Author Archives: peterbp

Oh, America!

So… you guys have that prez race going on at what nears a crescendo, having had to listen to the above-the-usual political racket for over a year.

What can be said on that whole affair? What HAS been said? Lots. Oodles. Far more than a single Library of Congress can encompass. More than the Bush elections and drama ever elicited. Lots. Whatever.

My summary for now is that Trump is a self-made stand-up comedian, and Hilary is the best president you can buy for money.

People with a flair for the cringey, embarassing and scary (think Plan 9 From Outer Space, only in colour) should hoard popcorn the way preppers hoard bullets. More to come.

That wage gap

If women earn 79 cents in wages for every one male dollar, then why aren’t employers hiring women in droves? Recall that capitalist profit-maximising phenomenon, yes? Minimizing AVC! Hiring labour where it is cheapest!

The labour market as illustrated in the classic D/S graph, would merge the two purportedly separate labour-pools to home in on the clearing price of labour as one single supply factor.

So, to believe in the wage gap, you have to entertain the concept of the nasty patriarchy at work, suppressing female wages at the same time as that the (same, patriarchal?) capitalists employers happen to be too inept to properly make use of the labour-market system of economic operation that benefit them anywhere else.

Differences between the U.S. of A. and Denmark

… as seen from the ground. Reporting live, and in rough order of apparence, from the World’s #1:

  • (to start somewhere). Customs officers (i.e. CBP) aren’t necessary unpleasant, just fast-talking and very forward. Of course, they have to process a thousand entrants a days: no time for chatter. I didn’t get probed in the airport.
  • Many cars in town.
  • Litter everywhere on the roads, though mostly on carriageways and onramps. Anywhere from the degree of a few bits and pieces lying around, to something giving you the impression that someone emptied a dumpster over the street. (DK: Litter many places as well, but mostly little and on onramps.)
  • So many cars! Everything here in the US in clearly made for easy and direct automotive access. There are drive-ins everywhere at the eatery places.
  • Food is clearly cheaper, both in absolute terms for the total price of a full dish plus beverage, but especially in the amount:price ratio.
  • America asphalt-centric culture also means that the equipment of the road is very extensive: There are traffic lights everywhere, and many of the intersections has one for each lane. You can turn right on a red if it does not inconvenience drivers from the left. Not so in Denmark.
  • Heavy precense of soda on the store shelves/fridges, but also larger containers.
  • Gasoline is cheap: One Gallon is anywhere from two Dollar twenty to Three Dollar, depending on state. 1 U.S. Gallon is 3,79 litres. (1 USD = 6.5 USD, 1 USG = 3.79 L, this 1 $/G = 6.5/3.79 = 1.72 DKK/L, which is for 1 USD/Gal; current gas prices then mean 1.72 * 2.2 = 3.77 DKK/L, which is pretty fucking cheap. That’s around 40% that of Danish gas prices.)
  • Flouridated water: The slight smell of something like swimming pool in the tap water, yet not quite.
  • So many damn cars! Carriageways are both big: 3 lanes are the bare minimum, 4 ubiquituous in metro areas, 5 if the carpooling-driving lane is counted*.
  • (*) Yes, America actually has something Denmark has not – the specific roadside incentive to share cars and not drive alone: HOV-lanes, that is High Occupancy Vehicle lanes. Would you believe it? You get properly fucked if you do drive solo in an HOV lane: 124$ in Washington state. 481$ in California. (Each child counts as an occupant, but pets, infants still in the womb, inflatable dolls or ghosts do not (we’ve heard ’em all.)
  • Many homeless people living and begging on the streets i the US. I’m not surprised that the US has many homeless poor (as its reputation goes and well-deservedly so, although this is no “laurels” for the rest of the western world to congratulate itself from), but what is certain in any case is that they are very visible in the street. In San Francisco, you meet them on every block you walk. Many are seemingly mentally ill, as they constantly mutter to themselves, break out in verbal fits, and lunge for unseen opponents.
  • Very attentive and approachable staff in stores, gas stations and restaurants. Oh, and some places, the storm “sevice station” has a meaning – that is, you get SERVICED at the pump. It’s not all self-service (which is why it was renamed ‘gas-station’)
  • US: Barely any recycling standards society-wide. Some states has a return system / redemption value on soda bottles (mostly New England and The Left Coast tho, no great surprise that the Midwest and South aren’t partaking), but these are so small that there is barely any economic incentive in sorting the recyclable bottles and taking them back. 10 cents for bottles in CA and MI, 5 cents elsewere. It’s a joke, and it is why the streets are strewn with crushed bottles.
  • Seen on Route 101 on the coast of Oregon and California: “Unmuffled engine breaking fine ”  … 400$. 520$. 750$. (!) 2000$ (!!!). Someone really has to dislike automobile engine noise.
  • House numbers in up to 5 figures. 32000 Pacific Coast Highway.
  • California: “Littering fine 1000$”. Fine by me….a eeeerrrrrr…

 

Ghey Buht Seks, the Moral Edition!

