? It would fit her character.

    881:

    Way to make it gross and offensive, Greg.

    That's the point — there are things that aren't illegal/immoral that most people understand quite well are still deserving of privacy. If some authoritarian prick claims that the only reason you want to keep something hidden is that you have something horrible to hide, hitting them with an example affecting something they hold dear* is perfectly reasonable.

    And honestly, phone number and email address is a pretty tame ask given some of the nasty demands of the authoritarians south of me…

    *Especially when they have shown that the really don't give a rat's sphincter about most of the people they have power over.

    882:

    Giant pole rising through a ring…

    Bet people had fun with that symbolism when it was first built! :-)

    883:

    Snowden is smart? Really?

    Didn't finish any degrees.

    Employed as a security guard.

    Was a system manager.

    Most of what Wiki has about his career is from him and as his CV had demonstrably misleading sections I think a significant amount of bull may be expected.

    The only reason he wasn't caught earlier were his impressive skills at lying combined with the jawdropping naivety among his colleagues.

    "Hey, just give me your password. I want to check the security of the system!"

    884:

    The conquest of the Americas was no better. I'd say that racking up a higher per capita body count of conquered peoples than the Aztecs did is nothing to brag about.

    Saw this little gem in my morning paper:

    In 1907, then chief medical officer for Indian Affairs, Peter Bryce, estimated that about 40 per cent of the children who attended the [Red Deer Industrial School] died as a result of their time there.

    https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/06/01/theres-another-kamloops-coming-here-are-some-canadian-sites-believed-to-hold-more-unmarked-graves-of-indigenous-children.html

    Current mental state a mix of gob-smacked and appalled. 40% mortality rate at a school and no one did anything?

    885:

    Looked up the tables for 1900. Horror show for under five with just shy of 20% mortality, but school age children had a 99 percent chance of making it to adulthood. So.. Yhea, that is mass murder.

    886:

    To a mathematician, the idea that the USA has an uncountable number of guns is amusing ....

    Why? Here a few of the many causes.

    1) Guns, especially assault rifles, are increasingly modular. If someone has three receivers, five barrels, and four stocks, all of which are interchangeable, how many guns do they own?

    B) Ghost guns. This is getting around the law by selling mostly-made receivers that are missing two things: a serial number and the few key holes that make them the receiver, without which they're legally a fancy bit of metal. Said fancy bit of metal is typically sold with jigs and precise instructions on how to make them into fully functioning, and unregistered, assault weapon receivers. Barrels, stocks, clips, and so forth can all be bought separately and legally. Ghost guns the new hotness in mass shootings this year, and bills to end the sale of these things are trotting through the California legislature as I write this.

    When you couple these with gun-running to Mexico (Mexico has a problem with illegal firearms coming in from the US, because the US has problems with illegal drugs that Mexican cartels are killing each other to supply), a lot of guns getting illegally gifted* and so forth, and yeah, we don't know how many functioning guns are out there at the moment.

    *Grandpa gives Johnny his prized 1950 22 rimfire rifle when he turned 12, so that the boy could learn to shoot with the same gun his father and grandfather learned on. That gift without telling the government is illegal, but who's checking? And the paperwork didn't exist when that gun was first purchased.

    887:

    Heteromeles @ 886

    There is also a steady stream of firearms illegally coming into Canada from the U.S.. But it's a small drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of firearms just floating around, South of our undefended border. And the price difference is an incentive to the smuggling.

    "You will see a gun, a firearm purchased in the States for potentially $200 to $300, and they'll go on the streets [in Canada] for $3,000."

    888:

    I think the Kamloops discovery is the tipping point for some serious effort at reconciliation here in Canada.

    Put another way, if incontrovertible evidence of the heedless and intentional slaughter of hundreds of children is not a catalyst for change, then this country needs to start over.

    I've spent much of the past week appalled and horrified.

    889:

    Because in math uncountable is a term of art for an infinity with a cardinality greater than aleph-null so the idea that the number of guns in the USA is uncountable is side-splittingly funny.

    890:

    Re: '... some chemicals are thought to cause hearing damage, although the evidence seems to be not much stronger than the mysterious ray beam we're talking about here.'

    Suggest you check erythromycin - probably the most popular/prescribed antibiotic of the 20th century esp. for children. Hearing loss particularly in the vocal/speech range has now been confirmed (scientifically) many times. Also tinnitus.

    Unfortunately there's no mention of these 'side effects' in Wikipedia.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1731511/

    891:

    Because in math uncountable is a term of art for an infinity with a cardinality greater than aleph-null so the idea that the number of guns in the USA is uncountable is side-splittingly funny.

    Oh. I'm coming at this from the botanical angle. If you chop a strawberry plant in two, you get two strawberry plants, whereas if you cut a human in half, you get one dead human. That makes counting humans easier than counting strawberries. When you're doing botany, one of the things you have to define is what you're counting as an individual for a survey.

    In that regard, the number of guns is uncountable, because there's no universal survey method, for some of the reasons I gave. It's not an infinity joke, it's an effingly-real problem. One of the outcomes is that when Officer Friendly makes a house call on a domestic violence complaint, they tend to come in armed, just in case.

    892:

    Well, SOMEONE got the joke ....

    Heteromeles is wrong, I am afraid. A gun is an ill-defined term, but the number is most definitely not uncountable in even a lay sense, let alone a statistical one. All you have to do is to define the term and then, in theory if not practice, could search every square inch of the USA and count them.

    There ARE things that statistically uncountable, but almost all are where individuality is not a practically definable concept. Strawberries are a poor example, but ground-elder, twitch, some sumacs and many more plants are like that. When does a sucker or shoot from a running root become a separate plant?

    893:

    I got it; thought you put it with a nice bit of subtlety.

    894:

    Re: 'I'm told that some of the programs - the panels, etc, will be, but no things like kaffeeklatches, and I wouldn't expect the book launch to be.'

    Although I got registered for your talk the Zoom* link for it didn't work so I missed it. Maybe you managed to get a personal recording of it that you could upload onto YT?

    I do plan on ordering your book soon.

    Hmm... still no word from my bookstore about the delay on OGH's book that I pre-ordered.

    • I was able to view/participate in all but your and one other 'webinar' that I tried. I checked in case it was a glitch/screw-up at my end.
    895:

    Legally, a gun is a functioning receiver. But how many receivers (each a legal gun) are sitting in inventory in gun dealers, lockers, attacks, etc.? A receiver by itself is not a functioning gun, but it's where the serial number for the composite entity labeled a gun goes. The whole idea of a ghost gun is that it's a receiver without a serial number, sold through a legal loophole.

    So there are two problems: guns are composite entities, and the legal definition is a part, not a functioning weapon. The other problem is that a century-old gun can still function quite well, so there's a long tail of varying weapons laws that define what a gun is, and quite a few of the guns made during that time have fallen through various cracks. And people are finding new ways around the legal requirements all the time.

    As a result, if you do your theoretical method of counting every square centimeter of the US, you still won't get a number that's very useful. Worse, the census would take so long that people could easily move guns away from the surveyors (leaving them uncounted), and a fair number would be both built and destroyed during the census, so the census would be fairly inaccurate.

    896:

    when Officer Friendly makes a house call on a domestic violence complaint, they tend to come in armed, just in case.

    I was under the impression that your police are always armed?

    897:

    Re #1 - the answer is easy and clear. Three receivers (the part actually tracked by SN per federal regulation) = three "guns".

    B - Look up "80% lowers" - this for example: https://www.80-lower.com/products/80-lower-raw-1-pack-1/ By itself, unmodified, completely unusable as a firearm. It still has a fair bit of machining needed to make it functional, though absolutely can be done by most people if they are using jigs and have a drill press. Where's the dividing line between what should be federally controlled and what shouldn't? And in the future, 3-D printed lowers will take over this 80% market: https://www.hoffmantactical.com/blog/finally-a-3d-printed-ar-15-lower-that-assembles-right-off-the-bed-with-a-standard-classic-build-kit#/

    In California, it is still legal for a person to create a firearm for themselves as long as you apply for a SN and register with the state. In theory you would get in trouble if you sell them (frequently, some threshold, would require a federal firearm license) or if you give them away without the recipient going through normal background checks.

    Given all this, if police are seeing an uptick in "ghost guns" being used in crimes (which is already criminal!) maybe rather than putting more restrictions on specific technology, maybe put more effort into reducing the root causes of the crimes? End the drug war for example? Or if you really care about gun deaths, almost 2/3 of which are suicides in the USA, create a better social safety net? National health care?

    898:

    With our present technologies it would be difficult ro count the firearms in the USA but future archeologists would have no problems given shape recognition machines which would be just a little smarter than the ones we currently have for sorting recyclable materials.

    899:

    that is mass murder

    Yeah. I knew about the sex abuse and other horrible stuff, which is bad enough, but I had no idea that they were killing children and dumping the bodies in unmarked mass graves.

    And this was in the time when they were run by the Catholic and Anglican churches, too. Did the priests think "suffer the children" was a fucking instruction?!

    Kinda puts all the horrible school experiences people have shared here into perspective, doesn't it? And lends credence to Greg's oft-expressed opinion on organized religion…

    900:

    As I said, "gun" is an ill-defined term, but it's easy enough to produce several definitions that are good enough for statistical purposes - gator gave one, but I can think of several others. And your niggles about the practical difficulties are no different from most other statistical counting, such as people.

    901:

    if incontrovertible evidence of the heedless and intentional slaughter of hundreds of children is not a catalyst for change, then this country needs to start over

    I fear that little will change. And I'm not certain what I can personally do to encourage change, beyond writing to my MP. If you have any suggestions I'll gladly consider them…

    902:

    Date-stamped? I do that, or add a digit, but I have thought of installing a VCS, and using that.

    (For non-computer folks, version control system, which lets you check out previous versions, for example).

    903:

    sigh I see this brought guns into the thread.

    I had a completely and totally different instant reaction: day-after pills (for abortion) in, say, Texas.

    904:

    your niggles about the practical difficulties are no different from most other statistical counting, such as people

    That also appears problematical in America, given the fights over the recent census…

    905:

    Thank you, sorry you missed it.

    I've been encouraged to record a reading and post it, and I'll probably do that.

    906:

    Btw, among the many reasons I do not want nor intend to self-publish... somewhere, on one of the blurbs that I did not write, it notes that one of the things I look at (that I don't remember having intended) is to consider what it means to be "human".

    And I hear Amazon has some sort of index, and it's under evolution, or some such.

    907:

    Every time I look on Amazon it's changed both rank and type of fiction. Last time it was Space Opera and something else.

    908:

    I was trying to make a joke to reply with based around a gun manufacturer with a name resembling Cantor, but I couldn't think of one.

    909:

    It needs to be approached diagonally, I think. Should I leave now?

    910:

    Given all this, if police are seeing an uptick in "ghost guns" being used in crimes (which is already criminal!) maybe rather than putting more restrictions on specific technology, maybe put more effort into reducing the root causes of the crimes? End the drug war for example? Or if you really care about gun deaths, almost 2/3 of which are suicides in the USA, create a better social safety net? National health care?

    While I agree about the suicides, what's pushing this is that at least three of the mass shootings in California this year were with "ghost guns." By definition, the best way to prevent people from going postal is to heavily regulate the gun industry and gun ownership. I'm in favor of that, actually, but the people who own the large majority of guns in this country are not.

    911:

    paws4thot @ 857: Sorry, but the radar equation deals in facts. To prove a capability to microwave people at $range requires a minimum transmit power, call that Pmin.

    If the set being used for the surveillance can only deliver Pmin/2 watts, there is no intent to harm.

    There was EVERY INTENT to harm. The particular method chosen might have been ineffective for doing so, but there's still the dehumanizing unconcern; not giving a shit whether it harms or not ... or whether it harms innocent bystanders. Like the assassins Putin's Russia sent to murder Sergei Skripal in the UK and who they actually ended up killing.

    In fact, if it had harmed U.S. Diplomats, that would have been considered a bonus.

    912:

    Richard H @ 864:

    Consider an analogy ... Drink Driving.

    First, the onus is on you to explain how it's an analogy. I don't think you have done so. We're talking about the simple physics of heating via non-ionising radiation, not the statistical relationship between intoxicants, cognitive impairment and its probabilistic consequences.

    If you don't understand what an anology is, the onus is on you ... perhaps shared by your teachers back in secondary school.

    Please clarify something: do you actually understand the difference between ionising and non-ionising radiation? If you don't, it's not surprising that you are arguing at cross purposes with the facts.

    I spent 30+ years as a NUCLEAR, Biological & Chemical warfare specialists. I may know a little something about it. I may know even more about WAR, "Diplomacy" and Espionage ... along with the things governments will try to get away with in the margins where they overlap.

    If I bombard you with alpha or beta particles, or gamma or X rays, you may have an increased probability of developing cancer at some later date but it's impossible to predict with certainty.

    If I shine a multi-kilowatt floodlight on you from close quarters it might be quite unpleasant. If I shine a torch bulb on you the effects are qualitatively just the same, but you might not even notice, and it will have no future consequences. So should the latter be considered harmful (i.e. a crime) or not?

    If you attempt to bombard me with radiation or any other kind of directed energy source without my permission, you WILL have an increased probability of early death. You won't live long enough to find out if it causes cancer or not.

    "Ionizing" may have been a poor choice of words, but microwaves CAN kill you. Why do you think they put all those warnings on microwave ovens? Exposure to any kind of RF energy in sufficient quantity can kill you.

    But you're still missing the point. Even if the Soviets had known it would definitely harm the diplomats in the American Embassy, they'd have done it anyway. And, I suspect, you would still condone it.

    913:

    Charlie Stross @ 879: Moz: doxxing relatives (including children) of targeted individuals is A Thing on the internet these days (mostly in the less salubrious parts of it). Greg's description is quite accurate, but not really nasty enough to reflect the actual thing accurately. (Think: flash mob of hangers-on who, given details of said teen-age kid comb their Facebook or Pinterest for signs of vulnerability and eg. try to induce suicidal depression over weight, acne, breakup with boyfriend, etc.)

    Especially in those parts of the media & internet dominated by Rupert Murdoch & sons and their ilk ... and you know where HE came from.

    914:

    Heteromeles @ 886:

    To a mathematician, the idea that the USA has an uncountable number of guns is amusing ....

    Why? Here a few of the many causes.

    1) Guns, especially assault rifles, are increasingly modular. If someone has three receivers, five barrels, and four stocks, all of which are interchangeable, how many guns do they own?

    Three. You have three receivers, you have three guns ... all the rest are spare parts.

    B) Ghost guns. This is getting around the law by selling mostly-made receivers that are missing two things: a serial number and the few key holes that make them the receiver, without which they're legally a fancy bit of metal. Said fancy bit of metal is typically sold with jigs and precise instructions on how to make them into fully functioning, and unregistered, assault weapon receivers. Barrels, stocks, clips, and so forth can all be bought separately and legally. Ghost guns the new hotness in mass shootings this year, and bills to end the sale of these things are trotting through the California legislature as I write this.

    When you couple these with gun-running to Mexico (Mexico has a problem with illegal firearms coming in from the US, because the US has problems with illegal drugs that Mexican cartels are killing each other to supply), a lot of guns getting illegally gifted* and so forth, and yeah, we don't know how many functioning guns are out there at the moment.

    *Grandpa gives Johnny his prized 1950 22 rimfire rifle when he turned 12, so that the boy could learn to shoot with the same gun his father and grandfather learned on. That gift without telling the government is illegal, but who's checking? And the paperwork didn't exist when that gun was first purchased.

    Actually it's not illegal. Those kind of inside the family gifts were "Grandfathered in" when the law was written. It's actually something the NRA lobbied for back when they were still a firearms safety organization, promoting sane gun laws and marksmanship training.

    Union Army records for the Civil War indicate that its troops fired about 1,000 rifle shots for each Confederate hit, causing General Burnside to lament his recruits: "Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill and the manual of arms, only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn." The generals attributed this to the use of volley tactics, devised for earlier, less accurate smoothbore muskets.
    915:

    William T Goodall @ 889: Because in math uncountable is a term of art for an infinity with a cardinality greater than aleph-null so the idea that the number of guns in the USA is uncountable is side-splittingly funny.

    Mathematicians are really, REALLY weird!

    916:

    Robert Prior @ 896:

    when Officer Friendly makes a house call on a domestic violence complaint, they tend to come in armed, just in case.

    I was under the impression that your police are always armed?

    Pretty much nowadays, although there are some holdouts. It's an ongoing escalation between the Cops & Criminals of the capability to use force, with neither side having much concern regarding the effect it might have on innocent bystanders.

    But I was under the impression that "Officer Friendly" is a term of art for police in the U.K., where the escalation has not proceeded at quite the same pace as it has here in the U.S.

    917:

    When British police do a house call for domestic violence, they are generally not armed with firearms. Stab vest, check. Baton, check. CS spray, check. Firearm? Requires calling in a specialized unit.

    So my assumption was Frank was talking about American police.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00yaFwZ5bc

    918:

    I'm not convinced that "we should be no better than the Murdoch media" is a good guide to behaviour.

    The point would be no less made by referring to "children" or "family members" but it's much more salacious to specify that it has to be "teenage daughter". Salacious is apparently a desirable thing here.

    919:

    So my assumption was Frank was talking about American police.

    Correct, because this is a UK blog. Also, Officer Friendly shows up in OGH's books.

    The point was that I've heard from cops chatting about stuff that they hate domestic disturbance calls, because in the US they can escalate rapidly if guns get involved. Years ago, something like this happened in a town home next block over from mine. Either an argument escalated, or someone had a mental break, but I found out about it when they surrounded the unit with officers with shotguns and rifles drawn, plus a canine unit, plus a cop waiting with the beanbag gun (and playing catch with the round while he waited). That day my AC compressor chose to crap out, so while the repairman was fixing it, I was standing watch next to him, to tell him to take cover behind the AC if things went pear-shaped.

    Fortunately, things did not go pear-shaped, but they had over a dozen cops to talk someone down.

    The problem in these gods-awful situations is that ideally the job for the authorities is to de-escalate a violent or potentially violent situation down to where people who are going through a really bad day don't make it worse. Throw guns into the mix, and it's not just the people fighting who can get shot, it's cop at the door, the neighbors on the other side of the drywall, or across the street. And it's hard to de-escalate if someone's freaked out and waving a gun around, unless there's overwhelming firepower on the "...or else" side of the discussion and time for this fact to soak in and for sanity to make its own drive-by.

    This is just another reason why I'd be happier if there were fewer guns running around in the US. Shooting someone because of what they said about your mother isn't fighting tyranny or serving in a well-regulated militia, it's screwing up royally.

    920:

    Robert 901:

    "I fear that little will change. And I'm not certain what I can personally do to encourage change, beyond writing to my MP. If you have any suggestions I'll gladly consider them…"

    What we have been seeing for about 15-20 years is a tug-of-war between the 'action now! Not fast enough!' crowd and the large number of persons who had trouble seeing that there was any problem at all.

