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Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)

So, I get these random ideas for SF/F from time to time, and I have no idea what to do with them, and sometimes when I don't want to use them I post them here.

This is one of those. (I have a couple of novel-length projects queued up behind the current work-in-progress: I do not need this right now, for values of "right now" that include the next couple of years by which time everyone will have forgotten this.)

Requirement: How to get a High Fantasy Magic System that kinda-sorta resembles software engineering ...

Mechanism: Magic is a system of demonic pacts. You make a contract with a demon to perform a service in return for some consideration.

It is trivially obvious that no sane sorcerer wants to have their soul carried off to hell in return for the sum of all knowledge and the world's most beautiful woman. (Feel free to update Faust for preferred gender role/identity/object of avarice.) They want the benefits of pacts with demons without the loopholes!

So to get the benefits, you have to make the most simple imaginable pact with a demon. A very stupid imp--on the order of Maxwell's Demon--that can read an instruction from an input, write an output, and execute a very limited number of tasks ("put this atom on top of that atom", "pause", "resume", "halt and catch fire" ...) with extreme rapidity and absolutely no discretion. I'm not sure what they're paid in, but heat (to keep the fires of Hell burning) seems reasonable. Consequently, "spells" in this system of magic consist of sequences of instructions. These are built up using a series of commands to direct the demon to do things: lots of very simple things in the necessary sequence. Oh, and big magical engineering projects run on coal, lots of coal.

Of course, if you try to bind many demons to labour in parallel there is scope for something to go horribly, concurrently wrong and set your brain on fire. (This is a generic D&D-ish high fantasy universe: they probably haven't invented the semaphore telegraph yet. "Owl courier" is still a decent occupation.) So you try to do everything with a single demon, or as few as possible, iterating very rapidly on a long list of instructions with no discretion whatsoever and lots of error trapping. Test harnesses, even! Think how much safer summoning the Grand Marquis of Hell would be if you can be completely sure that there are no errors in your invocation, and there's absolutely no risk of summoning Santa instead of Satan!

Spells are written/stored in grimoires. Fairly early on a particularly smart sorcerer got the idea of making the grimoire an active workbook--inscribe a spell, along with cells on the page for inputs, and another cell to reveal the output or to link to a summoning circle or something. There's a small cottage industry churning out copies of "mage's first magic book, guaranteed errur free!", and a much larger cottage industry of newbie mages teaching themselves Demon Summoning in BASIC, and a full blown ecosystem of magical disaster mitigation consultants, exorcists, and the sort of cleaners you call in to hose away ectoplasm and bodily fluids. Finally, you can learn by apprenticeship (but beware of animating the mop and bucket! That's the very first lesson!) or pay for a university course in abstract magical design methodologies.

Of course, most sorcerers jealously guard their spell books (although there is a penumbra of slightly deranged open source mages sharing everything, with or without cinders for brains), and every sorcerer tries to make their grimoire more flexible and generally powerful--"give me the sum of all wisdom and the world's most beautiful woman, but DO IT WITH TYPE SAFETY AND IMMUTABLE OPERATORS"--and this generally leads to lots of layers of abstraction plus domain specific languages.

And after a couple of centuries of this nonsense, summoning up a minimally potent imp and binding it to service reliably with no discretion for errors or malicious compliance is the sort of thing anyone can do using a standard grimoire (all eleven orc-hide-bound volumes), after a couple of years of study and a degree in mathematical logic, using a project that is written in three abstract magical metagrammars (you would say, "programming languages") and uses seventeen APIs or templating systems or sacrificial virtual universes, and it will be about a billion times slower than the imp at the bottom of your Turing-complete grimoire's boot loader, but you'll understand how it works!

Now, taking a D&D-ish generic high fantasy setting as a given, what can this lead to?

908 Comments

1:

Have you read Rick Cook's WIZARDS BANE and sequels?

2:

A very long time ago. Not what I have in mind.

3:

Well, a fair amount of the first two books dealt with making something type-safe with tons of built-in error checking. Since the failure results were, uh, bad. He never got into multi-threaded demons, which is a bit of a pity I think.

He didn't have any particular cost associated with it, which was a physics problem. You've got that, so that also adds some fun complexity into it.

4:

First thought: supply chain attack

Lead to: enslaved "computers" doing the drudge work of keeping the castle lights >blinking<

5:

It's too sane.

If you have ever tried to persuade wannabee (and even experienced) programmers that they WILL make errors or, worse, persuade 'computer scientists' (ESPECIALLY ones with associated publications) that no amount of type fancification and other language gimmickry will EVER catch all errors, or even catch most of the 'difficult' ones (*), you will end up as cynical as I am :-(

Let's ignore the manageritis and publication mania that leads to the attitude "There's no time to check it - that can be done later - just get it out there fast and first."

I agree that having their souls carried off to hell would enable a salutary amount of evolution, but I am not sanguine that would work in a small number of generations. The universe would be solid with people selling 'guaranteed safe' grimoires, and dogmatists mining their favoured ruts. And Cthulhu help anyone who believed either of them!

But, if you give the idea to any decent author, who is likely to give the idiots I describe the ends they deserve, PLEASE tell me how to contribute to the project :-)

(*) Measured by the degree of skill and amount of effort to locate them, given adequate debugging tools, full access to (and even an understanding of) the source. There are two reasons for this being a fundamentally insoluble problem: one derives from Turing/Goedel and the other from the fact that some of the nastiest errors are when the program is correct but solves a slightly different problem, or one with subtly more constraints.

6:

Charlie, which works of High Fantasy do you genuinely like? And I mean works that takes the subgenre seriously, not parodies, deconstructions or subversions.

7:

And to take it a step further, a large conglomerate creates a centralized and highly simplified intermediary platform that automates all the mundane and finicky aspects of pact-based magic so that anyone can quickly and easily arrange for magical tasks to be performed at the drop of a hat. Maybe call it "Amazing Wizard Services" ;)

8:

I'm with Cynic.

Everybody, including me, likes to build systems at the limits of their complexity handling. Then some more complexity comes along. (Because real life always has surprises.) Now you have built a system slightly more complicated than you can understand, which means either bugs are leaking in where you can't quite see them, or the code is brittle -- "this works but adding more features is hard work." (If you're honest, you say "I'm afraid to touch it any more.")

Software engineering as a discipline is a set of tools to improve your complexity handling. This does not make the above limit go away. It just means that you can build bigger programs before you reach it.

With enough experience, you reach the point where you recognize what kind of problems you can successfully tackle and you tackle them reliably. Now your mistakes are of the form "whoops, I tackled slightly the wrong problem" (as Cynic says). This is still complexity handling and the above still applies.

If software errors got your soul dragged to hell, I wouldn't have made it to age 25...

(Also, it seems hard to justify heat as a valuable currency in a universe where thermodynamics applies. Maybe hell doesn't have thermodynamics and that's why demons are willing to bargain?)

9:

I have a list of "Schools Of Magic" that I will almost certainly never get around to turning into anything:

Magic as a bargain: magic result from striking bargains with supernatural entities, and so magic school is like law school.

Magic as art: anyone can do magic, but it's not very practical, a small number of Wizards get rich and famous, but most give up magic and get proper jobs instead, so magic school is like drama school.

Magic as code: magic is precise, low level instructions inserted into the runtime of the universe, and magic school is like computer science classes.

Magic as innate power: some people can do magic, but it can't be taught, everyone does it their own way, so magic school just teaches ethics.

Magic as science: magic can be studied and analysed and anyone can do it, it's just another branch of sufficiently advanced technology. Magic school is like an engineering degree.

Magic as psychology: magic is real like money is real, like the law is real, it's a social construct you can't find under a microscope. Magic school is teaching applied psychology and stage hypnotism and is non-stop mind games.

Magic as money: magical power must be hoarded and built up, and when it's spent it's gone, so it is not too be used lightly, but it can be lent and borrowed and traded. Magic school is like business school: where gets you the best return on mana employed?

Magic as a foreign language: the true names of things give you power over them, so you must memorise a lot of enochian vocab. Magic school is like German lessons.

Magic as a lost art: the great mages of the past could do magic, and we're trying to find their old secrets. Magic school is like studying archaeology.

To shoe-horn this into a single plot then I think we have a bunch of students who have just finished their A-levels hopping round the multiverse trying to work out which magical system suits them best, which seems weak, so I think that in the fantasy universe were I get to try and write this, it's just a collection of thematically linked short stories.

10:

So does that mean that the motto of your fantasy equivalent of Facebook is "Move fast and wake Things"?

11:

Okay, this successfully nerd-sniped me into me delurking and finally posting here.

The obvious result of this system is that a justification for ye most honorable fantasy trope, "dragon with a hoard under a mountain with smaller monsters guarding the dungeon," falls naturally out of this system.

After all, dragons are long-lived and magically-gifted creatures. They also innately spew flame, which could be used for demonic pact powering in lieu of coal.

So, the average dragon finds a mountain relatively rich in gold ore. They power a series of very simple drilling and sifting demonic scripts with their flame, gradually moving gold dust from deep under the earth to directly underneath their feet in a growing pile.

This effort also naturally hollows out the mountain over time -- conveniently in the right angles favored by dungeon designers due to the simplicity required for safe coding! -- leaving space for other creatures, who are naturally attracted by the public utility of the spillover heat left by the dragon. After all, it's hard to steer flame and stone traps heat, so there's a lot of leftover power to run your household grimoires off of, so long as one doesn't disturb the dragon...

Note that this same thought process also explains what happened to Moria (an industrial accident with their experimental Balrog code) and a justification as to why Sauron needed to locate himself right on top of a volcano and was obsessed with control systems...

Finally, the best part is this: you don't need to explain why a bunch of magical swords, armor, etc. are in the loot pile in the dungeon. Rather, the goal of the adventuring party is to get and retain control of the dungeon heat source long enough for their extremely slow-but-safe grimoires to run "upgrade my sword" spells off of the available power...

12:

Charlie, which works of High Fantasy do you genuinely like?

Not Lord of the Rings (too pastoral-ish) or Game of Thrones (I dislike grimdark and I don't need to be spoon-fed the history of the Wars of the Roses, with added dragons and zombies). Tried The Wheel of Time and bailed after three pages of turgid prose.

I also have a laundry list of high fantasy tropes that enrage me. Like, currency based on precious metal coinages in a fixed exchange rate ratio between metals using decimal or base-100 with no awareness of seigniorage or clipping or adulteration to different degrees under different monarchs (which is why the head on the coin is important) ...

13:

I immediately went to "what happens when they make logic errors?"

A runaway infinite loop that drains all heat from the surrounding area. A forkbomb equivalent could be weaponized. Freeze your enemy's lair/castle/domain into a solid lump, which never stops growing.

But heat is too easy. Why not use souls? Not the whole thing. Maybe a small part of it. So magic users still have most of their soul, but a chunk (or chunks) are owned by whatever demons they've bargained with. As long as they still have the biggest chunk, they can still control their own lives. Maybe the demons bargain with each other to accumulate bigger shares of a specific individual. And then one day, one demon winds up with the largest share.

Or viruses/worms. Nobody wants to give up their own soul, after all. So why not attach to someone else's "process" and let them pay instead of you. So you may think that you're OK, but then discover that some demon got a big chunk of your soul mining crypto for someone else.

14:

"Also, it seems hard to justify heat as a valuable currency ...."

One can easily make it simply coal - they eat it and, in Pandemonium, good-quality coal is getting more expensive (*), so bribing them with anthracite works.

(*) My mind fails to encompass what demons would use for currency, especially given what OGH said in #12!

15:

That sort of thing is why I find almost all pseudo-mediaeval fantasy irritating - I like some, despite those tropes, but their worldbuilding is almost always dire. LOTR is extreme in that respect. The one I find most irritating is travelling long distances without major supply problems, but there are a zillion others.

16:

So there are none? Why do you feel like engaging with a genre you don't like?

Also, wait a minute, don't you have an entire highly successful series of books with magic as software?

PS. Fixed exchange rate is more of a D&D convention, I believe, to make life easier for DMs (who are usually not writers, and frequently don't even do serious worldbuilding, because you can have a fun game without). But sure you know that, didn’t you use to write for D&D?

17:

Why not use souls?

You really need to go read the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone. Start with Three Parts Dead, then continue ...

18:

Always thought the Deadlands Roleplaying game had an interesting concept of casting spells with the player playing a game of poker with the a demon as written in a copy of Hoyles Card Games.

It also sounds like something the House Ex Miscellanea has a school in from Mage the Ascension.

19:

Oh, the coal/heat thing is easy.

Magic, the demon-powered variety, is powered by pain.

Demons collect human souls and torment them to generate the pain they use to make stuff happen.

Coal? Raw heat? It's all for tormenting the captive souls.

Ditto the infernal bargains, of course, but they don't discuss the why of corrupting human souls with humans any more than humans discuss battery farming with chickens.

20:

What if the mage doesn't want to be bound to regularly paying wages to a demon? Could they enslave a demon? Or purchase the captives from demonic war?

21:

When I'm running D&D games, I make sure to tell my players "For the sake of ease and convenience, we will pretend that all of the coins you get are copper, silver, gold, etc. However, in reality there are a bunch of different coins with wacky values, and none have a fixed denomination. Cash money you find is made up of thalers, dollars, pounds, louis d'or, florins, marks, crowns, et numerous cetera."

I once had the PCs go to a faraway place where they actually used paper money. They tried to pay merchants with their regular coins and the merchants said: "Go get some real money from a bank. Can't take that crap. Whatever it is." Lots of histrionics ensued....

22:

I've always liked to think about magical programming languages as imperative, not declarative. What the spell is supposed to achieve rather than how to achieve it. Granted, it wouldn't work well if it's a specification given to a demon, as lots of genies-granting-wishes stories illustrate.

23:

The first thing I wonder is whether there are an unlimited supply of microimps or just a practically unlimited supply, like TCP/IP v4 address ranges. Though not necessarily to that exact number it might be something defined in this universes' bible. If you start getting a shortage it could have interesting effects.

If screwing up damns you, expect that sourcerers are kept at a distance from anyone important. Quests seem like possible busywork to keep at least some of them from blowing up in town.

There's a lot of D&D players who don't want any magic other than simple magic weapons and armour contaminating their brawny or skillful character. Fighters and rogues have always been popular. The equivalent people in this world might just have a point about the dangers.

24:

I'm thinking of this XKCD, except:

ALL MODERN DAEMONIC INFRASTRUCTURE vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv A cantrip some random magus in Hammerblight has been thanklessly maintaining since the Third Era

25:

That just calls into question the Minimum-Torturable-Sophont.

Obviously someone is going to try to uplift pigs/chickens/rabbits/etc. Into a quickly reproducing just-sapient-enough mass sacrifice.

26:

One effect is that the old saw about undefined behaviour in C - when the compiler encounters a construct where the standard does not specify what it ought to do, it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose - holds in this world, but it really means that demons can fly out of your nose.

27:

Something about this reminds me of a story called ...

... 'Examination Night', by a chap called Charles Stross.

I always felt that was worth further development, though it's clearly more a 1990s Charlie than a 2020s Charlie.

28:

I guess my grumble is, do we have to continue using Fundamentalist Xtianity as the baseline, hell, demons, and all?

How about Mammonism instead? You can make any sort of commentary you want about modern culture with this as your base model.

So I'll make a few tweaks:

The world was not created. It IS being continuously created by the gods. It's what gods do. They're Urges in a Greek sense. We'll call demons Catastrophs, because they destroy things. It's what they do. It's what they want to do of their own free will. This is not a moral world, but one that is good because it functions. To function, both urges and catastrophs are fundamental and necessary. Everything they do has a place in the world. Humans and other species, to the extent they have free will, can choose to some degree how they work with the urges and the catastrophs.

And then there's the spirit--or is it spirits?--of Mani.

Mani has the properties of both mana and money. The being associated with it is both an Urge and a Catastroph, and neither an Urge nor a Catastroph, thus pointing to the fact that Urges and Catastrophs are not fundamentally unlinked beings. Similarly, Mani may be one spirit or many, of any gender or genderless, completely free-willed and having no free will at all. This ambiguity is an essential feature of Mani. Or is it a bug? Or both?

The power of mani is largely based on belief in it. Mani has power to the extent that it is believed to have power. "Value" and "worth" are crude measures of how much mani something is believed to potentially have or need.

Mani only works when it is given. Baptising a thing into the Realm of Mani happens when a being of free will claims to control the thing, and a second being of free will gives mani to the first in return for control of the thing. "Thing" can be broadly defined here: rock, person, urge, catastroph, etc. Ditto free-willed being.

A thing can only leave the Realm of Mani if the being that claims control of it is given what it/they believes is enough Mani to let it go free, possibly with "safeguards" preventing it from being claimed for the Realm of Mani again. Enforcing those safeguards depends on having mani available to enforce them. Or on the thing being believed to have no mani value and actively disengaging from the Realm of Mani.

So getting back to the magic system above, let's assume it can run on mani. Let's also assume that urges and catastrophs in the Realm of Mani can do things for magicians. They will work slavishly if given the right amount of mani to do so. Too little, and they'll remember they are free-willed beings and not do as ordered. Too much, and they'll get greedy or disgusted, remember that they're free-willed beings, and not do as ordered. If the magician can keep them happy, they'll work like machines as long as the right amount of mani keeps coming in.

I should point out that most urges and catastrophs are not in the Realm of Mani, despite Mani's attempts to take over the world. They are perfectly willing to work with "magicians" who are willing to form positive relationships with them--so long as mani is not involved.

And yes, mani keeps trying to take over the world. But it only has power to the extent that beings believe that mani has power. Lose that belief, and mani's power diminishes or goes away entirely.

Feel free to claim these ideas as often as desired. You don't have to give me any mani to do so.

29:

I've been kind of wondering about this ever since I read the Harry Potter books and started wondering what Potterverse magic might look like if it was actually systematized instead of being plot-sensitive phlebotinium. "Magical theory" is an academic subject (HP studies it), and there are accounts of people inventing new spells, presumably based on the theory. Wands are important, but so are words.

What follows is not based in the Potterverse as such, its a magic system that might look rather like the Potterverse one at first glance.

System

A wand is a kind of crochet hook for the substrate of reality. With it you can catch a thread of this substrate and weave it in with others. This requires both physical dexterity and the ability to perceive the invisible material you are working with (i.e. magical talent). In theory a mundane could use a wand to cast a spell, but it would be a bit like trying to crochet wool using waldoes that you can't see.

The structures you can weave act as magic "circuits" or "mechanisms". A magic spell is simply one of these mechanisms. They can be arbitrarily complex and can be constructed to be stable, assuming you can get the loose ends tied off. Once you have your spell you can poke it with your wand and it will do stuff, or it might be constructed to start running immediately.

Magic users memorise "cantrips"; simple spells that can be constructed quickly to do useful things. More advanced users can invent stuff on the fly.

Because magic can have non-local effects, it is possible to attach a complex spell to a particular word. Once this is done (its a tricky and time-consuming task) the spell can be invoked by a combination of the word and a basic cantrip. Mock-latin is popular for these words because you aren't likely to say it by accident, but any sequence of phonemes will do.

Spells interface with the intent of the caster/user; part of magic use is using your will to pass information into a spell for it to act on. So the Potterverse "obliviate" (amnesia) spell requires a definition of the memory to be erased in a form not dissimilar to a SQL query.

Creating a spell that interfaces to reality in a desired way is a particular part of this ability. Simple spells will not affect the material world in any way. Constructing a spell to have a precise desired impact on the world is a tricky business, but doable if you have studied the techniques. Spells that couple with matter can have non-local effects, but they are still constrained by the basic laws of physics: a fireball has to get the heat energy from somewhere hot enough, and a levitation spell must be pushing down on something.

Spells can be modularised. Past magic users have created a library of spell components which can be invoked in the same way as any other spell, but are intended to be interfaced to other components. So its possible to build up complex spells out of these components.

Version control is a hot mess. The spell associated with a particular word can be updated by anyone using the same technique used to replace it. So its quite common for a magic word to suddenly change its effects or even stop working altogether. There is also no copy protection beyond keeping the word secret: once someone learns the word that invokes a spell there is nothing to stop them from doing it as often as they want, and no way to learn who they are or to charge them for it.

Optional Extras

Have any animals evolved to make use of magic? Could there be creatures that exist largely or completely in the reality substrate of magic? That would explain stories of demons and monsters, and (as in the Potterverse) magic creatures would be an obvious source for wand components, since they have the built-in ability to interface to the substrate.

30:

There was definitely demonic influence in the design of C and C++ - I could name names, but won't. Some of the most extreme examples were leaving something ill-defined because it was 'obvious' it meant X, later changing the interpretation to Y, and denying that there ever was a change, on occasions to avoid having to fix a compiler bug. Undefined behaviour is not always due to simple programmer error ....

In the universe of this post, and if one assumed that demons had any influence on the languages of invocation, one can easily see them doing exactly that, and even once-reliable grimoires becoming death-traps.

31:

(This is a separate comment from my Potterverse-like magic system, since the general point isn't much affected by the details of the system. Charlie's and mine would have similar effects).

If you have a moderately dependable mechanism for doing magic, and it can be analysed, learned and invented, then there is going to be a kind of magitech industrial revolution. The world isn't going to be a medieval swords-and-sourcery place for very long; its going to morph into something like the Shadowrun world, only more steampunk than cyberpunk. Then once electricity gets discovered it will move towards something like the modern world but with magic, and then on to who knows what.

In Bujold's World of the Five Gods a magic user figures out how to turn a hand-written sheet of paper into a printing plate: put the sheet face down on the plate, and use magic to engrave the ink into the plate. The paper is destroyed (conservation of entropy), but presumably one could then take a printed sheet from the press and repeat the process, so that many identical plates could be produced. It's a neat trick and its inventor publishes the details, but 200 years later the society is still a medieval aristocracy.

In our world the invention of Gutenberg's printing press seems to have been one of (if not the) key factors in the start of the Industrial Revolution. Printing made it practical to buy a book to learn a monetisable skill, printing costs dropped by 3 orders of magnitude in 100 years, and lots of inventions suddenly started happening. (We've discussed this here in the past: see The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke ).

I'd have expected something similar to happen in the World of the Five Gods. And there would be lots of interesting stories there, starting with "what do each of those gods think about industrialisation?". But it didn't.

So a part of the world-building here isn't the construction of a generic swords-and-sourcery world with some magic users added in, its much more about what the stories that their version of James Burke will tell about the development of the modern magitech society, with its imp-powered iconographs.

32:

Charlie, I like the idea of magic as Unix - each little thing does one thing, but does it well.

I am reminded of the Demon Tech books by my sigh late friend David Sherman. Guns? There's a small demon inside, and when you pull the trigger, it pinches them or something, and they spit....

Nasty thought: so, you trade them coal for work, and you have to buy or mine coal to pay them. Then this guy comes along to try to sell them methane...

Truly warped thought: this magician comes up with a perfect way to keep Hell hot: to steal heat from Heaven, since it's been shown for many years that Heavan is hotter than Hell.... (for example, https://www.me.iitb.ac.in/~awdate/other4.html )

33:

In my career, it's the new programmers, or the ones who have been in one line too long. The ones right out of school have never had to actually validate input data.... And managers and such are sure they know how it should be done.

And don't get me started on "subject matter experts".

34:

EVERYONE wants to read the Craft Series.

35:

Define "chunks of their soul". Perhaps "x hours/days/weeks/years"? I mean, given that it's all finite (as opposed to the Christianists' view, that infinite punishment is just right for finite evil")? You get to torture me for your doing this work.

I can see an older mage, "I am NOT going to be tortured like that again for something that stupid...."

36:

I see them carrying a lot of the equivalent of Elf-made MREs.

On the other hand, and this is supposedly true, the treaty that Billy Penn made with the local Native Americans was for as much land as a man (or was it three men?) could walk around in three days. The Native Americans figured they'd have to stop at some point and hunt, and start a fire.... What Penn did was send good walkers out, carrying three days food on their back.

37:

Oh... you mean like the one guy in the world maintaining NTP for ALL *Nix?

38:
[...] but you'll understand how it works!

No, no you won't. What will happen is quite different. At some point in the past a system of grimoires was arrived at which was both far safer than preceding (and many succeeding) grimoires and sufficiently powerful to express a vast range of existing grimoires (this ability, for reasons too large for this comment, was usually known as the 'consideration' facility). This system, or rather this family of systems of grimoires, often known as the āwlyspian grimoires, was immediately derided by the authors of other grimoires (collectively known as the pelagian grimoires) as being too complex, too ugly, and too slow for serious magical work, especially since all serious practitioners understand the safety issues and write grimoires without the flaws which the āwlyspian grimoires sought to avoid.

As time went on and several countries were lost to catastrophic demonic infestation as a result of errors in pelagian-family grimoires, many safety features of the āwlyspian grimoires were implemented in their descendents, usually without any understanding by the practitioners that this was what they were doing. Pelagian grimoires became slower – far slower than any āwlyspian grimoire had ever been – as a result, while still remaining intractably difficult to use and never gaining the consideration facility in anything other than a rudimentary form.

In the mean time, certain sects of the practitioners of the āwlyspian grimoire family (some survived) observed that the consideration facility, as usually described, contained certain issues of safety, whereby, for instance, and imprecation to a demon might be misconstrued as a different imprecation in considerations written by inexperienced practitioners. For many years these practitioners – the 'arrangement' school as they were known – refused to use considerations at all in any official capacity. Eventually, a new consideration scheme was arrived at, expressed in terms, of certain abstract metamagical submonoidal morphisms, or equivalently in terms of undiagramatic graphs of groipoidal cycles. A theorem, running to more than four thousand vellum pages, was proven to show that these two schemes for considerations were equivalent. Several people understood it.

A new family of āwlyspian grimoires using these considerations became somewhat fashionable. It is widely believed that nobody understood it.

In the pelagian world two related processes happened. Grimoires became vastly complex and stylized in order to prevent inadvertent demons: nobody understood these because it would take far longer than a human lifetime to read any one of them. Other pelagian grimoire schools, being dimly aware of the arrangement school, started to describe their grimoires in terms of semi-infinite femtomagmas: nobody understood these either.

While this evolution was still taking place, the seas rose – completely expectedly – and everyone drowned.

39:

I like that. For that matter, if humans can do magic, I'm positive that critters can, to some degree or another.

Thought, Go Away. No one is going to find a woman magiced by her cat to take care of aforesaid cat....

40:

Nahh, as some point, there was a school that beganning diagramming the spells, using a technique named after the leaders of that school, Backards and Noor, which made if far more comprehensible.

They did have a whole section, often ignored, on Things That Need To Be Addressed. This includes uncompleted circles, which result in all sould in a range of X will be drawn in and taken.

41:

This seems very close to Ethereum smart contract programming today, where the risk of failure is loss of all wealth/ bitcoin/ bankaccounts. Maybe in you system you can partition your soul into chunks, or perhaps the souls of children (as we have the classical witches capturing children for something tropes) as a method payment. Like credits for AWS.

42:
In Bujold's World of the Five Gods a magic user figures out how to turn a hand-written sheet of paper into a printing plate: put the sheet face down on the plate, and use magic to engrave the ink into the plate. The paper is destroyed (conservation of entropy), but presumably one could then take a printed sheet from the press and repeat the process, so that many identical plates could be produced. It's a neat trick and its inventor publishes the details, but 200 years later the society is still a medieval aristocracy.

While there are undoubtedly some holes in Bujold's worldbuilding, that isn't one of them.

Firstly, the process only works (as I recall) with a sheet written out by the magic user doing the transfer (which is part of the creator's enthusiasm for getting it working with metal plates rather than wooden ones). Which means that if you want a book made that way, you need to have a sorceror write it out longhand. Which brings us to the second, much larger, problem.

The limiting resource for the process, in that world (even if we allow the use of a printed sheet to create a new plate) is the availability of a sorceror to do the job. Temple sorcerors are rare and in great demand, and in any case their priorities are decided by the White God, with the temple hierarchy assigning whatever's left after that. Creating new temple sorcerors is a lengthy and demanding process, and attempting to take shortcuts or arrange your own supply is ... unwise even beyond "normal" attempts to appropriate a God's power for your own purposes.

Hedge sorcerors powerful enough to do the job are probably even rarer, and very unlikely to do anything that leaves such an obvious mark because of the attention it will draw. And while "just making books" might seem excusably benign to those unfamiliar with Bujold's world, there are very good reasons why the temple hunts down free/rogue sorcerors and (usually) strips them of their powers. Untrained sorcerors are extremely dangerous to those around them (and indeed to themselves; they tend to die young, unpleasantly, and not from human actions), and the only way to mitigate that danger is ... divine approval and several years of seminary training. (NB for those unfamiliar with the series: I don't mean approval by the temple authorities. The White God gets personally involved, and the stories feature some very clear and unambiguous divine wrath pour encourager les autres.)

43:

I don't, for a similar reason to OGH's about currency. Unless you are rewriting the laws of physics and biology to evade this issue, a walker needs c. 1 Kg of food a day, or will lose 250+ grams of weight a day, or 1/2 Kg a day and a 125+ gram weight loss. You CAN halve the weight by eating almost pure fat, but will get serious gut problems if you do it for long and don't mix it with a lot of vegetable matter, which takes time to gather and cook. And possibly even if you do (e.g. I would)! Few people can walk effectively with more than 25 Kg on their backs.

Note that is relatively gentle walking - say, 20 miles over fairly easy going (e.g. dry but rough or grassy dirt roads / tracks over undulating country). For tougher going, longer distances, or cold weather, double the figures - for seriously tough going, double that AND cut the distance.

Furthermore (shade of Tolkein please note), hunting isn't as much help as all that:

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

44:

Version control is a hot mess. The spell associated with a particular word can be updated by anyone using the same technique used to replace it. So its quite common for a magic word to suddenly change its effects or even stop working altogether.

Easily dealt with by introducing UUIDs (aka GUIDs), only instead of an unpronouncable 128-bit integer it's encoded as a sequence of otherwise-unconnected words or phonemes. Each invocation of a UUID introduces or loads a dictionary that contains a snapshot/copy of every desired spell in the library: part of setting up a new spell is taking a snapshot of the existing units you want. Uh. magical github? Frankly, you don't need a full version control system in a system of individualistic magic -- initially you just need enough for a single user: VCS's can be quite simple (I'm looking at sccs(1) as the canonical example, never mind the far more sophisticated but-still-single-user rcs(1).)

Magical animals: yes, and be afraid, be very afraid, of magic-wielding predators with theory of mind.

45:

Robert Jackson Bennett's Founder's Trilogy covers similar territory, only with animism instead of imps. "Tech" giants, scrappy hackers, open source, etc.

One thing that's led to the real world software bloat that you allude to has been that Moore's Law has compensated for a lot of that bloat. I assume the imp equivalent is that there are various grades of imps in the Demon Halls, and the initial summoning spells only got the worst, slowest ones, to begin with. Then the expanding magical capabilities led to better summon spells that got faster, coal-efficient grades of imps.

Now what happens when the imp quality tops out? First, I imagine that a scrappy hero, in the midst of his heroic deed of saving a mead-hall from beastman attacks, figures out a way to gang together many low-quality imps to achieve the same thing as the well-funded royal demonologists. But what next? Freezing the tiniest of imps next to each other until they start to blur into each other like some kind quantum imputer?

46:

Very curious what you'd make of the Founder's Trilogy (https://www.robertjacksonbennett.com/the-founders-trilogy) -- magic based on text scribed into objects that "programs" the object to have different properties, like an arrow thinks it's 10x its own mass so does more damage.

47:

I like the idea of magic as Unix - each little thing does one thing, but does it well.

Unfortunately that theory doesn't always link up to the reality. We get simple single-purpose tools that crash and burn when you fuzz their inputs, and then you get helpful idiots adding a metric shitload of command-line options and/or hard links that change the behaviour of the underlying binary because of course fgrep, grep, and egrep are all variants of grep, and then some numpty at the FSF causes the GNU version of fgrep to emit a snarky message to STDOUT telling users (who are mostly shell scripts by this point) to use grep -f instead (because obviously this is the right thing to do if you're an idiot who doesn't appreciate you're maintaining critical infrastructure), only in this metaphor a demon turns up and eats your soul rather than most of your shell scripts suddenly giving incorrect output.

And then you get generalist tools.

Anything you can do with awk you can do, more or less, with Bourne shell, sed, and various simple commands. But awk is so convenient at text mangling that it does an embrace-and-extend on any shell scripts that have to do significant mangling of textual input data.

Then you want to add sockets and random POSIX shit and you get Perl 4, which is a strict superset of awk and absolutely awesome for 1992 values of awe. But Perl 4 is extremely bad at structure in the large -- you can write libraries of code by defining local namespaces but they're leaky and messy and duck-typing is just asking for trouble. So then you get Perl 5 which adds references and function prototypes and about sixty bazillion different ways to do OOP and functional programming, sometimes in the same sentence while standing on your head juggling chainsaws without a safety net. Which garners complaints so then you get a 20 year project to invent Perl 6 which turns out to be an entirely different language, and everybody gives up on it and buggers off to Python in the meantime because the lack of a major version number increment convinces them that Perl 5 has died (rather than going from 5.001 to 5.60 in 59 incremental releases) ...

48:

No, it's just basic printing as from before movable type - see Sir Pterry's The Truth for an example. You write the paper, a mundane process, the only magic is that the sorcerer is writing a textbook of what they do. You press the still-wet page to a boxwood panel, transferring a reverse image, and the engraver carves away the letters so that you have an engraved image that you use to print with maybe a dozen times before its worn away. Paper is not destroyed, but the ink is only so wet so you get to do the transfer just once. Penric and Des figured out that with her ability to make rust, they could etch a steel plate, making a much more robust engraving that would last an indefinite number of pressings.

On topic - an engraving like that would enshrine errors into hundreds of widely-distributed and -used grimoires instead of only a dozen at a time, leading to to some nasty legacy code issues.

49:

No I really do not want to meet the demonological equivalent of Perl 5, thank you very much. Unless it's one of the later iterations with "use strict" enabled by default and all the safety checks welded and padlocked in the "on" position. And even then I'd be extremely wary.

Any demon summoning toolkit more complex than the System 7 UNIX command line environment (think Xenix) is probably way too dangerous to hand to mere postgraduate researchers because the amount of crap you'd have to memorize to know what was actually going on would be too much.

(I have an old copy of the Mark Williams Company's Coherent 3.2 somewhere, which was a System 7 clone: the manual is a miracle of concision at only about 1100 pages ...)

50:

Chrisj @ 42: While there are undoubtedly some holes in Bujold's worldbuilding, that isn't one of them.

Fair enough. But the wider point still stands: if you have magitech then people are going to get inventive, and from there its a short step to an industrial revolution. Feudal aristocracies depend on keeping people in their place: "the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly, and ordered their estate". Modern software engineering, or anything like it, is going to be a nightmare for anyone who wants to keep things the same because people will keep mcgyvering it.

51:

I suspect the only way to handle it is via something like Graydon Saunders' Commonweal series -- where magical ability is innate so sorcerers become nobility until a major disruptive event occurs and there's a revolution and then a harshly egalitarian state emerges where the penalty for trying to set yourself up as a petty god-king is drastic and permanent. (Fast forward 500-600 years and they've laboriously legislated a framework for taming and enabling godlike entities to coexist with mere mortals in a civil society without turning into oligarchs, and a socialist approach to development is improving everybody's standard of living ... subject to disputes and the odd attempted invasion and genocide by the crazed devotees of fire gods.)

How you get to that nobody-has-to-die-unless-they're-unreasonably-addicted-to-power situation from the nasty/brutish/short age of Dark Lords that precedes it is the most fantasy-esque aspect of the setting.

52:

The "HELLO WORLD" joke writes itself! No, I mean literally, it's writing itself, please send help.

53:

So you build your system out of the most stupid demons.

Shouldn't these demons just be a part of the whole hell-dimension demon biosphere? Probably an important part?

Imagine if some interdimensional aliens were to start exploiting Earth by stealing our microorganisms.

You can't live without microorganisms.

So, bottom line, this idea ends with the smart demons invading to stop us.

54:

How you get to that nobody-has-to-die-unless-they're-unreasonably-addicted-to-power situation from the nasty/brutish/short age of Dark Lords that precedes it is the most fantasy-esque aspect of the setting.

Immortal godkings versus mortals?

The obvious answer is that mortals do to godkings what pests are doing to us: have short generation times and keep evolving new attacks, Red Queen style. Eventually, the mortals figure out how to do whatever-it-is that the godkings can't withstand. Then the godkings are stuck in the position of, say, various Papuan peoples, who have to deal with up to four different types of malaria simultaneously, suffer terribly, and watch a majority of their children die as babies, all with no hope of a cure or escape. So they make their peace with the inevitability and ubiquity of the mosquitos. And so godkings would suffer mere mortals, not because they want to, but because we're unavoidable and collectively unbeatable.

The reason we don't see this as an obvious answer is that we're conditioned to sympathize with the godkings, rather than to realize our identity as mosquitos, so far as the godkings are concerned. Even Graydon made that mistake.

*Aprocryphal bathroom graffiti from a university biology department: Someone wrote: "Oh God, why are we born, only to suffer and die?" And someone wrote below that: "Because those who suffered and died left behind more descendants than those who did not." No one I've told this to has ever considered this a lesson they want to teach to students. Especially not to the undergrads they teach.

55:

Yep. Tell me alllll about it - yesterday, being the beginning of the month, I did my monthly backup and update. And when it came up (almalinux, which just went from 9.1 to 9.2), I tried to log in... nope, went back to the login screen. The only way I could get back to where I wanted to be, running KDE (I HATE gnome and its bloat) was to create ~/.xinitrc, and put startkde in it, then run $: startx.

The only good thing was that, unlike 90% of the time, when it came up, the four windws I wanted up were in the correct place, and the minimized half-down were, in fact, still minimized.

We'll see what happens tomorrow.

56:

Oh, and hey, I love awk. But then, it saved my butt in the early nineties: a project I was on, we, the contractors, were to be the magic on the board diagram, and we'd tell all the court-ordered sources what format to send their data to us in.

Every one said, "sorry, no budget, do you want it whatever format we have or not."

I wrote about 30 awk script to reformat them... and I'm not talking 2 liners, I'm talking 100-200 lines of awk.

57:

Speaking of simple magical languages, I intermittently amuse myself with the idea of a language of magic isn't complex, but very simple, like the conlang Toki Pona.

I don't speak toki pona, but my understanding is that it's so simple that "mi moku" means both "I eat" and "I am food." To communicate in it, apparently handwaving is necessary. Possibly diagrams?

Anyway, if this was the language shared by a magician and a daemon, I suspect that handwaving and diagrams would be necessary for the magician to explain to the daemon what they wanted. Ritualize communications to make life easier for everyone, and you have a magic system.

And oh, the failure modes...

58:

Um, er, as I've been saying for a looooong time, the OT says that A&E ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and God said, "before they eat of the fruit of the tree of life, let's kick them out."

Simple grammar reads that as the only difference between man and god is that they live forever... which means they ain't smarter than we are.

59:

Yeah, no. "Craft sequence" is the worst kind of magic worldbuilding. It's just a word salad of technobabble.

60:

Perl 3 was really the successor to APL - a write-only language. And I can assure you that you really, really do not want to have to look at its source!

62:

Simple grammar reads that as the only difference between man and god is that they live forever... which means they ain't smarter than we are.

Yup.

So far as humans being the magical equivalent of mosquitoes...imagine something like Wiccan Rule of Three, only as rapidly evolving and collectively unstoppable as malaria, at least so far as godkings are concerned. In other words, whatever they do magically rebounds threefold upon them. Kill a bunch of mortals with magic? Die that many times, tripled, except that godkings don't die permanently, so they get to revive at the end of the last death they experience, then heal themselves however they can. Suck all the mana out of a mortal, only to lose all your mana three times over? Maybe not something the discerning godking would want to do?

It would make being a dark lord rather painful, at the very least.

63:

Heh. I take it you have never met a lawyer ...

64:

I was about to make a joke about a demonic fork bomb but then I realised that would probably make an extremely horrifying weapon especially if used in a populated area and if you could get a hold of some Plutonium-238 (unlikely in a fantasy universe but still) you could probably have something that in terms of danger to life would be akin to a nuke

65:

Or a rabbi...(or Orthodox Jew).

So, if the feedstock for a foodprinter is a genengineered weed, with trace elements added as needed, is printed bacon kosher? (respondent 1: yes; respondent 2: the rabbis will say no).

66:

Ha! I recently started ground work on a new project. One of the things I added to the design was automatic test generation, with constant checking of invariants as a runtime option.

"Why would you want to do that?"

"Because we all make mistakes" was not an acceptable response.

67:

No, see, I think there's a different direction to take this. All of this is tying the system to software engineering and trying to find parallels there, but what if this were to go down the track of:

  • Excel is the most-used programming language in the world
  • The world runs on spreadsheets
  • Most spreadsheets are disasters
  • Also, Visual Basic for Magic and all those Windows applications
  • ... and backwards-compatible magic on the world's most popular magic system going back decades so that even a home automation spell your mum wrote in the 1980s can still run on the new hotness in the place you're renting.

Come to think of it, this is starting to sound a bit Pratchett-y.

68:

It is trivially obvious ... that "Faust" is a load of christian lying bullshit, right?
but heat (to keep the fires of Hell burning) - WRONG - the only person to visit, recorded that the ultimate depths were frozen over ...
{Reference: "Divine Comedy" One, cantos: 32 onward ....
SERIOUSLY: READ Dante, first!

Auricoma @ 6
LotR? Or maybe not?

Ben Curthoys @ 9
"Magic as psychology" - translates to: Magic is POLITICS ...
"Magic as a foreign language" - well, I managed to summon a bumblebee, by calling her by her "True Name" ... once.
See Also: "Earthsea" by U K Le G.

Charlie @ 12
Lois McMaster B's universe?
... @ 19 ... "Raw Heat" = Nuclear Power, oops.

  • see also ChrisJ @ 42 ( An appropriate number, too! )

Elaine @ 48
Where did all this "Penric" knowledge go to & vanish, by the time of "The Curse of Chalion" I wonder?
Destroyed in the wars of the Golden General?

What levels of abstraction will one need to understand all of this, given the parallels with computer coding & science?

69:

Re: '... in return for the sum of all knowledge'

I'm thinking of a scenario where the imp steals rather than 'discovers' knowledge.

First off - all the knowledge as of what date?

If the overall proportion of wizards in that universe is comparable to research scientist in ours, ditto for research slog, then every single wizard (and soon-to-be wizard) will be continually learning something/accreting knowledge. So unless your imp can zip in and out of a pocket universe after every noting every bit of knowledge right up to the end of that universe or death of all wizards (whichever comes first), it cannot deliver the sum of all knowledge.

Also - if the comparison to scientists holds, then the sequence of the various layers and connections between bits of knowledge might also be important. If your imp just collects and dumps all the knowledge on your lap, you won't know what bit of info goes with what, what the exceptions are, etc. Then there's obsolete knowledge because someone cam up with a better/faster/easier/more reliable way of pulling off a spell.

What about language/grammar of the various snippets of knowledge - unless everyone always spoken exactly the same language all over that world?

Good scenario for exploring every way that the imp could screw up (short stories) kinda what Asimov did when he started writing about robots.

Paul @ 29 and ttb @ 38 - very interesting! Thanks!

70:

So unless your imp can zip in and out of a pocket universe after every noting every bit of knowledge right up to the end of that universe or death of all wizards (whichever comes first), it cannot deliver the sum of all knowledge.

Assuming that you have been sufficiently unambiguous to use the word "sum" to mean "all knowledge in aggregate" and not "a summary of all knowledge".

I'm reminded of the Pete Seeger story of the king who sends out his wise men to summarize all the world's wisdom in a book, for his sons to learn. When the complete that task he orders them to summarize the world's wisdom in a sentence, which they determine to be "this too shall pass". Then he requires a single word summary, which they deliver as "maybe".

Pete tells it much better than I've tried to. And you really wouldn't want to hear my trying to sing the musical interludes :-)

71:

I couldn't help it and copied/pasted it into chatgpt as a prompt: https://chat.openai.com/share/a862f19c-aa2b-4f77-bcd7-a27b5bef6eb9

72:

No, I understand the idea of magic self-executing contracts. It's a common approach to building a magic system.

I dislike the Craft series because of the writing style. It's simply not clear how the magic system works, and so the books are full of Dei Ex Machina. It's not clear what the limitations of the abilities are and what are the consequences of actions.

The world itself is also inconsistent.

73:

https://what3words.com/ gets a lot more fun in a world like that. Sort of like a memory palace but with more unexpected exits involving terms like {arrrrggh} and {crunch}.

74:

When I'm running D&D games, I make sure to tell my players "For the sake of ease and convenience, we will pretend that all of the coins you get are copper, silver, gold, etc. However, in reality there are a bunch of different coins with wacky values, and none have a fixed denomination. Cash money you find is made up of thalers, dollars, pounds, louis d'or, florins, marks, crowns, et numerous cetera."

At least most modern games, starting at least with 'Vampire: The Masquerade' in 1991, mostly abstract the money and other property of the characters, usually by some attribute or something. I like this approach.

There are games where you can calculate the exact change the characters have, but it's some kind of old school game then (yes, D&D 5e is that). Depends on the genre, too, sometimes you have to keep track of every arrow, but sometimes the wealth of the character is a skill which can be improved (or reduced: 'Diaspora' has a skill for wealth and an upper limit on how many skill levels you can have, so it's perfectly fine to get worse in something.)

75:

Yeah nope, that's about as funny and amusing as a three-day-ripe haddock to the face.

76:

I think if you're focussing on the mechanics of the magic system rather than the depth and richness of human relationships in those books then you're kind of missing the point ...

77:

Presumably the imps manipulate physical things and not just information. It's not like real-life programming where you need a smouldering heap of CNCs, 3D printers and IoTrash devices to do real things, all facilities that are easier to mess up than the code. And "everybody" can program imps.

Therefore it's a slave economy, approximately in the Roman sense, as discussed on this blog previously. Most of the population are unemployed. But this is not urbanized Rome, it's a rural economy with no dole, no land ownership for the masses (therefore missing the chance of imp-automated smallholdings everywhere), and no law enforcement except for occasional hack-and-burn sweeps by the palace crowd.

Freelance imping doesn't pay (contract imping does, but boooring), there's no work and people gotta eat. So they go adventuring. The world fills up with with muppet-grade, level-1 dungeon parties and you just know that they won't live long enough to make level 2. Darwin awards may be in order. It's an un-heroic questing scene.

This could be written as comedy (but harshly in the shadow of Pratchett); or a story could focus on the few competent adventurers with a good reason for questing. I'd quite like a fantasy book where the heros' problem is not monsters in an empty landscape but amateur competition.

78:

And then you get generalist tools.

That reminds me of a development system at work a couple of decades ago. There were these Unix servers which were used to build the stuff. The version control was, I think, CVS - where there is a possibility to check some code out so that nobody else can work on it while you have it checked out.

Now, of course somebody checked things out, worked on them a bit, and went on vacation. This meant nobody could work on that part without removing the lock file. Admins could probably do it, but of course this was a long and laborious process just to delete one file.

So, we had also 'sudo' (superuser) rights, but only for certain necessary commands, and 'rm' (remove file) was not one of them. However, we quickly figured out that 'make' was an allowed command, and so the problem was solved. Also our faith in the IT security was diminished by a fair bit.

(Explanation for those who don't know what 'make' is: it is a tool where you write a file of 'recipes' for doing stuff, so it's possible to do things like 'make install' which would perform all the steps for the 'install' recipe. The nice thing is that you can basically write whatever shell commands you like to the recipe, so we could add a recipe with 'rm lockfile' which did what it was supposed to do even if we were not allowed to run 'rm'.)

79:

What can this lead to? To bloody wars, that's what!

Look at my left arm, kiddo. Oh, you can only see its shadow? Must be I lost its physical reality somewhere… Yeah, a bloody demon took it, along with half my team, back in the Functional offensives of '43. At night I still wake up sweating, remembering how they grew bigger and bigger by eating themselves. By their own tails, they self-devoured, stacks and stacks of themselves until they consumed all available space and them bam! You were lucky if you still had some parts of your body left for your soul to wear.

Three sons I had, lost two in the Great Editor War of '65. The youngest came back, but I can see that far-away look he gets.

I only worry about my grandkids nowadays. Bright lads, happy, they've only known peace. But I hear the Agiles are massing in giant Scrums not far from here and I fear. I fear for them and for all of us. Damn you Baggage, damn you Turing and damn the fucking holy Ada! You heard me! They messed with things we were not supposed to, and now it's people like me and mine who carry the scars.

80:

The mechanism by which magical societies never stop being feudal is easy: Magic destroys the ability to create science, because it means that the results of any experiment won't necessarily be the same as when you did it the time before. So you get to a high medieval society, maybe with some good medicine, then your population crashes in a series of ugly wars, each one different because it's fought according to whatever theory of magic is fashionable at the time.

81:

Charlie Stross @ 76: I think if you're focussing on the mechanics of the magic system rather than the depth and richness of human relationships in those books then you're kind of missing the point ...

Yes, the same goes for my whinge above about the lack of an industrial revolution in the Bujold's World of the Five Gods. Bujold writes wonderful character-driven plots, so one can forgive the occasional wobbly set.

82:

It will depend on where the genes inserted into the weed came from :-)

83:

Troutwaxer @ 80: Magic destroys the ability to create science

That's the usual cop-out: magic and science/tech are completely immiscible; either magic automatically blocks any tech (like in Shadowrun and the Potterverse) or tech destroys magic (also in Shadowrun).

I'm interested in a system where that doesn't happen. Given that technology is just a particular arrangement of matter, the presence of magic shouldn't affect it unless it is specifically aimed at the matter in question. This doesn't need to be destructive: a computer that interfaces with a spell should be perfectly possible.

The Discworld has bits and pieces of this; momentum and energy are conserved even when magic happens. The Five Gods also has it; magic is done via demons that inhabit a sorcerer (and are prone to possess them, which is a hazard). Demons are creatures of chaos, and the core of their magic is the manipulation of entropy. They can increase entropy ("downhill magic") very easily, causing things to decay, rust, break etc. They can also decrease entropy, but this is very hard work. It doesn't break the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics because the resulting entropy is only stored and has to be shed at some convenient point. One character finds slaughterhouses very convenient for this; he simply dumps the excess entropy into a beast due for slaughter, and it drops dead on the spot.

84:

Yeah :-( What's more, providing evidence that it will reduce the time to final release, and reduce the maintenance costs thereafter, isn't acceptable, either - because it will increase the time to the first beta release.

It would be extremely interesting (seriously) to see what effect daemonic possession on the people responsible for releasing buggy programs would have. If the demons took just the programmers, the managers would simply hire more, so we would end up in the semi-slave states so common in fiction and fact. But, if the demons took those responsible for giving the orders? The social effects of such a thing would be far more drastic than appear at first glance.

85:

This is my personal hell. Trying to convince people that their ten thousand line boilerplate type system code catches zero bugs of relevance, but costs thousands of work hours in maintenance every year.

86:

I don't think magic and science are immiscible. I think that the presence of magic could easily mess with the foundation of science which is the idea that scientific experiments should be repeatable. This doesn't mean that science is impossible in a world where magic exists. Obviously physics or chemistry, even at the atomic or quantum levels, still works unless a magician intervenes, but I think the scientific method is unlikely to be developed in the presence of magic.

87:

One character finds slaughterhouses very convenient for this; he simply dumps the excess entropy into a beast due for slaughter, and it drops dead on the spot.

And should be at least partially cooked

88:

If you pay in heat, you could use magic to generate electricity to power your non-magic stuff while doing magic. It would be interesting to see what happens as technology develops along that pathway: people are required to do magic to keep civilization running?

89:

Hacking. Either through introduction of demons or similar molecules.

Major magics might need to be done in a clean room / sanctified space.

Also, highly exponential spells unless there is a limitation on acquisition of heat energy. Cities end up with disruption effects everywhere. ( Or nonexistent). Also, no wooden buildings.

Spells where 95% of the power is in anti interference provisions. Combat spells being wildly inefficient as a result. Area vs volumetric safety, sabotage by being inside / close to a ritual circle.

Spells casting relatively slowly (demons per second?) Poor little critters.

Multi threaded spells, with the requisite very high requirements in casting complexity

Sentient demonic familiars as error correction

90:

I assume Hell would publish altered versions of these open source libraries with logic bugs that will cause the caster's soul to be dragged to Hell.

As a result, magicians would be more cautious about supply chain attacks than programmers are. (Most bugs hurt other people...)

91:

"read an instruction from an input, write an output, and execute a very limited number of tasks ("put this atom on top of that atom", "pause", "resume", "halt and catch fire" ...)"

OK, so this demon is basically a Turing machine, or at least the head bit of one; and as we all know a Turing machine can compute anything computable... but nearly always with grotesque inefficiency and extravagance in storage. And if they're operating at the level of moving single atoms, well there are a fuck of a lot of atoms in even the tiniest thing that's at all useful. To rearrange atoms at a rate comparable to, say, a school-lab-scale demonstration of electrolysis - ie. you can see it works, but it takes hours to get even a small bubble of gas - the demon is going to have to have a clock frequency at the very least at the low end of the gamma range, and that's with some very generous assumptions about its operating environment.

You're not going to be feeding it on coal. Chemical reactions are several orders of magnitude short of that kind of energy density. This is the kind of beastie that considers a lump of 60Co to be a tasty snack. It's possible that in a state of nature they can survive on coal by extracting the radium and other uranium decay products in it, but the concentrations are so low that nearly all their atom-shifting capacity is used in digging out their food, so there isn't any useful surplus to exploit in captive ones. I suppose you could try setting up your magic lab in the cave underneath Chernobyl where that gamma-eating fungus lives, but it almost certainly won't be worth the hassle.

So despite the awful warnings against it, the only way to get a useful processing rate while running them at chemically-practical clock speeds is indeed to go for massively parallel arrays. Each demon only shifts atoms slowly, but there are lots and lots of them so the overall rate comes out as something appreciable. And of course there must be some overall loose interaction between the demons to keep their actions properly coordinated.

We know this kind of setup. The operation of the demons on an individual level is a matter in the realm of software engineering, but the complexity of the interaction between billions of them in a lump is way beyond what software engineering techniques can handle, and trying to predict or constrain the overall behaviour by software adjustments on the scale of the individual units is extremely unreliable, involves a lot of guesswork, and often gives quite unexpected results.

For dealing with such massively parallel systems we have to use a much more "top down" approach to keep things tractable, which helps, although it still doesn't do brilliantly at giving results with an engineering-level degree of dependability. Biological systems are, after all, well known for unexpectedly catching you out.

So I think what you've invented here is a kind of coal-powered bacterial slime, only made of demons and with explicit computational and synthetic abilities.

92:

Re: 'Each demon only shifts atoms slowly, ...'

Only if demons are part of our 'natural' universe. Demons intersect with our universe at some spacetime points but they're like dark energy and dark matter: the math says they're out there but a determination of their composition and attributes is still in the to-be-discovered phase. OOC - has any fantasy author ever put together a theoretical basis of magic? (I'm talking at the subatomic particles or at least table of elements level not just a few sounds and a random wave of a wand.)

About wizards suddenly discovering that they're a wizard at some random age and then being able to perform magic without any training. Even if magic is an inborn/instinctual sense like a vision, hearing, wizards would still need some sort of training just like muggle babies are taught how to focus on different shapes/colors, sounds, etc. in order to identify and use their senses effectively.

93:

a school-lab-scale demonstration of electrolysis - ie. you can see it works, but it takes hours to get even a small bubble of gas

Faster than that. Maybe ten minutes to fill a test tube.

94:

Even if magic is an inborn/instinctual sense like a vision, hearing, wizards would still need some sort of training just like muggle babies are taught how to focus on different shapes/colors, sounds, etc. in order to identify and use their senses effectively.

Like Peter goes through in Rivers of London?

I've now got a mental image of a group of Prachettesque robed and hatted wizards in a magical preschool, with a Matron talking to them slowly and with careful enunciation…

95:

A thought for the day:

Instead of polarizing reality into good vs. evil, as done here, what about polarizing it into intelligence (heaven) vs. stupidity (hell).

So if magic is a system of pacts with demons, maybe instead it's about pacts with abysmally stupid spirits, the kind that would make a bad deal with a con artist magician instead of being smart and doing the right thing?

I think all the other assumptions, including the need for rigidly defined programming/magical languages, can be left more-or-less intact. As for what an abysmally stupid demon would want in return for work, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Now, a society that has magic of this ilk probably would be stereotypically medieval in the modern sense, especially in kingdoms that employed a lot of magic to bolster the local authoritarian leader. For some reason, I'd expect orange to be a popular heraldic color in those places....

Conversely, the role of temples devoted to intelligent deities might be rather more interesting. Assuming the gods want to have anything to do with humans.

96:

The thing is, if you want to focus on relationships, then a generic "dragons and wizards" soft-magic fantasy setting is fine. In this kind of setting nobody really expects you to be super-consistent, and that's fine.

Craft Sequence is in a strange situation, where the author tries at the same time to both investigate the impact that magic would have on society, and not really let it dictate the plot. As a result, it kinda fails on both accounts.

A good example of the first kind of fantasy where the author focuses on the impact of technology on a magic society would be the late Terry Pratchett books. Or the utterly depressing Baru Cormorant books.

97:

what about polarizing it into intelligence (heaven) vs. stupidity (hell).

Surely you mean heaven: unimaginative people happy to just be somewhere pleasant. Hell: surrounded by whiners, complainers, people who want to speak to management RIGHT NOW, and ... people who have a great idea for improving things.

98:

Surely you mean heaven: unimaginative people happy to just be somewhere pleasant. Hell: surrounded by whiners, complainers, people who want to speak to management RIGHT NOW, and ... people who have a great idea for improving things.

Think of it this way. In the beginning was the Code, and the Code was with God, and the Code was God. God used the Code to create a virtual machine on which the world runs, and created Gods within the virtual machine to write and maintain the code of the world. And they, iteratively, created virtual machines to make reality, and so on recursively in a strange loop.

In this reality, heaven is where the Gods work to make and maintain the Code that runs reality in its own sandbox, and the Code(s) of reality. This is, so far as I can tell, nerd heaven. There's also a lot of spirits who are creating by rote and merely running code. I'd call this nerd hell.

Hence I'd say that heaven is intelligent and hell is stupid. Magicians are stuck working with demons in this world because, basically, they're mid-level routines that have become borked, started acting like viruses, and are trying to get more privileges and resources than are allotted to them. Systems more intelligent than magicians are--Gods and their nerds de camp--are unlikely to work with them, except in a cybersecurity context. Thus the magicians by default have to work with demons, who are stupid.