Watching this video about one of our favorite libertarian moral preachers, coming up on (*cough*) the part where the author swaps murder with teh bhutsekks for illustration, and the overall philosophically argumentative setting combined with reading the comments, I couldn’t help to think that…

…anal sex is an end unto itself.

Out of a landscape
last touches of dusk receding,
lonely sparks from the embers
we fall into the sky

(ego, 29/mar-2016)

Briefly on SSD reliability

Having recently lost an SSD storage unit to a chance electronic failure, I have done a bit of (more) homework on the reliability of this kind of device. While I have been very much aware of the possibility of drive failure of the “old” Hard Disk Drive storage technology we have used for three decades, the standard go-to for checkes for imminent failure of an HDD has been to do a SMART test or monitor the SMART values that an HDD constantly produces in an attempt to describe its present state of operation. While SMART is a nice bed pillow for your angst of data loss, it useful but certainly not perfect.

Nevertheless, electronics can die for no apperent reason; this unit, an Intel SSD 330 at 180 Gigabytes capacity went from being fully functional one friday afternoon to being unrecognized that same evening. This was not a case of storage degradation, as it went from the vernacular one to zero in one single drop. From that, I can only assume it was a failure in the bridge circuitry, and not the storage cells themselves.

So where the data angst in old times (crooked grin here) originated with ‘freckles’ on the magnetisisable surface of the spinning disks, the concern should more be on failure of critical interconnecting cmponents of the SSDs, rather than NAND wearout.

[There has been a lot of concern about wearout of the individual cells in SSDs since the humble beginnings in 2007-ish. While this worry was quite justified back in those days, it is less so now as actual storage wearout of an SSD is very unlikely for any typical user, or even prosumer, within any moderately long timespan, say from 3-5 years (figure grabbed out my personally proximate thin air). The range of SSD rates lifetimes in block writes are from 10,000 to 100,000  before the producer promises it giving up the ghost. For a 180 GB unit, that is 1,8 Petabyte or nearer to 18 PB for server-grade SSD storage. The only home-user/casual-user scenario that puts an SSD unit of reasonably good technical quality in the danger zone is where the user does lots of video recording. Lots and lots of it. Something to the tune of ten times the unit capacity every day of the year for 5 years. In short, nuking the storage capability of an SSD requires VERY heavy usage or deliberate effort to sabotage it.]

In the case of SSDs versus HDDs, it can be well summarized that while HDDs see more cases of general functional failure, their failure will typically be noticable in advance, contra that of SSDs that are less likely to fail at all but their functional failures tnd to be instantaneous and with little or no prior warning. In that sense SSDs are more dangerous to data of those people who are not in the habit of backing up their data.

Long story short is that SSDs, while a major boon to PC users everywhere in terms of the speed boost it offers typical use of computing products, are no panacea to all things storage, including that if failures while in general use.

Even shorter: Do you backups, and do them regularly*.

 

[Real men don’t do bacups, but they do allow themselves to show their feminine side when shedding tears over the loss of all of their personal data.]

*  The ways to go about safeguarding your data are numerous. Dumping it on an external HD, toss it on a USB stick, transfer it to a NAS unit, preferably one with a RAID-1 setup, Time Capsule, use a “cloud” solution which is anything from OneDrive, Google Drive, SkyDrive, whateverDrive, Dropbox, Bittorrent Sync, SyncThing, Symform, or any one of a hundred websites that gives you xxx Gigabytes of data storage. Regularly zip up your documents folder, encrypt it with a strong passphrase for calm of mind, and upload it. If you are concerned about your pricacy (which you should be in this day and age) you should keep the innocuous stuff in the backup systems “out there”, while the essential, personal and confidential stuff should be kept in one of the aforementioned personal data lockers within an arms reach.

Also, do note that a collaborative storage function isn’t a proper backup; while most online or network-accessible storage systems allow you to backtrack on a past file state, these are not necessarily reliable either, which brings me to remind us that the chief cause of computer annoyances and errors are human error [Error type: 40]. This should in this case be understood as that a major risk of data loss is simply entering wrong commands in, for example, file handling operations where one erroneous key stroke can delete files full of documents. Ditto for erroneous keystrokes within programs, a menial example being that of a word processor (Ctrl-A, Delete, Ctrl-S, bam, and your text is gone!!!).

