You’re going to start hearing a lot about Elizabeth Warren running in 2016.

Don’t get your hopes up. Elizabeth Warren has not the first chance in hell of being president.

It will never, ever happen.

She is too much a threat to Wall Street, to the powers that be, to everyone who “matters.”

I think Elizabeth Warren is awesome. She is a great speaker, really understands what’s happening to the country and how devastating this resurgent plutocracy is to average Americans.

It’s for these very reasons that she’ll never be president. She’s far too much of a threat to the plutocrats and the truly powerful in this country.

I would bet my life savings on that, and more.

As great as it would be, there is a zero percent chance of an Elizabeth Warren presidency occurring.

I realize a large part of this is the legacy of horrible people like Hugo Schwyzer and others of his nature, but there are two competing ideas as related to men participating in feminism today:

That if men are interested in feminism, it’s just to get laid.

That men should be more interested in feminism and all that entails.

Yeah, those are opposed. Completely. And of course this isn’t every feminist, just the majority nowadays.

Even though the first point is now accepted wisdom in most quarters, how common is that, considering it really doesn’t work? I am sure there are men like that of course, but many feminist thinkers seem to think this is 99% of men interested in feminism, and I suspect it’s more like ~1%. And an ineffective at their dumbass goal 1% at that.

As for me, I am interested in feminism because I believe in equality, and because it is just right.

I am interested in feminism because I’ve had amazing friends, mentors, teachers and role models who were women and I believe they deserve every chance in life that I’ve gotten.

I am interested in feminism because when I was at my most wretched, my most hated, it was a girl* who befriended me and stuck up for me in ways that I didn’t know how to do.

I am interested in feminism because it’s just fucking right no matter about any of the above. Again.

And anyone who thinks any different, fuck all ya’ll.

(Damn, I am feeling ornery today because so much stupid, so little time.)

*Literally a girl, before anyone freaks out over the word. We were seven.

I shouldn’t be, but I’m always surprised when even geeks don’t really understand how bandwidth and its pricing at the enterprise level works.

Most of the people in that thread are utterly clueless. I’d guess that at least one is working for Comcast (since it has been shown that they have thousands of shill accounts out on the web).

Let’s pretend I was starting my own very small ISP.

I’m going to omit some nuance and jargon here, but right now at an enterprise level you can get each Mbs for around $0.50 (fifty cents) per month. So that means a Gb/s link would run my tiny ISP around $500 per month. At an oversubscription rate of 40:1 my bandwidth costs alone for one subscriber should be about $12.50.

Also note that this is the highest-cost scenario possible.  Most major ISPs who run their own transit links pay approximately 1/100 to 1/200 of this actual cost, some much less even than that.

As I said, I’m developing this as the highest cost possible, like I was going to start my own ISP for a very tiny user population.

Note that the 1Gbs mentioned above is not your piddling home connection. This is the connection that your actual ISP or similar would use. (I’m being slightly inaccurate here, unless you have a small ISP, but being very accurate would take a thousand words. Large ISPs who run their own transit pay much, much, much less as already mentioned.) This is guaranteed with a rock-solid service-level agreement and would have 99.999% uptime. It also would include a 5% burst to 10Gbs.*

Comcast wants to have an oversubscription rate of 70:1 or higher. A reasonable oversubscription rate would be my 40:1 or so.

So I start my own ISP. My actual bandwidth cost per my 40 users is $12.50 per month. That means I offer all of them a 1Gbs connection assuming like most users that 95% of the time that everyone won’t be downloading at 100%. (Note: this is how all ISPS work. All of them. Every last single one that you’ve ever used.)

So even the tiniest ISP in the universe still has pretty small bandwidth costs, still with far better oversubscription rates than Comcast.

Assuming for the sake of minimizing the complexities and having a comparable scale that my little ISP’s users all live in the same building, I could charge these users $60 a month and still make a huge profit. (Before anyone gets into it, infrastructure costs amortized over 20-40 years are really tiny. Look it up yourself, it’s right in the 10Ks and 10Qs of any public ISP. In addition, a lot of that is and has been paid for by taxpayers and not by ISPs.)

