Joe Rogan’s use of the n-word is another January 6 moment – CNN

But what Rogan and those that defend him have done since video clips of him using the n-word surfaced on social media is arguably just as dangerous as what a mob did when they stormed the US Capitol on January 6 last year.

Source: Joe Rogan’s use of the n-word is another January 6 moment – CNN

It’s bad enough to call what happened on January 6th an actual insurrection. Do I think what happened was illegal? No question. Do I think it was serious? Yes. Do I support it? No. Do I think it was an actual attempt to overthrow the government? No. I think it was a poorly thought-out protest gone wrong, despite whatever involvement Trump or his administration might have had to do with it.

After 30 years of the network media warning us that the wingnut contingent was absurdly-armed and poorly-socialized, I would think that if a right-wing group had wanted to occupy the Capitol and prevent the Electoral College vote count, they could have easily overwhelmed the local LEO presence there and done just that. Whatever it was, the people who need to go to jail surely will, even if I think those sentences are overloaded, and trying to send a message. Which, to be fair, they probably should. Anyway, I note that even Jon Blake doesn’t have the guts to put a name to whatever it was. He assumes his readers will fill in the blank for him.

But, then, on top of this house of cards, he calls the utterance of a word to be the same thing as whatever the reader thinks January 6th was. So if you think CNN’s editorial idea of what happened on that day is specious, then you’re not going to make the logical turn here. Again, you can say that it’s rude to say the N-word. You can consider it an act which should remove you from polite society. But at the end of the day, it’s just a word, and it’s a word that’s still in widespread use by a lot of people. And while I won’t say the word, I detest this double standard. The media is not going to make me stop detesting this situation because they tell me that I should be ok with it. Sorry, Jon Blake, but you  just don’t have that kind of influence on my life.

So, in effect, this “article” is a dog whistle of a dog whistle to the true-believing Left, written only to further inflame racial and political tensions, and pressure Spotify to censor Rogan in the name of Wokeness. CNN wants me to consider them to be a serious news organization, which doesn’t stoop to “Faux News” levels of jingoism. Uh huh. Dry that one out and you can use it to fertilize the lawn.

Monopolize All The Things

Trying to capture the housing market

This is a perfect, illustrated example of venture capital squeezing out individuals, cornering a market, and trying to extract ALL the profits from it. This sort of behavior is why housing prices have shot up nationwide. Home ownership was already under siege from underemployment, inflation, and educational loan burdens. Now we have the malfeasance of big companies trying to capture the low-hanging fruit in the housing market, which will only serve to further erode the American dream of the middle class, to the benefit of the already-wealthy. Zillow may have over-leveraged their algorithm here, but, rest assured, there are people out there doing this on a wide scale.

Sideloading Bill Would Allow ‘Malware, Scams and Data-Exploitation to Proliferate,’ Says Apple – MacRumors

Sideloading would enable bad actors to evade Apple’s privacy and security protections by distributing apps without critical privacy and security checks. These provisions would allow malware, scams and data-exploitation to proliferate.

Source: Sideloading Bill Would Allow ‘Malware, Scams and Data-Exploitation to Proliferate,’ Says Apple – MacRumors

As if malware, scams, and data-exploitation apps don’t already exist in the App Store. I would argue the opposite of what Apple is claiming, in fact. If some scammer was tricking people into installing a sideloaded app that stole all your data, word would get around, and the traffic pointing to that app would eventually die off. Instead, what we have are lots of crummy apps in the App Store, doing specious things, with Apple’s implicit blessing, with an overwhelmingly-spammed review score. And these things are stubborn.

This guy has made waves pointing out how widespread the problem is.

Apple’s recalcitrance around their walled garden smells funny to me. I get it. I mean, when there is literally no other option for people, you get to act as a middleman on every transaction. But how much money is enough for a company which vies to be the world largest market cap from month to month? Whatever that figure might be, they surely flew past it a long time ago.

The Crushing Weight of Knowing What You’re Doing

“Who are you and why are you here?” –Dave Cutler (DaveC)

Source: 012. I Shipped, Therefore I Am

Steven Sinofsky, once a huge wheel at Microsoft, for a very long time, is writing a series of articles chronicling the halcyon days of the early PC business at Substack. I can’t quite bring myself to subscribe, because most of it is free already. Plus, there aren’t many surprises for me, since I was living it during that time.