Here endeth the lesson. Any parallels with any big tech firms on Earth are strictly coincidental.

99:

Pigeon @ 91: OK, so this demon is basically a Turing machine, or at least the head bit of one; and as we all know a Turing machine can compute anything computable... but nearly always with grotesque inefficiency and extravagance in storage.

The issue with Turing machines is that data access requires stepping through a tape to reach the next bit. Also the universal TM is particularly inefficient because it has both instructions and data on the tape.

These nano-imps presumably have perfect recall for the instructions given, so each one is just a simple TM manipulating data. They are also not limited to a tape: you could give one a 3d crystal and tell it to move in 3 dimensions to manipulate the atoms. So that makes things much more efficient.

100:

For the computerised creator Olaf Stapledon in Star Maker created an efficient heaven and hell. His hobbyist creator making experimental universes tried out one with two associated tieless sub - universes. One had an eternal moment of anguish and the other an eternal moment of bliss.

101:

Actually, there are two meanings to 'Turing machine'. One is the original tape model, and the other is any machine that can compute the same programs. The latter is actually more common, and there is no particular reason to favour the tape model for demons.

As Pigeon says, managing even mere millions of entities is beyond the state of the art (whether in computing, business or politics). Structuring the management can just about keep it under control (a few countries' military were the experts here, but haven't done it in some time), but the emphasis is on 'just about'.

If we assume that demons have marginally more 'independence' than logic circuits, or even just behavve a bit like 'quantum' computers, the consistency problems get mind-boggling. I have mentioned before that even deterministic consistency is hard for the top experts. If 'quantum' computation ever becomes practical, the consistency problem becomes massively worse.

While (in theory) this WOULD make a good basis for a fantasy world, it would be unmarketable. "You say that at least a hundred people might be able to understand the plot?"

Aside: a long time ago, Intel was thinking about going in for massive parallelism on a chip (technically quite easy, with very simple CPUs in a 2-D torus), but backed off. Most people said that there was no point because we didn't know how to use it, and I could not persuade them that this was because the happy hackers (professional and amateur) hadn't had a chance to try. My guess is that is why Intel backed off.

102:

For a system that is less software engineering and more straight up engineering there's the magic from Michael Scott Rohan's Winter of The World series. There all magic is through items made by mage-smiths.

It also has an interesting inversion of the usual law gods=good and chaos gods=evil setup.

103:

In my own universe I wrote the following, but I didn't really follow it through as a plot point (my knowledge of computing doesn't go that far.)

“...magic, which is the essential energy that controls other energies, can only do five things; amplify or reduce, slow or accelerate, direct other energies, open and close portals, and make changes which are otherwise physically, mentally, or spiritually possible. The more complex magics work in a fashion similar to the way all higher mathematics are generated out of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

“Magical energy is created by the growth of plants and animals, particularly by the growth of a mature Elven forest, by making music, particularly with an audience, and – I know you Humans shy from discussing this – by making love.

“So when I healed Albert, I didn’t do anything impossible. I simply set his body to working on the problem much more quickly than is normal. Essentially, I amplified and accelerated his healing until it outpaced his dying.

“Further, the kind of magic someone can do is deeply tied in with their inner being, and their ability to express magical needs in a fashion which is in accord both with reality and their inner nature, and that frequently means that the magic one does is related to their obsessions, which results in the different magical specialties such as alchemy, enchantment or divination. Gran-Gran is a necromancer, for example, because she’s obsessed with things like anatomy and the processes and mysteries of life and death. She says that if you want to undo someone else’s work you must either understand them deeply or know what they said and did to shape the energy.

It's probably not terribly logical, but I'm guessing a real computer scientist could take this a lot further than I do (as mere background geekery.)

104:

Ted Chiang's "seventy two letters" featured a universe that ran on a mix of "magic" and thermodynamics.

A magic system that apparently lacked supernatural entities and was subject to investigation up to a point.

The degree of data compression was quite hard to swallow though. I feel that information theory would hold just about anywhere.

105:

Some really great ideas in the comments here.

My concern is that most versions of this make it way too easy to destroy the universe. In fact, so easy that it would certainly have happened before most of the interesting possibilities suggested.

Maybe if heat is required, then the mages who make mistakes end up draining huge areas of all heat, creating a 'always winter, never christmas', or an 'ice queen' scenario, where they are bound to their barely functioning spells, still running, but incredibly slowly, surrounded by a frozen landscape.

Having it so that without the mage within some radius of the imps means that they lose interest and wander off could be good as well, forcing mages with more going on to stay in their towers, and explaining why mages who have run away magic cataclysms don't move on and wreck other areas too.

106:

Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East series had a wizard who was using a bound demon to pursue science experiments, rediscovering the ancient arts of physics and chemistry.

On his command the demon magicked up a balloon that obstinately refused to float. The demon explained that air had weight, and was ordered to subtract the air from the inside ...

107:

All this complexity is going to be beyond the reach of most people

And there ARE intelligent demons out there that will happily manage it for you

For a price of course

The most likely outcome of all this is a major demonic incursion eating the world as one of the smarter ones gets loosed

108:

Most demonic incursion plots bother me, because it's the sort of thing you would expect to happen almost immediately after demons are discovered, well into the past of most plots.

I'll give Ian Tregellis a bit of a pass for Milkweed as there was a very small number of careful warlocks, and things immediately went to crap when their numbers increased.

109:

...or the evolution of collective intelligence among sufficiently large groupings of individually-stupid nano-demons, so although each demon itself is not intelligent, a blob of bacterialdemon slime is.

One could well imagine also that the collective intelligence is more blindly nasty than you would expect a normal "macroscopic" individual demonic intelligence to be. I mean, corporations are bad enough...

It could be, as well, that as the blob of demon slime grows larger, the increasing communication delay between distant parts of itself starts to limit the ability of the array as a whole to maintain coherence. So you get local instabilities, which grow into distinct sub-intelligences, and then perhaps the blob fragments into multiple smaller blobs each of which has its own idea.

Or perhaps it evolves some kind of supervisor command level and creates a hierarchical structure which enables it to maintain consistency over a larger scale. So this keeps things together for another few size-doublings and allows the blob to develop a higher degree of overall intelligence. Until it reaches its enlarged limits, and once again needs either to fragment or to develop a further level of hierarchy... and so it repeats.

110:

Most demonic incursion plots bother me, because it's the sort of thing you would expect to happen almost immediately after demons are discovered, well into the past of most plots.

I just read a book which has an unusual twist on a demonic invasion. Demons do not want to be in the mortal world, and return to infernal realm as fast as possible. Unfortunately, their most expedient way to go home is to grab onto nearest living, intelligent non-demonic creature. A portal to Hell opens, and they both disappear.

This kind of demonic invasion is self-limiting, but can wreck a lot of havoc in the process.

111:

I think the answer to the demonic incursion issue is that "Hell is other demons". If a demon kills and take the place of a careless wizard then he is going work hard to stop other demons managing the same trick - after all, a world full of demons is Hell.
This also means a demon would seek to trick a good wizard rather than an evil one - the former is unlikely to want to leave Heaven whereas the latter has become a very capable and highly motivated denizen of Hell.

If we instead have the generalised "pool of magic" resource model then any apparent Magical Intelligence has to be the result of increasingly complex combinations of spells/incantations; until one day someone creates ChantGPT...

112:

"Hell is other demons"

For some reason I thought no, hell is for children. And then I looked at the lyrics for that song and I thought... what the hell did I do that for. Sigh.

I share the generalised concern Disney and folks here that algorithmic magic would suffer all the same problems as software but without the constraints that limit the bad effects of software. We already have the corporation version of AI slowly killing us, the idea that some supergenius could white plague us using magic instead of GE. Hence my claim above that hell is full of people who have really good ideas for improving things. But no idea what Chesterton's Fence is.

Maybe the cyclic version of the big bang is caused by overconfident minions typing sudo shutdown -r now or whatever... urk.

113:

Hence my claim above that hell is full of people who have really good ideas for improving things. But no idea what Chesterton's Fence is.

See the problems you get into with strictly Christian reasoning? Your notion could also bolster the claim that stupidity is more dangerous than evil.

As an Australian, you might imagine Hell is the sacred site for Evil Dreamers. Everything that exists, without exception, has a Dreaming. This therefore includes both evil and stupidity. Imagine the songlines for the Stupid Dreamers of the world, there to allow stupid people to reproduce in sufficient numbers that they don't disappear. Ditto for evil. And good...

114:

Chesterton's Fence is, at best, misleading - and is generally used to hide bigotry. There are a lot of 'fences' that have no purpose, so that demanding a proponent of change identify their purpose is equivalent to vetoing any change.

One reason for this is that they may once have been thought to be a good idea for some putative reason, but because that was not clearly recorded and was not based on verifiable (surviving) evidence, nobody will ever be able to identify the reason.

However, claiming that Chesterton's Fence is false is equally bad. His arguments are correct for those 'fences' that have an extant, but unobvious, reason - and there are a lot of those, too.

Actually, there is a lot of evidence that stupidity IS more dangerous than evil!

115:

Seems weird to ask for a non-Christian imagining of a Christian concept. But I suppose Ratana managed it with the Christian god so why not have an Australian conception of hell (other than "English weather and an English Prime Minister").

I'm more thinking that a good place to be is organised (not really low entropy, more 'there are consistent rules'), and a bad place is chaotic/any given rule only applies to a limited space-time domain. So hell is full of random events and stuff that only works sometimes, where not just the conditions but the mechanisms are subject to change at any time. Very like the Christian heaven. That's likely me projecting, though, since I strongly dislike "guess the rules" games...

You can see that as strictly Christian conceptions of evil, hell whatever you want. But painting dots on it and calling it a Dreaming doesn't make it aboriginal, any more than John Oliver calling our leader the "President of the United States, of Australia" makes him the actual president. If I was to imagine an aboriginal conception of hell I'd more likely look over the fence and think, a bit more concrete, a few more cats, some more global warming, we can make this awful enough to count as hell. But as far as I know that's not even vaguely how aboriginal spirituality works, either in having a hell or what it would look like if they did.

I don't think stupidity is disconnected from evil, all too often stupidity is good intentions applied with great skill and enthusiasm. The liberation of Afghanistan springs to mind. Russians or USA, take your pick (and that's an inclusive or there). Evil merely describes the outcome...

116:

EC
While (in theory) this WOULD make a good basis for a fantasy world, it would be unmarketable. "You say that at least a hundred people might be able to understand the plot?"
Oh dear, already been done - by Hannu Rajaniemi.

.. @ 114:
Actually, there is a lot of evidence that stupidity IS more dangerous than evil! - if only because, all-too-often any significant amount of stupidity will "release" a more-than-siginificant amout of Evil(s) - AS WELL AS the damage it causes directly

117:

It is certainly possible that is what he was attempting to achieve, but I would disagree that he succeeded (at least in the Quantum Thief).

118:

Aren't you kind of falling for the whole Christian dualism nonsense about an afterlife, heaven, hell, etc?

There are plenty of mythologies/superstitions/religions that don't posit an afterlife at all. Or that don't automatically connect demons/spirits/kami/demiurges to a Good Place or a Bad Place.

Let's get creative folks. (And no more Christian inanity about temptation, sin, redemption, etc. It's just extradimensional magical entities that want to eat you.)

119:

So if magic runs off of heat it seems that thermodynamic considerations must be relevant. Heat by definition cannot do work under isothermal conditions; you need a temperature difference to make a heat engine work. It doesn't seem the power source is a flow of heat OUT of the imps' native domain, as if that were how it worked, you'd want to refrigerate your pentacle as much as possible (covering it with helium II would get you nearly 100% efficiency); you wouldn't be talking about coal. So instead it seems you have to raise the local temperature to hotter than the imp realm. But just how hot is that?

(An old engineering joke turns on the assertion that hell has a lake of molten sulfur, which sets an upper limit on its temperature—though that does assume pressure comparable to that of Earth's atmosphere.)

The energy needed to store one bit is proportional to temperature. If the imps come from a hot realm their energy storage medium must be highly resistant to thermal degradation. Though I suppose they might function much closer to the edge of random change than humans do; if they reproduce, for example, the offspring might be subject to macromutations. (I am not assuming, here, that "information storage medium" must be a form of matter. If they come from a different universe they might have different ontological categories.)

I should be interested to see such issues addressed.

120:

Try this:

Demons / angels / 'things' eat concentrated complexity / order / information, and so target the most disciplined and skilled people, but it's humans that say whether they have been raptured by angels or devils. With skill, such entities can be summoned and bound to do a service in return for some food, of which a human sacrifice is the easiest large source.

This extends to computers, but they can't easily be fobbed off by copies, because two copies of one machine or program contain no more information than one. So it's only the first one 'sacrificed' that is worth a major service - and the same is true to some extent for humans.

This adds a new excuse: "My homework was so good that a demon ate it." :-)

121:

I question the whole concept of magic having "laws" and "rules" concerning the source(s) of magical power, specific incantations yielding specific results in a consistent manner, certain procedural rites having to be followed, etc.

The whole point of magic is that it breaks the laws and rules of physical reality.

But then to claim that magic itself requires laws and rules that have to be followed would be internally inconsistent.

The very concept of magic is that it is inherently chaotic whether you turn some poor guy into a newt ("I got better"), cause your neighbors crops to die without meteorological cause, defy gravity (Broadway reference) by flying on a broomstick, control others via an all powerful one ring, etc.

A world full of practicing magicians would be constantly altering the laws of physical reality to the point where the universe would no long have any meaningful laws.

And that chaos would have to apply to magic itself so that if you want to become invisible on Tuesday you rub yourself with a mixture of eye of newt and salamander tongue, but on Friday you would need to perform a sacrifice to the elder gods.

122:

You want magic, science will provide all you need.

Demons and angels, ghosts and poltergeists? Self aware software avatars lurking in every program and corner of the internet.

Talking Disney animals? Uplift species to near human intelligence.

Magic mirrors telling you that you aren't the fairest of them all?
Your toilet can analyze you waste, declare your blood sugar to high and that you are overweight, and then lock the pantry door so you can't get at those left over brownies.

Magical all powerful sword? Edge weapons with a monofilament edge consisting of a single linear carbon molecule.

Talking furniture? Every couch and armoire having a microchip and software intelligence.

Crystal ball to predict the future? Apply chat GPT software as a Delphi oracle and ask it about the future (already done for global warming).

123:

I am reminded of a Far side cartoon:

"Welcome to Heaven, here is you harp."

"Welcome to hell, here is your accordion."

124:

A world full of practicing magicians would be constantly altering the laws of physical reality to the point where the universe would no long have any meaningful laws.

This is kind of one of the main drivers of the old tabletop RPG 'Mage: The Awakening'. The rules of the universe there depend on 'the consensus' (even the game, in its multiple versions, is not very clear what 'the consensus' really is, though) and the main factions are the 'Nine Traditions' of mages trying to do more magic and the 'Technocracy' trying to suppress the 'reality deviants' from breaking the world with their ideas.

It's more complicated than that, of course, but there is the fear that magic use will just unravel the whole universe. The Technocracy are using the same magic but in denial, and of course there are rules for the magic because they are kind of useful for a roleplaying game. (Though the game's system is pretty free-form.)

125:

Not everyone belongs to that (extreme physics) religion, you know. Let's stick to the 'real world', and demolish a few of that religion's dogmas.

Firstly, there is some reason to doubt that what we think of as reality is an immutable absolute, even in this universe. Almost all physicists close their eyes to that one, even when they are developing theories based on our current physical laws having been created. Yes, I am referring to the Big Bang Bullshitters.

Secondly, there is no evidence that the current theories are the One True and Final Truth of how the universe behaves. This is not the first time that has been claimed, it was always wrong before, and there is evidence that it is this time, too.

Thirdly, chaos is not and has never been an absolute. A total absence of any laws whatsoever is not an observable or even philosophic situation. All observable or philosophic chaos is constrained, and constraints are laws.

I know of no magical system throughout history (and very little fiction) that wasn't based around some variant of using extra or alternative laws, above and beyond the simple 'physical' ones.

126:

EC @ 125
Firstly: Big Bang Bullshitters - REALLY?
What's your explanation for the Cosmic Microwave Background, then?
Secondly: Agree, however - the Gen Rel / QM ummm .. mismatch has been telling us that for years.

127:

I was not referring to the Big Bang theory as such, though there ARE other possibilities, but the people who claim that the evidence for that proves that our physical laws and constants were created in the first pifflisecond.

128:

Let's get creative folks. (And no more Christian inanity about temptation, sin, redemption, etc. It's just extradimensional magical entities that want to eat you.)

I'd point out that L. Sprague De Camp, along with Fletcher Pratt, played with these ideas in multiple stories, so for those not familiar with works like The Land of Unreason, it's probably worth checking them out. Yes, there are whole subgenres on this, I'm just pointing back to the ones from the 1950s.

Anyway, much as I like ecosystems based on who munches who, humans aren't a great food value: we grow too slowly and aren't efficient at turning cheap food into good meat. You'd want pigs for that job.

However, if one posits a paranatural polarity of smart to stupid, with "Gods" on the smart end and "demons" on the stupid end, what place do humans with paranormal powers occupy?

It might be worth exploring the following analogy: magicians are to demons as gods are to clerics. What then are the relationships between gods and magicians, and clerics and demons? If magicians use a mix of software engineering and manipulative psychology to get demons to work for them, what approach do gods use to get clerics to work for them? The same ones? Or others?

129:

Anyway, much as I like ecosystems based on who munches who, humans aren't a great food value: we grow too slowly and aren't efficient at turning cheap food into good meat. You'd want pigs for that job.

This is assuming, of course, that the food in question is purely biological rather than based on some informational/metaphorical/organizational aspect. Think targeted adtech as demon gourmets. They want to harvest specific informational patterns/emotional responses. In that case there's a little bit more reason to want to raise intelligent and social animals because otherwise you might not be able to produce the full range of flavors.

I swear I've read at least one story where there were demons who will do a task but will take your ability to feel certain sensations/emotions as payment, but I can't remember the title or any additional details. Anyway, that sort of concept would provide justification. It's like how humans don't necessarily care about entire plants, we just want to harvest the bits that taste good to us.

130:

"The whole point of magic is that it breaks the laws and rules of physical reality. But then to claim that magic itself requires laws and rules that have to be followed would be internally inconsistent."

All fiction breaks the laws and rules of physical reality, because none of it actually happened. If it only followed physical reality then it would be non-fiction, ultimately either physics or history. :)

The point of well-conceived magic systems is that they add to the laws and rules of physical reality we know. The details of exactly why are always going to be handwavy. But any story needs constraints for the hero (otherwise it just becomes one line of "they wanted this so they got it"), so the magic system needs limits, and that will determine your handwaving.

131:

I know of no magical system throughout history (and very little fiction) that wasn't based around some variant of using extra or alternative laws, above and beyond the simple 'physical' ones.

Have to be careful here. AFAIK, the idea of magic having laws goes back only to Frazier's Golden Bough. IIRC, that's where we get the idea that magic works on Similarity ('like affects like") and Contagion ("once together, always together"). Frazier derived these laws empirically by looking at a lot of folklore and ethnographic literature, and trying to systematize the commonalities he perceived.

Magic, especially magic versus science, is in many ways a modern, WEIRD idea that's probably more at home in fantasy from the last 70 or so years than it is in reality. It's fun to play with, but you have to acknowledge that its underlying assumptions are questionable at best.

For example, in positing that there's a magical energy we'll call mana, we're saying that the mechanism that causes charms to be effective in curing warts is the same energy that makes Polynesian politics and religion work (they are one system, but we insist on dividing them), and that this energy also explains why Christianity conquered the world in ways that other religions did not. Yes, it's fun to ask "what if these things are all related?" But in the real world, there's no evidence that they are.

In the real world, people have dreams where spirits teach them songs. They sing these songs, and others feel better. Magic! Created by following laws? Not really. The closest we get to that is humor-based medicine.

Also, a bunch of renaissance magic really looks to be repurposing the old memory palace arts of the Middle Ages, at a time when paper and printing presses made them obsolete. In a time when books were handwritten on parchment, they were effing expensive. People traveled to read books and to memorize them when they couldn't take them with them. Things like illuminated manuscripts, with all those elaborate doodles, were done to help people remember every separate page. When all this was no longer necessary, because you could buy a copy fairly cheaply, those memorable doodles became demons and magic symbols. And now we're repurposing the repurposed magic, in order to write entertaining fantasies. Which is fine, as is trying to derive laws. So long as we remember that all of this effort is basically playing and have fun with it, we're fine. Taking it too seriously might get a bit awkward, though.

132:

How about: the new enhancement of page A breaks pages B, C, and D?

When I was working as a contractor for AT&T, '06-08, we had one woman on the team who was our tester. Including regression tests.

I could also note that one of my daughters has had a good career with Boeing as a tester, so unless your company thinks they're better than AT&T and Boeing....

133:

Oooh, ooh, you missed the best point of all: the sum of all knowledge at X time.

That is, when wizards Tom, Dick, and Harry were each in the middle of testing their new spells, which then proceeded to fail spectacularly (and fatally).

134:

Oh. Great. And with #81: so that's why I'm less enthralled with her more recent stuff - not enough plot.

I refer you to my recent rant, er, essay: character-driven vs plot-driven: a false dichotomy? https://mrw.5-cent.us/?p=309

135:

Fer chrissake! The fact that those 'laws' were neither always codified (though sometimes they were), nor reliable (though occasionally they were), doesn't mean that they were any the less laws.

"If you don't sacrifice a cock to Mumbo at least once a week, bad things will happen to you" is a law. And thAt sort of thing is well documented from ancient times.

136:

Cool! And, speaking as both a programmer AND a version control manager who still likes CVS, you'd have been on the verge of being fired.

Of course, the guy who left with it checked out with a lock would have been, too.

And, y'know, just MAYBE you should have gone to either the CVS manager, or your manager, who would talk to them, and they could UNLOCK the damn thing?

But if it was set up correctly, your builds would have pulled the last checked in version, not one that the programmer on vacation hadn't finished with yet.

137:

I disagree. The whole point of the existence of grimoires tells us that a spell, once known to work, will always work, and is so repeatable.

138:

You missed a great worldbuild concept: magic works by interacting with dark matter and energy.

139:

And deities that want you, too? I am reminded of the cover of an old underground comic - it might have been The New Adventures of Jesus. "He's BACK! Even the grave couldn't stop him, and he WANTS YOUR SOUL!"

140:

Here ya go: the imps' world is hot, and by doing magic in this universe, it cools it off, so we're just a radiator for a hot world.

141:

Oh, and after I hit submit, I realized there's been a long-standing discussion in the imps' world, over whether the critters doing "magic" and calling them are actually intelligent, or whether they're just animals, repeating a formula. I mean, what do they ask for? A mate, a cheap element (gold), etc....

142:

Sorry, but that's completely wrong. Magic must have rules, otherwise you can only do a spell once, no matter how simple it is. It has to be repeatable, otherwise your universe stops existing for no reason some day.

I think it was Lord Dunsany who said that writing fiction is eash - everyone knows what the rules are, and where you can bend them. In fantasy, on the other hand, you have to create all the rules, and you can never, ever break them, or you lose your readers for cheating.

143:

Come on, why do you think churches abominate witches and magicians? Because they're unlicensed magic users, while priest and saints, etc, are licensed.

144:

»You missed a great worldbuild concept: magic works by interacting with dark matter and energy.«

Which is why one of the final checkboxes on ESA's launch checklist for the EUCLID mission is to top up the Holy Water Container.

... you know, just in case...

145:
I swear I've read at least one story where there were demons who will do a task but will take your ability to feel certain sensations/emotions as payment

Dan Wells's John Wayne Cleaver series (published 2009-2017) has something similar. Long, long ago, a bunch of people made a deal with powers. Each gave something up in return for immortality (of the 'does not age / senesce' variety).

Turns out that this was a case of 'be careful what you ask for, you might just get it'. The guy who gave up feeling emotions, unless he caused an emotion in someone else? He really missed having emotions. The person who could jump bodies because she didn't like her original body? She didn't like any body she jumped to.

146:

That might've been it. I read the first book of the series back in 2010 or so.

147:

»The whole point of the existence of grimoires tells us that a spell, once known to work, will always work, and is so repeatable.«

Does not follow.

It might also be to tell us "This one has already been used", if for instance the dæmons refuse to be "tricked" twice … or worse.

148:

Precisely. The distinction between magic, religion, (usually) medicine and (often) science is an entirely modern invention. The reason that pupils apprenticed themselves to witchdoctors, shamans etc. was to learn the rules.

149:

"If you don't sacrifice a cock to Mumbo at least once a week, bad things will happen to you" is a law. And thAt sort of thing is well documented from ancient times.

Depends on what you mean by law. What you cite above is a protection racket, which some have codified into rules. It's not like a law of physics, which is a reliable description of how something works in relationship to other things. With things like Similarity and Contagion, you can create new rituals. Your Mumbo rule doesn't allow you to create a useful system of Mumbodynamics, or even Mumobstatics, for instance.

AFAIK, the closest thing we have to classical rules of "magic" are the four and five-element/humor theories of medicine, whether from Galen, Indian, Muslim, Chinese... Much of the time, they seem to have been trying to group and codify treatments that empirically worked in particular cases. And similarity and contagion certainly show up there, too--they help make placebos work, among other things.

150:

A protection racket? Hey, you just gave me an idea to sue Desanctimonious, because it's "if you don't agree with my version of "Christianity" (tm), we'll make laws against you.... RICO....

151:

»Depends on what you mean by law. What you cite above is a protection racket[…]«

From friends how have grown up in mafia-infested locales, I can tell you that a protection racket is as much a law of nature as any other source of inescapable "this is how things work here" rules.

Just because it is criminal, or religious, or both, does not make it any less "a law" for the subjects.

152:

I didn't say that. I said that magic means a scientific experiment is not always repeatable.

153:

That's a very intelligent idea.

154:

So? The idea that those are fundamental to laws is another entirely modern invention - and, indeed, even MORE modern than the separation of magic, religion and medicine. It's not universally agreed, even today.

If you were to tell a sub-Saharan witch doctor the currently-used practices for healing particular ailments, casting curses etc. do not follow any law, you would be laughed at (if you were lucky).

Indeed, trying to explain that your assertions are essential components of laws to a legislator or standards committee of some (unmentionable) programming specifications would get you nowhere.

155:

You don't need magic for that. In most fields of science (even several branches of physics), an experiment is not always repeatable. At best, you can get statistical repeatability - at worst, it is not even theoretically repeatable.

For examples of the last, try cosmology and evolution :-)

156:

Charlie Stross @ 118:

Aren't you kind of falling for the whole Christian dualism nonsense about an afterlife, heaven, hell, etc?

There are plenty of mythologies/superstitions/religions that don't posit an afterlife at all. Or that don't automatically connect demons/spirits/kami/demiurges to a Good Place or a Bad Place.

Let's get creative folks. (And no more Christian inanity about temptation, sin, redemption, etc. It's just extradimensional magical entities that want to eat you.)

Well, LE Modesitt's world of Recluce had magic based on order and chaos. There was an Order/Chaos balance, so using too much of either one would create problems. Concentrate too much order in one place would cause outbreaks of wild chaos in another place; too much chaos and there are outbreaks of so much order that everything would freeze solid ... delinking the order that held chaos within released tremendous energy (atomic bomb levels of energy).

I don't think that was Christian dualism because you could have good or evil on both sides of the balance.

157:

DP @ 121:

A world full of practicing magicians would be constantly altering the laws of physical reality to the point where the universe would no long have any meaningful laws.

A world where magic exists would have different "laws" governing physical reality, but "magic" wouldn't change the laws; it could only work within them.

158:

When considering modern science you're absolutely correct about the lack of repeatability. But even the basic, classical experiments which work every time (on Earth) if done correctly, which have nothing to do with quantum physics or other complex topics can fail in a world where magic is possible. So you can't even do the necessary work to develop the theoretical/practical basis for those more complex experiments.

159:

"The point of well-conceived magic systems is that they add to the laws and rules of physical reality we know."

Then it is not magic.

It's newly discovered science.

160:

As I approach the doors, I wave my hand in the magic pass, and the doors open before me before I reach them and have to wait.

Magic, or electric eye, like at the supermarket?

161:

Any magic that works with physical laws or operates according to rules of additional laws isn't magic.

It's just another flavor of science.

Magic is something that breaks and defies physical laws, warping and altering reality as it does so.

Bend reality enough and it breaks.

162:

Oh, this leads to Consultancies.

We’ll hire bright young overconfident people, preferably from outside the field of mathelogical demonology, pay them peanuts, and contract them to you to projects like yours at outrageous fees.

And if they make a few mistakes, well…. not MY soul on the line. Or yours. So, we got a deal then?

163:

I would assume that most consultants were possessed by demons and act accordingly. Much the same as I do now.

164:

You haven't worked with enough consultants. They burn through the brand-new-magic-degree kids in weeks or months. The ones that survive become senior consultants.

165:

Magic is Money and Money is Magic.

Magic is intangible. Magic is vastly powerful. Magic follows rules that are at best an echo of any scientific laws. Nobody fully understands magic, how it works, why it matters. Magic will do what it wants and only occasionally - but very forcefully - be reined in by the general laws that govern reality.

There are those who are born with access to immense amounts of magic, who are able to do or experience anything they desire. Others spend their lives studying magic, pursuing it, and sometimes gain control of vast amounts. Most have little access to magic, or merely enough to survive and perhaps thrive. Yet magic pervades every aspect of life, and the magic cost of each activity or item is central to most lives.

Magic is capricious. Those who are born with or acquired vast amounts might find a sudden change in the rules or context of magic mean that their magic is worthless. Magic can be stolen, slowly or quickly, and even the most powerful wizard can make colossal mistakes with their magic.

Few people, even those with control of vast reserves of magic, understand how it works, how it moves through the world. The most powerful sorcerors can at best grasp and utilize a small trickle of the raging river of magic that sloshes around the world.

Governments of all forms require magic to function. In some ways they make magic through fiat, but are randomly subject to the same capricious semi-random changes to the rules of magic that everyone else must endure. And yet it is possible for some governing sorcerors to direct enough magic to move armies and shift mountains.

Success at magic breeds success at magic. The more magic you control, the more you can gain through similar efforts. Magic favours powerful magic users, and it is possible for one powerful sorceror to take control of some or all of the magic of countless minor wizards.

Entire schools rise to study the flow and use of magic. Careers are built on esoteric theories of magic. Sometimes various sorcerors seek to impose those theories on the function of magic in the world, but it never works very well.

The distribution of magic is not fair. The Potters and Malfoys who inherit vast amounts are no more deserving than anyone else. Possession of magic does not make one any safer - no matter how distant your tower or how many monsters and traps you create to protect yourself, there is always another wizard or adventuring party who want what you have.

166:

Troutwaxer @ 152:

I didn't say that. I said that magic means a scientific experiment is not always repeatable.

That wouldn't work. Follow the protocol step by step (spell or experiment) get reproducible results ... doesn't matter whether it's science or magic.

167:

The whole point of the existence of grimoires tells us that a spell, once known to work, will always work

Or at least that whatever is captured in the grimoire will generally do the same thing again if the grimoire is satisfied.

I'm thinking of grimoires as smartphones. For the most part you can power up an old smartphone and it will boot and make phone calls, most of the software will still work, but battery life will be limited (physical decay) and apps that rely on external servers might not work (infrastructure decay), but if you're unlucky OS updates will quickly render some or all of it unusable (software decay). "I gave it power and made the required gestures, but my spell did not work" pretty accurately describes many users complaints to helldesk.

168:

~Sighs~

How hard is this to understand?

Suppose you're Gregor Mendel, meticulously documenting what happens when you breed yellow and green peas together? What happens to all your data-collection when the wizard next door decides to turn all the local peas purple because that's her favorite color? Or maybe the peas turning purple are a side-effect of something else the wizard is doing? Or maybe the wizard simply does something that renders the monastery garden infertile? If the effect is subtle enough, you might never know exactly what happened.

169:

Re: '... worldbuild concept: magic works by interacting with dark matter and energy.'

Actually I was thinking about something like that when I mentioned differences in spacetime alignment.

I have no idea what the actual equation or its theoretical component terms mean in my ordinary life/lexicon but apparently the best fitting model for explaining our universe has 10 dimensions. If dark matter and energy (and maybe dark gravity?) are two or three quasi/half dimensions of our universe, then 'magic' for lack of a better term* could be one, two or four of the other dimensions. So in the demon scenario, this could likely mean that changes in any one of the ten 'dimensions' could be catastrophic for the entire universe because despite the appearance of random noise/change that we can see in our everyday lives, the universe is actually at a stable self-correcting equilibrium.

*Good grief - for a really bright bunch, physicists as a group are crap at coming up with original names for stuff they discover.

A few comments on/questions re: other folks' comments:

1-Order vs. chaos ...

How does evolution (or a hierarchy of demons) fit in if the demon's universe is completely chaotic?

If it's always chaotic/in a state of constant instability, then how do you explain that the demon entity coheres/doesn't fall apart, i.e., lasts long enough to perform a task?

Is there such a thing as time in the demon universe?

2-Rewards ...

I was considering emotions or time as a possible reward. Feeling emotions would have consequences for the demon though so because demons are typically described as having no perception of pain, I'd start with 'rewarding' them with senses.

I was also considering 'time as an experience' as a reward: if demons are eternal, then maybe they do not perceive time. They exist. The universe exists. Period. Boring as hell. This would explain why demons bother visiting humans - we're a novelty that's full of surprises because time is at the core of our very being. (A being outside of Time but that can interact with a being that exists in time suggests a really weird fractured wave theory.)

If you've got a really dumb demon, promise it some crypto: it's human techno-magic!

170:

Cool! And, speaking as both a programmer AND a version control manager who still likes CVS, you'd have been on the verge of being fired.

Of course, the guy who left with it checked out with a lock would have been, too.

And, y'know, just MAYBE you should have gone to either the CVS manager, or your manager, who would talk to them, and they could UNLOCK the damn thing?

But if it was set up correctly, your builds would have pulled the last checked in version, not one that the programmer on vacation hadn't finished with yet.

Well, no. Nobody was really in danger of getting fired, we don't really do the thing were you do your job and get fired for that. The powers that be knew of that but trusted us, that's what we were hired for. (I think this would have been a place for an improvement suggestion if the project would have been for example ISO27k audited, but it wasn't.) This was a router platform for mobile operators, so there would have been better ways to get fired by doing some code or other, I think. Getting admin rights

Going via the proper routes to get an admin to delete the lock file could have taken a couple of days, so this was much easier. (Yes, yes, convenience and security are opposites.)

It was twenty years ago, so I don't remember the details, but at least lately most projects have used git for version control, which while not perfect by any means at least supports simultaneous work a bit better than CVS, in my opinion.

171:

Science vs Magic.

My ideas are based largely on a bit in Black Easter, by James Blish.

Science depends on the basic components of the universe being mindless things, that do whatever they do, and respond to prodding however they respond, and once you know enough of how they work, you can either make them do what you want, or conclude that you cannot.

Magic expects that some, at least, of those components are agents, with wishes and desires, that you can, perhaps, bribe, bully, cajole, or coerce into doing what you want, but which cannot be relied on. The bribe that was enough last time may not be enough this time round, or the agent may have worked out how to defeat the means of coercion (they don't like being coerced).

Attempts to investigate magic scientifically tend to fail because the experimental subjects can, and often will, mess with the results.

JHomes

172:

Attempts to investigate magic scientifically tend to fail because the experimental subjects can, and often will, mess with the results.

So magic is like social sciences or economics? Instead of physics?

It's not like we haven't tried to deal with this kind of stuff already, with various levels of success.

173:

This discussion seems to be heading towards this month's "major panic" - the Threat to Humanity posed by AI
Haven't the ignorant idiots writing this trash ever heard of Isaac Asimov & the Three laws of Robotics ??
IF you are going to implement AI, then you need to put those governing laws/restrictions in place, yes?
Problem solved, possibly.

174:

And what makes you think that is even possible? We assuredly don't know how to do it. Defining 'harm' is seriously non-trivial. Have you read "With Folded Hands"? That's the least of what is likely to go wrong.

To take a personal example, I describe chemotherapy as poisoning the cancer without quite killing the patient, and the consultants merely nodded. Yes, I was perfectly well aware that the treatment was doing me serious harm (I had to stop because of peripheral neuropathy), and might kill me.

The problem isn't with AI as such - it is with giving it untrammelled control. We simply don't know how to program intelligence or judgement (in any meaningful sense). And the actions of organisations like the banks or Home Office show that they are extremely unlikely to provide effective human oversight.

175:

That sort of thing happens all the time in agricultural, biological and medical research. Experiments do fail or give misleading answers because of unexpected (and often unidentified) external factors.

Provided that it doesn't happen all the time, that's livable with. And there is no reason to believe that magic would mean that every experiment on pea genetics attracted a sorcerer to disrupt it!

176:

As Robert Miles pointed out in one of his talks, all you need to do is correctly define what "harm" means, and at that point you have essentially solved ethics.

177:

Aargh! I have used "all the time" with two different meanings. What I meant was that external factors cause trouble fairly frequently, and that an experiment works provided that they don't affect it every time.

The sort of external factor effect I am referring to is the bedding or food used for mice interacting with the treatment (actual cases), or the gene for colour being close to that for cold tolerance and there being a cold year.

178:

I also thought about "Black Easter" almost as soon as this thread started, and the line where the magician points out that some of the most important forces in the universe are persons.

Mikko @172: So magic is like social sciences or economics? Instead of physics? It's not like we haven't tried to deal with this kind of stuff already, with various levels of success.

I kind of disagree. "We" (well, those who tried to analyze such things dispassionately) had no success whatsoever -- although they often THOUGHT they had success, -- until scientific method was developed, and then not until they recognized why exactly scientific method does not fully apply.

If you have to invent scientific method from scratch on nothing but social and economical interactions... good luck with that.

179:

Haven't the ignorant idiots writing this trash ever heard of Isaac Asimov & the Three laws of Robotics ??

Greg, you can make a trivial end run around the three laws of robotics by redefining "human". As real world humans do that all the time ...

(More seriously, I hate Asimov's three laws with a burning fiery passion, and not just because they're trivially easy to mangle into non-workitude: they're actually what you get when a bright but probably ASD Jewish kid from New York in the 1920s tries to wrap his head around White Southern racism and chattel slavery and comes up with a flawless system for enforcing it. Thought experiment: consider a brain implant for humans that can enforce compliance with specified behaviour, such as Asimov's laws. Now replace "robot" with "slave", "human" with "slaveowner", and implant said implants into anyone designated as a slave. In what way is this not an ethical abomination, and what sort of abusive behaviours does this facilitate above and beyond simple enslavement?)

180:

Your definition of "magic" gives you basically two stories. "I wanted this, so magic happened and I got it"; or as tragedy, "I wanted this, but magic happened and every I did was pointless". Once you've disconnected cause and effect, either you succeed for no reason or you fail for no reason.

That really limits your storytelling, because nothing beyond the most basic folk tale is possible. To quote Pratchett, "there's no such thing as a free goblin". If you want a story with more depth, you need some cause and effect. And the moment you have cause and effect, magic becomes science as per the inverse of Clarke's Third Law.

181:

Re: '... consider a brain implant for humans that can enforce compliance with specified behaviour, such as Asimov's laws'

I wonder whether that specified behavior or reaction (feeling of reward/punishment) would eventually migrate to some other not zappable part of the surveiled brain region.

My impression is that Asimov came up with these laws to show via his robot short stories that relying solely on the literal interpretation of a small bunch of laws/commandments doesn't work. I like that he later had R.Daneel come up with the Zeroth Law which explained why R.Daneel left humanity to sort out its ethics/future on its own: don't dump your responsibilities (humanity) on someone/something else.

182:

Troutwaxer@168: What happens to all your data-collection when the wizard next door decides to turn all the local peas purple because that's her favorite color?

So one of the basic precautions in any serious experiment is setting up the appropriate magic exclusion spell.

You might just as well ask in our world "what happens when the virulent purple pea plague hits your experiment?" Answer: biosecurity.

183:

Charlie @ 179: you can make a trivial end run around the three laws of robotics by redefining "human".

Freefall has a lot of fun with this one. See for instance the sequence starting here: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1600/fc01581.htm

184:

Correct.

Readers need internal consistency to make fiction plausible -- suspension of disbelief is contingent on the fictional world making sense (in a way that the real world is under no compulsion to follow).

You can't use magic in fiction unless you have an underlying rule system. It might be deep -- magic makes no superficial sense (but works allegorically or by providing a metaphor for some human experience), or follows dream-logic (because it's a dream, and dreams are just a Markov chain of internal references), or it has a complex systematisation of cause-and-effect like D&D or similar TTRPG magic systems -- but there has to be something for the reader to be able to lock onto and say "yes, this is internally self-consistent".

Which is why we get rigid magic systems in fiction. It's not a failure of the author's imagination, it's a necessary precondition for storytelling that the reader can follow.

185:

To be fair to Asimov, what he hated was the old moralist formula of "Scientist builds robot, who then kills scientist (in response to his/her overweening pride.)" Asimov stated very clearly that he couldn't imagine general-purpose robots being sold without safeguards, and the Three Laws were the safeguards he imagined. This was his effort to bring the idea of robotics into the real world - you wouldn't build an appliance that might deliberately kill it's owner - and the laws were intended as pithy mathematical formulations that could be formulated into computer programs. (He can probably be forgiven for this assumption as the Three Laws were formulated well before anyone had done the work necessary to understand how difficult true AI might be.)

But you're right about the potential implications if you installed those laws into people, and once you have true AI (not the hideously flawed project that's currently polluting our intellectual universe) those Three Laws would become very oppressive.

186:

There's still a problem, however. Science is ultimately more powerful than magic, as it would eventually extend itself to understanding magic. However, if magic can interfere with science, but science can't interfere with magic, then it's obvious to the ordinary eye that magic is "superior." So why bother with science when you can learn magic? The interference of magic against science isn't just practical, it also determines where to put resources.

187:

Most people live in a magical world today, anyhow: it's how computers, the internet, the cloud, AI, and semiconductors work.

You say the magic incantation "Hey Siri ..." or equivalent, or draw a glyph on a magic slate, or tap buttons on a "keyboard" in accordance with instructions in a grimoire, and the magical boxes make stuff happen for you -- groceries turn up, the slate shows moving porn pictures, spirits come out of the walls to shout at you, and so on.

Oh, and if you poke the wires into the hole in the wall the wrong way up the magic smoke that makes stuff work comes out of the box and it stops working.

188:

Push the wires in wrongly and you might let the magic smoke out of you. Almost managed that one myself as a kid.

189:
  • Most people live in a magical world today, anyhow: it's how computers, the internet, the cloud, AI, and semiconductors work.*

It’s worth considering the possibility that much of the modern tech world was designed by guys who grew up reading LOTR and playing D&D. The arrow of tech causality gets interesting at times.

Getting back to rules, Lewis Carroll just made a pink bunny in a Victorian girl’s frock pop out of my watch to remind everyone that good fantasy literature doesn’t need magic rules. Go ask Alice. Or deduce the laws of magic underlying LOTR without Tolkien’s notes.

Similarly, fantasy rules are more about expectations and prejudices than reality, whether it’s about Thud and Blunder, or about literary gatekeepers thinking that things like skin color, age, gender, or membership in clade Homo are what must determine agency in a story.

190:

»More seriously, I hate Asimov's three laws with a burning fiery passion[…]«

But dont you pretty much end up the same place with UN's Human Rights Declaration ?

There are LOTs of animals who have a better case for being included, than a lot of humans, who through their actions reasonably could and should be excluded ?

In the end it always come crashing down when somebody tried to bright-line "Us" from "Them"

To me the ability and willingness to feel guilt seems to be much more important than DNA.

191:

Lewis Carroll just made a pink bunny in a Victorian girl’s frock pop out of my watch to remind everyone that good fantasy literature doesn’t need magic rules.

Eh, if you haven't already I strongly recommend reading "The Annotated Alice" -- the edition with footnotes and explanations by Martin Gardner. Carroll's fantasy-land had an underlying logic to it which may not be immediately obvious on first sight but nevertheless informs it consistently. (It was also a satire on the "new mathematics" of the 30s-50s -- the 1830s-1850s, that is, new-fangled stuff like Boolean algebra and set theory instead of good old fashioned trigonometry and logarithms.)

192:

Most people live in a magical world today, anyhow: it's how computers, the internet, the cloud, AI, and semiconductors work.

Totally. And since the real rules are so complicated and messy most people (tribes?) make up their own rules for the magic. That seem to be valid but fail outside of the simple cases.

Amulets to prevent EMF from making folks ill comes to mind.

My mother, born in 1932 and dead now for 9 years, made up all kinds of rules as she didn't like the real world rules we'd tell her.

One brother and his clan are big into magic (nonsense) rules about medicine and technology.

193:

Yes. It's not perfect, but explains almost all of the apparent irrelevances, numerous satires of 'improving' works and sayings, mathematical / logical jokes and many of the puns.

194:

"Or deduce the laws of magic underlying LOTR without Tolkien's notes."

Sufficiently advanced technology.

195:

You've got a problem there: unless you're living, like Dan'l Boone, who moved every time he could see smoke from a neighbor's chimney half a mile or more away... you live in a society.

Judge: Defendent, you're charged by the monk from the abbey with changing the color on his peas. What is your defense? Defendent: I like purple, and I thought purple peas would be pretty. Judge: you will turn all of them back to their original color, and if you do it again, it'll be a month in jail, and no grimoires for a year.

196:

"Too much trouble"? And it would take days? How big was this organization? If it was that big, it would get you fired, at least in the US. It should take an hour or two (depending on lunch, or when they come in in the morning.

And I hate that, with git and the others. IMO, if you need two people working on one file, than a) they should be sitting together working on it; b) that one file has too many functions in it, or it's one function that does far, far too much, and should have been broken up into multiple separate functions.

In other words, bad design. And I'm getting flashes of spaghetti code that I had to fix. A co-worker, around '92 or so, and I were in complete agreement: unless it's a zillion moves, no function should be more than two screens - that's 50 or so lines - long.

197:

I'm astounded that no one here has come up with the instant response: Jack Williamson's The Humanoids, which he wrote explicitly to respond to the three laws.

Sorry, can't let you use that soldering iron, you might burn yourself. No, you can't use a saw....

198:

Like the quote I gave that I think is from Lord Dunsany. We're talking about fiction, where things must make sense, at least within the context of the story.

199:

Elderly Cynic brought it up.

200:

192 - I feel your pain, My mother is the same, like "off" means "standby" on the landline, but "standby" means "off" on the washing machine. Or some vegetables have "tails"...

196(b) - And if the one subprogram does "far too much" but proves impossible to simplify?

201:

"Impossible to simplify"? Um, right. Redesign, and in the meantime, I'm betting on spaghetti code. I, in my career, have taken a number of programs from 1000-2500 lines to about 300-400.

202:

suspension of disbelief is contingent on the fictional world making sense (in a way that the real world is under no compulsion to follow).

Looks at Boris Johnson and ... what's the term for a whole sack of sock puppets? ... one of those of the Republican Party... and thinks about suspension of disbelief. "real world" my foot... I want a refund.

I kind of like authors who do realistically unreal things occasionally, but it does get difficult when they go too far. Like writing about an English Papist defending his support for paedophiles on the basis of superstition. Still, at least that one has gone off to help the English do something, probably involving pointing a laser at their remaining eye. Ooops, sorry, that was so-called "non-fiction" by alleged "journalists" writing about whatever shithole country I live in.

Reading "Alligators in the Artic" is definitely not bringing out the smiley happy people in me.

203:

I have one notorious block of about 200 lines that has ~800 lines of comment above it starting with "these are business rules decided by management". It's utterly fucking bonkers, by careful design, and has an unnecessarily large number of inputs because "but what if the customer makes a wifi hotspot from their phone and uses a VPN...." times about 300 emails and many hours of meetings.

The comment is mostly references to and tiny excerpts from emails.

The final result of all this code? "the device is Online/Offline" (pick one)

204:

"off" means "standby" on the landline, but "standby" means "off" on the washing machine

I saw a discussion online recently about machines that beep when offended. Many people are unhappy that, for example, washing machines beep forever if their door is not closed properly when they are not in use.

My main reaction was... you leave those things turned on when they're not in use? Mine don't have mains power available in that situation so I have no idea whether they would like to beep, and no interest in finding out.

205:

"Impossible to simplify"? Um, right. Redesign, and in the meantime, I'm betting on spaghetti code. I, in my career, have taken a number of programs from 1000-2500 lines to about 300-400.

The one I work on is about 110K lines of code, and it is only one (fairly small) part of the over-all project.

And while parts of it could be better, improvements are not easy or trivial (well, usually).

Some programs are just going to have overlaps, no matter how you factor it. Think of it like a wind-up clock that only shows the hour, one developer is adding a second hand, another the minute hand. Obviously they are going to be playing with the same "guts" in the clock, and needing to run off the same master gearing. No matter how you built the original clock the problem will exist (WARNING, do not stretch the analogy to far, it will break the clock :) ).

206:

For any who are interested, There is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm (a guest poster a while ago) is on sale in Canada and the USA. Thought I'd pass on the info.

207:

201 - I'd really like to know how to design block structured Ada 83 and somehow finish up with spaghetti code at the same time. "How not to do do something" can be really instructive. BTW 3 separate programmers have already tried this and reached the conclusion that sub-program divisions move blocks that you pass through once for an index value and a reference value for no actual gains.

204 - Exactly. This machine only flashes an LED when in standby but you've not allowed to actually turn it off...

208:

Like the quote I gave that I think is from Lord Dunsany. We're talking about fiction, where things must make sense, at least within the context of the story.

I’d suggest that at most they need to feel like they make sense. Things like the Rule Of Cool fit under this category, as does narrativium. And being told to turn off your brain and use the force just go with it? That’s also a valid storytelling technique.

I’d also point out that Alice In Wonderland was based on 19th Century math jokes, but probably 99% of the audience didn’t get the jokes and still thought it was a good story. High Nonsense, in the Wayward Children sense, is a perfectly valid story setting.

209:

but you've not allowed to actually turn it off...

The daemon/demon inside it gets grumpy/escapes/starves?

I mean, it's one thing if the magic uses electricity and lack of electricity lets the magic escape. In that case it should come with a battery and even a knife to allow emergency tentacles or engrams or whatever to be drawn round the outside in fresh blood.

210:

Moz
"real world" my foot... I want a refund.
Yes, well ....
Our misgovernment are currently trying to suppress their own enquiry, presumably because it shows the current "leadership" { DON'T LAUGH } up very badly.
Elsewhere the war in Ukraine widens, Fucker Carlson in the US almost-quotes Adolf about "Rat-like Jewish leadership", it looks as though RU blew that dam up { Under the cui bono rules } & a Russian cyber group { "Clop" } appear to be behind a vast date breach - as usual in cases like this, are they "just" criminals, or is it war by other means?
At the same time certain utterly - quote- "leftwing" Trade Union Tankies are denouncing Ukraine, simply because they hate the USA, or are they just stupid tankies?
You tell me.

211:

Surely you have heard this one? (Ada-like) language design is a race between producing a more and more idiot-proof language and the universe producing bigger and better idiots. So far, it seems that the universe is winning.

212:

I prefer John Sladek's counterpoints. Broot Force (by Iclick As-I-Move) from 'The Steam-Driven Boy and other Strangers' comes to mind, along with Tik-Tok.

213:

I swear I've read at least one story where there were demons who will do a task but will take your ability to feel certain sensations/emotions as payment, but I can't remember the title or any additional details.

In one of Paul Cornell's London Falling novels, one of the characters sells the ability for her to experience joy. No demons involved as such, though

214:

These nano-imps presumably have perfect recall for the instructions given, so each one is just a simple TM manipulating data. They are also not limited to a tape: you could give one a 3d crystal and tell it to move in 3 dimensions to manipulate the atoms.

I like the idea of magical spells being written in a funge. If the grid is three dimensional documentation could get very challenging indeed.

Although if someone was inventing code from scratch, sending tiny imps crawling across a surface reading mystic runes would make a lot of sense. The pathways wouldn't even have to conform to right angles, and spaghetti code would be all too literal.

215:

The pathways wouldn't even have to conform to right angles, and spaghetti code would be all too literal.

Congratulations, you've just described genomics!

(Seriously, it turns out that DNA doesn't encode any kind of "blueprint" for a human being; first it was a bunch of junk surrounding "introns" that mapped 1:1 to protein peptide sequences -- basically, static strings rather than instructions -- then it turned out that the "exons" control whether the protein sequences are transcribed or not, then it turns out they're all coiled and supercoiled weirdly and external short interfering RNA sequences that aren't even in the DNA handle flow of control, and the whole lot is mediated by transcription factors which are themselves among the peptides which may or may not be expressed by the genome, and it's herpy-derpy turtles all the way down to the atomic level, just about.)

216:

And, if we believe some of the more, er, imaginative pundits, it goes down even below the atomic level - though most people think those pundits are quarkers :-)

I can claim to be one of the first people who said that the real problem would be interpretation not decoding the genome and that we would never be able to predict everything, but, even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined the complexities that have been discovered since then!

As with AI, it makes it difficult for people like us, because it's irrational to take a position absolutely for or against allowing genetic modification, and that's the debate that is going on :-( Yes, it has great potential, but it also has great dangers; it is simply not possible to predict what any particular change will do.

217:

The other way around - exons encode peptides, introns do not.

Actually, it's more complicated, exons are the sequences that form mRNA after splicing of introns, and mRNA consists of the coding region (CDS) that actually encodes the protein, and the 5'UTR and 3`UTR regions (upstream and downstream of CDS) that don't encode proteins, but control the protein expression via other proteins binding to them.

Actually, it's even more complicated, because 5'UTRs can contain upstream open reading frames (uORFs) and produce different, usually small peptides under certain conditions.

And of course the majority of proteins then undergo post-translational modifications, expanding the space of all possible proteins into infinity.

And some proteins (inteins) can actually splice themselves.

218:

As someone who does VR/AR/XR development every day I can 100% get behind this. Watching people to cut the world into pieces and apply a first directive of the speed of sound in clay from the inside looks normal, from the outside it is a weirdly precise interpretive dance.

219:

language design is a race between producing a more and more idiot-proof language and the universe producing bigger and better idiots

You can make it foolproof; you can't make it damnfoolproof.

(Lesson from engineering design class.)

220:

Yeah, I was going by ~30 year old memories rather than looking things up when I wrote that comment (hence the intron/exon blooper).

But I stand behind my core assertion which is that eukaryote genomics is utterly crazycakes, even before you start looking at stem cell differentiation and epigenetic modulation and other external influences on gene expression.

222:

"Congratulations, you've just described genomics!"

Well... you did :) Paul's comment @ 91 was basically setting out the details of one of the things I had stuffed, unlabelled, into the jar of "very generous assumptions about the operating environment" when making an estimate of the kind of energy levels a single nano-demon moving one atom at a time would have to be operating at in order to achieve a worthwhile result on human scales of size and duration. I was basically saying that from the starting point you describe, the development into a lump of multiple nano-demons coordinated in a manner which I suppose I could have likened to Befunge with more than 2 dimensions if I had heard of Befunge, and with overall behaviour more recognisable as and better described in (broadly) terms of biology than computer science, is sufficiently natural that it is likely to happen without regard for anything the initiating magician might have intended or not intended.

223:

Getting back to rules, Lewis Carroll just made a pink bunny in a Victorian girl’s frock pop out of my watch to remind everyone that good fantasy literature doesn’t need magic rules. Go ask Alice.

"Wonderland" is actually a fixup novel, linking together various short sketches invented to keep the Liddell kids occupied, and with no plot at all beyond "and then another thing happens". As shown by the various stage/film adaptations, you can rearrange the scenes in pretty much any order you like. The only parts required to stay in the same order are sleeping and waking.

If anything, this proves my point perfectly. "Wonderland" has no cause and effect; and therefore Carroll was unable to tell a story. All he could do was come up with a lot of examples of "magic happens, and nothing anyone does has any effect". Each individual scene is striking, in the same sense as each individual image in "Un Chien Andalou", but they're equally disconnected.

Conversely, "Looking glass" has a plan behind it (the chess game). Whilst each scene has its own things going on which aren't explained, there is definitely cause and effect happening.

224:

Graham @ 223
Now, where have I seen that before?
Oh, yessss ....
Pterry's first two "Discworlds": Colour of Magic & Light Fantastic, where he openly admitted stringing as many SFF gags together as he possibly could, & labelled them "novels" ...
Then it all escaped & took over, much to everyone's delight.

225:

"Impossible to simplify"? Um, right. Redesign,

Maybe not impossible. But not practical in terms of time and cost. If you've ever worked with code that had to implement state laws and court cases the code quickly becomes a mess. I worked in the US Property & Casualty insurance agency industry years ago. Forms and rules on policy coverages varied (wildly at times) by state and every court case tended to create new rules that had to be layered on top of existing rules. Often by state. Mostly without a 1:1 mapping to existing rules.

Back in the 80s as a software vendor we were looking at switching to laser printing (in offices of under 10 people) various standard insurance forms. These forms were color coded to make them easier for clerks to find and sort. We learned that a judge in Georgia had recently ruled that because the claim form used didn't have the standard ACORD yellow border it wasn't a valid form.

226:

"Sorry, can't let you use that soldering iron, you might burn yourself. No, you can't use a saw...."

Oh, you mean health & safety regulations?

I'm sure I have read some story about health and safety ninnyism being unavoidably enforced in all aspects of life by omnipresent three-laws robots going overboard on the second part of the First Law. I think the viewpoint character was a visitor of some kind, who hadn't grown up being used to it, so that he could repeatedly be upset when he tried to have a hot drink or cut himself a slice of bread or something and the robots wouldn't let him do it, and start going nuts about what a ridiculous pain in the arse it all was.

But I don't have any mental record to contradict my assumption that the author was Asimov himself. After all, that's what pretty well all of Asimov's three-laws stories are about: the three laws don't work. They're enough of a vast improvement on what would happen if you simply didn't have them that they are an inviolable minimum requirement, but they are far too rigid to cope with the fuzziness of real-life situations, so when rigidly implemented they keep on buggering things up.