Bottled water

Bottled water is the greatest scam and rip-off in recent history – even bigger than that of the income tax.

 

Yes, I posted this on the 1st of April, since it’s a bloody joke on the consumers.

That R word…

Some say that strife between this or that group of ethnicity or national/popular group identification isn’t racism, because we are all part of the same race, that being the H.S.S. : Homo Sapiens Sapiens (Thinking Homonids).

While this is slightly true, it must be understod that the word “racism” has its roots in the word and concept “race”, which since ancient time has referred to “a people”, ie. any significant group identification (from within or without), and since most people since then of at least something differing skin colour have tended to be of a different ethnic group (and thus likely of a different cultural makeup) that the, “race” has thus extended to referred to “different culture”. (The Romans called themselves “the Toga-clad Race”. Hmmm!).

The 19th and 20th centuries have seen a massive upheaval in the conception of “races”, in form of our understanding of cellular composition and function, upwards through physiological and bodily workings, towards ethnology and anthropology, but even more so a push to even out human differences, be it material shortcomings to inter-cultural depredations. That much is fine; increase knowledge to push back the darkness, reduce sharp differences to ease group tensions.

Considering the scientific and ethnological advances the word “Racism” has thus come to means, in its modern and precise form, an active discrimination and persecution of other ethnicites.

However. While it is traditionally thought that the “right” (on the foolish one-dimensinal Left-Right scale of political identity/allegiance) is solely where racism is found, most actual racists would call themselves “rightists”, if not explicitly so, then state their enemies to be “leftists”. So; they are easily pigeonholed. (Human sapience at its finest, si?).

In that the “right” ostensibly harbours racism, and the “left” likewise ostensibly fights it in its mission to equilibrate the entire world, the concept of racism has been extended:

The extended definition of racism, is one which is morphed into whatever form and fine-grainedness the accuser wants it to be, which means that anyone can become a “racist” at 5 seconds notice. This is particularly used to browbeat Western critics of Islam, or at least any non-liberal+moderate branch/form of Islam, at which 9-tailed-self-and-other floggerds will of course never skip a beat to do. Discrimination of speakers of different languages also tend to fall under this smear. ( I have however only on a bare few occasions seen “racism ” applied to cases of discrimination irt. sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and such. Most leftists and far-leftists are not deranged enough to extende the already distended concept that far, most are perfectly content to use other ‘isms’ to attack and smear their purported opponents. Oh, wait. Those naughty Speciesists.)

So while these parrots have added to the mandatory operational vocabulary these emotionally laden semi-specious-concepts to attack any ideological heretic for being ‘racist’, they have in the process managed to impose such a massive inflation to the word that it has partially become meaningless. It has lost most of its descriptive valus, and become an emotional attack on whomever. Anyone can at all times be publicly flogged for their transgressions of thought. All dissidence will be crushed, any humans, esp. those with somewhat wayward conceptions of the world must learn through degradation and punishment.

So, not only are these leftists and extremist-leftists are not only verbally (and worse) abusing those they hate so, they are especially doing damage to those who could be educated to alter their mindset. If the goal is to enlighten “the human race”, these leftists are the ones that must be flattened.

Oh, and one peculiar thing. Once again, while the leftists are expected to decry national identification (amongst white westerners of course…) and other forms Western tribalism of whatever form, ie. peple flying their ethnicity under banners of varying shapes and colours, did it occur to anyone that these leftists are themselves a tribe, marching under a particular banner* of a Red hue? Is it not perculiar how these wayward beings hate everyone else so, but their own tribal identity and their own incandescent hatred is excepted from examination and censure?

*) I am generalizing. The “Red banner” is in fact a rag-tag collection of brutal, abusive, and madly purist ideologial identities, and they have been on each others throats for decades, if not a century: The Stalinists hate the Trots, the Trots hate the Anarchists, The Anarchists despise the Communists, The old Marxists consider the Marxist-Leninists to be fundamentalists AND the fucking Bernsteinites to be revisionists (in its decidedly negative form), the REAL *ahem* Marxist-Leninists dislike the Marxist-Leninist-(Stalinists) though some concede that Stalin had the right intentions, the Maoists are out back saying “WTF mate?”, the AnarchoCommunists are sitting in their cubbyhole grownling at eveyone else on the battlefield for shaking their heads at them and then running elsewhere, the Hoxhaites are all dead or hiding in a closet somewhere… most Reds are hugging Fidel’s image (and crying that the Imperialists gave Che lead imfusions, all at the same time as their icon is endlessly imprinted on Capitalist-distributed T-shirt in pretty red, Salot Sar-ites (revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist anti-imperialism-nationalism…. damn, this is good stuff.) are also hiding in the closet (I think Noam Chomsky learned from his youthful follies) together with Shining Path-wanderers, most Reds, esp. the Hipsters cheered the revolutionary fervor of Hugo Chavez all while he was enriching himself and his own clan from “his” nation’s (omg, tribal identity! destroy!) oil riches and rich landed estates (State-Capitalism, right?) … now that he’s dead, they still keep his memory revered as a monument to the resistance of American Imperialism. There are even a couple of Juche-ists sprinkled around the world, oh, by the way FUCK JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, the savior of Capitalism! Oh, re. State-Capitalism, since it was shown that all the mass-murdering Communist states were actually State-Capitalist states, most Reds worth their salt HATE THEM AS WELL!