When Windows NT was introduced, I was quick to jump on board. I was already experimenting with Linux towards the end of ’94. But then I saw a disc of NT 3.5 (not even 3.51 yet) on someone’s bookshelf. He said he wasn’t using it, so I snapped it up and installed it. For the next 20 years, I would dual boot my PC’s between Windows NT and Linux. I only used Windows for gaming, but for that use, it was obstinate. I tried every incarnation of Wine and Crossover and PlayOnLinux and everything else. Nothing ever let me run Windows games on Linux well enough to warrant getting rid of a native partition.

The content of the slide above is of no consequence, as is pretty much the case with all presentation slides. What’s interesting to me is the little toolbar on the top, left side. It’s from the early Office XP days, back when Microsoft was new and cool. “Before the dark times. Before the empire.” Seeing it evoked a visceral response. As a computer nerd, those really were interesting and exciting times to live through. From the article, that screencap is from 1992. Competing against giants like IBM, HP, and Sun, Microsoft’s eventual dominance was anything but sure at that time. And that’s what’s prompted me to write this anecdote.

In 1995, my Fortune 250 company didn’t even have an internet connection yet. I was using a phone line, and a modem that I conned my boss into letting me get. It was over this modem that I downloaded all 54 floppy drive images of Slackware Linux, on a computer running Windows 3.11 with Trumpet Winsock, connecting to a free SLIP dialup bank in California.

At first, I was much more into NT than Linux. I skipped Windows 95 entirely. I don’t think I ever had a computer that ran it.

I remember how easy it was to setup a dialup connection in NT. By 1996, I was running a dual Pentium Pro with 384 MB of RAM, SCSI hard drives, and a $2,500 video card to do FEA work. The total cost was about $10,000. A coworker got a SGI Indy to do the same sort of work, to the tune of $80,000. The company still didn’t have an internet connection, so he also got an external modem, and hired a local ISP to come set it up. The guy came and screwed around with the connection for 4 hours. I kind of razzed him, by pointing out that it took me all of 15 minutes to configure the same thing on NT. That’s how smug I was about NT versus Unix at the time.

The best part was still to come.

For the next week, the ISP guy still couldn’t get that Indy on the internet. Every time it would connect, the kernel would segfault, and the machine would crash.

But that’s not the best part.

The ISP guy worked with SGI to patch IRIX to fix the modem driver, and finally got it working. My coworker left it connected to the internet all the time to get his email. Things worked fine for a few weeks.

Then the company got a T1 internet connection, and then connected our facility to the main office via a SONET ring. I was really looking forward to not needing my dialup connection any more. But, the first morning, no one could access the internet. Complaints were made. Investigations were performed. Our internal IT would fix the problem, and the next day, it would come back.

Here comes the best part.

Finally, someone realized that computers inside our facility were getting the wrong gateway address to get to the internet. They realized that they were picking up the IP address of my workmate’s Indy, which was advertising itself as a route to the internet, and since the number of hops from computers in the office to the Indy were less than skipping over to the central office, they were preferring its modem, and the Indy’s phone line would choke from the load.

I recall very clearly that there was a simple checkbox in the dialog for setting up a dialup connection in Windows NT for advertising the connection to the LAN as a route to wherever you were connecting. It was on by default, but when I was running through the process, I quickly realized that this was NOT what I wanted, and un-ticked it.

And I felt pretty smug about being serious about NT at the time.

I stuck with NT as my primary interest until some time around 1998 or so. Then Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza released Ximian Desktop for Linux, which made Linux on the desktop really pleasant to use. I wasn’t doing analysis work any more. I had transferred to become the system admin of all the Unix machines in the advanced engineering group, so running Linux was a perfect fit. After that, it was pretty much all Linux, all the time, until switching to Macs just a few years ago.

Wealth Tax

Paper Assets

I once had a strained conversation with a good friend over the concept of a wealth tax. I was for it; he was very much against it, on the grounds that most of the “wealth” we’re usually talking about is in the form of stocks, which are “paper money.” He feels that this sort of asset is useless unless sold and converted to cash, when it will be taxed, if any gains are realized, and all’s fair in love in war, so to speak.