That should give you some idea just how much Comcast and the like is overcharging for terrible service.

I’ve tried to minimize jargon and other industry patter in this piece, but there is no way to reduce it that much more. But if there are any questions, feel free to ask.

*Meaning that 5% of the time, the connection could burst to 10Gbs with no extra fees to me.

I wish more older women blogged.

Does anyone know of any blogs of women (preferably feminist oriented or feminist sympathizing at least) in the 40+ age range?

I read Digby’s Hullabaloo and Echidne of the Snakes already.

The reason is that blogs of younger women tend to be so utterly consumed with White Guilt (if they are white) and identity politics that they are increasingly difficult for me to read.

While that stuff matters some, it’s about as likely to change the world as turning a vacuum cleaner on and off over and over again.

Women who grew up exposed to second wave feminism and who actively participated actually did change the world, so they know what it takes. I think that’s why I enjoy reading their blogs a lot more.

If this post offends anyone, I would say that I am sorry, but that would be a lie.

Hunger Games names’ meanings: explanations for Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, Alma, Cressida, and more.

Very cool. Most of these I knew because I read, well, a lot and love etymology. A few I didn’t.

But the author hasn’t quite read enough, as it’s pretty likely that Collins got the last name “Everdeen” from Thomas Hardy’s character Bathsheba Everdene in Far From the Madding Crowd.

By the way in that novel, Everdene’s closest friend is named “Gabriel.” Coincidence? Yeah, no.

People should pay me to research this shit.

I don’t even have to research.

Even enterprise-class non-Windows OSes have regressed greatly in interface design.

Over the past week, I’ve been using both CentOS 6 and CentoOS 7 which are rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Cent 6 is very clean and straightforward. Programs are labeled sensibly. It’s simple and like a tool should be.

Cent 7 is like someone grafted the worst tablet in the world onto the interface. Icons are missing (on purpose). Much is confusingly labeled or not labeled at all. You have to swipe up to log in, which took me about 10 minutes to figure out.

Why you’d ever, ever want a tablet interface on a server I haven’t a clue. Anyone who did this or had anything to do with it should be fired immediately, and if they worked for free, they should be hired and then fired.

Most of the time I will be in the command line anyway. But a few things can’t easily be done there, even per Red Hat, so it’s inevitable this monstrosity of an interface will annoy me from time to time.

Why does anyone think this is a good idea? Phone interfaces belong nowhere near servers, not at any point, no matter what.

Words matter, but other things matter more. Economic justice and structural change I would argue matter more, and only actions that lead to those will transform the world. Endless battles on Twitter and Tumblr about who said what bad word when, and who culturally appropriated what (usually inaccurate) and how hard are actually harmful, even to the people who it is supposed these arguments help.

It’s precisely because mainstream liberalism has so thoroughly surrendered on issues of economic justice and class war that so many young people think of politics as a game of word policing and loud noises on Twitter.

The Left is soulless – in the sense that it has no animus, just tribal markers that change weekly to enable policing and to promote exclusivity, to thin the ranks so that there can be an in group and the out group du jour.

I don’t think the Right and the RNC types are actually intelligent or conniving enough to do this, but if I wanted to destroy the Left, my attempt would look much like the focus on identity politics, word policing and outcast-creating that the modern Left has become.

That shit is damn effective for neutralizing a movement.

Dell’s latest 4K displays bring IPS goodness down to $600.

One of these will be the second monitor to my 5K iMac. A bit further away == don’t need 5K.

We are in the golden age of great displays.

Been waiting for decent fonts and easy readability on the desktop my whole life.

Come a long way from the 320×240 I first used.

You can tell nearly everyone who works on Linux software is an engineeritis infectee as most of the tools that are considered “best” are the most difficult to use, most difficult to set up, work in the most opaque ways, and are generally inimical to human understanding.

I can learn them. And I have learned some of them and will eventually learn them all. But they are all terribly designed, mistaking complexity for elegance, and difficulty of use for productivity.

Some examples are SELinux, iptables, systemd, and git.

All pieces of shit. Powerful pieces of shit, but pieces of shit nonetheless, that could have only been designed by “genius morons.”