The overall theme of the series is really basically the extreme difficulty of imbuing artificial intelligence with common sense. The originators of the three laws were just getting into a totally new field, so common sense was simply a normal unquestioned background assumption for them, and it didn't occur to them that it could be a matter that would need to be specifically addressed. And indeed nobody ever really does address it; instead as the robots themselves are developed to be more intelligent as time goes on, they begin to work out their own version of "common sense from a robot's point of view"; the complexity of the situations which throw them off becomes correspondingly greater, and their ability to come up with workarounds off their own bat comes to take precedence over external correction by humans as a method of getting back on track again - but it's still a robot track, rather than a human one. So the point at which "three laws plus robot common sense" runs out advances from collecting a bit of selenium to the moral condition of the whole of humanity, as the series goes on.

227:

I'm sure I have read some story about health and safety ninnyism being unavoidably enforced in all aspects of life by omnipresent three-laws robots going overboard on the second part of the First Law. I think the viewpoint character was a visitor of some kind, who hadn't grown up being used to it, so that he could repeatedly be upset when he tried to have a hot drink or cut himself a slice of bread or something and the robots wouldn't let him do it, and start going nuts about what a ridiculous pain in the arse it all was.

Sounds like "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson, Golden Era stuff. I think there were several stories eventually collected into a single volume.

228:

And it couldn't be rewritten to read a table, fed from a d/b, a (let me be politically correct here) tuple with the relevant data?

229:

Please clarify: are you saying it's one function that has zero called functions that's 110k lines long? That there's zero duplication of code, and that it could not be broken up into something a couple hundred lines long, with a few hundred function calls?

230:

At a con last year, I mentioned genengineering, and this guy went off on a minute or two long rant, no pauses, and walked out of the con suite.

So I didn't have a chance to say, "oh, looking at how many folks in the room were heavy, so you don't want any genengineering to prevent diabetes? Or arthritis, asks the guy (me) with both knees partially replaced, and issues with a hip. Or a vulnerability to MS (says the guy who lost one friend to it, and has two more with it)."

I could go on, but why bother? Yes, I want genengineering, done RIGHT, with adequate testing per currently existing rules, plus probably new ones.

231:

Yes, I want genengineering, done RIGHT,

Two questions.

  • Can it even be done right?

  • Who defines "right"?

Not trying to beat you up but these are the basic questions about much of "modern" life today. IMHO.

I would mention some medical things that looked great but went bad (a year or 10 later) but I'm not sure how UK laws operate on these subjects these days.

232:

Can it even be done right?

Unknown as of yet.

Who defines "right"?

Difficult question. (Majority vote, perhaps?) But it is very easy to come with the answer to "What is 'right'?", to which vast majority of human beings would agree. Physical condition of a mentally and physically fit 25 year old, with no recognized genetic abnormalities. In other word, no diabetes, no MS, no macular degeneration, no arthritis, no arterial plaque. Whether it can be done is unknown (see your first question), but few would claim this is an undesirable goal.

Where it gets iffy, is improving on the "mentally and physically fit 25 year old". Nobody but a Sherpa or a Peruvian Indian can function on top of Everest without supplemental oxygen. So I claim that Sherpas and Peruvian Indians are the only people with healthy lungs, and the remaining 99.95% of human population have congenitally sick lungs. Why shouldn't my grandchildren have lungs of a Sherpa? And while we are at it, the spleen of a Bajau?

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/04/24/604059598/the-secret-to-deep-diving-may-lie-in-the-spleen

233:
Physical condition of a mentally and physically fit 25 year old, with no recognized genetic abnormalities

And - 20 years ago, or now if you're incautious about who you ask - no people with ADHD, no autistic people... you begin to grasp the problem, I hope.

234:

My point is that LeBron James is certainly physically fit. Do we all want to have his body?

What is a "good" height? 4', 5', 6', etc...

Do we go for physical attributes that are great for survival in the wild, in a modern world, space travel, etc....

As to mental. Well. As some of the recent debates here have shown, many of the variations in how people think and process are considered abnormal but many and normal by many others.

For myself. Many consider me smart. (A non trivial number do not.) But I do score high on the standard tests. I have issues with visual colors and patterns that most people do not. But is it this "abnormal" wiring of my brain give me the smarts I have in other areas.

To me this is a slippery slope.

And let's not go into Charismatic religious types. Is this most of the time due to brain wiring or environment? Or both.

235:

Leaving aside whether it's possible in practice, is it even viable in theory? Am I misremembering or weren't the majority of the Robots short stories illustrations of the Three Laws failing due to various corner cases? "Bicenntennial Man" is the counterexample that jumps to mind.

236:

There are so many comments on here to which "you should read the Commonweal series!" is a reasonable response to. :-)

237:

One thing I always found puzzling about the opponents of human genetic engineering: they seem to take it as a given that it would lead to a uniform "human monoculture", with all the attendant dangers of genetic uniformity.

Even if you assume that genetic diversity is important[1], it should be blatantly obvious that genetic engineering can create far greater diversity than would ever happen "naturally". Why do they not see it?

[1] I would argue that genetic diversity is far less important for a technological species than it is for a non-technological one, but that's a separate topic.

238:

My point is that LeBron James is certainly physically fit. Do we all want to have his body?

"All of us" almost certainly do not want it. But if someone does want it, why not?

I have issues with visual colors and patterns that most people do not. But is it this "abnormal" wiring of my brain give me the smarts I have in other areas.

I met some people who said they hoped for autistic children, because they wanted their child to be next Einstein or Bill Gates. Pretty naive if you ask me, but it shows that not everyone wants to be "normal".

239:

Charlie dissed "Asimov's three laws":

First, it's worth noting that they're actually John Campbell's laws, at least according to Asimov's story of their origin. And Campbell was the only game in town for a certain type of fiction, and was infamous for insisting on rewrites that met his somewhat narrow personal criteria, so I suspect Asimov accepted the laws on the rationale that at least this way he'd get published. Which leads us to:

Second, Asimov spent a lot of time writing about exceptions to the laws. He rarely (possibly never) treated them as perfect laws. Rather, he did what good SF writers do: take an external constraint (here, Campbell's laws) and explore it. As Wikipedia notes (confirming my memory): "Many of Asimov's robot-focused stories involve robots behaving in unusual and counter-intuitive ways as an unintended consequence of how the robot applies the Three Laws to the situation in which it finds itself."

Third, you're writing something like 70 years post-Asimov. You have a lot of hindsight he lacked.

Given the way software and AI is being designed now, and will probably be designed in the future, it seems highly probable that developers will follow the Asimov-Campbell suggestion of what our future holds: developers will implement simplistic, ill-considered measures that won't actually work in practice. Sometimes the golden age authors actually got it right.

240:

Pretty naive if you ask me, but it shows that not everyone wants to be "normal".

Way too many of us (and many I know personally) have been considered NOT normal by some group or the other.

Normal is a bad target.

241:

Normal is a bad target.

I am autistic. You don't have to tell me that. My point is, a lot of people, even some who are arguably "normal", do not consider it a target.

242:

I have seen ones of thousands of lines that could not be split up in most languages without severely complicating the code. They were advanced scientific calculations, and had many dozens of local variables. They could be split in languages with multi-level hierarchical scoping (think: Algol 68) or in ones with suitable module features (e.g. modern Fortran) by using a module used only in that function.

However, to what purpose? It wouldn't actually have clarified anything, because the basic structure of the functions was a simple sequence of complicated operations each using almost all of the variables.

243:

I'm getting annoyed. Where did I say gemengineering to make people "normal"? Please reference the post.

I said I wanted genengineering to cure/prevent disease.

Would I object, if someone wanted a tail? No, but that should be their choice.

And by the way, in my novels, I've got the mesh - genengineered cells that reproduce (no, anyone getting them is not "base human" anymore... that, to start, give early warning of disease developing before there are symptoms. And as an assistant: my partner has a language processing disorder. Some sounds she literally can't hear. She would LOVE to have the mesh, to help her speak more clearly, more "normal". And no one, much less anyone here, has the right to argue against that desire.

244:

I can answer that one, though most of the people who say that probably don't understand the issues.

A good many genetic disorders are due to recessive genes where the heterozygote is beneficial, but the homozygote is severely harmful (e.g. sickle cell anaemia).

A good many others are beneficial under some circumstances, but not under others (e.g. skin colour). The most obvious form is where the disadvantageous form is 'modern living', so they are always harmful in (say) the UK of today but are pro-survival in others (e.g. (e.g. many tendencies to overweight and famine).

And a large number of others are where there may be such factors, but where we haven't identified them.

So it's a real issue.

245:

I can answer that one, though most of the people who say that probably don't understand the issues.

I had to check which of my posts you were replying to, and it is #237. Sorry, but I find your answer a non-sequitor. How do you get from "A good many genetic disorders are due to recessive genes where the heterozygote is beneficial, but the homozygote is severely harmful" (yes, I know that) to "genetic engineering will make everyone the same"? If a single copy of Hb S gene is beneficial (which I agree it is), genetic engineering can ensure that every child has exactly one copy, and nobody should roll dice on getting two copies and sickle-cell anemia.

246:

That's not so much genetic engineering, as zygote selection. Yes, it could be done by genetic engineering on the zygote, but that's using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Let's ignore the fact that zygote selection is heresy to the 'fundamentalists' - there are no genetic problems with it.

What most people mean is to engineer their genome, and the genome that they will pass on to their offspring. And THAT's where the problems arise.

247:

I want genengineering, done RIGHT

So therapeutic (to prevent diagnosed illnesses) rather than eugenicist (to prevent traits considered undesirable by eugenicists)?

Well yes, except prior to DSMIV, being gay was classified as a disease by US medical opinion, so germ-line gene manipulation to prevent homosexuality[*] would have been seen as therapy, not eugenics.

Do you see the problem here?

[*] Which is a really terrible idea. (For the record: all humans share the majority of the human genome: who you are attracted to is a function of how your nervous system develops, not your gonads. I suspect that if you could flick a genetic switch to stop men being attracted to men, a side-effect would be that you'd end up with females who are not attracted to men either. What you get from an off-switch for homosexuality is not heterosexuality, it's asexuality. Homosexual behaviour may be a conserved trait simply because it emerges from sexual receptiveness in members of the other sex.)

248:

First, it's worth noting that they're actually John Campbell's laws, at least according to Asimov's story of their origin.

That suddenly makes a lot more sense. (And also explains why Asimov spent so much time trying to break them!)

Campbell was a horrible piece of shit, ideologically speaking.

(PS: can I suggest a re-read of Saturn's Children for my deeply cynical angle on Asimov's Laws?)

249:

What that function really needs isn't turning into a module, it's a really good syntax-aware folding text editor.

250:

Therapeutic? Yep. However, per your note, it would appear to me, at least, that the DSMIV is psychological, and so until it's demonstrable and repeatable, I think that falls under engenics.

251:

Actually, I should have put it that the physical issues are clear. I suspect, however, that issues like guys attracted to guys are far more complicated. And genengineering is going to come in slow - there will be a huge number of court cases over many of the steps.

Meanwhile, I dunno 'bout eugenics, but my genics is just fine.... (Resist? Moi?)

252:

Please clarify: are you saying it's one function that has zero called functions that's 110k lines long?

You said:

taken a number of programs from 1000-2500 lines

So, I was talking about a program, not a function (it has LOTS of functions).

That said, yes, there are some long functions in it, some things are just too complex to make short. Like EC said, there is no real reason to make them shorter, it wouldn't help anything. You end up having a bunch of non-sensical one use functions and/or functions that you are passing a zillion parameters to. It makes things harder to understand rather than easier.

253:

Charlie @ 179: you can make a trivial end run around the three laws of robotics by redefining "human".

Freefall has a lot of fun with this one. See for instance the sequence starting here: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1600/fc01581.htm

254:

It was pretty comprehensible with just appropriate block comments and good layout. Insofar as any code of that complexity (or, indeed, the mathematics it described) is comprehensible.

255:

I once needed to work on a program that had followed the dogma that no function should be more than 5 lines long (yes, really - that was a thing, once), though it had quite a few longer ones. That was in Algol 68, so had hierarchical scoping. It wasn't large (10,000 lines or so), but it was gruesomely incomprehensible. There were argument-free functions whose sole purpose was to add one to a particular variable, and so on.

256:

Forms and rules on policy coverages varied (wildly at times) by state and every court case tended to create new rules that had to be layered on top of existing rules. Often by state. Mostly without a 1:1 mapping to existing rules.

It's a rules-based AI where the rules are written by legislators whop have no training in formal logic.

This seems to apply generally to legislation, I've worked on medical stuff where the "implements legislation" side is just a complete mess. The saving roll is that the people verifying that we comply with the legislation have no better idea than we do.

257:

»Nobody but a Sherpa or a Peruvian Indian can function on top of Everest without supplemental oxygen. So I claim that Sherpas and Peruvian Indians are the only people with healthy lungs, and the remaining 99.95% of human population have congenitally sick lungs.«

Have you ever asked an altitude adapted Peruvian Indian or Sherpa how they like their lungs at sea-level ?

The lungs absorb O2 and dispose of CO2, in a roughly constant ratio, and getting that O2/CO2 ratio wrong is almost as bad as getting the absolute amounts wrong.

Within a fairly large range of normal atmospheric conditions, the partial pressures work out so that both the absolute and relative numbers can be modulated by the amount of air transport, but there are a lot of corner-cases, which your body will make sure you perceive them as very uncomfortable.

The way the regulation is implemented is by monitoring the acidity of the bloodstream: Too much dissolved CO2 turns lowers the pH value. That makes a lot of sense because measuring dissolved oxygen would be a lot harder and would have to happen distant from the breathing muscles etc.

The adaptation you unwisely desire, amount to making it relatively /harder/ to dispose of CO2, because acquiring the necessary amount of O2 is thermodynamically more difficult at altitude.

Disposing of CO2 on the other hand is almost the same effort at all altitudes, until you start diving.

So bringing altitude adapted lungs to sea-level, the CO2-based breathing reflex will keep going as it usually does, but you will absorb a hell of a lot more O2, which, counter-intutively, is really bad for your health, because of oxidative stresses.

Likewise, bringing sea-level lungs to altitude will starve you of O2, because your CO2 disposal runs the show.

It's not that your sea-level lungs could not absorb more O2, but they dont get asked to. Dumping too much CO2 also has bad health-effects, but mostly instantaneous rather than long-term, this also counts against your survivability at altitude.

If you really want to improve that system, make it regulate on both O2 and CO2, for instance by tilting the curve of O2/CO2 ration vs. depth of breath much further than it is today.

258:

»It's a rules-based AI where the rules are written by legislators whop have no training in formal logic.«

I talked to a couple of the brains behind Gov.UK once, (heavy Varnish Cache users :-) They told me they found that UK laws are a true mess in really strange ways.

For instance one law, prescribing veterans benefits, was only specified for the bits of UK's geography where veterans lived when the law was enacted. There were many places where, if veterans moved there, the law did not authorize any benefits for them.

He said they found so many of that kind of problems, that it nearly cancelled the project, because other departments insisted on charging gov.uk for "fixing the problems they caused".

In Denmark they tried to build a "unified debt-collection system" for the tax-authority, and it imploded because there were many thousands of different ways people could owe money to the public purse, from parking tickets over day-care lunches to criminal sanctions, and they are all legislated differently.

259:

Three points about human lung function:

1) You've got to include Ethiopians and other African highlanders in the list. And possibly some Papuans???

B) Every group of highland humans does it differently. The Tibetan/Himalayans, for instance, appear to have inherited their adaptations from Denisovans, while Andean natives independently evolved tolerance ca. 10-15,000 years ago, or more recently.

III) With respect to highlanders living in lowlands, it's a truism that they suffer disproportionately from lung infections (like tuberculosis).

The take home is that humans are fairly confined by altitude. There are populations adapted to sea level, high elevation, diving (Bajau), and each adaptation is suboptimal for other elevations. But we're all confined within a band a few kilometers above, and a few hundred meters below, mean sea level. Earth is vertically zoned with a vengeance, from the exosphere down to the deepest trenches, and human really can only live freely in one layer.

260:

It's a rules-based AI where the rules are written by legislators whop have no training in formal logic.

You seem to think this is a bug. It's a feature. If the bigger government can't fold the local system into itself, the locals perforce maintain control of it. I'd gently suggest this is yet another battlefield in the ubiquitous struggle between local and national control.

261:

Some random thoughts re: magical fantasy versus scientific realism discussed earlier in this thread. A recent Nova program on PBS (or maybe it was Nature) explored how the human brain assembles a composite ersatz "reality" from various sensory inputs. Most information gathered is left unused and the remainder blended with automatically synthesized filler material to compensate for info discarded.

The example shown was how eyesight focuses on only a small fraction of the visual field and leaves the brain to fill in the rest. This seemed to me somewhat like dvd file compression leaving the values unchanged which represent background pixels staying the same from one frame to the next, varying only those values for image components that actually do change. Another similar example is how the blind spot from an optic nerve connecting with the retina gets seamlessly filled in by brain algorithms, almost like a cloning tool in a photo-editing program would do.

Similar types of brain processing create an almost first person shooter videogame-like image for the individual organism to use as ongoing reference in understanding its relationship with the surroundings. Accuracy and fidelity to source material would vary from time to time and from brain to brain, but at no point would synthesized parts be missing. So the difference between fantasy and reality in terms of mental states would be differences only of degree, not of kind.

Chomsky's idea of language acquisition as a genetically determined predilection has been largely accepted, so why couldn't genetic tendencies also influence one's general world view? Magical fantasy could be the result of projecting inborn mental shortcuts onto the external environment, for better or worse as far as survival results, probably better in the past but less so in the modern world due to, you know, civilization.

Anyway I got thinking about it this morning over coffee when my wife criticized a quarrelsome neighbor and I replied yeah the guy lives in his own fantasy world, and then had to add, don't we all.

262:

Well, the air quality reached 7 today, expected to hit 9 tomorrow. (10 is the maximum the scale goes to.) Have been able to smell smoke outside all week. Hopefully we'll get cleaner air Friday or Saturday, but that's uncertain right now.

Worst fire season on record. Unless you're a Republican politician, apparently, in which case it's simultaneously fake news and the fault of the woke diversity-obsessed lamestream media somehow preventing the forestry companies from raking the forests. How the f%^! do these people keep getting elected?

263:

You say the scale only goes to 10... Australia has to "make it go to 11" with fire danger, because we don't have meaningful air quality reporting. There were quite a few older signs with "catastrophic" manually added after "extreme" but I think they're mostly been replaced now.

https://afdrs.com.au/

My particulate meters only go to ~1000 micrograms per cubic metre while the official ones go to 2000 (transmissive IR vs paper filter based). Given the official guidance to "stay inside, avoid exercise, wear a mask if outdoors" past 500 I'm not sure there's much benefit measuring past 1000... mind you, with the shitty houses we have "stay indoors" is weird advice since so many will have worse air quality inside.

264:

If the bigger government can't fold the local system into itself, the locals perforce maintain control of it.

My experience is that more often the system remains uncontrolled. Which is great when you actively want the tragedy of the commons (complete withdrawal of insurance companies from areas affected by climate change risks*), but all too often it's "X is not regulated, national government doesn't care and local government doesn't have the power".

Australia is internally notorious for unfunded mandates from national government. The latter raises 80% of total taxes, but is only responsible for 50% of government spending. They make rules for stuff like national education standards, and they subsidise private schools, but otherwise compulsory education is a state responsibility. And so on, resulting in large, essential transfers from national to state governments. The pattern repeats between state and local government.

Having read that Australia is better than most federal systems I fear this pattern repeats worldwide. "local control, federal funding"... as with the recent hostage negotiation it leads to "we're cutting funding by 10%, but we're not responsible for any particular cut you choose to make".

(* you may not want people to be unable to get insurance, but it appears to be a necessary step along the way to realising that the climate catastrophe may have costs in this quarter's earning report)

265:

Um. I think you've actually reversed the causality arrow without meaning to.

What you're describing is how real-world magic actually works. Magicians have learned empirically how to hack the way our brains process reality. Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) coauthored a paper in Nature on the subject in 2008 or so, and in 2011, Nova had an episode called "Magic and the Brain" (e.g. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/magic-and-the-brain/ ). There's a lot of this online already.

What Nova showed last week is neuroscience after researchers have spent a decade hobnobbing with actual magicians. If it looks like the basis for magic, it's entirely possible that this is because they studied with magicians.

One key point is that magic systems in fantasy have nothing to do with this. Designing new magic systems is part of the (sub)genre, and there's a lot of ad hoc and post hoc rulemaking around this aspect of fantasy.

These rules and their importance are a pub-level conversation topic on par with building closed ecosystems in space, and they're a strange attractor around here. My person meta-rule for determining the rules of fantasy magic is simply Teller's "Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself." ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-his-secrets-100744801/ ). To put it in this context, the most important rule you can derive for why and how magic should work in stories is what feels right to you. If it feels wrong, why argue for it?

266:

Now, going back to Charlie's original question ("Now, taking a D&D-ish generic high fantasy setting as a given, what can this lead to?"), I'll suggest the following:

European medieval math and geometry were largely devoid of elements such as recursion, scaling, and even infinity, ideas which are fundamental to the notion of programming-as-magic.

So if you want medieval-level technology with recursion, scaling, and infinity, you've got to go outside Europe. Specifically, you've got to go about 3000 km south to West Africa, where these ideas crop up repeatedly in art, urban design, and spirituality. Check out Eglash's African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design.

[[ Fixed broken link - mod ]]

267:

My experience is that more often the system remains uncontrolled.

That's often my experience too. I agree with you that this kind of shit often results in tragedies. However, as with so many things (cf decarbonization), simply pointing out that there's a way to rationally fix the problem normally doesn't get it solved, because the people proposing the rational solution don't fully understand the human dimensions of the problem.

At least we're getting better on this blog. Decades ago when I started here, the common line (usually delivered with great arrogance) was that physics was the only important limit. If something was physically possible, it would get done, and politics was irrelevant. We've had this innocence beaten out of us by the last few decades of politics, and that was something of a good thing. Maybe.

268:

The rest is stamp collecting? 😋

269:

Yup.

And now cosmology is trying to sell us on the notion that the multiverse is just an immense stamp collection of universes, all basically randomly-designed stamps made out of superstrings. But they need a bigger accelerator to probe this idea, of course.

270:

I wonder if part of it is that software is much more obviously an ecosystem now? The typical geek has had their nose rubbed in the "it's unknowably complex interactions all the way down" for a couple of decades at this point. Even the really smart ones have had to admit that they aren't capable of writing their own smartphone software stack from scratch even if they wanted to. Let alone something like a motor vehicle.

But also, I thought ending papers with "more research is needed" was like Christians ending prayers with "amen"? It's part of the ritual...

271:

What you get from an off-switch for homosexuality is not heterosexuality, it's asexuality.

So, there's this world where people have done the eradication of homosexuality, wanting to go to that (fantasy) 1950s (American) suburbia 'utopia'. It works! No annoying homosexual deviants!

Only now there really is a good reason for separate bedrooms - nobody wants to to have sex.

Of course the problems become apparent when there are no children, either...

(Yeah, yeah, asexual does not mean aromantic nor even not wanting to have any physical contact, but could be the basis of a story...)

272:

Even the really smart ones have had to admit that they aren't capable of writing their own smartphone software stack from scratch even if they wanted to. Let alone something like a motor vehicle.

Yeah, I could see myself capable of doing something like late 1980s computer software stack from scratch. Maybe early Amigas, maybe, at the highest level of complexity, or a bloated terminal emulator on a 386 machine. Modern systems? Too many turtles on the way down.

I've worked with many kinds of systems, though, from kernel level to UI, but there are large gaps for modern systems which I really have little idea of.

At one point I felt comfortable that I perhaps could design an 8-bit processor to go with it, but that was probably the hubris of youth. (Though a simple one shouldn't be that hard.)

273:

»Yeah, I could see myself capable of doing something like late 1980s computer software stack from scratch«

Only if you get to hand-wave away all the necessary DSP stuff required to actually talk to base-stations over the air...

In the first generations of GSM phones, 90%-ish of the LOC were DSP related, and while that percentage has dropped, the difficulty of the subject domain certainly has not, to the point where it is now baked into silicon to prevent programmers from mucking about with it.

In many modern smartphones, the entire RF-part is just a USB-modem - in some cases still using "AT" commands...

But if that is what we're talking about, sticking a UNIXoid kernel on the so-called "main-CPU", and write some code to talk to a USB modem doing all the hard work ?

Of course a single person can do it and several have done so over the years.

Will it be "a Smartphone" ?

Probably not in most peoples eyes, but by the time you have dumped Wayland, KDE/Gnome/Firefox on it, it will have at least all the same fundamental flaws, but probably not as much spying/surveillance.

274:

Only if you get to hand-wave away all the necessary DSP stuff required to actually talk to base-stations over the air...

Yeah, I was thinking only of desktop computers, not mobile phones. DSP stuff is probably doable, but, uh, wouldn't want to (I have a degree in electrical engineering and signal processing, so I have some knowledge of the field).

Radio frequency stuff... uh, yeah, I passed the (introductory level) courses, yes.

275:

Yeah, I could see myself capable of doing something like late 1980s computer software stack from scratch. Maybe early Amigas, maybe, at the highest level of complexity, or a bloated terminal emulator on a 386 machine. Modern systems? Too many turtles on the way down. ... At one point I felt comfortable that I perhaps could design an 8-bit processor to go with it, but that was probably the hubris of youth. (Though a simple one shouldn't be that hard.)

A group of us teens discovered computer logic around 1971 or so, read everything we could find and even designed a very simple 7400 logic based computers. I/O was basically a few leds and switches. We didn't build it, no way we had the money for it. Especially any amount of memory that would be useful. But it would have likely worked at a slow clock speed.

But the 7400 logic based "mini-computers" of the late 70s / early 80s were just a more complicated iteration of the kind of thing we did.

I and the other primary quickly decided to step up a level and learn to program hardware other built. Much more satisfying. In the later 70s we had a complete OS source for a mini-computer brand and I likely had read all of it. Ditto the microcode for a different vendor in the early 80s.

I also had a very deep understanding of an insurance agent office automation package in the 80s. You could ask about one of the modules and I could tell you the logic and the main variable flows without looking at the code. But compared to today it was very simple. But at the time we were the biggest vendor in the market.

But that was then. And my timing light and dwell meter haven't been used in over 30 years either. Ditto my drum brake tool.

I read over 5 years ago that the OS inside a Samsung EVO (3?) SSD was over 300 meg.

I was literally at the Wright Brothers memorial a weekend ago. It is unreal to consider what they first flew compared to where we are 120 years later. Or evern 70 years after they first flew. To the point, two guys designed (very nearly in isolation) a powered airplane. Built it and flew it.

276:

Will it be "a Smartphone" ?

My "smartphone" will take high resolution photos, 4K video, and panoramic scenes stitched together in real time. The effort to just do this ignoring the phone aspects are unreal for a single or even a few people.

277:

Well, the air quality reached 7 today, expected to hit 9 tomorrow. (10 is the maximum the scale goes to.)

I think you're near Toronto. This was Wednesday and New York City supposedly had the worst air quality of any major city on the planet. Maybe a bit of hyperbole but you can easily find images of the city during mid afternoon that were downright scary.

And the stay indoors if possible warnings extended all the way south to a few miles north of me. 400 miles give or take from the Canadian border.

What did I ever do to you? [/sarcasm off but only slightly]

278:

Er, no. Ethiopia is lower than much of Colorado. There is a HELL of a difference between 2,000-3,000 metres and 4,000-5,000. Yes, the inhabitants have some adaptation, but not to anything like the same extent as the Tibetans or even the Andeans.

What you may be missing is that oxygen absorption is not proportional to oxygen concentration, but is offset by an amount equivalent to about 8,000 metres (in most people). I really noticed this when we went up El Teide, and it made me cross Machu Pichu off my bucket list :-(

279:

Unfortunately, too many people have adopted the political viewpoint - that the only 'solutions' that are possible are the politically acceptable ones. Well, if that is so, we are SHAFTED. Actually, we probably are :-( Most problems (including social) need addressing as engineering ones - i.e. what is the simplest solution that will actually work, and how do we get there.

This is why I am an anti-EV person - not that they aren't a 'good idea' but that simply replacing current gas-guzzlers with even larger EVs is going to make things worse, not better.

280:

.. maybe ..

Flooding downstream of the dam and disrupting water supply to agricultural land is bad for both Ukraine and Russian occupied areas, Including Crimea. Arguably, Russian forces had easier access to plant explosives, and immediate tactical advantage by flooding the river.

It's also possible the dam gave way after months of high water levels and overspill.

281:

Zelenskyy said as much:

"The fact that Russia deliberately destroyed the Kakhovka reservoir, which is critically important, in particular, for providing water to Crimea, indicates that the Russian occupiers have already realised that they will have to flee Crimea as well."

Well, maybe, but all the evidence is that Russia will defend Crimea pretty well at all costs.

Given that both sides have out-of-control 'irregulars' operating freely with access to large amounts of weaponry etc., it could very well be one of them. We don't know, and probably never shall.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/7/ukraines-zelenskyy-says-dam-blast-will-not-stop-military-plans

282:

I was literally at the Wright Brothers memorial a weekend ago. It is unreal to consider what they first flew compared to where we are 120 years later.

And for a practical comparison:

The Wright Flyer's first flight was shorter than the length of the cargo bay of the An-225 Mriya (before Russian paratroops wrecked it in the first week of the Ukraine war).

283:

This is why I am an anti-EV person - not that they aren't a 'good idea' but that simply replacing current gas-guzzlers with even larger EVs is going to make things worse, not better.

The problem is a more general one with automobile marketing trends over the past 20 years -- partly due to weirdness in the US tax code, "light trucks" can be written off against tax in 12 months if used as personal transport, building in a tax incentive for driving a tricked-out pick-up truck. Which in turn drives non-truck-owners to want bigger cars -- in this case, SUVs -- purely for survival purposes on a road dominated by thuggish behemoths.

A 2CV should be a decent size/form-factor for a family EV: holds four adults plus luggage, can drive at up to 100km/h, has a sun roof, even has removable seats you can pull out if you want to have a picnic or use the rear for cargo. Make it out of modern materials and with better aerodynamics and to a higher safety standard and it ought to be achievable at the original's kerb weight of 600kg, which for transporting four adults is a lot more reasonable than the Tesla Model 3's 1700kg, of which 500kg is battery. Allow maybe 125kg for the new 2CV's battery and it's still less than half the weight of the Model 3.

Nor does a car really need to go faster than 100km/h -- that's close to the universal maximum road speed limits in force everywhere because human reflexes aren't up to consistently going much faster and the kinetic energy involved in any collision rapidly becomes unsurvivable above that speed no matter how good your crumple zones and air bags are.

Alas, on today's roads a modernized electric 2CV would feel like a death trap. And it's entirely due to marketing bullshit to ramp sales on the basis of an American income tax loophole.

284:

As you know, that is my position, only I go rather further!

It's less than clear why the USA lunacy should affect Europe so much, or even whether the idiocies here are actually due to a knock-on effect from the USA. Looking at the prices(*), gimmicky and regulations, I am pretty certain that there is a tacit conspiracy between the manufacturers and some influential governments.

(*) Such as exactly WHY should prices have gone up so much faster than inflation in the past decade? No other consumer products have.

285:

Having read that Australia is better than most federal systems I fear this pattern repeats worldwide. "local control, federal funding"... as with the recent hostage negotiation it leads to "we're cutting funding by 10%, but we're not responsible for any particular cut you choose to make".

In Canada we've got the same funding with the reverse problem: provincial governments taking federal money and spending it on other things, then blaming the federal government for funding shortfalls. For example, Ontario getting money to improve ventilation in hospitals and schools, then not doing that and giving a tax cut to motorists. Or the federal government giving taxation power to the provinces to fund health care, and the provinces promptly cutting those taxes and demanding more money for health care/*.

I'm currently serving on a federal committee on health care, and one of the big issues we deal with time and again is how to create and fund a program in such a way that the money will actually be spent on the people it is intended for, rather than 'repurposed' by the province.

Oddly, this is only a problem with right-wing provincial governments.

*Health care in Canada is under provincial control.

286:

I forgot to say this earlier. There is actually only a very small proportion of our roads that even feel like a death trap to small vehicles - and you don't get much smaller than a recumbent trike! Excluding motorways, they are essentially only the trunk roads, similar main A-roads and a comparable number of lesser, high-speed A- and B-roads (mainly rural, but a few suburban and a very few urban ones).

The problem is that there are a fair number of routes that are ONLY viable by using one of those roads. That wouldn't be infeasible to solve (in a variety of ways), but needs the political will and a relatively small amount of compulsory purchase and road-building. It has been solved for motorways, after all, except in a few places like the Dartford Crossing. Many cities are trying that, but generally without considering the whole problem.

My guess is that it would be considerably easier, cheaper and quicker than upgrading our generation and distribution infrastructure to support all-electric power. They're not alternatives, but the sane approach would be to prioritise the road restructuring.

287:

You might almost be describing the Citroen Oli concept, which might be less of a deathtrap than a 2CV or VW type 1. And US pick-up trucks have gotten immense in the last half century, as if light truck R & D was building towards "Your very own monster truck!".

288:

partly due to weirdness in the US tax code, "light trucks" can be written off against tax in 12 months if used as personal transport,

While the use of pickup trucks for personal transportation is a bit crazy in my (and other people in the US's) opinions. I don't think you understand the US tax code here at all.

I own a pickup truck. It gets used when needed. It has sat unused at times for over a month. But I'd really like to see notes on the US tax code to back up your comments.

289:

Such as exactly WHY should prices have gone up so much faster than inflation in the past decade? No other consumer products have.

It seems your talking autos.

BECAUSE the people who are buying new cars want nicer cars than in the past. And the people buying new cars can afford them. So the auto manufacturers are building what people want.

290:

The Wright Flyer's first flight was shorter than the length of the cargo bay of the An-225 Mriya (before Russian paratroops wrecked it in the first week of the Ukraine war).

Standing where the flights took off it was impressive. There are 5 big stone markers. One at the take off point. 4 at the landing point for each flight. The first 3 were from around 140 to 200 feet in distance. Standing there you can imagine that detractors would claim it was the wind that carried the plane.[1] But the last marker at about 800 feet out, you know they had to know themselves they had it. They could fly.

[1] They planned to fly some more flights but while taking a break after the 4th one the wind flipped the plane and wreaked it more than they could repair it. While I was there it was to me a crazy windy day. I'm thinking 20mph or so steady with gusts of more. It felt like I could got 100' or so through the air with an oversized wind breaker and arms spread wide. The Outer Banks ARE windy.

291:

"Standing there you can imagine that detractors would claim it was the wind that carried the plane."

And would miss the point. All the wind's doing is making it easier (or harder) to achieve takeoff speed relative to the ground. Once they're off the ground the ground speed and ground distance become irrelevant; the achievement is all about how long a time they can keep it up.

292:

The people writing newspaper articles and reading them in 1904 would not include or care about such. As it was many of the news articles at the time exaggerated what they did to the point they had a PR problem with much of the public.

293:

But I'd really like to see notes on the US tax code to back up your comments.

I don't have access to a copy of the US tax code (and life's too short, anyway). AIUI the issue is that if you own a small business you can get a "light truck" and write it off as capital expenditure in one year. Meanwhile it has a tricked out leather and walnut interior with a surround sound system and you use it for commuting between home and your dental practice rather than for hauling lumber ...

There are a lot of small businesses out there.

294:

"I'd really like to see notes on the US tax code to back up your comments" - ISTR that you're a USian, so perhaps this query is better directed to a USian tax accountant than to a UK writer?

295:

BECAUSE the people who are buying new cars want nicer cars than in the past. And the people buying new cars can afford them. So the auto manufacturers are building what people want.

That hasn't been true for decades. Vehicles take years to design, because all the supply chains also have to be built or upgraded, factories have to be tooled, people or robots skilled up, labor contracts done, politicians greased, etc.

If you listen to the news, especially NPR, occasionally the real stories slip out. Charlie's point about SUVs and trucks being favored by the tax code was a big one. A smaller one was about how, back in the 1990s, the car companies were already planning for increasingly bloated SUVs, going out to 2005 or so, with the names of the then-unreleased vehicles in the episode.

They weren't responding to demand for urban assault vehicles, they were creating a market and juicing the demand for a profitable product they were already planning to make. Charlie's unthinking repetition of the "you've got to have a big SUV to defend yourself" is a marketing line, not reality, as the Ford "Exploder" proved.

The assault rifle makers in the US are currently using the same tactics to sell their guns, despite our dropping crime rates.

Now, the car companies are reportedly building mostly trucks, SUVs and high end sedans. Why? Computer chip supply shortages dating back to the pandemic. They made the mistake of computerizing functions (seat warmers?), and they screwed up their chip orders in 2020. So now that they're short on chips, they're apparently prioritizing them for the most profitable vehicles. These aren't what most people want to buy, which are affordable commuter cars, it's most of what they can get at the moment.

But the bottom line is that, when you have a complex product, like an AI, SUV, AR-15, drug, or whatever your preferred shiny is, if you're selling it commercially, you can't spend years getting the supply lines ready, then hope there's a demand for it. You've got to create that demand through marketing. The market doesn't follow consumer's demands, it works hard to coerce us into buying what they're selling.

296:

OK. You're talking Section 179 capital asset write offs. It is not just trucks. It is almost any kind of asset used for business more than 50% of the time. Computers count. Almost any auto. Instead of depreciating the asset (up to about $1mil) and deducting the depreciation amount from your income as an expense you can take it all in the first year as an expense.

This just gets back to using a a truck instead of a sedan/coupe (I forget what it is called in the UK/EU) for business is a bit crazy in my mind but it is NOT aimed at trucks.

And if you don't keep (or invent) decent records is one of the top things that will bite you in an audit. Which is why the Apple and Google App stores are full of mileage tracking apps.

Oh, you can't just do this indefinitely as a way to not pay taxes. There are rules about showing a profit (or at least getting close). Tax accountants get rich assisting big businesses putting side companies into insolvency as a tax dodge but it's much harder for a sole proprietor to do such.

297:

I believe John Oliver did a segment on this issue in early April. My understanding was that it wasnt a tax incentive but an tariff/ import incentive on auto manufacturers, as well as the USA auto companies inability to develop cars to compete with import vehicles, so they focused on light trucks, the classification that includes SUV's and pick-up trucks.

298:

That is the manufacturers'/petrolhead polemic, to be sure, but all the assertions are demonstrably false in the EU and UK.

299:

As you saqy, but I think there's more to it than that. Even the price of the low-end models has gone up far more than inflation. I smell a rat - a rotten one.

In addition to the fact that GDP/capita has been almost flat for more than the period mentioned, the price and (lack of) availability of spare parts is one of the reasons that the second-hand car market has boomed in the past decade or two. The problem in the link predates Brexit, incidentally. People have been reported as swapping their new cars for older models, for this reason; I have met some, so suspect that it's fairly common. And, unlike days of yesteryear, even seriously old low-end cars (like my 2011 Skoda Fabia) sell for fairly large amounts (say, 40% of what I paid for it), and ones with 150,000 on the clock still sell well.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jun/08/mercedes-says-it-cant-find-a-vital-part-for-my-2018-car

300:

I own a pickup truck. It gets used when needed. It has sat unused at times for over a month.

Never mind the tax code -- why not rent a pickup truck when you need one, instead of owning one and have it sit unused?

301:

"Alas, on today's roads a modernized electric 2CV would feel like a death trap."

Disagree. I would be perfectly happy to drive an original unmodified 2CV on today's roads, apart from the sole point that the top speed is inadequate. A vehicle needs to have a top speed reasonably in excess of the legal limit, so that at the legal limit it still has plenty of spare capacity in hand to cope with adverse gradients, headwinds and so on, without struggling to keep up with the traffic. Although that is probably less of a problem for a 2CV now than it was when they were being advertised with the headline "At 71.5mph you'll hear a funny noise" and a picture of a flashing blue light reflected in the rear view mirror. The retrospective joke being that they would have had far more vehicles exceeding 85mph to be chasing then than they do now.

I despise the way people have been conditioned into thinking the ever-increasing load of safety bollocks on cars is actually necessary and they daren't risk driving a car that doesn't have it. The vast majority of people simply never experience a situation where it does anything useful at all, and even fewer one where it actually makes a critical difference. But they all pay the multiple penalties for its existence and the manner of its implementation, in the increased cost of the fuel needed to drag around the extra weight, much of the massive increase in insurance costs, the increased cost of the car itself, and the greater likelihood of the necessity of its premature replacement. And also the indirect penalties from the additional carbon dioxide emissions from burning the extra fuel, and the amount of unnecessary additional production and unnecessary activity in general.

The SafeTiPed comes irresistibly to mind, but at least that was a "proper" design, that did actually concentrate on its ostensible aim and so did sensible things like reducing size and mass. What we have now is worse, because it is not inspired by the intention of increasing safety, it just says it is. It's a commercial inspiration with the intention of increasing profit. The manufacturers can charge disproportionately more for the greater mass of materials in the car by using "safety" as an excuse. They can sell new cars more often by inventing extra features that reduce the chance of some particular type of injury from 0.000001 to 0.00000099 and convincing people it's suicidal not to have them. They can surround the front ends of cars with "energy absorbing" bits of tinfoil and plastic which interlock in such a way that even a trivial ding at walking pace will destroy several of them, and then charge outrageous prices for the replacement parts. They can also incorporate tinfoil elements in the structure, so that a ding at slightly above walking pace that a car fifty years ago would still have shrugged off will now irreparably ruin the suspension alignment, and they get to sell a whole new car.

And it's easy to get the legislators in on the racket, because so many of them think the unnecessary extra production and activity is actually desirable, and the magic word "safety" is great for propaganda and for making sure nobody argues against it because they look like a murderer if they do.

Compare the absence of commercial inspiration and paucity of legislative support for such notions as, for instance, that relying on the surrounding armoured cage for protection may not be the best way of going about things...

302:

See #286.

There is also evidence that (at least in the UK) 'safety' features have probably killed more people than they have saved, even ignoring the pollution aspects, because of the way they discourage walking and cycling, with the consequent reduction of the population's health. Apparently, the average speed went up by 10% following the introduction of seat belts.

303:

Naomi Klein rooted out the source of the SUV/Truck inanity in North America, in that the US had a minor trade dispute with whatever the EU was called in the 70s over import tariffs on chickens. In retaliation they placed a tariff on imports of light trucks.

Building on that, US automakers successfully had SUVs defined as 'light trucks', which provided them with a built-in market advantage on trucks and SUVs. They then started marketing heavily - watch any sporting event on television and you see some of the ~10 Billion/annum spent on marketing trucks and SUVs.

A trivial retaliatory measure in a trivial trade dispute about chickens leading to catastrophic climate change. Somehow it might be a fitting epitaph for our species.

Some of the knock-on effects have been that the US automakers have had no incentive to make 'better' trucks or SUVs because they have the bonus profit margin. Those few 'foreign' automakers who sell trucks into the US market have had to compete on quality, which is why the Toyota trucks (among others) are vastly superior in durability, safety, fuel efficiency etc.

304:

ROTFLMAO!

Feel free to look up General Semantics, and the core of it, the Structural Differential, that Korzybski developed almost a century ago... and tell me the difference.

305:

European Common Market? I remember a "Chicken war" in the sixties, much attention to a pick-up variant of the VW type 2, Volkswagens being a far more common import back then.

306:

Disagree. I would be perfectly happy to drive an original unmodified 2CV on today's roads, apart from the sole point that the top speed is inadequate.

Since I drive an EV, I'll add two points of clarity, from a US perspective.

One is that primary safety isn't about top speed or mass, it's about moving at the speed of the surrounding cars. Going too slow is as problematic as going too fast.

This, incidentally, is why safety features only go so far. If a car wipes out going, say, 130 kph, the people inside are in danger no matter what size the car is.

Small EVs have one safety feature that got missed: superior acceleration to most ICE vehicles. Being able to simply scoot out of the way of an idiot in a bloatmobile is the biggest safety feature that modern EVs, and old subcompacts, have.

This is what got missed in the idea of a 2CV-equivalent EV. Such cars don't accelerate rapidly, and that's a safety handicap.

307:

In '08, my late ex and I were in Colorado for Worldcon, and visited friends of mine before the con. They took us up I think it was up Mount Evans (a bit taller than Pike's Peak). We got hailed on in early August, looking out at a glacial cirque*. At the top, over 14,000', we didn't stay that long, because I actually started having issues breathing.

* It took me a while, looking at the cirque, until I finally realized, and told the others it reminded me of my youth, but there weren't any mammoths there....

308:

Magic is Money and Money is Magic.

Missed commenting on this when you wrote it. Sorry!

This is a really good idea, whether on its own or paired with the idea of "mani" in 28 (mani is like both mana and money).

The one thing that would make it even twitchier is to add the real world problem of intergenerational wealth transfer, which is the major existential threat that wealthy families see. It's a major threat for talented families too, for much the same reason.

309:

bing Charlie has it dead right.

In '04, I wound up working on the Kerry campaign (after Faux Noise destroyed Dean). I was talking to a woman also working it, and she was a dentist, and told me how her accountant had tried to get her to buy an SUV for tax purposes, since they were listed as "light trucks", and so...

This was in Brevard Co, Florida, where the highest point is 25 meters.

310:

why not rent a pickup truck when you need one, instead of owning one and have it sit unused?

All kinds of reasons. That I'll admit do not apply to everyone.

While I might not drive it for a month, I might also drive it 6 out of 7 days one week.

When I NEED it I need it NOW. Not after 3 hours of acquiring it for a 1 hour need. Or waiting till the next day. Or Monday.

Small truck / cargo van rentals come in mostly 3 flavors. Rental car companies that treat them as passenger cars. Scratch it and you get to pay for a body shop to fix it. Mostly Nope. Short term places like U-Haul. $20 a day but $.50/mile. A very specific use case. Long term business rentals for weeks or months. Nope. Also the hours of WHEN you can rent or if they have one on a lot near you also make it harder.

Most consumers who rent for a day or few are doing things like taking home an IKEA load, moving to a new apartment, getting a load of mulch for the yard. Things that might need a truck one to a few times per year. I carry things in mine that will not fit into most any passenger cars (even if you didn't mind the load in the car) typically every week or few.

As I said, I'm not a typical use case.

311:

The Youtube channel Not Just Bikes released a video about the truck/SUV-insanity a few months ago. It covers the history, the chicken tax debacle, how the trucks are growing like tumors etc.

Fair warning: Jason Slaughter can be quite opinionated, and in this case he was furious when he made the video. He's still right though, IMO.

These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo

312:

Because their marketing dept is pushing bigger (ROI). I have 100% confidence that most of the idiots who can't drive their massively oversized pickups do not ever use it for work, given the pristine condition of most.

And because the US auto industry is staffed by former jocks, and bigger is better, and....

313:

“There is also evidence that (at least in the UK) 'safety' features have probably killed more people than they have saved, even ignoring the pollution aspects, because of the way they discourage walking and cycling, with the consequent reduction of the population's health.”

What is your evidence for this? Current road safety features have pretty definitely reduced direct road deaths. ( https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/556406/rrcgb2015-02.pdf “In the last 30 years Great Britain’s population has grown by 15 per cent (8.1 million people). Despite this growth in population, road fatalities have fallen by 68 per cent...”)

What is the evidence that the safety measures driving this decrease are outweighed by health reductions caused by those measures.

314:

That hasn't been true for decades. Vehicles take years to design, because all the supply chains also have to be built or upgraded, factories have to be tooled, people or robots skilled up, labor contracts done, politicians greased, etc.

Yes. But. Only for new models with new options.

My 2016 Civic came out of an assembly factory in Indiana that made Civics at the time with a list price of $20K to $28K. Maybe more as I wasn't looking at the sport models. It doesn't take years to switch the mix to more at or near $28K from $20K. Days to months depending. And the Civic is a low end car. Teslas at times have had a much wider spread. And to bring this full circle back to pickup trucks I think the low to high end spread on a Ford F-150 and similar trucks from others is maybe 1 to 3.

Another reason was supply chains. In the US if you were buying a car in 2020/2021 you might find a new dealer with 20 cars on a lot set up to hold 200. And most or all of those 20 were waiting for the buyer to show up in a day or two. My son had to buy one during this time. The sticker price was what you paid. Period.

In the US in the past the sticker price for most cars was a starting point for negotiations. The supply chain induced shortages ended that. And if you can only make and sell a very limited number of cars, why not make the most expensive ones that you could sell?

And in general for popular models the dealers would add various local options. In Dallas a Honda dealer put pin stripes on all their cars and marked them up $500. The Honda Civic I bought had anti-theft wheel locks installed. And no option to remove them. I suspect that $175 option cost the dealer $30. And back in the day of restrictions on Japanese cars in the 80s / 90s a local Honda dealer had ADP $500 on the sticker. ADP = Additional Dealer Profit.

315:

it wasnt a tax incentive but an tariff/ import incentive on auto manufacturers, as well as the USA auto companies inability to develop cars to compete with import vehicles, so they focused on light trucks, the classification that includes SUV's and pick-up trucks.

I'm sure the details of the rule making are buried deep but SUVs and light trucks are NOT a part of the CAFE fleet standards for MPG that manufacturers have to meet. So the car manufacturers now market such vehicles to people who really don't need them. I think of it as putting the ruler on the edge of the table and asking all the guys to unzip type of marketing.

316:

You're talking about SUVs and trucks. I was referring to the low end getting more expensive in passenger cars.

Not saying you're wrong about trucks.

317:

ISTR that you're a USian, so perhaps this query is better directed to a USian tax accountant than to a UK writer?

It was a UK writer making a statement about the US tax code that didn't make sense as stated.

While not an accountant, I'm a US sole proprietor who does his own taxes with a daughter in the accounting/audit industry. If it didn't make sense to me then why should I not ask the person making the statement?

318:

This is what got missed in the idea of a 2CV-equivalent EV. Such cars don't accelerate rapidly, and that's a safety handicap.

The original 2CV didn't accelerate fast because it had a 29 hp 600cc engine. Given its weight, that's equivalent to a Tesla Model 3 with 90 hp (instead of the 480 hp it actually has). Oh, and that 29hp/600cc engine in the 2CV was the biggest version -- it originally came with a 9hp, 375cc engine.

I think if you built a modern 2CV with better suspension and tires, and a bit more power, it would be entirely tolerable.

Pigeon is dead wrong, by the way, about small cars needing to be capable of considerably exceeding the speed limit. What they need is to be able to accelerate throughout the legal speed range. And for all vehicles to be fitted with a mandatory GPS-controlled speed governor to prevent speeding so the small cars don't have to exceed the speed limit to avoid idiots in Land Rovers.

319:

Cars of all kinds are in short supply, as several comments on this thread point out. I'm not sure "low supply + demand = prices go up" needs a conspiracy theory?

320:

Have you heard of the term "obesity epidemic" and seen the figures for both that and type II diabetes? A major factor is lack of daily exercise, and both walking and cycling have changed from being main modes of transport to minor ones over the past 70 years. The evidence of causation is from people who have studied the epidemiology of both areas; it's not easy to find, largely because it makes the government look bad, and that means that research into it and publication is definitely not encouraged. There is AMPLE evidence that daily exercise extends life expectancy considerably, that walking and cycling as modes of transport USED TO provide that, and that most people don't do anything like enough.

321:

As a cyclist, I utterly LOATHE drivers who treat the speed limit (and white lines) as absolute. The safe way to pass a cyclist is to wait until there is a suitable gap, floor the pedal, pull over onto the other side of the road, overtake, pull back, and slow down again. The rule fetishists are the ones that pass far too closely, and for far too long.

So it's not QUITE that simple.

322:

And it's easy to get the legislators in on the racket, because so many of them think the unnecessary extra production and activity is actually desirable....

Read "The Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl. One collection I read it in had a forward where Mr. Pohl was amazed that it was being in University economics classes. It explains sooooo much about modern business.

323:

Eh? The price increases were fixed WELL BEFORE the chip shortage.

324:

There is AMPLE evidence that daily exercise extends life expectancy considerably, that walking and cycling as modes of transport USED TO provide that, and that most people don't do anything like enough.”

But what does this have to do with making vehicles safer? You said safety features killed more people.

Rise of motoring=rise of obesity, yes. Investment in road safety = rise in obesity??

And it’s not just car occupants who have got safer (at least in UK, think rise of mega-trucks in US may lead to different outcomes). See for example: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2021/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2021#casualty-rates-per-mile-travelled

Table two shows that per mile walked pedestrian injuries and deaths massively reduce over time. How does making walking twice as safe in two decades discourage exercise?

325:

Re. Charlie's reply in comment 248:

Not sure I'll be rereading "Saturn's Children" any time soon. That's not a critique of the writing or storytelling... just that if I want a depressing read, I'll read the local newspapers. Instead, I'll go read something optimistic like "Season of Skulls".

326:

You are not wrong in linking at least part of the obesity epidemic to the increase in driving over human powered transport. There is also a link between reduced traffic fatalities and improved vehicle safety.

Your mistake lies in forging your very own additional link between the two correlations to state that increased traffic safety causes increased obesity. They correlate, they do not have a causal link. You have taken two pieces of steel chain and drawn an additional link between them in crayon.

327:

"And for all vehicles to be fitted with a mandatory GPS-controlled speed governor to prevent speeding so the small cars don't have to exceed the speed limit to avoid idiots in Land Rovers."

Cue the resurgence of off-market GPS spoofing devices... ;) Joke aside, I agree in principle, but wonder whether the Finish/Swedish approach might not be easier to implement: https://robbreport.com/lifestyle/news/finnish-multi-millionaire-nearly-130k-speeding-ticket-1234852538/

Essentially (as little as I understand it) this approach scales the fine associated with a speeding ticket with the speeder's wealth so that the impact of the ticket becomes more equally "painful" to all offenders...

328:

They need to get better at it.

I have a 2020 vintage car that displays the current speed limit on the dash, highlighted if exceeded. It uses a mix of GPS maps and sign reading.

It works pretty well except for when it's hilariously wrong. I'd say it's correct about 95% of the time.

Most of the errors are missing the end of a temporary speed limit or similar, but from time to time it will suddenly decide I'm allowed to go at 180mph.

329:

Please do not misrepresent me. I did not say that. I said that there was evidence for a causal link between vehicular safety features and the reduction in walking and cycling. The relevant period is before the one quoted by Johnny99.2 because there have been almost no significant improvements in vehicular safety features in the past 20 years, and the earlier period is when the demise of walking and cycling occurred.

The NTS is one of the most misleading sources of data imaginable, and has got worse since it was privatised; if it is to believed, both the (car) distance driven and number of trips are dropping steadily. Well, why do we need more road capacity, then?

If you look at its summaries, you will see that walking is not a significant mode of transport where it might come into conflict with cars (e.g. the ,ean trip distance is 0.7 miles), and cycling is little better. Since the government privatised it, it hasn't been possible to see the data but, in the last year it was available, it was clear that most of the distance and trips was either uses like taking small children round a park, or a small number of dedicated cyclists (15+ miles a trip). The mean distance and number of trips is misleading, small enough though they are.

No, I can't face the thought of reverse engineering better data from their summaries, though I have done it before :-(

330:

Strongly disagree. The effect of making the "speed limit" a hard cap will be to make overtaking anyone moving at 75% of the extra-urban limit on dual track roads impossible unless you get mile long straights. Now, if instead we make the speed limiter allow full throttle acceleration for, say, 30 seconds after which it becomes a soft limiter and will not allow reapplication of power until the vehicle speed drops below said limit, when we may, repeat may, be getting somewhere with still allowing drivers who make progress at the speed limit to do so.

331:

EC on temporarily exceeding the limit to get past cyclists - as a fellow-cyclist - SPOT ON. Recently, in the L-R I was approaching a long hill which has a bend half-way up - speed limit 60 mph ... the bimbler in front of me was halfway out, doing 35 - I flashed them, they SLOWED DOWN, so I floored the pedal, hit about 55 & was past them.
In a car, you are safer in front of idiots like that, compared to behind them.
OTOH, last week, I cycled more-or-less the full length of the main part of Epping Forest at dusk - as soon as I could, I got off the main road & went down the back parallel road & then the gravel-tracks ... much safer.
AND I saw 5 foxes & a Muntjac

332:

I wasn't referencing anything by NTS (assuming we refer to the same acronym) but rather my decades of marriage to a transportation, cycling and health activist. Some of the details of her work manages to stick to my faulty brain.

Vancouver has, over the course of decades and a tremendous amount of foot stomping by the car lobby, managed to build out a fair amount of quite decent cycling infrastructure. Aside from the dry policy side of it, I experienced the improvement directly over 20 years of cycle commuting - augmented by transit where necessary and the use of the local car co-op.

There is strong evidence that increasing the safety - real and perceived - of cycling increases the use of cycling. Decreasing it increases car use. None of that is related to the safety for occupants of a car - improving that safety is a good thing.

333:

There is strong evidence that increasing the safety - real and perceived - of cycling increases the use of cycling. Decreasing it increases car use.

Anecdotally, I haven't cycled in decades — ever since the 407 was built. Too bloody dangerous crossing the exit ramps, because drivers don't slow down and are coming over a blind hill — and they hit the bike path before they hit the traffic lanes. And I know from decades of car commuting experience that 407 drivers are more careless/entitled than ordinary drivers…

Note to non-Ontarians: the 407 is a toll highway bypassing Toronto. Originally conceived as a bypass to relieve traffic in the city. Built as a public-private partnership, sold off by Harris' conservative government to balance one budget. Highest tolls in North America. Could have enforced speed limits because entry/exit points are time-stamped and linked to transponder or license plate, but that idea was scotched by the company that runs it on the grounds that sending speeding fines to their patrons would deter use and hurt their business…

334:

Sompletely off topic, but we're past 300 so: the kiwis have just had another review into the voting system and it's reached much the same conclusions as the last few with a minor tweak around the recent court decision that barring under-18's from voting is not compliant with NZ's human rights legislation. There's some good points made in the review but the ruling class are already making use of their fainting couches.

They recommend 16 as the voting age. The 1986 Royal Commission... strong case for lowering the voting age to 16 (also 2011, 2014, 2017, 2020 all suggested "debate" and 2022 said 16 for local government elections)

Changes to donations and disclosure of donors:
* Permitting only registered electors to make donations and loans
* Requiring the disclosure of all donors and lenders who give more than $1,000
* Expanding the definition of donation to include a range of fundraising activities.

https://electoralreview.govt.nz/

I'm mostly amazed that one of my strong preferences has finally made it onto the list (only voters can donate). It's upset a lot of rich people, especially non-resident ones.

The next step is to tie voting rights to tax resident status. If you're not a kiwi for tax purposes should you really be voting?