    The slow trend has been towards the 'action' side of things, with various baby steps and occasional leaps of progress. There is a long way to go, and there are a lot of people who are oblivious and resistant to anything that might affect them personally.

    The revelation of hundreds (thousands) of children killed through systematic intent and intentional genocide will not go away quickly. It has moved the needle in a big jump towards 'action'.

    The hard part is that action needs to happen, but it can't be another round of well intentioned whiteys trampling all over the indigenous people's actual interests and needs. So for us well intentioned people of European descent, we need to listen and support meaningful change.

    And we need to take the lead in pushing back, hard, when the 'do nothing' crowd starts to speak up. Which will begin in a couple of weeks once the horror has subsided.

    921:

    Rbt Prior And, frequently, a Taser. Very good at disabling without killing [ If used properly ] Often used on idiots with knives, rather than resorting to firearms.

    Moz I quite deliberately picked the category who are seen, easily, as the most vulnerable, because they are. "Salacious" was & is irrelevant. Evil is often in the eye of the beholder - yours in this case. STOP IT - ok?

    922:

    The point was that I've heard from cops chatting about stuff that they hate domestic disturbance calls, because in the US they can escalate rapidly if guns get involved.

    And to toss one more issue into why they hate responding to such calls. Many times when they start to remove the "attacker" from the situation the person being attacked goes after the cops in a version of "I don't care if he's beating the crap out of me, YOU STAY OUT OF IT." Guns, knives, fists, lamps, whatever.

    So even without guns they want at least 2 cops involved. If not 3 or more.

    Domestic fights are always a mess.

    923:

    If you don't understand what an anology is, the onus is on you ...

    I understand very well what an analogy is, thank you. Yes, there's an analogy between drink-driving causing road deaths and ionizing radiation causing cancer, because the causal chain is stochastic. But there's no such analogy with microwaves causing death, because the causal chain there is deterministic, mediated by Maxwell's equations and the diffusion equation.

    perhaps shared by your teachers back in secondary school. Perhaps. But actually you don't know anything about my educational background, so "perhaps" you'd do better to stick to facts.

    If you attempt to bombard me with radiation or any other kind of directed energy source without my permission, you WILL have an increased probability of early death. You won't live long enough to find out if it causes cancer or not. Ho ho ho. (I assume that's meant as a joke, not an actual death threat?)

    "Ionizing" may have been a poor choice of words, If "poor" means "completely wrong", certainly.

    but microwaves CAN kill you. Why do you think they put all those warnings on microwave ovens? Exposure to any kind of RF energy in sufficient quantity can kill you. [your emphasis]

    Yes, of course. That is precisely the point. And the known physical facts suggest that in this case the energy density was nothing like "in sufficient quantity".

    But you're still missing the point. Even if the Soviets had known it would definitely harm the diplomats in the American Embassy, they'd have done it anyway. And, I suspect, you would still condone it.

    "Condone"? Where did I do that?

    924:

    As you say.

    The evidence that any kind of non-ionising electromagnetic radiation can cause any harm to humans other than by simple heating is sparse and dubious, to put it mildly. And everybody with normal sensations will feel heat long before it causes harm.

    As there is no evidence that (a) the illnesses were caused by any kind of radiation or (b) that they were caused by any other organisation, and significant evidence against both of those, the whole thing is just another Cold War lie.

    925:

    Non-technical article today in the Guardian:https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/02/microwave-weapons-havana-syndrome-experts

    The bonus is all the cool pictures of 1950's cars.

    926:

    Meanwhile HOW SAD An known rabid Brexiteer is complaining that he has got EXACTLY what he asked for My heart bleeds

    927:

    Greg: am pretty sure that what Tim Martin wants is to casualize non-UK resident workers: miss a shift or demand more money, face deportation by the Home Office, that sort of thing.

    And this was the agenda behind Brexit for a lot of the large workforce employers who backed it (as opposed to the tax evaders, offshore oligarchs, press barons, and so on).

    928:

    Sounds like they would do well to stick a bunch of these to their hats, with the leads spread out sideways, arranged to spell out "OI, TURN IT OFF".

    http://cpc.farnell.com/productimages/standard/en_GB/42252616.jpg

    929:

    Don't forget linking the work visa to a particular job, like Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker program does, so the worker has the choice of either working at one job or leaving the country. I'd be extremely surprised if that isn't being floated right now…

    930:

    An interesting blog piece from google researchers. (An aside: Google's science PR skills are top notch!) A Browsable Petascale Reconstruction of the Human Cortex (Tuesday, June 1, 2021, Tim Blakely, Software Engineer and Michał Januszewski, Research Scientist, Connectomics at Google) Today, in collaboration with the Lichtman Laboratory at Harvard University, we are releasing the “H01” dataset, a 1.4 petabyte rendering of a small sample of human brain tissue, along with a companion paper, “A connectomic study of a petascale fragment of human cerebral cortex.” ... We collaborated with brain surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (MGH) who sometimes remove pieces of normal human cerebral cortex when performing a surgery to cure epilepsy in order to gain access to a site in the deeper brain where an epileptic seizure is being initiated. Patients anonymously donated this tissue, which is normally discarded, to our colleagues in the Lichtman lab.

    Obligatory: Young Frankenstein (1974) - Abby Normal scene (21 seconds) (Yeah, they say the tissue is normal :-)

    The main paper (preprint) A connectomic study of a petascale fragment of human cerebral cortex (May 30, 2021, Alexander Shapson-Coe, ... long author list)

    Another preprint: Denoising-based Image Compression for Connectomics (May 30, 2021, David Minnen, Michał Januszewski, Alexander Shapson-Coe, Richard L. Schalek, Johannes Ballé, Jeff W. Lichtman, Viren Jain) Connectomic reconstruction of neural circuits relies on nanometer resolution microscopy which produces on the order of a petabyte of imagery for each cubic millimeter of brain tissue. The cost of storing such data is a significant barrier to broadening the use of connectomic approaches and scaling to even larger volumes. We present an image compression approach that uses machine learning-based denoising and standard image codecs to compress raw electron microscopy imagery of neuropil up to 17-fold with negligible loss of reconstruction accuracy.

    931:

    An interesting quote from the article.

    Martin said: “The UK has a low birth rate. A reasonably liberal immigration system controlled by those we have elected, as distinct from the EU system, would be a plus for the economy and the country. “America, Australia and Singapore have benefitted for many decades from this approach. Immigration combined with democracy works.”

    Assuming by America he means the US, Stephen Miller, Trump's immigration point person wanted to stop all of this. At most he only wanted to allow short term visits for these kinds of workers. No kind of residency. Worked hard at shutting down any kind of immigration.

    932:

    Robert Prior @ 917: When British police do a house call for domestic violence, they are generally not armed with firearms. Stab vest, check. Baton, check. CS spray, check. Firearm? Requires calling in a specialized unit.

    So my assumption was Frank was talking about American police.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00yaFwZ5bc

    That's my point. If he's talking about police in the U.S., why is he using the British term of art? And what do Canadian Mounties have to do with policing in the U.S.?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBD8M3WFrAw

    933:

    Yes. Carrying a gun, or having one handy, is like refusing to wear a mask.

    Ah! It just hit me: gang colors!

    My Eldest tells me they're hoping to put their house in Klamath Falls, OR on the market, this month, and they're looking to move to the Rome, NY area, the other side of the country.

    She's been fed up with the local politics for a long time, but in the fall, in a bunch of them standing on a streetcorner with BLM signs, some ass with a gun came over to talk politics with her. And now she tells me a neighbor, four houses down, gardens with a .45 on her hip - no doubt to protect herself from roaming gangs of raccoons....

    934:

    It's like that in the US. For H1-B visas, tech people, the compan bringing them over has to pay thousands of dollars for the visa, and the background checks.

    935:

    Moz @ 918: I'm not convinced that "we should be no better than the Murdoch media" is a good guide to behaviour.

    I agree. So, why do you propose it as a standard.

    936:

    Yep. I've been hearing that since the seventies, and it wasn't new then - the calls cops hate answering the most is "domestic disturbance", because, so often, it turns into us against them (the cops).

    937:

    David L @ 931: An interesting quote from the article.

    Martin said: “The UK has a low birth rate. A reasonably liberal immigration system controlled by those we have elected, as distinct from the EU system, would be a plus for the economy and the country.
    “America, Australia and Singapore have benefitted for many decades from this approach. Immigration combined with democracy works.”

    Assuming by America he means the US, Stephen Miller, Trump's immigration point person wanted to stop all of this. At most he only wanted to allow short term visits for these kinds of workers. No kind of residency. Worked hard at shutting down any kind of immigration.

    Actually, Miller only wanted to shut down immigration by non-whites.

    Germans, Russians, most northern Europeans & some Scandinavians were OK, but none of those swarthy Mediterranean types ... especially no Hispanics, Africans or Asians and more especially not anyone who might turn out to believe in socialism (unless it was National-Socialism).

    938:

    whitroth @ 934: It's like that in the US. For H1-B visas, tech people, the compan bringing them over has to pay thousands of dollars for the visa, and the background checks.

    And the companies still make out like bandits by oppressing those H1-B tech people and using them in turn to suppress wages for American tech people.

    939:

    The folks Miller wanted to let in were not interested in showing up in the US to tend bar. At all.

    No parents I've met aspire to that for their kids. Which is why for 200+ years those jobs have in so many ways been filled by people stuck at the bottom of the ladder or by recent immigrants. Shutting down the immigrants for those jobs means convincing the low end to get "bigger" or raising the pay to make more folks with some education want to do the job.

    Total disconnect from reality.

    940:

    My main point was the Brexiteer saying lets do it like the Mericans without realizing the Mericans don't have it working.

    941:

    Nobody has ever accused Tim Martin of being smart about anything other than building out a successful pub chain.

    942:

    Ah. The "I'm great at this, therefore I'm great at everything" mindset. Drives me nuts when I have to deal with this mindset.

    943:

    Or just the desire to avoid having your everyday purchases snooped on by arseholes trying to shove adverts down your throat and caring nothing for any other possible consequence of their illegitimate scarfing of your data? Or something else entirely?

    If I want to buy thing "THING". Which is legal. But there are people who don't want me or people "like me" to own such. Should they get to see what I buy and organize folks to not sell it to me? Or double the price when I buy? Or ....

    Welcome to Jim Crow. Nice fellow according to some. Not everyone agreed.

    944:

    Aotearoa has no restriction on owning sex toys, for example, but in many parts of the US a horrifying combination of laws restricting ownership and use of sex toys makes privacy essential.

    I may be wrong but I think you're a decade or few behind current events.

    945:

    Grandpa gives Johnny his prized 1950 22 rimfire rifle when he turned 12, so that the boy could learn to shoot with the same gun his father and grandfather learned on. That gift without telling the government is illegal, but who's checking? And the paperwork didn't exist when that gun was first purchased.

    Oh, yes. When I was a youth getting the Boy Scouts magazine "Boys Life" in the 60s you could order such for a few $$ from the ads in the back.

    946:

    Did the priests think

    The priests and most everyone else not of a darker or slanted eye genealogy thought of them as inferior. So their deaths didn't mean as much.

    Even those who thought them fully human.

    947:

    hoping to put their house in Klamath Falls, OR on the market, this month, and they're looking to move to the Rome, NY are

    Why does this strike me as not really changing anything but the weather.

    Upstate NY next to a former cold world war SAC base? I suspect there are more than a few retirees who have politics she'll not like.

    948:

    Her husband a) has serious allergies, and b) he really doesn't want to live too close to a major metro area....

    949:

    I'll give her that Rome NY is less right-wing than Klamath OR https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/oregon/klamath_falls https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/new_york/rome but it still leans (US standards) conservative. Don't recall seeing anyone open carrying though driving through that county a few months ago, and New York is not an open carry state. (Except for cops and armed guards, and long guns on own property, and hunters, somehow.)

    (Got some (very rare) burial insurance spam today. Irritating.)

    950:

    And what do Canadian Mounties have to do with policing in the U.S.?

    Up in the Klondike they were policing a lot of Americans, without a lot of men or firepower, and the Americans behaved a lot better than they did on the American side of the border.

    So possibly the need for overwhelming fire superiority is overstated…

    951:

    "Two shinty teams went into a pub..." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-57329610 ( was first reported on Alba 3 or 4 days ago, when it was ~30 cases )

    952:

    Of interest to some: Netanyahu rivals form an Israeli coalition government to oust him (Laura KingStaff Writer, June 2, 2021) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief political rival formally declared Wednesday night that he had put together a governing coalition with sufficient parliamentary backing to dislodge Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving leader. (Note: the announcement is of a "remove Netanyahu" coalition, diverse ideologically (though right wing) otherwise.)

    953:

    {sex toys} I may be wrong but I think you're a decade or few behind current events

    I'm going with the first option pending further advice. First two references I found:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Obscenity_Enforcement_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_obscenity_statute

    I suppose you could argue that Alabama is a decade or two behind current events :)

    954:

    Re: 'The priests and most everyone else not of a darker or slanted eye genealogy ...'

    Any of the perps that are in RC religious orders and still alive won't be able to hide behind the church. Haven't seen any reaction from CofE.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pope-revises-church-law-updates-rules-sexual-abuse-n1269207

    Yeah - he's still a Jesuit (aka sh*t-disturber).

    955:

    Doesn't cover malnutrition and shitty/nonexistent medical care, though.

    956:

    I'm going with the first option pending further advice. First two references I found:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Obscenity_Enforcement_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_obscenity_statute

    I suppose you could argue that Alabama is a decade or two behind current events :)

    Whereas Texas is Texas and don't need none of yer fancy current events. :-)

    If you're in the mood for a sendup of the sex toy rules (and are not at work) you may enjoy The Wet Spots singing Texas Annie, a musical parable treating the situation with as much seriousness as it deserves.

    957:

    the sex toy rules

    Oh no, there are rules? What if I've been doing it wrong all these years? Will I have to be spanked?

    958:

    Scoot Manley just mentioned OGH's "A Tall Tail" in the context of unusual propellants. https://youtu.be/sx1RyOrpI9c?t=973

    I assume most of you will see that but for anyone not subscribed Scott is quite fun to watch.

    959:

    Oh no, there are rules? What if I've been doing it wrong all these years? Will I have to be spanked?

    Unsurprisingly, The Wet Spots have sung about that too! :-)

    960:

    My experience is from 1991, so there’s that, but on the day I started work at the company that hired me to Silicon Valley there were three of us being inducted. Me from UK, a young woman from Hong Kong, and an Israeli chap. I promise you, they were not paying us less than any Murrican- and I can also promise you that if they could have found locals able to do the work they would have taken them. The legal costs, the moving costs, the temporary paid accommodation, car, etc, etc probably added up to a years pay. If they’ve mangled the system into a gastarbeiter program then I guess someone got a good payoff.

    961:

    Sign in to confirm your age
    This video may be inappropriate for some users.

    Now you're actively trying to lead me astray.

    962:

    You probably haven't been following the NFT news - I certainly haven't - but Kotaku ran an article observing The NFT Market has Collapsed, Oh No. The author observes that the Bigger Sucker game was short lived, with the NFT idea coming about about three months ago, the market peaking about one month ago, and has already shrunk to Dutch tulip scale.

    963:

    {sex toys} I may be wrong but I think you're a decade or few behind current events

    I'm going with the first option pending further advice. First two references I found:

    OK. Difference of interpretation.

    There are 100s (1000s or 10,000s) of laws on the books in the US which are no longer enforced (enforceable) due to court decisions. In the US. If the Supremes (or state equivalent) say "XYZ" is invalid that just means that. Invalid. There is no process that requires local or state or even federal legislatures to remove the law from the books. Better states used to consolidates decades of individual criminal and civil law every 20+ years or so to make figuring them out a bit more sane.[1] In the current political environment that process has slowed down. A lot. Voting for the wrong hobby horse can get you thrown out of office.

    The downside of this is every now and again some asshole will create a lot of sound and fury (their point) trying to make use of such a law.

    Plus it keeps lawyers more fully employed to keep up with what the net net net rules really are.

    [1]In the 70s in Kentucky they did one of those consolidations / constitutional updates. It removed a requirement that anyone driving a car down a road and approached by someone on a horse had to get off the road and hide his car. Dismantling it if needed to fully hide it. This was to prevent his crazy contraption from spooking the horse. Had been on the books since around 1900.

    964:

    Re uncountable.

    If a mathematician has two imaginary friends that have sex with each other, will they give birth to a real enemy?

    965:

    My bad, apparently I can't spel.

    966:

    My fault. I should have looked at the posts from the last 8 hours, only about 5 posts...

    967:

    I think you will find any offspring will be a little more complex.

    968:
    Martin said: “London has a low birth rate. A reasonably liberal immigration system controlled by those we have elected, as distinct from the UK system, would be a plus for the economy and the city."

    The EU does not control immigration to member states, immigration is a purely national matter.

    Free movement between EU member states is not immigration, no more than movement between Leeds and London.

    969:

    Er, thanks to Scamoron, Mayhem and Bozo, "the wors easiest deal ever", and the resultant WrecksIt, the UK is not actually in the EU.

    970:

    Love the PPS; I am in the same camp.

    This cryptocurrency nonsense is a scam and a societally useless one to boot. When I look at the SF future worlds presented to us on the big screen I see the behemoths of Star Wars & Star Trek; one is a dystopian hellscape that is full of boys' own adventures and marketable soft toys, the other an improving civilization bent on making the universe a better place for all its living creatures. I know which one I want to see in the 23rd century.

    971:

    RE: Star Wars vs Star Trek, But how will the fortunate have a positive self image without human wreckage to look at?/S IMNSHO, counseling seems like a better answer than reeducation camps.

    972:

    Never said it was.

    Free movement still exists, just not for Brits.

    973:

    Trust me, they're doing their research. Plus, of course, she's taking time off work, and they'll be driving around the area for some days.

    I reminded her that I had decided that one of our family mottos is "don't be stupid", and she assures me she's attempting to live up to that.

    974:

    Never heard of him, and I agree, he's fun. I watched that one... and then the one on "could you make an emergency space suit from duct tape".

    975:

    Perhaps you missed the lawsuit, a couple-three years ago, where an Asian (Chines? Indian? I disremember) sued Oracle, and won. In the evidence were execs' emails "we can pay him at least $10k less than an American).

    976:

    I don't think so, since to have an enemy, they'd have to be negative. This implies a real friend and an imaginary friend having a child.

    977:

    Hadn't thought of that, but not just yes, but hell, yes. Clearly, the Empire (or the Repbulic), there are artificial shortages to stratify society.

    Interestingly enough, I just got the first review on Amazon for my novel, and in addition to being 5/5 stars, it noted that one of the polities in my far future universe had... artificial shortages to stratify society.

