Silicon Valley Redneck

Guess the columnist!

Headline that turned up in my phone "news" suggestions:

Conservative columnist: Sanders should be shunned after White House job

"Conservative columnist", eh?  Which one?  Jennifer Rubin, perchance?

Nailed it.

Really, when was the last time she wrote anything remotely conservative?

(Not that there's much conservative about Trump, but Rubin sure doesn't seem to match the handle either.)

Interpretation

Interesting article over at the Claremont Review of Books.  (NOTE: "interesting" ≠ "right".)

Seems there's a plausible interpretation of the 14^th Amendment whereby birthright citizenship applies only to those over whom the United States has exclusive jurisdiction - so excluding not just children of diplomats but also (e.g.) those who have birthright citizenship elsewhere, based on their parents' nationality.

Which is material for ponderment, if nothing else.  I'd always assumed otherwise.

Clothing sizes

If the sizes run: Small, Medium, Large, X-Large, XX-Large, XXX-Large, and XXXX-Large....

... Then "Medium" isn't very medium, is it?

In connection with which, the item I just ordered turns out to be cheaper as a name-brand product than as "Amazon Basics."  It pays to compare!

Life imitates an unwritten novel

Back in the mid 90s, I sketched the rough outline of an action-adventure novel, centered around an assassination attempt using a specialized miniature cruise missile.  Actually, sort of a cruise missile / drone hybrid.

I didn't actually write it, for a variety of reasons: didn't want to give people ideas, couldn't figure a way for the hero to foil the plot, had other priorities in life, lack novel-writing aptitude, that sort of thing.  But the idea kind of stuck with me, technology has improved to the point that such an attack would be much more plausible now than it would have been at the time, and I have a couple of variants on the drawing board.  And I still can't figure a way for the hero to foil the plot at the last moment.

And now... someone's tried to blow up a South American dictator (who recently showed signs of political unreliability), apparently using toy aircraft laden with explosives (via).  A crude attempt, but they'll surely get more sophisticated in the future.

No, restricting technology isn't the answer.  The genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and much of modern life depends on the technologies that will soon enable autonomous hunter-seeker missiles.

(Yes, there are potentially ways to protect point targets, without necessarily putting them behind armored domes.  I don't feel like mentioning them here.  OK, so I'll suggest a 12-gauge DIVAD.)

Update:  ... Or, the incident may have been a Reichstag fire, possibly without the trouble of having an actual fire.  Especially if (as is rumored) all the injuries were caused by a stampede, with none resulting from the purported explosion.

Update to the update:  I'm not sure where I'd encountered this Orwell quote within the last few days, but it seems relevant.

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.

So, perhaps a random domestic accident that made a loud noise is being reported as an organized assassination attempt, soldiers trampled in the rush to get away are being reported as heroes, and it will all make a handy pretext for exterminating some political opponents?

In which I disagree with George Will

I start out agreeing with the basic premise of Will's article over at National Review:  basic science ain't gonna happen when the focus is on applied science with immediately useful results.

But then there's this:

Only government can have the long-time horizon required for the basic research that produces — in time — innovations that propel economic growth.

Bzzzt!  Principle time: government isn't frittering away its own money on useless basic research; it's frittering away the taxpayers' money.  If corporations were to fund basic research, at least they'd be frittering away the money of shareholders, who (in theory*) voluntarily entered into the funding relationship and are free to take their investment dollars elsewhere.

Responsible governance (whether governmental or corporate) entails being very careful about how other people's money is being spent.  You can't have responsible government and government sponsorship of basic science at the same time.

Remember, most of the work done in basic science goes exactly nowhere.  It turns out to be a complete waste (except in the sense of providing negative results, which may never be published, making it entirely a waste).  Throwing money at it isn't going to help, and adding layers of bureaucracy to keep track of every dollar and prevent waste both increases costs and prevents the science from happening.  Besides which, where are you going to find bureaucrats who are qualified to tell a promising line of inquiry from a line of BS peddled by a scam artist?

No, basic research belongs in academia, with funding from eccentric rich people who are throwing their own money away.  Which is pretty much how it was, up until World War II, wasn't it?  I guess that's why there was no technology prior to the war.