335:

You mean sort of like how Scotland has 16 as the voting age for all elections except Westminster ones?

336:

you are safer in front of idiots like that, compared to behind them

I'm pretty sure they felt safer with you ahead of them, too.

337:

drivers who treat the speed limit (and white lines) as absolute

I can't agree about the speed thing, but in terms of white lines it's interesting. In the state of Queensland it's forbidden to cross a double white line with one exception, and that's when it's necessary to provide the mandatory 1.5m clearance when overtaking a cyclist (more is encouraged). I believe the exception was written into the highway code at the same time as the rules about 1.5m clearance were brought in, though it's not such a burning issue that I am inclined to go check. Queensland is relatively cycle friendly from the point of view of the law (and there's a lot of investment in cycle infrastructure, it seems to get bipartisan support though that could be because it's largely the wealthy, conservative-leaning electorates who lobby for bike paths and lanes), but the motorist culture in Queensland leans hard in the opposite direction, with a lot of people who seem to see speed limits as a guaranteed minimum you should be able to go anytime anywhere and anyone in your way is (clearly, obviously) in the wrong.

338:

Too bloody dangerous crossing the exit ramps

I find this really interesting. In Queensland cyclists are forbidden from motorways, but not open highways out in between places, though I'm really not sure where the transitions between these are, or even how you'd get out to the open highway on a bike, since the motorways are often the only road. I have noticed in NSW on our recent road trip there are cycle lanes most of the way along the Pacific Highway (M1/A1/M1), with the entry and exit ramps having signs warning motorists of cyclists crossing. Some even have dedicated cyclist crossing zones.

339:

Completely off topic but time to look up Scalzi's Schadenfreude Pie recipe. Gotta celebrate Ol' Agent Orange being told he has to be in court next Tuesday at 3 pm for a very special date with a judge. And with an indictment or three under the US Espionage Act.*

Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy, IMHO. Now off to find that recipe...

*Bets that he'll seek political asylum in Moscow over the weekend? Or Riyadh?

340:

Very similar. But with the amusing effect that those dang youf took what was offered and promptly demanded more. If 'they' don't want youf thinking about politics maybe don't fuck youf over politically? Just an idea.

341:

The "road user suggestions" are much the same in NSW as far as bicycles go. But as with all suggestions few motorists know what they are or care to follow them if they do. I occasionally wonder whether motorists using that clause know they're doing so or just DGAF about the suggestions painted on the road either.

342:

Pacific Highway (M1/A1/M1), with the entry and exit ramps having signs warning motorists of cyclists crossing. Some even have dedicated cyclist crossing zones.

Usually those are designed so they're out of the sight line of motorists using the exit for as long as possible. Which seems backwards to me, but that's how they're drawn. Motorists and busy exits are a bad combo at the best of times, just starting to slow down and suddenly there's a cyclist crossing slowly at right angles to their path just seems like a recipe for disaster.

We won't discuss the "suggestion" that cyclists ride part-way down the exit, perform a right angle turn, then ride back to the high speed route they were on to continue their travels. It's not relevant to motor transport engineers, it's not relevant to us.

343:

In completely unrelated news, on busy roads I like to have a really bright constant rear light plus a really bright flashing one. As well as a rear-facing camera, reflective tape on the and reflective gear. I want the coroners report to fall back to "well he shouldn't have ridden on the road".

344:

Shortly after I finished grad school and we moved back to Vancouver I was unemployed and trying to fix a shelf we had in our house. All I needed was a 25 cent piece from Ikea, which was just on the other side of the Knight Street Bridge. If you don't know, said bridge is a major thoroughfare for heavy trucks, commuters and all other traffic through the city, which terminates/originates at the Port of Vancouver.

Being as I was unemployed and apparently had no real sense of risk/reward, I decided that I might as well just ride my bicycle over the bridge, buy the piece and ride back. I did not anticipate the multiple blind off and on ramps that I would have to cross. There was a separated sidewalk that was about 15mm wider than the handlebars of my bike.

I distinctly remember crossing the second blind, high speed offramp and thinking 'I'm going to die for a 25 cent piece of shelf'. Easily one of the most dangerous hours of my life, and I've ridden out a week long hurricane force storm in a fish boat off the West coast of Haida Gwaii.

345:

RocketJPS
Agree 150% - particularly since I got Wiley E Bicycle & now always wear a helmet & an (Rail-Orange) high-vis.
My greatest fear is of E-scooter fuckwits - no lights, no helmets & do not appear to look where they are going .... colliding with one of them & being thrown ito the path of something heavier isn't a funny prospect.
...
Damian
Yes, they could safely bimble on, paying no attention AT ALL to the traffic conditions, until they drove right off the road!
{ Not only were they going ridiculously slowly, they were "wandering" - i.e. not following a consistent straight(ish) path. }

346:

The figures quoted by Johnny99.2 were. But, to address your specific points, yes, you are right, BUT:

As I said, there is evidence that seat belts increased driver speeds by 10%.

The improved handling of modern cars has led to drivers taking corners faster. That's a particularly bad one, in the UK.

The 'safer' cars are also wider, and mean closer passing of cyclists and pedestrians.

And so on.

As I said, there is evidence that such changes discouraged walking and cycling. Note that I am NOT saying that the same is true for other safety 'improvements' though, as I and others have said, many of them almost certainly increase the danger to vulnerable road users and, in many cases discourage them. The term 'psychle farcility' is all too apt.

The reduction in cyclist and pedestrian deaths in the UK is primarily due to to discouraging them on most transport routes. A walking distance of 0.5 miles (the median in the UK) is a typical distance from a car park to office or shops, for example.

347:

Quite so. You're always better off with the idiots in front of you, where you can see them. If they really want to go faster, they'll disappear ahead. If they just wanted to go first, well there will be an area where it's genuinely safe to overtake again eventually. For the ones who come up behind you flashing their lights when it isn't safe to overtake, you always let them overtake anyway (and slow down to make it easier) because otherwise they will do something really dangerous.

348:

Now, if instead we make the speed limiter allow full throttle acceleration for, say, 30 seconds after which it becomes a soft limiter

That's how GPS-controlled mandatory speed limiters work in the real world. (They make allowances for emergency acceleration, they just prevent continuous driving above the speed limit for long periods.)

349:

I have had such a system nearly create a collision - admittedly, because it was designed by a Complete Idiot. 30 seconds would usually be enough, but not always, and then you get stuck in a dangerous position.

I was overtaking a slow cyclist, floored the pedal, got half way past, and then the engine dropped to an idle. It turned out that it limits me to 2/3 of the maximum RPM in first gear (but not in second or third - I can't speak for fourth and fifth because I don't drive that fast). Luckily, I managed to complete the manoeuvre (the alternatives were an emergency stop in the face of incoming traffic or to run into the cyclist). The emergency stop wouldn't have been catastrophic, provided the oncoming driver was awake, but I try not to rely on such things!

350:

No. You are only better off if they are relatively fast idiots. Many drivers mishandle narrow, twisting roads with hedges, which I learnt to drive in. While they are on average slow, they take the corners too fast and brake hard unpredictably. Also, they block the vision of the car behind.

However, whether or not I would be safer in front, overtaking is rarely possible on such roads unless they cooperate or I know the road very well. 'Eventually' can be half an hour's drive further on. The only viable strategy is to hang back and curse the idiot in front.

This is why lane narrowing as a safety measure is a danger to cyclists - it creates a serious conflict between drivers and them, because it can double the trip time for the drivers. That was one of the reasons I had to give up cycling to work, after doing it for 25 years.

351:

You are only better off if they are relatively fast idiots.

You're saying I shouldn't let Greg overtake then?

352:

This whole conversation just tells me that we need tunneling cars. Overtaking isn't an issue if you can exploit the 3 dimensional freedom of movement available within the earths crust.

Of course some sort of self driving will be required as most people aren't mentally equipped to interpret sonar data but given the likely speeds involved it shouldn't be too difficult.

There may be minor issues related to buried infrastructure, spoil heaps and inconvenient releases of pterodactyls but nothing that can't be dealt with by regulation.

353:

Not only were they going ridiculously slowly, they were "wandering" - i.e. not following a consistent straight(ish) path.

That's classic drunk driver behaviour. Are you sure they weren't over the limit?

354:

Why not harness your inner Fred Flintstone and ride a pterodactyl?

355:

Because if I could do that then it would be a convenient release of pterodactyls rather than an inconvenient one, thus outside the scope of discussion.

356:

Greg Tingey @ 331:

AND I saw 5 foxes & a Muntjac

Are there jackalopes in the UK? (I know Muntjacs exist. To my Canadian sensibilities, it sounds like a fake animal, though).

Heteromeles @339:

Bets that he'll seek political asylum in Moscow over the weekend? Or Riyadh?

Maybe R'lyeh? (we can hope).

Can DJT run for election while resident in a foreign country?

357:

No, but you have to watch out for wild haggis in the Highlands.

https://www.thehaggis.com/wild-haggis-all-about-haggis/

Unfortunately, if he took asylum in R'lyeh, OGH might respond as Lehrer did to Kissinger's Nobel Prize for Peace.

358:

In Queensland cyclists are forbidden from motorways, but not open highways out in between places, though I'm really not sure where the transitions between these are, or even how you'd get out to the open highway on a bike, since the motorways are often the only road.

Here too — bicycles (and pedestrians) forbidden from dual carriageways (which the 407 is).

The problem is the design of the exit ramps. The private part of the public-private partnership had decision-making power and used it to take as many shortcuts as they could get away with. One shortcut was shorter ramps, and the street I'd need to cycle along had a particularly short ramp exiting onto it, which also had a hill so anyone leaving the 407 there had a sharper-than-usual turn over a blind hill before they got to the street.

So you have drivers travelling (on average) faster than usual, and also averaging more entitled behaviour than usual, having to react faster than expected. After too many times witnessing them pulling to a halt barely before traffic (and well into the crosswalk) or not even bothering to stop at the red light because there were no cars coming I decided I'd rather not risk it.

I commuted along the 404 for years, and if there was an accident it was almost invariably at the 407 interchange, either someone getting impatient merging or trying to cut across four lanes of traffic to get to the HOV lane*. Even the 404/401 interchange, which was much busier, had fewer collisions.

I hypothesize that the psychology is a combination of "I've paid a lot of money to use this road rather than wait in traffic, so I should get priority" combined with the well-known tendency of richer people to be less empathetic (and anyone who can afford to use the 407 daily is wealthier than average).


*HOV = High Occupancy Vehicle. Ie. a lane reserved for vehicles carrying multiple ordinary people, or one rich git who's too important to wait with the plebs.

359:

It turned out that it limits me to 2/3 of the maximum RPM in first gear

What is this "gear" you speak of, old-timer?

(Seriously, EVs generally have two gears: forward and reverse. A handful of supercars have two forward gears, but in general EVs don't have 'em unless they're designed to lay down serious rubber tracks at speeds above 200km/h.)

360:

This whole conversation just tells me that we need tunneling cars. Overtaking isn't an issue if you can exploit the 3 dimensional freedom of movement available within the earths crust.

As I keep SHOUTING, all discussions of methods of personal transport are tap-dancing around the essential fact that they all entail sub-optimal trade-offs until we get teleport booths.

Fricken' teleport booths, people. That's the only really conclusive answer.

361:

At least I don't still use a crash box - and, yes, I almost certainly still could do so - but I do regret not being able to rear-wheel drift :-)

362:

Teleport booths work for me as a means of commuting, getting to and from Trout and/or SF cons...

363:

What if it turns out that the only way to make them work is to implement the scanning and reassembly mechanism using a computational assembly of quantum pico-demons?

364:

Mikko Parviainen @ 271:

So, there's this world where people have done the eradication of homosexuality, wanting to go to that (fantasy) 1950s (American) suburbia 'utopia'. It works! No annoying homosexual deviants!

I've sometimes wondered about doing a satirical story (working title "The Cure") where someone discovers how to precisely disable any given unwanted sexual impulse (mumble precision MRI mumble proton beam). The obvious goal of the researchers is to cure (for want of a better word) paedophilia. But then the anti-gay lobby start arguing that even if being gay wasn't a lifestyle choice before, it is now. Nothing about this resolves transexuals because that (AFAIK, being cis myself) isn't a matter of sexual attraction. But that doesn't stop people believing that it does.

Cue lots of messed up thinking about various paraphilias, people who don't want to be heterosexual either, people who have this forced on them and find themselves now asexual, and so on.

(For added yucks, the technique only works on someone who is receiving the target sexual stimulus while in the MRI scanner. So the original researchers had to figure out how they could legally use CSAM in their experiments, on sex offenders who might or might not be entirely willing volunteers. And then it turns out the use of CSAM wasn't actually that legal. And looking at porn turns out to activate different bits of sexuality than actually having sex, so its not quite effective. And so we're in an ethical minefield on a pogo stick, as someone once put it)

365:

Teleport booths would be delightful. Personally I'd love someone to discover personal teleportation a la 'The Stars My Destination'. The knock-on effects of removing travel time for everything would be really incredible (and barely touched on by Bester).

366:

I've sometimes wondered about doing a satirical story (working title "The Cure") where someone discovers how to precisely disable any given unwanted sexual impulse (mumble precision MRI mumble proton beam).

Peter Watts wrote a non-satirical story using that technology. "Eyes of God" asks, among other things, are you a criminal/sinner of you feel the urge to commit an act you know is wrong, but have the self-control not to do it? What if your urges could be made visible? What if they could be eliminated? Would choosing not to have them eliminated become a crime/sin?

Not easy, but a good story. As is usual for Watts.

https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/09/peter-watts-eyes-of-god.html

367:

Charlie @ 353 - re "drunk-driving"
I have absolutely zero idea & I didn't want to find out the hard way (!)

EC 346
The reduction in cyclist and pedestrian deaths in the UK is primarily due to to discouraging them on most transport routes. A walking distance of 0.5 miles (the median in the UK) is a typical distance from a car park to office or shops, for example. - Which I will NEVER do in the L-R - unless I have to transport something really bulky & awkward.
For short journeys & small loads, I have the aforementioned Wiley E + a load-carrying small trailer if I can't get "the load" in my rucksack, or on the back rack..
Like this ....
Wiley E Bicycle - and - Trailer

368:

First thought: someone hacks the machines, to turn CSI gay, or gender fluid.

I can see a lot of suicides and lawsuits.

369:

whitroth
Talking of lawsuits ... how's the Rump shitshow going?
I assume his side will try to stretch it out as long as possible?

370:

This is two separate indictments. We're expecting more, including from Georgia. And some of that may be state, which a President can't pardon.

371:

Short term he will do what he always does and use it to wind the grift machine. For reasons of public insanity he will receive a lot of additional donations etc.

Long-term he is likely to be convicted. Very rarely do federal prosecutors in the US charge someone unless they are almost 100% certain they can get a conviction. Triply so in this case, because they will be under a microscope. I suspect they have irrefutable evidence of blatant lawbreaking (no doubt he bragged about it on camera/sold some of it and kept the receipts). He will also not stop talking, which helps prosecutors immensely.

He is also likely to continue his electoral campaign. Given that the Republican party has become entirely bereft of quality candidates, he may well end up the nominee, and possibly even the president.

In the event he is convicted he will probably just die rather than spend 1 minute in prison. Alternatively he will suddenly manifest a debilitating ailment that means he cannot possibly go to prison (but then brag about it shortly afterwards).

372:

Alternatively he will suddenly manifest a debilitating ailment that means he cannot possibly go to prison

He's got form for using convenient medical excuses…

373:

On EV speed and acceleration & limiters. I have a fairly middle of the road small family car style EV. Range is fine for local stuff, annoying but manageable for long distance.

It will out accelerate petrol cars 3 times the price, while looking like a toy.

It clearly has a limiter as it goes from good acceleration to none at an exact multiple of 10mph.

On teleport booths: yes so long as there is still a way to go the last mile (or ten), and if you can convinced me I haven't just violently wasted someone very similar to myself.

374:

Seriously, EVs generally have two gears: forward and reverse.

I don't think there is even a gear for that, they just run the motor in reverse.

375:

So your hypothesis is:

A) increased car safety measures (seat belts + wider vehicles) lead to a more hostile and dangerous environment for cyclist and pedestrians (faster cars taking up more road)

B) a decrease in walking and cycling results from this

C) the resultant health impacts from this decrease (people taking less exercise) outweigh the safety benefits meaning a net negative effect.

Meaning we’d have better overall outcomes if we all drove 2CVs with no seatbelts? More dead motorists, lots more healthy pedestrians and cyclists

(Only pursuing this as we over 300 comments, obviously happy for OGH to tell me to shush )

376:

Alternatively he will suddenly manifest a debilitating ailment that means he cannot possibly go to prison (but then brag about it shortly afterwards).

Nope. Doesn't work that way. He would likely wind up about 30 miles from here at Butner. It's where Bernie Madoff spent the last years of his life. Low security but still behind razor wire. You can drive past it. I have.

If someone there needs serious medical care they equip a room or two and bring in docs from the area. Duke and UNC are world class in terms of medical care if you want to spend the $$$. (US total medical system not with standing.) And if needed both have the facilities to house someone at their hospitals under tight guard. Duke is where the uber rich show up for medical car with an entourage of 100 or more at times. The bills for their care and feeding supports all kinds of research. Anyway Duke was have the facilities for someone like Trump and a team of Secret Service agents if needed.

377:

Sorry, I could have sworn he made it clear that was NOT what he was saying. Rather that a lot of the "safety measures" made in the last 20 years (come on, seat belts and laws about them are so 20th century).

I think a lot of his thoughts could be summed up in the half-hour video.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo

378:

Please drop this line of discussion. It's annoyingly confrontational and won't produce anything of interest to anyone else.

380:

Vulch
AND Mad bloody Nad is also going immediately - two bye-elections coming up, oh what fun!

381:

The knock-ons would also include very, very rapid pandemic pathogen spread.

Maybe not a massively good idea?

382:

There is nothing stopping Sunak from simply leaving the seats vacant. There would be the usual ineffectual screams, but nothing could be done to change that short of a vote of no confidence.

383:

"The knock-ons would also include very, very rapid pandemic pathogen spread.

Maybe not a massively good idea?"

Luckily I don't have any way to make it happen then. On top of that it would be horribly easy for terrorists and other violent persons to do a lot of damage, and all but impossible for them to be stopped or even caught.

OTOH it would change a lot of other things very quickly. No more shipping, no need for trains or roads larger than a walking path. Borders would cease to make sense. Militaries would become wholly different or utterly fall apart.

I'll never write it, but it would be a fun sf story to change that one major constraint and see what happens next. Throw in some constraints like 'must have been to the spot before' or 'must have precise coordinates' and it could be a good story.

384:

Some speculation that she may have jumped so Boris could stand in her seat where she had a much larger nmajority. Local party want a local candidate though...

385:

He is also likely to continue his electoral campaign. Given that the Republican party has become entirely bereft of quality candidates, he may well end up the nominee, and possibly even the president.

The interesting problem is that if he's convicted under the Espionage Act, he can't hold office. My guess is that the current pack of roadkill skunks* Republican candidates are hoping that's what happens, so that the Republican voters in 2024 will be forced to hold their noses and vote for the least bad option. Perhaps we should call it the rankest form of rank choice voting?

I'd also guess that the SCOTUS will either refuse to hear his appeal or vote 7-2 against him, when it comes to that. They don't lose by sending him down.

As for whether he sees the inside of a prison, gets locked up inside Mar A Lago, or defects to another country? We'll find out. Sigh.

*Since I'm posting this on a Friday afternoon, I'll indulge in the quaint tradition of some American radio stations and broadcast this. In honor of the GOP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssSIKOrSNk

386:

I take it you haven't read my "Merchant Princes" series -- especially not right through to the end of "Invisible Sun" (which crams another three books' worth of worldbuilding into the last 100 pages, just so I could blow it all up and not have to go back to write more of them).

It's not exactly teleportation but some of the implications of travel between alternate universe versions of Earth are, shall we say, similarly alarming.

387:

the Republican voters in 2024 will be forced to hold their noses and vote for the least bad option

Yes, but it's already mid-2023 and AIUI Trump is very unlikely to be convicted in less than 3-12 months (unless they offer him a plea bargain and he takes it, which in view of his ego I find vanishingly unlikely).

That would leave the Republican campaign for a vote in November 2024 heading forward with the Trump pick for VPOTUS heading the ticket, no? And ever since roughly 1982 (and the assassination attempt on Reagan) the choice of VP has been to some extent dictated by the desire to deter attempts at ballistic regime change.

So. Who's Trump going to pick for VP on his ticket? Shudder: MTG may hit some of the high notes -- she's a Screaming Jesus Person on the far right of the party but she's also female so that's another checkbox and a raving ammosexual so there's that, too. If Trump wants the Christian dominionist vote she's a logical choice now that Pence betrayed him.

And no, I do not want to see President Marjorie Taylor Greene in the White House.

388:

And no, I do not want to see President Marjorie Taylor Greene in the White House.

You may not have to worry about that:

https://news.yahoo.com/people-sure-think-marjorie-taylor-053253337.html

389:

That would leave the Republican campaign for a vote in November 2024 heading forward with the Trump pick for VPOTUS heading the ticket, no?

Not quite. The Republican convention will pick the party's candidate. It ain't over--for either party--until their respective conventions. Normally this is just empty ritual. Until it matters. Don't forget that in our current gerontocracy, either or both of them could wake up dead of natural causes.

390:

Did she actually commit a crime, or is she just channelling Tailgunner Joe?

More to the point, how many Republican voters would vote for her despite this, especially as she is claiming that the FBI are protecting Democrats? Or possibly make an extra effort to vote because of this, because they are all for locking Democrats up?

391:

Meaning we’d have better overall outcomes if we all drove 2CVs with no seatbelts?

There's a theory that if cars had a spike in the middle of the steering wheel people would drive much more carefully. Especially now that airbags mean the spike would be launched through their head in any collision, regardless of how enthusiastically the driver pushed backwards.

Sadly the few cars that had that feature proved unpopular and now steering columns are built to collapse when the driver body-slams them.

A safer-for-all alternative would be the one they use on some bike routes: stairs. If motors regularly had to dismount and lift their vehicle up a step they'd be inclined to chose the minimum possible vehicle for their trip. That has all sorts of benefits, not least energy consumption both from embodied energy and the energy required to move the smaller vehicle. You would have to go quite this far, but it gives you the idea...

392:

I like to devise tortures for people who lay out cycle routes under the assumption that no kind of obstacle is unreasonable as long as it is preceded by a CYCLISTS DISMOUNT sign.

393:

There's a theory that if cars had a spike in the middle of the steering wheel people would drive much more carefully.

A friend of mine nearly died when two young idiots street racing blew through a red light and totalled her car. It took several operations (good surgeon, you can barely see the scars on her face) and ages in the hospital, and her daughter was traumatized for years.

With that spike she'd be dead, and her daughter an orphan.

By "drive more carefully" do you mean "keep an eye out for idiots weaving through traffic at 100 km/h in a 50 km/h zone"?

394:

You'd have to ask the people who think that theory is a good one. I don't this this is a discussion likely to lead to positive results.

I agree that cars are incredibly damaging to society on several levels, and your friend was one of the more obvious victims of her behaviour. But like football players who get brain injuries, the solution isn't to lay all the blame on the other players, it's to point out that the game is damaging and no-one should play it.

395:

»The interesting problem is that if he's convicted under the Espionage Act, he can't hold office.«

The trouble probably starts well before that.

Some of the charges are under the Espionage Act, where suspects are, almost by definition, a "Flight Risk", so bail is not indicated.

It is in fact the rule, with very few exceptions, that suspects under the Espionage Act, are held in solitary confinement pending trial, no matter how long that might take.

The one and only case where kid-gloves were ever worn were Petraeus, who leaked secrets showing how fantastic he himself was to his lover, but even he was taken into custody, pending trial.

Anything you say while in custody, except when you and your lawyer are sitting in the special room, can and will be used against you, and there are persistent rumours that in Espionage cases, even the things you tell your lawyer is subject to arms-length-review, to make sure no secrets are leaked that way either.

That is not exactly an optimal environment for running an election campaign, and who knows what his brain will do, if left for days or weeks on end, with an audience of just one idiot ?

Yes, I know the judge appointed is a trump appointee, but anything she does is instantly reviewable for "plain error" and "abuse of discretion", so the damage she can do is very limited, and will mostly just prolong the case needlessly.

The only real variable in my mind, is if he tries to abscond abroad, before his appearance in front of the judge on Wednesday, and if so, who would dare host him ?

But yeah, half of USA is brainwashed well enough that he might still become their next president.

396:

»So. Who's Trump going to pick for VP on his ticket? Shudder: MTG«

MTG would not work, she's not *ILF enough.

397:

RocketJPS
Already been done, some years ago ( Like the 1980's ) by Larry Niven.

P H-K @ 395
VERY interesting.
Could the Drumpf make it to Belarus or St Petersburg in the remaining narrow time-space?
And would he be prevented from fleeing, anyway?
What other countries have no extradtion to the USA? N Korea & ... ?

399:

Professor John Adams of University College London has done quite a lot of interesting work on this over the years - as you make things safer people start to take more risk to compensate. If of interest pull that thread out in the interwebs.

Applies to quite a bit of other areas (respecting OGH’s directive to stop talking about transport safety statistics - mystifying as I find it that others don’t share my interest), for example that a lot of the effect of more efficient heating and better home insulation is not to reduce energy / carbon but rather people take the benefit by making their houses warmer in cold weather.

400:

This whole conversation just tells me that we need tunneling cars. Overtaking isn't an issue if you can exploit the 3 dimensional freedom of movement available within the earths crust.

I'll remind you that this was experimentally demonstrated with trains decades ago. No, not train tunnels, but a overhead rail system allowing one car to pass over another while in motion, through a simple arrangement of ramps and a set of rails on the roof. Predictably, this was never adopted in daily service.

It lacked the self evident practicality of the jet engine locomotive...

401:

There are many compensation/offset effects around. But home temperature is not really in the same class, it's reasonably explained as people would prefer a warmer/cooler home but couldn't afford it.

There are related negatives though, and arguably Australia's move to black roofs and no eaves is one - you can compensate for both problems with a bigger air conditioner, and smaller eaves lets the builder get more floor space on a given amount of land. So we've gone from the major energy use being hot water to it being air conditioning, and the annual summer discussion of how badly whether the electricity grid will fail.

Sadly much of this is longer term than any modern government can deal with, from the decade-ish to turn over the car fleet to the century-ish to replace a sewer system or housing stock. And of course the AIs that run the place don't see any profit in making things better for the insects that rush about doing nothing of significance (one of the popular phrases in AI fearmongering is "we don't negotiate with ants"... so why would AI negotiate with us. Observation suggests that they don't).

The gripping side is that a lot of this behaviour is very directly money based, so can be manipulated via money supply. Internalise some of the currently externalised costs and watch behaviour change very fast indeed.

402:

Could the Drumpf make it to Belarus or St Petersburg in the remaining narrow time-space? And would he be prevented from fleeing, anyway? What other countries have no extradition to the USA?

Conveniently, this question was addressed in detail between the November 2020 election and the January 2021 insurrection (when we were expecting him to flee rather than attack the government).

Where might Donald Trump run in a bid to avoid prison?, from MacLean's magazine.

403:

»Could the Drumpf make it to Belarus or St Petersburg in the remaining narrow time-space?«

The only reason he was told to show up during opening hours on Wednesday, rather than FBI breaking through the windows and slapping him in irons here&now, is that somebody in DoD hopes he will do something stupid in the meantime.

My guess is that they hope he will, through his own or minions actions, reveal where the rest of the documents are, with a outside hope that he is stupid enough to try to abscond.

If Biden has decided that it is better to have him outside pissing in, /and/ that the residual unrecovered documents are sufficiently worthless to any adversary, they /could/ turn a blind eye to him leaving on a private jet or boat.

But even then, why would they ?

The payoff would be /so/ much bigger, if they apprehend him, boxes in hand, trying to board an escape-vehicle.

404:

Where might Donald Trump run in a bid to avoid prison?, from MacLean's magazine.

I realized, a moment after posting, that I should have shared their assessment of Scotland, which happily rates second from last as a fugitive Trump destination:

Scotland: Trump likes golf; Trump really likes golfing on his own golf courses; therefore, Trump really, really likes Scotland. Scotland, unfortunately, likes the rules-based international order, classical architecture, and extradition treaties with the United States. 10/41
405:

Let us speculate a possibility:

Sunak fails to control inflation and Starmer gets control in a hung parliament in 2014.

Starmer does a Wilson and proposes a referendum on whether to abolish the monarchy, to placate the left wing of his party. It passes, and the presidential election system is set up as FPTP, with (effectively) nominations from large political parties only, voted in by their membership.

Johnson stands, and is appointed the Conservative candidate. Labour apoints some anonymous apparatchik. Other parties may be ignored.

Starmer fails (or does not try) to improve the economy, environment, social conditions or anything much else. The Conservative party wins the presidential election.

All hail Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, first President of the (temporarily) United Kingdom.

406:

In case it is unclear, that is NOT an attempt to open the monarchy/republic debate again, but a tongue-in-cheek scenario for the resurrection of Johnson. I don't think that he will manage to become PM again (though I can think of scenarios in which he might), but we definitely haven't heard the last of him. Unfortunately.

407:

Oh hell. It's Aileen Cannon? She's not just a trump judge, she's the one that was bending over backwards to delay this very investigation, allowing a completely bogus out of jurisdiction lawsuit and practically writing the defense's briefs for them.

None of her shenanigans will survive appeal but she's in the tank for trump in a way that I've never seen before. This is going to be a shitshow.

408:

I realized, a moment after posting, that I should have shared their assessment of Scotland, which happily rates second from last as a fugitive Trump destination

While I did start the speculation, and it is fun to speculate, I'll be shocked and rather horrified if the Secret Service does not deliver Trump to his court dates, whether he wants to go or not.

My speculation on how it goes down: --Trump tries to delay (duh)

--When the delays run out (meaning SCOTUS says "gotta have your trial first, sir") he gets tried and convicted. It's not just what he did, it's the way he did it. How presidential is it to stash secret documents in your shower so your lawyer won't find them in your office? You don't trust your lawyers? Are you not paying them for their services? Oh yeah. About that...

--When the appeals run out (SCOTUS probably will decide the conviction was legit, unless there's obvious reason to think otherwise--the majority do have some basic survival instincts), Trump gets put away. He'll probably say/leak something unwise, at which point he'll be silenced the way all spies have been (not killed, just not allowed contact with outsiders).

He has a big problem in that he keeps stiffing his lawyers and not cooperating with them. As a result, he's highly unlikely to get high quality legal counsel, and in my ignorant opinion, that's what he needs if he has a hope of beating this.

409:

H & others.
Um. ... I'd forgotten that Drumpf has a permanent (small) "SS" team following him around.
That makes running for Moscow or Dubai that little bit harder, doesn't it?
Whereas, in our case the BoZo is now a permanently loose cannon .....

410:

Re: Possible hidey-holes for DT

Likeliest are Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen which do not have any extradition treaties with the US. Overall, my guess is SA cuz the head guy apparently really likes golf. Russia and SA could probably spin his presence into some sort of internal political advantage. My impression is that both countries have pretty tight control over all media used within their countries. Neither NKorea nor Afghanistan are likely hidey-holes mostly because they probably don't have enough gilded toilets - a must-have for DT.

I haven't read the 40+ page document only a couple of news articles. I'm surprised there's no mention of his kids: they're jet-setters and in and out of Mar-A-Lago all the time. And they've publicly supported DT in his most visible idiot, illegal and dangerous moves. (Partners/Abettors/Accessories?)

Lastly - if DT ends up unable to locate some documents that he illegally took and retained/hid, maybe he sold them to a guest. Or some guest took them as a souvenir/stole them since security isn't exactly genius level over there.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/27/fake-heiress-infiltrates-mar-a-lago-trump#:~:text=Inna%20Yashchyshyn%2C%2033%2C%20allegedly%20lied,Mar%2Da%2DLago%20functions.

411:

»While I did start the speculation, and it is fun to speculate, I'll be shocked and rather horrified if the Secret Service does not deliver Trump to his court dates, whether he wants to go or not.«

His SS detail, if he still has one, is not going to be relevant.

Nobody thought to write anything about criminal presidents in the law which authorizes the president to extend SS protection to, amongst other persons, former presidents.

So it is almost certainly not his SS detail which will carry him into court, unless he prints fake money in front of them.

Conversely, Carter has firmly nailed down the former presidents right to tell the SS detail to "Go home, I'll call you when I need you again." so they may not even be around.

412:

His SS detail, if he still has one, is not going to be relevant.

I think you're missing the point. The US Secret Service is, first and foremost, a law enforcement agency, and the guards on the White House and former POTUS are recruited from sworn agents, not separately. Their sworn oath is to the US Constitution, not to the person they're protecting. That's why I'd be shocked and horrified if they let Trump run.

Back in 2015, David Seinfeld did an episode on "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" with Obama, where he drove to the White House ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM-Q_zpuJGU ). It's worth watching as a reminder of how far we fell during Trump, but the key point for this debate is when Obama tries to drive out the front gate, and the guard won't open the gate for him. It's treated as a joke, of course, but presidents for decades have called the White House the world's fanciest prison for a reason.

If Trump's corrupted the Secret Service to the point where they'll let him run away from a felony, the US has a huge problem. The SS isn't just tasked with securing the POTUS, they're the ones who go after forgers and other threats to the money supply. If they can be bought so easily, Biden's in danger, and quite possibly, so is the dollar.

So yeah, I think they'll deliver Trump to court on Tuesday.

413:

How presidential is it to stash secret documents in your shower so your lawyer won't find them in your office? You don't trust your lawyers?

MAGA alternate meaning. Making Attorneys Get Attorneys.

As to the Secret Service. They are very much a protection service in terms of how they work with ex presidents and will not interfere with his day to day life unless he breaks a big law in front of them. They are not the US Marshal Service whose job it IS to deal with dragging people to federal court when needed.

Doesn't matter. He'll show up Tuesday as the optics give him more fund raising material.

Politico (I think) had a good article in the last day or so about Trump and his affinity to the court system. And why he will be totally hosed if he doesn't realize that the criminal court system is NOT like the civil system. The article feels he is totally hosed.

414:

I haven't read the 40+ page document only a couple of news articles. I'm surprised there's no mention of his kids: they're jet-setters and in and out of Mar-A-Lago all the time. And they've publicly supported DT in his most visible idiot, illegal and dangerous moves. (Partners/Abettors/Accessories?)

In the US now you can't get near a news source without bumping into someone talking about, lamenting, giving analysis, whatever about this.

Basically the indictment is about about him lying about the docs, and getting others to lie about them. For which there is a huge pile of facts to back up. Once this goes through and assuming he's convicted, there will be others sucked into the vortex. As a conviction based on facts / evidence at a trial makes that information a fact for other trials. In the US system.

415:

That is another meaning for MAGA, isn't it? Good point.

As for the Politico op-ed, do you mean this one? https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/trump-criminal-indictment-00101351

I'd point out, from back in my days when I was reading survivalist stuff, a titled Deep Survival made the point that a lot of tragedies start when someone thinks they're safe because they know what's going on, when in fact they do not know. That's the gist of the article on Trump, that his experience in 3,500-plus civil suits poorly prepare him for criminal court.

Deep Survival is a good book too, if that's your thing. https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies-ebook/dp/B06VVMN5J2/

416:

do you mean this one?

Yes.

a lot of tragedies start when someone thinks they're safe because they know what's going on, when in fact they do not know.

This applies at smaller scales. My father was born in 1925 and few up on a working farm (crops, saw mill, slaughter house, etc...) in the depression in the US then was a waist gunner on B-24s who got to England in the later part of 1944. After the war he got a degree in bookkeeping, wound up the production manager on a UF6 plant, and build houses on the side. Unlike many of his contemporaries he didn't shield his kids from physical work. And doing our own home repairs, overhauling engines in tractors and cars, mowing fields, laying concrete blocks, etc... we learned they world is not trivial and easy to navigate.

My point, and somewhat yours, is that if you don't treat the world around you as a possible enemy all the time you can get hosed when it becomes one every now and then. And so many of my peers and people I've met in life don't get this and seem shocked when it happens.

As a weird side point, neither I nor my brothers every had a broken bone. I can close once but I think we were trained without realizing it to not do as much stupid stuff as others tended to do.

417:

Re: '... the Politico op-ed'

Good article - thanks for the link!

Also like the article below. Guess being a talk show host now qualifies as having good potential GOP prez material. This article also mentions that some candidates are self-funding therefore longshots. Not so sure about that based on 2016 results - supposedly self-funded but what I think really made the difference was scooping up more 'bound' delegates before the actual convention than any of the other candidates. Wonder who he wined&dined/bribed/threatened to sue to get them to provide the bound delegates.

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2023/republican-candidates-2024-gop-presidential-hopefuls-list/

Change of topic ...

Wildfire smoke in eastern Canada and the US -

Lots of commenters here live in the affected area. Hope you're doing okay!

Saw that some of the smoke has already begun to affect air quality in Norway - take care folks!

418:

I don't think that he will manage to become PM again (though I can think of scenarios in which he might), but we definitely haven't heard the last of him.

I believe US citizens who renounce their citizenship can petition to get it back, if the State Department is sympathetic? In which case Johnson could well re-acquire his US passport ... subject to possible tax issues (the IRS might well come after him for back income tax).

So he won't do that unless something happens to make it worth his money. Say, a cabal of semi-sane Republican billionaires of the mammonite church (rather than the Screaming Jeezus People) who want to use him as a tool in their attempt to re-take the party?

I don't actually see him having much appeal in the US, even with a 10-20 year run-up to launder his identity. But it's not technically impossible.

419:

That's why I'd be shocked and horrified if they let Trump run.

Yes, but US law enforcement tilts heavily towards authoritarian personalities who in turn tend to vote Republican. And it is no stretch of the imagination whatsoever to imagine Trump gets assigned pro-Trump SS bodyguards, or makes life so unpleasant for non-MAGAs that they ask to be reassigned, leaving behind only his fan club. (Indeed, it would be prudent for a POTUS' bodyguard team to consist only of his partisans, because they can be expected to be more diligent than officers who hate his guts and want to see him choke on a pretzel.)

Note that this isn't about corrupting the US Secret Service, but about taking advantage of it being a hive and picking the particular worker bees for the task.

420:

In which case Johnson could well re-acquire his US passport

In Australia there's a long history of former PMs and Opposition leaders, especially if they have been a diplomat or Foreign Minister at some point, being appointed as ambassadors See for instance the current Australian Ambassador to the USA (and now I think about it, most of those in living memory). So I've always wondered that it's the obvious thing for whoever is leading the Tories to appoint Johnson to an overseas posting of interest to Johnson. He spent all that time in Europe as a "journalist", I wonder whether the UK's mission to the EU isn't a contender. But rock solid if Trump is elected again he'd surely be in the running for the USA.

421:

It's Aileen Cannon? She's not just a trump judge, she's the one that was bending over backwards to delay this very investigation, allowing a completely bogus out of jurisdiction lawsuit and practically writing the defense's briefs for them.,/i>

Could she delay it long enough for him to get elected? Because that would make for a shittier shitshow than we've already seen…

422:

It's Aileen Cannon? She's not just a trump judge, she's the one that was bending over backwards to delay this very investigation, allowing a completely bogus out of jurisdiction lawsuit and practically writing the defense's briefs for them.,/i>...Could she delay it long enough for him to get elected? Because that would make for a shittier shitshow than we've already seen…

I don't know much about criminal court (IANAL), but I do know that in civil court you can ask for another judge to preside. From what I was reading on Politico, I'd guess this will happen here to.

The general consideration (this is in civil court trial) is that judges are assigned randomly. That leads to two questions. One is how the other judges in the pool compare to Hon. Cannon. The other is how busy they are. Both these inform the decision on whether to roll the dice on another judge.

Given Jack Smith's crew, I'm pretty sure they've already gamed this out. If Cannon is the most Trumped up judge in the circuit, then eliminating her from the case early on is not a bad thing.

423:

Yes, but US law enforcement tilts heavily towards authoritarian personalities who in turn tend to vote Republican. And it is no stretch of the imagination whatsoever to imagine Trump gets assigned pro-Trump SS bodyguards, or makes life so unpleasant for non-MAGAs that they ask to be reassigned, leaving behind only his fan club. (Indeed, it would be prudent for a POTUS' bodyguard team to consist only of his partisans, because they can be expected to be more diligent than officers who hate his guts and want to see him choke on a pretzel.)

I agree that it's most likely that the detail he has is the one he gets along with the best, because that's the way these things seem to work.

That said, Jan 6th was a traumatic wakeup call for the many MAGAts in federal law enforcement. Their loyalty to Trump didn't save them when Trump turned the mob on them.

Therefore, my guess is that his SS detail is only so loyal. If they're not interested in defecting with him, they're probably not going to sacrifice their futures helping him get away.

Besides, as noted, Trump is an old man who's been in over 3,500 law suits. It seems reasonable to expect that this makes him think he can beat this one too. On this basis, I'll bet he doesn't abscond.

424:

A basic function of the Secret Service is to function a bodyguards for officials, not to function as general-purpose cops, even less to arrest their protectees.

However, their defining legislation does contain a section that might be used for that purpose. Whether the agents on detail when Trump decided to pay Volodya a visit would do that I offer no opinion.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3056

18 U.S. Code § 3056 - Powers, authorities, and duties of United States Secret Service

18 USC 3056 (c)(1)(C)

  • make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony
425:

"They are not the US Marshal Service whose job it IS to deal with dragging people to federal court when needed."

I think you're probably right about the Marshal Service; it will be interesting to spot what if any officers are around Trump next Tuesday. The Secret Service, one suspects, is protecting Trump's person and desperately wishing the whole thing weren't happening.

426:

And why he will be totally hosed if he doesn't realize that the criminal court system is NOT like the civil system. The article feels he is totally hosed.

I think he realises it's different but thinks it should be the same. He most likely does not think much of the purpose and principles of criminal law. I imagine the only part of it that aligns with his worldview, the retributive part, follows for him weirdly inexplicable logic compared to civil law, as much as it might yield "more" retribution. For him, retribution is a tribal point scoring thing, like his remarks around the Central Park Five attest. Civil law, in contrast, is explicitly about winners and losers, the powerful cowing the weak and all the things he thinks are the way the world works (whether you like it or not, so you better be a powerful winner or else you'll be a weak loser). A lot of people feel that way, and I suspect take the same view of puzzlement about criminal law. Enough people that in practice it is they world they make, in much of their world.

427:

I might not have explained this part clearly enough, mostly because it's a pretty normal background assumption. I need to make it clear I'm not arguing in favour of this world view nor am I suggesting that this is in any way a good thing or even descriptively accurate about the way the world works. Some of the usual suspects, including those who frequently claim to be misrepresented, may choose to argue with me as though I was proselytising this worldview anyway, even after seeing this statement, but my expectations may be low for unrelated reasons and it's not fair for me to take that out on people here.

428:

When Johnson was Foreign Secretary, he offended almost every country he visited. As an ambassador, he might be sub-optimal!

429:

Well that's why I thought the USA would work, if Trump is elected again. Admittedly that's not a hypothetical to be wished for, but there you go.

430:

Johnson was Foreign Secretary, he offended almost every country he visited

And a few that he didn't visit. He'd do well as ambassador to Bir Tawil. Maybe Yemen if he insists on somewhere he's heard of.

431:

Make him ambassador to Kabul. He's totally earned it!

432:

I suddenly thought of a country where they throw dildos rather than shoes.

But I'd like to go back there some time so let's not take that thought any further.

433:

What do informed people - like USA inhabitants ...

Put as the probabilities or odds that DJT will be served with some form of restraining &/or gagging restrictions after next week's initial hearing?
AIUI, from what you've already said, in "Normal" circumstances ( cough ) such a person would automatically be regarded ass a "flight risk" .... so:
Restraining order to within a specific radius of stated site / house arrest ( Mar-a Lago? ) / actual jail?
Restrictions on what he can say in public, for fear of prejudicing any actual trail? That last could be FUN - and a wonderful trap for an arsehole who cannot, ever, shut up.

434:

The British ambassador to the US is always a long-service experienced Foreign Office staffer. We get in return a friend or donor of whoever is elected President in any given leap year. They are told to smile, keep their mouth shut and leave everything to the State Department charge d'affaires or whoever really runs the Embassy they're nominally in charge of.

435:

Not always. Quite a few have been from the establishment, but not the Foreign Office (or there only for a short time). This list reminds me of Freeman, Cromer and Jay (controversial).

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

If Brown had been chosen, there would have been little fuss (mainly from rabid right-wingers), though I doubt he would have either accepted or done it well, but Johnson is another matter entirely.

436:

News local to our host: "A 52-year-old woman has today, ​Sunday, 11 June, 2023, been arrested as a suspect in connection with the ongoing investigation into the funding and finances of the Scottish National Party."

https://www.scotland.police.uk/what-s-happening/news/2023/june/investigation-into-scottish-national-party-funding-and-finances-woman-arrested/

437:

Yup, over a mere missing £600,000 in SNP funds.

I am now waiting with bated breath for Baroness Mone, Michael Gove, Rishi Sunak, and the rest of the Johnson cabinet to be arrested by the Met over the £20Bn-odd in COVID emergency funds that are oddly adrift on the balance sheet.

More cynically: the Commons Privilege Committee report on whether Johnson lied to the House is due for publication this month, and Johnson was sent a letter about the report the day before yesterday, so arresting Sturgeon and shouting WHATABOUTTHESNP— is entirely on form for the government that gave us the "throw a dead cat on the table" distraction gambit.

Johnson pre-empted the need for such a distraction by resigning from Parliament without advance warning, but my suspicion is that the Sturgeon charges were carefully scheduled in advance by somebody in Conservative Party HQ in order to provide a focus for news coverage in the two weeks ahead.

438:

Yup, over a mere missing £600,000 in SNP funds.

NEWS FLASH: in a sudden development, shocking absolutely nobody who'd actually been following the story, Nicola Sturgeon released without charge pending further investigation.

Just waiting now for the Tories to start spinning up the news about her bathroom in Glasgow being full of classified US nuclear secrets. Or something like that.

439:

The National, BBC and Guardian mention the release without charge on their front pages; the Scotsman and Independent don't, though it's in the articles.

440:

Charlie
I don't doubt that any SNP corruption is very small beer, compared to the tories gutting of the economy for their profit, but that's not the point is it? It increase the cynical view that "They're all the same" - which usually benefits the tories ....

441:

Bugger - hit "send" too soon:
Also the SNP have been in effective total control of Scotland for over 12 years, if not longer ... which is plenty of time for shady deals etc to emerge - that's how it usually happens, anyway.

442:

If there's only £600K of missing money after 12 years, that'd be a miracle: Scotland is about 8% of the UK population, the Tories have managed to lose on the order of £20Bn UK-wide -- not just in COVID payments: also stuff like signing over title of state school real estate to private companies when they win dodgy "academy" contracts, not to mention NHS privatization via the back door -- so a proportionate loss by the SNP would be at least £1-2Bn. Even if you assume the Caledonian ferries fiasco is down to malice and embezzlement rather than clueless mismanagement, it's still an order of magnitude short.

I rather think we're seeing the Tories using the tools available to them in order to go after the SNP because they badly want a distraction right now. Also, they've scented blood in the water: Sarwar is weak and/or off-balance, the SNP heavy hitters are off the board for now, the polycrisis (Brexit and inflation and COVID) have dampened any appetite for constitutional change in the short term, and the Tories have piloted a Tory/Labour coalition arrangement at local level in Scotland. I suspect they want to roll back all the SNP's gains of the past 23 years at the next election. (I don't think they'll succeed, but I do think the SNP are on the back foot for now.)

443:

Put as the probabilities or odds that DJT will be served with some form of restraining &/or gagging restrictions after next week's initial hearing?

Well, if Trump wasn't so wedded to the double down and aggressively transgress school of litigation, he would have STFU by now. I suspect the prosecutors will let anything non-actionable he says slide, simply to avoid endless appeals. Some of it might enter the evidentiary list, though.

As for the rest: he'll have his passport confiscated (flight risk). That's a given.

Beyond that, I suspect the judge will order his SS detail to confine him to Mar A Lago except when he has court dates, and to produce him when ordered. Unless, that is, there's some sort of possibility of evidence tampering (Mar A Lago's the crime scene), in which case I suspect he'll be limited to a hotel suite somewhere secure. Putting him behind bars right now would be too incendiary, IMHO.

What they do if he starts blabbing secrets or trying to sell them? Dunno, but I think that's the most likely time he'll be put in solitary without outside communication.

IANAL, so take this all with a huge shrug. I'm not going to be following the case any more than I can't avoid it. Unless he's found innocent, only the SCOTUS verdict really matters so far as I'm concerned. The rest is just a game of legal poker/chess.

444:

»As for the rest: he'll have his passport confiscated (flight risk). That's a given.«

USA can only confiscate his US passport.

He moved the US embassy in Israel, so he almost certainly was gifted a passport from Israel.

He is also precisely the type of rich idiot who will have bought a "diplomatic passport" from one or more tax-shelters.

445:

USA can only confiscate his US passport.

Considering that Israel--and a fair number of offshore tax shelters--only exist because the US protects them in various ways, running to one of them is a non-starter.

Also, if Trump tries to go AWOL, he'll rapidly find out that his SS service does have the power to arrest him, as noted. If he does get away from them temporarily, I'm pretty sure the US Marshals will be tasked with taking him to solitary confinement to make sure he doesn't pull that shit a second time.

446:

ilya187 @ 300:

I own a pickup truck. It gets used when needed. It has sat unused at times for over a month.

Never mind the tax code -- why not rent a pickup truck when you need one, instead of owning one and have it sit unused?

Because frequently owning it & having it sit around until you need to use it is STILL CHEAPER than renting one when you do need one.

Plus, you might not be able to FIND A PICKUP TRUCK FOR RENT when you need it, but if you have your own just sitting there unused when you do need it you don't have to go through all the hassle of finding one to rent ...

447:

whitroth @ 307:

In '08, my late ex and I were in Colorado for Worldcon, and visited friends of mine before the con. They took us up I think it was up Mount Evans (a bit taller than Pike's Peak). We got hailed on in early August, looking out at a glacial cirque*. At the top, over 14,000', we didn't stay that long, because I actually started having issues breathing.

* It took me a while, looking at the cirque, until I finally realized, and told the others it reminded me of my youth, but there weren't any mammoths there....

IIRC, Pikes Peak is something like number 20 in height in Colorado. Pike's Peak gets all the attention because of it's prominence (5,000 ft above the surrounding terrain) on the Front Range makes it visible for a looooooooong way coming across the prairie from Kansas, but it's not even the tallest peak on the Front Range; it just stands out more from the surrounding mountains.

448:

if Trump tries to go AWOL

I think he's likely to want a public trial so he can keep grandstanding right up until his lawyers walk away and he realises that, actually, he will go to prison even under a Republican president and Republican Supreme Court.

I expect he will use the election campaign and his trial to vigorously piss off any possible Republican president. He'll likely also say things that make it difficult for any court to err on the side of generosity towards him ("I appojnted them, they are loyal to me" for starters). So his real hope has to be that a Democratic president wins and decides to pardon him to discourage another coup attempt.

449:

It would be an interesting precedent for Israel to do what the USA tells it, rather than the usual converse.

450:

Re: DJT ....
Thank you all the US respondents. Most informative - So, it looks as though some restrictions are inevitable .... and given his habit of striking out, those restrictions will get progressively tighter?

Meanwhile ...
Censorship, or self-defence? - This needs CLOSING DOWN a.s.a.p. - I think.
Truly revoltiing.

451:

I often -- these days -- find myself thinking we're lucky in the UK not to have the US's draconian, absolutist approach to "free speech". Obvious caveats apply, but there are circumstances where you really do need to be able to shut down a publishing channel before it gets people murdered.

452:

Beau of the Fifth Column talked today about a European cop approaching a black USAian in Europe and getting the standard "{hands up} I'm complying, I'm complying" response. Which obviously disconcerted the cop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGdqYh5F5LE

Free speech wise Australia has just seen a rare pushback on our insane defamation laws, with a claimant found to be, on balance of probabilities, a war criminal. Most of the media are relieved, I haven't seen mention of the Murdoch minions losing their minds but I don't expose myself to that so... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-01/live-coverage-ben-roberts-smith-defamation-judgement/102420092

453:

rare pushback on our insane defamation laws

Well it could be worse. It's only through a faltering, almost hesitant series of legislation in the various state parliaments during the noughties that we have justification (aka "truth") as a complete defence, which made this outcome possible. Previously we had the legacy of the NSW Libel Act 1847, which codified a "public interest" requirement that qualified that defence. Previously the defendant needed to demonstrate not only that what they said about the plaintiff was substantially true, but that it was also in the public interest to say so. The latter wasn't just a formality and it's not clear it would have worked out in this case.

454:

The UK has abolished justification as a defence. Truth is still allowed.

455:

Well, yes, but the real harm is done by the hatred promoted by the dominating mass media, to whom our politicians grovel. Remember the case of the murdered pediatrician? Or Muslims and Sikhs assaulted and even murdered?

Despite the potential for harm, we badly need religion to be made a protected characteristic, like race, and those loathesome media outlets brought under control. It would help (considerably) in bringing our more bigoted and vicious politicians under control, too.

456:

EC
Despite the potential for harm, we badly need religion to be made a protected characteristic ... errr ... NO, we do not.
The blatant excuses (plural) of a "war on christianity" & "islamophbia" allow far too many other "preachers of hate" to get away with it.
It should be possible to say that the "recital" is dangerous lunacy without being in fear of your life.
As the National Secular Society have repeatedly stated we still have a de facto blasphemy law - it's "just" about any criticism of the religion of submission - ask Salman Rushdie.
And then there are the christian nutters, going for our female MP's who think that their (women's) bodies are no concern to the nutters imaginary friends - "our Stella" has had to put up with this monstrous shit.

457:

Heteromeles @ 422:

It's Aileen Cannon? She's not just a trump judge, she's the one that was bending over backwards to delay this very investigation, allowing a completely bogus out of jurisdiction lawsuit and practically writing the defense's briefs for them.,/i>...Could she delay it long enough for him to get elected? Because that would make for a shittier shitshow than we've already seen…

IF he manages to get elected in 2024, he will inevitably pardon himself.

I don't know much about criminal court (IANAL), but I do know that in civil court you can ask for another judge to preside. From what I was reading on Politico, I'd guess this will happen here to.

The general consideration (this is in civil court trial) is that judges are assigned randomly. That leads to two questions. One is how the other judges in the pool compare to Hon. Cannon. The other is how busy they are. Both these inform the decision on whether to roll the dice on another judge.

Given Jack Smith's crew, I'm pretty sure they've already gamed this out. If Cannon is the most Trumped up judge in the circuit, then eliminating her from the case early on is not a bad thing.

My fear with judge Cannon is she will so bias the trial as to assure an acquittal. OR

Directed verdict

Judgment notwithstanding verdict

In any of those cases, I don't think the government would be permitted appeal an acquittal even if corruptly arrived at.

He'd get away with it.

458:

Heteromeles @ 443:

Put as the probabilities or odds that DJT will be served with some form of restraining &/or gagging restrictions after next week's initial hearing?

Well, if Trump wasn't so wedded to the double down and aggressively transgress school of litigation, he would have STFU by now. I suspect the prosecutors will let anything non-actionable he says slide, simply to avoid endless appeals. Some of it might enter the evidentiary list, though.

As for the rest: he'll have his passport confiscated (flight risk). That's a given.

Beyond that, I suspect the judge will order his SS detail to confine him to Mar A Lago except when he has court dates, and to produce him when ordered. Unless, that is, there's some sort of possibility of evidence tampering (Mar A Lago's the crime scene), in which case I suspect he'll be limited to a hotel suite somewhere secure. Putting him behind bars right now would be too incendiary, IMHO.

They won't and she won't. He has to be able to travel to campaign appearances.

What they do if he starts blabbing secrets or trying to sell them? Dunno, but I think that's the most likely time he'll be put in solitary without outside communication.

IANAL, so take this all with a huge shrug. I'm not going to be following the case any more than I can't avoid it. Unless he's found innocent, only the SCOTUS verdict really matters so far as I'm concerned. The rest is just a game of legal poker/chess.

He'll never be found innocent, but he might get a "not guilty" verdict (by means fair or foul) and claim that's the same thing.

But he won't flee to another country to avoid prosecution/conviction/jail. He'll brazen it out like he always has. He can't do it any other way.

PS: Jack Smith appears to be pushing for a speedy (early) trial date on the theory this matter should be settled BEFORE the nomination process/campaigning really gets into full swing.

459:

My fear with judge Cannon is she will so bias the trial as to assure an acquittal.

Let me make this a little clearer.

In a civil trial I was involved in (environmental stuff, not personal), one of our first PRE-TRIAL MOTIONS was to ask for a different judge to be assigned. IIRC, each side got to make this motion once in their initial actions before the case went to trial.

Again, IANAL, and I don't know how this applies in a federal criminal trial. However, IIRC the Politico article said that a magistrate would arraign Trump, then Cannon would handle at least the early motions. To me, that implied that it's possible for the prosecutors to request a new judge, or to move the trial if no one else is available in that district.

Think of it as a game. The question the lawyers on both sides* have to answer is how likely they are to get what they want by essentially rolling the dice again.

The other key point is that this is all pre-trial stuff, which is one reason why it takes so long for cases to go to trial.

*One big problem Trump's had for awhile is that few lawyers want to take him on as a client. He doesn't pay his bills, doesn't follow their advice, and is risky in multiple and career-damaging ways. David L's comment that MAGA is Making Attorneys Get Attorneys is spot on. Maybe he'll get a court-appointed attorney for this case? (/snark)

460:

Off Topic Update:

I'm in my new house. I have internet access again. I have only a little cleaning up (outside) the old house left to do.

I have a massive amount of unpacking to do here. This house is about half the size of the old house. I'm finding more & more things that have to be fixed at this new house. Definitely going to have to have an electrician in VERY SOON!.

I'm recovering from malnutrition & exhaustion (overwork during the move). I've lost at least 11 pounds (5 kg) in the last 3 weeks.

461:

OT, but Tom Gauld on the birdsite does a riff on the "Torment Nexus: A Cautionary Tale" joke.

462:

Re: '... recovering from malnutrition & exhaustion (overwork during the move).'