But this viewpoint overlooks the fact that “paper money” is an asset that has an strongly-estimable value in the future, just as much as real estate. And that means it can be borrowed against. The way the world works, and the laws of increasing returns being what they are, a guy like Elon Musk can just ask the nearest national bank for several hundred million dollars in cash, pay essentially nothing for the service, and all he would need to do is throw a stack at the armored car company to deliver it to his house, where he could fill up the pool in the back yard with the bills, and dive into it like Scrooge McDuck.

I mean, heck, I could do it, if I had a some short term need. I’m not going to get even Ms. Dugan’s rate, let alone Musk’s, but I could do it. I could borrow money against my portfolio, and use the money to pay for something like… college tuition. Oh, crap. This is probably a better option than actually dipping into the asset, huh?

> How do you deal with Microsoft’s crap on a daily basis? I don’t use Windows 11… | Hacker News

How do you deal with Microsoft’s crap on a daily basis?

I don’t use Windows 11. On Windows 10, I modify the installation image with DISM, removing as much of the unnecessary and user-hostile stuff as possible…

I make extensive changes to the registry that disable all the unwanted stuff. Some of these settings are not documented, and even the documented ones are likely to change without notice or become re-enabled by default in subsequent builds. For this reason, to avoid such unpleasant surprises, I prevent any automatic updates.

Source: > How do you deal with Microsoft’s crap on a daily basis? I don’t use Windows 11… | Hacker News

There was a time when I was reinstalling Windows XP so often that I made a “slipstreamed” install disc with Service Pack 3 pre-integrated, but this is on a whole other level. If I’m being honest?… I kinda want to try it. If I’m reading the blurb on Microsoft’s docs correctly, DISM is not, in fact, some tens-of-thousands-of-dollars corporate thing, but something that ships with every copy of Windows? That can’t be right, can it? In any case, I never want to hear about how much “work” it is to run Linux any more, when this is what it takes to run a copy of Windows that Microsoft doesn’t actively sabotage on a routine basis.

The Problem With NFTs – YouTube

I’ve watched The Big Short many times now. In fact, I just rewatched it again a couple weeks ago. This video makes some really good points about the 2008 mortgage meltdown in its 7-minute introduction, and draws lines between some dots which I didn’t even realize were left unconnected by the movie.

The big question that this all raises is, “Who?” Someone, somewhere, selling mortgage bonds, had to have realized, “Hey, I’m literally running out of mortgages to bundle into new bonds. I need the banks to start selling more mortgages, but the only way they can do that is to offer mortgages which make no traditional, financial sense.”

As I’ve noted many times on this blog, I’ve watched the housing situation in the Valley for decades, because of the IT/programming angle. Sure, a programmer can make twice the money on the coast, but housing is five to ten times more expensive. I don’t know how it is sustainable, or why it hasn’t collapsed, in the 20 years I’ve been paying attention.

This is where I entered this particular picture. When I started hearing about teaser-rate mortgages that allowed people to get into housing in California that they normally wouldn’t be able to afford, I did the thinking, and came away perplexed. Who would buy a house, predicated on barely being able to afford the teaser rate, knowing that they were either going to have to sell or find a way better job in 2-3 years? It just didn’t make sense to me.

The idea of these ridiculous teaser-rate mortgages had to start with someone. They didn’t make sense from the perspective of the buyer, or the bank, in any traditional sense. But, as this video points out, they made perfect sense if the bank was only interested in writing the mortgage with the intent to sell it into the bond market, where they would no longer care if it went into default.

I bought my first house around 1998. I was already hearing about how banks were selling their mortgages, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to be able to drive across town and talk with the people who held “my paper.” So I bought a mortgage with the old, established, local bank here in town. Imagine my surprise when I got a letter just a week after closing that my mortgage had been sold to a big bank. At least mine was a “real” mortgage, based on sustainable numbers, but it’s easy to see that the craze of bundling mortgages was already well underway, 20 years before the crash.

And then my local bank was gobbled up by some other chain, and has been bought and sold multiple times since. But that’s a rant for another day.