    Unlike what Hollywood did to Roddenberry's future, making it not last 800 years, my Terran Confederation lasts over 1500... and what follows is equally non-stratified and non-shortaged.

    978:

    Actually, thinking about duct tape space suits, and the old mechanical high-altitude suits.... The duct tape ones might work better if there was a narrow strip of elastic material (aka "Spandex", (tm)) along the sides.

    979:

    Tim Martin has been "got" dead-to-rights by the Daily Mash .... Oops

    980:

    So, his naming needs work. Maybe a "British Union", or a "British Commonwealth"....

    981:

    "I don't think so, since to have an enemy, they'd have to be negative. This implies a real friend and an imaginary friend having a child."

    But they would be negative and real, being the product of two imaginaries. The child you postulate would be complex.

    982:

    whitroth "British Workhouse"

    The last word has other connotations - see C. Dickens .....

    983:

    I'm not sure about that. An emergency space suit is presumably intended as cover for situations where you weren't expecting to need any sort of space suit, otherwise you'd have been wearing one already, so it's just needing to keep you more or less alive until the rescuers turn up. So what you're basically trying to do is encase your body closely in a material which has enough tensile strength that when you increase the internal pressure by squirting oxygen into your lungs you don't pop. The last thing you'd want would be for there to be any give in it, and probably also you would have to wind on several layers of tape to make it strong enough. The big problem would be whether you had enough time to do that before you passed out.

    984:

    I'm well aware of the meaning.... And there were workhouses in the US, too.

    985:

    SHIT I have just seen this Brexshit-related? Probably, I think. Needs to be stopped. tory scum

    986:

    But they would be negative and real, being the product of two imaginaries. The child you postulate would be complex.

    Once you've sorted that out, time to look into quaternions. Four flavours: (1, i, j, k) where i2 and j2 and k2 are all -1, as is ijk. But they don't commute: ij is k, but ji is minus k. So as well as the four classes we need another attribute regarding "who does what to whom" ;-)

    987:

    timrowledge @ 960: My experience is from 1991, so there’s that, but on the day I started work at the company that hired me to Silicon Valley there were three of us being inducted.
    Me from UK, a young woman from Hong Kong, and an Israeli chap. I promise you, they were not paying us less than any Murrican- and I can also promise you that if they could have found locals able to do the work they would have taken them. The legal costs, the moving costs, the temporary paid accommodation, car, etc, etc probably added up to a years pay.
    If they’ve mangled the system into a gastarbeiter program then I guess someone got a good payoff.

    Gastarbeiter - Yeah, I think that's as good a descriptive word as any for what I experienced.

    During the second half of the 1990s I worked "for" a large computer manufacturing company out at Research Triangle Park here in North Carolina. I started as a "Supplemental" employee1, but eventually became a "contractor". In my department 8 out of 10 were "Gastarbeiters" - here on H-1b visas - primarily from Pakistan, some from India and one guy from Bangladesh. The Pakistanis & Indians got along Ok as long as you didn't let them get started arguing about cricket.

    The Bangladeshi guy told us on the first day he joined our team that he had never seen a vending machine & didn't know what it was or how to get something out of it.

    We weren't doing computer-rocket-science, we worked in or for manufacturing; getting the product ready to ship. Integrated Software Subsystems Lab. We assembled the Windoze (and for a while OS/2 before that was squeezed out) preloads2 so that the manufacturing plants could install it on the new PCs as they came down the assembly line.

    We were also sprouting the seeds for the gig economy to come.

    But here's the thing ... all that time Wake Tech was graduating batches of new minted "programmers" every year. Been doing it since I don't know when, and especially in those years when the Y2K pressure was mounting. But I only ever encountered one of them during my years working on computers; the token Black guy hired as a software tester for our lab. All of my cow-orkers were "Gastarbeiters"

    I don't think anyone actually got paid off, but probably there were just a few contributions to various lawmakers reelection campaigns over the years.

    1 Supplementals were some sort of internal "contractor" system - limited to 5 years and no benefits. If after 5 years you didn't get offered REAL employee status, you had to leave. I was a supplemental for about a year & a half, laid off without warning at end of shift on New Years Eve. On January 2, I was called by a contracting company who wanted to know if I'd be willing to go back to work there as an outside contractor (with health insurance). All those H-1b visa people also worked for the outside contracting company.

    2 We did preloads in 30 some languages. I was originally hired as a software tester, but my job quickly evolved into logistics management for the lab - keeping the "programmers" supplied with up to date hardware so the software could be tested against the latest machine revisions and preparing the forms for customs and export licenses. And physically getting the packages to the carriers, because the software wasn't always ready (in fact was rarely ready) to go into the FedEx/UPS boxes before the 5:00pm pickup time. Pre-9/11 that often meant a stop by the supervisor's office at the UPS hub at RDU airport. If I could get it there before 10:00pm the package could still make it out "on time".

    PS: They weren't paying you less than the Murricans because just by being able to hire YOU at whatever salary they were able to force the Murricans to work for that same salary.

    PPS: How do you know you weren't being paid less. Most corporations very strongly discourage (i.e. "Don't do it or we'll fire your ass!") employees from discussing how much they're being paid.

    988:

    David L @ 963:

    {sex toys} I may be wrong but I think you're a decade or few behind current events
    I'm going with the first option pending further advice. First two references I found:

    OK. Difference of interpretation.

    There are 100s (1000s or 10,000s) of laws on the books in the US which are no longer enforced (enforceable) due to court decisions. In the US. If the Supremes (or state equivalent) say "XYZ" is invalid that just means that. Invalid. There is no process that requires local or state or even federal legislatures to remove the law from the books. Better states used to consolidates decades of individual criminal and civil law every 20+ years or so to make figuring them out a bit more sane.[1] In the current political environment that process has slowed down. A lot. Voting for the wrong hobby horse can get you thrown out of office.

    The downside of this is every now and again some asshole will create a lot of sound and fury (their point) trying to make use of such a law.

    Plus it keeps lawyers more fully employed to keep up with what the net net net rules really are.

    [1]In the 70s in Kentucky they did one of those consolidations / constitutional updates. It removed a requirement that anyone driving a car down a road and approached by someone on a horse had to get off the road and hide his car. Dismantling it if needed to fully hide it. This was to prevent his crazy contraption from spooking the horse. Had been on the books since around 1900.

    There was, at one time, a law in North Carolina prohibiting elephants from being used to pull the plow in a cotton field.

    I believe I first acquired that bit of trivia some time in the early 70s, and I'm still trying to find out (although not trying too hard) Who, What, When, Where & Why?

    I don't know when the law was repealed either (if it ever was formally repealed), but it's no longer among the North Carolina General Statutes. At the latest, it got weeded out when North Carolina adopted the current Constitution of North Carolina in 1971.

    989:

    whitroth @ 978: I don't think so, since to have an enemy, they'd have to be negative. This implies a real friend and an imaginary friend having a child.

    Probably against the law in Alabama, Missouri & Texas and mandatory in Florida.

    990:

    Pigeon @ 985: I'm not sure about that. An emergency space suit is presumably intended as cover for situations where you weren't expecting to need any sort of space suit, otherwise you'd have been wearing one already, so it's just needing to keep you more or less alive until the rescuers turn up. So what you're basically trying to do is encase your body closely in a material which has enough tensile strength that when you increase the internal pressure by squirting oxygen into your lungs you don't pop. The last thing you'd want would be for there to be any give in it, and probably also you would have to wind on several layers of tape to make it strong enough. The big problem would be whether you had enough time to do that before you passed out.

    I don't think you could make a space suit out of duct tape, but you could probably use it to patch a leak in one.

    991:

    Regarding crypto currency, this is only the worst news, as Norton is supposedly in the the business of crypto security:

    [ "Your next laptop may come with a cryptominer, courtesy of Norton Norton 360 has everything: a VPN, LifeLock, and... Ethereum mining?" ]

    https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/6/2/22465862/norton-360-crypto-mining-ethereum-coinbase

    Everyone I know who ever was afflicted with Norton w/o their choice, including myself, we got rid of it as fast as possible. But now -- this.

    992:

    why do you propose it as a standard.

    I was objecting to other people using it as a standard.

    But having thought about it, I'm not sure I can suggest a better standard. Very "I know what I like but I can't explain it" and "I know it when I see it".

    I suppose: minimum detail necessary to convey the offence. We don't need to know every last gory detail to understand that something bad happened. Especially in criminal matters, I prefer the kiwi approach of "the Christchurch terrorist" rather than naming him. I prefer to let trained professionals with proper support systems in place deal with the details.

    Beau of the Fifth Column talking about the recent shooting in San Jose and how the five random cops actually did everything as they should have and for all the little picking away at them being less than perfect the outcome is what we want: fewer people dead.

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

    993:

    I remember when Norton was the guy himself, and had a really good tool that everyone used.

    Then he sold it....

    994:

    ... the connection being: he doesn't go into any detail about what happened, who died 9did anyone die?) etc, he just talks about how the cops responded to "the shooting". Which conveys everything I care to know about what happened.

    995:

    Those pesky Australian pirates.

    On 7 May 1957, while docked in Sydney for Coral Sea Day celebrations, ten University of Sydney students dressed as pirates boarded the aircraft carrier in the early morning hours undetected. While some began soliciting donations from the Navy crew for a local charity, others entered the bridge. The public address system was turned on. "Now hear this!" announced Paul Lennon, a medical student. "The USS Bennington has been captured by Sydney University pirates!" Alarms for general quarters, atomic and chemical attacks were sounded, rousing the crew from their bunks. Marines escorted the students off the ship. No charges were filed.

    I had followed a rabbit deep down a hole.

    996:

    I may even still have a copy of the pink shirt book somewhere :)

    997:

    From the inside, you probably could. After all, Kim Kinnison managed it with something called "plastic", which seems to basically be dum-dum from the description.

    998:

    THANK YOU

    Both forms now printed out, filled in, and inserted in envelopes addressed and stamped ready for posting. And a banner with the links added to my website for the next 3 weeks odd.

    UK people: You have until 23rd June to sort this out, so get on it.

    I have moaned on here before about my GP making it impossible to book appointments or repeat prescriptions over the internet by getting rid of the system they used to have, which worked fine, was simple, and didn't fuck you about, and replacing it with some government-cronies-designed shit which didn't even work, not even a little bit (this being the guaranteed and universal result of using that stupid fucking "react" bollocks with zero content in the HTML), and concerning which I could find no documentation of any actual use but did find absolute reams of official help and guidance for any parasitic scum who might want to incorporate a portal into their own websites so they could scarf your input to it to fuckingadvertise crap at you based on your personal medical conditions - ie. official information which made it clear that the thing was designed to assist parasites in pinching your personal data and therefore any purported safeguarding or privacy protection they claimed for it wasn't worth a wank.

    But at least that thing didn't do anything unless you actually signed up for it, whereas this shit would have bitten me automatically if I hadn't read that link. So thank you Greg.

    I really should get myself a T-shirt to the design described by Iain Banks in (I think) "Espedair Street".

    999:

    For no particular reason I ordered a couple of those DNA ancestor kits & have sent my spit off to be analyzed.

    I'm not particularly worried about privacy implications, the U.S. military has had my DNA on file since the early 90s (after the Arrow Air Flight 1285 crash). If they haven't misused it by now I don't think it's going to be a problem in the future.

    I've seen a lot of news warning people these Home DNA Tests might give you unexpected results containing unwelcome news. I don't think that's going to happen here either.

    I sort of wish there might be some surprises, but I expect it's just plain vanilla ... no pirates, no poets and no Lost Dauphins.

    1000:

    Home DNA Tests might give you unexpected results containing unwelcome news

    You think that now.

    But when the results come back and you find out that you're a labradoodle I bet you'll be shocked.

    1001:

    @977 - didn’t see that one but nothing terrible Oracle does would ever be a surprise. And it would be > 25 years after my experience anyway. Ellison still firmly believes he is god’s boss.

    JBS@989 - well I always had the strong impression that things were much less ... decent? ... on the east pasta. Friends & ex-colleagues in IBM research told me tales. More recently I hear of increasing outright racism in hiring over there.

    They certainly weren’t using “pay me less to force good honest murricans to work for less” because there were maybe two dozen people in the world that could do the particular job and they already had a dozen of them. And I already knew exactly what people were getting paid because prior work experience meant I had, ah, “seen” their financial data, and after a short while I took over managing the engineering division budget. Which had the side benefit that I was able to push back against some weasel trying to pay the female engineers les, despite the fact that several of them were the best performing staff.

    1002:

    I have a nasty feeling this is part of something that has been going on for a few years, so unlikely to be Brexit-related.

    In social care, there's an initiative called the Client Level Data set which got announced around 5 years ago. Basically, instead of reporting aggregate data to DHSC, the idea is that we upload a list of events linked to personal data. This is linked to the NHS spine using the person's NHS ID by the local DHSCRO, and then the combined anonymised data set is transferred to NHS Digital.

    It's being touted to councils as a work-saving replacement for the current aggregated returns and allows NHSD to answer questions without asking us. What they don't understand is the crap nature of our data and what they are asking is going to involve far more work than the aggregate returns.

    There's also an initiative in public health called Health-e-Intent, which is a similar thing based on health data, although we're providing some social care data as well. A fair amount of this has been pandemic-driven because of the difficulty identifying vulnerable people from available registers.

    1003:

    I don't think you could make a space suit out of duct tape, but you could probably use it to patch a leak in one.

    Like this?

    http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3600/fc03556.htm

    1004:

    I don't think you could make a space suit out of duct tape, but you could probably use it to patch a leak in one.

    I'm now wondering if there is, in fact, a space-rated version of duct tape. Or cable ties, cyano glue or WD-40 or any of the classic gotos normally used to bodge a repair job down her in this gravity-well.

    1005:

    Pigeon: UK people: You have until 23rd June to sort this out, so get on it.

    AIUI this is NHS England (and possibly NHS Wales) only. It isn't happening in Scotland (the NHS here is fully devolved and under Scottish government control).

    1006:

    I'm now wondering if there is, in fact, a space-rated version of duct tape.

    There are certainly aerospace rated tapes. "Helicopter tape" is used to protect the leading edges of helicopter rotor blades from abrasion, and for other aviation applications. There was also this case where a SleazyJet aircraft engine was "taped up" as a temporary repair. This was actually speed tape.

    On cable ties, I know of a rail accident which was caused by the wrong kind of cable tie. At some point someone had to install a cable running along the bottom of a passenger foot bridge. Instead of using the proper metal cable ties they used plastic ones. Over the following years the plastic ties degraded and something like 20 years later they eventually broke. This left the cable dangling down below the bridge where it was hooked by a passing train and whipped along the platform, seriously injuring a passenger.

    1007:

    Or, more commonly, as "tank tape". Amongst its attributes, it's a fuel (particularly octane-based) proof self-adhesive.

    And "bondage tape". That's notable for how well it will stick to itself, but not to human skin.

    1008:

    Or, to choose the last of the 'arithmetic' fields (see 'division algebra'), you could use octonions :-)

    1009:

    Don't you bet on it - Cheltenham is in England ....

    1010:

    But when the results come back and you find out that you're a labradoodle I bet you'll be shocked.

    I'd be shocked at those results, too. I'd've expected a large chunk of Alsatian or other working dog in the mix.

    1011:

    No, it's Brexit-related - it was actually a fairly major driver behind Brexit. Successive governments (both post-Thatcherite and Blairite) have tried doing variants of this several times before, but have been blocked by respectable MPs and others, relying on the ultimate weapon of it being illegal under EU law. It was one of the main reasons I regarded the EU as so beneficial. I don't see a hope in hell of it being stopped.

    I have posted before that I have direct knowledge of how the Department of Total Incompetence and its predecessors have been passing UK commercial information on to the USA since at least the 1960s, and blocking UK attempts to innovate where that competes with the USA. But, nowadays, biomedical data is where the money is - hence this sort of thing.

    An independent Scotland in the EU is the only hope for the medium-term political future in the British Isles - England is beyond redemption and Ireland is about to have serious trouble.

    1012:

    Yup. I might go in for one of those if I knew a reliable one that would give decently complete information, but am disinclined to waste money on one that just tells me I am almost entirely of north-western European ancestry and a few other things that I know, anyway. Being largely a dark Celt, I very probably have some Moorish and Neanderthal ancestry.

    1013:

    I was interested in the NatGeo version of the DNA test that would give you some broader historical things like when your ancestors exited Africa and some other key paleo-data points. I don't see a lot of use in finding out the precise percentages of Irish, Scottish, English, Hungarian and miscellaneous I might have. I suppose I'd be interested in unexpected but plausible outliers like Mongol or Roma. There is a good solid chance of some Ashkenazi heritage in there as well which would be interesting.

    My great-grandmother was Scottish Canadian by descent but also about 14th generation Nova Scotia. I've always wondered if somewhere along that line there must be some indigenous ancestry, not that I would ever have any legitimate reason to make anything of it other than 'interesting'.

    1014:

    I've been off a while. Here's some space news

  • This article is talking about the fact that new satellite operators and startups are using cloud infrastructure to plan and execute missions. This practically indicates that space tech is undergoing the standardization that is long overdue IMO.
  • https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjNzY7SqP7wAhWMmuAKHT2QDoQQFjAAegQIBBAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F05%2F25%2Ftechnology%2Fcloud-computing-simulations-startups.html&usg=AOvVaw12Pb2KQBN1qTOixXoIFgPX

  • TV/movies are becoming a profitable niche in human space flight. The interesting factoid is that NASA believes that the ISS can only sustain a maximum of 2 purely commercial missions a year. I wonder if this limitation is based on any objective facts https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjqyby8qf7wAhVdFVkFHd2iDH8QFjAAegQIBBAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F05%2F26%2Fscience%2Fspace-station-reality-tv-movies.html&usg=AOvVaw2hxSZ07VJaQ7N3p2hc-n_4

  • The CEO of Astra just claimed that predictions of a crowded satellite launcher market are not true. Time will tell who's correct. https://spacenews.com/launch-executives-see-booming-demand-despite-gloomy-forecasts/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThere's%20a%20diverse%20and%20growing,market%20analysts%2C%E2%80%9D%20he%20said.

  • NASA is sending probes to Venus. Finally https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/nasa-is-going-back-to-venus-to-discover-why-it-became-a-runaway-hothouse/

  • The Air Force is planning to invest $48 million in the coming year into Starship. This is not as significant as it would have been 10 years ago, but it's still welcome. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/the-us-military-is-starting-to-get-really-interested-in-starship/

  • Falcon 9 is 15 flights short of equaling the entire STS program. Since April 22, it's been launching approx once every 9 days.

  • 1015:

    I'm now wondering if there is, in fact, a space-rated version of duct tape. Or cable ties, cyano glue or WD-40 or any of the classic gotos normally used to bodge a repair job down her in this gravity-well.