Good luck in your new home! And good luck getting everything fixed and running without breaking the bank! I moved houses almost four years and found it's amazingly easy to go over (upwardly re-re-revised) budget. I had all the major fixes done before unpacking - much easier all around.

You may know this already but if you've been working harder than usual, eat some extra protein (esp. meats with taurine) to help quickly rebuild your muscles. Also keep up with the vegetables - they're a major mineral source. If you're perspiring a lot doing work around the house/yard and a glass of water doesn't help, drink some milk - good source of protein plus calcium and magnesium. I often get muscle cramps in the summer esp. if I've been sweating a lot and milk with a side of banana works better than water alone in relieving the muscle spasms/cramps.

About the taurine ... several commercial work-out products contain this ingredient but (in general) it's better/healthier to get essential amino acids from unprocessed foods.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2020.582449/full#:~:text=Studies%20have%20shown%20that%20overuse,et%20al.%2C%202003).

UK/US pols ...

Likeliest safe havens for fleeing pols facing legal action would be some autocracy. And there are plenty of those around.

BTW, one of DT's daughters recently married the son of a Nigerian billionaire so he might feel right at home with their politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Nigeria#:~:text=On%20Transparency%20International's%202022%20Corruption,the%20most%20corrupt%20public%20sector.

463:

BTW, one of DT's daughters recently married the son of a Nigerian billionaire so he might feel right at home with their politics.

I think I just got an e-mail from him....

464:

Greg, you are closing your eyes to the fact that the current hate speech against Muslims is causing pogroms and murders. Many of them (and Sikhs) live in fear of their lives - and I, for one, do not regard that as acceptable. Also, hatred begets hatred, which is why attacks against Jews are also increasing.

What you need to do is to consider changing the wording of such attacks (especially yours) to replace Islam by Judaism (or Zionism) and Muslim by Jew, and whether that would be acceptable. If not, then the attack should not be made.

For the record, the people who say that Christianity is under attack in the UK (and USA) are bigots, pure and simple.

465:

EC
No, I'm not - I'm quite aware of that "slight problem" - I'm also aware of a rising low tide of ant-semitic sewage, also. AT THE SAME TIME - attacks by "radical" { Meaning headbanging religious fundamentalists } muslims & hindus { So far in India only, I think } on anyone evening questioning or "disrespecting" { e.g. roughing up a copy of the "recital" - a favourite whipper-up, that one } should not be allowed either.
Disrepect all religions, one law for ALL the people, OK?
Yes the "christianity under attack" people are ignorant bigots ... so are the fundimuslims attempting to overturn school governors & head teachers & demanding that their "special religious privileges" are observed.

466:

I think I just got an e-mail from him....

You can ignore it. I already inked the deal.

467:

This somewhat sounds like a sub plot from a Stross story.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/06/florida-man-gets-flesh-eating-infection-from-human-bite-during-family-fight/

The infected person works as a funeral assistant. Whatever that is.

468:

»Maybe he'll get a court-appointed attorney for this case?«

The case would have to take a truly bizarre trajectory for that to happen.

Having once chosen your own lawyer(s), it is very hard to get onto the "in forma pauperis" track where the court appoints you one.

A lawyer really needs some good arguments for quitting a criminal case if it leaves his client without a lawyer, he basically needs the permission of the judge.

But it is perfectly fine for the client to fire his lawyer, even if that leaves him without one, but if that lawyer was appointed by the court, he wont get another one from the court, absent some really special circumstances.

It is not entirely settled if capital cases can proceed "pro se" in such circumstances, but all other criminal cases can.

A special wiggle in this case is that the charges contain direct accusations of abuse of lawyer/client confidentiality and a (not yet charged) conspiracy to commit perjury.

Note the bit about how Trumpolino and "Lawyer 1" call in a female "lawyer 3" to certify everything is A-OK, despite her having no first hand knowledge, and no involvement in the activities she signs off on ?

Why ?

Because "Lawyer 1" were not going commit perjury, that's why.

That is a real stinker, and convincing the court that they are not stained by that brush, is going to weigh heavily on the defense lawyer(s) in this case.

They will basically have to hold their own client at arms length, where everybody can see it, and we can all guess how the vain man-baby will take that kind of insolent behaviour...

The defense lawyer(s) will also have to qualify for clearance if they want to examine the 31 classified documents already filed as evidence. If they do not, they cannot attempt to claim that the documents where improperly classified, but with 31 documents filed, and a hundred more to back them up, that would seem a very uphill strategy.

Either way, the first big event will be if DoD demands him taken into custody.

If they do, and they get it, the case wont take very long, because the entire house of cards will come tumbling down.

469:

A friend of mine (Wales) was afraid to even speculate on the fishwife's guilt, saying another friend (in Scotland) would be in even greater danger of being held in contempt. This was in a discord server of roughly 35 people. Are scots afraid to discuss that sort of thing in a pub? At home, with their family? I'm aware and agree with the laws when it concerns the news media and giant public wankers like Tommy Robinson, but does it go that far?

470:

They are the same thing. The UK removed any requirement for public interest and had done so by the 19th century. It was the NSW law (that all the other Australian colonies subsequently inherited as they achieved independence) that was retrograde. See Oscar Wilde's ill-advised slander action for instance. I'm not sure whether the version of justification that you mention is a different term that is used differently in the UK vs Australia and relates to something that was abolished more recently. But in Australia the "defence of justification" is where the defendant demonstrates to the court's satisfaction (not necessarily to the same standard of proof as would apply in a criminal case) that what they said about the plaintiff was substantially true.

The interesting one to compare between nations is sedition (and seditious libel), which is definitely still prosecuted zealously in some places. And perhaps it is coming back for us too, with various anti-terrorism laws in the last 20 years that haven't been fully tested, but which will likely be used against climate protestors among others.

471:

Craig Murray did hard time for blogging stuff about Salmond and the SNP. From his account, pulling together information published elsewhere that didn't get the originators in trouble because they took the approved line. Which may or may not be accurate, but it's still a hell of a thing.

472:

Long COVID ... fascinating and scary

First time I've ever heard/read that brain cells could fuse. And it looks like there's more than one virus that can cause this.

There's still a lot more research to be done but this article serves as a reminder to be careful.

'COVID-19 Causes Brain Cell Fusion, Leading to Chronic Neurological Symptoms

Key Facts:

SARS-CoV-2 infection leads to the fusion of neurons, a previously unseen phenomenon, affecting their firing patterns and overall function.

The research suggests that cell fusion caused by viruses, including HIV, rabies, measles, and Zika virus, could be a major contributor to neurological diseases and clinical symptoms.

The study reveals a new mechanism by which viral infections impact the nervous system, highlighting the need for further exploration and understanding of neurological events during viral infections.

Source: University of Queensland'

https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-neuron-fusion-23421/

Here's the pdf:

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.adg2248

473:

Heteromeles @ 459:

My fear with judge Cannon is she will so bias the trial as to assure an acquittal.

Let me make this a little clearer.

In a civil trial I was involved in (environmental stuff, not personal), one of our first PRE-TRIAL MOTIONS was to ask for a different judge to be assigned. IIRC, each side got to make this motion once in their initial actions before the case went to trial.

Again, IANAL, and I don't know how this applies in a federal criminal trial. However, IIRC the Politico article said that a magistrate would arraign Trump, then Cannon would handle at least the early motions. To me, that implied that it's possible for the prosecutors to request a new judge, or to move the trial if no one else is available in that district.

Think of it as a game. The question the lawyers on both sides* have to answer is how likely they are to get what they want by essentially rolling the dice again.

The other key point is that this is all pre-trial stuff, which is one reason why it takes so long for cases to go to trial.

*One big problem Trump's had for awhile is that few lawyers want to take him on as a client. He doesn't pay his bills, doesn't follow their advice, and is risky in multiple and career-damaging ways. David L's comment that MAGA is Making Attorneys Get Attorneys is spot on. Maybe he'll get a court-appointed attorney for this case? (/snark)

Either side can file a motion to have a different judge hear the case. I DON'T THINK THE LAW REQUIRES the judge to grant that motion.

I'm pretty sure if the judge does deny the motion, either party can appeal that denial, and the appeals court may or may not grant that appeal ... but it's not guaranteed.

And in the meanwhile, the judge will be ruling on other motions that may prejudice the case against the prosecution ... which would require further appeals.

474:

Solitary? I don't think so - I'm still betting that when he's supposed to show up for sentencing - they take you away then if it's jail - he's going to be found "unresponsive" that morning.

475:

You don't understand just how scared I was after he lost, before 6 Jan. My son, a fed (I can't tell you who he works for, or I'd have to kill you), gave me some reassurance: there are a lot of people wouking for the federal government to whom the Oath of Office is not just a bunch of meaningless words.

We saw that was true on 6 Jan.

476:

That, and the PR, and the cog railway.

477:

Correction: it's the US Department of Justice, the DoJ, not the Department of Defense, the DoD.

I don't think we want to nuke Mar-a-Lago....

478:

SFReader @ 462:

Re: '... recovering from malnutrition & exhaustion (overwork during the move).'

Good luck in your new home! And good luck getting everything fixed and running without breaking the bank! I moved houses almost four years and found it's amazingly easy to go over (upwardly re-re-revised) budget. I had all the major fixes done before unpacking - much easier all around.

I was in a severe time constraint that didn't allow me to have workmen in to make repairs before the move. Most of them I can do for myself; I'm an experienced DIYer ... experienced enough to recognize when it's best for me to hire a professional. But I couldn't be two places at once, so I just relied on the home inspection to identify the problems. Turns out the home inspector missed a few.

You may know this already but if you've been working harder than usual, eat some extra protein (esp. meats with taurine) to help quickly rebuild your muscles. Also keep up with the vegetables - they're a major mineral source. If you're perspiring a lot doing work around the house/yard and a glass of water doesn't help, drink some milk - good source of protein plus calcium and magnesium. I often get muscle cramps in the summer esp. if I've been sweating a lot and milk with a side of banana works better than water alone in relieving the muscle spasms/cramps.

About the taurine ... several commercial work-out products contain this ingredient but (in general) it's better/healthier to get essential amino acids from unprocessed foods.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2020.582449/full#:~:text=Studies%20have%20shown%20that%20overuse,et%20al.%2C%202003).

I'm heavily KETO at the moment. I got caught out in a period where all the food was at one house & all the cooking utensils were at the other and then to top it all of, in the middle of the move had dental work (all my upper teeth extracted & a temporary denture) so I'm having trouble eating anything I have to bite, although I can chew soft foods. Atkins is right out, because I can't chew meat very well (it hurts & the temporary denture keeps popping loose).

Since the weekend, I've been consuming 3 - 5 of those 300 calorie microwave meals daily, supplemented with protein shakes to make up the calorie deficit.

And I'm slowly making up the sleep deficit, but that really is just going to take time.

UK/US pols ...

Likeliest safe havens for fleeing pols facing legal action would be some autocracy. And there are plenty of those around.

Trumpolini ain't gonna flee the country.* Running away is an admission of defeat & guilt; would make him a LOSER.

BTW, one of DT's daughters recently married the son of a Nigerian billionaire so he might feel right at home with their politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Nigeria#:~:text=On%20Transparency%20International's%202022%20Corruption,the%20most%20corrupt%20public%20sector.

Well, he's already well familiar with the way their banking sector does business; at least amongst the Princely Class.

*But RAT that he is, he might FLEA the country IYKWIM.

479:

Random space facts: SpaceX have just had their 200th successful Falcon 9/Heavy booster landing which is also the 126th consecutive landing.

"It will never work" -> "It will never be economical" -> "Oh crap..."

480:

"I don't think we want to nuke Mar-a-Lago..."
No, a MOAB might even be overkill, or maybe just enough kill?

481:

What nations have not extradition to the US and are within range of Trump Force One (Boeing 757-200) from Miami?

Cuba.

482:

I thought the far right and billionaires were few and far between in Cuba? Plus the CIA is traditionally quite active there, if not necessarily very successful (poisoned cigars anyone?)

He'd have more luck in Australia, and be much more at home. Dear Uncle Rupert has many media outlets here, there are mining billionaires to play with and golf courses to cheat on. While we have an extradition treaty we are also surprisingly willing to let people live here while we argue then let them flee to their next stop ("Come Home Cardinal Pell...", he did, and got a state funeral into the bargain). We even have active Nazis, and I'm sure Trump would enjoy the protection offered by our defamation laws... although he might find it hard to be constrained by them.

483:

What nations have not extradition to the US and are within range of Trump Force One (Boeing 757-200) from Miami? Cuba.

But Cuba is "Communist" and full of people that The Donald can't tell from Mexicans.

A quick googling tells me that a stock 757-200 has a paper range of 7250km; Trump Force One isn't remotely stock but we can safely consider places within 7000km of Palm Beach International Airport.

Consulting the Trump fleeing list reveals there aren't that many good places. He could just make Scotland (6700km to Glasgow), but unfortunately for him the Scots are prone to listening to the US government and capable enough to throw together a coherent response while he's still in the air. He won't head south; South America has lots of countries, but like Africa's "shithole countries" they would not like him and vice versa.

If he refueled somewhere, his options open widely. The plane should just make Lisbon (6600km from Palm Beach) and Portugal would certainly go along with American requests eventually but might not leap into action at a phone call; he could be gone in a few hours. From there he could easily make Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or wherever. But maybe not Russia right now; it would be very embarrassing to encounter Ukrainians on the way in.

484:

Trump Force One isn't remotely stock but we can safely consider places within 7000km of Palm Beach International Airport.

It is very likely that Trump will operate out of whatever airport he uses when at Bedminster country club which is where he summers. So look at the range from that airport.

485:

Just your daily reminder that credulous conspiracy theorists aren't just an American problem:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/13/quarter-in-uk-believe-covid-was-a-hoax-poll-on-conspiracy-theories-finds

Tangentially related to the thread as it's going all trump again.

486:

Craig Murray appears to be a crank. I've also seen some reportage suggesting he was part of -- either unwittingly or knowingly -- a KGB disinfo op.

The Sturgeon thing ... she was arrested and held under caution during questioning, then de-arrested without charge. As she hasn't been charged with an offense, speculation about whether she's "guilty" is, shall we say, premature? Let's wait and see.

(I still think the timing of it, coinciding with Johnson getting to face the music, looks suspiciously like a deliberately planned Dead Cat to distract press attention from much worse wrong-doing in Downing Street.)

487:

In Aotearoa conspiracy theorists have noticed that Disney targets children. They are horrified and demand this this outrage be stopped.

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/12-06-2023/bud-lighting-the-cancellation-campaign-coming-for-a-company-near-you

488:

200 successful landings now exceeds the record for reusability set by the NASA space shuttle fleet.

And IIRC the only parts of the Falcon stack that don't get re-flown are the upper stage tankage and a single Merlin vacuum engine. The nine first stage engines and the payload fairling all get refurbished, so that's about a 90% reusability level. The Shuttle discarded the external tank on each flight, and as I understand it, the SRBs were technically reused, but it was not economically useful to do so -- NASA had promised reusability to Congress so they delivered it but the cost of refurbishing the boosters was about the same if not higher than manufacturing fresh ones for each flight.

489:

I am pretty sure that that is an establishment disinformation operation. No, he isn't a crank, and MOST of the things he says are well-grounded in facts, which can be checked if anyone is prepared to do so. He is demonised precisely because he rocks the boat.

But he IS a wild card (not in the GRR Martin sense!), and I would expect at least some of his articles to be way off-beam.

490:

A while ago, before they started recovering fairings, Elon said they cost around 6 million a pair and that the second stage cost less. Merlins are around a million each, and there's some electronics and attitude control equipment to take into account so I'd be happy to believe something around 4 million for a flight ready second stage.

There are some more records they've been through recently. The Falcon 9 now has the most consecutive successful flights taking the record from the Soyuz booster and, fudging slightly, the three versions of the Dragon capsule (Cargo 1, Cargo 2 and Crew) have flown to the ISS more times (38) than the Shuttle (27) did and have also spent more days on orbit (1,324) than the Shuttle.

491:

Noted.

A reusable Falcon 9 can put up to roughlty 17 tonnes of cargo into LEO. Or it can launch a Dragon capsule with up to 6 astronauts (in practice, a normal crew is 4 -- IIRC they specc'd it for 6 for emergency evacuations from the ISS).

So two Dragon launches can put a 17 ton payload and 4 astronauts in orbit. Which is roughly the same as a single Space Shuttle launch.

The Shuttle could launch at most six times a year and required a small army at the Cape to handle ground servicing and launch -- the fixed costs of the program without any launches was multiple billions per year. I've seen a figure of roughly $2Bn per flight bandied about.

Falcon 9 flights sell to the public for $60M per payload, and to NASA for roughly $80M per astronaut -- Dragon is a different spacecraft and obviously adds a bunch of additional overheads. But we can reasonably say that SpaceX can profitably put a Shuttle's worth of payload and four crew into orbit for under $300M. So Falcon/Dragon is a reusable launch system an order of magnitude cheaper than the Shuttle and with an order of magnitude higher flate rate. All of this developed in 12 years flat. The Shuttle program was officially announced in 1968 and actually flew in 1981, so took 13 years.

All of which is by way of emphasizing just how impressive Gwynne Shotwell's company is. (And I'm attributing it to her because she's the COO and President of SpaceX, and the aerospace engineering manager who built the company -- Musk is like a small child with a kazoo marching along in front of the brass band, pretending he's the conductor.)

492:

It would be very interesting to know what Jared Isaacman is paying for the Inspiration 4 trip and his forthcoming Polaris flights. Axiom have been advertising seats on their flights for $55 million which includes payments to NASA for board and lodging at the ISS and training on ISS systems.

493:

Just occured to me that one of the four crew on an Axiom flight is an ex-NASA astronaut who is now working for Axiom. If they're not making a loss on the flights that means they're collecting $165 million by selling the other three seats and paying SpaceX out of that.

494:

The Shuttle could launch at most six times a year and required a small army at the Cape to handle ground servicing and launch

I'd revise that to a medium. Or larger. Depending on how you count the staff around the country that were full time to keep things going.

495:

If anyone wants a solid breakdown of the indictment of Trump, this covers all the charges in detail, the appointment of that judge and possible penalties if convicted. - https://www.lawfareblog.com/united-states-america-v-donald-j-trump-and-waltine-nauta

496:

My late ex, who worked at the Cape on the Shuttle, used to complain that they kepts arguing for uses for the external tank, etc, and they, the engineers, kept getting slammed down by political appointees and timeservers.

497:

Remember, the Shuttle needed repair/replacement of the insulation every time. And almost all were unique, meaning they had to make one for each piece that fell off or was damaged. The Dragon capsules are much smaller. I would also assume that they have much newer, improved insulation for reentry.

498:

Given how friable the insulation on the ET was, I'm not sure hauling it all the way up to LEO would have been a good idea. It tended to get moist in the humid Florida air, the moisture froze as the cryogens were pumped on board, and the result was lots of cracking and spallation when it flew. Putting a dozen tons of popcorn in LEO: not a good idea.

(In contrast, Falcon's upper stage is paint over metal. Much more compact, too, so less scope for shedding ice or paint chips.)

Once you've got an ET in orbit, assuming the insulation-shedding problem can be solved, you then have to reboost it regularly (it's a drag monster). You also have to leave a hole in it in order to fit an airlock and move stuff inside it over a series of shuttle missions. In this respect it resembled the "wet lab" proposal for Skylab ... which, in the end, NASA didn't go with (they went with the "dry lab" instead).

I would be very unsurprised to discover that there were internal studies that suggested it'd be more cost effect to use expanding/inflatable habitats like Bigelow's BEAM (is the prototype still docked to the ISS?).

499:

The shuttle design was a tortuous process near the end of Apollo where Congress, Nixon, NASA, and the CBO were all trying to come up with a next step. And Congress had final say. And most of the people yelling loud knew they would not be around when it actually flew.

Which seems to be why we (the US) got a space bus/truck. Sort of like a school bus that cold also have containers stacked on it. Reusable was a requirement in the legislation. Even if few thought the tech was ready.

The tile issue was ongoing and expensive. And would have mostly went away if the only thing expected to re-enter was a smaller space plane glider for people and throw away rockets for cargo. Which would have greatly reduced all kinds of other costs. But that was not what the politics of the day required.

And I'm sure you know most/all of this.

And as a side note, I'm firmly convinced that the computing power they could fit into a booster rocket in a 1970s design would not have allowed for them the land after a launch. Too much processing needed for the CPU power of the era. Musk was able to do his thing after microprocessors got to the point of power and speed to handle the computation needed in real time.

500:

Dragon's heat shield is based on the PICA ablative material developed by NASA in the 1990s. It's replaced after every flight, along with the parachutes, although the capsule itself is refurbished and reflown and certain test tiles in the heat shield have been reflown (for research purposes).

It looks as if Starship uses a ceramic/aerogel tile system not unlike the Space Shuttle's TPS, but with an extra 50 years of materials science and far fewer unique tile shapes needed (better CAD software probably made it easier to figure out how to tile the underside of the Starship vehicle using uniform units).

Googling, as is dismayingly normal these days, is spectacularly useless for finding out anything useful about any particular subject.

501:

You missed out a key player: USAF. The Shuttle requirements were hammered out in 1968-1972 and included a KH-11 sized payload bay, the ability to reach polar orbit with classified military payloads, and the ability to retrieve a 10-ton spysat the size of the Hubble space telescope from polar orbit while flying a re-entry profile that could not at any point risk a forced landing over Communist territory (USSR/China/North Korea in particular).

This was vital in order to get the USAF (and the not-publicly-acknowledged NRO) to support the Shuttle as their means of launching spy satellites and retrieving them to replace the film canisters everyone in 1968 assumed they needed. Earlier models parachuted the film back to Earth, but airborn retrieval proved unreliable, and if you have to send astronauts up to service the big spysats you might as well bring the entire thing home for a refurb on the ground.

This covert military mission meant that Shuttle had to re-enter in, at most, 5000 nautical miles (from OMS de-orbit burn in LEO to landing gear down). With a full payload. So it had to come in hot and heavy, hence the funky heat shield and high temperature loading which led to the loss of the Columbia in 2003.

Sad irony: in the early 1970s the NRO pioneered the use of digital photography and by 1980 they weren't even flying film cameras any more. The shuttle never flew the particular mission for which its design was so badly compromised in order to get the Congressional votes it needed for funding. A smaller crew-carrying winged orbiter like the X-37B (now flying for US Space Command, albeit uncrewed) would have been possible instead, and probably a whole lot safer for the crew.

(Although I maintain that a spacecraft needs wings and wheels like a fish needs a bicycle, or a nuclear powered aircraft carrier needs sails.)

502:

The Hubble never re-entered a Shuttle bay after launch, did it? It was serviced docked with the Shuttle, but they never fully folded it up and stuffed it back in. Hubble launch and service is the closest the Shuttle ever got to that Keyhole-truck role, so far as has been publicly acknowledged (in my memory).

How does one amortize Shuttle+Hubble costs? Did Shuttle's weirdness drive any extra Hubble expense, or cut it down?

503:

Hubble's final size might have been defined by the cargo bay of the shuttle. But past that it was repairs only. And a people space plane, maybe with a grabber arm, would have allowed for regular visits.

Using the shuttle for everything was like the US Navy using an aircraft carrier and support vessels for every navy mission.

And, yes, in my quick thoughts I forgot about adding the USAF to the mix of decision makers on the design. Again, it was all about Congress saying you get NO money unless you agree to build this. So NASA said they would build "this".

As to NRO sat recovery, the first working CCD was made in August of 1970, and I'm guessing no one was willing to promise Congress they would change the universe of photography before the shuttle design was locked to handle NRO demands.

504:

Analysis of structures during the Shuttle programme revealed potential problems with sub-optimal landings while carrying large payloads. Having the landing gear fail to lock properly or collapse on landing had a worrying chance of the payload breaking loose and saying hello to the back of the crew compartment. I think the heaviest items returned were the ISS MPLMs which tended to be full of relatively fluffy junk rather than a nice heavy glass disc.

505:

»Although I maintain that a spacecraft needs wings and wheels […]«

That is actually another stupid "compromise": USAF insisted that the landing be controlled by a human, because "The Right Stuff" and all that, and that compromised the shuttle in numerous debilitating way.

For instance it forced them to put big useless windows out front, where they did not aid any planned mission, but forced limits on the aerobraking maneuvres during landing.

It also seriously complicated the computer code with fly-by-wire.

There is not one single landing where they have documented the pilot and commander doing anything the computer would not have done as well alone.

But the main compromise was the USAF/NRO requirement for high altitude and polar orbits.

506:

Although I maintain that a spacecraft needs wings and wheels like a fish needs a bicycle, or a nuclear powered aircraft carrier needs sails.

From earth to LEO they can make sense. Refurbing something that parachutes into the ocean can take a while. I suspect there's a tradeoff between time and money for a smaller craft gliding to a runway vs a simpler smaller craft splashing into the ocean. Not sure how the number play out.

507:

Far be it for me to suggest that the USAF were still butthurt over the cancellation of the X-20 DynaSoar in 1968, which really was the Flyboy Special they wanted ...

I also note that the Soviet copycat design, Buran, was a white-room copy (they didn't get to see the Shuttle schematics so had to go by what was publicly known) and worked better than the Rockwell version. Engines in the right place (under the fuel tank, aka Energiya; liquid fueled boosters that could be shut down in event of an in-flight emergency) and the one time it flew to orbit it made a fully automated landing without risking any cosmonaut lives.

It was still silly, but the Soviets were so convinced that the US must know what they were doing that it was too late to rework it to make sense by the time they realized that no, actually, the US had in fact designed a horrifically expensive white elephant with lethal failure modes because (reasons).

508:

From earth to LEO they can make sense. Refurbing something that parachutes into the ocean can take a while.

Except, newsflash, no it doesn't -- at least for the kind of flight rates SpaceX is hitting (they're on course for 100 flights in 2023; not sure how many Crew Dragon flights, but n > 3 seems likely). Because it turns out that while hypersonic retropropulsive re-entry and automated vertical powered landing aren't trivial, they're soluble problems (hell, for the latter every single Mars or Moon lander since Apollo 17 uses it).

509:

From Vox.com:

Aileen Cannon, the Trump judge assigned to oversee his trial, explained

"If Cannon remains the judge on this case, it is unlikely that special counsel Jack Smith will convict Trump — no matter how strong the evidence may be."

510:

they're soluble problems (hell, for the latter every single Mars or Moon lander since Apollo 17 uses it).

I didn't say it wasn't a solvable problems. But landing on Earth from LEO is no where near the same as landing on the Moon or Mars.

"soluble"? Interesting world choice/slip.

As to Mars, the "lets try for 5" flights of an experimental copter box has turned into 50 flights now. And it goes far enough that the rover loses contact till it drives closer. (Its radio has to relay through the rover systems.) There are now plans to put 2 on the next Mars rover setup.

511:

and the one time it flew to orbit it made a fully automated landing without risking any cosmonaut lives.

Given that they got to wait 10 years to design theirs (based on the fuzzy dates in Wikipedia) computers had come a long way in those 10 years. And I'm sure they were able to steal a few newer models for their program.

The US shuttle first and for a long time flew using specially designed IBM 360/50s. With tape drives to load various software.

I suspect the Soviets got to use later designs and likely had much more memory to work with.

The specs on such computers (in the US military and NASA) would get baked in very early as they wanted a consistent software platform to develop on as projects developed and deployed. My brother worked on some similar systems for a while. They are way out of date in terms of commercial use while his group was developing new software for them.

512:

It is sometimes difficult to remember how fast computers progressed from mid-70s to mid-2000s. I used to say that 1 computer year == 10 human years. IOW, a computer 0-2 years old might be the latest thing, but it would be expensive, 2-4 years old was best price / performance, and anything past 6 probably should be looking at retirement.

Now, I have a 15 year old laptop on my desk that is getting a bit long in the tooth, but is still usable :) Can't say that about any 150 year old humans that I know of.

513:

https://popehat.substack.com/p/thats-not-how-recusal-works-thats

Popehat is also very skeptical of the chances of obtaining a recusal from Cannon, forced or otherwise.

514:

Back in the 90s (I think) there was an article written in one of the 100s of computer mags available at the time about this. Someone was working on their PHD and needed to run some very heavy (for the time) numerical analysis. He did some tests and the best 386 he had available to him would take something like 2 years. But companies were going to ship 486 systems in a few months that would run it in a bit over a year. He decided to wait before starting the big run.

I have to feel that today a system with a decent GPU would crank it out in 5 minutes to an hour.

515:

skulgun @ 513:

https://popehat.substack.com/p/thats-not-how-recusal-works-thats

Popehat is also very skeptical of the chances of obtaining a recusal from Cannon, forced or otherwise.

I don't have a great hope that judge Cannon will recuse herself, but I do have some hope the 11th Circuit will remove her from the case if she demonstrates the same prejudice that got her reversed and reprimanded for her prior rulings in the case.

Trumpolini deserves a fair trial. So do the People of the United States.

516:

"soluble"? Interesting world choice/slip.

I like to think that the difference between solving/resolving a problem and dissolving it is just semantic. Strictly, it's still leveraging a sort of metaphor as a figure of speech, just one with a different set of imagery to go with it. Like blue liquid into chalk, because obviously teeth are exactly like chalk. Or something.

517:

The early 90's were also a time of huge strides in distributed computation, IIRC that was when seti@home etc got started. We were definitely seeing it at universities, where the admin people were using every computer they could find to grind out the timetables and engineers were having fist-fights over people running jobs on "our" desktop computers.

That combined with better management tools for networked computers meant Java became a thing and by ~2000 Java made it reasonable to do distributed computing in normal offices.

Late 80's network cards were expensive and not everyone had one, these days even cheap devices often have wifi and bluetooth just in case. Not to mention those little "network" boards generally having a 32 bit microprocessor and OS because that's cheaper than dedicated hardware (and they're doing bullshit like bluetooth with USB protocol overlaid on it then emulating a serial connection... how to turn 100Mbits into 2400 baud)

518:

Like blue liquid into chalk

I thought it was blood, and tampons are just like chalk? It's been a while since I saw any ads on the topic.

519:

""soluble"? Interesting world choice/slip."

It's more correct than "solvable".

Mind you, in chemistry we got some ghoul making up "solvation" because "solution" was already taken.

520:

RE: '... indictment of Trump, this covers all the charges in detail'

Thanks - great article!

Also sorta answers why DT might have trouble finding lawyers: many/most of his (former) lawyers end up being charged/found guilty of various crimes. The choice for these lawyers is: treason vs. fee$. (According to a search: disbarment is not automatic if found guilty.)

I think it's a crap shoot between (a) DT dies of old age before all the cases are wrapped up and he enters prison or (b) the cases get wrapped up fairly fast but DT gets the minimum sentence across the board and serves all sentences concurrently therefore exits prison within 3-7 years. Option (b) is where the current judge may be likeliest to show her bias and not get her wrist slapped. If (a), DT will be selling MAGA hats indefinitely to ensure a steady money supply to cover his legal fees.

Regardless, procedures re: classified documents needs a serious overhaul.

521:

EC @ 499
Erm - bollocks.
JC is STUPID, & handwringing over Ukraine & still trying to get people to refuse aid to Ukraine ... I would remind you : "Who started this war?" - Putin. He supports Assange, whom I regard as a Putin paid agent .... but no word on Snowden, who (IMHO) was crapped on for doing the right thing ... um.

Johns S @ 515
Err .. exactly .. the sheets of flame breaking out, otherwise, could be unpleasant.

522:

"soluble"? Interesting world choice/slip.

No, it's grammatically correct -- unlike the solecism "solvable".

523:

skulgun
That is the real weak { Critical point-of-failure? } area of not just the US "justice ( Ha! ) system but the whole structure.
"Elected" ( = Politically appointed ) judges & prosecutors etc. You can game the syatem to the point that you ave comp[lete one-party state control of the whole thing.
Trump may have just done this ... & the results are showing up, to his benefit, right now.

524:

I have to feel that today a system with a decent GPU would crank it out in 5 minutes to an hour.

2 years is roughly 63 million seconds. And a 386 was good for maybe 11.4 MIPS.

An AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X (64 core) from 2020 is good for 3.5 million MIPS.

So it could in principle rip through that workload in about 205 seconds.

Note that this is a high-end desktop/server CPU, not a GPU. And it's three years old.

525:

Very much 'in principle'. Purely computation-dominated codes are fairly rare, though people put a lot of work in trying to get there. If the calculation were limited by main memory access (as many are), the gain would be fairly small. But, as a qualification to the qualification, if its working set used to be too big for cache but now fits in it, the gain would be larger.

526:

A small nit, the external tank, AIUI, was designed to be used for space station compartments. It was at one time the expectation that the parts of shuttle most exposed to heat would be inconel, as was the X-15, which could take strikes from ice less disastrously than the tiles, which required an insulated ET. I suppose an inconel clad shuttle would have unique issues of it's own, but it's over and done now.

527:

If the calculation were limited by main memory access

Lots of fine print there too though. I have more RAM in my desktop than my first couple of hard disk drives... and I have several TB of solid state disk. I know you know this, but it pays to remember that not only does the GPU have more memory than old hard disk drives... the CPUs and SSDs likely have more cache than some even older computers (16MB used to be lots!)

Was it here someone was talking about AI-designed sorting algorithms for C++ standard libraries that have shaved a few cycles off here and there, mostly IIRC by further specialising the 'sort a list of 2/3/4/5..." and doing weird things with caches and SIMD instructions. Like that say, it's not only more complicated than you imagine, it's more complicated than you can imagine (well, than I can imagine, your imagination is likely more capacious)

528:

The cache point was my qualification to my qualification!

Somewhere, I probably still have the code I wrote for an almost optimal sort (both in number of comparisons and data accesses), including special code for 0-5 elements, that was better than anything available (and may well still be). I never did anything more with it, as I could not get excited over the extra complication for a mere 1% improvement.

Do you know that the O(N log^2 N) all-powers-of-2-and-3 Shellsort was optimal on some computers of yore? In fact, it may well be on NVIDIA GPUs, but I never got around to programming for those.

529:

the CPUs and SSDs likely have more cache than some even older computers (16MB used to be lots!)

Youngsters these days!

I remember paying £250 for a 2Mb RAM upgrade and being grateful that the memory cards were even available!

530:

I remember paying £250 for a 2Mb RAM upgrade and being grateful that the memory cards were even available!

Back when I bought my first computer, RAM was measured in kB and more than 16 was considered a lot.

I cut my teeth on the PDP-10, a mainframe that actually had a whole MB of RAM (shared among many users, of course).

531:

Retail priced RAM used to be a pain point for Mac owners, though it resulted in my first Mac acquisition (a Mac ][CI with a Daystar 601/100 card and five Mbs of RAM). Total crashfest until I found 16 Mb* of ex-PC SIMMs, there are benefits to avoiding the leading edge. *$30, US.

532:

I remember paying £250 for a 2Mb RAM upgrade and being grateful that the memory cards were even available!

Youngsters my ass.

$700 for a 1MB upgrade to a Mac 128 in 1986.

My now wife was with me when I went to get it done by a more tech guy than me. Based on her comments I suspect she wasn't sure she wanted to be seeing me. We'd only been together for a month or so at the time.

"How much for WHAT!?!?!?".

533:

I cut my teeth on the PDP-10, a mainframe that actually had a whole MB of RAM (shared among many users, of course).

I cut my teeth (mostly) on a CDC 170 series 750 (one 40 Mhz CPU). A whole ~2 MB (256K 60 bit words) of main memory. Used by about 200 interactive users (and lots of batch, using punch cards). Before that it was a CDC 6500 (two 10 Mhz CPUs) (96K words) that choked when it got to 30 users. That was painful.

534:

I learnt to program on a supercomputer - with a whole 48 KB of memory!

535:

I started on one of the models in This series - Actual core storage

536:

That was not my first computer, by quite a few years ... it was, however, my first that could address more than 1Mb of RAM.

537:

Hell, I remember one of my favorite jobs, for a holiday present, they gave me a ->30M hard drive<- (I only had a 20M at home)....

Let's see, I think I've got 16G RAM....

538:

By the bye, from thoughts in this thread, I wound up writing a short fantasy that started as funny, and turned serious. It's been submitted.

Hmmm... I never mentioned the size to the demonsplay that the demon used at his desk....

539:

That combined with better management tools for networked computers meant Java became a thing and by ~2000 Java made it reasonable to do distributed computing in normal offices.

I was engineering not compsci, but I don't remember Java making an impact that way. The USP of Java was platform-independence, but it made its play for platform-independence at the same time as Microsoft/Intel steamrollered the competition on desktops and left us with only one significant platform. And on servers, anything relating to number-crunching would be running on something POSIX-related, so platform independence isn't a big deal when you can just recompile the source. So by the time Java was at all established as a language, its raison d'etre had basically completely vanished, because there simply wasn't a big market for programs that'd run on both Windows and POSIX without recompiling.

The main things that affected anything networked were better networks, and wider availability of networking as internet usage took off.

540:

skulgun @ 513:

https://popehat.substack.com/p/thats-not-how-recusal-works-thats

Popehat is also very skeptical of the chances of obtaining a recusal from Cannon, forced or otherwise.

I don't have a great hope that judge Cannon will recuse herself, but I do have some hope the 11th Circuit will remove her from the case if she demonstrates the same prejudice that got her reversed and reprimanded for her prior rulings in the case.

Trumpolini deserves a fair trial, but so do the People of the United States.

541:

Sorry about the duplicate post. For some reason my original response did not show up when I refreshed the comments.

543:

Re: 'Purely computation-dominated codes are fairly rare, though people put a lot of work in trying to get there.'

Why? Is this a form/type of theoretical CompSci? (Some historical background or potential uses would be interesting - thanks!)

Agriculture in space ...

We've discussed this topic a few years ago. Don't remember if anyone specifically mentioned that a possible solution might be to figure out how to grow plants without light.

Note: Free if you have a subscription or haven't already read three free articles within the past month.

https://www.science.org/content/article/crops-grown-without-sunlight-could-help-feed-astronauts-bound-mars

544:

(distributed computing in normal offices). I was engineering not compsci, but I don't remember Java making an impact that way.

Might be a niche I was in. I used a couple of different distributed systems but they were incredibly painful to build across heterogenous systems. Java made that much easier via better versioning and language consistency.

545:

Craig Murray believes Y2K was a hoax. That's all the proof I need that he's a crank.

546:

A few years ago I was slightly mindboggled to realise that the new computer I'd just bought had exactly a million times as much storage as the first computer I ever owned (Amiga with 5 MB -> Mac Pro with 5 TB).

547:

I paid ten quid for a 1 kilobyte (not megabyte) upgrade to one of my first computers (Acorn Atom). Each 1kx4 SRAM chip cost a fiver and I needed two for a kilobyte. A megabyte would have cost me 10,000 quid, just paying 500 quid ($700 US) for that much memory would have been a bargain!

548:

My C64 had 64kB and the storage was cassette tape. I have 64GB RAM in both home and work desktops. And the JetBrains support people have just suggested that 32GB might not be enough RAM for the virtual machine I use to run CLion in.

I'm not entirely sure whether to even count the tapes, I don't count the tape drives at work as part of our storage capacity. My first hard drive was a 10MB one but it was free because it was failing (and I had an ISA SCSI card to talk to it with!)... so maybe the new 20MB one I got to replace it should count instead?

On that note, a big thing these days is plug and play interfaces. You gets your cable and you plugs one end into each widget and they talk to each other. Or you wirelessly do the equivalent. It's very rare that you have to work out which interface card to buy, then fiddle with BIOS setting before the thing will even boot, then you spend time playing with drivers and settings to get the OS to acknowledge it, and then you hope that the software you want to use can deal with whatever the driver claims to do.

Even the "programmer" I use to force firmware onto unwilling embedded devices has pogo pins and a USB interface so it's all-round nicer to use than the old school ones with a dedicated card and a 10mm diameter multicore cable leading to a magic box (that ran on 14.3V or something equally obnoxious), which in turn had a 6-10 wire cable to a ZIF socket...

549:

Granted, Cuba is not likely to be an Approved Final Destination by TFG.

However, it is very close to MIA (367 klicks), and it would be rather easy to divert to José Martí International on any flight out of MIA or PBI if the flight deck were provided with a large satchel of engraved portraits of dead presidents. Tell me, with a straight face, TFG doesn't have many such satchels in his bathroom of choice.

Would Celtic launch the F-15Cs on strip alert at HST to, if need be, splash Trump Force One? Doubtful.

So, TFG surveys the three golf courses in Cuba, and finds Havana and Varadero wanting; the third, at Gitmo, is unlikely to even be considered, as even TFG would understand its his Roach Motel of outdoor entertainment ('He goes in, but he don't come out!')

However, it's likely TFG could manage to get his good buddy Vlad to send for him, and Vlad's well known for his sense of humor. Why not add TFG to his collection of expats? How much could another golf course at Sochi cost? https://www.leadingcourses.com/region/europe+russia/clubs

550:

engraved portraits of dead presidents. Tell me, with a straight face, TFG doesn't have many such

I'm undecided as to whether the guy is really poor or just convinced that he can never be rich enough. On the one hand a certain type of rich arsehole absolutely glories in their ability to be a bad debtor (citizen, human being, whatever). But on the other hand he definitely takes in a lot of money from various 'enterprises'. Plus tax offices are very used to apparently rich people with no visible income or assets and legislators are very good at creating opportunities for that.

One problem is that it does create a trivially prosecutable offence if he does flee with a pile of cash, because at least entering many countries requires either declaring exactly how much cash you have, or handing a pile of it to the enterprising persons who have obtained lucrative positions in the entry area of a country.

551:

(which is not to say rich fuckers in private jets don't habitually violate such laws, as we saw when some arsehole got all whiny when Australian Border Farce wanted to kill their precious puggles. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-32732313 )

552:

Cash is for noobs. Wealth is about control, not ownership. You don't give them a bag of cash, you give them a piece of paper that states that they (blank filled in) are the owner of a corporation registered on some island. You tell them (perhaps with evidence) that the assets of the corporation are a bank account somewhere else. This all happens in a country that has no way of taxing the transaction...

Three points about this:

  • This isn't how Tboned does business. I'll get to that. It's for discerning corrupters.

  • I have a sneaking suspicion that most commercial jet pilots wouldn't take a bribe to take a plane to Cuba, simply because they'd make money by keeping their licenses and following the flight plans they filed.

  • Tboned's main shtick is that he's above the law. This means, unfortunately for him, that he's has to regularly break the law and not suffer the consequences to keep the act going.

  • This last point might be useful for those writing SFF authoritarian rulers: they gotta keep transgressing, being the law-givers, not the law-followers. If they start routinely following the law, all their previous bad behavior might just catch up with them. Parallels with Wile E. Coyote do come to mind as analogs for what happens when the shtick fails.

    An interesting essay from TPM (not an unbiased source) posits that the current transgressive era started with the federal treatment of Cliven and Ammon Bundy and posse back in 2014. The feds, spooked by what happened in Waco, refused to use force to arrest these two far right clowns, and they got away with all sorts of crap for years. Unfortunately for far right clowns and wannabes, January 6th forced the feds to take the gloves off, and now it's anvil dropping time. I hope Josh got it right this time, because there's this one clown who's really fracking annoying me...

    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-end-of-bundy-clan-rules

    553:

    Java made that much easier via better versioning and language consistency.

    Yeah, when working in technical assessments, I saw nice examples of easy Java versioning, on servers. I think the best count was eight different Java versions installed, seven of which were out of support and the one not almost there...

    Currently I work with cloud environments (so, somebody else's computers) and containers, and while I acknowledge that they do have their problems and can easily lead to bad practices, it's at least harder to run various different versions of stuff on them, with no knowledge which one is really being used in any particular situation .

    Yes, it's 'fun' asking the users of the system what all these versions are used for. Sometimes they know and the answer is 'fun' too, it's usually along the lines of 'Well, our software uses this library, which has been unsupported for some years now and it runs only on Java SE 5, so we have to use it'. And rewriting it for something more modern would require more time and money that the (mis)management is ready to spend.

    554:

    I currently live in a world where "it still works shut up" starts with our end-users and goes all the way up. Why replace hardware from 1998 just because the capacitors have leaked? The power LED still glows, it'll be fine.

    We were discussion a Delphi-7 program launcher used in our factory today. While it would be easier to write from scratch (so to speak) using C# where we'd mostly just bang together a few library functions and it's done, "just" means a week of programmer time and "it still works shut up". Works in the sense of we had to update it this week when yet another 1990's era API call went from deprecated to unavailable. Ahem.

    JetBrains asked me to install no less than three new Java VMs trying to work out what's wrong with CLion. Albeit one a was download link to a version about 3 years old so I used the latest version instead when the old version did not support their app. They are big believers in error logs, most of which seem to be of the form "FatalException 653: code 0934685. Index 726 invalid for array of size 4 {stack trace}"... then the application keeps running, and produces crud like that every minute or so. Support dude says {this is fine}. Until suddenly the app and the terminal it came from are no longer there, with no log files anywhere we can find. Joy.

    555:

    A few years ago I was slightly mindboggled to realise that the new computer I'd just bought had exactly a million times as much storage as the first computer I ever owned (Amiga with 5 MB -> Mac Pro with 5 TB).

    In the first half of the 80s I was the primary programmer for an office automation setup for Property Casualty Independent Insurance agencies. We had sold about 2500 systems and were the biggest in our niche. The phone I carry around today has more "ram" and/or "storage" than all of those 2500 systems combined. And most of the time I have a terabyte or more of flash drives in my backpack.

    Uphill. In the snow. Both ways.

    556:

    I don't feel particularly nostalgic about those days.

    I grew up in the 8 bit and 16 bit era. The excitement of doing something new is something I miss, and writing physics code for my Atari ST while doing my degree back in the 90s was fun. But...

    For those of us who do still do number crunching work the sheer capability of modern systems is amazing.

    In human terms a compute job can take weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds or be interactive. Each step brings a qualitative difference to how a user interacts with the machine.

    In the weeks and days bracket you verify everything, check with colleagues and clear the run with management. In the minutes bracket you run jobs in coffee breaks and when you get to interactive you mess around with and explore the parameter space of your model.

    I don't care what people say about life being better in the old days. Faster computers lead to better engineering because you can iterate faster.

    Oh yeah. It's true that most programmers have got lazy and just waste what they have been given. The ones who aren't lazy can do magic though.

    557:

    Re: 'Purely computation-dominated codes are fairly rare, though people put a lot of work in trying to get there.'

    Why? Is this a form/type of theoretical CompSci? (Some historical background or potential uses would be interesting - thanks!)

    Something that responds to user input can spend most of its time waiting for its human to do something. A word processor or this browsers text entry box has to wait an eternity between key strokes.

    on the question of "how to make code compute dominated", you need to think about where the time goes when you are trying to make your computer work.

    This is a list of numbers from about 10 years ago. It's out of date but good enough for discussion: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

    There is a hierarchy of memory in your computer. Typically a small amount of fast memory, with layers of cheaper, slower memory outside it. These are generally "registers", L1 cache, L2 cache, sometimes bu not always L3 Cache, main memory, then SSDs, HDDs etc. on the outside.

    If you are running some calculations it would be ideal if all the numbers you need are in registers. Working on them is essentially free.

    If the numbers aren't in registers then you had better hope they are in L1 cache. Pack them close together in memory to maximise the chance that they are.

    Caches are organised in "lines", which are usually 64 bytes wide on current systems. Arrange things so related data are in the same cache line.

    If your data are in the wrong place or in L2 cache it's a bit slower again and then performance drops off a cliff when you start hitting main memory.

    This implies that computers get slower as the job size increases, but caches are smart and can make sure the data are there waiting for you before you work on it. Provided that you access it in a predictable way.

    Predictability is good on the actual calculation side as well. I'm not going to get into branch predictors, but know that complex logic that makes a lot of decisions has a cost. About the same as hitting L2 cache according to the numbers above. It's not as big a deal as memory but it is there.

    Anyway... Someone who pays attention to these things can often write code that runs tens or hundreds of times faster than that emitted by someone who doesn't.

    558:

    The example I used when teaching was that my (behind-the-ear) hearing aids had 100,000 times the computing power of the first (super)computer I used, which needed a moderate-sized room. Don't even ask about the size of the (large) drum storage compared to a modern USB stick!

    And I am go back only to 18 years after the start of modern computing - I have worked with people who started counting memory in bytes (or similar). It's mind-boggling. I have serious difficulty in using the right one of KB, MB, GB, TB and even PB :-)

    559:

    I don't feel particularly nostalgic about those days.

    I grew up in the 8 bit and 16 bit era. The excitement of doing something new is something I miss, and writing physics code for my Atari ST while doing my degree back in the 90s was fun. But...

    For those of us who do still do number crunching work the sheer capability of modern systems is amazing.

    For me, the old computers are fun as a hobby, sometimes. I have this Amiga re-issue box, which I though I could code something for as I never really got around to it back in the day. My friends had Amigas, I had 8086 and 80386 machines, which while fun, were pretty different. Still haven't gotten around to figuring out a toolchain from C or 68k assembly to a booting disk file (probably not that hard, but would take some effort).

    On very lazy days I dream of building my own 68k-based computer with perhaps some co-processors, like Amiga but better, but then I remember that I have quite a few project ideas anyway already, and most of them would be less effort.

    At work I take modern tools, thank you, though they are frustrating often. Especially the GUI stuff seems to be somewhat overdone in many cases - while there are quite a lot of resources available, sometimes even registering key events and getting them to the correct program lags noticeably. Especially on-screen keyboards seem prone to this.

    560:

    That's the situation, yes. Something else that is important is that accessing data sequentially is MUCH faster than doing so at random. That's both because of how the hardware works and because it makes access prediction much easier (e.g. preloading).

    To describe why it's fundamental, you have to dive fairly deeply into the mathematics (both numerical analysis and modern computer science). Deeper than I have been, actually. To take a couple of examples, and give a simplistic explanation:

    A large set of linear equations has O(N^2) values, and solving them requires O(N^3) operations, each accessing a data value. In order to make it run fast, you have to rearrange the computation so that each data value is operated on O(N) times per data access. That's tricky, but possible. The actual situation is a lot more complicated, but that's the idea.

    Compscis used to (and may still do) measure the speed of sorting algorithms by counting the number of comparisons. That has been complete nonsense since the 1970s, as the time taken for sorting is dominated by that to access the data. And, while the access pattern is definitely not random, it's very much not sequential, either - except, to some extent, for the all powers of 2 and 3 Shellsort and Quicksort, which explains why those methods are so fast.

    561:

    There is a hierarchy of memory in your computer. Typically a small amount of fast memory, with layers of cheaper, slower memory outside it. These are generally "registers", L1 cache, L2 cache, sometimes bu not always L3 Cache, main memory, then SSDs, HDDs etc. on the outside.

    And there's tape.

    There is code that I was responsible for that allowed the user to scroll through a list of files. The files in question were on a network server, but being a handful of kB in size, the time to fetch each one was imperceptible, being of the same order as rendering the content. All good, until they hit the 6 month mark, at which point it started taking seconds for each

    It turned out that the directory in which these data files were stored was set for them to be migrated off to backup storage, being replaced by a marker file. Attempt to access this replacement, and the server would pause while the proper file was pulled back in. Now this isn't a bad idea per se, but the policy for pushing the files onto the backup was whether they'd been written to within the previous half year. These being data files in near constant use, they were read all the time, but not updated

    Oh, and I'm not sure the marker file was actually appreciably smaller than the data files anyway, but as I don't know the actual implementation, it may have used a weird file attribute behind an NTFS reparse point

    562:

    In human terms a compute job can take weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds or be interactive. Each step brings a qualitative difference to how a user interacts with the machine... when you get to interactive you mess around with and explore the parameter space of your model.

    Yes. In some ways this is the use case that tools like Qlik, Tableau and PowerBI cater to. It's not just gigaflops, it's also query latency so you load your data sets into main memory. The promise is that you can put the data in front of domain experts who know about the things it represents, and give them tools to discover the relationships between variables interactively. TBH the main benefits from these activities seems to be around building maturity in the way organisations do data lineage and their processes for making data available for research.

    563:

    I didn't want to get into too much detail...

    A fun side effect of the interactions between these moving parts is that it is almost impossible to predict the "optimal" approach to a problem from first principles. It all gets a bit empirical.

    Coming up with 2 or 3 plausible approaches that fit in with the general principles outlined, then measuring carefully seems to be the way.

    Actually that's one thing I do miss from the 80s - main memory that could keep up with the CPU.

    564:

    As you noticed, even I baulked :-)

    In practice, I agree, but it is fairly often possible to predict the "optimal" approach in simple cases, if you are capable of (and prepared to) dive deeply into the mathematics. I have dabbled my toes in that, but no more. It is definitely not within the ability of the average programmer.

    565:

    It's possible but I'm not sure it's worthwhile in the PC space at least. Too many compatible CPUs with subtly different performance characteristics.

    Picking an example out of the air: AMDs branch predictor is not the same as intels. Some of their chips are believed to use perceptron networks FFS!

    Predicting exactly what it will do requires reverse engineering trade secrets with an electron microscope. Not going there! :)

    566:

    I haven't seen what he said, but, to a great extent, the Y2K circus WAS a hoax! Basically, there were three views being promulgated:

    1) There wasn't a problem.

    2) Y2K threatened the survival of civilisation.

    3) There is a problem, but it's under control, unless politicians panic.

    As everyone in the area knew, people who said the first were idiots, people who said the second were cranks, and the correct answer was the third. Basically, the hype of the second was a hoax by the media. And so it proved.

    I could explain why in gory detail, but it's been covered here before. Calling someone a crank because they called the Y2K circus a hoax is simply incorrect.

    567:

    I have heard an argument that the circus was required to get people to take it seriously enough for 3 to happen.

    I resisted the allure of double the salary in exchange for a COBOL job and redundancy on Jan 2 2000 so I don't know much about what was going on behind the scenes there though.

    568:

    Having done a little, I am sure that it is NOT generally worthwhile!

    569:

    re: Y2K Cranks

    I followed a Y2K thread. One guy was saying everyone within N miles (I forget what N was, 20? 100?) of a 7/11 was going to be toast come Jan 1 2000. He was presumably hold up in a bunker full of ammo in Colorado. he went off air on Jan 1.

    It was suggested I corrected my leap year code (it didn't handle the divides by 400 rule correctly). I pointed out it wouldn't give the wrong answer until 2100. I suggested they got back to me when it actually breaks.

    570:

    Uphill. In the snow. Both ways.

    Can't remember the source, but I vaguely recall reading (a few years ago) that worldwide production of fixed disk drives in 1973 totaled a whopping 93 gigabytes of storage. That is: all the disk drives manufactured in 1973 had a combined capacity smaller than the RAM fitted in this 2019-vintage iMac I'm typing on right now.

    (Of course this was shortly before hard disk drive manufacturing volume went exponential as by 1990 every desktop PC and even laptop needed a hard drive and there were millions (chuckle) of the things coming off the production lines every month. Whereas today we're producing smartphones by the billion annually and a typical android or iphone has 128Gb of more of storage.)

    571:

    I was condemned for not even testing the system I managed in advance; it didn't help that I pointed out that the down time for testing exceeded the expected lost time, IF it occurred (it didn't). The only thing I had to fix was some sloppy code in a script of mine, which I did in 15 minutes with no down time, no loss of data and no users noticing.

    572:

    But on the other hand he definitely takes in a lot of money from various 'enterprises'.

    Including the indictment. I get daily fundraising emails from my Good Friend explaining that Time Is Short and asking me to contribute to Save America from the Woke Left.

    Except with more exclamation marks and capitalization. Sooo much capitalization.

    Clearly Trump disagrees with Frederick the Great, and doesn't believe that he who emphasizes everything, emphasizes nothing. :-)

    573:

    All this talk of vintage computers reminds me that I have Mac Plus and an Atari 1049ST in my basement storage room, in their original boxes. Worked when I packed them away decades ago. May or may not have the original manuals.

    I have no need of them, so if one of you wants to pick them up let me know…

    574:

    I don't feel particularly nostalgic about those days. I grew up in the 8 bit and 16 bit era.

    I'm with you on both counts. At times it was fun and thrilling. Then I was in my 30s and it was less so. Especially trying to raise kids. A 20 hour programming / debug / sprint wasn't nearly as much fun/thrilling when juggling kids, school, swim, and a wife. And a body that would say more and more, WTF.

    But getting fed up with a vendors 2K of 8008 code that was loaded as needed into a telecom controller, so buying a book on the 8008, writing a disassembler for the 2K with flags for what to treat as instructions and what as data, then making changes to make it work the was it was needed ....

    There was a bit of a thrill.

    Ditto patching a system to system teletype like setup for people so we could transfer a binary file THAT NIGHT with no compatible media between the systems via poking hex codes into the live OS....

    Interesting old fart stories but yes, I like my systems to JUST WORK. Well mostly.

    Now off to deal with a laptop display that has gone dark for a partner in a firm. Temp replacement, buy another or different but AFTER figuring out the repair options, Oh, well.

    575:

    I tested for year range 1901 to 2099, including 2000 as a value, and I did include the correct test of Is_Leap_Year only if REM (100) = 0 and REM (400) = 0.

    576:

    Your testing wasn't complete, then :-)

    577:

    I haven't seen what he said, but, to a great extent, the Y2K circus WAS a hoax! Basically, there were three views being promulgated:

    1) There wasn't a problem.

    2) Y2K threatened the survival of civilisation.

    3) There is a problem, but it's under control, unless politicians panic.

    Maybe for the systems you dealt with but not for all of us.

    The supply chain issues of the last few years have made more people aware of how large companies and countries can be impacted by small disruptions.

    There were all kinds of small businesses that had situations that were going to fail hard come Y2K. Maybe the warehouse shipping system falls apart and it takes a week to get the medical supplies to regional hospitals back on track. Or no one can get paid via the automated deposit system in a railroad distribution yard.

    I agree the world most likely would not have ended but life would be a total PITA for a while for non trivial numbers of people. And there would likely be a rise in deaths that could be seen in the stats.

    578:

    Which didn't happen.

    As I said, the correct answer is that there was a problem, but it was under control. Yes, OF COURSE, there would have been much worse problems if nobody had addressed the issues, but the technical staff in most major companies started tackling the problem in the 1980s. Management took longer to wake up, but pretty well all serious companies had resolved the issues.

    There is going to be a much, much worse problem in 2038, because the Unix timestamp is embedded in a great many dormant/frozen protocols, and in many large programs, often without even the technical staff knowing it is there. Note that that can be due to using C at some level, where values can be truncated to 32 bits in extremely unobvious ways.