* In the Corporatist State, the government may be "investing" the taxpayers' money in quasi-private corporations, especially if said corporations are doing something economically implausible but favored by the political class.  Also, most investment (actually, speculation on financial-instrument futures) nowadays is done by big financial institutions, with the nominal owners of the capital having little or no say in how it's directed.

Now, there's a phrase.

"Gender affirmation surgery."

Affirmation, eh?  Like, er, todger enhancement?  That sort of thing?  (Regrettably, giveschlong.com, a satire of the no-satire-necessary giveboobs.com, is long gone and not usefully archived.)

But, no: in Newspeak, "gender affirmation" means "sex change."  Kind of the opposite of affirmation, innit?

Unintended consequences

I'd noted, some time ago, the insanity of the Exalted Ones' plan to triple the Bay Area population without overmuch worry about infrastructure - transportation, water, electricity, and so on.

More recently, we're seeing plans for radical water rationing.  After all, California has been running a water deficit (aquifer depletion) for a great many years, even with its pre-expansion population and no drought.  So, as the population increases, total (not merely per capita) water usage must decrease.

With leads me to wonder: what will be the effect on sewer systems as the waste/water ratio increases?  Surely they were designed for some range of density; increasing it far beyond that will gum things up, no?

Amazing what you find.

Up on a nearly-inaccessible shelf in the garage: various smallish cardboard boxes.

First box: assorted small optics.

Second box: various wire-wrap sockets, some random electronic components, and a little envelope.

Envelope?  What's in that?  Small pyrotechnic devices?

Nope.  It's my wisdom teeth.

I knew they were around somewhere.

Late-night mental drift

Thinking back a few years, before Joy had the series of illnesses that left her (until quite recently) medically unable to hold a job....

She was in the mode of spending maybe 5 months job-hunting, finding something that seemed a good match and paid fairly well, and then after 3 months having the company go bust, or close down her division, or replace everybody with H-1B workers.

A company that went bust had an interesting product.  They had demo units.  They'd sold a few one-off units.  Finally, they had their big break: an overseas institutional customer ordered a whole bunch of the product.  Ka-ching!

Well, wait a minute.  It was a physical product, so manufacturing a bunch of copies was going to cost money.  And tooling up for economical manufacturing was going to run up the NRE.  When all was delivered and paid for, though, it'd be a highly profitable deal, and the next batch would be cheaper to manufacture (the tooling-up having been done for that first big order).

No problem, right?  Having a product, a signed order, and a clear plan for filling the order and turning a profit in a few months is what business banking is for, isn't it?

Not so fast.  Apparently banks don't lend money on those terms anymore.  They want real estate as collateral.  So, off the the venture-capital crowd.

No soap.  There was simply no funding available to this company for doing a production run to fulfill the order.

And so the company went bust, laid everyone off, and the product never happened.

Sometime last night, this tale crossed paths with this item, on which I'd been meaning to remark since I first saw it.  Maybe the problem was that all the financial gatekeepers assume that product means app, with low development costs, quick payoff, and no manufacturing costs?

... Except that the gatekeepers were happy to pour long-term money into Thanatos Theranos, without much worry about the viability (or existence) of the product.  So, clearly, it's not a general rule.

Infuriating

Once you get on a political donor list?

You'll be on a lot of lists.  The phone calls won't stop.  And the callers won't (or will claim they can't) take you off the list.  They're not allowed to stop calling until you make a commitment!

Another fun tactic of political fundraisers: recurring donations.  So they have assured cash flow, and you have no way of stopping them other than cancelling your credit card.  And now they've started asking for bank details, so they can just hoover money directly out of your bank account.

Conquest's Second Law of Politics:

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

Revised:

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes a fundraising auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

There is no Planet 9 In Outer Space.

It's semi-official-ish: Nemesis, the yet-to-be-discovered outer planet on beyond Pluto, is not to be called Planet 9, a title which is reserved for Pluto, dang it, even if Pluto has been demoted and is no longer a planet.

A suggested alternative, following Apple's OS numbering scheme, is Planet X.  Which is a fine name if it turns out to be populated by monkeymen.  Or to have the only remaining supply of illudium phosdex, the shaving-cream atom.

Besides, calling it "Planet 9" is insensitive.  We must find it, first, and then ask how it prefers to be addressed.  It may identify as a pygmy neutron star named Zebulon, for all we know.