    I peaked around a bit. The Apollo missions did fly with a pouch of spacesuit repair stuff. The description was sparse, but it included glue, beta cloth, rubber, and about what you'd expect for patching a hole in the layer cake that is a spacesuit.

    If you google "adhesive in a vacuum" you can read all about those products. So materials are available.

    The problem I see is patching yourself if you get holed while on a spacewalk, even assuming the trauma inside the suit is minimized. The problem is that there's around a 4 lb/in2 pressure differential between the air inside the suit and the vacuum outside (100% oxygen running at 1/3 atmosphere on the inside, vacuum outside). This means the suit gloves are about as flexible as the gloves worn by a hockey goalie. Even if an external patch is available, applying it with those gloves is going to be a troublesome. I'm pretty sure the suit makers have figured out workarounds, but I don't think it's easy. Patching a tire hole while wearing welder's gloves is probably a similar challenge, as is patching a backpack while wearing it.

    1016:

    Looks like coding is starting to resemble a spell book even more. Microsoft is beginning to use NLP transformers to transform natural language into code. This sounds very basic now, but who knows?

    https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/25/microsoft-uses-gpt-3-to-let-you-code-in-natural-language/

    1017:

    It would also be like patching a tyre which still has some pressure in it, so air is coming out of the hole while you're trying to put the patch on and keeps lifting it off again before the glue has a chance to act completely, with the result that you can't get it to stick and a good deal of your remaining oxygen supply is consumed in swearing at it. Kinnison's suit had enough room inside it that he could wriggle his arms out of the sleeves and get at the hole from the inside, so the pressure difference was working in his favour, the repair kit also being stashed inside the suit to make such things possible.

    1018:

    EC Unless ( Unlikely ) somone raises a fearful stink in eithe the HoC or HoL, but, given BoZo the Lying Creep, I don't think stopping it is likely. Like Pigeon, I am, of course, opting out. There is also the hope than if too many GP's refuse to play ( As indicated in the original article ) it may collapse

    1019:

    Let's see: I'm from eastern Europe, and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.

    I need a DNA ancestry test for that?

    And a) I do not want my info sold, which most of them will do, allegedly anonymizing (and I believe that, right), and b) at least now, I don't have to worry about future employer insurance....

    1020:

    That's because most modern code is a freakin' kludge, because management wants it done when?

    I've done maintenance on crap. I wrote clear, self-documenting code, with comments. Past employers and co-workers could use my code, so I know what I'm talking about.

    1021:

    I've thought of, and mentioned, building a space station with a layer that's water. Insulation, radiation protection, balancing... and, when punctured, self-seals.

    1022:

    To me it seems also that one of the tones making up the overall reek of government scam is a distinct whiff of it being the early stages of a plot to derive an increasing amount of NHS funding from private entities, starting with those (or their parent entities) which are being encouraged to view it as something to batten on to for their own advantage. The overall aim being a kind of stealth privatisation whereby subsections of NHS functionality are taken over in dribs and drabs by a tangled web of private interests, bit by bit until there is nothing left, and creating such a horrendously fucking complex mess that any future government with an intention of reversing it would be faced with a nightmarishly impossible task. Like the railways only with a greater degree of subdivision and a whole lot less transparency. Also like one of those variants of parasitism which ends up with the parasite controlling so many of the host's functions that it's pretty much the parasite keeping the host alive, in the form of some zombified crippled wreck repurposed to serve the parasite's interests.

    As regards DNA ancestry tests, I am beginning to develop a certain interest in the purely practical possibility that it might reveal that I had enough Scottish ancestry to qualify for a Scottish passport post-independence. There is at least some chance, on one side, of traces from indigenes of the border region long before anything like the current political division existed, and from the later population exchanging theft-and-rape missions across the border after it did exist, neither of which is likely to be determinable from ordinary genealogical records, but I have little idea of how much chance and less of how detectable it might be from a DNA test, and there is also a reasonable chance of confusion arising from the contracting distribution of the population later called Welsh.

    1023:

    Agreed - and with Greg and whitroth.

    1024:

    Balancing a wheel full of water would get interesting. I think reasonably strong pumps and reservoirs, would probably be useful.

    Anyway, there's one space technology I've not seen mentioned: portable/mobile work shelters. They're certainly a thing on Earth. Having a portable whipple and radiation shield, combined with skirts to catch dropped stuff, and places to hang lights, cameras, and tools, would be really handy. Keeping it foldable enough to be portable would be fun for the design engineers.

    For a ship in interplanetary space, or somewhere like the Jupiter system, some sort of portable shelter would almost be mandatory. It would also be mandatory in LEO after a Kessler cascade.

    1025:

    Falcon 9 is 15 flights short of equaling the entire STS program. Since April 22, it's been launching approx once every 9 days.

    To me a bigger deal is they just launched a brand new booster. After 20 used ones in a row.

    Grumble, grumble, Congress telling NASA how to build rockets and .... grumble, grumble... Maybe we had to drop a gazillion $$$ the wrong way to show it was wrong.

    Oh, well.

    1026:

    And in a related situation, Ariane has dug a big hole. In 2014 they decided the Ariane 6 would not be re-usable[1]. So while it's only 40% the cost of an Ariane 5 launch it will still be more expensive than anything from SpaceX.

    So they have a new great single use rocket that needs to be replaced before it has it's first launch next year. And the company knows it and is talking about the situation publicly. So the world's commercial launch leader for 15 years is now trying to avoid becoming the IBM mainframe of the rocket business.

    [1] Back around 2014 when asked about re-usable rockets a higher ups at Ariane said what should not have been said. Why would we switch to reusable rockets and reduce our workforce? Basically he said Ariane was a jobs program. I wish I could find the quote but anyway, it sure sounds like US Senator Shelby and the NASA SLS.

    1027:

    pigeon @ 1024 it by bit until there is nothing left, and creating such a horrendously fucking complex mess that any future government with an intention of reversing it would be faced with a nightmarishly impossible task. Like the railways only with a greater degree of subdivision and a whole lot less transparency Like they did with the Railways, you mean?

    Meanwhile Just as you thought it could not get any worse & this is NOT satire Actual Nazi emulation in Arizona Eugh

    1028:

    Today is National Doughnut Day in the U.S. ... or perhaps it's National Donut Day. Apparently there is some debate.

    https://www.npr.org/2021/06/04/1003128553/doughnut-or-donut-discuss

    Anyway, if you know where to get them they'll give you a free one today.

    1029:

    Doughnut, unless you actually insist on using Noah Webster's misspellings of English words.

    1030:

    Re: Future employment and health insurance related to DNA testing. Definitely an issue in Ameristan, most civilized countries have national health of some kind.

    I don't see any practical uses for mass market DNA tests, only interest and curiosity. Medically oriented DNA testing is only at the beginning of what is going to become an immense field.

    Over the decades hundreds and thousands of drugs have been tried for various ailments, most notably cancer. In a large percentage of cases a particular experimental drug has worked very well for some people, not at all for others, and outright killed some. Until very recently the 'outright killed' was enough to remove a drug from consideration and further testing, for obvious reasons.

    If it is possible to identify the genetic traits that put us in one of the categories, a great many drugs will come back into potential use as treatment for various ailments. If you can be reliably identified as someone for whom a treatment works very well (and does not kill) then it can open many doors that were previously thought closed.

    1031:

    Paul @ 1008:

    I'm now wondering if there is, in fact, a space-rated version of duct tape.

    Used on Apollo 13 to adapt the square CO2 filters from the Command Module to work on the round holes in Lunar Module CO2 scrubber and again on Apollo 17 to repair a damaged fender on the Lunar Rover.

    According to NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill, a 52-year NASA veteran, duct tape had been stowed on board every mission since early in the Gemini program.

    There are certainly aerospace rated tapes. "Helicopter tape" is used to protect the leading edges of helicopter rotor blades from abrasion, and for other aviation applications. There was also this case where a SleazyJet aircraft engine was "taped up" as a temporary repair. This was actually speed tape.

    On cable ties, I know of a rail accident which was caused by the wrong kind of cable tie. At some point someone had to install a cable running along the bottom of a passenger foot bridge. Instead of using the proper metal cable ties they used plastic ones. Over the following years the plastic ties degraded and something like 20 years later they eventually broke. This left the cable dangling down below the bridge where it was hooked by a passing train and whipped along the platform, seriously injuring a passenger.

    I believe "Duct Tape" has its origins with the military. What we now know as "duct tape" (although maybe "duck tape" is the more correct name) was originally developed to meet military requirements:

    During World War II, Revolite (then a division of Johnson & Johnson) developed an adhesive tape made from a rubber-based adhesive applied to a durable duck cloth backing. This tape resisted water and was used to seal some ammunition cases during that period.

    The Army calls it "90 mile an hour tape"; the Air Corps1 called it "100mph tape".

    1 aka the U.S. Air Farce and additionally now the U.S. Space Farce.

    1032:

    Definitely an issue in Ameristan, most civilized countries have national health of some kind.

    OK. In a any country with a national health care system write the rules for the following.

    You have a genetic marker for a "THING" for which 99% of the people who have this marker die before they turn 30 years old. You're 25 and need a kidney transplant. What is the decision?

    And if you're 18 and likely to die before 45?

    And if ....

    OK yes there is dialysis but it's nothing you'd wish on anyone unless it was the only option. How about a corneal transplant so you aren't functionally blind? A heart, lung, or liver transplant?

    DNA testing is going to start a lot of emotional arguments.

    1033:

    Robert Prior @ 1012:

    But when the results come back and you find out that you're a labradoodle I bet you'll be shocked.

    I'd be shocked at those results, too. I'd've expected a large chunk of Alsatian or other working dog in the mix.

    I expect Big Mama Thornton will be pleased with the vindication.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoHDrzw-RPg

    1034:

    I'm now wondering if there is, in fact, a space-rated version of duct tape.

    Well in the US the brand "duct tape" is a piss poor product. Apparently was the "first" and now should never be used. It is really crappy.

    There are all kinds of similar tapes specific to various jobs. For actual HVAC duct taping there are some really nice aluminum foil backed things which have a thick "sticky" side and are designed for just this. After it is in place for a while it sort of merges into the duct as a single product.

    There are also other types for other things.

    NASCAR (racing) teams use something they call 200mph duct tape. I suspect it is the same thing airlines use for emergency / short term maintenance situations. I doubt that such would work for F1 or Indy cars as they are way too finely tuned complexly shaped carbon filament boxes that don't so much crack as disintegrate.

    1035:

    David L @ 1028: And in a related situation, Ariane has dug a big hole.

    That's not a phrase you usually want to hear in relation to rocket launches.

    1036:

    paws4thot @ 1031: Doughnut, unless you actually insist on using Noah Webster's misspellings of English words.

    In that case they should be "dough nuts" - two words

    No matter how you spell it they're delicious ... even more so when you can get a freebie.

    1038:

    I'm now wondering if there is, in fact, a space-rated version of duct tape.

    I had forgotten about this one: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210529.html

    Real life duct tape usage on the moon.

    1039:

    Those arguments already exist in countries with national health care systems. Do we spend millions on a drug to possibly save a single toddler, or spend the same money in other ways such as providing emergency medicine or preventative treatments for more people?

    Back in the 80s I heard an interview with someone whose father (or uncle?) was responsible for allocating the funds in Public Health District #1 — the first implementation of Medicare in Canada.

    He said it was a heartbreaking task — how to allocate limited resources to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of patients — and the choices were never easy.

    It's still a heartbreaking task, with things like transplant eligibility. Does an old codger like you or I get the new kidney, or a younger person who has other medical conditions? Genetic markers add another layer of information, but we already use lots of imperfect information to make life-altering decisions.

    1040:

    My point was the pay for heath care or not was only a "bit" of the conversation.

    Oregon 10+ years ago got into by trying to put in limits on care for the terminally ill. It was a PR disaster and got rolled back into who knows what.

    1041:

    Who pays for health care is a bit of the conversatiom, but all health care decisions and spending are some form of triage.

    Triage is the last place for emotional arguments. Sadly in the US and much of the Anglosphere (and very possibly elsewhere) decision making by public opinion is all too often the model.

    Do you add 1 year of life to a toddler or 10 to an octogenarian? What if that toddler might have a slim chance of becoming an octogenarian.

    Of course, if we stop spending gazillions on ever more effective ways to kill each other we could probably easily afford to extend both lives. So that triage decision has already been made - keep the bombs dropping even if it costs us a few toddlers.

    1042:

    https://www.wired.com/story/inside-spinlaunch-the-space-industrys-best-kept-secret/

    "The company is building a massive centrifuge to accelerate rockets and send them screaming into space."

    Is this reasonable or batshit insane?

    1043:

    You think that now. But when the results come back and you find out that you're a labradoodle I bet you'll be shocked.

    Ah, yes, the SMBC self-domesticating dog model. Better a labradoodle than a yappy lapdog, I guess.

    Observation suggests I'm derived from one of those giant shaggy breeds that looks powerful and dynamic but actually spends all its time napping in the living room and shedding on the sofa.

    1044:

    Sounds great to me; looks like an excellent way of sending kids into orbit.

    1045:

    So they are planning to launch a 50kg test projectile at 8km/s. That's a KE of 1.6GJ, which is equivalent to about 380t explosive yield, and a good chance of seeing it happen if the thing experiences any untoward perturbations on hitting the atmosphere.

    They are planning to wind it up using a 50m radius centrifuge. The arm has to stand a tension of 64MN. (They are an order of magnitude out in their "10,000g" figure; it's more like 130,000g.) It also has to stand a step change of 64MN in the out-of-balance forces at the moment it lets go, and more than likely a severe aerodynamic disturbance from a blast of air rushing in when the exit port opens on top of that. I don't feel like trying to estimate a figure for the mass of so large and strong a lump of machinery, but I reckon it's safe to say that it will be a heck of a lot more than 50kg and will end up having KE equivalent to a pretty respectable nuke.

    I'd rather have a factory assembling actual nukes in my back yard than that thing, even if all the assembly was being done by the apprentices.

    1046:

    "The arm has to stand a tension of 64MN." - from the load alone, let alone what it has to stand due to its own mass.

    1047:

    Oops, I think I'm a factor of 1000 out in my tons/joules conversion.

    1048:

    Is this reasonable or batshit insane?

    I think they've left reasonable behind many spins ago.

    I'd like to hear more about this simultaneously dropped counterweight. Where does that go? How do they safely stop something moving at near escape velocity?

    How does one build a hatch large enough for a rocket that will also pop open in a fraction of a second? If it is blown out of the way by explosives, I see several potential failure modes.

    The prototype is shown with a vertical rotational axis, meaning that anything falling off will fly away basically horizontally. Spacecraft famously go up. Is the actual launcher supposed to be mounted at an angle? That's the sort of thing that should be tested a few times before building the expensive one.

    1049:

    Back in the days before modern UPS systems sold for $1K to $10K for very decent long running battery setups, labs (college and industry) would build motor generator setups with a heavy flywheel in the middle to keep lab experiments running. This was for those situations which "could not" handle a power interruption during days/weeks of running without ruining the experiments.

    Many had a process or someone around that would deal with putting all that kinetic energy in a room in a building full of people and precautions would be put into place. Some did not. And if discovered tempers / fears could rise as the situation was explained.

    1050:

    Batshit at least feeds indigenous cockroaches, and can be mined for garden guano, black powder ingredients, or exotic coronaviruses. It's useful stuff.

    This...well, the polite way to phrase it is that with 10,000 g lateral acceleration, the bearings will have stopped screaming some minutes before the pieces of the centrifuge have stopped falling out of the sky. Also, I'm not clear how you aim the launch, at least within 360 degrees of your preferred angle.

    Basically, this "works" because the projectile launched would experience about the same forces a rifle bullet feels when the cartridge ignites. So we know projectiles can be launched that fast. Thing is, you can get off Earth at 3 gee with somewhat fewer risks, so why not do it that way and spend the cargo money on sophistication rather than ruggedness?

    Anyway, if you want cool, invest in a rocketoon, which is a rocket module hauled to ca. 100,000 feet by weather balloons, then fired. That lets you lose the first rocket stage, which saves a lot on costs and related kinetic self-demolitions.

    1051:

    rocketjps Here, in the UK that decision has been made ... We throw "silly" ( except it's not ) amounts of money at start-of-life, which is why our infant mortality stats are so much better than the USA's. We usually try hard for really old people, but once it is actually clear that nothing is going to save them, we switch to palliative & end-of-life treatments. We've had US visiotrs comment on this - always favourably, may I say.

    skulgun & pigeon I'd say "batshit" - not because it's impossible, in theory, but the sheer practical difficulties, especially if something goes worng, are horrendous. Size-limited too, the problems increasing as the cube of any dimension of the payload, of course. I'd rather have a factory assembling actual nukes in my back yard than that thing, even if all the assembly was being done by the apprentices. Yeah

    P.S. I'm surprised no-one has significantly commented on the actual return of Nazi Death camp practices to Arizona. Tell me again, was this what my Father's generation spent all their treasure & oceans of blood to achieve?

    1052:

    A few years ago I took a deep dive into tether based momentum exchange, which is basically the same as this.

    If you vary the length of the tether the g forces go up or down, but the maximum achievable tip velocity doesn't. The maximum tip velocity only varies with the strength and density of the tether material. The limit is a bit over 3 km/s using spectra 2000 which was the best existing material about 3 years ago when I last looked at it. Orbital velocity from the ground is out of the question unless you're looking at utterly absurd taper. You might be able to use it to boost material from LEO to escape velocity but there's not much margin.

    https://doi.org/10.1051/matecconf/201814801001

    1053:

    Well, there is no documentation, but some years ago I had a semi-sensible debate on this subject with a group including physicists, engineers and biologists, with qualifications ranging from BSc (Hons) up to PhD, and a variety of employment relevant to their degrees.

    Our basic conclusions were that a space elevator was more doable than a space trebuchet, but we still needed exotic materials not yet invented to make the beanstalk.

    1054:

    Aramid fibre would do, as would very high-tensile steel. What we don't have is the space engineering cabability to produce those.

    1055:

    "Not yet invented" included a 17_600 mile long buckystring, which we reckoned was high enough tensile strength to support more than its own mass.

    1056:

    Indeed. But did you do the calculations using the appropriate taper? I did, and the problem is as I said.

    In more detail, metallic asteroids are fairly common, and contain the main ingredients used in making maraging steels (*). With enough taper, those become viable, at least in theory, though I accept that it is a poor solution. I can't remember the taper factor, though it was something fairly extreme (50,000?), and am disinclined to recalculate it.

    Equally, the materials for making aramid fibre are available on the outer planets' moons, which would be a better (if still not good) solution. Making fullerene tubes in bulk is, I agree, so far an unsolved problem, but the carbon is available.

    (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maraging_steel

    1057:

    As regards DNA ancestry tests, I am beginning to develop a certain interest in the purely practical possibility that it might reveal that I had enough Scottish ancestry to qualify for a Scottish passport post-independence.