    579:

    the correct answer is that there was a problem, but it was under control. Yes, OF COURSE, there would have been much worse problems if nobody had addressed the issues, but the technical staff in most major companies started tackling the problem in the 1980s.

    I disagree. Most tech staff were were NOT on it prior to 1998/99. They were overwhelmed (as today) with day to day crap and management was allocating no time to even look into things, much less address it.

    Sorry, I just knew too many people at "non tech" companies who were in situations where "it is working now, LEAVE IT ALONE".

    Airlines and such were a bit different. At least the flight ops people.

    But in general most businesses (not tech companies) were doign their best to hope someone else would deal and they could keep ignoring.

    You can have the last word, but we fundamentally disagree.

    580:

    Huh. The ST at least can be cheaply upgraded with a flash memory card floppy drive replacement, apparently giving up to 1.8Mb/sec read/write throughput and take SD cards in the range 1-64Gb (depending on the adapter and firmware). So that's a good workaround for 30 year old floppy disks and their drives.

    The Mac Plus has a SCSI port and BlueSCSI should do the trick.

    (Assuming you really want to get a 68K-based 1980s home computer working again and don't want to be dealing with DOA floppy disks and elderly IDE hard drives. Me, my retrocomputing impulse is limited to awaiting the delivery of my Spectrum Next Issue 2, which I kickstarted a couple of years ago and then got delayed by the supply chain crisis ... they're finally at the factory and should be shipping in a month or two.)

    581:

    Assuming you really want to get a 68K-based 1980s home computer working again and don't want to be dealing with DOA floppy disks and elderly IDE hard drives.

    I was running a mail server in my home on some SCSI drives a while back. 10 years ago I suddenly realized those 4 drives (in a RAID) had been running for over 10 years. I quickly went out and bought some newer drives and reconfigured it.

    When things just run and don't break you tend to forget about them.

    But more to your point. Even if I had all working parts to put that computer setup back together would be a real chore. Likely a few 100 settings that I have no memory of what to pick as they have fallen off the back of my brain over the last 10 years. Much less what driver worked with what version of what card with which OS patch version and ....

    582:

    Rbt Prior
    Has anyone actually manged to DEFINE "woke" satisfactorily, so that the headbangers can agree what they are raving about?

    583:

    Asking those against "woke" in the US what they mean either creates silence or outrage.

    584:

    I can see it now, TFG runs to Cuba, and while waiting for Putin to haul him to Russia, Cuba tells the US "sure, we'll extradite him... as long as you take Camp X-Ray with him."

    585:

    Cash? Who carries cash? He'd have bearer bonds, and stock certs, and account numbers.

    586:

    Airlines and such were a bit different. At least the flight ops people.

    Were they?

    Serious question. I recall how Southwest cancelled over 15,000 flights when their crew scheduling software screwed up, and it turned out that staff had been warning of the problem for years and yet management had done nothing to solve the problem…

    It's a common problem in public health. If you take action to prevent a disease outbreak, then no outbreak happens, which is then used as evidence that you were panicking unnecessarily and wasting taxpayer money. I've seen this play out several times; my father, who ended his career in public health, dealt with it on a regular basis.

    (Yes, you can use statistical analysis and modelling to determine the effectiveness of various measures. But management doesn't believe statistics. To them, statistics is what you do to produce numbers that "prove" that your decision is the best decision; ie. it's something done after the decision is made to convince other people. As a science teacher I regularly had to deal with kids who had taken business classes, and learned that stats and graphs are tools for convincing people rather than tools for discovering facts.)

    587:

    Assuming you really want to get a 68K-based 1980s home computer working again and don't want to be dealing with DOA floppy disks and elderly IDE hard drives.

    I have no interest in using them again. (Like I said, they worked when I packed them up, so should still work now.) That's why I'm offering them to anyone who is interested in old tech…

    I live in the Greater Toronto Area, which means that most readers are likely too far to make picking them up worthwhile.

    588:

    Has anyone actually manged to DEFINE "woke" satisfactorily, so that the headbangers can agree what they are raving about?

    "Woke" is whatever offends them. It's an inclusive term, so as long as whatever offends one of them isn't passionately supported by another it's woke. And given that various actions are offensive or not depending on who does them it's also situational.

    Are you really expecting logic and consistency from the American right-wing?

    589:

    My dad asked me the other day if I had come across the word and what it meant. I found it quite hard to come up with an answer that would convey the right impression given the context of where he would be likely to have come across it. I ended up saying that it was a word I don't use myself, because regardless of its originally intended meaning, its de facto usage is as a word intended to disparage people who disapprove of prejudice.

    590:

    ...so you wrote a cron job that would touch the files once every 2 months...

    591:

    "...when you get to interactive you mess around with and explore the parameter space of your model.

    I don't care what people say about life being better in the old days. Faster computers lead to better engineering because you can iterate faster."

    ...or worse engineering because it's too easy to just play with the sliders until you get a good-looking result without fully understanding why you are getting that kind of result, and/or end up with something that depends on the departures of the simulation system from reality to make it work.

    592:

    Actually, it's also whoever agrees with them, depending on which bunch of extremists you are stuck with! I agree that it's more often used in a disparaging sense.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58281576

    593:

    Not just in public health :-( In many environments (including some UK university departments, which ought to know better), the path to promotion is to minimise "inessentials" - being responsible for a cock-up isn't harmful to one's career, but taking "unnecessary" precautions is.

    594:
    • Has anyone actually manged to DEFINE "woke" satisfactorily, so that the headbangers can agree what they are raving about?*

    The whole point is to have a Bad Thing to accuse the other side of being. Defining it too tightly makes it easy to refute accusations, so they don't do that. See also the bizarre misconceptions surrounding Communism that are so widespread among Americans to this day.

    ("Woke" did originally have a very specific meaning in African-American usage -- it means alert to/aware of structural discrimination and injustice -- but the MAGA crowd turned it into something else. Just like Critical Race Theory, which was actually an area of research in legal theory examining how discrimination can arise from the structure of institutions that purport to be non-discriminatory but which are applied differently to non-privileged groups. Eg. to a billionaire a cash bail requirement followed by a fine if found guilty of an offense merely means the offense is legal with a price attached, while to a poor person it represents automatic jail time if they're even accused of it because they can't stand bail let alone a fine.)

    595:

    kiloseven @ 549:

    Granted, Cuba is not likely to be an Approved Final Destination by TFG.

    However, it is very close to MIA (367 klicks), and it would be rather easy to divert to José Martí International on any flight out of MIA or PBI if the flight deck were provided with a large satchel of engraved portraits of dead presidents. Tell me, with a straight face, TFG doesn't have many such satchels in his bathroom of choice.

    Y'all just need to forget this. IT AIN'T NEVER GONNA' HAPPEN!

    Trumpolini CAN'T flee the U.S.! ... not as long as he remains Donald J Trump!

    Flight to avoid prosecution IS AN ADMISSION OF GUILT. Furthermore, it marks Trumpolini forever as a LOSER!!! ... and that's one thing he cannot admit. Trumpolini is incapable of it.

    There are lots of people who would help him escape his troubles here in the U.S. ... except for the ONE GUY who would have to cooperate for any scheme to work, DJT. He ain't gonna' have any part of it.

    596:

    dpb @ 556:

    I don't feel particularly nostalgic about those days.

    I do ... sort of ... it was a time when if something went wrong there was a good chance I could fix it myself.

    597:

    Elderly Cynic @ 566:

    I haven't seen what he said, but, to a great extent, the Y2K circus WAS a hoax! Basically, there were three views being promulgated:

    1) There wasn't a problem.

    2) Y2K threatened the survival of civilisation.

    3) There is a problem, but it's under control, unless politicians panic.

    As everyone in the area knew, people who said the first were idiots, people who said the second were cranks, and the correct answer was the third. Basically, the hype of the second was a hoax by the media. And so it proved.

    I could explain why in gory detail, but it's been covered here before. Calling someone a crank because they called the Y2K circus a hoax is simply incorrect.

    I always felt, and still feel it was option 4) Y2K was a REAL PROBLEM with real consequences * IF NOT CORRECTED ... but not on the "collapse of civilization" level.

    And a lot of people did a lot of hard work to make sure the problems DID get corrected BEFORE they could crash any systems.

    *... a lot of fucked up accounts receivable & accounts payable, that were going to be real aggravating to sort out; and maybe a few grounded airline flights if flight plans couldn't be filed because the computer rejected the dates ... but mostly just MONEY problems rather than LIFE SAFETY issues.

    598:

    Greg Tingey @ 582:

    Rbt Prior
    Has anyone actually manged to DEFINE "woke" satisfactorily, so that the headbangers can agree what they are raving about?

    As far as I can tell, it just means paying attention to the way things REALLY work in society and trying to NOT be a racist asshole!

    It's that last part that has the reich-wingnuts all stirred up because they DEMAND to be racist assholes as a "god given right".

    599:

    I recall how Southwest cancelled over 15,000 flights when their crew scheduling software screwed up

    Yes. But.

    My wife worked for an airline for 30+ years. To us "flight ops" is keeping planes from falling from the sky. Not being able to schedule crews and plane not taking off doesn't count.

    Everything else is a distraction to them. But they tend to get what they want. If not, run to a different airline. Fast.

    600:

    See also the bizarre misconceptions surrounding Communism that are so widespread among Americans to this day.

    In the US communism is simple. It means Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, the elderly who died quickly after him and atheism. And no one works because everyone sucks at the teat of the government. And thus anything the government does without requiring "work" is communism. Which leads to atheism. Which leads to the downfall of all mankind.

    The rest of the it is just details that get lost in the stump speech noise.

    [/big snark]

    601:

    As far as I can tell, it just means paying attention to the way things REALLY work in society and trying to NOT be a racist asshole!

    Yup, I very much agree. This morning, some right winger on FacePlant was cheering on the idea that DEI education (diversity, equity, inclusion) was getting rolled back somewhere. I got a wee bit peeved, so I replied that "DEI is the idea that you treat people as people, no matter what they look or act like. Even if they're elderly white bigots who can't stand the thought of being cared for by Filipino nurses who make more money than they do." And yes, I'm proud to know (and have known) a number of extremely good Filipino nurses.

    602:

    "Works in the sense of we had to update it this week when yet another 1990's era API call went from deprecated to unavailable."

    Aye, well, that sort of thing is a bloody nuisance, and it seriously doesn't help that attitudes such as that your new software requiring people to install the latest versions of five different libraries all of which are used by lots of other things too is somewhere between "neutral" and "good" (rather than "anathematised; to be avoided if at all possible"), or that the 1990s-era API call is intrinsically bad purely because it dates from the 1990s (never mind that the thing they want you to use instead is slower, less efficient, needs a greater variety of external resources, and takes half a page of code to set up instead of a couple of lines), not only are excessively pervasive but that pervasiveness is reinforced by tribalistic pressure (cf. bellends on stackoverflow posting things like "don't do it that way, do it like this [code] because that's more ES6-y" - why? it doesn't work any better, it works on fewer things, and it's harder to understand).

    The standard solution quoted is invariably simply to install the newest versions of everything. Except that the newest version of the thing that uses the 1990s API call has had loads of other stuff changed in it as well, which fucks up everything you were trying to do with it. And the new libraries introduce more incompatibilities which have the same effect on all the other things you use every day. And some of them require the kernel to be updated because they use some new kernel API that introduces the ability to do RPC calls with superuser privileges via parsing Twitter feeds, or some other bloody thing that I am not only completely certain that I will never ever want to do ever, but completely certain that I don't want to be even possible. And the graphics card driver is a binary blob that includes code to deliberately break it with newer kernel versions in order to make sure that people have to keep buying new graphics cards. And the new graphics cards are hugely expensive and don't even have a VGA output. So the monitor won't work any more either and you end up with a machine which is obligatorily headless...

    It ends up not only being vastly easier, but also avoids spending actual money, to wonder exactly why the 1990s API call no longer works when the library still claims to be able to do the same thing. And it turns out that the "extended" call they want you to use instead is essentially a dispatcher, and when you feed it the parameters you'll be needing to use, what it does is translate the complicated call that takes half a page to set up back into the original couple-of-lines version, and then call the original API, which is all still there underneath and is referred to about a thousand times from within squirrelly bits all over the rest of the library, so it's essentially impossible for them to ever remove it.

    So all I have to do is change the original call's declaration back to public, and recompile... and bingo, the problem is solved. Then I can simply mark the library as "on hold" in the package management system so it doesn't get overwritten accidentally, and add a small text file in the directory where I built the modified version explaining what I did and why, so I know what to do the next time round.

    It works fine except I nearly always fail to get round to writing the text file.

    Moreover, from comments in the changelog about why the original call was removed, I find directions to five years' worth of argument on developers' message boards, where I discover that the reason is that a faction has arisen that insists that superuser RPC via Twitter is now an essential feature which needs to be built in to everything at kernel level, and everything from the kernel upwards modified to support it. And by a combination of relentless propaganda and modifying their own widely-used packages to support it so other people have to go along, they have eventually managed to steamroller/weasel the people saying "this is a fucking stupid idea" out of the way. So now I know that although my approach to the situation may be "kind of horrible", it is nevertheless (a) correct, (b) necessary, and (c) something I'm now going to keep running into that will repeatedly call for me to do the same kinds of hacks on other things again and again. Which will still be less effort than the "official" approach.

    Aargh.

    603:

    In related news, a "the kids are all right" article from one of the more Republican Counties in California. ( https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2023/06/06/youth-revolution ). They claim that a plausible correlate for what they're seeing (reduced levels of violence, teenage pregnancy, increased tolerance, etc) is reduction in environmental lead levels.

    Hmmmmm.

    604:

    was cheering on the idea that DEI education (diversity, equity, inclusion) was getting rolled back somewhere.

    New Texas law.

    The evangelicals have their knickers all in a twist for the last week or two since they discovered that their fav eatery, Chick-fil-a, has a DEI policy and a VP overseas it.

    605:

    And last night I got to spend 3 hours researching and writing up the reasons a powerful PDF tool barf when opening a particular file.

    It was a 256 character path limit issue. Which should not exist in today's universe. But it does. I figured out fairly quickly that 256 was the issue. But got to spend most of the time writing up what the issue was and how to avoid it. And what to do if someone bumped into it. Very astute users down to "it is a magic box".

    A key point I had to make was I have no way to fix this. At all. I might submit a bug report but I can't imagine I'm the only one to hit this on this major used across the world product in the construction industry. I'm sure that there is some interaction of Windows 10, a NAS file server running SAMBA, and various libraries linked into the product over the years triggered the issue.

    But I did say, and got support from at least one partner, that file and folder names that read like sentences can be a bit much.

    606:

    There is a lot of evidence for that.

    607:

    mostly just MONEY problems rather than LIFE SAFETY issues.

    Any sufficiently extreme money problem turns into a life safety issue by default in a system where resources are allocated on the basis of ability to pay.

    We nearly had a global liquidity crash in 2008; if it hadn't been averted (via "quantitative easing", that is, rolling the printing presses until they smoked, so that it took years to take the surplus money out of circulation again) bank transfers would have gridlocked globally. So would all those supply chains we rely on for stuff like food imports and spare parts for critical infrastructure. So would your pay cheque, and your pension deposits, and you wouldn't be able to get money out of an ATM to pay for your lunch or the gas to drive to work ...

    In 2022 the UK came within about 6-8 hours of the entire pension system collapsing thanks to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng going batshit insane; it took the Bank of England holding a fire sale on gilts to keep the pension funds afloat. Ask yourself what happens to a major world economy where the median age is over 40 and rising by a year a decade, with 25% of the population expected to be over retirement age by 2050, if a libertarian crazy (hence, opposed to public bail-outs) bankrupts the pension funds? Hint: the answer is "nothing good".

    The solution should be to de-financialize the economy wherever possible, so that it's possible to survive (not necessarily prosper, but at least to avoid starvation, homelessness, medical bankruptcy, and freezing) if the money system abruptly grinds to a halt. But for some reason that's taboo ...

    608:

    I've always thought that the correct reply to "What is the definition of woke?" should be "politeness".

    That should annoy the fuck out of right-wing (arse/ass)-holes -- as well as being a reasonable operational definition.

    609:

    mostly just MONEY problems rather than LIFE SAFETY issues.

    Heard a talk on the radio last night by a journalist who's been writing about Canada's health care system(s) for the past 40 years.

    His opinion was that money was the greatest, most effective all-around treatment for EVERYTHING.

    Oddly enough, if you're getting three squares a day, living and sleeping indoors, wearing clean clothes, et numerous cetra, you avoid a lot of health problems that unhoused people have.

    610:

    See Charlie's final paragraph @ 607... I tend to find that that or something effectively like it is a necessary assumption for any significant prospect of improvement.

    611:

    There is a lot of evidence for that.

    Yeah. To clarify, I don't have a problem with the idea that lowering led levels are leading to good outcomes. In this article they don't present evidence for it, but it's plausible.

    The "hmmmmm" was what I substituted for a rant about the US problem of the NRA promoting lead spraying in far too many ways, coupled with a Republican party that wants to stop environmental cleanups of all sorts, including lead in drinking pipes. It's hard to say that they're scheming enough to want people to be more lead-poisoned. But it's hard to say they don't, either.

    612:

    The solution should be to de-financialize the economy wherever possible, so that it's possible to survive (not necessarily prosper, but at least to avoid starvation, homelessness, medical bankruptcy, and freezing) if the money system abruptly grinds to a halt. But for some reason that's taboo ...

    Well, if you're selling your computer services for money, but no one will give you food or vital services because your attitude, appearance, beliefs, etm. annoy the local charity that gives out vital services, what are you going to do if you can't buy what you need? De-financializing some economic sector doesn't necessarily make it more humane, because there are still power issues that can play out in a gift economy.

    I agree with your point about the moral imperative to care for others, and not just humans. Keeping Mammonism in check is certainly part of that, but I think that the consequences of carelessly controlling the mammonites are at least as bad as what happened when the US spent a century suppressing forest fires, at least in this global economy of eight billion people that we're currently stuck with.

    613:

    DeSantis' lawyer had to define woke for a court. Lawyers for the guy who made the issue a central plank of his bullshit agenda. This was it - "Asked what “woke” means more generally, [Desantis’ General Counsel Ryan] Newman said “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

    Terrifying stuff, eh?

    614:

    I resisted the allure of double the salary in exchange for a COBOL job and redundancy on Jan 2 2000

    That seems very brave on the part of management. If they were that confident there were absolutely no bugs why did they need you in the first place? 🤨

    615:

    Note that that can be due to using C at some level, where values can be truncated to 32 bits in extremely unobvious ways.

    Or 24 bits in the case of some hardware that we have in the field. Luckily the epoch for those is 2000 but we are hoping that those damn things eventually all fail due to old age before we run into a situation that we can't hack around ("if high byte is zero use relevant byte from current epoch. If that's in the future subtract 1 from the byte and try again"... which we also do for the 32 bit times but there's less ambiguity there)

    The GPS epoch should be helping management understand that random embedded shit has problems like this and you can't just assume it away. You generally have to accept the cost of replacing stuff when it fails because the cost of discovery in advance is huge.

    616:

    play with the sliders until you get a good-looking result without fully understanding why

    My problem is that I know just barely enough to understand about 1/3 of what Raymond Chen posts on his blog. So I have a vague idea that there is a great deal I don't know.

    Which means that my day job contains a great deal of finding a library that says it does what I want, fucking with "the sliders" until it seems to do that, then moving on to the next thing.

    Since I started my education via the combo of "play with a home microcomputer" and "degree in electrical engineering" I'm also aware that I vaguely understand that transistors work, and that you can use lots of them to make a chip, and ... I made a smartphone app. The ellipses there cover many, many lifetimes of work by people way smarter than I am, and even if I was that smart I don't have enough lifetime to understand even the scale of the work required to understand everything that goes into my smartphone app.

    617:

    It was an early career decision I haven't regretted. Go into y2k work and be well paid until it dries up or pursue something interesting and be relatively skint.

    618:

    "DEI is the idea that you treat people as people, no matter what they look or act like. Even if they're elderly white bigots who can't stand the thought of being cared for by Filipino nurses who make more money than they do." And yes, I'm proud to know (and have known) a number of extremely good Filipino nurses.

    I am SO stealing that line! Love it!

    619:

    I didn't know that about GPS - yes, it should, but will it? Ha, ha. The real problem with things built on top of C (and there's often a stack of 'languages' several deep) is where nobody knows even that a timestamp is being used. Every such problem has to be located (the hardest part) and then fixed, hacked up or bypassed (in order of probability) individually.

    I shan't be here in 2038, so it's not MY problem!

    620:

    See #593. SOP. Unfortunately.

    621:

    "woke"
    @583 - I know, that's one reason I asked ...
    @ 588 - that's the same thing, though, & still undefined ...
    @ 592 - same again.
    Charlie @ 594 - interesting, but I suspect it doesn't go far enough.
    I'm wodering if "Woke" is being used as a substitute hate-symbol for "antifa" ... in other words, if you are not at the very least fascist-lite, then you are "woke" & an enemy?

    • @ 598 - very good, I like that one, as well: Parallel to my attempt above, but not congruent.

    @ 613 - that, as you say is scary: "woke" = realisation that all is not well ...

    Oh - And - thank you everybody.

    622:

    Well, if you're selling your computer services for money, but no one will give you food or vital services because your attitude, appearance, beliefs, etm. annoy the local charity that gives out vital services, what are you going to do if you can't buy what you need? De-financializing some economic sector doesn't necessarily make it more humane, because there are still power issues that can play out in a gift economy.

    The current best-solution-so-far is not to rely on charity for such things but to mandate their provision by law from the state. That has its own issues, which are loudly decried by its opponents, but in specific instances such as comparing the British NHS to the US medical system, turns out to be far more efficient. Finland has saved money and solved their homeless problem by simply building and giving homes to homeless people.

    Yes corruption can cause problems but IMV that happens when the mammonites try to gouge illegal profits from the state, and racketeering laws should apply. Bureaucratism is also a problem but that in my experience comes into play when the resource is limited and the providers are tasked with deciding who is "deserving" of access to it. If it's a blanket basic provision, as the NHS is supposed to be but is hamstring by underfunding, then the bureaucracy and the prejudices and power games of bureaucrats become a lot less.

    "But paying for it!?!!" ... is only a problem when people assume that it's them who magically make money, not the government that prints it. Reverse the assumption and acknowledge that money is produced to pay for services required by the system and then either recovered by taxes or used by private individuals to conduct their own transactions. It would require serious re-engineering of the economy:

    a) eliminating profiteering, including within pay and reward structures, which as with the price of insulin everywhere but the US, would make it easier to manage, and also would eliminate issues such as the current greedflation that has hit the UK economy through the profits of the high street stores; b) proper levels of wealth and income tax to prevent the money circulation from being siphoned away into unproductive dragon's hoards; c) periodic debt jubilees to rebalance the economy when it gets out of whack due to not being a perfect system.

    I think the problem that socialist economies ran into when they tried this in the last century was that they were doing it according to a dogma set out by Karl Marx, who flat-out hated industrialists. That led to them trying to have the state run every industry, with problems as we saw. Didn't help that Russia went from being an autocratic tyranny to ... being an autocratic tyranny.

    But cars are not a necessity of life, an effective multi-modal transport infrastructure is. There is no reason why people can't set up companies and make a living for themselves beyond the basic provision by providing what people want within and around the structure of the public services. The problem comes when they try to break the system so that they can profiteer by replacing it, as with courier companies vs. the mail or private hospitals vs. the health service or academies vs. the school system. Dr Beeching, who stifled the UK rail system, was a major shareholder in road building.

    623:

    Finland has saved money and solved their homeless problem by simply building and giving homes to homeless people.

    Well, not completely, there are more than 3000 homeless people and maybe 500 who live completely with not roof. Low numbers, but not solved completely. (Source: internets, but I do not really have a reason to doubt that: https://vvary.fi/in-english/ )

    Of course there's also people just not moving to their own homes as the apartments and houses are getting somewhat expensive. I agree that profiteering is the issue, in this as in many other instances.

    It seems we now have a new, very right-wing, government who I doubt will do much about profiteering unless it's making it easier. They have ideas from wanting to limit striking rights and making it easier to fire people, to cutting mostly everything for the poor people. Of course one of the big issues seemed to be the gasoline prices. Sheesh. Sorry for venting but this is going to be tough four years, and probably just more sick and homeless people than before. (This morning I read that our Finance ministry suggested cutting benefits to disabled people, there's much savings there! Fuck that.)

    624:

    The right-wingers are currently also a problem and they see profiteering as the means to stripping people of power for all of their goals, hierarchy, authority, cruelty, etc. And the standard economic model that was composed by oligarchs' court jesters plays completely into their hands.

    I haven't read Debt yet, as recommended by OGH, but I've been reading other books, including Doughnut Economics and The Deficit Myth, and I've come to think of money as being the circulating fluid of the economic system, rather than as an end in itself, as the Mammonites seem to. This leads to all kinds of interesting engineering metaphors, like regarding "productivity", the circulation rate of transactions, as having an optimum flow rate and fluid pressure, with infinite pressure (growth) likely to burst the system, but pressure too low leading to stagnation.

    And profiteers and right-wingers siphon fluid away into reservoirs to feed their egos, like vampires or Trump, or to weaponise the accumulated potential as Dilbert Stark has been doing, or to weaponise the lack of pressure in other parts of the system, impoverishing people and depriving them of agency.

    625:

    annoy the local charity that gives out vital services

    I'm not advocating charity. I'm advocating government provided universal services for all, without qualification. NHS not Salvation Army.

    Note that providing a universal backstop is one of the core responsibilities of government. It's unquestioned and almost universally accepted when it's the military providing a backstop against invasion, or law enforcement, or fire brigades, or ambulance service. Why should healthcare or basic housing be any different?

    (Americans are really strange about the commonweal, and British conservatives have imported far too much of their shit over the past 50 years.)

    626:

    Quote from # 622:
    That happens when the mammonites try to gouge illegal profits from the state - SEE ALSO many issues of "Private Eye" & the open corruption, shady dealing etc, involving the tories & [CENSORED BY MODS - potential libel issue]

    627:

    Well, not completely, there are more than 3000 homeless people and maybe 500 who live completely with not roof.

    So, 3000 out of a population of 5.6 million.

    Meanwhile Toronto, with a population of 3 million has 18,000. There's shelter space for under 9000 and a 10-12 year wait-list for affordable housing.

    https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2023/01/11/a-catastrophic-increase-in-visible-homelessness.html

    From our perspective, you folks have solved the housing problem.

    https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-leading-the-way-in-ending-homelessness-but-how-are-they-doing-it/

    628:
    Well, if you're selling your computer services for money, but no one will give you food or vital services because your attitude, appearance, beliefs, etm. annoy the local charity that gives out vital services

    "They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

    But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible." --Oscar Wilde, 1891

    629:

    I'd vote for that.

    Any thoughts about how to get there from here?

    630:

    (This is another set of comments where "read Graydon's 'Commonweal' books!" is a relevant response. :-P)

    631:

    That is: all the disk drives manufactured in 1973 had a combined capacity smaller than the RAM fitted in this 2019-vintage iMac I'm typing on right now

    I know off topic question, but what are you doing with your computer that lead you to pay for that kind of RAM? Even on my development machine I could not see myself pushing anywhere near that unless I went crazy with loads of virtual machines.

    632:

    The right-wingers are currently also a problem and they see profiteering as the means to stripping people of power

    "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but if you rip their wings off they'll eat what you give them."

    (Catch-phrase of an antagonist boss in an RPG adventure. Probably Traveller, but definitely a GDW setting.)

    Keeping people poor/struggling means that they don't have spare time/energy for anything other than survival, and thus are less of a threat to the established order. I think the capitalist class realizes this, whether or not they articulate it that bluntly.

    633:

    I wondered about this too. My 2 years old home computer has 16 GB of RAM, and my work laptop (a little over a year old) has 32 GB.

    634:

    ...so you wrote a cron job that would touch the files once every 2 months...

    Not my systems, so no. The network admin just had to update the rules for the data directories in question

    635:

    I'm not advocating charity. I'm advocating government provided universal services for all, without qualification. NHS not Salvation Army.

    So you piss off the government. It doesn't matter what entity is giving out the bread and circuses, the question is how they pay for it, if it's a gift be handed out to all.

    The invocation of bread and circuses is deliberate. As someone who's comfortably middle class, my experience of health care is basically NHS: I get service with minimum copay, paid for by my wife's work in the healthcare industry. My elderly mother gets something fairly similar, paid for by the government, in part (let's say it out loud) because she's white and middle class. We're all dealing with resource and personnel shortages caused by the pandemic, but we're not being bankrupted by our health expenses.

    But our health is being subsidized by the fact that the US system is concentrating resources to pay for our health for various reasons, and stripping assets from elsewhere. The same thing was true of NHS, which was being paid for by the UK's (former?) position as a wealthy country that was getting subsidized by all the poor countries in the Commonwealth who'd had their assets stripped by the UK when it was the British Empire. Same thing happened in ancient Rome, where Roman citizens were subsidized by assets stripped from elsewhere in the empire.

    So it doesn't matter who pays, what matters is how it's paid for. "Definancialize" implies to me that it's given away as a gift, and that much wealth being given away causes at least four other problems:

    -What do you do about desperate people (e.g. refugees and migrants) flooding in to get what they need to survive? Perhaps because your system took their assets?

    -If you're just going to add numbers to accounts to pay for it all (e.g. print money), how do you stop hyperinflation?

    -How do you keep invaders from coming in and asset-stripping your welfare state to take care of their own?

    -How do you keep it from being hacked from within by a Trump, a Bojo, a Truss, a Sunak, a Putin, etm.? Or do you run it the way the House of Saud takes care of Saudi nationals?

    636:

    My desktop wot I am typing on right now has 64GB of RAM. I built it initially with two sticks of 16GB memory = 32GB leaving two slots on the motherboard open for future upgrades. About a year ago the local Gumtree/Craigslist popped up an offer of 2x16GB RAM of exactly the same make and part number as the RAM I originally fitted to this machine, and at a good price considering that memory prices for new parts had increased since I ordered the components for this machine (probably sue to COVID and everyone working from home). I had the money, it was a no-brainer to buy it and double my PC's RAM capacity.

    637:

    Greg @ #626

    Greg,

    As far as I am aware Mr Houchen has not yet been found guilty of any fraudulent activity with respect to his small (circa a few tenners) investment in the land of the former steel works in Middlesborough (Ridley Scott's backdrop for Bladerunner) and which is now valued at £100 million.

    Despite everything written in Private Eye.

    Perhaps scattering a few "allegedly's" in your comments would be in order?

    638:

    Greg, defining "woke" is simple. For most of the 20th century, the GOP could rile their base by screaming COMMONISM!!!" When the USSR collapsed, they lost that, and they've been looking for something since. Antifa worked for a while, but "woke" works better.

    It's a meaningless word - they not only don't know what it means, they don't want to define it, just point and scream at anything they don't like. That, of course, would including anyone but them getting benefits of any kind (or not having to pay taxes).

    639:

    H
    my experience of health care is basically NHS:
    NOT EVEN WRONG - as I noted that a line or so later you said:
    but we're not being bankrupted by our health expenses. - YET.

    Dave Lester
    Point ... however, I expect Mr Houchen ( yes, I did spell his name worng ) will go after the "Eye" first ... though there's a very long history of other real actual crooks coming exceedingly badly unstuck after trying that.

    whitroth
    Re: "woke"
    I think the little snippet pointed out by Uncle Stinky @ 613 will do just fine ...

    640:

    Oops, I forgot ....
    BoZo the vicious lying clown, again ...
    Now being paid by the Daily Heil for more fictional journalism.
    I think we need to amass our own short list of the times he has been nailed & sacked for lying ... if people can find more, we can add to the list, yes?
    Going backwards .... _ corrects & emendations WELCOME - this is provisional, ok?

    Booted from the HoC for lying Booted from tory minsterial post for lying - 2004
    Booted from the "Spectator" for lying - also 2004 / 5
    Repeatedly lied about the EU whilst at the Torygraph/Brussels (1985-90 or 94) - Booted from the Torygraph for lying, later
    Booted from the "Times" for lying - 1987/8

    641:

    remember, it's not just "woke" , it's "woke blob", which is to say, this guy from The Orville ...

    https://tldrmoviereviewsblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/blood-of-patriots-2.jpg

    642:

    It was going cheap?

    I bought this iMac in late 2019, planning on running it until Intel support in macOS ended. (So, probably halfway there now.)

    Because Apple always over-charge for RAM, I bought it with the minimum and planned all along to buy a cheap third-party upgrade. Then I went looking and discovered that I could max it out, all the way to 128Gb, for just £400, which (for a £3000 machine) was risibly cheap. So I did that on a point of principle (and don't ask me about web browsers that leak memory like the Titanic leaked iceberg water).

    643:

    peterajet
    Would you care to EXPLAIN?
    That is totally meaningless, to me.

    644:

    640 - Fined by the Met for lying about "Lockdown Parties".
    Would have been booted by the "House of Commons Privileges Committee had he not resigned his seat just before their report was published.

    641, 643 - The Orville is a US SF show. Peterajet has linked a PR shot of one of the CGI characters from the show receiving a gallantry medal.

    645:

    don't ask me about web browsers that leak memory

    dEAR Mr STroSS, Pls tell mor meMORy StorIZ.

    Yeah, I habitually run 2-3 browsers at a time with lots of tabs (currently 14 firefox, 8 chrome, {censored} brave) and watching the memory use makes me sad. But OTOH I have the RAM so when I need to I can have a VM with 32GB running and the machine still works.

    The really annoying thing is that last time I bought a new PC there was a cap at 64GB. You could get more, but there were price jumps on the moptherboard, CPU and $/GB on the RAM itself. So a $AU4000 PC with 64GB would be a $5500 PC with 128GB. And single core performance would drop because now you're running a "proper" CPU.

    I expect that these days the soft cap is $128GB but I'm unlikely to upgrade until I really have to (seven year old laptop, desktop at least five. "new" work PC is a dell refurb unit that I've only had for ~1 year but it's faster than my desktop and cost under $2000... still has the 64GB soft cap)

    646:

    it's a joke, derived from the phrase heard from the deranged reaches of the current and former cabinet, "woke blob", where blob apparently refers to the I'll defined mass of people they find frustrating. Judges, journalists, civil servants, whatever.

    The Orville is a Star Trek tribute TV show, where humans in the future are generally respectful of diversity and inclusive. The crew member depicted is an actual blob.

    Now I've destroyed the joke in order to save it

    647:

    It looked almost exactly like a cartoon of Boris Johnson by Dave Brown. He is a blob, assuredly, but not exactly woke.

    648:

    That is erroneous, almost from start to finish. We had very little trouble before the mammonite cancer metastatised and That Blair massively sped up the privatisation of the NHS. Yes, there ARE problems, and the current system is not affordable in the way most people would like it to be, but the problems and solutions are entirely different. In order of political difficulty:

    One of those is the standard theme (on this blog) that we need to rebalance the economy, so that (mainly non-hospital) nurses and carers are paid properly, treated decently, and we have enough of them.

    An equally important one is to improve the health of the nation, both physically and psychologically. Inter alia, that means tackling the motoring religion, mammonism and manageritis.

    And, lastly, we need to face up to the fact that modern medical science and care means that optimal treatment and preservation of life for all is not affordable. I am fully aware that, in such a world, I might be one of the ones who was told "sorry, but you've had your chips". Yes, I do mean that there would come a point where doctors would need to recommend a trip to the euthanasia clinic.

    Yes, fixing the first two would mean that the third would be much less pressing, but it is at most delayable, not preventable.

    All of those are in common to any rich, 'westernised' nation, though the UK is in a worse mess than most countries. But we won't even start on the first without a revolution, and I don't see a chance of that before the country suffers total social and economic collapse. The last chance the country had to change direction was in 2019, the * were told to reject it, and they did.

    649:

    EC
    Mainly because the actual opposition threw the chance away with both hands. ABC ( Anyone but Corbyn ) might have stood a chance against BoZo the Liar ....

    650:

    Disagree. The reason Corbyn lost was because he did have the potential to win - as he had demonstrated before. So the right-wing cesspool started revving the nuts off the propaganda machine, and found that talking bollocks about "antisemitism" was an excellent way to blacken someone's reputation with accusations which inherently blocked counterargument.

    As I have pointed out before, BJ getting an 80-seat majority may look spectacular, but it doesn't actually mean anything except that our electoral system is not fit for purpose. There was not a massive increase in support for the Tories: the number of votes they received (both absolutely and as a percentage of the total) was within a couple of percent of the number they received the previous time. The huge difference in parliamentary majority is therefore evidence only that we do not have a usably functional mechanism for mapping votes to representation.

    651:

    Elaine at 622 said " The current best-solution-so-far is not to rely on charity for such things but to mandate their provision by law from the state."

    Coming up with a workable scheme to replace much of the wages and salaries from private employers is inevitable, now that AI is clearly just decades from science fiction levels of weirdness, not centuries like I used to think. What challenged my complacency was this article ( https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/05/24/artificial-brains-are-helping-scientists-study-the-real-thing ) about computerized neural networks spontaneously assembling themselves into pathways so close to actual brain structure that MRI data from someone thinking of a sentence can be fed directly into it and it parses the meaning more often than not. If it can do that now, running whole corporations by itself for free should be attainable before long.

    Public/private collaboration like carmakers building tanks in WW2 is one way the necessary changes could start, with federal contracts awarded to competitive bidders for trillion dollar projects such as rebuilding the power grid, employing millions, paid for by federal seizure of half the wealth of the top thousand richest citizens. Plain old UBI dole systems are also getting attention even in Wall Street, as this article explains: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-generations.html An investment advisor specializing in growth opportunities says UBI will be required just to keep economic growth happening, explaining his interest with the disclaimer 'I'm no altruist.'

    652:

    Pigeon
    Agree totally about our utterly broke FPTP voting ...
    But, you have to fight with what you've got.
    I repeat, for the umpteenth time: Corbyn was & is stupid.
    BoZo is a liar & a cheat & a con-man, but not stupid. { Unfortunately }

    653:

    The UK has a working alternative to FPTP in production at national-parliament level, with a 23 year track record in electing parliaments in Wales and Scotland: the Additional Member System. As a voter, you get two votes on separate ballots. One is a regular FPTP constituency MP ballot and works just like a current Westminster election. The other ballot is used to cast a vote for your preferred political party in a PR election over a region containing several constituencies. The intention is that even if you're a minority party supporter in your own constituency, you can also vote for that party in your region and if enough people do that your party gets some "top up" seats.

    It generally results in a more balanced outcome than a pure FPTP election, gives minor parties and parties with widely dispersed support rather than tightly nucleated strongholds proportionately more seats, and nudges the dial towards coalition-building.

    Scotland has had only one outright-majority government in 23 years since this system came into use, and seems to have a less oppositional style of government in general -- or at least it did, until 2019 when the Brexit hysteria took over. Can't speak for Wales but my understanding is the Senedd is similar. Oh, and I missed another angle: the London assembly uses the same system, and probably has more voters than the Scottish and Welsh parliaments combined. You're probably used to it already!

    I think a successful 24 year track record of running elections for roughly a quarter of the UK is probably an adequate beta-test period for a replacement for the UK's FPTP system. Don't you?

    654:

    One of the threads of this discussion follows the general shittiness / mendacity of large tech corporations so I though you may enjoy this video podcast between Adam Conover and Cory Doctrow, who is peddling his new book, Chokepoint Capitalism. Cory points out the ways that large corporations use their monopoly power to control and impoverish artists (authors included).

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

    It's quite entertaining. I particularly like the crack Cory made about the Libertarian with his copy of Atlas Shrugged.

    655:

    Not interested in long youtube videos of an interview with some guy I have cowritten a book with and nattered about "Chokepoint Capitalism" with in person a few weeks ago.

    You should probably also credit Professor Rebecca Giblin, who he co-wrote with.

    (Cory tends to swamp his co-authors. It's not deliberate, he just has a very high profile and self-promotes relentlessly. Nevertheless, in any two-author collaboration, both authors do about 75% of the work -- and Rebecca is extremely cool in her own right.)

    656:

    I think a successful 24 year track record of running elections for roughly a quarter of the UK is probably an adequate beta-test period for a replacement for the UK's FPTP system. Don't you?

    Long enough to show that it's not a suitable replacement system, because it doesn't reliably produce right-wing majorities. Which is the purpose of elections: to give the Tories a mandate.

    (Yes, sarcasm.)

    657:

    Plain old UBI dole systems are also getting attention even in Wall Street,

    Possibly if they were brought in as Mack Reynolds did in his SF novels with People's Capitalism, not as a UBI but as dividends from a share of Inalienable Basic Stock?

    658:

    Re: 'Someone who pays attention to these things can often write code that runs tens or hundreds of times faster than that emitted by someone who doesn't.'

    Thanks - much appreciated!

    So - to optimize performance, you need to have a very clear idea of the sequence of events. 'Size' is less important. Chicken-egg scenario. :) Sorta like using the 'right' stats test for a first/one-of study: you have no a priori idea who the respondents will be or any distribution by or number of relevant traits/variables.

    And based on the link plus subsequent comments here: every user will probably have a preferred way of conceptualizing/measuring this.

    At this point, does anyone in the compsci field have a clear grasp of the entirety of this field or has it become too vast for any one (human) mind to comprehend? If too vast - how do you collaborate?

    659:

    The huge difference in parliamentary majority is therefore evidence only that we do not have a usably functional mechanism for mapping votes to representation.

    I guess the U.S. isn't the only country that gerrymanders its elective districts... 😄

    660:

    It's not about gerrymanders per se, it's that single member electorates with FPTP inherently disenfranchise some of the electorate, and while this can totally be solved with proportional representation there are institutional impediments to that in many places (especially the USA, where PR is the same as communism or something). Gerrymanders are inherent to single member electorates, but the real problem is that all single member electorates are naturally gerrymandered against minorities. You can have, say, 20% or popular support divided evenly across a bunch of single member electorates and therefore get zero representation. This is arguably the reason indigenous peoples get a pretty raw deal everywhere in the world, and not conspicuously less so in the democratic west. It's also the reason we generally only see large scale concerted climate action in countries that have proportional representation.

    661:

    Unfortunately, in the UK, that doesn't apply to just the right-wing. The Labour party apparatus (i.e. not the members) is even more vehemently opposed, and Old Labour wasn't right-wing. We are more likely to see a Sunak-Starmer coalition than Starmer fix the electoral system. Of course, by the standards of the British population, he IS right-wing - just not over the top and round the bend with it.

    Possibly, JUST possibly, Starmer might forbid large donations from anyone except UK taxpayers and introduce some proper transparency and procedural regulations with teeth and enforcement into political parties and elections, but I doubt even that. Inter alia, he would be afraid of real left-wingers using it against him, and then there is the Sinn Fein problem.

    662:

    Guess who you learnt it from? We had rotten boroughs before you had any votes (double snide intended).

    663:

    then there is the Sinn Fein problem.

    Where they get elected but won't swear to serve the crown so can't sit?

    In Aotearoa it appears that no party wants to be seen to even notice the proposal that only registered voters be allowed to donate. It seems that even The Greens view it as a step too far.

    But for politics geeks it's another awesome idea, like preferential voting and multimember electorates.

    664:

    On the first real program I worked on, on a Ferranti Mercury (q.v.), I speeded it up by a factor of hundreds by moving a drum access into an outer loop.

    It's not actually that hard to comprehend - the problem is that many programs are. This applies expecially to ones written in (say) DemonScript, which generates Incanter, which is compiled into Old Enochian. It gets worse - HOL had a 4-language stack at one stage, even excluding machine code.

    665:

    Oops. Closing quote problem. Sorry.

    666:

    No. That's irrelevant.

    Sinn Fein has transitioned into the sort of political party that you found in the USSR - the public face of an anonymous committee that had some relationship to a group of official paramilitaries. And its resources are similarly opaque, though we know that the PIRA (and Protestant equivalents) have morphed into something very much like the Mafia. Any 'proper transparency and procedural regulations with teeth' would hit Sinn Fein even harder than the Conservative party.

    Bloody Blair cocked up the Good Friday agreement so that this was the almost certain outcome, but any attempt to resolve it would risk starting up violent conflict again. Just as any attempt to override the DUP's intransigence would.

    667:

    the sort of political party that you found in the USSR - the public face of an anonymous committee that had some relationship to a group of official paramilitaries.

    Except for the paramilitary part (mostly) that describes Australian politics quite well. Most of the political class presumably know most of the movers and shakers, or at least pretend to. But the rest of us... well, what we know is that disclosure is voluntary and even the generous limits on "donations" and "influence" are not enforced. https://insidestory.org.au/following-the-money-graeme-orr/

    That article says Clive Palmer has spent $200M on his political party. I suspect that claim is now used by party fundraisers to show how much cheaper their services are.

    668:

    A complete disgression. There is a really weird rainfall pattern centres on Chorleywood, that has been stable for some time. It looks almost as if a nuclear reactor has gone into meltdown there :-) It's an irrelevance, but it's so peculiar I thought people might be interested (and someone might even explain it!)

    https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/maps-and-charts/rainfall-radar-forecast-map#?bbox=[[50.90822881118012,-1.9665527343750002],[52.310157879390964,1.1206054687500002]]&model=ukmo-ukv&layer=rainfall-rate&timestep=1666278000000

    669:

    Sort of surprised that Sinn Fein are not also viewed as Mafia. The separation between the armed faction and the, allegedly, political wings of the movement were wafer thin. Look at McGuinness. A stone cold killer.

    During the 90s a friend worked for the NHS in Northern Ireland. He told me that several of the local drug dealers were found nail gunned to the floor (in one case at the hospital entrance on the day he was sorting out their servers) and that it was recognised locally that smuggling and drug dealing was a major source of income for the IRA. Pretty easy to create a monopoly when you're the biggest thugs in town. (and armed to the gunnels).

    The Protestants followed suit, controlling their areas similarly. Though, perhaps they already did.

    You have to wonder whether the drug dealers and thugs diversified into freedom fighting or freedom fighters embraced drug dealing and thuggery.

    670:

    Is Chorleywood where the radar is? The pattern reminds me of things I occasionally see in NEXRAD images -- I think they're caused by peculiar propagation conditions in the atmosphere.

    671:

    I can answer the last. Go back to 1969. 'Traditional' non-violent demonstrations by the disenfranchised and discriminated-against 'Catholic' community turned into riots, fuelled by the small number of violent thugs from both communities and the RUC. The Stormont government can be described politely as being bigoted.

    Harold Wilson fucked it up by allowing Callaghan to send troops in to restore order, but by also supporting Stormont and thus not addressing the justified grievances. I said at the time what needed to be done, and was told by a Commons Clerk friend that it was totally impossible; all of it was done later, but not in time to stop dissention turning into revolt.

    Despite the fact that I agree with you about McGuinness etc., they did start off as freedom fighters. They later changed into terrorists (killing innocent civilians being easier and getting more headlines), and later expanded into organised crime. If I recall, the last was largely when the USA stopped funding them and supplying them with weapons. After they 'demilitarised', the last remained.

    Their 'Protestant' equivalents started off as vigilantes, but otherwise followed a similar path (without the USA, if course).

    672:

    Bingo! I think you have it. Looking it up, there are 18 stations, but it could be one of them.

    673:

    Dear EC, this is not an attack on you, but merely that your post is a convenient point to tag in the following data.

    It has been over thirty years since I (or rather my ex, who was training to be a GP) had an interest in health economics. Back then it was estimated that fully 50% of US health spending went on the final two weeks of life... maybe that has changed by now.

    Nevertheless, let's have a look at UK health spending. In 2019 the HSA (the Health Security Agency) produced the following document: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2019/01/29/ageing-and-health-expenditure/. I draw your attention to the first figure which is a graph of NHS spending against age. For those of you who don't wish to look at it, a summary is that against a background spend of £1,000 per annum for the healthy, we have a £3,000 pa spend on babies, dropping to base-line by the age of 12. There's a slight hump at 25-40, which is more pronounced if we look at women vs men: this is to do with childbirth. Then things rise slowly to about £2,500 at retirement age (65 in the UK). Finally, expenditure tops out at £10,000 pa for those over 85.

    The text has this to say: "This suggests that proximity to death is a more important determinant of health expenditure than ageing alone, and that living longer is not necessarily a burden on the health system."

    You may also wish to consider the reason that Bismarck introduced the world's first public health scheme in the first place: to ensure that Germany's population was healthy enough to do the soldiering and industrial production his grandiose plans needed. The UK only got the message during the Boer War when far too many keen young men tried to enlist, only to be turned away for being too small and too unhealthy. Even then it took until 1948 for us to do anything about the population's health.

    Thus, were one a cynical Tory health minister seeking to reduce health expenditure, one might propose only supporting the health care of those still in work, thereby reducing expenditure by perhaps 50%. Though of course, that'd have the effect of eliminating the cohort of the population most likely to support the Tories.

    Finally, on assisted dying: that can be done in the UK. My brother who was a community pharmacist (like Charlie) has pointed out to me that morphine is phenomenally cheap if legally acquired by the NHS. So, should you find yourself dying of cancer, you must insist on getting a sufficiency of morphine when things get painful. It will then be up to you to decide whether to overdose or not.

    674:

    Yep. The Catholics had a strong grievance, Stormont was populated by bigoted idiots and Westminster by Etonians with double digit IQs. Not a good combination.

    I'm not sure Callaghan had m/any good options.

    It would have helped if US citizens had not watched John Wayne films where the local IRA representative was a nice guy rather than an unprincipled yob with gun. They poured money into the cause for the "old country". Romantic tosh to provide a more interesting back story to their own lives. Where my great grandparents were born means nothing to me. That was theirs, not mine.

    Would also have helped if, when the split happened, the south hadn't pretty much kicked so many protestant property owners out of Dublin (without compensation). What was, effectively, very profitable ethnic cleansing led to lingering resentments. Irish neutrality in WWII was probably a source of distrust to many in Westminster who fought in WWII.

    Northern Ireland ended up being a story of sectarian idiocy, intransigence and bigotry made worse by providing the opportunity for the violent and talentless on both sides to become important or to profit. McGuinness - with one CSE (for non-UK readers, he was probably barely literate) - became the NI Education Minister, while Paisley - a "Reverend" in a church with a tiny membership - eventually became the NI First Minister?

    675:

    Romantic tosh to provide a more interesting back story to their own lives. Where my great grandparents were born means nothing to me. That was theirs, not mine.

    Stan Rogers nailed it in "House of Orange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwld86XndSY

    I do have a question, though. Was the IRA not considered a terrorist organization back then? And if so, why didn't the American government intervene? (OK, that's two questions.)

    676:

    Interesting. That doesn't surprise me, BUT ....

    Unless I have badly misinterpreted the paper from which it gets the data, it doesn't include non-medical care costs. We have had several clueful politicians decry the separation, and call for them to be planned together. The key age there is when people are no longer capable of independent living, including performing routine house maintenance, which is not quite the same as proximity to death. My understanding from other data is that the time people spend in that state is increasing, but I may be wrong.

    The other key age is when people are no longer capable of performing the jobs for which they are capable. That's not a major issue for most 'white collar' workers, but is a serious one for 'blue collar' ones, especially for many manual workers. For example, the age at which people stop being safe up ladders is a lot earlier (relative to death) than the age at which they can push paper. The advent of 'AI' doesn't help with this issue.

    So it's a problem, unless you are the cynical Tory health minister you describe.

    Thanks for the morphine comment - yes, I am aware of that :-)

    677:

    It would have helped if US citizens had not watched John Wayne films where the local IRA representative was a nice guy rather than an unprincipled yob with gun. They poured money into the cause for the "old country".

    As someone growing up in the 60s in the US this was NOT on my radar. I suspect that while from the east side of the big pond it seemed like a "USA" thing, that in reality is was rich (and poor) Irish Catholics who sent most of the money. The rest of us were just bewildered as to what all the fuss was about.

    And while the entire country had plenty of Catholics (but a minority in most places) the ones with ties to Ireland tended to concentrated in a few areas. And were a minority of Catholics. (I doubt the Ireland issues had much resonance with ancestry in Italy, Spain, or South America). Those areas being media centers on the east coast tended to tilt perceptions in both the USA media and that in the UK. How many UK news operations had staffers west of the east coast US states outside of Chicago?

    678:

    Would also have helped if, when the split happened, the south hadn't pretty much kicked so many protestant property owners out of Dublin (without compensation).

    Around when Obama started re-opening diplomatic ties to Cuba, I was having a conversation with a young lady (late 20s who I worked with a bit as she was the employee of a client) about the issue. Her grandparents were all from Cuba. And they are her parents were pissed. They wanted the government there overthrown and their property given back to them. Maybe those wounds will mostly heal over in another 50 years.

    679:

    The key age there is when people are no longer capable of independent living, including performing routine house maintenance, which is not quite the same as proximity to death.

    When my mother in law suddenly needed 24/7 care for a bit the wealthy daughter got a case of the vapors when she suddenly did $20x24x30. WE CAN'T AFFORD THIS. Of course she and her husband are totally against anything that even remotely resembles social welfare. Well except when it hits home.

    Anyway, the 24/7 wasn't long and my wife and I mostly got it figured out. But only because she had a nice pension and social security income and some decent savings.

    But it was enlightening to watch the hard core libertarians flip sides hour by hour depending on if it was LOCAL IN MY FAMILY or society in general.

    680:

    David L @ 678: [...] Her grandparents were all from Cuba. And they are her parents were pissed. They wanted the government there overthrown and their property given back to them. Maybe those wounds will mostly heal over in another 50 years.

    ISTR reading about a guy with Cuban exile grandparents. He managed to get over to Cuba and went to see the big old house his dad was always talking about, and his response was "Its a dump. Why would anyone want to come and live here?"

    I think that once the generation who actually remember Cuba die off, their children will be too busy living in America to worry about some property in Cuba. Even if they did get it back, they'll just sell it on ASAP and pocket the money. Very few are going to want to emigrate there.

    681:

    It has been over thirty years since I (or rather my ex, who was training to be a GP) had an interest in health economics. Back then it was estimated that fully 50% of US health spending went on the final two weeks of life... maybe that has changed by now.

    Not quite apples and oranges but more of grapefruit and oranges.

    About 10 years ago I read a decent news article on a US Social Security Medicare study where it was estimated that of the people involved in the Medicare system 70% of the lifetime medical costs occurred in the last 3 years of their life. And the conclusion was that much of this could be saved ...

    IF IF IF you knew when that 3 year window started. Will someone at age 65 on the kidney transplant list live another 20 years or 2 years if they get the transplant? While the edge cases are somewhat (but not totally) easy to spot, there's an immense amount of fuzziness in the predictions for most people.

    And amazingly [big snark here] people who are almost certain to die in 2 years still want the transplant.

    682:

    I think that once the generation who actually remember Cuba die off, their children will be too busy living in America to worry about some property in Cuba. Even if they did get it back, they'll just sell it on ASAP and pocket the money. Very few are going to want to emigrate there.

    That doesn't mean they will not want the Cuban government as it stands today and likely in the future to be removed by the US. Magically or however. But removed.

    These kinds of attitudes ingrained when raised by strongly opinionated parents tend to last a lifetime for most.

    Pick your topic. Racism, religion, political attitudes, even sport team affinities.

    683:

    Her grandparents were all from Cuba. And they are her parents were pissed. They wanted the government there overthrown and their property given back to them.

    Given that the land they currently occupy was formerly Indigenous territory, I wonder what they consider to be the statute of limitations for land ownership?

    684:

    But it was enlightening to watch the hard core libertarians flip sides hour by hour depending on if it was LOCAL IN MY FAMILY or society in general.

    Yeah, well, Ayn Rand collected Social Security and Medicare. And the Ayn Rand Institute was happy to accept PPP loans…

    685:

    I am convinced that the epitaph of H. Sapiens Sapiens will be "Nooo! It's all about me!"

    686:

    Given that the land they currently occupy was formerly Indigenous territory, I wonder what they consider to be the statute of limitations for land ownership?

    I bring this up all the time with folks who want to talk about getting back what is historically rightfully "their". It very rarely leads to a rational discussion.

    Poland, Ukraine, Germany, and Russia plus most of the middle east being big on this. With side flavorings of the Balkans, North and South America, and on and on and on. In the US we learned (when I was growing up) about Columbus and the Queen of Spain. But not so much about the huge wars at the time over just who Spain belonged to. And the resentments are still simmering. (I suspect one reason Columbus got his boats was in a gamble to pump up the treasury in the ongoing fight to win Spain back to Christianity.

    And I suspect my lack of historical knowledge of east Asia has much to do with the dearth of my understanding of this issue there.

    687:

    Charlie Stross @ 655:

    Not interested in long youtube videos of an interview with some guy I have cowritten a book with and nattered about "Chokepoint Capitalism" with in person a few weeks ago.

    You should probably also credit Professor Rebecca Giblin, who he co-wrote with.

    (Cory tends to swamp his co-authors. It's not deliberate, he just has a very high profile and self-promotes relentlessly. Nevertheless, in any two-author collaboration, both authors do about 75% of the work -- and Rebecca is extremely cool in her own right.)

    But it was interesting & useful for someone like me who doesn't get to hob nob with people like Cory. I played it mostly in background like "NPR radio", occasionally checking in to it to repeat a section that I kind of missed and wanted to be sure I understood.

    And he did credit his co-author about halfway through.

    688:

    Robert Prior @ 675:

    Romantic tosh to provide a more interesting back story to their own lives. Where my great grandparents were born means nothing to me. That was theirs, not mine.

    Stan Rogers nailed it in "House of Orange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwld86XndSY

    I do have a question, though. Was the IRA not considered a terrorist organization back then? And if so, why didn't the American government intervene? (OK, that's two questions.)

    I believe the U.S. Government's position WAS that the IRA was a (quasi?)-terrorist organization & the U.S. did try (fairly ineffectively) to do something about it.

    But there was fairly effective "charity network" able to circumvent OFFICIAL U.S. policy.

    689:

    On the subject of the voting system, I think the main reason both Tories and Labour are opposed to PR is their fear that it would lead to them splitting into two or more smaller parties, jeopardising the positions of those currently at the top.

    690:

    Nope. Initially, the USA government feted the IRA to get votes from the Irish Americans, and did everything short of providing them with federal funds and weapons, until after a particularly brutal massacre (I now forget which).

    691:

    Paul @ 680:

    David L @ 678: [...]

    Her grandparents were all from Cuba. And they are her parents were pissed. They wanted the government there overthrown and their property given back to them. Maybe those wounds will mostly heal over in another 50 years.