Who said ideology is no fun?

Global Happiness

Stumbling across this:

http://www.livescience.com/51325-happiest-countries-2014.html

In the survey, researchers asked more than 146,000 people all over the world questions about five aspects of their well-being: their sense of purpose, social relationships, financial situations, community involvement and physical health. Based on their responses, participants were considered “thriving,” “struggling” or “suffering” in each of those five aspects.

My excerpt of the highest 7 scorers:

The other countries in the top 10, ranked by the percentage of people who were thriving in three or more aspects of well-being, were:

  • Costa Rica: 47.6 percent
  • Puerto Rico: 45.8 percent
  • Switzerland: 39.4 percent
  • Belize: 38.9 percent
  • Chile: 38.7 percent
  • Denmark: 37.0 percent
  • Guatemala: 36.3 percent

Since I’m in Denmark, I’m not that surprised that we are in top of the global happiness pile – and this has been remarked upon several times in the American press over the past couple of years. Compared to the more pronounced stratification/inequality and higher incidence of poverty of the American society, the relative economic homogeneity of Denmark does concievably make people feel more alike and ‘together’.

Now, the puzzling thing is how several Latin-American countries pop to the top of the list, despite their less materially properous society. This alone indicates that absolute material abundance does not automatically carry with it happiness in life. Of course, it has been known for a while that meterial abundance for individuals and households only increases happiness up to a certain point, as which it does nothing at all.

Be that as it may, what caught my more sarcastic side wa the bottom of the pile:

The lowest ranking country, Afghanistan, had 0 percent of residents thriving in at least three aspects of their well-being, according to the findings. Other countries at the bottom of the rankings included:

  • Bhutan: 3 percent
  • Cameroon: 3.1 percent
  • Togo: 3.9 percent
  • Tunisia: 4.0 percent
  • Congo Kinshasa: 4.1 percent

Why point this out?

Because Bhutan decided to abolish accounting their national prowess measured in GDP some years ago, and instead go with “Gross Domestic Happiness”. Judging from this, they failed miserably, with only Afghanistan scoring worse. Epic fail as they say.

What’s more is that Bhutan is a Buddhist country, something that would – naively – lead me to believe that it is nation of happy and content people, since Buddhism is as system of not as much acceptance of the state of things (which I would think leading to a degree of indifference towards material wealth), but rather insight into the state of things internal as external, and that this could lead to a generally more accomplished pursuance and achievement of the goals that pertain to the necessities of human life and happiness.

Apparently not. Of course, Buddhism nor any religion for that matter, in its various forms and interpretations is not (automatically) a shining … road… to happiness and peace, on the individual level or the societal level.

Yet we are all individuals, imperfect, confused, largely unknowing of the many intricacies of life and existence. And the execution of statecraft (as libertarians and anarchists know 🙂 has a life on its own,  tending to bend and pervert the principles it is founded upon, or upheld by its constituent populace.

Any Buddhism does not define its followers, or those who live in its vicinity. So while I know know that n-Buddhism is certainly imperfect, the fact that a country with a populace of plenty of deprivation and discontent, is formally Buddhist, is not an indictment of that belief system.

So there. Enough pocket fluff for now.

This due to that

Various religious scriptures are in its contents, as well as the uttered wisdom of holy men, often boiled down to the slogan ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you’, which is on appearence reasoanle enough.

Did it occur to you that this summation is a good analogue of Axelrod’s game-theoretic strategy of ‘Tit-for-Tat”? This is fascinationg in that the TfT approach to games (i.e. interactions between conscious agents, leading up the ladder to human interaction on a given scale)  is as per current theory, experiment and evidence available, the method of cooperation which in its process is the most stable and as well provides the best results; that is the least conflict.

‘Do unto others…’ may not (seem to) work that well for individuals, but if applied on the larger scale, it is  likely to produce the result of a lasting, low degree of social agression.

The irony of this is of course that successfully applying this on a larger scale is precisely predicated by that of individual adopting it.