    You don't need ancestry; just residency. Rent a room or a flat somewhere cheap and move here before independence (make sure you're on the electoral register, paying bills, etc) and you'll be fine.

    More likely: unless the Tories go full scorched earth on Scottish independence, any legal divorce terms will likely echo those of the Ireland/UK breakup negotiated 1920-22. Which means: Scottish residents (or those who can prove ancestry) acquire dual nationality, citizens of either country can freely move to the other, register to vote and pay taxes there, and naturalize/acquire citizenship after a few years. (This latter may have been killed by Brexit wrt. Ireland/UK.)

    The hardest part will be finding somewhere to live if, as expected, Scotland opens the doors to immigration (spoiler: everyone in politics except the Scottish Tories agree that Scotland needs healthy young immigrant workers).

    1058:

    To me a bigger deal is they just launched a brand new booster. After 20 used ones in a row.

    I note that Falcon 9 launches throw away the upper stage, so they're not 100% fully reusable.

    But Shuttle launches threw away the ET on every flight, so ditto.

    Also: the Falcon 9 first stage is fully reusable through ten flights (proven, may be more). Nine engines. The upper stage is, well, one engine and a much smaller tank: presumably about 10% of the total manufacturing cost. The payload fairings are now reusable. So we can charitably call the Falcon 9 90% reusable (although the proportion of wastage grows with the number of flight cycles, so that over 10 flights, 50% of the engines are tossed overboard).

    Crew Dragon capsules are reusable, too. And one Crew Dragon launch and one freight launch ($80M and $60M charged to the customer) equal roughly the payload of a Shuttle mission ($2000M or more charged to the customer).

    This is really significant. Falcon 9 has delivered a 90% reusable "space truck" than can fly at 9 day intervals, at vastly lower cost and with far fewer personnel involved, than shuttle even promised in the 1970s powerpoint ranger era.

    So Falcon 9 achieves roughly the original touted parameters of the Space Shuttle, including flight frequency and reusability, for roughly 1/15 of the Shuttle's actual in-service operational costs.

    1059:

    I'm surprised no-one has significantly commented on the actual return of Nazi Death camp practices to Arizona.

    Maybe because, given the events of the past few years, no one is surprised?

    1060:

    You have a genetic marker for a "THING" for which 99% of the people who have this marker die before they turn 30 years old. You're 25 and need a kidney transplant. What is the decision?

    You've heard of QALYs, right? Quality-Adjusted Life-Years as a metric for determining how useful treatment is for such conditions?

    Obvs. 25yo with lethal-at-30 condition probably gets no more than 5 years extra life from a kidney transplant.

    But histocompatible donor organs come up more or less randomly.

    So you put the 25yo in the queue for an organ anyway, but assign them 5 QALYs. Now a suitable organ comes up: you identify the compatible recipients, and identify their likely benefit in QALYs from receiving the organ, and work out who gets more use from it. So an 80yo ... might actually end up behind our hypothetical dead-at-30 25yo, because 80yo's often die on the operating table and are unlikely to get more than a couple more years if they're an immunosuppressed transplant recipient. (They generally only get an organ if (a) they're likely to survive the operation, and (b) there's nobody on the list who'll get more use out of it.) On the other hand, an otherwise-healthy 25yo who just happens to have kidney failure will out-rank our dead-at-30 subject, because: more than 5 QALYs ahead of them if they get the organ.

    Final point: genetics aren't deterministic. 5 years might be time for an experimental treatment to show up that will save our 25 year old. Or they might be the 1% who live longer. Who knows?

    (You will find that medical ethicists -- as opposed to insurance underwriters -- have a lot of opinions about this topic, and don't take "but mah premiums!!!" as an acceptable answer.)

    1061:

    Many had a process or someone around that would deal with putting all that kinetic energy in a room in a building full of people

    See also ultracentrifuges (the biochem lab kind, not the uranium enrichment kind). Rotor head massing 1-5kg of solid machined titanium, 6-12 'fuge buckets holding maybe 1-5ml of samples (also machined from lumps of titanium), spinning at up to 250,000rpm in an evacuated chamber.

    The ultracentrifuges sort of resembled an ancient top-loading washing machine. And sane universities either put them in a tunnel in the sub-basement, or failing that, on the very top floor against an outside wall. That way, if a head failed, 50% of the shrapnel would simply zip through the wall and have several hundred metres of open air in which to slow down, rather than slowing down inside staff/student's bodies.

    1062:

    Naah, forget balloons and centrifuges: if your goal is to put 50-250kg lumps of construction material into orbit at 90 minute intervals, your best bet is to dust off the plans for Project Babylon, the fourth-generation descendant of Gerald Bull's 1960s Project HARP, which still holds the world record for the highest altitude achieved by a gun-launched projectile (a mere 180km, which qualifies it as a space launch system -- albeit sub-orbital -- by current standards).

    1063:

    If you're trying that, better invest a bit of your funding in personal security. :-/

    1064:

    Right. And there is also the fact that transplants and subsequent medication regimes impact quality of life, so it's not a simple year-for-year issue.

    1065:

    There's another Falcon 9 due up in the early hours of Sunday morning, for once with a commercial payload. Launch window opens at 04:26 UTC and runs for about two hours and they usually target the start of the window as that gives just enough time to do a full recycle if there's any kind of problem. The first stage is a youngster and has only flown twice before, sending the Crew-1 and Crew-2 Dragon flights on their way. Fairing re-use status is unknown at this time, although the SpaceX presenter will usually mention it in the webcast.

    Fairing production was giving them problems at one point, each pair costs around 6 million USD and takes a long time to manufacture. They are composite structures and need to spend a while in a curing oven, the only way to make more is to buy another oven which is an eye watering cost even by space standards. Unusually, SpaceX are buying in the larger fairings they need for some USAF/USSF payloads rather than making them themselves.

    1066:

    The maximum tip velocity only varies with the strength and density of the tether material. The limit is a bit over 3 km/s using spectra 2000 which was the best existing material about 3 years ago

    That's high enough to be a slam dunk for getting stuff between Lunar surface and Lunar orbit. Lunar escape velocity is only 2.38km/s ("only" is doing a lot of work here!) so you could conceivably put a trebuchet in low Lunar orbit and have payloads dock with it and slide down to a soft landing, and also have it scoop payloads from very low altitude/speed all the way up to orbital velocity. It'd need constant reboost/orbital corrections, presumably using a much beefier version of the ion rockets proposed for Lunar Gateway stationkeeping, but it would totally save over the cost of using methalox fuel in bulk for Lunar Starship landing/ascent.

    1067:

    I suspect USSF/USAF have security concerns about putting Someone Else's fairing in close proximity to a classified payload. They might insist on SpaceX's fairing production and installation systems being security-cleared to their standards, which would probably not be cheap and/or would interfere with SpaceX's civilian customers' needs.

    1068:

    The business about Arizona has been wildly exaggerated. Note that as I respond that I'm definitely not pro-death-penalty,* just trying to blow some fog away from all the nonsense, (this is horrible-enough without the exaggerations.)

    To start with, nobody is using Zyklon-B. That was a particular product from a particular company. The Arizona "justice" system is simply using ordinary chemistry to generate cyanide gas. This was the standard method of execution in multiple US states for decades, including after World War II and at least until the 1970s, and they're bringing it back because the drugs used for a truely painless execution are no longer available. (Yes, I understand that executions simply should not happen.) Note that during the whole of these multiple decades there was not much outcry over the "Naziness" of the whole business, even as multiple WWII veterans were part of the police, DA's office, defense attorneys, criminals, judges, city councilors, and/or state or federal executives or legislatures.

    Also, the "gas chamber" is strictly a one-person affair - there is simply not anything which remotely resembles WWII Germany's assembly-line of death, and the gas-chamber is smaller than the average stall in a public restroom. It has room for one chair and maybe a single guard (who must stand up - no sitting room) to strap the "guilty" party into the chair. I would guess that the most active gas-chamber will be used no more than once a month.

    So no, as horrible as the whole thing is, no Nazi practices are being revived, and U.S. progressives** have once again tried for the easy propaganda victory instead of actually explaining to the public why the whole thing is so very wrong! (Racism, poor legal practices, cops and DAs who lie, basic human decency, etc.)

    • Given the racism and the horrible error-rate of the U.S. justice system there's no way to be sure that anyone is really guilty, and that's before you get into the philosophy of whether the death penalty should ever be used, and I definitely have my doubts about that one!

    ** I'm very progressive and liberal as the U.S. goes - this is by far the more rational position - and I frequently get very frustrated at my own side's attempts to convince. I don't know how they get it wrong so often when there is almost always a better path to changing public opinion.

    1069:

    "This was the standard method of execution in multiple US states for decades, including after World War II and at least until the 1970s"

    I didn't realise it had ever been stopped.

    "and they're bringing it back because the drugs used for a truely painless execution are no longer available."

    What, you can't get smack any more? Or fentanyl? Pull the other one, it's got bells on...

    It has to be said that I've not noticed the US ever having any particular interest in "painless" execution. Quite the reverse, in fact; they seem to have deliberately discarded the methods used in other countries which are at least rapid and effective, in favour of grotesquely clumsy and stupid ideas of dubious efficacy, performed incompetently, and apparently evading the prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment" by making the cruel punishment usual so the "and" clause evaluates to false. Instead of a quick and efficient drop or chop or something, there are things like the slow roast by direct resistive heating, the protracted series of injections with a succession of bizarrely and poorly chosen chemicals, and the gas chamber without enough fucking gas in it, for fuck's sake, as described in Greg's article. Way to take an idea which is indefensibly bad in the first place and then make it so much worse by bungling and fucking about and being stupidly incompetent at it.

    1070:

    What, you can't get smack any more? Or fentanyl? Pull the other one, it's got bells on...

    Yeah, actually true. The actual problem is the pharmaceutical industry publicly honors the Hippocratic oath, and finding a company that will produce the three drug cocktail for explicitly for killing people turned out to be impossible once the one maker became publicized. The three drugs together are relatively painless, unlike what happens when any combination of the three is used.

    I'm personally against the death penalty, simply because of messes like this. I don't think that getting stuck in prison for life is an improvement over dying, but it doesn't satisfy desires for vengeance either.

    1071:

    Absolutely an Ameristan issue... that is, unless the batshit Tories privatize the NHS.

    And what the insurance co's do, if it's not a huge company, and one or two people need to use the insurance, is to jack up the company's rates for insurance. I worked at a small telecom, 20 or so people, and they got hit with a 20% increase in the four months I worked there (not due to me).

    1072:

    I vaguely remember reading a book when I was a little kid that explained why the hole in the doughnut came to be (it involved sailors, and not sinking if they fell overboard).

    1073:

    Please. Someone I know considers former VP Darth Cheney to be a murderer, because he got a heart transplant in the last dozen years... and guidelines say no one over 55 gets one.

    1074:

    For decades, I've been saying build a magrail launcher up Pike's Peak from Denver - at 14k feet/~ 4.3km, you're above a lot of the atmosphere, no first stage needed... and enough milage to keep the G's low.

    Having one on the Moon is a no-brainer.

    1075:

    /RANT/ My late ex, who actually was an engineer at the Cape, told me how for years, they kept proposing using the external tanks, given they were already on orbit, and had to be decelerated to deorbit... and management, time-servers who had no interest in The Dream, kept denying them.

    1076:

    Also, the "gas chamber" is strictly a one-person affair - there is simply not anything which remotely resembles WWII Germany's assembly-line of death, and the gas-chamber is smaller than the average stall in a public restroom. It has room for one chair and maybe a single guard (who must stand up - no sitting room) to strap the "guilty" party into the chair.

    Actually the California gas chamber was a two-seater. And they had a team of at least two people (I think three) to strap the victim in.

    1077:

    The book I read said that the hole was so the sailors could put their doughnut on one of the handles of the ship's wheel :-)

    1078:

    skulgun @ 1044: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-spinlaunch-the-space-industrys-best-kept-secret/

    "The company is building a massive centrifuge to accelerate rockets and send them screaming into space."

    Is this reasonable or batshit insane?

    Neither one. They'll waste a few billion dollars in venture capital seed money before going out of business because they can't make it work.

    If it's not a swindle, it'll keep a some engineers (and other employees) families fed for a few years before failing.

    ... and maybe the horse will sing opera.

    1079:

    Have you read Brin's story "Tank Farm Dynamo"?

    1080:

    Greg Tingey @ 1053: P.S. I'm surprised no-one has significantly commented on the actual return of Nazi Death camp practices to Arizona.
    Tell me again, was this what my Father's generation spent all their treasure & oceans of blood to achieve?

    That's because it's NOT a return to Nazi death camp practices.

    There are legitimate arguments against the death penalty, but hyperbolic anti-American BULLSHIT isn't one of them.

    I find it surprising that the EU allows Germany's IG Farben to manufacture "Zyklon-B" or that they're granting an export license so that Arizona can use it for executions, although I would not be at all surprised if it turns out the enterprise is a wholly owned subsidiary of City of London banksters.

    The reason Arizona is refurbishing its gas chamber is because they can't get the chemicals to use for lethal injection (the chemicals they can get don't appear to produce an easy death for the convicted murderer).

    I think Arizona should investigate using Nitrogen or CO2 for executions. I understand both of those are fairly painless.

    But, last night I realized there IS an alternative to capital punishment. Instead of executing murderers for their heinous crimes, UPON CONVICTION, we should just EXILE them to the U.K. and E.U.

    Y'all can do with them as you wish and you can be proud that you've played your part in ending capital punishment here in the U.S.

    1081:

    We discussed this romantic idea of lifting External Tanks to orbit before, to no avail sadly.

    The ETs weren't deliberately deorbited, they were detached after being emptied well before the Shuttle achieved orbital velocity using its OMS and they naturally fell back to earth in a predicatable manner. They had no controls, no motors, no power or communications systems, all the things that the recent Chinese Long March 5B second stage didn't have and you know what happened to that.

    Mass in orbit can be useful but only if it's controllable otherwise it's a Kessler Syndrome cascade waiting to happen. There were all sorts of other problems with lifting External Tanks into orbit but that doesn't stop the romantics dreaming of Tank Farm.

    1082:

    They're happy with the standard fairing for most DoD launches, but it is volume limited and the payloads that need a Falcon Heavy also need more space inside. The company in line to make the larger fairings are Swiss, and already make fairings for Ariane 5 and Atlas 5. ULA are muddying the waters to some extent by claiming IP on some parts of the design for Vulcan.

    1083:

    They had no controls, no motors, no power or communications systems, all the things that the recent Chinese Long March 5B second stage didn't have and you know what happened to that.

    While I agree with your comment about SST ETs I believe the Chinese rocket that re-entered was the first stage. It wasn't supposed to make it to orbit and ... yet it did. Oops.

    As to the ETs. There's a very long path from a disposable external tank to something that you take to orbit and do something useful with. And I can't imagine NASA (or Congress) spending more development funds on a new and improved ET. Especially as it might actually reduce the payload / max orbit options for the SST.

    1084:

    I was referring to the Arizona gas chamber, which was pictured in one of the recent articles - and even with a two-seater we're not remotely to Auschwitz levels of horror yet. And once again, I'm not pro-execution, just against thoughtless comparisons.

    1085:

    No Zyklon-B is in use. Per The Guardian:

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/28/arizona-gas-chamber-executions-documents

    Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that Arizona’s department of corrections has spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients to make cyanide gas. The department bought a solid brick of potassium cyanide in December for $1,530.

    It also purchased sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid which are intended to be used to generate the deadly gas. The gas chamber itself, built in 1949 and disused for 22 years, has been dusted off and, according to the department, “refurbished”.

    1086:

    I think if you'd said 'that gas chamber' instead of 'the gas chamber' I would have realized that. I brought it up as a curiosity. I'm sure we share similar anti-death penalty views. And I think I had a professor of Comp Sci who said that one of the fundamental laws of computer science was 'what's true of two things is true of n things'. :-)

    1087:

    I believe the Chinese rocket that re-entered was the first stage. It wasn't supposed to make it to orbit and ... yet it did. Oops.

    No oops about it. The CZ-5B is a core stage plus four boosters and the core stage is intended to reach orbit. The CZ-5 (no B) variant has another stage that lights at altitude so the core stage of that burns out while still sub-orbital.

    1088:

    Not to worry. We're good.

    1089:

    For decades, I've been saying build a magrail launcher up Pike's Peak from Denver - at 14k feet/~ 4.3km, you're above a lot of the atmosphere, no first stage needed... and enough milage to keep the G's low.

    One of my RPG campaigns featured a long string of incidents involving very large electromagnets, apparently related somehow to the British government. There was no obvious connection to an African regional irrigation project which for some reason was soaking up British pounds.

    I expected the penny to drop about the time someone saw the robust concrete 'aqueduct' running laser-straight up the western face of Mount Kilimanjaro...

    1090:

    A materials hoist for the construction site building the bridge between the two peaks?

    1091:

    Aww, Host.

    Don't be depressed / bored. Even The Tory driven "music makers" of Vox Populii are noticing the trends.

    Following the recent fighting in Gaza, perceptions of Israel have worsened across Europe

    Net favourability of Israel in each country Flag of United Kingdom -41 (down 27pts since Feb) Flag of Denmark -39 (down 22pts) Flag of France -36 (down 23pts) Flag of Sweden -33 (down 17pts) Flag of Germany -24 (down 14pts)

    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1400741999792230401

    Now Then, Now Then.

    Either Pompeo fucked off the wrong [redacted] or you're dealing with an Entity with some superior abilities.

    Us vrs Entire Western PR Department with Multi-Billion Funding

    ~~~Flawless Victory~~~

    Wait 'till you pass the Name and get into who we really hate fuck. Hint: begins with a P, rhymes with "Volcanoe went off and eradicted it from the Earth back when the Romans were the top dogs".

    p.s.

    https://dro.dur.ac.uk/19441/1/19441.pdf

    Ho-Ho-H2O. Did warn ya. grep "But you're over 40" for the real warning signs.

    Anyhow, CA is dry, Ice is vanishing, white rhinos (Northern) are extinct (a bit of ecological nouse to know what a population that cannot sustain it is defined by) and so on.

    ~

    Oh, and parse the Name.

    The First word: That's... kinda... what we were called.

    1092:

    Ahh.. wait.

    The wobble is what-is-about-to-become. Magnetic fields, Ice shelf weight lessening and so on.

    Apologies, forgot you'd not reached the wobble yet. [Hint: it's... not good]

    1093:

    (Smelling mistakes are for bot warriors)

    Note for Jewish people making stupid fucking statements about Wine made in France during the Occupation as "antisemitic": "Einem Strang zu ziehen".

    You're doing the opposite of that, you're making yourselves look weak and... cringe.

    "Putz"

    Watches $150 billion in 20 years go up in smoke in a six month period

    "We gave them you name, your address, all your details, everything"

    And?

    We'll break your world apart, laughing while we do it.

    p.s.