So, now, 14 years after the crash, and watching movies and videos about it all, I finally realize: there was a guy. There had to have been a guy; a guy who had an “aha!” moment. He went to a bank, and talked them into this scheme of selling unsustainable mortgages, purely as cord wood for the inferno raging in the mortgage backed security market. As soon as he did, the bank became complicit. As soon as bond agency started buying these mortgages to bundle into bonds, they became complicit. As soon as they asked the bond rating firms to falsify their ratings, they became complicit. And when the FTC and the SEC didn’t do their jobs to oversee the ratings agencies, they, too, became complicit.

But there was a guy. Who was that guy? I’m just curious. I want to know who he was. How he spread the idea like a virus. How he made out when it all came crashing down. Maybe that’s a known known, but I haven’t heard his name. And it wouldn’t be surprising. I mean, one guy lighting the touch paper to the entire world’s economy? If I were complicit, I wouldn’t want to go around pointing fingers. And if I were the guy, I would surely keep my head down too.

Calf born with three eyes and four nostrils as people queue up to worship cow

A three-eyed cow born in India has been dubbed a “divine miracle” and a reincarnation of Hindu God, Shiva, with a veterinary doctor saying it is not Viswanatha but an abnormal embryo development.

Source: Calf born with three eyes and four nostrils as people queue up to worship cow

Aha! Excellent! This is a perfect display of the theory of evolution at work in the modern era! With crappy cell phone video and all!

Clearly, this mutant, super-seeing, super-smelling cow will be favored for mating over all others in its herd. (And that’s true whether it’s allowed to breed naturally, or forced by its owners.) So this cow will start a new species, which will eventually come to supplant all other cows in the world.

I just wish I could be here in a couple hundred thousand years, and see them roaming the hills, here in the Americas.

Critical Ignorance of How Things Work

Whar Money?

On this news, one highly-upvoted person at 9gag had this to say:

Critical Ignorance

“The only person screwed was insurance companies.”

elonmustnt

Where does this person think that insurance companies get their money? How do they not understand that people pay what-are-called premiums for that coverage? How do they not understand that the insurance companies will pass increased prices on to their customers in the form of increased premiums? Even if they are employed with insurance, and never look at their pay stub, how do they not understand that employers covering only some of the costs of these premiums eventually pass increases on to employees, both in terms of raising their contribution, and by paying people less?

And lest you think this was brutally-ignorant take was isolated, there’s another, even more highly-upvoted post further down the comment section, with lots of replies, none of which correct this fundamental disconnect with the basic, underlying mechanism of good, old fashioned capitalism. Apparently everyone on 9gag is content with the explanation that the insurance companies were the only ones getting screwed by Shkreli, and they view his move as some sort of inverse, anarcho-capitalist Robin Hood maneuver. It’s almost insane.

I guess the question is: What did I expect from a post titled “Justice Served?” as if there were a popular misunderstanding of what was actually happening here. One comment gets at the truth: Shkreli is being made an example of, in order to send a signal to other people who make waves for Big Pharma. Yes, of course, every other pharma CEO wants to do what he did, but you have to do it quietly. Slowly. Like a frog being boiled alive. You can’t make moves so big or fast that they cannot be ignored.

It’s little wonder how we can’t find common ground in our politics today. People can post a critical misunderstanding of how something works to a top-10 web site, find validation from scores of like-minded people, and come away thinking that they’ve really got a handle on how the world works.

These are the people that political operatives are targeting with disinformation campaigns. The rubes that got snookered by the Cambridge Analytica election campaign for Trump? This is them. And they vote, thinking that they have “done their research,” and have insight into how the world really works.

I weep for the future. If there is one.

Nightbirde Speaks Out During AGT Finale After Exiting Due to Cancer Battle | PEOPLE.com

“I spend a lot of time squeezing my eyes shut and trying to remember what I believe; counting my breaths in the grief cloud; burying my face into God’s T-shirt. I remind Him sometimes, (and not kindly) that I believed Him when He told me the story He wrote for me is good, and that He never stops thinking of me,” she continued. “I must be a fool in love, because even from under all this debris, I still believe Him. And when I’m too angry to ask Him to sit on my bed until I fall asleep, He still stays.”

Source: Nightbirde Speaks Out During AGT Finale After Exiting Due to Cancer Battle | PEOPLE.com