May 15

No context as usual

Journalists write these articles and provide no context.

What Lily Hay Newman should’ve explained is that public IPv4 addresses are handed out by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. They generally issue blocks of IP addresses to large corporations and ISPs.

This is what has been exhausted. There are no more of these large blocks remaining to assign to Level 3 or Cogent or IBM.

These large companies further subdivide IP address blocks for various purposes. For instance usually when I’ll set up a company that uses for example Cogent as an ISP, I’ll request a /28 block. This means I’ll get a contiguous block of 16 public IP addresses, 14 of which are usable*. It’ll look something like this: 173.65.128.16/28.

These IPv4 addresses have not run out. Believe me if you request a block of IP addresses from Cogent, you’re gonna get ’em as long as you pay the money.

Eventually however ISPs and other large companies will run out of these IP addresses to issue. But contrary to what you’ve heard that is not likely to happen soon and even if it does, there are ways around it.

Also there are a lot of companies that hoard ridiculously-sized /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses. That’s 16,777,216 addresses. These were issued before it was known the internet would explode in popularity and now these corporations refuse to return these blocks to be re-issued. They should be forced to, in my opinion.

If these /8 blocks were to be returned, it’d ease the IPv4 address scarcity problems for a good while.

Anyway, IPv6 hasn’t been widely adopted mainly because it is a huge piece of crap designed by engineers clueless about nearly everything.

Here’s what an IPv4 address looks like: 10.100.50.20

Easy. Not too bad to remember.

Here’s what an IPv6 address looks like: 2001:db8:100:f101:210:a4ff:fee3:9566

Get all that? Yeah, me neither. And I have actually used IPv6 in the real world. (And it sucks.)

But to get back to the main point, IPv4 addresses are indeed in short supply. But not in the way you’ve been told and it’s not some huge danger that threatens us all, and there are things we could do to mitigate the problem if we wanted to.

*Really good network engineers will know that I am not being entirely accurate here.

May 14

Mulder I am not

I want to believe this is a troll. Oh, I want to believe.

But I know it’s not.

That sort of crap is now dogma in the fat acceptance movement.

By the way, 2000 and especially 2500 calories a day is more than most people throughout all of human history have gotten per diem.

A starvation diet for most people would actually be 800 to a thousand calories a day.

I eat 1,200 to 1,600 calories a day and I’m just fine.

May 12

Croesus

Anyone who thinks there is anything natural about home prices or the housing market is on all the drugs.

Absent Fed manipulation and other catering to the rich, and depending on the market, the average house should/could be about 40% to 90% cheaper.

If we weren’t so intent on propping up the rich’s riches, nearly everyone with a job could afford an ok house nearly anywhere.

May 12

Like no

And this reminds me of where I grew up.

Now some rifle nerdery.

The girl on the left has probably never fired or even held a rifle before. The girl on the right probably has.

The left weapon is an AR-15. There is no magazine, though it can hold one in the chamber like that. The one on the right is probably a Remington 770.

I have fired both weapons. The Remington 770 was in .30-06. It is a great rifle. The AR-15 is not that bad, but by comparison is a piece of crap though they are intended for different purposes.

I like bolt-action rifles, which the Remington is. If I cared about hunting — which I do not — I’d buy one much like that. It’s cheap so if you break it, no big deal, and it’s accurate out to about 500 yards.

If you need to shoot something more distant than that and can actually hit it — well, I’m impressed.

May 09

The metallic past

Reminds me of being in the Sinai.

The desert there is littered with old military hardware, some of it lethal. There are still land mines; sometimes the feral dogs will stumble on one and you’ll feel and hear the rough roar of an explosion savage the silence of a warm desert night.

Most of the time the dogs are too light to set one off. But not always.

Being in the Sinai and in the Middle East there is no mistaking that it has been and is a conflicted place. A rusting armored personnel carrier, its door canted and one-hinged, fills no longer with personnel but with sand. The turret of a bombed tank rests atop a dune, beetle-like, its main gun’s barrel an antenna bent to the sky.

Tanglefoot. Barbed wire. Concertina wire. Fences with razor wire on top. Cement barriers. Fifty cals in your face at a checkpoint, AK-47s slung, M-4s on a casual stroll — in a McDonald’s. At the beach.

So many things designed to keep others out, others in, repel the threat. To destroy.

I don’t miss being there. But it was a learning experience.

May 07

Genderizers

As fields become “feminized,” prestige and pay go down.

Note that this is not an economic effect, in that it is not excess supply-caused. Even in fields where demand outstrips supply when women enter a field en masse pay decreases and prestige also dies a quick death.

If you ignore the meta- temporarily, this is a legitimate fear that male IT workers have. (Note: Read closely. I am not saying that it is right or “best world,” but the fear is legitimate.) Because unless IT nerds somehow succeed in changing thousands of years of entrenched misogyny and patriarchy, it is an actual fact that when women enter the field and excel there beyond a certain ratio the entire field’s pay and prestige will decline.

As the post pointed out, within 10-20 years expect the profession of doctor to be seen as much, much less prestigious. The same will happen with attorneys, too, as women come to dominate that.

Interesting how fields shift to “soft” and “easy” when women succeed there, though nothing at all has changed about the skills, science or talent needed. In fact, many of the fields have actually gotten substantially harder and more competitive in the past 50 years.

May 06

I want to

This article is full of dumb.

My response: I want to like physical books, but I just can’t.

They are so heavy that when I move I nearly break my back. When I go on a trip, I can only carry a few of them. I can carry thousands of ebooks if I want.

Physical books are smelly and they decay. They also attract bugs and take up far too much space  in the house. And I don’t like displaying what I read to other people as I want as many as possible to know as little about me as possible, so ebooks are much more private.

Copying text out of a physical book is a slow, manual process. It’s a few clicks in an ebook.

Some old people and their adoration of antiquated, inferior technology mystify me.

Stacked correctly, physical books are pretty bulletproof and as an American that is important.

So there’s that, I guess.

May 06

Mi without the graine

First time I’ve ever had the vision deficits of a migraine without the pain.

I can barely see what I am typing. Fovea centralis acuity totally diminished with significant blind spots.

Odd. I’m usually in so much pain at this point that I can’t even type. No pain, though, just visual impairment.

At least not a stroke as no sign of cognitive impairment. Well, no more than normal that is.

May 05

Control

This doesn’t match my experience at all.

Specifically, this part.

“Imagine you’re in a meeting and someone plops a big box of doughnuts on the table,” Mann said. “To resist this doughnut, it’s not a one-time thing. You resist it when you first notice it, and you resist it every time you look up and see it again. I know I’d be tempted every time I looked up!” Resisting the doughnut, in other words, requires not just one act of self-control, but many — not to mention that each time you resist, it gets a little more difficult to do so, as self-control is thought to be a limited resource.

Do normal people really work this way? I am a stubborn, stubborn motherfucker so I guess I just don’t think like this at all.

When I decide something, it’s decided. If I decide not to eat the donut, I don’t eat the donut. Simple as that.

I truly do think having military experience helps with that sort of thinking and control. And just being naturally stubborn to start with.

For as similar as humans truly are, things can seem awfully different. I just can’t imagine being so, for lack of a better word, weak.

May 05

Repro

Many scientist types believe that if you can’t locate something with a scientific study (etc.), that it doesn’t exist.

Given the reproducibility of much of science — that is to say, low — even if you can locate something statistically, there’s still a very high chance it doesn’t exist.

I am no enemy of science. Quite the opposite.

Despite much of my writing here, I think as I age I’ve come to appreciate nuance and doubt more, that’s all.