    Threatening us with H.S.S stuff and vibes is a really bad idea. "Remember Me".

    1094:

    Yes, you can use Tethers to get on and off the lunar surface, but that's just the beginning. You can use Tethers to get from LEO to the lunar surface and back for virtually no propellant.

    "architecture consists of one rotating tether in elliptical, equatorial Earth orbit and a second rotating tether in a circular low lunar orbit. The Earth-orbit tether picks up a payload from a circular low Earth orbit and tosses it into a minimal-energy lunar transfer orbit. When the payload arrives at the Moon, the lunar tether catches it and deposits it on the surface of the Moon. Simultaneously, the lunar tether picks up a lunar payload to be sent down to the Earth orbit tether. By transporting equal masses to and from the Moon, the orbital energy and momentum of the system can be conserved, eliminating the need for transfer propellant."

    There are more sophisticated versions with three tethers that have basically no window restrictions. What propellant needs there are can be satisfied by driving electricity through conductive Tethers against the earth's magnetic field. That also allows an asymmetrical flow of mass rather than having to send mass to the moon to get mass back.

    http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/7Hoyt.pdf

    1095:

    Beginning of the End 1944 Sword Juno Gold Omaha Utah

    1096:

    “ The wobble is what-is-about-to-become.”

    So true. Happens to the best of us, love. You hit middle age and no matter how much you exercise the pounds just start to pack on.

    1097:

    Also, while donor kidneys (also other organs but this is a good example) that are suitable for transplant are rare, it's not a binary and there is a scale of viability for donor organs. A fellow student of mine recently presented his PhD thesis on exactly this topic, specifically kidneys. You can get quite a few more QALYs by accepting less viable organs into your transplantation program, and then matching the organs to the prognosis of the recipient. So you have a comorbidity that means your chance of dying from something unrelated to your kidneys in the next 10 years is higher than others; we can get you off renal dialysis in a few weeks by giving you a kidney that might not last 10 years (if it fails you're back on dialysis and rejoining the queue for a transplant), or if you prefer you can wait till you get to the head of the queue for a longer-term viable organ, but bear in mind that might take several years and in the meantime dialysis really sucks.

    Not clear how far we are away from artificial kidneys that are better than transplanted ones, but there's a lot of economic and ethics analysis (a QALY is about as close as it gets to a direct measure of "utility", so it's really both) going on all the time to optimise the outcomes with what we have now.

    Of course none of this is hypothetical, we don't have to talk about mysterious genetic markers... comorbidity is comorbidity, transplantation programs deal with this all the time. The same issues apply if you don't have an efficient health system, it's just that you're not necessarily able to capture the data.

    1099:

    It occurs to me that the nonsense about Nazi-style executions is apophenia-- not knowing the difference between a resemblance and an argument. It might be like low-quality biblical interpretation.

    1100:

    There's also the question of next of kin consent or assumed donor consent. It's too early to be certain (in Scotland), but assumed donor consent seems to make a difference too.

    1101:

    It occurs to me that the nonsense about Nazi-style executions is apophenia

    It's about click bait. But instead of driving revenue to a news site, it is mostly about generating political donations.

    I'm in total agreement with Troutwaxer's comment on the issue.

    1102:

    Nancy Actually, it was the sheer horror, of actively wanting to both return to "Capital" punishment & to deliberately select a known-to-be-painful-&-nasty method of doing so & THEN selecting that used in the extermination pogroms. Putting it all together ... ok .. maybe not "the camps" but, just the same ... euuuwww ...

    1103:

    Latest dispatch from Debt: The Last 5000 Years. Incidentally, while Googling for the chapter headings I just discovered the full text here. Presumably this is legal. I just wish I'd found it before forking over for the Kindle version.

    I've finished reading chapter 5: A Brief Treatise on Moral Grounds of Economic Relations. Things are not improving. This chapter is not a treatise (a systematic exploration of a subject); its a gish-gallop through a range of social systems illustrated with random anecdotes (sorry, but I can think of no better term) extracted from anthropological studies, apart from one story featuring the Incomparable Mullah Nasrudin.

    The story of the gluttonous Maori is a case in point. We are told that this person would not bother fishing, but would walk along the river bank accosting his neighbours and politely asking for a portion of the catch, which they had to grant because Manners. Eventually they tired of this behaviour and killed him.

    This seems to be quoted in support of the primitive communist version of "from each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities" rather than a concept of exchange of value. But the story would equally support a belief that exchange was a thing in Maori culture, just not one which was immediate. It suggests a code in which a share of food is earned by work that the community values, which is just as much an exchange as if Joe and Pete trade fish for fish-hooks. It also suggests that the people were keeping accounts and the glutton made the mistake of getting too much in the red.

    But we can't tell, because we are told no more about this culture. We also don't know what status was attached to routinely bringing home more fish than others. We don't know what happened to the fish spear maker. We don't know how the male job of fishing related to what women did. Sex is often a factor in these things; does it relate here? We just don't know. And of course it is plainly a story, presumably told to children as a cautionary tale.

    And that is just one example. This stuff goes on and on. I also found it very difficult to relate these anecdotes to the main thesis (which was introduced in a long rambling sub-chapter). I began to feel I was trapped in this XKCD cartoon.

    My view was not improved by occasional sideswipes at other academics, including whole sub-disciplines, for (in Graeber's view) missing the entire point of their subject due to blinkers, which Graeber has now munificently removed so that they may see clearly. Such claims are grandiose, and I have never come across one that has withstood scrutiny.

    My opinion of Graeber has also taken a knock from another direction: an article in this week's Economist pointed me at this paper which studies the "Bullshit Jobs" thesis, and finds that the evidence is wanting at best.

    Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.

    So still highly unimpressed. Maybe the second half of the book will be better.

    1104:

    It was quite a deed, eh?

    1105:

    Exercise schmexercise. I am no longer even capable of exercise (go up stairs to the loo, spend 5 minutes getting my breath back) but I still have to be careful I don't fall down drain covers. I had always thought this was simply because I regard eating as an expensive pain in the arse not to be indulged in beyond minimum necessity, but thanks to your comment I can now see that a simpler explanation is that I'm just not one of "the best of us".

    1106:

    Fair enough, and I appreciate the comments.

    While I haven't bit hit by an actual Gish Gallop courtesy Gish himself, I do have a relative who's a Trumper. And I've argued with him, just to see what would happen, and he galloped pretty well.*

    In this regard, I think probably the ugly word "anecdata" better fits Graeber's style than Gish Gallop. I'd also point out that Debt is the most coherent of his works that I've read, so if this is annoying you, don't bother with the rest.

    As for the bullshit jobs, that's good to know. It would be interesting to know if the research was completed before or after the pandemic hit, as the whole "vital workers" phenomenon highlighted different elements of bullshit in the workplace.

    The dope-smoking hippies of the 60s and 70s have been replaced in some instances by the dope smoking NZ*s of the Howling Teens and Twenties. Stronger dope, different batshit conspiracies, similar incoherence. And bad publicity for dope.

    1107:

    Well, of course, they were a British invention originally, and displayed the British characteristic of achieving by simple bodgery what the Germans thought had to be achieved by complex technical innovation. And we thought it was such a good idea that we're still doing it, and we're such a bunch of cunts that we can set up an instance right in full view on the side of the A6 a bit north of Bedford and have signposts pointing to it for miles around and have it sit there for years and everyone just gets used to it and stops even noticing.

    1108:

    Incidentally, while Googling for the chapter headings I just discovered the full text here. Presumably this is legal.

    It's not legal for that to be on the public web, but it's almost certainly incompetence rather than malice. It appears to be provided as part of the reading list for an academic course, and if they were Doing It Right they'd have provided ebook gift vouchers to the students instead (or if there's some legal provision for the PDF—conceivably Graeber gave them permission—they should at least have put it behind a password).

    1109:

    Graeber died last year: Bullshit Jobs was published in 2018.

    I imagine if he was still alive he'd be contemplating a second edition, taking into account the lessons of the past 18 months (which have bought the linked phenomena of workplace presenteeism and "essential workers" into sharp relief for all of us).

    1110:

    Troutwaxer @ 1087: No Zyklon-B is in use. Per The Guardian:

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/28/arizona-gas-chamber-executions-documents

    Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that Arizona’s department of corrections has spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients to make cyanide gas. The department bought a solid brick of potassium cyanide in December for $1,530.
    It also purchased sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid which are intended to be used to generate the deadly gas. The gas chamber itself, built in 1949 and disused for 22 years, has been dusted off and, according to the department, “refurbished”.

    Other outlets have mentioned it, so I'll stand by my sarcasm.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/arizona-zyklon-b-gas-chamber.html

    https://abcnews.go.com/US/arizona-planning-nazi-era-gas-death-row-executions/story?id=78038959

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/arizona-gas-chamber-zyklon-b-horror.html

    1111:

    Yep. I knew Graeber had passed, it simply didn't seem germane to the reply.

    That said, I agree Graeber can be both annoying and/or offbase rather frequently. I just happen to like Debt and think it's useful.

    Speaking of useful but wrong-headed, I'd point to Ward's Out of Thin Air and McMenamin's Hypersea. They've both got some raisins of good idealets embedded in a fruitcake of generally wrongness, to the point where it's not worth testing the hypotheses they lay out. These are great books for SFF writers, in the tradition of "imagine a world where these hypotheses were correct?" As terrestrial science, they're at least falsifiable, which is good.

    1112:

    It's not legal for that to be on the public web, but it's almost certainly incompetence rather than malice. It appears to be provided as part of the reading list for an academic course,

    I don't know about your side of the pond but over here college classes are well know for passing out / making available copyrighted works without paying any attention to the pesky details and laws about such.

    1113:

    How do we ensure that QALYs aren't used by ghouls to deny transplants to disabled people, or that they don't come up with some metric like "projected future income"?

    Slightly unrelated example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/13/new-do-not-resuscitate-orders-imposed-on-covid-19-patients-with-learning-difficulties

    1114:

    this is horrible-enough without the exaggerations

    Agreed. It still comes across as a crime against humanity, even without the comparisons to past contexts of genocide and so on. That isn't saying it's remotely unusual in the present context, which has plenty of examples and a lot of history, much of which is not specific to the USA. And here I am sitting in Queensland, a jurisdiction that abolished the death penalty in 1922 but continued to treat indigenous people appallingly under state custodianship for decades after that (if anything, abuses increased in the 1920s as land that had previously been reserved for Aboriginal people was taken and given out as grants to returned soldiers; and the 1920s also saw the height of black birding in Queensland).

    Still the question is really how do you respond to the prevalence of certain sentiments in the community. I think we're all (or mostly anyway) taking a position that if the state must commit murder, at least it should do all it can to also torture its victims. And the sentiment we're addressing is the one that says no, go ahead and torture if it's inconvenient to avoid it, heck, why bother avoiding it anyway, isn't that the point really? Going broad rather than deep for a moment, this is roughly the same personality that sees the world as fundamentally just, that in general people get the treatment they deserve, which is to say that wealthy people mostly deserve to be wealthy, poor people mostly deserve to be poor and incarcerated people generally deserve to be tortured to death. This personality is not a USA-specific phenomenon, not even perhaps a Western-specific one. So surely the question is how we deal with it, evanescing as it does from time to time. I think the challenge is that some institutions currently encourage it, and the cycle of abuse has its own life, some see it as intrinsically valuable, more so than people. It's not anchored to national boundaries, though might be distributed unevenly.

    I think our instinctive response is to see it as a monster that must be killed. I struggle not to see it that way myself. But there is a more effective and sensible response that stands a better chance of leading to better outcomes, one that involves talking the monster through and out of its bloodlust. I'm still not clear how it works, I think I have seen it and I can recognise it when I do, but I've no idea at all how to do it myself.

    1115:

    No. Thanks for the link.

    1116:

    do all it can to also torture its victims

    Gah, missing "not".

    Do all it can not to also torture its victims. Just to be clear.

    1117:

    Definitely "euuuwww..." Lots to say about why, but no time today.

    1118:

    I think sarcasm is quite the appropriate response.

    1119:

    Um, er... do you have any tightness at the top of your chest when you do that?

    1120:

    How do we ensure that QALYs aren't used by ghouls to deny transplants to disabled people

    It might help to remember that we have to have some rationing system. We can't provide all the treatments to everyone who needs them (we can't even provide food to everyone that needs it). So the question is not whether any given rationing system is ideal (for whatever ideal you prefer), but whether it's less awful than the alternatives.

    So in that sense QALYs are better than "projected future income" and "current accessible wealth" or "but where ya really from" (just to list a few of the current measures that are widely used). I think that if anything we should use QALYs more and the other metrics less,.

    1121:

    Yes, transplantable organs are a limited and time-limited resource.

    Posit a blind person, a deaf person, a person in a wheelchair, a paraplegic who is mobile with a motor chair and surfs the internet with their mouth, or someone with any number of mental illnesses; who is 30 years old.

    What fraction are they compared to a 30 y/o with none of those things? If that number is anything other than 1/1, I don't trust the system not to put them at the bottom of the list ahead of older non-disabled people or off the list entirely.

    1122:

    Economics can be fun... and their caveats include a lot of "we can only see holdings over 5% and listed companies". I wonder what the private equity holders are doing?

    In industries like these there’s a temptation to share the spoils — not to compete too hard on price or service. How much stronger would that temptation be if both dominant firms in each industry were owned by the same shareholder or set of shareholders?

    There’s evidence to suggest this has indeed been the case in the United States where increases in common ownership have been linked to higher airline fares, more expensive pharmaceuticals, and higher bank fees.

    ...

    Documenting the channels through which common owners affect competition, Nathan Shekita identifies 30 cases of common owner intervention across industries including pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, banking and ride-sharing.

    https://theconversation.com/new-finding-in-49-australian-industries-the-major-firms-are-owned-by-common-investors-159809

    1123:

    We have a rather more, let us say, transmogrificationary issue when it comes to "middle age". Talk to us about weight issues when all your legs fall off and your midriff[1] balloons to the size of a house and suddenly you have to eat all your sisters (pre-historic times: these days we find nice holiday resorts and ship them out before the nasty happens)[2].

    Even Insects have better plans for future societies than Apes.

    C'est La Peste Ironique.

    ~

    Why we posting?

    Oh, right:

    The most important aspect of this definition is its narrowness: in line with France’s position at U.N. meetings, LAWS are considered as fully autonomous systems. Defining LAWS has always been a challenge, because — if understood as fully autonomous — we are talking about weapons that do not yet exist.

    https://warontherocks.com/2021/06/the-french-defense-ethics-committees-opinion-on-autonomous-weapons/

    Polite Notice: This is False. Mot only in the Agent Specific Realm (i.e. shit that drops bombs) but also in the G-S-B Command Structure (note: deliberate piss-take there of the Police rather than naming the actual CC structures you Apes use, we've been getting lessons in etiquette from a "right posh Nob").

    We can give you their Unique Identifiers if you want, but you can't parse Magnetic Flux stuff so, hey.

    p.s.

    Cute quote: here's another (this is real [Redacted] level): "How is it so thin after all of this?" No, you won't understand.

    But we do.

    [1] "There's a bomb in your Liver". εἰς τό ὄνομα τοῦ Πατρὸς καί τοῦ Υἱοῦ καί τοῦ Ἁγίου Πνεύματος -- Well then.

    [2] This is, or really is, a joke at the expense of Mr (Epstein friend) Super-Rationality Inc[tm] White Haired Dwaaaaaarkinds.

    1124:

    Note: shit you will never get but it just got written:

    "...the Israelis are orgasming over this"

    "...the Mind is a Garden, it is to be treated as such"

    Want the Unique Biological Reference Point (Time/Space) for those? Hint: This stuff will get you https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vanned

    You know: if we were, hmmmm, tracking the Hostile Take-Over and Ruthless Eradication of H.S.S by [redacted].

    Which we are.

    "White Protestant Male"

    Insert Gif: UK Footballer Black Failing to Hide Grin / Laugh

    For the record: Friends Don't Skull-Fuck Friends. "We Are Family".

    ~

    You wan't to see a real Civil War? Ooooh, Honey. You don't. Their side views Human Slaves as fucking liberal tears.

    1125:

    Yes, transplantable organs are a limited and time-limited resource.

    Since a family member recently went through a so-far-successful kidney transplant, after almost a decade of dialysis, on the third attempt (the first two kidneys weren't viable on receipt, and were not transplanted)...I'd say there are a bunch of limits.

    It's fun to deal with it in theory, but in practice, a lot of very sick people spend a good chunk of their lives hooked up to machines and on special diets, in the hopes that they can make it to the head of the waiting line and still be acceptable as a transplant recipient. Then in a decade or so they have to do it again when the transplant fails.

    QALYs are good. In practice, a lot of people fall off the list through hospice, rather than through being judged not quite good enough. The wait for an organ is brutal. Even when you're at the top of the list, the wait can be a year or more before an organ that's healthy enough and compatible enough becomes available. That's on top of going through many years of dialysis to become eligible for a transplant.

    1126:

    What fraction are they compared to a 30 y/o with none of those things?

    I would find your reasoning much easier to understand if you could suggest a rationing system that you support. Just objecting on the basis that every potential recipient be treated exactly equally is not something we're capable of doing (viz, there is no evidence that even a single person has ever managed to do this. Admittedly anyone did would be dead, but in a way that reinforces my point).

    Let's make up round numbers: 1M people need kidney transplants in a given year, and there are 100k kidneys available. How do you think they should be given out? Let's imagine for this scenario that distance is no barrier, we can keep any kidney alive long enough to get it to any recipient or vice versa.

    1127:

    Thank you, but there is nothing of any acute concern. It's just boring old emphysema, and the docs know all about it.

    1128:

    The most straightforward answer to that is that it just doesn't work like that; none of this works like that. QALYs are an aggregate system-level measure of outcomes at the system level. They are not "assigned" to individual people like a score and people are not categorised by their potential in the way you suggest. The closest to what you suggest is where QALYs are used as a performance measure for the healthcare delivery organisation and it imposes a regime that ekes out the most possible down to a ludicrous degree. In practice the sort of categories you're talking about (certain disabilities) have a profoundly lower impact on the calculation of QALYs than something like renal failure, so much so as to be lost in the noise of relatively innocuous impacts (chronic obesity would be more significant, for instance).

    The point is that health services measure their performance somehow. QALYs are a way to make that measure explicitly about maximising happiness, and the people who work in this space are quite aware of the problems with that. Moz's question about what your proposed alternative might stands: if not this then what? How would you measure a health system's performance? If you are interested in the subject, the OECD and WHO websites have a lot of material to help you get started, both of which publish more stats and metrics than you can consume (this is their role, really, something I think a few people misunderstood in the recent crisis).

    It is also way too easy to underestimate how awful living on dialysis can be. Many people chose to stop treatment, often transitioning directly to a palliative care plan.