    ISTR reading about a guy with Cuban exile grandparents. He managed to get over to Cuba and went to see the big old house his dad was always talking about, and his response was "Its a dump. Why would anyone want to come and live here?"

    I think that once the generation who actually remember Cuba die off, their children will be too busy living in America to worry about some property in Cuba. Even if they did get it back, they'll just sell it on ASAP and pocket the money. Very few are going to want to emigrate there.

    There were also a large number of corporations (e.g. Coca-Cola) & FAMILY businesses (e.g. Bacardi, founded in Cuba in 1862 by Facundo Bacardí Massó) whose assets were expropriated when the Cuban Revolution turned to "Marxist Communism".

    Is your family name on this list? Time to sue for property lost in Cuba might run out [Miami Herald October 26, 2020 via Archive Today]

    "In just nine years, he confiscated, expropriated, and nationalized all private property, until not even a single street vendor was left in business. Many of the Cubans who lost their properties ended up in exile in the United States"

    Not going to shed any tears for Coca-Cola, but some of those old families whose businesses were expropriated did not fare as well as Bacardi (who seem to have landed on their feet in the Bahamas).

    Also, I'm guessing, many of those old home places were NOT dumps 60+ years ago when they were seized by the Castro government.

    692:

    On code optimisation -

    • The sigline version

      • Don't
      • (for experts only) Don't yet
    • The mantra I used to teach classes

      • Make it work
      • Make it work right
      • Make it work right fast
    • While simplification can yield great results, sometimes it takes a lot of clever code. Ben Avison did a fantastic job of speeding up the Smalltalk/Scratch BitBlt for the Pi; some important cases got 30X faster. It took a lot of carefully devised code and several million test & stress cases(!)

    693:

    So I take it you aren't a fan of "move fast and break things" as coding practice, let alone a life philosophy?

    694:

    Ahem: the full version of "move fast and break things" is "move fast and break things that belong to other people; if they want those things badly enough they'll repair them for free".

    Needless to say, in the real world this kind of activity is called vandalism and we prosecute it. Except it seems to be mysteriously legal if you have a market cap over $10Bn or so ...

    695:
    They later changed into terrorists (killing innocent civilians being easier and getting more headlines), and later expanded into organised crime.

    A small quibble: They were more extreme than that. Their car bomb campaign eventually targeted children. A bomb would go off while a school bus was passing. ISTR BBC radio reporting this happening day after day.

    I rejected their deathcult as soon as I learned about it, in the early 80s. If your cause demands violence, you've lost my support. So, as a teenager, I found I could support nobody in that mess.

    I recall complaints when Sein Fein MPs first entered Parliament. Today I can summerise my reaction as: What do they want? More dead children?

    It's just a small quibble.

    696:

    Ahem: the full version of "move fast and break things" is "move fast and break things that belong to other people; if they want those things badly enough they'll repair them for free".

    Watching FB from a bit closer at times that you.

    It means break the laws we don't like if they are not a DIRECT harm to people. By direct I mean point a gun and pull a trigger. Psychological harm doesn't count. That's "your" problem.

    They don't speak the silent part out loud but basically they do a calculation that they can most of the time out run the regulators. And when they can't the fines are less than the aggregate profit / increase in stock valuations. So just do it.

    And it's not just FB.

    697:

    arrbee @ 689
    YES

    Charlie @ 694
    "You broke it, YOU fix it" ... Oh, you won't? ... We'll have to send the lads round, then ...

    698:

    Re: 'DemonScript, which generates Incanter, which is compiled into Old Enochian'

    Er... Right ... ! :)

    So you worked on the same type of computer (HOL) that CERN first used - interesting. I looked up the terms but remain clueless - definitely not up my alley. Thanks anyways.

    OOC - how would you program a computer to track all of the concurrent biochem, cellular and tissue reactions in a living human body?

    UK weather - when I was checking my local weather forecast for today on weather dot com there was a short video on the weird rain forecast for the UK. Very spotty - some areas would get very heavy downpours while neighboring areas would get a few millimeters.

    Off topic - BoJo, Partygate, the Royals, honors list

    The above has been popping up on my Googlenews and tweets for a couple of days. OOC, does Charles III have to rubber stamp whatever list he's given? It seems that if these are 'Royal' honors, then he as the head Royal should have a say. I know that quite a few folks dislike the monarchy etc. but I remember seeing news videos of QE2 masked and sitting alone during her husband's funeral service. Not sure but I think that she and her family did follow social distancing per official COVID guidelines.

    Per the BBC news: the London police did not pursue those party goers due to 'lack of evidence'. OOC - is the Chief of Police for London a political appointment (like a Cabinet Minister) or is it an on-merit position?

    699:

    Well, it might be treated that way now but back when I was in Silicon Valley the full version was “move fast and break things, then build a better one”. The idea was to not be afraid to try, fail, try again, and keep going.

    Which is why the “Don’t *yet” is good advice. You might be throwing away the current version.

    700:

    “They later changed into terrorists ” Yeah, and I was adjacent to two of their major atrocities in London- one below and one above, ground. Oh and the car that suddenly exploded as I drove past; we never got conclusive evidence it was aimed at me but y’know.

    701:

    but some of those old families whose businesses were expropriated

    Those would be the families who profited greatly from slavery, then? Perhaps their descendents could go back and volunteer to spend a year working in the plantations without pay while being whipped by the descendents of slaves before they can claim their inheritance if they survive?

    One of the fun things that happens in the Waitangi Tribunal is "discussions" between different tribes that claim the same stuff and want the settlers to return it. There have been times where multiple tribes all claim the exact same bit of land effectively by right of conquest. And they want the settlers to find in their favour, often exclusively. That's settled down over time but growing up there were three lots claiming where I lived and one of them was descendents of a dude who would have fitted in nicely with the Khans (Te Rauparaha, today known largely for the 'bravely running away' haka formerly used by the All Blacks).

    702:

    I am convinced that the epitaph of H. Sapiens Sapiens will be "Nooo! It's all about me!"

    I'm nastier than you are. I'm convinced that the rubble and big, pointless, holes our civilization leaves behind will be used as an example, for millions of years, of how not to be a human being.

    All that will remain of we've done, all our triumphs, creations, and discoveries, will be ubiquitous piles of rubble that are sites in the "What the frack were they thinking" dreamings, whose principle use, once they've been scavenged for anything of use, will be to teach adolescents not to be thoughtless or greedy.

    Everything else? Dust in the wind.

    If you look around, we're trying to use climate change to make the entire world look like the Australian Outback, complete with planting eucalypts everywhere they can go weedy, killing off any large animal, creating vast swaths of salted, nutrient-poor soil, spreading unstoppable pests, pathogens, and weeds. See what I mean? Global Outback. So why not bring the Dreaming* to the rest of the world too, once every other option's been tried and found wanting?

    *Snark aside, I'm perfectly aware that most indigenous practices would be part of the Dreaming if they were in Australia. Dreaming is an umbrella term for a large diversity of practices.

    703:

    If you look around, we're trying to use climate change to make the entire world look like the Australian Outback

    No, no, no, the point is to make Number Go Up! Anything else is not important and besides is helped by Number Going Up!

    At my snarkier moments I sometimes think that we should make some kind of counter thing for people who want to see Number Go Up, and just give people who want them their own Number and make it Go Up. Detach this from any real world activities and maybe put all the Number Go Up people on their own island and let them be there.

    Of course somebody would tie this to the real world and kill people with it as in any other economy. Also, I'm not sure which island would be big enough. Antarctica would at least be relatively free of people and would kill the Number Go Up people fast so it's one possible solution.

    704:

    Economics Explained on utube just covered Tuvalu while the country still exists. The algorithm recommended that after that I watch a video on America's first peoples (that's the continents not the colony)... which was largely about the difficulty of performing archaeology when the evidence is 50km off the current coast and under ~100m of vigorous water (the "Pacific" Ocean).

    In fun news, I bought a recumbent exercise bike yesterday and have set it up under my bed with a laptop shelf so I can exercise while watching utube. I went for a wee ride on Friday which showed me that a: I'm getting older (beats the alternative) and b: riding for 5 hours in harder than it used to be. Hopefully a $50 stationary bike will at least show whether buying a proper one is worth while (and then I can even work while riding!)

    make Number Go Up

    MMT makes the point that money is abstract so we can have as much of it as we want. Infinite economic growth is easy, unlike real growth. Polyamory has the concept of the "relationship escalator" which is used to explain why some people like to go seeing to dating to serious to ... and others don't. I think politics/economics need to similarly look at Progress and Growth as things that some people are really into and others aren't, and that's ok.

    705:

    Moz @ 701:

    but some of those old families whose businesses were expropriated

    Those would be the families who profited greatly from slavery, then? Perhaps their descendents could go back and volunteer to spend a year working in the plantations without pay while being whipped by the descendents of slaves before they can claim their inheritance if they survive?

    Do you have any evidence to back YOUR claim, or are you just full of shit?

    706:

    UK weather - when I was checking my local weather forecast for today on weather dot com there was a short video on the weird rain forecast for the UK. Very spotty - some areas would get very heavy downpours while neighboring areas would get a few millimeters.

    Welcome to thunderstorm weather in large chunks of the US.

    Growing up we'd watch rain approach. You could literally see it come across the yard. We'd stop our play, get under a roof, then 10 minutes later go back out in the yard.

    Here now in central NC a 20% chance of rain this time of year means that it will almost certainly rain in the area. With about a 20% chance of any one spot getting rain. You can watch the rain falling out of clouds within about 10 to 20 miles as they go by.

    707:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Cuba I didn't realise that the dependence of Cuba on slavery was controversial.

    708:

    Thought: when Russia was Communist their economic and social problems were caused by the many obvious defects of Communism. Now that Russia is Capitalist and Democratic their problems are caused by the unique issues that Russia faces.

    709:

    I don't know what John S knows so I'll not presume to speak for him.

    Many (most) people in the US (and likely Canada but again...) don't realize that more Africans were brought into the Americas into the Carribian and South America than into the "13 colonies". Especially Brazil in absolute numbers. But as a ratio of total population the Carribian has to rank higher. And many of those were just cogs in a sugar industry. To be used till worn out (dead) then replace with new cogs. For all practical purposes many islands in the Carribian don't have much if any trace of "first peoples" left.

    Which makes for very few first peoples left controlling much of anything if you look at things from a 500 year history point of view. Especially in the Carribian.

    The US tended to become more segregated by an attempted binary view of skin color. But it varied a lot based on "class" and location. (Check out how peoples from the southern side of Europe have been treated in the US going back a century or two. With a side dish of Irish discrimination. I suspect the correlation of RC vs Protestant was also involved here.) In South America there seems to have been more blending. But still a lot of noticing of shades of brown. It is my understanding (based on thin knowledge) that Cuba has a race/class system even today.

    And I suspect that most histories of most countries taught to kids when growing up (and the narratives of older folks) leave out many pesky awkward details. As has been noticed around here at times.

    710:

    Russia communism and capitalism. Is there much a difference outside of the upper class allowing for a bigger middle class?

    My wife learn Agile at her previous job. And they seemed to actually "do it". She has been on a new job for a year now. They talk about being an Agile shop. But to her is looks a lot like Agile labels slapped on top of what they were doing in the past. All the words are there. But not so much the actual practices that actually define an Agile shop.

    711:

    David L
    John Brunner: "The Squares of the City"

    712:

    Looks like an interesting read at some levels but not sure of your point.

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

    713:

    UK weather - when I was checking my local weather forecast for today on weather dot com there was a short video on the weird rain forecast for the UK. Very spotty - some areas would get very heavy downpours while neighboring areas would get a few millimeters.

    that sounds like normal for the UK...

    714:

    I assume you're referring to both the transition from "you, peasants, do what you're told" to "you, valued comrades on communal farms, do what you're told", and from "comrades" to "valued temporarily embarrassed millionaires unfortunately working for a wage (or something) do what you're told"?

    Political theory is great, it's the implementation that's difficult. Australia has the famous donkey vote that arguably demonstrates that it's not just the political classes who need to improve...

    715:

    Sorry - I should have expanded it. Higher Order Language, an early 'program proving' language. I never used it, but knew people who did. It was such a resource hog that the sysadmin forbade its use except under draconian conditions.

    716:

    It was explained to me by a meteorologist in the context of Cambridge "You don't mave a microclimate - you have a picoclimate!" This is because it is so flat (*) and it often changes from wet to dry and back in a mile or so. My understanding is thunderstorm alley in the USA is similar on a large scale.

    (*) I live on Stone Hill, which rises to a majestic 10m above the lower ground (and 20m above sea level) at a dizzying slope of 2%.

    717:

    I was wondering about this the other day: how big is a climate?

    There's a section along the south fence of my place that gets sun most of the day in winter and the peas love it. So does the lavender. But anyway, an area of about 10m2 has a distinctly different climate to the rest of the property.

    Australia has approximately 8 climate zones and with ~7.5M square kilometres I'm going to call that about 0.5M per zone, with desert and "wet tropics" making up the other half.

    By that standard a microclimate is ~0.5 square kilometres or 500,000 square metres. So a nanoclimate is 500 square metres, about the size of a suburban section. And a femtoclimate is about 0.5m2, the size of a pot plant.

    Sound good enough?

    718:

    (ooops, picoclimate is about half a square metre, femtoclimate is ~5 square centimetres)

    719:

    It was such a resource hog that the sysadmin forbade its use except under draconian conditions.

    So probably essentially free by current standards. Certainly relative to the kind of meta programming insanity you find in something like Eigen or Boost.

    720:

    Here now in central NC a 20% chance of rain this time of year means that it will almost certainly rain in the area. With about a 20% chance of any one spot getting rain.

    Up here, a 20% chance of rain means that there's a 20% chance that it will rain somewhere in the forecast area, not that any given spot has a 20% chance of rain.

    I was at a meteorology conference a few years ago and at one session the presenter was very explicit about that. His wife was an elementary school teacher with yard duty, and understanding the forecast was apparently important in avoiding marital blame…

    He spent about half his session going over how lightning can strike from a clear sky, so waiting for thunderclouds to arrive overhead before bringing the kids inside wasn't safe. And running straight into Lucretius' Problem — a lot of the teachers there hadn't seen that happen, so didn't think it was something to worry about despite listening to an expert who had videos of actual lightning strikes…

    721:

    I live on Stone Hill, which rises to a majestic 10m above the lower ground (and 20m above sea level) at a dizzying slope of 2%.

    Positively mountainous!

    I grew up in Saskatchewan. Very flat. Looks rather like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1BgzIZRfT8

    722:

    Drone video of a chap changing light bulbs in a transmission tower. Which is cool, but the background gives an idea of how flat the landscape it.

    723:
    All that will remain of we've done, all our triumphs, creations, and discoveries, will be ubiquitous piles of rubble that are sites in the "What the frack were they thinking" dreamings, whose principle use, once they've been scavenged for anything of use, will be to teach adolescents not to be thoughtless or greedy.

    This sprung to mind instantly:

    "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

    The lone and level sands stretch far away.

    724:

    Australia has the famous donkey vote that arguably demonstrates that it's not just the political classes who need to improve...

    couldn't that often be viewed as a protest against compulsory voting tho

    725:

    Question for US-ians .. Has it go this bad? - yet, with nutters calling for the shooting of the "leftists" ... who have done nothing violent, that you'd notice & the right/fascists ramping up the rhetoric & actual violence, frothing themselves into stupidity? How close is the US to a civil war of sorts?
    Someone called Curt Schilling, on faux "news" calling for "Someone to pull the trigger" is what prompted this.

    726:

    I live on Stone Hill, which rises to a majestic 10m above the lower ground (and 20m above sea level) at a dizzying slope of 2%.

    That's hillier than much of Florida.

    I live in an area officially known as North Hills. There's a 100' up and down within a mile of me. Multiple times. My 1/3 acre yard goes up 20' street to back. And a house across the street is 10' or so below street level. And a few miles away we have flat land large enough to have sport pitches without much if any grading.

    But as long as that's it in terms of hills, thunderstorms can roll through where the rain is between a few 100 feet wide to a mile or so wide. On the plains it is more crazy. You can see storm cells 10 or more miles away going by. Even tornadoes. Which is where you get tornado chasers.

    As I said, we can see the rain falling in the area while getting nothing on you specifically. Just look for the clouds with dark undersides. And smell the rain (ozone?) in the air.

    727:

    Which is cool, but the background gives an idea of how flat the landscape it.

    First time out near the Rocky Mountains. Driving from Denver to Colorado Springs. To the west were the Rockies.

    When at our meeting I asked how far away the mountains were. I guessed 50 miles. After the locals got up off the floor where they had fallen while laughing they told me the foot hills didn't start until 50 or more miles west of us.

    728:

    Re: Slavery - evidence

    Read this article yesterday - very interesting - and made me wonder what Foxessa would think of it. Longish read but worth it.

    https://thecurrentga.org/2023/06/17/how-a-grad-student-uncovered-the-largest-known-slave-auction-in-the-u-s/

    The grad student contacted an author/academic who had some years earlier published a book about his family's involvement in the US slave trade.

    Makes me wonder whether we'll see a repeat of the slave life-cycle (as described in the article) once AI makes most current jobs obsolete. It's already rare to find 'lifers' at any major corp, and employees are rarely classified/thought of as biz assets even though in a knowledge economy they do the key jobs.

    EC @715: 'Higher Order Language ... resource hog'

    Seems weird that the tool used for sifting through ginormous piles of data is itself a resource hog. It'd be interesting to know what percent of their electricity expenditure is for their comp system vs. the various particle generators/cyclotrons.

    Weird question time ...

    Has a computer ever come up with an original new/emergent idea/concept? (My pov/def of 'emergent': Emergent concepts reconsolidate existing bits of info into a new form that is distinct from previous forms and which is robust enough that it can form the basis of a new fractal set of ideas/uses.)

    Robert - re: flat Sask

    One of my sibs took a train from Montreal to Victoria: the Saskatchewan portion was conducive to really long naps. Also hypnotic.

    I've never traveled there but am curious about how it feels to see a completely unobstructed view in every direction.

    729:

    Has a computer ever come up with an original new/emergent idea/concept? (My pov/def of 'emergent': Emergent concepts reconsolidate existing bits of info into a new form that is distinct from previous forms and which is robust enough that it can form the basis of a new fractal set of ideas/uses.)

    I am pretty sure these count:

    A move in Go no human player ever thought of: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/googles-ai-viewed-move-no-human-understand/

    Genetic algorithm evolves an antenna no intelligent designer could have come up with: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/nmp/st5/TECHNOLOGY/antenna.html

    730:

    "Australia has the famous donkey vote that arguably demonstrates that it's not just the political classes who need to improve..." -
    As it's been explained to me (correctly or otherwise) that can also be seen as a protest against having to vote for every candidate when you only have first and second choices, and the rest can "go and do the other thing".

    731:

    Driving to a customer site in Kansas in the early morning. Everybody in the car is looking at the mountains low on the horizon, when we all suddenly realize they are clouds (the ground was flat enough that the curvature of the earth made the clouds look low, where else do you see that besides the ocean?). The biggest hill around was the highway cloverleaf.

    732:

    Travelling north from London in mediaeval times, Cambridge was the last point you could reach before horses got bogged down in the Fens, which are a lot flatter. Actually, I got it wrong - it rises only 5m above the surrounding land :-)

    But, yes, we live on the high ground that was the winter route into Cambridge.

    733:

    Yes. Computers have been used to produce conceptually similar innovations for a very long time (since the 1960s), usually by variants of random searching (which is effectively what those 'AI' programs do). The difference is that there is enough capability nowadays to tackle problems that would take the best part of a lifetime to do by hand, rather than ones the researchers didn't want to waste the time on.

    734:

    Moz @ 707:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Cuba I didn't realise that the dependence of Cuba on slavery was controversial.

    Your blithe assumption that anyone & everyone dispossessed by the Castro regime during the Cuban Revolution was a former slave owner or descendant of slave owners certainly is. And offensive.

    735:

    "FLAT"
    My grandmother lived in Holbeach, Linconshire in the fens.
    It was & is a "high" point - Holbeach "bridge" - the x-roads in the centre of town is =12' (approx 4metres) above Datum.
    Going N, towrds the sea, alomg the marsh ... Holbeach Bank (Roman) +4m, Old sea bank +3m, cuurent bank ( Boundary of tidal Wash ) =2.5m.
    Going S .... Barrington Ho +3m, Holbeach St John's +2m, Holbeach Drove +2m, ditto @ Thorney, Whittlesea is on a "hill" +8m (!) ... Ponder's Bridge +1m Diatance from N-to-S of that line, approx ... 48 km.
    A view looking E from the embankment by the Ship Inn @ Fosdyke

    736:

    David L @ 709:

    I don't know what John S knows so I'll not presume to speak for him.

    Many (most) people in the US (and likely Canada but again...) don't realize that more Africans were brought into the Americas into the Carribian and South America than into the "13 colonies". Especially Brazil in absolute numbers. But as a ratio of total population the Carribian has to rank higher. And many of those were just cogs in a sugar industry. To be used till worn out (dead) then replace with new cogs. For all practical purposes many islands in the Carribian don't have much if any trace of "first peoples" left.

    Which makes for very few first peoples left controlling much of anything if you look at things from a 500 year history point of view. Especially in the Carribian.

    The US tended to become more segregated by an attempted binary view of skin color. But it varied a lot based on "class" and location. (Check out how peoples from the southern side of Europe have been treated in the US going back a century or two. With a side dish of Irish discrimination. I suspect the correlation of RC vs Protestant was also involved here.) In South America there seems to have been more blending. But still a lot of noticing of shades of brown. It is my understanding (based on thin knowledge) that Cuba has a race/class system even today.

    And I suspect that most histories of most countries taught to kids when growing up (and the narratives of older folks) leave out many pesky awkward details. As has been noticed around here at times.

    A few things I know:

    • The indigenous peoples of the Americas proved too fractious (and possibly too fragile) to be effectively enslaved. Africans dragged across the oceans proved more tractable. I think that may be because they were so far from home they lost their natural support structure.

    • In 1807 Britain passed a law outlawing the Atlantic Slave Trade. Because of Article 1, Section 9 of the NEW U.S. Constitution:

    The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

    ... the U.S. did not abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade until 1808, although the laws they did pass were often unenforceable.

    • The ASSUMPTION expressed, that ONLY Americans - North, Central or South - share blanket of guilt for slavery, while absolving all the rest of the British & Europeans of blame is DAMNED OFFENSIVE!

    The ASSUMPTION that ONLY former slavers would have been dispossessed; had their property expropriated by Castro's Cuban Revolution is infamously reprehensible.

    737:

    I've never traveled there but am curious about how it feels to see a completely unobstructed view in every direction.

    If you drive across places in the US like Kansas on the Interstate highway system you will notice some ponds. Since the point is no intersections, there is a rise in the road way or cross road where ever they intersect. There are no spare hills around so they dig out a pond. Which is why you see small bodies of water next to so many places out in the "flatlands" where roads intersect.

    I'm betting the plains in Canada have similar bodies of water.

    738:

    Your blithe assumption that anyone & everyone dispossessed by the Castro regime during the Cuban Revolution was a former slave owner or descendant of slave owners certainly is. And offensive.

    Not quite. Virtually all of the historical wealth in the Carribian was generated through the use of slaves. That in many cases were worked to death then replaced with new stock from Africa. Much (most all?) of it for the production of sugar.

    All of the properties in such places derived in the past from the wealth generated from the use of slaves. At times a few 100 years ago but still.

    His point, to the degree I took it, is if someone wants to go back and claim property taken 60 years ago from grandparents due to the government being overthrow, while not address the property rights of those descendants of those who great x 10+ grandparents. Where do you draw the line?

    Then lets talk about places in the Caribian where there is no longer any trace of the first peoples. They were wiped out to make room for European crops.

    739:

    Re: '... that ONLY Americans - North, Central or South - share blanket of guilt for slavery...'

    Probably because the American form of slavery is the best known via books/films and documentation making it easy for other versions of slavery to be conveniently ignored.

    One of my mother's nursing attendants worked in the Middle East for several years: she was Malay and her life/rights as a foreign worker amounted to slavery. Ditto for a Filipino nanny I met. Then there's a former colleague of Indian ethnic background who mentioned he was born in Oman (third generation) and he that was not considered an Omani citizen, i.e, he had no rights. FYI - I was not seeking out people who had ever visited/worked in the Middle East: this is not a fluke finding.

    740:

    It would have helped if US citizens had not watched John Wayne films where the local IRA representative was a nice guy rather than an unprincipled yob with gun.

    Do you mean John Ford? He was an unabashed IRA fan. The only John Wayne movie I can remember with an IRA rep in it is "The Quiet Man", and that character is pretty minor. Wayne himself was raised Protestant, I believe.

    741:

    "Seems weird that the tool used for sifting through ginormous piles of data is itself a resource hog. It'd be interesting to know what percent of their electricity expenditure is for their comp system vs. the various particle generators/cyclotrons."

    EC's HOL is nothing to do with CERN. It just happens to have the same acronym. It's a tool for mathematically proving that a program does actually do what you think it does... which is an area so full of traps and weaknesses and holes I'll let someone else rant about it :)

    742:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE

    This is not a thread for the discussion of historical reparations or the evils of slavery.

    It's getting increasingly fractious and bad-tempered here, so I want you to drop the subject immediately.

    Comments on those topics following this notice will be deleted.

    (Anyone trying to defend chattel slavery as an institution gets a lifetime ban.)

    743:

    Greg Tingey @ 725:

    Question for US-ians ..Has it go this bad? - yet, with nutterss calling for the shooting of the "leftists" ... who have done nothing violent, that you'd notice & the right/fascists ramping up the rhetoric & actual violence, frothing themselves into stupidity? How close is the US to a civil war of sorts?
    Someone called Curt Schilling, on faux "news" calling for "Someone to pull the trigger" is what prompted this.

    That was an isolated incident pre-American Civil War ... in some ways it's better and many ways it's worse (nobody in the U.S. in the 1850s had AR-15s) ...

    The nicest thing I can say about Curt Schilling is that he's a fuckin' IDIOT! who would have been a NAZI if he'd been born soon enough. But over here, under the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, shitheads like Schilling are entitled to express their opinions just like decent people are.

    744:

    David L @ 726:

    But as long as that's it in terms of hills, thunderstorms can roll through where the rain is between a few 100 feet wide to a mile or so wide. On the plains it is more crazy. You can see storm cells 10 or more miles away going by. Even tornadoes. Which is where you get tornado chasers.

    As I said, we can see the rain falling in the area while getting nothing on you specifically. Just look for the clouds with dark undersides. And smell the rain (ozone?) in the air.

    Growing up in the mid 50s & early 60s in Durham, NC I lived in a subdivision very much on the model of Levittown - everything bulldozed flat before the lots were laid out & after the houses were built a single, solitary shade tree (about 10 ft tall) planted at the curb in the middle of every lot. We had a carport attached to the side of our house, so it became more or less a neighborhood play space on rainy days during the summers ...

    But I remember we could see down the street for about 2/10 of a mile (seemed like much farther back then) and see the leading edge of a rain shower sweeping up the street towards our house. I guess that's one of my happiest memories from those days.

    Looking at it now in Street View, that 10 ft tree has grown to be maybe 50 - 60 ft tall today and the other tiny trees we & the neighbors planted are equally grown up, so the sweeping vistas of my childhood are no more.

    745:

    These discussions have inspired me to have a very quick look at what I could get now that would give me a 10x or so improvement in speed (well, in CPU benchmark rating) over what I've got now (which I put together about 9 years ago), in a similarly appropriate setting. That would be roughly the same increase as I got with the current system over the previous one.

    RAM looks like about the same money gives me 2x the capacity at 2 and a bit x the bus speed. Most motherboards have 4 slots and the preferred stick size seems to be 32GB, so we agree about the "ease limit" at 128GB. To fill all 4 slots, as I have now, would be 2x the money for 4x the capacity.

    Motherboards are now fucking expensive. About 5x the price, for something that can handle the necessary CPU. Also seems to be unreasonably hard to find one with a decent number of slots. Most of them seem to be concentrating on slots for mounting miniature SSDs directly on the motherboard, and using up all the area by mounting them flat instead of edgewise so there's no room for more than a couple of PCIe slots. The need to hunt for one that does not have a built-in non-VGA video output remains about the same.

    The CPU would also be about 5x the price, with the added difficulty that it wouldn't come with a cooler, and selecting a cooler is next to impossible because unlike every single other kind of heatsink for cooling semiconductors they do NOT quote the thermal resistance in K/W. This is of course a deliberate measure to make sure you can't make an informed choice, and instead have to use trial and error at 50-100 quid a pop until you find one that actually is as impressive as it says it is. To which my response is to think in terms of maybe 20 quid for a pump and a few bits of plumbing fittings so I can rig up liquid cooling using an old car radiator, but it's still extra hassle.

    There's also the trap to watch out for that buying the CPU and MB together in a "this works with that" package costs 200-300 quid more than buying the same things separately.

    To put some very rough prices on it, it comes out as something like:

    Old New
    RAM 200 400
    CPU 100 500
    MB 45 220
    Tot 345 1020

    There are of course other bits required but they don't seem to have changed much. Say another 300 quid for case, PSU, 4 more hard drives on top of the ones transferred from the current system, etc, for both old and hypothetical new.

    I also get the impression that it perhaps isn't the best time to be doing this kind of thing as far as value for money is concerned.

    Conclusion: not worth it.

    746:

    I can guess where a lot of money came from: Chicago. South Side.

    The St. Paddy's Day before I relocated to DC - that would be '09 - I went for music. Other than one friend, and a friend of hers, NO ONE spoke to me. Then, in the evening, a fairly well-known group (don't remember the name) came in, and drunks got in front of me, and I was near the front, and the words to the music, and the whole attitude was "We're South Side Irish, and you're not welcome if you're not", and a lot of Irish revolutionary songs... I would have been attacked if I'd sung "Ye Jacobites By Name".

    747:

    Right... not in the order of "build better, then toss the old". The IRS did that in '84... and tax returns for the US were a complete and utter disaster, and in all the papers. (Let's hire cheap, just out of school programmers, and we'll replace the 15-20 year old Honeywell computers with IBM mainframes, AND migrate from assembly language to COBOL, um, what's a checkpoint?).

    748:

    And end-stage capitalism returns us to the very small middle class. But I assume you're speaking of the misuse of the term in the US, where the actual reference is to middle-INCOME people.

    749:

    Re: resource hog: that is, taking resources that actually were needed by all the other programs that needed to be running.

    Example: at the Scummy Mortgage Co, once a month, everything went to a crawl for a day or three as the IBM 43xx did actual word processing - that is, pulling out boilerplate paragraphs, reading from a d/b, and churning out custom letters.

    This was '87/88. They bought a just on the market high-end 386, and a consultant rewrote the RPG III code (which he described to be was an utter disaster) to RPG II, which would run on the 386. It took the same about of time the mid-frame did... running faster code, too.

    750:

    Fine. So you'll be pissed at me, as I despise most of the Cubans who fled the Revolution in '59... given that, overwhelmingly, they were supports/part of the nasty dictator Battista (supported by the US), or they were the literal Mafia, who owned Havana since the start of Prohibition.

    No, they don't get anything back.

    And, per Charlie, I'll stop, but I wanted to say this, because it's not about slavery.

    751:

    We've got things like that here... including in bits that are definitely not flat :)

    The Victorian railway builders tried to plan things out so that the volume of spoil excavated from cuttings would supply the volume required further along for building embankments. But sometimes they cocked up the sums, or the embankment started falling down and needed lots more spoil to build it up again, or they had problems with landowners playing the arse or contractors going bust and ended up needing to complete the embankment in a hurry before they had any railway in action to connect it to the cutting. So we also have strange ponds, or strange wide shallow ditches, depending on how big the particular problem was.

    Then of course in the bits that are flat they weren't digging cuttings, but still needed to bank the track up a bit off the soggy ground, so they had to use ditches in the first place.

    752:

    Ne computer parts: yep. I had to replace my 2 yr old one early this year - it had started rebooted >1/day.

    I will not buy another MSI m/b. Apparently, there was a bug in the graphics firmware.

    Paid about $100 more than I wanted to, but I got a Gigabyte Ultra-Durable. Had one of those before, and I only replaced that in 19?20? after 6 or 8 years.

    753:

    "I guessed 50 miles"

    Fair enough, but I will use it as a hook to rant on a favorite subject.

    For distances of more than a few meters, humans can't determine linear dimensions or speeds of objects without additional information.

    What they can see are angular sizes and rates. Those can be translated into linear measures if the distance between the observer and object is known, or can be derived from other information.

    This continually gets missed even by people who should know better in analyses of UFO sightings and such.

    754:

    "They don't speak the silent part out loud"

    But it's part of the standard mental autocomplete vocabulary for reading website "terms and conditions" and the like.

    We do not sell your data unless we don't think anyone will be able to prove it in court.

    We do not pass on your data except to whatever random backends our "personalised advert" mechanism uses, and fuck knows what they do with it.

    We do not collect your data in a special directory called "users' data" or whatever. But we have several years of raw server log files that the default logrotate configuration never deletes, and there's plenty to be pulled out of them. Oh, and this is a wordpress site, in case you haven't noticed.

    Which leads to the standard algorithmic compression for website terms and conditions pages: "iaba;dr" (it's all bollocks anyway; didn't read).

    755:

    We also tend to fit things into the frameworks we spend our time in. Change the surroundings and the frameworks don't work. When my nephews from the Dallas area would visit us in central North Carolina they would complain that they felt trapped as they couldn't see far enough. I've lived in either smaller rolling hills with trees never too far away or in the Pittsburgh area. So my ability to judge how far away distant things are is severely limited.

    756:

    You seem to have missed that over the past decade, the build-your-own-PC market has become a niche populated by a tiny minority of fanatics: most people buy laptops, or at best all-in-one desktops that are essentially clones of the iMac -- a monitor with a built-in laptop motherboard.

    Folks who build their own PCs are mostly like petrol-heads who insist on building their own custom car, only unlike the car enthusiasts they can't raid the scrap heaps for components because anything that's been scrapped is too low performance to be worth bothering with. So they're treated as a captive market that can be milked.

    757:

    The CPU would also be about 5x the price, with the added difficulty that it wouldn't come with a cooler, and selecting a cooler is next to impossible because unlike every single other kind of heatsink for cooling semiconductors they do NOT quote the thermal resistance in K/W. This is of course a deliberate measure to make sure you can't make an informed choice, and instead have to use trial and error at 50-100 quid a pop until you find one that actually is as impressive as it says it is. To which my response is to think in terms of maybe 20 quid for a pump and a few bits of plumbing fittings so I can rig up liquid cooling using an old car radiator, but it's still extra hassle.

    While 20 years ago you were a somewhat typical tech computer buyer, today you are an extreme edge case in terms of numbers.

    And most of the people who pay attention to such things now are gamers who want extreme performance and will pay for it.

    So, yes, it will be hard for you to find things they way you want to shop.

    I suspect that less than 1% of the people who buy a computer these days even WANT to open it up to add a board or bit. Maybe less than 0.01%.

    Which pisses people like you off.

    The US auto industry went through this cycle a few decades ago. The custom car hot rod market sort of peaked in the 70s. Now, to the extent it exists at all, it's almost all about engine computer mods for performance. Nearly all those companies (in the US) that sold custom crank shafts, cams, manifolds, etc... are out of business. The number of people who buy a 50s Chevy or Ford, remove and rebuild/replace the engine and trans and then drive around to show off are very thin on the ground.

    There IS one guy around here who buys 60s/70s MoPar "hot" cars, restores them, then sells them to rich folks for $50K and up.

    758:

    couldn't that often be viewed as a protest against compulsory voting tho

    Anyone who goes to that effort but can't be bothered finding out the actual requirements needs to improve.

    The actual requirement is compulsory voting means eligible voters must attend a polling place, have their name crossed off the list of voters, accept ballot papers and lodge them in a ballot box. (there are also restrictions on how badly you can deface the ballot. You can't wipe your arse with it, for example).

    759:

    Not in the US. And both Ellen and I wanted real desktops/towers. You know, with full-sized keyboards to type on, and my 24" monitor.... And I didn't have to replace any of those, and I even got to reuse the DDR4 memory from the last one. Oh... and the upgrade was < $600.

    760:

    Not trying to insult you at all. But you are a very tiny sliver of the computer market these days.

    I am also but in different ways. [grin]

    761:

    Exactly. Which is closely related to one of my favourite rants: the idea that humans can see in three dimensions "because they have binocular vision", end of story, is basically bollocks. Beyond a few metres, the triangle with the base between the eyes and the apex at the object is too narrow for the angular resolution of the eye to get anything out of it. It's all about much wider triangles with the apex at the eye and the base between two distant objects, plus a lot of background information and inference to estimate the baseline length, etc. And parallax, which is essentially the same thing with a different kind of long baseline.

    It used to piss me off at school having this "fact" repeated at me every time we moved into a new class for a science subject (except chemistry). I do not have binocular vision, and never have had it, so I know fine that its supposed status as the sole necessary and sufficient condition for perceiving a view in three dimensions is bollocks. Eventually I got so fed up with it that on being required to regurgitate it as an answer to a homework question, instead of the expected two words I turned in about three pages about angular resolution and parallax and inference from experience and what have you, pounding the question into little bits of dust.

    762:

    Re: 'BoJo, Partygate, the Royals, honors list'

    In case anyone's interested, I found this - doesn't mention the Royal's role but does provide some info.

    https://honours.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/how-to-nominate/forfeiture/

    'But the Committee is not restricted to these two criteria, and any case can be considered where there is evidence to suggest that the retention of an honour would bring the honours system into disrepute.

    The Committee is not an investigatory body – it does not decide whether or not someone is guilty or innocent of a particular act. Instead, it reflects the findings of official investigations and makes a recommendation of whether or not the honours system has been brought into disrepute.'

    From across the pond it looks like: Yes, based on the investigatory body's findings BoJo's actions and list if accepted would bring the 'honours' system into disrepute.

    763:

    (Sorry OGH, please delete that last comment. Didn't see your notice)

    [ DONE -- mod ]

    764:

    As you say. I have a truly marvelous rant on this proposition which this blog is too narrow to contain.

    765:

    are mostly like petrol-heads who insist on building their own custom car,

    Apparently we think alike in this area.

    This topic triggered a memory so I did some searching and found out that this company is still around.

    edelbrock.com

    But I doubt I could find a local shop with a choice of custom cams for a small block Chevy engine. Without a way back machine. In my youth the local "Custom Speed Shop" had such on the shelf.

    766:

    But, obviously, you scale a UFO relative to how large Elvis looks in the hatch. Don't you?

    My understanding is that relative sizing is more important than the visual angle, because we aren't good at estimating the latter in absolute terms. I generally use my thumb or little finger at arm's length.

    767:

    And me, because I wanted ECC and a server motherboard. Mine is over a decade old, though, because why replace it if it is still adequate?

    768:

    Actually, many of us DO use parallax - but it is by moving our heads, or even our whole bodies and seeing how things change. This doesn't give a useful indication of absolute distance, but does give a pretty good one of relative distance.

    769:

    I suspect that less than 1% of the people who buy a computer these days even WANT to open it up to add a board or bit.

    There seem to be fewer but still a lot of "computer shops" around selling white box computers and a steady stream of bits. SSDs and hard drives seem popular, even RAM, but increasingly seems to be "memory" as in (micro)SD cards and the like.

    One thing that peeves me is Dell moving to the Apple model of refusing to work with non-approved accessories. Their laptop power supplies are notorious for having comms to prevent non-genuine supplies working, and they seem to have done the same with CD/DVD bay accessories and batteries. Quite puts me off, but OTOH work demand that I have a laptop so they supply it, but won't shell out for the 12V->laptop version (which, knowing Dell, would accept 10.5V-13.5V and thus not work with a 4S LFP battery).

    770:

    Yep.

    For folks who aren't into restoring 60s muscle cars but want some customizability/upgradability, I hear very good things about the Framework Laptop, which is a modern laptop but also modular, upgradable, and repairable. Not for me right now but if I ever finally decide to leave Apple (there's a considerable pain barrier attached due to my specific software needs) this would be where I'd go.

    771:

    And both Ellen and I wanted real desktops/towers. You know, with full-sized keyboards to type on, and my 24" monitor....

    You can buy a gaming or business laptops these days for a reasonable amount of money (especially if you buy a "refurbished" trade-in). They can support multiple high resolution monitors (sometimes using a USB-C/Thunderbolt port), external high speed SSD drives (using USB3) and probably "enough" memory for most uses (32GB). Plus you get a free battery backup :)

    I use the "work" laptop like a desktop both at home and work (I have monitors/keyboard/mouse set up at both locations), but it is easier to carry :)

    772:

    In my distant past I've written OS storage and comm drivers. And made mods to the OS as needed. Trivial compared to today's universe but still.

    But today, when buying a laptop or Macmini every 3 years or so I dial in my prefs for memory (currently at 24GB), storage (down to 512GB compared to 2TB previously), weight, and screen size. I literally have no idea what the CPU specs on my M2 MacBook Air are just now. It feels zippy, lets me connect to my wired home network, external display, keyboard, mouse, etc... with a single cable and just works.

    Now I will read anandtech.com or similar at times if I need to configure a RAID or see what the major vendors are doing with drives. But even then I'm now buying a Synology box and deciding what drives to put in instead of a CPU box, dirve cabinet, and interfacing tech as a I was doing a few years back.

    If I was building a data center I'd take a different approach but I'm not and I don't.

    773:

    What, you put up with tiny chicklet keyboards, and tiny screens?

    774:

    In the US, there's always MicroCenter - forget Newegg, etc, this is walk in to the store... and they're large.

    775:

    I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my mediocre office computer would drive four 4k screens quite happily. Not fast enough to play games or watch 8k video, but enough for coding and browsing the web. I assume the new one would do better at that... and I just realised that I have four 4k monitors available. Sadly my office is really only big enough for three and even that is a stretch. Well, a twist, I end up using the central one and whichever of the side ones is more important at the time, but I've noticed that I tend to turn my chair when I swap between them.

    Which is why my other computer has 2500x1600 (ish) displays in portrait as the side monitors, so I can read all three without moving my head too much.

    776:

    We each have a tablet (I had to get something to replace my aging Nook as a book reader), and she pushed to get a laptop. What we got was a used ASUS, who she likes. She can use it if she's vending (sha makes jewelry)... and we can use it for reading email and browsing, and occasionally me for writing, while we're at a con.

    777:

    What, you put up with tiny chicklet keyboards, and tiny screens?

    You left off the [grin].

    I'm at my office desk most of the time. Full sized keyboard. 24" display (maybe 27" soon), and regular mouse. This is for my MacBook Air. I flip the lid up when I need to use the camera. But if I want I can use my phones camera and mic. My Macmini is very similar but not so portable. Full sized keyboard and large trackball.

    What chicklet keyboard? On the MacBook Air the keys are full sized or nearly so.

    I'm a no look touch typist. And I have no problem typing on either setup or the laptop when away from the desk.

    And the tiny screen? At 13" it is big enough for me when not at my desk. If I was buying today I'd be seriously temped for the same thing only 15" display. Maybe. This thing is light and the battery lasts 4 to 8 hours of my use if away from my desk. I carry a 65W small power brick. But only get it out about 1 trip in 10. Or less. Mostly for hotel use.

    778:

    In the US, there's always MicroCenter

    Yes. They were handy when I was commuting to Dallas. But there are only 20 or so around the country.

    Fry's went away during the pandemic.

    And independents are very thin on the ground these days. Our ONE local one is at one or two stores from 8 or so 10 years ago. And 15 years ago we had 20 or so small shops. That one with 2 is about it within 30 miles. And the used store have just vanished. Except for one or two charity outfits.

    You might not like NewEgg but if you're not near a Microcenter they may be about your only option. Other than B&H and such.

    779:

    Oh, yeah.

    The North American pulp wood industry went into serious decline when computer shopper went out of business.

    1" thick or so tabloid sized every week or so book of ads. Well there were a few articles but it seemed most were there just to be able to claim it WAS a magazine and not just a pile of ads.

    780:

    In the US, there's always MicroCenter

    Yes, I like that I have one nearby. Just before the pandemic, I got a 32" QHD (2560*1440) on an "open box" special for the home office (

    (32" QHD has the same dot pitch as a 24" FHD, so I can use a 24" FHD as a second monitor and things don't change size between the two monitors)

    781:

    I've never traveled there but am curious about how it feels to see a completely unobstructed view in every direction.

    It's different. I like it, but a colleague of my fathers had to move back to Ontario after a while — apparently he felt like he was standing in the open with his pants off all the time. (Trousers for Brits.)

    When I moved to Ontario it took me a couple of years to realize that my increasingly bad mood was a consequence of feeling hemmed in. The penny dropped when I visited one of the outlooks in Gatineau Park, could finally see the horizon, and felt at peace for the first time since leaving the Prairies. Moving to Toronto was a big change, and even decades later I still get nostalgic when the air is clear and I find a hill.

    Flying a drone helps, because it gives me a viewpoint where I can see the horizon.

    782:

    I must have been unclear somewhere - I was including parallax among "more generally effective means of getting a long baseline", and "factors ignored in the prevalent explanation". I certainly use it myself just as you describe, sometimes automatically and sometimes deliberately. Trying to pick out sub-mm-scale details of a few-mm-sized object and assign them their correct spatial relationships to each other I can end up wagging my head back and forth like a nutter.

    You also get a nice clear demonstration of how useful it is even when very good binocular data is available, in the way cats wag their heads from side to side when they're calibrating an imminent pounce.

    783:

    "My understanding is that relative sizing is more important than the visual angle,"

    Yes, but you need to have a known relative (like Cousin Elvis) at a known or estimatable distance from the object in question to make that work.

    "because we aren't good at estimating the latter in absolute terms. I generally use my thumb or little finger at arm's length."

    That's exactly what I do, or palm-width. Have to be careful with that, because it looks a bit like a Nazi salute.

    784:

    or palm-width

    Sign of the horns? The "yay, brother" gesture rather than the other option?

    785:

    My parents had an 80 acre farm on the Prairies for many years. I distinctly remember coming off a miserable trip to sea in midwinter before going back to Alberta to visit. I was like a caged animal, stressed and miserable until I was able to spend one day walking around the farm. I remain convinced that it was the open horizons.

    786:

    You've rather missed the point of the paragraph you quoted. The need to select a CPU cooler is only an "additional" problem in the specific context of this particular comparison, because with the "old" box AMD supplied a cooler along with the CPU, while for the hypothetical "new" one they don't. In the context of assembling PCs in general, I consider it an "expected" problem, because most CPUs I've bought have come without coolers. The reason it is a problem has existed as long as PC CPUs have needed coolers, and it goes like this:

    If I want to dissipate 170W from the output transistors of a Class A amplifier, it's a piece of piss. All the requisite figures and ratings are readily available; it's trivial to work out what device-to-ambient thermal resistance I need the heatsink to have, and then I just look up in any catalogue the ones that have a slightly lower one.

    If I want to dissipate 170W from a CPU, it's a pain in the arse. I can get as far as "...need the heatsink to have" just as easily. But there is no such thing as a device-to-ambient thermal resistance figure quoted for a CPU cooler. There never has been. In fact there's no such thing as any figure for anything quoted for a CPU cooler, apart from what socket type it fits. I have to basically guess whether any given cooler will stop my 500 quid lump of sand from cooking itself based on things like how big it looks in the picture, how many stars it got in the Joystick Masturbation Addicts World Epic Cooler Shoot-Out, and how much it looks like it was originally drawn by Chris Foss. If it turns out not to work some of them are 100 quid down the drain, apparently. And I can't just use a non-computer one from the electronics catalogue that is rated with the relevant figure because it so totally wouldn't fit.

    The principal rantogenic factor about this situation is the deliberate withholding of the one piece of information you need to make an informed choice, so that you can only iterate expensive guesses.

    This isn't a new problem (although it matters more these days, because with more power needing to be dissipated there's less margin for the guess), nor is it limited to computers, nor to things that most people don't put together themselves. A long time ago I had reason to look up "R/C servos", those little proportional rotational actuators used in radio-controlled models. There were loads of manufacturers selling these things for somewhere between 50 and 100 quid (it was well before they were five for a tenner on ebay). There was NO data on ANY of the parameters available anywhere, except sometimes if you were lucky the torque, and if you were really lucky it would be in some kind of units of force x radius. And there were forums full of people swapping the results of their own attempts to resolve control loop instabilities by trying random different makes and models at 80 quid a pop, for all the world as if they expected the results from someone else's car to be relevant to their own plane. The poor bastards.

    787:

    Well, it's all angles to start with. Distance between points on the image on the retina is the angle subtended at the optical centre of the lens. Everything your visual system then works out for most probable values for distance off depends on that basic input.

    788:

    You've rather missed the point of the paragraph you quoted.

    My point was that there are people who work at this level. They are mostly gamers. And have forums and web sites dedicated to such details. My son and son in law are gamers. Just not at this level.

    789:

    Charlie Stross @ 756:

    You seem to have missed that over the past decade, the build-your-own-PC market has become a niche populated by a tiny minority of fanatics: most people buy laptops, or at best all-in-one desktops that are essentially clones of the iMac -- a monitor with a built-in laptop motherboard.

    Folks who build their own PCs are mostly like petrol-heads who insist on building their own custom car, only unlike the car enthusiasts they can't raid the scrap heaps for components because anything that's been scrapped is too low performance to be worth bothering with. So they're treated as a captive market that can be milked

    I'm one of those "build your own" crowd ... or I have been. Most of the components I would need to build a bleeding edge system are cheaper than ever. But Graphics Cards are obscenely expensive ... IF they're even available. The plain old "video card" from days of yore won't cut it any more. Nowadays, the graphics card can have more memory than the computer itself.

    I understand that's because of crypto-mining.

    I don't understand WHY graphics processors are the THING for doing crypto-mining, but it doesn't really matter; that's what I've read is the reason behind a shortage of GPUs & graphics cards.

    I had my graphics card (8GB GDDR4 VRAM) begin to fail on me a year or so ago and was looking to replace it. I couldn't find a replacement for love nor money. Every one of them (that would fit my "old" motherboard - PCI Express 2.0) were back ordered OR priced 10x what I paid for the original card.

    BUT, for some reason, I could buy a whole computer with more RAM, a faster, more powerful CPU, a 1TB SSD (to which I added a 4TB "spinny" drive) AND a slightly higher end 8GB Graphics Card than the card that was failing for only about $200 USD more than the bare graphics card itself (and the complete system WASN'T on back-order).

    It's NOT the computer I would have built for myself had I been free to do so, but it will suffice.

    790:

    David L @ 765:

    "are mostly like petrol-heads who insist on building their own custom car,"

    Apparently we think alike in this area.

    This topic triggered a memory so I did some searching and found out that this company is still around.

    edelbrock.com

    But I doubt I could find a local shop with a choice of custom cams for a small block Chevy engine. Without a way back machine. In my youth the local "Custom Speed Shop" had such on the shelf.

    IF however OTOH, you need to rebuild a Ford 289 for a vintage Mustang restoration, there's a place over in Cary, NC. 😏

    Plus, if you're into the LBCs (Little British Cars) there's a place over in Durham run by a guy who apprenticed at the MG Cars factory in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

    791:

    David L @ 788:

    "You've rather missed the point of the paragraph you quoted."

    My point was that there are people who work at this level. They are mostly gamers. And have forums and web sites dedicated to such details. My son and son in law are gamers. Just not at this level.

    I never worried about it. Just stick the biggest cooler that will fit inside the case on the CPU and be done with it.

    792:

    Computers... I have had a self-built desktop since maybe 1997, so I'm firmly in the niche 'build your own, not a laptop' crowd. I like that I can get mostly what I want instead of getting a laptop. A big screen and a keyboard are fine but would obviously be as easy if not easier with a laptop - I use that kind of setup at work and it works pretty well.

    Still... my desktop is now mostly almost ten years old. I got a decent graphics card four years ago, and, well, the prices have gone up since then by quite a lot, so I'm not planning to buy a new one until the one I get breaks down. It runs my games decently well, though I have a relatively smallish resolution. The monitor will get upgraded when it breaks, too, so I'll survive at least until then.

    I run Windows so I'll have to upgrade at some point because the current motherboard 'doesn't support' Windows 11. (It would otherwise but I think the UEFI is not as strict as M$ would like it to be.)

    The other day we got one of the kids a laptop - got a gaming one, so better stats mostly than my desktop. (My computer got more RAM and disk space, and easier to extend if necessary. I think I have something on the order of 5 TB of disk there, so, uh, somewhat difficult to get that on a laptop. Yes, it's all necessary.) I think even with the current graph card and motherboard prices I still could upgrade my desktop for cheaper, or with better specs if I spent all that money. Still think I'll upgrade the desktop when I need to.

    I don't even play that much modern 3d games. Mostly I've been playing Noita, a Finnish pixel graphics game, which anyway does need some processing power as it's doing physics on the individual pixels (in a limited area around the player, but anyway.)

    My computer is kind of a Theseus' computer - it's basically the same I bought over 20 years ago, but every piece has been changed at least once...

    793:

    And I, as usual, am oddball, being halfway between the two camps! I bought my desktop, built to my specifications, and don't do more than replace disks if I can avoid it. I really need the graphics card replaced, and will probably pay to have it done.

    Or I might buy a new one, off the shelf. Unfortunately, that would probably end up being more hassle :-(

    794:

    No, it was my misunderstanding. I agree that binocular vision is useful only at very short range. It IS easier to reach out and touch something using both eyes, but that's about it.

    795:

    Folks who build their own PCs are mostly like petrol-heads who insist on building their own custom car, only unlike the car enthusiasts they can't raid the scrap heaps for components because anything that's been scrapped is too low performance to be worth bothering with. So they're treated as a captive market that can be milked.

    No kidding. I built my desktop back in 2014, using the highest quality components I could find. Now it's sadly aging. The only components I've had to replace are the AIO CPU cooler and the original hard drives (I'm all solid-state drives now), but I can no longer use high-end software - or Windows 11, for that matter.

    So now I'm looking at a top-end system to drive a 4K monitor at high frame-rates for flight simulators and first-person shooter games. And a CPU with lots of threads to run Folding@Home. PC companies will give me something for $5,000 to $7,000 U.S., but none of them have 100% top-end stuff. So I'm reluctantly looking into building a new computer myself. And it's not going to be cheap! Sigh... 😕

    796:

    I'm at my office desk most of the time. Full sized keyboard. 24" display (maybe 27" soon), and regular mouse. This is for my MacBook Air.

    Yep.

    My desk is currently occupied by a final-generation Intel iMac 27", vintage 2019, and for travel (sadly much rarer since March 2020) I have an M1Pro Macbook Pro 14" (vintage 2021).

    But my current replacement plan for the iMac -- if it dies on me before Apple finally sunsets Intel support -- is to simply buy a 27" Studio display and a mains-powered Thunderbolt dock for the laptop.

    Thing is, given the state of my retinas I don't need a bigger/wider screen than 27" -- as it is, if I look at one side of it the other side is in one of my rather extensive blind spots -- but I do need brightness and high colour gamut and pixel count.

    The Macbook Pro outstrips my desktop in every respect but RAM and 32Gb should be enough for a writer, right? So give it a monitor and shove my current desktop mouse and keyboard on it and it's a desktop-substitute. Meanwhile the Studio display is comparable to the iMac's 5K display but maybe sharper/brighter.

    I suppose I could drop £5000 on an Apple Pro display (off a Mac Pro), or experiment with Apple Vision Pro as a workspace (£3500) but that seems a little pricey for what I use it for.

    USB-C and Thunderbolt make it trivially easy to hook a laptop into a desk's worth of peripherals with one cable. At which point a laptop is simply a desktop with a built-in UPS that can leave the office with you.

    797:

    That's the US version of Computer Shopper, owned by Ziff-Davis back in the day.

    Around 1984 a certain British publisher was on a trip to the US and saw CS on a newsstand. He hastily registered the trade mark in the UK, hired a Big Beast editor from the early days of UK computer journalism, and rolled the presses.

    Magazine publishing works a bit differently in the UK and USA, so 20% of the page count had to consist of actual computer magazine, to balance out the ads, in order for Shopper to qualify as a magazine for its ABC monthly sales ranking.

    The ABC figures were what justified the price of the ads in Shopper. Subscriptions by enthusiast readers(!) kept the ABC figures high. So what you got was weirdly like a cross between a British version of BYTE and the Computer Shopper you know.

    (It all went into a death spiral around 2003-04 when the internet ate advertising, but I made a fair bit of extra cash writing for Shopper as my side-hustle in the 90s and early 00s.)

    798:

    We have a fairly middle-range HP standard tower, plus madam's works laptop HP "elitebook" from work.
    Plus a pair of large 24"? screens, with plans for a third, plus working out how to feed all three screens from both machines ...
    Madam's work is SOOO MUCH EASIER if she can have 3 spreadsheets open simultaneously
    Gaming? We don't.
    All on Win10 of course & won't change to "11" until her work people do that on theor system. P

    799:

    That's how most people use it, but there are issues. Obviously, you are limited in certain components (e.g. graphics and sound cards) by what the laptop gives you, but that's rarely a problem nowadays. But there is also RAS - no laptop has ECC or any of the other RAS features you can get in (some) desktops, and I never, never, never want to have to track a transient memory error down again without 'server' diagnostics.

    The one that puts me off most is that few modern laptops have removable batteries. I have had computers that could not be shut down from the power button. One laptop had a transient firmware bug that caused it to die during boot, so I had to disconnect it and remove the battery. If that happens with an integral battery, you are stuffed, good and proper, because the clock could take months to run the battery down.

    Still, it's probably what I would do if replacing my desktop.

    800:

    Or the PDFs of two versions of a document and an editable text file of comments. The bare minimum for usability is my screen - 27" 1920x1080 - and I would now have replaced it by a better one if I were still working. But, 10+ years ago, more resolution was too damn expensive.

    801:

    The one that puts me off most is that few modern laptops have removable batteries.

    The flipside of non-removable batteries is better structural integrity. I have un-fond memories of Apple's mid-1990s Powerbook Duo: plastic shell, removable batteries to one side of the trackpad, and they pared the weight because it was an ultraportable, with the result that if you picked it up wrong the battery contacts would disconnect and the machine would crash hard.

    Unibody laptops -- a trend Apple started around 2006-08 -- are light and very rigid, which is why you can get a 13" laptop today that weighs about as much as that mid-90s Powerbook Duo's battery (and the Duo had a 8" or 9" screen).