As some commenter noted, “Usability is always an important design element. If multiple users are making the same mistake, then it is the software that is the problem, not the users. “

I’m tired of seeing things about the crazy demands that bands and artists make while touring.

Touring is hard. Being on the road ever day? Sleeping very little? Having to get up in front of screaming and occasionally hostile crowds no matter how you feel?

Yeah, that sounds hellish to me. I’d ask for some damn fried chicken in my dressing room, too.

Anyway, as mentioned in the comments, a lot of the time demands in artist’s rider sheets are to determine if the correct attention is being paid to other things – for instance, if the request for chocolate-covered burritos on silver platters embossed with the face of Nicolas Cage is ignored, chances are the sound or lighting will be screwed up too.

I saw the contention on a message board the other day that a good systems administrator should “be able to write quality software.”

This is of a piece with the idea I’ve seen all over lately that everyone in any field should be a programmer, should learn how to program.

While I agree that a better case can be made for a systems admin to learn some programming (as I know some myself), the idea that someone like me (or rather, more what I used to do) should be able to write quality software is rather absurd.

I can bash out a script (in Bash and several other environments) pretty well. I could probably cobble something together in Visual Studio in a few days if I really had to.

But it would not be “quality” by any measure.

Programming is its own discipline that takes time and study to master. Not even the best sys admins with mega IQs I’ve ever met (unless they were former programmers) could write quality software. And even the ones who had been programmers in the past – even excellent former programmers — would probably not have claimed to be able to write quality software any longer, as it takes like most things in life constant practice.

From what I’ve seen, it takes about 5-7 years to become a really decent programmer. Most programmers I’ve talked to agree with that.

So to do that – to be able to write quality software — I’d have to put my real career on hold, missing most advances in my actual field, to do something I’m not really interested in for no obvious benefit.

Agreed, some understanding of programming and (even more so) of computer science is necessary in my field. I’ve often had to (involuntarily) debug terrible code or examine code in 10+ languages to figure out how something works.

It happens.

But the idea that everyone should be a programmer is most often pushed by (surprise!) programmers.

It’s easy for them. Shouldn’t it be easy for everyone else? I mean, just code, right?

It’s a cockamamie, terrible idea. Even as system administration is moving to more automation and more scripting, the idea that I should be turning out “quality software” rather than doing my job is fucking ridiculous.

Only a programmer or others also prone to engineeritis could conceive of something so asinine.

I have written some pretty long and complicated scripts and will do so again. But I don’t really think of that as software, and that is not the sense in which this idiot was using those terms.

Even as being a system admin changes in the “cloud” era, it’ll have very little to do with coding and much more to do (as it always has) with understanding the interactions of multiple complex systems (duh) and configuring them in the best way possible to work for whatever business or other organization is making use of those systems.

While this might involve writing some “software” – that is to say, scripts – along the way, the primary goal of a sys admin should not be programming or writing “quality software,” but rather using whatever tools are best suited to achieving the above goals.

Doing anything else is a waste of time, and quite likely to get you fired for wasting said time.

Facebook really is taking over.

I ran a blog nearly a decade and a half ago. It was significantly worse than this one as the writing wasn’t nearly as good.

Though its quality was worse and its inappropriate rant content much higher, it had thousands of readers a day.

Really, I don’t care much about my readership numbers. If three or four people read my blog a day, that’s great with me. But it is interesting that pre-Facebook how some F-list blogger could pull in thousands of readers a day easily with no promotion and now a better blogger (me, but later) can hardly make it beyond a few dozen a day.

I’m not the only blog with this problem. Better bloggers experience the same thing.

Admittedly, just like I did back in the old days I still toss off most posts in five minutes or less.

There were fewer blogs then but also fewer readers. It appears then that most people have just disappeared into the limitless maw that is Facebook, never to return.

As I’ve written before, we had the internet but were too stupid to keep it.

This happens with many things that humanity touches.

Now that I’ve realized that systemd is just a way for Red Hat to take over control of Linux indirectly (since it’s impossible to unseat Torvalds at this time), all makes a lot more sense.

Guess it’s a good thing I’m getting that Red Hat cert.