    1129:

    Damian not even perhaps a Western-specific one. Yeah, look at the way the PRC is behaving, for a start.

    QALYs Of course this sort of attempt at a rational discussion immediately raises the spectre of US nutjobs screaming "Death Panels! Socialism! Horror!" - without, of course, actually looking at the problem(s) No-one ever said that Triage was going to be easy.

    1130:

    The truly sad and ironic thing about the US Republican "death panels" rhetoric is that the US has had death panels for a very long time. Its called "prior authorisation". Basically for expensive treatments (like for cancer) a doctor has to get permission from the health insurer before starting therapy. In many cases the authorisation will require that cheaper treatments be tried and shown to fail first. So your doctor's judgement is overridden by a bunch of unelected unaccountable bureaucrats at your health insurance company.

    1131:

    I have recently (Feb 2021) been diagnosed with renal failure. So far, any "special diet" requirements have been "Reduce, but not exclude, cured meats", don't add salt at table (which I was doing (or not doing. Whichever means keep not adding salt at table) anyway), and "keep an eye on the fluid bulk you drink".

    Ok, I am also effectively tied to a dialyser, but that means I'm catching up on my reading.

    1132:

    It has been in development for at least 20 years (from a quick google), but I get the impression cloning kidneys (and other organs, but kidneys seem to be first on the list) is becoming a real possibility (I'm guessing within the next 5 years). Now, that has the potential to really cause an industry disruption. Dialysis is a big business right now. I'm hoping the dialysis companies back the organ cloning tech and make the post-dialysis transition, and don't spend their money fighting it.

    1133:

    I have recently (Feb 2021) been diagnosed with renal failure. So far, any "special diet" requirements have been ...

    Ouch.

    Someone I know nearly lost his kidney function but they recovered. (E Coli infection.) While he was doing dialysis he was amazed at the number of people who thought doing such 3 to 5 times a week for 4 or more hours a day was preferable to changing their diets. His position was he'd eat dirt if that would let him get off the machines. (Giving up watermelon was a big loss to him.)

    1134:

    Hey, there's no shortage. You can get a lot of kidneys.

    But you have to put up with the tabloid stories from people who wake up in a bathtub filled with ice....

    1135:

    And a lot of the transplants are rejected by the body, though I assume far fewer than, say, 1985 (a woman I lived with in the late seventies turned up with lupus, and died in early '86, having had one? two? kidney transplants, and was waiting for another).

    1136:

    Ok. Having just had the more interesting cause... and I'm hoping to meet you in person, assuming Glasgow wins.

    1137:

    Cloning your own body parts is very attractive precisely because your body is unlikely to reject something that is not an alien tissue. This would be revolutionary and I sincerely hope it becomes a reality sooner than later. Kidneys, hearts, lungs...

    Paul 1130: Replace 'truly sad, ironic thing' with 'monstrous, hypocritical thing' and you will be closer to the truth.

    1138:

    David L @ 1112:

    It's not legal for that to be on the public web, but it's almost certainly incompetence rather than malice. It appears to be provided as part of the reading list for an academic course,

    I don't know about your side of the pond but over here college classes are well know for passing out / making available copyrighted works without paying any attention to the pesky details and laws about such.

    They can get a bit persnickety when it's the professor's own text book and it's cutting into their own revenue streams.

    1139:

    skulgun @ 1113: How do we ensure that QALYs aren't used by ghouls to deny transplants to disabled people, or that they don't come up with some metric like "projected future income"?

    Slightly unrelated example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/13/new-do-not-resuscitate-orders-imposed-on-covid-19-patients-with-learning-difficulties

    That's not good.

    1140:

    Moz @ 1120: (we can't even provide food to everyone that needs it).

    I think you're wrong about that. The will to do so may be lacking, but the ability to feed everyone IS there.

    1141:

    A few times recently I've been trying to chase up some reference or quotation and found a copy of the complete text on some university or other's website. I haven't particularly noticed whether it's UK or US ones that do it more - both do it - but it does seem to have become more common in the last few months or so.

    1142:

    Sounds like a good idea to me. I believe you already have my email address?

    1143:

    It has become common in school in Canada, as teachers are struggling to cope with students whose textbooks were left at school before schools were closed, or were never in school to get them (start of new quadmester while locked down or signed up for virtual school).

    At the teacher level it's being driven by the expectation (by school administration and the government) that teachers will somehow create all the content for students, in multiple formats as required by IEPs and differentiated preferences*, and frankly there isn't enough time in the day to do everything they are being required to do. Each individual request may be small, but multiply by 60-70 students (and no prep time) and people are saying things like "we have the books in a room at school, so we've already paid for them and this is just like lending them out for a class".

    Can we take my rant against school administrators and government officials as given, or do you want details? :-/

    *Eg. parent says "my kid gets bored listening to a lesson, you have to provide him with written summary" or "my kid doesn't learn from reading, you need to give him one-on-one instruction through chat because I decided he doesn't have to turn on his camera or microphone". Administration is basically telling teacher to give parents/students any accommodation they ask for

    1144: 1133 - So your mate actually had a recoverable cause. I don't, and am a sufficiently interesting case to have a clinical geneticist getting involved. 1136 - Glasgow wins what exactly? There is already a Glasgow based convention scheduled for 27 - 29 May 2022. https://seven.satellitex.org.uk/
    1145:

    Paul @ 1130: The truly sad and ironic thing about the US Republican "death panels" rhetoric is that the US has had death panels for a very long time. Its called "prior authorisation". Basically for expensive treatments (like for cancer) a doctor has to get permission from the health insurer before starting therapy. In many cases the authorisation will require that cheaper treatments be tried and shown to fail first. So your doctor's judgement is overridden by a bunch of unelected unaccountable bureaucrats at your health insurance company.

    "Prior authorization" is a real sore point for me.

    I was 57 when I "retired"1 from the National Guard. Retirement benefits for the National Guard are the same as those for the Regular Army with one exception ... You don't start to draw your retirement benefits (including VA health care) until age 60. I had a PSA test as part of my separation physical. Nothing to worry about in the results.

    About a year later I was eligible to join my then civilian employer's "Health Plan". I managed to find a primary care provider and during my initial "wellness" physical the doctor ordered a PSA test. Here's where that "Prior authorization" comes in. The doctor didn't have it and the insurance company refused to pay for the PSA test. So it didn't get processed by the lab & I never got any results.

    Fast forward two years. At age 60 I became eligible for retired pay & medical care through the VA. During my first visit to my new doctor, he found a lump during the manual digital exam. He ordered a biopsy and a PSA test. By then I had a Gleason Score of 9 and the cancer was Stage IIIA.

    I can't help but feel that if the PSA from two years earlier had been processed, my cancer would have been detected at a much earlier stage and the necessary treatment would not have devastated my body as much as it has.

    So, "Prior authorization" indeed.

    1 Basically they kicked me out for being too old. They were reorganizing the Brigade; getting ready to deploy to Iraq again. It was obvious I wouldn't going with them & they wanted my slot to be filled by someone younger who WOULD be deploying. Call it a RIF, "made redundant" or a lay-off, but that's what happened. But I lost my health care when I was "retired" & I wasn't covered by a civilian employer for at least a year. And even after I was covered by my employer's plan it wasn't all that much.

    PS: I retired in June 2007. The Brigade went to Iraq the second time in early 2009. They've made at least one more trip since then. I know they were fighting Daesh/ISIS/ISIL in Syria (near the Iraq/Syria border) in 2019.

    1146:

    I don'

    As I said. Ouch. I truly am sorry. Dialysis is a terrible thing. Except it keeps you alive.

    I had a sister born in 52 who might have led a full life if born 20 years later. Her kidneys basically turned into cysts and she only lived about 4 years.

    My point was there are people who CAN control things with diet who choose not to as they prefer their food and drink choices over dialysis. I don't get it. At all.

    1147:

    And a lot of the transplants are rejected by the body, though I assume far fewer than, say, 1985

    Transplants, even when reasonably matched, almost always require life long treatments with anti rejection drugs. The drugs get better all the time but it is still an issue.

    And this made the last year and half such an issue for transplant recipients. Most of them are on immune suppressive drugs. Which makes them very susceptible to almost any disease.

    My son's SO is a nurse at a major local infusion center. Mostly for transplant patients. Once things went nuts they totally switched to home based care. Which cut her daily patient load in half. Which created staffing issues. And so on ...

    But she did get a vaccine shot before almost anyone not in an early trial.

    1148:

    JBS But I lost my health care when I was "retired" & I wasn't covered by a civilian employer for at least a year. That simply if not "CANNOT" is at the very least, exteremly unlikely ( like < 0.01% ) to happen in any European country, or Canada, or AUS, or .... Which shows just what a shit-hole the US is to it's own people. As for not getting a test & then finding you have "big C" - words fail me.

    1149: 1146 - Thanks. I had a great aunt who might also still be alive if she'd developed renal failure after the invention of dialysis. Speaking of which, the dialysis time is mostly determined by the need to spend 4 or 5 hours 3 times a week pushing blood through an artificial kidney.

    You mean like this one guy who insists on drinking Bovril even though his Potassium and Sodium are both high? My electrolytes are "pretty normal", now I've been taken off the vitamin D supplement that the renalogists prescribed for me!

    1150:

    I'm sorry, this is Charlie Stross' blog. He's a very well known fantasy and science fiction writer, so I just assume everyone knows that Glasgow's bidding for the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention, and that would be the reason I'd be talking about getting off this continent again.

    1151:

    I might consider talking to a lawyer. PSA is a dead-standard test, and for them to refuse/require prior authorization is bullshit, and practicing medicine without a license.

    1152:

    the ability to feed everyone IS there.

    I suspect you mean "is physically possible" rather than using ability in the sense that, say, I have the ability to ride a bicycle. We've had enough food to feed everyone for a while, but we waste it instead because we don't have the political and ethical ability to do otherwise.

    We're nowhere near the point yet, but "everyone" is also technically challenging. You can't just say to people in, say, Yemen, that their food is piled on a dock in New York whenever they're ready to eat it. There will also be people who are physically or mentally disabled to the point where they can't access food (anorexia being an obvious example). So "feed everyone" turns out to involve things like universal healthcare as well as universal peace and freedom. None of that is politically acceptable (and much of it is subject to a minority veto... you can't have universal peace while Spain is still fighting Catalonia, for example).

    1153:

    Correct, as far as it goes. Charlie's gaff is about 43 miles from the venue for Satellite 7 (1:20 by train, 1:10 by car in light traffic), and he is a life member of Satellite conventions. So more interested in a 2022 event (Covid permitting) than a Worldcon bid!

    1154:

    Just because nobody else has brought it up and I need to express my utter rage, Dido Harding, who made such a success of our £37 billion test, track and trace, is in the frame for Simon Stevens job as head of the NHS. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/07/dido-harding-nhs-test-and-trace-boris-johnson

    Arrrrrgh!!

    1155:

    Uncle Stinky Yes The Chumocracy is determined to screw it up so badly, that it cannot be put together again, so that they can scrape up the pieces for profit. We have discussed this before, I think?

    1156:

    As Whitroth has already said PSA s a standard test. It's also not very expensive for an immunoassay. When I was running an automated lab it certainly wasn't in the top ten most expensive assays for reagent costs and was no more difficult to process than any other automated immunoassays,(most expensive vitamin B12 and CRP). I suspect the lab had inflated prices like most US labs otherwise they could have offered your doctor the test privately for a small fee. These insurance companies are just parasites increasing costs and making healthcare harder for patients.

    1157:

    These insurance companies are just parasites increasing costs

    Remember the argument a few years ago that smokers saved the country money by dying earlier and more suddenly (on average). Could be the same analysis here, at least from the insurance company point of view.

    Remember: people often value their own lives more than money, but companies do the opposite.

    1158:

    Kidneys, hearts, lungs and livers, I guess probably in that order if only for the optics and the public perception that liver disease is mostly self inflicted.

    1159:

    whitroth @ 1151: I might consider talking to a lawyer. PSA is a dead-standard test, and for them to refuse/require prior authorization is bullshit, and practicing medicine without a license.

    Who you gonna sue? The doctor ordered the test. The nurse drew the blood. If the doctor had known the test wouldn't be covered, I doubt he would have ordered it. This was before the Affordable Care Act when there was no required minimum standard of care for health insurance policies. It's a "must cover" item now, but there was no "must cover" standard then.

    Lawyer ain't gonna' take the case unless there's some chance of a payoff.

    There's got to be an identifiable tort and there's got to be an identifiable party culpable for that tort. In this case it was the Great American Health Care SYSTEM. So, again, who you gonna' sue?

    1160:

    Mike Collins @ 1156: As Whitroth has already said PSA s a standard test. It's also not very expensive for an immunoassay. When I was running an automated lab it certainly wasn't in the top ten most expensive assays for reagent costs and was no more difficult to process than any other automated immunoassays,(most expensive vitamin B12 and CRP).

    I suspect the lab had inflated prices like most US labs otherwise they could have offered your doctor the test privately for a small fee. These insurance companies are just parasites increasing costs and making healthcare harder for patients.

    Yeah, I don't know. There was a doctor I used to go to before I went on active duty after 9/11. I was insured while I worked for the burglar alarm company. After that (1995-2001) I was uninsured & paid out of pocket. I think he might have got old & retired while I was away.

    When I went on active duty before the Brigade was tapped to go to Iraq, I was covered by Tri-Care Prime Remote. Their contract around here was fulfilled by the UNC Memorial Hospital and their associated medical practices. And, of course, while mobilized I just went on sick call to the Troop Clinics if I needed to be seen. After demob, I was seen by the VA clinic in Durham up until my "retirement" from the National Guard.

    When I qualified for the employer health care plan (first open enrollment period after I had been employed there for more than 6 months) I just called the 800 number and asked for a referral to an "in network" primary care provider who was accepting new patients and the insurance company told me to go to that doctor.

    I was there for a basic initial annual physical/wellness exam. I wasn't sick, although by that time in my life I was having the kind of early urinary symptoms usually related to the prostate in older men (i.e. when I had to go, it took FOREVER to empty my bladder).

    The test should have gone to whatever lab the insurance company required their "in network" doctors to use.

    1161:

    "Kidneys, hearts, lungs and livers, I guess probably in that order if only for the optics and the public perception that liver disease is mostly self inflicted. "

    From a PR point of view I suppose, though that is mostly an issue in the US where moralizing serves as a cover for 'f-you I got mine' and refusing to help others because freedom.

    From a practical health point of view whichever becomes viable first will probably the first one to happen. I have no meaningful idea of the relative barriers, costs or risks to integration or cloning of particular orders. Somebody does, and I hope a metric like potential QALYs is used rather than potential optics.

    1162:

    Aντίχριστος Spretnak Wobble # 1124 1123 1093 1092 1091 Pompeo That one is loathsome. Pompeo's pathetic twitter brag-a-thon in Jan 2021, heavy on bragging about swagger, when the Trumpublican keystone (Trump) was knocked out and he (Pompeo(and others)) were shortly to lose power...[1] It's the overt applied eschatology (engineering, though incompetent) that really sets me off. Related; have people in Israel noticed the pattern where when B. Netanyahu gets into political trouble, Hamas engages in increased active hostilities (sometimes provoked) and bails him out politically? Goes back to the 1990s.

    "...the Mind is a Garden, it is to be treated as such" So the first usage of the analogy in English is attributed to W. Wordsworth.[2] More recently, it's been used by various people, notably perhaps quite close to that form by Osho(Rajneesh). (I got a paragraph into his Foreword in "Intuition, knowing beyond logic" and refused to read further proto-NewAgey mushiness. I have a (small class of) working explanatory framework(s) for intuition. Maybe that book gets better or describes some useful techniques...)

    For the record: Friends Don't Skull-Fuck Friends. "We Are Family". I believe this too.

    [1] Mike Pompeo Is Trying to Bluff His Way to a Legacy - Even insurrection didn’t interrupt a tour de force of Twitter bragging. (Jeffrey Lewis, January 12, 2021) [2] "Your mind is the garden / Your thoughts are the seeds / The harvest can either be flowers / Or weeds."

    1163:

    Two nitpicks to this analysis

  • The STS promised 50 flights a year, which gives a launch of about once every 7 days.

  • The Economist has confirmed that SpaceX charges $50 million for reused boosters. This is why last year the only new boosters were ordered by the USSF, ESA, and NASA

  • As for the idea of cloning organs. You still haven't solved the problem of the medium in which to grow them. The experience of the pigs shows why

    I can't find the NYT article which states that an attempt to grow organs in pigs identified at least 16 different pathogens which could potentially use the incubation period to jump species.

    1164:

    Well, unfortunately STS managed a total of 135 flights in 30 years, which is 4.5 per year. Even at this time of night I can see that is quite a bit less than 1 a week.

    1165:

    equal roughly the payload of a Shuttle mission ($2000M or more charged to the customer

    And to pile on a bit the cost per STS mission was always some what hazey. The fully all in cost was estimated at $500M to $1B per launch. NASA had all kinds of expenses that went to general overhead that existed mainly to handle STS.

    SpaceX and others have to account for such things. I'm not saying that NASA doesn't subsidize some of the new private companies at some level just that those private companies have to bake such things into their costs and thus prices.

    1166:

    In the UK, the perception is that lung disease is primarily:- 1) Self-inflicted, mostly by smoking or working with cyano-acrylates. 2) Caused by working in dusty mines. 3) A result of passive smoking. 4) A result of exposure to asbestos. 5) Short term, and probably caused by viral conditions.

    1167:

    Anecdata: a friend had Wilson's disease. His first liver transplant failed. Happily his second took, and he's in good health now.

    1168:

    F9 has averaged 8.8 days apart this year, the main bottleneck seems to be finding payloads.

    They recently launched just under 3 days apart. 3/6/21 17:29 - 6/6/21 04:26 and have a couple of pairs 4 days apart this year. 4th and 11th of May, 20th and 24th of January. That's a pretty amazing cadence.

    1169:

    The reason for not ordering PSA tests is primarily that they are unreliable (*), and relying on them causes a lot of unnecessary operations. I had to badger to get annual ones (under the NHS), but that was accepted as worthwhile by the fact that I have ALL of the symptoms of prostate cancer except blood in the urine, and have had almost all since I was a small child.

    However, I disagree with the medical dogma about this (as I would, being a statistician). The test SHOULD be done more often, but the results should be regarded as no more than indicative, and trigger only (say) an anal probe and repeat PSA text some months later. However, physicians and physicists are notoriously weak on statistics.

    (*) In both directions.

    1170:

    The STS promised 50 flights a year, which gives a launch of about once every 7 days.

    The PR people talked about 50 flights a year for the Shuttle but that was predicated on a fleet of at least 9 Shuttles and a payload itinerary that would require fifty flights a year. It turned out that the finance to pay for this sort of tempo was somewhat lacking, ditto demand for that number of payloads.