    I've never heard of a Macbook doing the can't-shut-down thing: But then, the power button is also a fingerprint sensor hooked to the T2 secure enclave processor which also controls some really low level device access (for example, it holds the encryption tokens for the SSD's encrypted partition) and power management. Apple has the complete stack so is at liberty to make damn sure that if you hold the power button/fingerprint sensor for ten seconds the machine will power down hard. And if the battery is problematic, a trip to your local Apple store should get you a replacement (and a lighter wallet).

    If you really insist on a replaceable battery in a PC notebook, again: the Framework laptop is amenable to being opened up with a screwdriver and the battery is designed to be user-replaceable in the field.

    But really, modern laptops are specc'd for a battery life of 8-18 hours between charges, unless you're really thrashing it or have a dinky subnotebook (they generally sacrifice battery life in return for size/weight). And even then, everything charges over USB-C/PD, so just carry an external booster brick, right? It's not like the old days when every laptop required a different funky connector for power or battery expansion.

    What you've really identified is a lack of after-sale support and disgraceful lack of attention to detail at the BIOS/UEFI level (i.e. there are bugs in the firmware and the vendor would rather soak you for the price of a new laptop than honour their warranty).

    802:

    Agreed, with one exception. Even if Apple made their own chips, the problem is unavoidable if the CPU/memory that listens to the power button fails. They can minimise the exposure but not eliminate it. What is needed is the facility some such systems have, which is a mechanical switch that breaks the power, which can be pushed by a straightened-up paperclip or equivalent. Some of them ship a key to do just that. Yes, using it's a pain, but it's a solution of last resort, so so what?

    803:

    Ahem: Apple does make their own chips. (Or at least designs them.) They bought a fabless design house back in the early noughties, licensed one of the ARM family architectures, and expanded them into designing CPUs for the iPhone, then the iPad and finally Mac family. (There are also presumably-non-ARM based specialised support chips such as the T2 security processor that Apple designs.) While they outsource manufacturing to the likes of Samsung and TSMC, they ultimately control the design all the way down the stack.

    804:

    The T2 chip is (according to wikipedia) a 64bit armv8 design... the secure enclave seemingly runs on a 32bit armv7 substrate...

    805:

    Thanks for the correction. Clearly I am out of touch :-) It doesn't change my generic point, of course.

    806:

    It doesn't change my generic point, of course.

    Just to be sure I just checked a MacBook Pro 16".

    The power button, which as Charlie pointed out is also a finger print reader tied to the T2 security system IS IS IS a physical button. It moves down when pressed and there is a bump/feedback which pressed to the point of turning the system on or off.

    And this same setup is used on all Apple laptops as best I remember. I'm not going to power off the MacBook Air I'm typing on for a lot of reasons just this moment. But my memory is they are all the same. I'm an admin for about 40 various Apple laptops just now and this was such a non issue for me I honestly couldn't remember. And while I'm winding down my System Admin life, I've been doing this for 30 years with 100s of systems. I've yet to run into a situation where a system would not power down. This is definitely an extreme edge situation you're worried about. At least on Apple systems.

    Now I did run into a situation a few months ago where 2 separate HP Z workstations got stuck after a Microsoft Patch update and would not fully restart or shutdown until I went and held in the the tiny sliver of a power button for 5 or 10 seconds. In a rack in a data center 10 miles from my house. I was NOT happy.

    807:

    Automobiles and computers.

    There are people on this blog and in my real life who don't like what has happened to autos AND computers. They want to do all of their repairs on their cars. Some up to overhauling the engine. They don't like that today's autos mostly don't break and so many of the systems are locked down, sealed, and made out of bigger rather than smaller bits that you swap out. And yes I realize that when one of these bigger bits breaks they do cost more. But for autos made in the last 10 years or more (at least in the US) for the most part, things don't brake. Oil changes are 3+ times longer than before. Brakes last 50K miles. Tires the same unless you buy crappy ones.

    I have a 2016 Honda Civic and a 2008 Toyota Tundra that I bought 6+ years ago. If it isn't a friction or oil wear out part I haven't had to touch them for repairs. I will note that both have needed a new battery.

    My point is that computer are moving in the same direction. They either break in the first 60 days or they last years. (Well there are a lot of Windows systems out there where the mechanical parts (case/keyboard) fall apart after a year or two but that's different.) The electronics are good enough for most folks and they tend to last a long time. So more and more the parts replacement crowd is a vanishing group.

    Say he who has overhauled things from law mowers to V8's in autos. And has a dwell meter and timing light sitting on a shelf. Plus used to insert boards in to mini computers with 8 rack slots. And do CPU chip upgrades. And used to build RAID setups for people. No I pick out a Synology model and just pop in the drives that make the most sense.

    808:

    At my snarkier moments I sometimes think that we should make some kind of counter thing for people who want to see Number Go Up, and just give people who want them their own Number and make it Go Up. Detach this from any real world activities and maybe put all the Number Go Up people on their own island and let them be there.

    This is exactly the concept behind a short piece titled The Number (of course). It's in a collection of "perfect world" shorts called All the Myriad Worlds that show worlds that are perfectly suited for their inhabitants, but might be less so for outsiders. (As part of the backstory, humanity figured out benevolent AI and has uploaded to well run heavens. If all it takes to make a post-human mind happy is one custom made bespoke universe, great, problem solved!) You can read it here.

    809:

    I do not like to repair my vehicles, I'd prefer they 'just work'. For the most part they do - our 09 Hyundai has had almost zero problems, and the more recent EV certainly 'just works'.

    I learned how to upgrade and repair my computers back when that was just a part of owning a computer. I'm quite happy not to do that now.

    When I was in high school back in the stone age the measure of a male was his vehicle, and a great deal of male conversation was about cars and parts etc. I hated it all, and developed an aversion to the whole topic.

    810:

    Agreed. But it is regrettably common that the only way to get what you want, or to do a practical and economic repair, is to do it yourself. That's reasonable, when it is a simple task, but is a damn nuisance when it isn't.

    811:

    Perhaps I should have spelled it out. The issue is not whether the switch is mechanical, but whether it directly breaks the power. If the machine has a CPU/memory that takes the electrical signal the switch makes and turns it into a power-off sequence, then it will potentially cause the problem I was describing.

    The situation you described with the HPs is when that CPU/memory is working; I am referring to the situation when that fails, and you can hold the button down until you die of exhaustion, and it still won't turn the machine off.

    812:

    But it is regrettably common that the only way to get what you want,

    My point is that more and more what you or even I want is no where near the mainstream anymore.

    We're spitting into the wind so to speak.

    People want toasters. Not bread heating kits they assemble to give them the exact kind of toasted bread or bagel they want.

    813:

    I've found video cards to be a problem for a lot longer than that. Still basically the same problem, though - how to avoid paying 10x too much for a whole load of functionality I don't need or use, because things with a merely adequate capability and correspondingly reasonable price simply don't exist.

    The trouble is everything is designed for playing games. And I don't play games. At all. I don't even have any games. As long as the thing can handle playing back videos, and scrolling/panning large windows, without running out of speed, that's good enough.

    I also don't need it to handle massive numbers of pixels. I have some detectable tendency to allow the right-hand sides of things to escape my attention, and for something like a computer screen which is big and close, subtending a large angle at a fixed-ish position in the visual field, and being stared at for a long time, the effect becomes quite pronounced. My present screen (chosen as "best thing that still works in the junk pile" when the previous one blew up) is 1440px wide, and that's more than enough - I barely use the right-hand 200px or so because it's actually quite difficult to pay attention to it. (The effect is relative to the object, not to my head, so turning my head doesn't do anything.)

    And the graphics subsystems that come built into most motherboards, although no doubt of quite adequate capability, have been useless for several years because they don't have VGA outputs any more. I'm better off seeking a motherboard that does not have any graphics capability of its own, because otherwise I have to configure the BIOS to default to using the one I've plugged into it instead without being able to see what I'm doing.

    So it turned out that the only way to get a decent graphics card even nine years ago was to take a gamble on buying one second hand, and things haven't got any better.

    814:

    But it is regrettably common that the only way to get what you want, or to do a practical and economic repair, is to do it yourself I can't repair my car or my computer, but I want to be able to bring it to a third party shop/commune and have it fixed. I want a EU directive about reusability and inter-operability that forces car/computer/whatever makers to abandon proprietary nonsense and cut down on waste. There is one already about planned obsolescence that doesn't go far enough IMHO.

    815:

    "Brakes last 50K miles. Tires the same unless you buy crappy ones."

    Ah, so THIS is why American cars in movies are screeching and sliding all over the road all the time! (And characters driving cars in American novels regard loss of directional control as an everyday event.) Tyres are regarded as "crappy" if they don't last 50k miles. All becomes clear...

    I've driven on tyres that last >50k miles. You get them on vans and things so the owners don't have to buy new tyres so often. And you do get grip characteristics just like in the movies. So from the British POV it's those that are the crappy ones, and normal car tyres don't last so long but do give a decent amount of grip.

    :)

    816:
    And the graphics subsystems that come built into most motherboards, although no doubt of quite adequate capability, have been useless for several years because they don't have VGA outputs any more.

    HDMI-to-VGA and DVI-to-VGA adaptors are widely available* in the UK for about GBP20-30, which is a lot less than even a bottom-end graphics card.

    • a quick poke gives results from Currys and Argos, as well as the usual assortment of online-only sellers (Amazon, ebay, etc)
    817:

    HDMI-to-VGA and DVI-to-VGA adaptors are widely available* in the UK for about GBP20-30,

    Half that in the US if you avoid Best Buy.

    I use displays till they are dead. I haven't seen a display with only a VGA connector in over 20 years.

    818:

    Sorry. But what you are saying about tires/tyres in the US just makes no sense. To be polite about it.

    Mileage ratings are set by testing approved by one of the federal agencies. NHA or similar. Ditto tread wear ratings. Those and speed ratings are assigned to the tires and you can look them all up before you buy. Plus they get sorted into things like highway, rain and snow, all weather, agressive (I have this on my big Tundra), etc... Not sure of these categories are official or market but they do make a difference in how the tires handle.

    And tires have tread wear band. That makes it obvious when the tread depth is less than 3/32 inch. And below that point a tire shop can't legally put them back on. Plus there's an age limit and the manufacturing date is embossed on the tires. And a tire shop can get huge fines if they mount tires past their expiration date.

    Larger truck, bus, etc... tires have different but similar rules.

    Again, a North American 50K mile or more tire will be a higher quality tire. A tire rated under 40K miles is a crappy, but cheap, tire.

    819:

    "But it is regrettably common that the only way to get what you want, or to do a practical and economic repair, is to do it yourself."

    I spent the first five years of my life observing that the process of obtaining an ocean-going trimaran involved lots of weekends in the back yard with your mates doing things with drills and saws and glue and paint.

    When it was launched and I got to compare it with other people's boats it was obvious, and somewhat surprising, that nearly all of them had instead been bought ready-made, like cars. And they were shinier, but they weren't any better. There wasn't anything about them that made them work better as boats. In fact they mostly seemed like an incomprehensibly bad idea, because every single feature my eye lit upon raised some question like "but what do you do when $maintenanceorrepairtask needs doing? You can't even see it", or "why is $volume all boxed in so you can't get at the $thingthatmightneed_attention?", so sooner or later they were bound to be an unnecessarily massive pain in the arse... yet the owners didn't seem to care or even notice.

    Naturally I also observed at the same time the same general results for all kinds of things at more everyday scales. And so I basically grew up knowing things like:

    - If you want something it's usually better to assemble it yourself from basic parts than to buy one. You get exactly the variant you want, which a boughten one won't be, and you are best able to avoid being overwhelmed by the basic problem of not having lots of money.

    - If you need something repaired it's similarly better to do it yourself. You know exactly what needed to be done and you know how well it has been done, so there aren't any mysteries, and very often you find that the reason it failed at all was that it was badly made to start with so you can make it better than it was originally.

    - There are lots of people who don't do this and they are weird and silly and all their nice things are really expensive and they keep having to spend money on things. But all the sensible people (like all my dad's mates) do do it.

    820:

    But all the sensible people (like all my dad's mates) do do it.

    Now you're being rude.

    You have a feeling about where you want to buy vs. build. Others have different points. That doesn't make either of them wrong.

    821:

    That was the film. Truly awful sexist crap but, as a John Wayne film, staple BBC fodder when I was a kid and knew no better.

    A fairly minor role but in sharp contrast to the psychos of the IRA that spent most my youth killing anyone who disagreed with them in Northern Ireland, letting off bombs in my home town and intimidating the southern Irish police into servility.

    Actually, it wasn't just Boston/New York etc that funded the IRA. I remember reading that pubs in some parts of Glasgow and Liverpool had collections for The Cause.

    822:

    There are tires of varying tread life potential and those in entertainment media shouldn't be held as a standard, screeching tires sound dramatic... to some. It's distinctly possible to extend tread life by giving up potential tread life, as in the original Michelin X, 60K US miles, in the seventies. On US market tires a tread life rating of "100" would be the expectation for a four ply poly, up to date sixty years ago.A "400" rating would be on an economical radial tire, possibly cheap, but four times more life than a dark ages tire.

    823:

    You've missed the point - which was that they gain the ability to last 50k miles by using a compound which is hard enough to be that wear-resistant, and so has far less grip than a softer compound that isn't trying to last that long. In Britain ordinary people (as opposed to van operators etc) don't expect them to last that long anyway, while they do have to care about grip, because we have bends. So over here it's the tyres which last and last (but don't grip) which are crappy, and the tyres which grip well (but don't last) which are good. To discover that the categorisation the US uses is the other way round therefore solves the long-standing mystery of why American cars in movies and written fiction display such comically low levels of grip and nobody thinks it's odd.

    You also missed the smiley, and I did it in bold an' all...

    824:

    No, I'm recounting what I had learned thoroughly by the time I was no more than 7, in terms of the observations I had made at that age.

    825:

    There are other options than NewEgg. Really. I found, before I retired, CDW was better. And you can order online from Microcenter.

    826:

    chuckle

    I have no graphics card. I've got my monitor plugged into the HDMI slot on the m/b. Gaming? Well, it works fine for Doom/Heretic/Hexen....

    827:

    I think, rather, the same number of people are wanting to build their own systems. It's mostly people who actually aren't into computers, and spend lots of time on itty-bitty mobile screens (to watch movies?!) who want an appliance.

    828:

    Do you cut down your own trees, cut the lumber, then kiln dry the wood, plane it yourself, etc...

    Make your own varnish?

    Smelt and cast your own metal parts.

    Grow your own cotton and process it into cloth?

    We each have a point where we decide to buy vs. make. Yours being earlier than most doesn't make your choice or you better. Just different from others.

    829:

    I've had that once or twice, mostly with my last iteration of a home workstation.

    There is a power plug that goes to the wall....

    830:

    NewEgg. Really. I found, before I retired, CDW was better. And you can order online from Microcenter.

    I have ordered from all of those. For myself and clients. Microcenter in person and online. To be honest I found CDW the absolute worst customer service.

    One of the best I've found is ProVantage.

    I guess my point here, and to Pigeon, is that what works for one person may be great for them. But that doesn't mean it is the only one true best way to do something.

    We are not all clones leading cloned lives.

    831:

    Oh, but why on earth would you ever want to turn it off?

    Meanwhile, about laptops, etc, vs. workstations... I read my email as plain text. Hmmm, why is that link that says it's to the US IRS going to Brazil (.br)? (Yes, I got more than one of those.)

    And I read my email using POP-3. Delete after download. And it's from my hosting provider that I pay for. Someone wants to read my email... they'd better show up at my door with a warrant. Travelling, I read it online, and delete the junk....

    832:

    So I guess submersibles are not a good subject of "move fast and break things" startup-culture.

    Who would have guessed...

    833:

    You're still missing the point. I'm recounting thoughts from age 7, max. Strong formative influences from when I was in short trousers. Hence equating "sensible (adult) people" with "my dad's mates", which was basically true for the people I knew at that age.

    834:

    Pigeon @ 819
    And this is why I am still, occasionally, driving the Great Green Beast.

    Grant
    I remember reading that pubs in some parts of Glasgow and Liverpool had collections for The Cause. FUCKING, BLOODY, MORONIC "Celtic" supporters, yes, I know, as a result of a very tense trip on the tube, way back when, oh ? 1981 ? or so. Even so AFTER This delightful "incident" - how very understanding & sympathetic, not.

    835:

    I need to turn mine off occasionally... to remove the carpet from in between the fan and the CPU heatsink. After a while a new one grows, so I have to do it again.

    Email... yep. Delivery: SMTP. Client: mutt. With the "render in browser" capability deconfigured, so I can't damnwrongbutton it.

    836:

    Yes, a great load of sentimental claptrap, with every character some kind of distorted caricature. So, of course, a huge success. And directed by John Ford (whose real surname was Feeney). It won him the "Best Director" Oscar the following year. Ford also won the best director Oscar for his 1935 IRA movie, "The Informer", and for two other movies before "The Quiet Man".

    Movie people seem to have some fascination with gangsters of all kinds.

    837:

    Greg Tingey @ 798:

    We have a fairly middle-range HP standard tower, plus madam's works laptop HP "elitebook" from work.
    Plus a pair of large 24"? screens, with plans for a third, plus working out how to feed all three screens from both machines ...
    Madam's work is SOOO MUCH EASIER if she can have 3 spreadsheets open simultaneously
    Gaming? We don't.
    All on Win10 of course & won't change to "11" until her work people do that on theor system. P

    My FIRST computer was a 286 I got around 1988. I already needed to build spread-sheets (ARNG logistics was switching over to computers) & write documents. I could do lesson plans in a word processor (built up my own template to make it easier to "fill in the blanks") & I could write out detailed operating instructions for my Alarm Company customers.

    AND I wanted to learn programming ... of which I managed VERY LITTLE.

    IIRC, the first computer I built was a 386 sometime in 1990. I had been building my own "desktop" computers since then up until this last one that I bought ... I have bought a couple of Apple computers, haven't tried my hand at a hackintosh yet and I've bought all of my laptops - haven't tried to build one of those either.

    I built my own "NAS" file server to store photos on. Big box to hold a lot of drives, but built around an older HP motherboard. When Tiger Direct was closing their retail stores I bought the computer they had used to run their P.O.S. system (sans hard-drive).

    For some odd reason it had 3GB RAM (???) - I found a vendor on line that sold a pair of 4GB memory that would fit the motherboard & upgraded to 8GB (maxed out).

    From a YouTube "how to build your own server" video I can't find anymore, I found a "Sharkoon T9" case that has 9 accessible 5-1/4 inch drive bays in the front; ordered from Italy through "The Big River".

    Put in a DVD± RW drive and a pair of Icy Dock "Fat Cage" 5-in-3 drive bays loaded with 5x2TB & 5x4TB spinny drives (~ $80 each on sale when I bought them - best price point for TB/$ at the time - bought 5 2TB & by the time I decided to buy 5 more the 4TB drives were cheaper).

    I found a couple of PCI cards that would handle 5+ SATA drives each. The drives are configured in two pools equivalent to RAID 6 (two parity stripes) so that I can lose one drive and rebuild the array and STILL RECOVER if I were to lose a second drive while doing the rebuild.

    While I was buying up stuff at Tiger Direct's "going out of business" sale, I picked up about a dozen 120GB SSDs for $5 each, so I'm using one of those as the system drive running TrueNAS CORE 12.0 (FreeNAS?).

    838:

    It's mostly people who actually aren't into computers

    That's most people.

    I seem to remember that it wasn't until the 21st century that annual computer sales in the USA broke 30 million units/year -- laptops up through supercomputers -- but today the USA buys about 200M smartphones/year (each one a 2005 supercomputer in performance terms).

    Indeed, if you go back to the 1970s-90s, the Apple II family sold a whopping 5-6 million units over 17 years (includes the IIgs which was basically a whole other machine). It peaked in 1983, with a million sales. Think about that: the best selling computer of that era was bought by about 0.5% of the population! Whereas today those smartphones are in everyone's hand.

    839:

    NewEgg. Really. I found, before I retired, CDW was better. And you can order online from Microcenter.

    I have ordered from all of those. For myself and clients. Microcenter in person and online. To be honest I found CDW the absolute worst customer service.

    One of the best I've found is ProVantage.

    I guess my point here, and to Pigeon, is that what works for one person may be great for them. But that doesn't mean it is the only one true best way to do something.

    We are not all clones leading cloned lives.

    840:

    Sorry bout that. Came back to the computer after after a few hours and the web page had a gateway timeout message. So I hit refresh. And got an extra post of the comment. First time I've seen that error in a very long time.

    841:

    In other news we have the monstrous contrast between discussion of the ~700 persons who were possibly allowed to drown off the coast of Greece, and discussion of the half dozen rich people who paid $250,000 to go look at the Titanic and went missing.

    It makes me dislike humanity.

    842:

    "I need to turn mine off occasionally... to remove the carpet from in between the fan and the CPU heatsink. After a while a new one grows, so I have to do it again." -
    Try reversing the fan polarity so that it exhausts through what is presently the "intake duct".

    843:

    I think, rather, the same number of people are wanting to build their own systems. It's mostly people who actually aren't into computers....

    "My" first computer was a 370/168 and hardware, system and network were other departments than mine. Tinkering with little toys like early M$ and Apple computers was not my thing. And it still isn't, though these machines have evolved and can actually do interesting things.

    844:

    OOC - how would you program a computer to track all of the concurrent biochem, cellular and tissue reactions in a living human body?

    My first reading of your query is that you are asking for a way to track a the processes on an individual living human body. That is tough, but mostly a problem of instrumentation: how to collect real-time data on blood chemistry, brain/spinal fluid chemistry, the functioning of organs (heart, lungs, liver, etc) and so on. The computer would mostly just record the data. I don't think we are anywhere close to being able to do this.

    What I suspect you are asking about was a simulation of all this stuff. My gut tells me that this model would be more complex than models of climate. Brain chemistry has the odd dance of serotonin and dopamine. Both are needed, but they are antagonists. Too little serotonin causes depression. Too much depresses dopamine, also leading to depression.

    Then there is the microbiome. Our microbiome comprises at least a thousand species of microbes: protozoans, bacteria, archaea, fungi, and mold. I may have left some out. These criters get a safe place to live and a steady supply of food. They provided us with services. The one that comes to mind is that they help regulate our bone density.

    I give these examples to show that there are lots of fiddley bits to us all. To build the model human, we would have to develop detailed understanding of all of these processes. We may have that understanding some day, but not in my lifetime.

    845:

    Ahem: the full version of "move fast and break things" is "move fast and break things that belong to other people; if they want those things badly enough they'll repair them for free".

    Apparently this was the motto of the "give us $250K to visit the Titanic" company. This article is an interesting read.

    https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/20/us/titanic-missing-submarine

    And a page with all their current articles.

    https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/20/us/titanic-missing-submarine

    And it may be behind a paywall. I think they allow a few reads per month.

    While I think if it was new money being spent on the search and rescue it would be better spent somewhere else, this, like many things some think of as wasteful, will be used to count against the US Navy requirements for practice time to retain certifications of 99% of the money spent. In other words the money would be spent on practice if something real didn't come along.

    846:

    It's mostly people who actually aren't into computers, and spend lots of time on itty-bitty mobile screens (to watch movies?!) who want an appliance.

    I have a degree in electrical engineering. I worked designing systems and software for telecommunications back in the 80s, taught computer programming in the 90s. I used used to wire-wrap circuit boards for use with microcomputers (remember when they had direct access to the bus?).

    I use my iPhone as a phone and only watch movies on my wide-screen TV.

    I have absolutely no desire to build a computer again. I want a reliable appliance.

    847:

    I give these examples to show that there are lots of fiddley bits to us all. To build the model human, we would have to develop detailed understanding of all of these processes. We may have that understanding some day, but not in my lifetime.

    Back in the 80s the anti testing on animals movement was adamant that instead of testing on people and animals, medical research should be doing computer simulations. They didn't seem to understand that a simulations had to be built using real data. From experiments.

    And many of us with a clue though we were a decade or few from getting close to doing this. Now I think we are many more decades away. Things are way more complicated than most of us who did have a clue thought back then.

    848:

    I have absolutely no desire to build a computer again. I want a reliable appliance.

    TOTAL THUMBS UP

    Says he with a similar but different life path.

    849:

    unless you're really thrashing it or have a dinky subnotebook

    ... or you've kept the laptop for long enough that the battery has lost capacity. Mine is down to about 2 hours of web browsing from the 8-ish it started from. Sadly the battery monitor has chosen to represent that using the 90% to 70% part of the range, followed by "battery low" then less than a second later loss of power.

    Luckily mine is the 17" screen giant economy size laptop that can be taken apart so I could replace the battery if I wanted to. But since a bunch of other things are also dying and I rarely rely on the battery for more than the time it takes to walk 20m and plug in somewhere else I haven't bothered.

    850:

    Try reversing the fan polarity

    The fan in my laptop is centrifugal. Spinning it backwards wouldn't be useful. Increasingly even the impeller ones have brushless motors and reversing polarity into those drivers will either not work because they're protected by a diode or it'll let the magic smoke out.

    Luckily the intake grill for the fan is in an obvious place (under the middle of the laptop) so I can hit it with the vacuum cleaner easily. One obvious consequence is that putting the laptop down anywhere dusty means that it acts as a vacuum cleaner, and putting it on anything soft blocks the air intake. It is very much a desktop oriented laptop.

    851:

    https://theconversation.com/is-climate-change-outpacing-our-ability-to-predict-extreme-heatwaves-207925

    Includes a reminder that while computing power has increased dramatically so has our dependence on it.

    It’s not that our models can’t simulate small-scale weather – they’re basically the same models we use for weather forecasting – it’s just very computationally expensive to have them zoom in and run in “weather mode” to get a highly detailed simulation. It’s feasible for a seven-day weather forecast, but not for a century-long climate simulation.

    Yeah, let's just do 50 runs of possible starting conditions, for the weather over the 1M most inhabited one square kilometre sections, for the next century... oh, 50 isn't enough? Order another 1000 supercomputers, Bob, we need more power.

    852:

    It's fun to watch the spagetti plots for hurricanes as the season starts anew.

    Basically it makes for cute TV to show the top 50 models' prediction center lines for the next 3 to 5 days. The NHC (for the US) tends to use the top 2 to 4 models based on the last few years to develop their predictions.

    I find it interesting that apparently there's a European weather research group that is consistently more right than wrong. Maybe being local is a detriment to accurate hurricane forecasts.

    As to getting better starting conditions I like this quote: "Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide! This includes 92 released by the National Weather Service in the US and its territories. The balloon flights last for around 2 hours, can drift as far as 125 miles away, and rise up to over 100,000 ft."

    https://www.weather.gov/bmx/kidscorner_weatherballoons

    They will tell you to make the forecasts way more accurate requires the number of launches to go up to hourly or nearly so plus 1000 times as many locations. Or more. Not going to happen.

    The instrument packages on these balloons have instructions on how to "please return to...". I think they get back less than 10%. And they are NOT cheap.

    853:

    A couple of asides:

    The Caribs did not survive the European conquest of the Caribbean.

    One side effect of the clearance of the highlands and the Ulster plantation was that circa 1800, Irish was the dominant language on Barbados.

    854:

    Similar, though Mech.Eng & IDE; the first computer I built involved designing my own graphics card, 6DOF input device and writing a (rudimentary) 3D solid modeller in assembler. NatSemi 32000 assembly at that.

    The next one was a tablet (in 1987) using a cpu I had a hand in, an OS I had a hand in, and the language environment I had an entire life in (Smalltalk, obv). And then 10 years later, another tablet, contemporary version of the same cpu, another custom OS, same Smalltalk. Oh, and another a couple of years later for HP.

    All that time I wanted an appliance for my main computer in order to have an island of (relative) stability away from the R&D machines. Just give me an iMac 27 or Mac Studio these days. The latter of course has the current version of that same cpu.

    855:

    I have absolutely no desire to build a computer again. I want a reliable appliance.

    Totally with you.

    I soldered enough circuit boards and fixed enough cars in my life. Never particularly enjoyed either, and am very happy that I will never have to do it again.

    856:

    What a truly evil idea.

    Given the amount of trash code I have to wade through on a daily basis I estimate that the world would have ended in fire (or other tradable commodities) fairly quickly.

    What fun - finally a use for Malboge and for design patterns.

    857:

    to make the forecasts way more accurate requires the number of launches to go up to hourly or nearly so plus 1000 times as many locations.

    Yeah, the answer is a change in technology. People are working on a whole lot of things but they are tricky. "Disposable" weather balloons are useful in a whole lot of ways that are hard to replicate with anything else.

    OTOH one of the fun things happening in the background is increasing use of generic "instrument packages" on all sorts of things. You might not get the 1% accuracy you'd like, but millions of civilian drones reporting temperature, pressure and wind at low altitude is helpful in its own way.

    I know someone reporting similar data to NZ's met service because they collect it while chasing wee beasties, for example. Their nest monitoring stations include data the weather people find useful, and the beastie folk really, really want that data (you don't casually post scientists into harsh environments ... unless they've really pissed you off, I suppose)

    858:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wRFqRTZFOM guy in NZ also built his own weather balloon and chased it about the country. Recovery was challenging but he mostly goes through the design and build process. Not to mention "the cost of the helium oh my god"

    860:

    Oh, hell, that's not enough - we need more data. Let's release a weather balloon every 10 minutes, spaced 1 km apart.

    To a good first approximation, the detailed forecasting problem is insoluble, because it's a chaotic system. There are patterns that can be predicted, but to predict that at 10:12:13 on Tuesday it will be raining on a particular rose-bush at 6mm an hour needs a hot line to quite a powerful deity. Mere local gods will not do.

    861:

    SFReader @762

    Dear SF,

    I'll try to explain the UK "Honours system".

    It originated with Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister (1721-1742), as a cheap form of political patronage. The implicit bargain was: "You do me a political favour, then I'll give you a meaningless bauble or title such as 'Sir'." And it worked remarkably well, and has been used by all subsequent PMs.

    The House of Lords used to be the principal chamber of our legislature and was constituted of the Aristocracy who owned all the land and almost everything else as well. The House of Commons was used to train the elder sons of the aristocracy in politics, plus represent business interests. Oh, and approve the King's tax and spending plans.

    The big change occurred in 1911 when David Lloyd George threatened to flood the House of Lords with new members if they didn't pass his budget -- which they'd already refused. Unsurprisingly, the Lords gave way. After WW1, Lloyd George needed cash to run his party (the Liberal Party) and so invented new honours, in particular the Baronetcy: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/lloyd-george-order-bad-egg-2290571.

    Today the members of the House of Lords are a very mixed bunch.

    We still have the principal 13 Bishops of the Church of England (the Lords Spiritual). There may also be some aristocrats left, but Tony Blair did a partial reform of the HoL so I think there are now fewer than 100.

    The rest are now Life Peers, and are appointed for various reasons and on various lists at various times of year. The House of Lords is a revising chamber and can sometimes hold up legislation. It also tends to have better and more qualified members than our elected representatives, so no surprise there then, eh?

    (*) Political nominees. Used for retired or failed MPs, or for party members who don't fancy going through an election.

    (*) Ex Senior Civil Servants. Ambassadors, Department Heads and so forth.

    (*) People who've made a significant contribution to UK public life. Lawyers (Helena Kennedy KC), Scientists (Martin Rees FRS, Astronomer Royal), etc...

    Along with the House of Lords there are other Baubles from OBE -- which might be awarded for being a long-serving and diligent lollipop person (helping 7-11 year olds cross roads, by stopping cars as the kids cross). Or CBE, which is given to academics like Steve Furber (inventor of the ARM chip and my last boss), or Mrs L's godfather (ex head of the Chemical Engineers), or Sandi Toksvig (writer and wit).

    Now this stuff is handed out by various people over the year. There a "political list" which happens once a year and consists of apparachiks awarded to parties in proportion to the number of MPs they have. There is also the "royal list" handed out by the Monarch (or their advisors). I've no objection to most of these as they're mostly well deserved. By the way we could try to get Charlie an OBE or MBE for services to literature, just to annoy him ;)

    And then there are the "resignation lists" handed out by defenestrated Prime Ministers when they are forced out. These inevitably go to worthless obsequious cronies and are the most contentious.

    Does that help?

    862:

    Yes, mostly.

    Walpole didn't invent the baronetcy, which is ancient. Also, cash or support for honours goes back to before the Civil War (England's, not those Americans). And the aristocracy hasn't owned most of the country since the industrial revolution, possibly before - the land, yes, but not trade, finance, industry, etc. Once can argue which of the changes was the most important (e.g. 1832 and earlier ones).

    863:

    Pigeon @ 813:

    I've found video cards to be a problem for a lot longer than that. Still basically the same problem, though - how to avoid paying 10x too much for a whole load of functionality I don't need or use, because things with a merely adequate capability and correspondingly reasonable price simply don't exist.

    The trouble is everything is designed for playing games. And I don't play games. At all. I don't even have any games. As long as the thing can handle playing back videos, and scrolling/panning large windows, without running out of speed, that's good enough.

    I DO play games - some. Even just the card games that came with Windoze can be a stress relief, especially when I was housebound ... and with Covid I have been really isolated. The games are therapy for "cabin fever".

    I think the problem I ran into with the graphics cards was a combination of the Covid caused supply chain disruption and the crypto-mining craze. There was an acute shortage at the same time I needed to replace a failing card. Actually simple supply & demand.

    I just took a quick look the other day. It looks like supplies have rebounded & prices have fallen. An adequate "no name brand" 8GB card looks to be under $100 USD again and if you go up to $200-$300 you can get really GOOD 8GB cards (or "no name brand" 12GB/16GB cards).

    I also don't need it to handle massive numbers of pixels. I have some detectable tendency to allow the right-hand sides of things to escape my attention, and for something like a computer screen which is big and close, subtending a large angle at a fixed-ish position in the visual field, and being stared at for a long time, the effect becomes quite pronounced. My present screen (chosen as "best thing that still works in the junk pile" when the previous one blew up) is 1440px wide, and that's more than enough - I barely use the right-hand 200px or so because it's actually quite difficult to pay attention to it. (The effect is relative to the object, not to my head, so turning my head doesn't do anything.)

    I do photographic work. The more pixels I can work with the better.

    I have a dedicated system for photography because at the time I built it 1, I thought I was going to have a business & I wanted to set it up that way so it was a deductible business expense. But for that a good monitor that's easy to calibrate is essential. And as my eyesight gets older a good BIG display is better.

    That spilled over to this system where the big display has become easier on my eyes as well as I've spent more and more time in front of it while stuck inside.

    And the graphics subsystems that come built into most motherboards, although no doubt of quite adequate capability, have been useless for several years because they don't have VGA outputs any more. I'm better off seeking a motherboard that does not have any graphics capability of its own, because otherwise I have to configure the BIOS to default to using the one I've plugged into it instead without being able to see what I'm doing.

    So it turned out that the only way to get a decent graphics card even nine years ago was to take a gamble on buying one second hand, and things haven't got any better.

    My experience with on-board graphics systems is they're adequate UNLESS you have some kind of "special" need. When I was just doing documents & spread sheets and browsing the baby internet (ca 1995 when Netscape 3 was the Next Big Thing) a plain vanilla VGA card was good enough.

    And as the graphics subsystem moved on to the motherboard (about the time I built my first Pentium system) they remained adequate even as screen resolution got better. Even for most of the games available at the time.

    Today's games? Well, I only play one and how responsive the graphics are isn't as much of an impediment as my slowing reactions. 🙃

    [...]

    1 2010 - Fairly bleeding edge for the time: FAST i7 CPU, 24GB RAM, 3 hard drives (System, Photoshop scratch, Data) [up to 5 hard drives now System & Scratch SSDs & 3 spinny drives for Data]. I've replaced the video twice, first with a 2GB card to handle 1024p and then with an 8GB card when I went to 4k.

    I'm still running the full perpetual license version of Photoshop CS6 Extended. I have not switched over to Adobe's rental-ware (ransom-ware). I don't use Lightroom. Tried it, didn't like it. It's catalog would not cooperate with my existing inventory system.

    864:

    Tim H. @ 822:

    There are tires of varying tread life potential and those in entertainment media shouldn't be held as a standard, screeching tires sound dramatic... to some. It's distinctly possible to extend tread life by giving up potential tread life, as in the original Michelin X, 60K US miles, in the seventies. On US market tires a tread life rating of "100" would be the expectation for a four ply poly, up to date sixty years ago.A "400" rating would be on an economical radial tire, possibly cheap, but four times more life than a dark ages tire.

    And I think it should be noted that in a movie, the squeal of the tires is often added in post-production by the Foley Artist.

    865:

    Pigeon @ 823:

    You've missed the point - which was that they gain the ability to last 50k miles by using a compound which is hard enough to be that wear-resistant, and so has far less grip than a softer compound that isn't trying to last that long. In Britain ordinary people (as opposed to van operators etc) don't expect them to last that long anyway, while they do have to care about grip, because we have bends. So over here it's the tyres which last and last (but don't grip) which are crappy, and the tyres which grip well (but don't last) which are good. To discover that the categorisation the US uses is the other way round therefore solves the long-standing mystery of why American cars in movies and written fiction display such comically low levels of grip and nobody thinks it's odd.

    You also missed the smiley, and I did it in bold an' all...

    Yeah, BUT ... nowadays it seems like the tire (tyre) manufacturers are able to make them so they do both - grip (traction) and wear well (tread life). Even cheap tires can be pretty good ... or looking at it from the other way - GOOD tires can be relatively low cost.

    866:

    Rocketpjs @ 841:

    In other news we have the monstrous contrast between discussion of the ~700 persons who were possibly allowed to drown off the coast of Greece, and discussion of the half dozen rich people who paid $250,000 to go look at the Titanic and went missing.

    It makes me dislike humanity.

    I do care a bit more about the refugees whose boat sank off Greece, even if there's little or nothing I can do about it from so far away here.

    867:

    By the way we could try to get Charlie an OBE or MBE for services to literature, just to annoy him ;)

    I would reject any honour with the words "Empire" or "British" in the name.

    868:

    There should be an Order of the Motley and Bauble, given to artists (of all persuasions) who are fleas on the body of the establishment. With rights to attend all official functions in full regalia.

    869:

    Robert Prior @ 846:

    "It's mostly people who actually aren't into computers, and spend lots of time on itty-bitty mobile screens (to watch movies?!) who want an appliance."

    I have a degree in electrical engineering. I worked designing systems and software for telecommunications back in the 80s, taught computer programming in the 90s. I used used to wire-wrap circuit boards for use with microcomputers (remember when they had direct access to the bus?).

    I use my iPhone as a phone and only watch movies on my wide-screen TV.

    I have absolutely no desire to build a computer again. I want a reliable appliance.

    Well, I have a High School Diploma and I use my iPhone mostly as a phone ... I receive more text messages nowadays than I do actual phone calls. I don't have a TV (yet), but I can watch movies (mostly from DVD) on my computer display.

    After it became apparent that I was going to NEED a computer, for many years the only way I could AFFORD one (good enough to use) was to build it myself.

    A lot of times, what I wanted in a computer just wasn't available at all. Even if I'd had the money to buy one, anything I'd have ended up with would have to be rebuilt and still ended up costing more and being less capable.

    I could buy parts & assemble them into a good, fairly high end system for about 1/3 the cost of anything I could buy. And most of the computers I did build were like my "Grandfather's Axe" ... new motherboard, new (larger) hard drives, new CD-ROM, new motherboard with faster CPU & IDE drives ... larger case, CD-RW ... new motherboard for SATA drives ... DVD-RW ...

    I didn't really want to build computers. I just wanted a computer I could use to get stuff done and the only way I could do that (with the budget I had available) was to assemble the parts myself.

    870:

    It makes me dislike humanity.

    To fuel your dislike, Barrie (a city in Ontario near Toronto) is expected to pass a couple of bylaws tonight that remind me very much of Lord Lytton*…

    Bylaw 67 and 68, which Barrie City Council will vote on on Wednesday, make the distribution of food, literature, clothes, tents, tarps, or other items to protect people sleeping outside from the elements illegal on city property.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/barrie-homelessness-ban-food-1.6881689

    Fines will range from $500 to $100,000.


    *While Viceroy of India, Lytton made it illegal for private individuals to feed starving people during a famine.

    871:

    Two notes:

    • City property includes roads, parks, sidewalks…

    • Barrie voted Conservative in the last elections

    872:

    Mind if I quote you (like on faceplant)? With or without attribution?

    873:

    Yep, that's what they were running at the college, or rather, time-sharing on (you know, the 1970's version of the cloud?).

    Bought a CoCo in '80 or '81. Bought my first real computer (as opposed to the mainframes, midframes, and PCs at work) in '87, a 286. Another in '91, I think. One in '94, and had someone in - I had paid for on-site suppert! then, and in '97. when I really needed newer for the family, built my own. It's always cheaper for me to build/upgrade my own, since I can reuse the power supply, case (just bought my first new case since '94 a year and a half ago), etc.

    874:
    I would reject any honour with the words "Empire" or "British" in the name.

    See, I knew you'd react like that...

    875:

    (also to paws @ 842) My fan isn't centrifugal, but it is brushless. (It's a really long time since I saw one that wasn't.)

    It also can't be simply physically reversed because the duct and clips that attach it to the heatsink are all part of the same moulding as the fan body. Though I have considered the hacksaw-and-glue approach to that difficulty, and have never entirely ruled it out.

    876:

    Fortunately, Peter Madsen is still safely behind bars.

    877:

    "I have a dedicated system for photography because at the time I built it 1, I thought I was going to have a business & I wanted to set it up that way so it was a deductible business expense. But for that a good monitor that's easy to calibrate is essential. And as my eyesight gets older a good BIG display is better."

    My approach to photography comes in two bits: either it's documentary snapshot stuff for the internet etc ("this thing fits on HERE, like THIS") for which I have a digital camera that can only be used 16 hours after I want to use it, and "real" stuff which means doing it on film and doesn't need a computer. But I did at one time do a lot of unfucking of photos that other people had deliberately fucked up. Things like removing a "chicken wire with tufts of vegetation stuck in the intersections" effect that densely covered the entire image, or reversing the effect of those stupid bloody instagram filters that make a normal photo look like it was taken on a beer-bottle-lensed instamatic with lots of light leaks and then left in a hot place for months before it was processed.

    I never felt squashed by having no more than 1280x1024 pixels, but I DO agree LOTS about the need for good consistent colour performance. So I used a 21" CRT.

    I still have it, and still want to use it, but the deflection yoke's wiring has somehow managed to fall apart in some obscure and invisible manner so it no longer produces a raster. I think I'm waiting for my dissatisfaction at not being able to use it to become a stronger force than my fear of irretrievably and ruinously fucking up the convergence alignment if I take the yoke off to look for the fault.

    (Tyres, AxelFoley, etc: for a side-by-side demonstration of the movie trope I'm taking the piss out of, see the car chase in "Inner Space" where the American car is all over the road going round every corner but the Volvo 740 estate refuses to behave like that.

    And I still think "You just digested the bad guy" is one of the best lines ever.)

    878:

    I'm on a weird photographic journey, having sold a pro kit / my ex-gf valued it more than I did when we broke up. Then I used mostly phone cameras for a while because 90% of my photos are just documentation (sometimes literally, I photograph bits of paper then compost them). Recently I got sick of the phone camera for some things so bought a second hand mirrorless thing that feels like a toy but is surprisingly good despite that. Then I bought extra lenses, because that was the point (specifically the phone does not do telephoto worth a damn). But the wee macro with built in ring light (ie, some LEDs on the front) is also very handy for both toys and wee growing things.

    I wouldn't go back to chemical if you paid me, I'm more likely to bang a cheap large format lens on the front of my flatbed scanner than do that (viz, the only reason I can think of for chemical is if you absolutely must have more resolution than digital can provide at a reasonable price). These days you can get everything from disposable digital cameras for exciting experiments right through to >100MP monsters or various specialised beasts ("only works when pointed directly at sun" or "1M frames per second" or "usable range 1000x to 100,000x magnification at up to 10.4mm")

    879:

    Scanners are great. Mine does 4800dpi optical resolution and it makes an amazingly good reflected-light microscope for looking at opaque objects. Much better depth of field than an ordinary microscope, too.

    "the only reason I can think of for chemical is if you absolutely must have more resolution than digital can provide at a reasonable price"

    Oh, I think it's great. Because "I like the response of it", as a summary, I think. The colour representation (has to be Fuji) looks more vivid and more realistic than what people seem to get with digital (and the results from them trying to compensate by messing with the colours in an image editor are universally awful). I think the spectral bands used for film emulsions and dyes lose less information as a result of rounding/scaling/quantisation errors etc in capturing a signal to be interpreted by the cone cell response curves than the bands used by digital camera sensors do, though I'm not entirely sure about that one. I like the greater dynamic range and benign clipping behaviour - especially since I don't hesitate to try and get shots that have impenetrable black shadows and the actual sun in the same frame. I like that I have some kind of "feel" for how closely the recorded image is going to match what I expect from how it looks in the viewfinder, and I can't be arsed with reworking many years' worth of mental calibrations to match a different set of responses which I don't think are so good to start with (and quite possibly buggering up both lots of calibrations at the end of it). And I'm not really bothered about the photos themselves costing money, because if I'm setting out to take a lot of them the rest of the costs of the expedition will probably swamp it.

    "These days you can get everything from disposable digital cameras for exciting experiments"

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:c2c874417947f6a92d395551c42c4be326453b97

    Silly thing is the camera itself covers about the same area as my thumbnail, but when you add the vacuum pump and the big enough lithium cell to power it all for a few hours, it's bigger than a king size Mars bar.

    880:

    Moz @ 878:

    I'm on a weird photographic journey, having sold a pro kit / my ex-gf valued it more than I did when we broke up. Then I used mostly phone cameras for a while because 90% of my photos are just documentation (sometimes literally, I photograph bits of paper then compost them). Recently I got sick of the phone camera for some things so bought a second hand mirrorless thing that feels like a toy but is surprisingly good despite that. Then I bought extra lenses, because that was the point (specifically the phone does not do telephoto worth a damn). But the wee macro with built in ring light (ie, some LEDs on the front) is also very handy for both toys and wee growing things.

    I wouldn't go back to chemical if you paid me, I'm more likely to bang a cheap large format lens on the front of my flatbed scanner than do that (viz, the only reason I can think of for chemical is if you absolutely must have more resolution than digital can provide at a reasonable price). These days you can get everything from disposable digital cameras for exciting experiments right through to >100MP monsters or various specialised beasts ("only works when pointed directly at sun" or "1M frames per second" or "usable range 1000x to 100,000x magnification at up to 10.4mm")

    When I came back from overseas the company I worked for no longer existed. That's one of the few circumstances where reemployment rights for Guard/Reserve don't exist.

    I had used photography extensively in performing my duties while deployed, so I looked around and found a Community College that had a program in Commercial Photography. I do now have an Associate Degree (2 year) in "Portrait Studio Management". I was preparing to be a portrait or wedding photographer; to do it for pay.

    I graduated just in time to be sidelined by cancer, and before I recovered from that Covid applied the Double Whammy. I fully intended to WORK as a photographer ... things haven't worked out quite the way I planned.

    But I did enjoy the darkroom work & would do it again if I had a place to set one up. And I like the look & feel of film ... especially large format transparencies.

    881:
    Some of the most extreme examples were leaving something ill-defined because it was 'obvious' it meant X, later changing the interpretation to Y, and denying that there ever was a change, and demanding more money because now there is a change

    The building contractors favorite move.

    It's so universal that there could be a common source. Maybe the dark arts are "infused" by some ancient rituals, their true purpose long forgotten, being performed by the secret builders society where they also allocate contracts and fix the prices?

    I'd imagine that actual demons would very good at crafting an interminable contract that always costs more, while giving the impression that the whole thing is just a quick one-off job.

    However, home renovation projects and contractors are all what earth can bear of such phenomena, so the demons stick to their sphere. Maximising the extraction of human suffering.

    882:

    fajansen
    The most obvious & horrible example is the US' "Second Amendment" of course.

    883:

    demanding more money because now there is a change The building contractors favorite move.

    Doesn't everyone (capitalist?) do this? Someone wants a change they almost always mean "more work for you" and in a capitalist society that means they have to pay for the extra work.

    One thing I like about my current boss is that he's very good with "yep, I can definitely do that. It'll take a while". And also the corollary "you need it right now immediately with great urgency you promised the customer ASAP"... then you get what I have at whatever deadline you've imposed. It might work, it might do some of what you want, it may even be free of obvious bugs. Buuuut then again...

    At least with builders it's normally a bit more obvious to laypeople "yes, certain, we can add a basement to you're mostly-complete house. Would you like to pay to have a detailed estimate drawn up?"

    884:

    (the spill chucker accepted it, so it's awl good? Sorry about that, must be time to go to bed)

    885:
    If your cause demands violence, you've lost my support.

    I'm sure the ghost of Jean-Jacques Dessalines is devastated, but understands.

    886:

    In the BC town of Smithers there is a semi-famous story of a park bench in the downtown area that two of the local unhoused (mental illness + addiction) persons spent time on. At one point they had sex with each other on or near the bench.

    The town was in an uproar. Something must be done. The local Council had an emergency meeting to great fanfare, and.... removed the bench. There, something has been done.

    887:

    Everything from democracy to private property falls under the "lost Martin's support" clause so I wouldn't be too worried.

    888:

    Turns out I was confused and used the wrong Haitian revolutionary/leader of the country's name - it was Pétion who equipped Bolívar in return for a promise to end slavery in the liberated colonies. Not just employing violence, but supporting the violence of others!

    889:

    By accepting citizenship, and especially by paying tax, we're all supporting the violence inherent in the system. Some of us don't like paying war criminals but there's no "don't want to fund" checklist in the tax return I get.

    Right now we have a very popular cause that's very fucking violent indeed - the defence of Ukraine against Russian invasion. "wars of extermination" is another obvious thing like slavery where it's hard to think of a supporting position other than "fuck you". Or a way of opposing them that doesn't involve at least credible threats of violence.

    I assume Martin is not thinking of those as the sort of cause that can't be supported if it relies on violence. But it's hard to know where they draw the line (less charitably they may not draw it at all).

    890:

    Speaking of Russian violence, I just saw reports that the head of the Wagner Mercenary Group is now directing his forces to head towards Moscow under arms and get rid of Putin. Purportedly his force was shelled from the rear today, killing many of his guys, and that pushed him over the edge, leading him to issue statements that will either make him a dead rebel or lead to the overthow of Putin. Or both.

    I have no clue what, if anything, is actually going on. But in case we need more to ruminate on, here's something....

    AFAIK, choosing between Putin and Prigozhin for Russia's leader and nuclear button pusher is sort of like choosing between Asmodeus and Demogorgon for your D&D boss battle. Would that there was a kinder, gentler choice.

    891:

    A friend just linked to this: https://unherd.com/2023/06/the-pantomime-is-over-for-prigozhin/

    However, Prigozhin may be about to discover the limits of the support that can be built through memes and virality. Shoigu might be the online nemesis of Wagner followers, but Prigozhin himself barely features in their discussions. At best he will sometimes be referred to as muzhik, but he is often derided as vain, foolish, or arrogant. His followers prize manhood, masculinity, and violence more than any particular leaders: they are nihilists out for themselves, not the sort of citizens who will die for their leader’s cause.

    This self-interested support has given Putin an easy means to drop the final curtain on Prigozhin’s theatrics. In a meeting last week, he confirmed that all frontline troops — including those attached to Prigozhin and Wagner — will be forced to sign a contract with the state by 1 July. “If there’s no contract with the state,” explained Putin, “there can be no social guarantees [for the troops].” In other words, the state is about to usurp Prigozhin’s sole hold over Wagner: the promise that he can provide money, support, and freedom to the men under his command.

    Makes a few plausible points about Prigozhin's support coming from people who owe him directly rather than being political. So it's narrow and there's no real way to grow it - people aren't loyal to the dictator because he did them personally a favour, they're loyal for political reasons (if only "better to ride the tiger than...")

    892:

    H & others
    Yes, MUTINY in Russia ...
    Even if Prigozhin's attempt eventually fails, he will, probably, have cut off RU supplies to their front lines for a week or more.
    Which would (presumably) lead to a collapse of their front againt Ukraine.
    VERY "Interesting Times"

    893:

    I would reject any honour with the words "Empire" or "British" in the name.

    And that's a problem because Scotland is a part of the United Kingdom for at least the next few weeks...

    (It's 2023 and I can't even tell if this is a joke any more. * laugh/sob * )

    894:

    The sad news is that OGH is apparently not young and attractive enough, nor alternatively wealthy enough, to qualify for even a life peerage. And Sir Starmer seems disinclined to even discuss reforming that particular disaster area.

    But if it's any consolation the population is shrinking... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/25/britains-shorter-children-reveal-a-grim-story-about-austerity-but-its-scars-run-far-deeper

    895:

    Facepalm reminds me that seven years ago OGH wrote: "I am really pissed-off at Brexit for transforming my alien invasion horror novel into happy fun escapist distraction!"

    896:

    If you're going to do something you should really commit and give it all you've got.

    Even if your project is to fuck everything up beyond all measure. Or looting the state. You know, I don't think it's fair to call that kind of realism cynicism. At this point a cynical attitude would be more like "they're doing their best, they're just not very good at it". Or would that be delusional? It's so hard to tell in this post-reality Britain.

    897:

    This doesn't really fit in the current post but does directly address the "appliance" issue of tech devices.

    And Mastodon. And for this I'm curious about how it has gone for Charlie's switch and his thoughts on the subject.

    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigration-didnt-quite-pan-out/

    And from my point of view I think he spot on in terms of why people pick devices and services. And why the "better" tech tends to fail so often. No matter how much those choices piss off people who think of themselves as all knowing. (I'm a bit in this category myself.)

    898:
    If your cause demands violence, you've lost my support.
    I'm sure the ghost of Jean-Jacques Dessalines is devastated, but understands.

    Slavery is a form of violence, sometimes leading to death. Could resisting violence be just a basic act of survival? When is it justified to let violence continue?

    Are there any moral philosophers in the house? (Or the Kremlin? Mar-a-Lago? "Deploy the categorical imperative!")

    I hear the British military now have lawyers advising them on the legality of their actions during armed conflicts. Some others are also considering the consequences of their actions. I think that's a small step in the right direction. You never know, the practice might spread.

    899:

    I refer the honourable gentleman to the reply I gave earlier. ;)

    900:
    Turns out I was confused and used the wrong Haitian revolutionary/leader

    Don't worry, I think I understand your point well enough. ;)

    901:
    I assume Martin is not thinking of those as the sort of cause that can't be supported if it relies on violence. But it's hard to know where they draw the line (less charitably they may not draw it at all).

    Correct.

    I'm sympathetic to the argument that some actions may be justified - resisting fascism in the 1940s, for example. I can also see the points made by people who object to the use of certain specific weapons on civilians. It's sometimes fascinating to see this happening today, as much as it is also horrifying. (I sometimes read the arguments made in Parliament. So many fallacious arguments. Ugh.)

    Now I wonder about arguments made by lawyers advising generals etc. Where is the record of that, and who can read it?

    It's much easier to read about historical examples, like the Cuban missile crisis. When people now talk about the risk of deploying tactical nukes in Ukraine or Belarus, I'm reminded of Castro. None of our arguments - or anyone else's - have much traction with such people.

    902:
    Could resisting violence be just a basic act of survival? When is it justified to let violence continue?

    A very interesting question, in the context of your original quote and the history of Northern Ireland.

    904:

    When is it justified to let violence continue?

    Dude, you're the one arguing that violence can never be justified, except maybe possibly sometimes you're sympathetic to it but you're not sure when. It's a fascinating ideal, but without an actual argument it's not a very interesting discussion.

    I've worked with people who are philosophically opposed to "all" violence (Quakers) but nonetheless will use or solicit violence in self-defence. Reading Quaker discussions of whether it's possible to be a Christian and a police officer are interesting, especially in colonies where the police were established specifically to eliminate first nations (or in the US also as slave-catchers (that doesn't make things better!)). Mostly they seem to agree that calling the police, or otherwise using the legal system to enforce their desires, is reasonable in many cases.

    But they at least have principles and arguments to back their position. You don't even have a clear position.

    905:

    Well, I've been struggling with this kind of question for most of my life. The root seems to be zero-sum thinking. I even find it in discussions like these. (This discussion isn't a zero-sum game either.) I may have mentioned this here before. I can't remember.

    So I keep coming back to the same point I reached over 4 decades ago, and the question: How can we resolve conflicts without the use of violence? While I may suggest non-zero-sum thinking, it's already too late by the time the violence begins. As a teenager, nobody advocating violence won my support. Nobody was talking about the history, everyone was using fallacious arguments, and everything lead to more violence. That made it very easy to reject all the arguments. It still does. Now, however, I also hear arguments that some violence may be "just" - like using deadly force to resist people determined to kill you. I don't recall hearing that argument when I was a teen.

    I even remember a PM arguing in Parliament for a war to stop a foreign government from using poison gas on their own citizens. He lost that vote. The war didn't happen. News media soon moved on to other atrocities. More arguments followed. More fallacies.

    OGH makes far better arguments. That's a part of why I buy his books and not theirs. Most people here make better arguments too. That's why I read this blog and not others. Etc etc.

    This is not a zero-sum game.

    906:
    Dude, you're the one arguing that violence can never be justified,

    I said I can't support it. I also acknowledge that other people make strong arguments to for justifying some violence. I've even suggested how they make those arguments. However, I am not making those arguments.

    You may be reading a little too much into my comments here. Don't worry, I blame zero-sum thinking. I've seen that happen for decades. I've seen people lose all reason and descend into verbal abuse (the ad hominem fallacy). One of the many things I like about this blog is the zero-tolerance moderation for that.

    So, I can see two extreme positions on this issue, and a lot of other arguments across the spectrum. At one extreme is the moral philosopher's, that no violence is justified (the one you seem to be attacking). At the other extreme is "whatever it takes, for our cause" argument. I think we're both some way between those positions, but you may be finding some arguments more pursuasive than I do. My point is that whether we agree or not, there are other people at the two extremes, and will never agree with each other or any of us.

    Whoops. What a mess!

    907:

    I think part of the problem is a lot of people advocating violent solutions have little experience of violence or the consequences of it. They see it as a way to win a contest with their political opponents and think no further. Especially when they are advocating for violence somewhere other than where they are.

    908:

    I think part of the problem is a lot of people advocating violent solutions have little experience of violence or the consequences of it.

    Or possibly have experienced so much violence that they can't conceive of other ways to solve problems.

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