I love it when people want me to write a work instruction for some extremely complicated, highly context-dependent activity. And of course to write it in such a way that someone with no experience can follow it end to end.

This is not possible. Just not.

If you could have some document telling an intern what to do, you WOULDN’T NEED ME.

Sure, I’ll write that document. I’ll write it and then I’ll spend the next three days either explaining to said Level 1 person how to do the actions, actually doing the actions for them, or correcting the huge fuck-ups that result when management convinces itself that 20 years of experience can be distilled meaningfully into a Word document.

I know, it sucks paying me such a sum for what I do, that you can’t yet outsource it to someone chained to a wall and beaten with bamboo rods on the hourly.

But that’s the way it is. The intern can’t build a datacenter. The intern can’t even boot their own machine up.

If I could write a work instruction for most of what I do, I’d write a script and sit at my desk and lollygag while the script did my work for me.

Simple as that.

It’s interesting to see so many older people so terrified of something as relatively innocuous and unlikely as Bernie Sanders having had the slim possibility of being president.

They are more frightened of that prospect than of Trump winning — which I can’t make sense of, really.

I suspect part of it is that Sanders is an implicit critique of the entire ethos under which they’ve lived their whole lives — and during which they’ve indeliberately but nevertheless in a very real and direct way harmed their own offspring. Though they are not the first couple of generations to bring great harm upon their own progeny, those in the 45- to 75 age cohort are perhaps the first to do so with the most awareness — possible or actual — that it was being done and how to stop it if they so wished.

They did not and do not wish that, it turns out.

This guilt must be an enormous and insuperable weight. Otherwise, how to explain Kevin Drum, Lance Mannion and their weird maundering posts about how Bernie Sanders is some Josef Mengele-level corrupt evil genius.

Just some New Deal democrat whose party has retreated so far from him he’s had to call himself a socialist.

For those who’ve demonstrably made the world worse for their own children, how could they support a candidate like Bernie Sanders, or like Jill Stein, when this is a condemnation of their very selves?

They could not, of course. The human psyche does not permit such things, such self-negation.

I’m not sure what’s with lately all the counsels of despair on the possibility of losing weight.

This latest example at The New York Times combines some dubious science with poorly-derived “conclusions.”

Important questions are omitted such as if everyone is inevitably destined to be the size of a tractor-trailer, why 50 years ago were people of that size relatively rare?

Even I am old enough to remember when seeing someone over 350 pounds was really, really unusual — so much so that it caused a social ripple through people nearby. Now it’s so quotidian no one even notices.

The questionable science — unsourced of course — is that one can be healthy and obese at the same time for very long. This does not appear to be the case.

And there’s this bit which is almost guaranteed to be false.

After several months of eating fewer than 800 calories a day and spending an hour at the gym every morning, I hadn’t lost another ounce.

Self-reported calorie counts are highly suspect. Almost everyone lies to themselves on this. Unless she is an extreme, one in 10 million genetic freak, with working out an hour a day and eating less than 800 calories she would’ve been losing well more than a pound a week.

Reality is that she was probably not counting snacks, drinks, “just this onces,” etc. Of course.

It’s probably not the only problem (perhaps this is the main one), but one problem is that Americans want to be told that they don’t have to change a thing, don’t have to move a muscle, to have that perfect body, that ideal shape — or, worse, that they are just a perfect little snowflake just as they are, in all their corpulent glory.

Alas, neither image comports with reality nor ever will.

Now here’s the truth: most things worth doing in life are fucking hard. But ain’t nobody want to hear that. It is athwart the entire cultural current of “one weird trick” and “easy weight loss, guaranteed.”

So the refrain of impossibility is all that will reverberate in most ears, and much failure will ensue.

One thing I can say for sure: I will never train my replacement.

Severance: don’t give a shit.

Health care: don’t care.

Lawsuit: have a good time. Send the subpoena to Micronesia, general delivery.

To quote Meghan Trainor

My name is no
My sign is no
My number is no

If you’re gonna let me go.

Most arguments about consciousness, its ramifications and its formation, are beginning to feel to me like debating how much phlogiston a burning log gives off.

There’s much being missed, or perhaps not much to miss. I’m not sure yet.

“So the question a feminist ought to be asking is this: Why do men and women have such an unequal relation to parenthood? Is it biology—we bear children, they don’t? Actually, this difference becomes inequality only in the context of a specific social system for rearing children—the family, or, to be more precise, familialism (since I’m talking about a system that affects us all, whether we’re in actual families or not). A familialist society assigns legal responsibility for children to the biological parents; the society as a whole has only minimal obligations to its children, and people rarely make deep commitments to children outside their families. This system puts women at an inherent disadvantage: Since it’s obvious who a child’s mother is, her parental responsibility is automatic; the father’s is not. And so the burden has always been on women to get men to do right by them. Loesch takes familialism for granted. Nearly everyone does.”

-Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

I’m not planning on voting for Trump or Clinton, but it’s not clear to me that Clinton would be less damaging to the nation or the world than Trump. Clinton will be more effective than Trump, almost certainly, and that is a danger in itself.

That she’s firmly in the pocket of Wall Street in a way that Trump isn’t matters. That she’s more likely to start overseas wars matters. That she will wield imperial power more effectively — that matters too.

Say what you want about Trump, but becoming president is not going to give him magical powers no other president has possessed. The US is a big ship, difficult to turn, hard to stop and even harder to get moving. Trump isn’t going to build any wall across the fucking border (Republicans have been threatening that since the 1920s at least), and he’s not going to ban Muslims. He’s not going to do anything that he’s claimed. That’s just bluster to get the (racist) vote out.

But Clinton? She will hand over more of the country to Wall Street. She will bomb plenty of brown people. She will help upper class white people some. And she will do nothing at all about climate change, and perhaps even make it worse.

Trump’s risk is mostly in his unpredictability. In some circumstances, that might be a good thing.

Clinton’s risk is in her extreme predictability combined with not being incompetent.

In a country where you’d literally have to be crazy to want to be president, is it any wonder who we have a the best we could produce? Any wonder at all?

The nightmare that is Windows licensing is discussed in this thread.

Makes me think about path dependence, sunk cost fallacies and bad idea traps — in the context that I had a person at work try to justify to me one time why it made sense that at many companies it requires one and sometimes two people to do nothing but specialize in complying with Microsoft’s onerous and incomprehensible licensing.

Listening to someone explain why something has to be a certain way when it absolutely does not is one of the reasons that I have given up on humanity, because it happens so damn often.

Do people mistake the reasons that something came to exist for a teleological inevitability? Do they truly believe — as this person did — that Microsoft’s bonkers scheme is the best possible solution rather than one of the worst?

I think some people — most people — just take the world as a given, and then perceive any attempt to change it as a threat. Even if it’s something as byzantine, bizarre, and useless as Microsoft’s software licensing racket.

Here’s how you defeat/bypass a firewall on a local machine where you have enough rights to create a VM: create in that VM an adapter that operates at Layer 2 (such as macvtap in Linux). Use this VM. Firewalls operate on Layer 3. They will not see this traffic at all.

Boom, done.

Is there any distro of Linux where OpenVPN, SELinux and network manager are not some buggy fucking mess?

No?

I thought not. Embarrassing for something most consider enterprise-class software.

It’s only enterprise-class if your time is not valuable.