    Falcon Heavy is suffering from the same syndrome, it was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, payload customers were queued up to take advantage of the 50-tonne throw-weight and... crickets. There have been a total of three Falcon Heavy launches -- the first was a PR test stunt, the second was a standard GEOsync bird that a launcher like Delta or Ariane V could have carried and the third was a collection of small satellites that could have been lifted by pretty much anything in the toybox down to Electron multiple flights. A lot of the promised payload customers for Falcon Heavy have evaporated or moved to other platforms and unitary 30-tonne-plus payloads are still missing in action.

    1171:

    PSA tests may be unreliable en masse but they're indicative in individuals. Anecdotally I'm someone whose PSA levels were up there in lights when my urinary system suddenly decided to go on strike ("peeing in Morse Code") a few years ago. I've made a point of insisting on a PSA test every few months while Big Pharma does its thing on my biochemistry and sure enough the numbers have come way down and are staying down.

    I'm in the UK and being treated by the NHS so I don't need to do a dance of supplication in front of insurance companies and gatekeepers or move from one health services supplier to another every few weeks as many Americans have to. This probably helps.

    1172:

    1. The STS promised 50 flights a year, which gives a launch of about once every 7 days.

    Yep. And SpaceX are currently at a launch every 9 days so far this year, so within spitting distance of the Shuttle's promised launch tempo ... while Shuttle never really managed more than 6 launches/year.

    2. The Economist has confirmed that SpaceX charges $50 million for reused boosters.

    I am reasonably sure that SpaceX is not selling flights on reused boosters below cost, considering that they only charge about $60-80M for a new one, and a reused one trends towards 10 flights.

    They might be selling new boosters at a discount (aiming to turn a profit on flights when they reuse them) but I doubt it insofar as SpaceX's charges haven't gone up significantly since they were single-flight hardware, which was only 5 years ago.

    I suspect the profit margin on a used Falcon 9 stage is quite significant, and they're rolling the profits into R&D on Starship, which will probably be significantly cheaper to operate -- Starship guzzles much more fuel per flight, but it doesn't throw away the upper stage, and fuel is the cheapest element of a space launch system. (If it's $1/litre -- which would be on the pricey side -- then an all-up Starship launch would burn about $4.5M in fuel, to place 100 tons of cargo in LEO.)

    The organ-cloning talk isn't me. I think it's a tough problem to crack (although much more hopeful than it looked a couple of decades ago).

    1173:

    There are a couple of upcoming Falcon Heavy flights scheduled: mostly USSF/DoD payloads.

    What happened was, Falcon 9 block 1.5 payloads are nearly double that of the original Falcon 9 1.0 model, and overlap with the original market for Falcon Heavy flights. So they cannibalized most of their own sales potential.

    (On the other hand, AIUI the strap-on boosters for FH are just regular F9 stages, so aside from the R&D sunk costs and one or two FH central stages, SpaceX aren't out a lot of money -- it's not like Boeing developed an entire new airliner and saw its market cannibalized by a minor design tweak on its predecessor.)

    Another contributing factor is the multi-year lead time for payloads to be designed. After Shuttle retired, there was no real HLV available in the US market, so nobody designed satellites that needed one. And SpaceX grew so fast -- remember, before 2017 they were a whacky outsider who were doomed to fail -- that the market hasn't caught up with the available capacity.

    I expect the same is going to be true for Starship, as well. There's a marked shortage of 100 ton payloads out there, apart from NASA's Artemis program (which is going to guzzle a stupid amount of on-orbit refueling capacity) and maybe super-sized Starlink clusters. (If an F9 can loft 60 Starlink sats, then a Starship could put up to 400 in orbit in one shot -- or launch larger Starlink elements with higher power antennae, for better ground coverage.)

    1174:

    "Falcon Heavy is suffering from the same syndrome, it was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, payload customers were queued up to take advantage of the 50-tonne throw-weight and... crickets."

    To be fair, I don't think that was SpaceX's PR people. It was mostly HLV enthusiasts. If you remember, I sparred with some on this site in 2018. FH was initially envisioned as a launcher that would carry most of the payloads that are now regularly flying on the F9. Musk didn't originally think some of these payloads would permit the F9 to be reusable. According to Eric Berger, Musk wanted to cancel it 3 times. He was talked out of it. I don't remember the reason, but it probably had something to do with needing to launch the payloads that could only fit on the Delta IV Heavy?

    By the time FH launched, Musk was entirely devoted to Starship. It's still an open question whether Starship will be able to find customers outside Starlink.

    While I think that it's a dead end for Musk, I will defend the FH on 3 counts

  • It usually takes at least 5 years to design and build a new satellite. Probably the satellites specific to FH take longer. Since the FH spent over 5 years in development limbo, I doubt commercial customers would have taken the risk to design for a then "paper rocket". Likewise, I doubt that DIVH was that popular to have many payloads that could be switched over to FH the way many switched over to F9 after it demonstrated success.

  • FH has 1 launch coming up this year. Ironically, it's ViaSat. For those who don't know, that company is suing to block the FCC's decision to permit Musk to launch satellites at a lower orbit than initially granted https://www.telecompetitor.com/viasat-threatens-lawsuit-to-delay-spacex-starlink-broadband/

  • F9 may or may not pose limits on interplanetary missions. That's why next year FH is launching a mission to explore the asteroid Psyche. Since there's been a slowdown in such missions from NASA since the 2000s, these don't enter most observer's attention as much, but Musk is has seriously been bidding for these launches as well. https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/03/04/nasa-taps-spacexs-falcon-heavy-rocket-to-launch-mission-to-metal-asteroid/

  • 1176:

    The article I got that from is here, but it's behind a paywall https://towardsdatascience.com/gpt-3-scared-you-meet-wu-dao-2-0-a-monster-of-1-75-trillion-parameters-832cd83db484

    Here's my understanding of the situation. Musk was selling the reused boosters at a discount to encourage their adoption. I don't know their internal cost structure, so it's quite possible that they're making more profit on a discounted reused booster than on a new one at full price?. Since last year's new boosters flew on missions with added costs built in, it's quite possible that SpaceX made the same profit on a new booster as on a reused one.

    As for the organ cloning, I should have been more specific that I wasn't talking to you. Sorry.

    1177:
    • Added costs which means Musk charges more for them, closer to the $80 million end of the range.
    1178:

    There are a couple of upcoming Falcon Heavy flights scheduled: mostly USSF/DoD payloads.

    There were, I think, three Falcon Heavy launches originally scheduled for 2020. There were zero actual Falcon Heavy launches that year.

    I really like the idea of Falcon Heavy, it's got a lot of good synergies. But. Falcon Heavy supplies a gap in the market between twenty-tonne max launches (Ariane V and Delta 4 Heavy) and man-rated Moonshot missions that need a unitary 100-tonne single-lift capability for some reason I've never seen explained satisfactorily. I've mentioned this before, about a blog post by someone who used to work with Thales and Boeing on geosync birds, the straitjacket the satellite designers work within so they can always get a launcher when the time comes. Building a twenty-tonne geosync satellite that only Falcon Heavy or a Moonshot SLS can carry is a big risk, it's better to build a six-tonne satellite that half a dozen launchers from three or four companies can place into orbit. Step and repeat for science satellites and most other markets and Falcon Heavy is a solution looking for a problem.

    The NRO likes the idea of having an alternative to the Delta 4 Heavy but it's still one launch a year at best, it's not the Gold Rush of heavy-lift-to-orbit Falcon Heavy (and Starship) have promised.

    1180:

    I suspect problems with the FH design process are part of the reason Elon has been so ready to make major changes to the various iterations of the BFR programme.

    Originally FH was intended to be three normal cores strapped together, so to add a Heavy launch "just" required the interstages and parts of the Octaweb to be swapped out on the three boosters. However, early on a decision was made that the thrust transfer would be done through the Octaweb structure at the bottom unlike every other side booster design I could find which transferred the thrust through the top mounts. The Shuttle SRBs had a girder through the gap between the two tanks in the ET, D-IV-H has something similar, the Soyuz boosters push on the centre core at the top which is also where it's supported on the launch pad. Doing it that way up means all the lower stages are sharing the weight of the upper stage and payload and the bottom attachments are just keeping things in line. With FH doing that upside down it means the centre core is supporting all of the weight (and I'm using 'weight' deliberately, F=ma) of the upper stage and payload, so instead of being a standard core it has had to be strengthened to cope with the extra loads. Going back and rethinking that feature may have resulted in a flight ready FH much sooner than sticking with it did.

    1181:

    They are useful for tracking treatment, especially for people on anti-androgen therapy, yes, but are very poor for diagnosis. If you intervene when the levels are high, or growing slowly, most of the interventions are unnecessary. If you wait until they are sky-high or growing rapidly, other symptoms have usually occurred first. Yes, there are exceptions, but the risk of intervention is high enough to make it a bad idea to do it unecessarily; that's why they aren't favoured by the NHS as a routine procedure.

    1183:

    A full-length external rib running up the sides of the Falcon Heavy stages to make the top attachment points load-bearing would shift the CofG of each stage sideways making it a lot more difficult to land them for reuse. Having the extra hardware at the bottom shifts the CofG down (mostly) which is less disturbing to the dynamic characteristics of the near-empty stage as it lands.

    The Delta 4 Heavy isn't in the business of reusing the stages it uses so ULA can use top attachment mounts to couple the thrust of the side-stages to the core.

    This is speculation on my part, the Jiant Brains at SpaceX know a lot more about space engineering than I do and they decided the way they did it to be optimum, for them.

    1184:

    That depends on how they're used.

    My local NHS trust does not use QALYs as a raw score. Instead, they look at QALYs gained from a given treatment as a proportion of QALYs you would have had if you had neither the treatment nor the disease that requires treating. Assuming that a treatment is equally effective in blind people, deaf people, paraplegics etc, then by this scoring they get the same benefit.

    If, however, the blind person gets proportionally more QALYs than a healthy person would (say because there's a QALY reduction because the treatment does permanent sight damage), they'd end up ahead on this measure.

    As with all metrics, the issue is not the metric, it's in how it's used.

    1185:

    Suing the insurance co. was what I meant, of course, Since I left Chicago in '09, every doc orders PSA, and if I understand correctly, use them as an indicator. For the insurance co. to decide it required prior authorization, as if it was unusual, is utter incompetence on their part, and complete ignorance that this was the way medicine had gone.

    1186:

    They vastly underestimated the amount of work needed to refurbish a Shuttle between flights - manufacturing and installing new tiles, to replace the ones that had fallen off, inspecting everything (and needing experts for that, to look for my late wife's pet rant, corrosion microcracking, given they're in salt air...)

    1187:

    Glad to hear it. But my late ladyfriend had lupus, not great treatment in the mid-eighties for lupus, and transplants.

    1188:

    They vastly underestimated the amount of work needed to refurbish a Shuttle between flights

    There were a lot of people involved who have said that they (mid level designers/engineers in the 70s) were strongly influenced to come up with "happy talk" refurbishment times/costs. Because that's what Congress said to do if you want us to fund the Shuttle. Or most anything.

    So they did.

    1189:

    Oh, and riffing over to the latest post, RH had a LOT of STRONG opinions on NASA in general and the STS in particular.

    1190:

    Unrelated to anything, the NATO golfball near Kinross is on the market if anyone wants a unique residence. https://www.rightmove.co.uk/commercial-property-for-sale/property-89864398.html

    1191:

    I blame the lab for not doing the test and the insurance companies (plus Richard Nixon for legitimising medical profits).

    Had I been running the lab I would have done the tests anyway. The extra marginal cost would be small. It's counterintuitive and I've had a hard time getting people to accept this but not doing lab tests costs a lot more than doing them. Dealing with problems like missing samples, incoherent requests and financial problems requires manual intervention which is much more expensive than routine testing. It's not something NHS labs notice because they are not paid for tests. But I spent ten years coordinating clinical trials in an NHS lab and I know that missing results and problem samples (usually because clinicians sent the wrong samples) took a lot of my time and that of my staff. I soon made it clear to the sponsors of trials that tests not done would be charged at the same rate as completed tests. A US company insisting on using non-standard glass tubes which would break more often in our centrifuges was made to sign a contract stating that any broken tube would be charged (in 1995) at £500.00 for clean-up and disrupting the flow of routine samples while the centrifuge was out of service. Had your tests been sent to my lab your PSA tests would have been done and, whether or not payment was forthcoming an abnormal result would have been reported.

    This is the sort of computerised analyser track which would be used by a reference lab. All samples identified by a barcode or an integral RFID chip in the tube. Samples loaded, centrifuged, de-capped, analysed, resealed and stored automatically. Hardly any manual intervention apart from putting the samples in the system and throwing away the bin bags of tubes excreted after the end of the set storage time.

    https://youtu.be/hORiqBvadno (short YouTube video)

    I can appreciate how you felt about the effects of prostate problems. I was lucky, I just have benign hyperplasia.

    1192:

    PSA has false positives and false negatives (like any other lab test) but that doesn't prevent it from being useful. It's requested often. (We don't order tests in the UK. We're too polite. We request them.) But in my experience they are not used for diagnosis without other clinical signs and symptoms. One of the biggest studies on prostate cancer and it's treatment, the PROTECT study took samples from 50% of male patients, from many GP surgeries, in the desired age range (IIRC 50 to 70) and did PSA and free PSA plus taking lots of other samples for storage and possible later analysis. In the Leeds part of the study the first three patients with raised total PSA had prostate cancer on biopsy which surprised everybody involved since they only had levels expected in BPH. Also IIRC the treatment arm of the study found that watchful waiting rather than immediate irradiation or surgery was preferable.

    In my own case my GP did PSA in the annual check for older men but it wasn't very high. When I had prostate symptoms, including haematuria he sent me to a the local clinic which found I only had BPH. Better tests than PSA are now under consideration but I don't know much about them.

    1193:

    It sounds to me like the doctor sent the PSA to a lab which wasn't in-network? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

    1194:

    Well this will reduce interest in one of Bitcoin’s major use cases: US seizes $2.3 million Colonial Pipeline paid to ransomware attackers https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/us-seizes-2-3-million-colonial-pipeline-paid-to-ransomware-attackers/

    1195:

    Only to the extent that the ciminals don't keep their BitCoin keys secure.

    1196:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1169: The reason for not ordering PSA tests is primarily that they are unreliable (*), and relying on them causes a lot of unnecessary operations. I had to badger to get annual ones (under the NHS), but that was accepted as worthwhile by the fact that I have ALL of the symptoms of prostate cancer except blood in the urine, and have had almost all since I was a small child.

    However, I disagree with the medical dogma about this (as I would, being a statistician). The test SHOULD be done more often, but the results should be regarded as no more than indicative, and trigger only (say) an anal probe and repeat PSA text some months later. However, physicians and physicists are notoriously weak on statistics.

    (*) In both directions.

    What the doctors have told me about the PSA test ...

    1. A relatively young man (under 60) should not have a high PSA number. If he does, that's reason to look further into what might be causing it. It might be caused by something other than cancer, but you want to find out what it is, so you can rule out cancer if it's not and if it IS cancer, it's more treatable if caught early.

    2. What they really pay attention to is the CHANGE from year to year. If you have a PSA of 6.5 at age 55 and then at age 56 it' s 6.6, that's not too worrying, but if in a year it's jumped from 6.5 to 14, that's something they want to investigate real carefully, because that's a primary sign for cancer.

    My PSA was 6.5 on my separation physical (age 57), it was 37 on my VA physical after I turned 60 (5.6x rise in three years). I have no idea what the number might have been in the interim when the test was not processed.

    After my surgery & radiation, it was less than 0.5 for three years and then in six months shot up to 1.5. That's when I started hormone treatments ... and eventually a second round of radiation.

    They tracked the cancer to a single spot on my breast bone and offered a "new" treatment. Studies done in the 6 years after my initial treatment suggested an additional round of radiation could be effective when the cancer had spread to fewer than 5 spots.

    Since that second round of radiation I've been back to less than 0.5 without the hormones.

    When I was first diagnosed the doctors told me that with the treatments they proposed I had a 60% chance of being cancer free after 5 years (it came back at 3), and a 50% chance of survival for 10 years.

    My 10 year anniversary was in April last year.

    1197:

    The finance press always points out such correlations: Why is bitcoin crashing? BTC down almost 10% after Colonial Pipeline ransom seized (8 Jun 2021, Michael Grothaus)

    David L 1195: It's more of an indicator/awareness that authorities are clamping down on uses of cryptocurrencies that they don't approve of. (Which for some countries is any uses.)

    ASW: that ambiguity (#1162) was unkind of me. I consider you a friend.

    1198:

    whitroth @ 1185: Suing the insurance co. was what I meant, of course, Since I left Chicago in '09, every doc orders PSA, and if I understand correctly, use them as an indicator. For the insurance co. to decide it required prior authorization, as if it was unusual, is utter incompetence on their part, and complete ignorance that this was the way medicine had gone.

    As I noted this occurred BEFORE the Affordable Care Act. There's no identifiable tort a lawyer could grab hold to. It was bad, stupid and just downright malicious, but it wasn't a violation of any law or patient's rights.

    I believe that NOW under the Affordable Care Act, that's one of the required minimum benefits any insurance plan must include, but it wasn't back then.

    I'm again reminded of what my lawyer told me when I was getting divorced:

    Don't go into court expecting TRUTH, JUSTICE AND THE AMERICAN WAY, because what you're going to get is the LAW ... and the law is what the judge says the law is.

    Don't have to like it. Don't have to agree with it, but you do have to live with it.

    1199:

    Uncle Stinky @ 1190: Unrelated to anything, the NATO golfball near Kinross is on the market if anyone wants a unique residence.
    https://www.rightmove.co.uk/commercial-property-for-sale/property-89864398.html

    I bet it's got good satellite TV reception ... or are they going to take the antenna with them?

    1200:

    Troutwaxer @ 1193: It sounds to me like the doctor sent the PSA to a lab which wasn't in-network? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

    I don't know why they would. They knew I was there because the insurance company told me they were IN-NETWORK. The forms I filled out on that visit identified the insurance company that would be paying. So if they sent it anywhere, they should have sent it where the insurance company said to send it.

    1201:

    the law is what the judge says the law is

    Which means it's effectively a lottery, not only which judge you get but how hungry they are, whether they're male or female, whether they hear the case in the morning or afternoon, whether the weather is warm or cool, whether you local football team won or lost the last game…

    Started reading Kahneman et al's latest book Noise, and they start off with judges and insurance adjusters, and how the variation between different professional judgements is a lot greater than generally acknowledged.

    1202:

    I'm sorry, this is Charlie Stross' blog. He's a very well known fantasy and science fiction writer, so I just assume everyone knows that Glasgow's bidding for the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention, and that would be the reason I'd be talking about getting off this continent again.

    Also, Charlie came home with a Hugo from the last Glasgow WorldCon. He's certainly not going to miss the next one, whether or not they offer him a nifty rocket.

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