Meanwhile, back on the work front

I'm reminded that, while putting a scope probe on a communication line is easy, putting a probe on a software construct is more problematic.

Yeah, maybe there's some way to drive an analog output from the system-on-module, so the comm demon running under Linux could perhaps generate an analog level corresponding to the fill level in a particular queue...?

But probing a signal chain that involves a TCP connection, to see where the delays are coming in, is decidedly Not Happening.

... And tomorrow I'll be trying to put a scope probe on some Aard-Wino firmware for another project....

Chains of association

Joy made some sort of cabbage-salad thing, incorporating smoked trout.

My father's comment was: "Kraut with trout!"

Which led to my trying to remember how one actually says trout in Kraut.  Which led to humming.

Ya learn something new every day.

Apparently an "ostrich coat" does not resemble the middle of a Big Bird costume.  I am disappointed.

Also, spending (or having spent, in the past) outlandish sums on ugly designer clothing is now a crime.  But it was totally fine when a certain candidate spent how-freakin'-much on that hideous designer coat that looked like Grandma's sofa?  Go figure.

Another day, another...

... session of sorting and packing and hauling away (ditty).

My pants are getting looser, and my shirts, tighter.  Which I guess is a good thing, as long as I don't end up having to buy all new shirts.

Also, the past couple of days I've made some useful progress on a project for a client, tracking down some communication issues and possibly even fixing them.

Somehow, though, I haven't found time to celebrate Lughnasadh.  Well, it's a harvest festival, and I didn't do any farming this year.  Next year for sure!

Additional:  Meanwhile, Joy is continuing to sort through the Stuff in my father's garage.  I'd forgotten that I'd stashed a case of mixed MRE entrees out there, in the early 90s.  (I disposed of my remaining stock a few years ago, on the assumption that the useful shelf life at Sunnyvale garage temperatures was a heck of a lot less than 20 years.)

It's always something.

So yesterday I cobbled up a field-expedient tootsie guard for the outlet strip...

... Being just a bent piece of cardboard, it's not as classy as a proper Molly guard, but it is after all just a temporary expedient for the interim workspace...

... And, this morning, there was another unscheduled local power outage.  Just the workstation, this time.  Wut?

Oh.  The workstation was plugged into a flakey outlet in the strip.  Minor vibration could cause it to disconnect.

Oh, well.  Use a different outlet, for now.

'Bye, Sierra Club.

I was going to get around to renewing my Sierra Club membership, despite some ill behavior on the Club's part over the years.  But...

Well, I'd noted many years back that the Sierra Club, notably unlike the NRA, is reliably partisan in its political endorsements.  Which, in terms of political strategy, is mind-bogglingly stupid; if both candidates know you'll endorse the Democrat, neither the Democrat nor the Republican has any incentive to support your agenda.

It doesn't help that, some years ago (back when I was still leading events), National started pushing the idea that every event should have an educational (read: political) aspect, because getting outdoors and enjoying nature was just not good enough.  Then there was the business of endorsing the Corporatist slate in that one high-stakes Sunnyvale City Council election.

Lately, their e-mail blasts have acquired a serious case of TDS and bizarre, over-the-top and yet entirely nonspecific, proclamations of doom with regard to the Endangered Species Act.  It's the sort of thing I'd expect to see if some conservation efforts had been successful, protections for no-longer-endangered species were being dialed back a notch, and the professional doom-monger lobbyists and (more to the point) fundraisers came out in force.

And now?  They sent one to an e-mail address that I'm quite certain I never gave them.  An address, in fact, that's exclusively used by spammers (but that, for one specific reason, needs to exist and to be visible).

Next thing you know, they'll be selling their list (as all the other Democrat-aligned organizations seem to be doing; if you've donated money to a Democrat in the last decade or so, you'll know what I mean).

Oh, and SPLC?  You're counting me as a member twice, at two different addresses (maybe a third, for all I know, but mail from the third address doesn't forward).  One of me sent you some money back in the 1980s; the other has never sent you anything.  I'd say 'bye to you, too, but I did that decades ago.  Hundreds of millions in the bank; a mission of making the Koo Koo Klowns sound awesome; and an inflated membership list.  This is supposed to be a worthy cause?