Month: June 2019

There

Chill Uncategorized

The guy on the right is 58. Looks 35 or so. That’s roughly my fitness goal, though I don’t want to be quite so lean. I’m about halfway there, though the last half will take longer than the first half. In about two years, I’ll be there. Just takes work, and that work is worth it to not have aggressive amputations due to completely-preventable diseases, etc.

Bind

Chill Regular-ass Post

Western liberalism (in the broadest sense*) is probably incompatible with any chance of dealing with the climate crisis.

The question then becomes, is anything else, any other ideology or method of organizing society adequate to the challenge? And if so is there a way from this metastable peak to the one over there somewhere?

I have no idea. I suspect the answer is no, but I’d love to be wrong about this.

*Western liberalism here includes Republicans, nearly all Christians, and all people who call themselves liberals, libertarians, etc., because they all basically think the same way, have the same minds.

Comp

Chill Regular-ass Post

Reading some philosophy tonight (Greg Anderson’s The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History, if anyone cares) and thinking about so-called polarization.

I don’t think it’s really polarization as we conceive of it through the lenses of our past perception. It’s more of a lurch to positions to deal with increasing destruction of knowledge heuristics that no longer function, or that input nonsense and also output the same.

Let’s look at some Anderson.

In short, we see in Athens nothing less than the “total suffusion of…society with the gods and their concerns.”

All of this is common scholarly knowledge. And as such, it presents significant challenges for mainstream historians, who, it goes without saying, do not readily accept the reality of Greek divinities. How exactly can one account historically for a past world where the primary actors were apparently unreal, ahistorical beings, pure figments of the imagination?*

The reason I quote this passage is that society is undergoing an enormous phase transition now and the prior decades are becoming just as illegible to many as the Greek method of sense-making Anderson cites. This transition, unrealized by nearly all and denied by many, is intensely fascinating to observe because these society-wide sociopsycho-epistemological (apologies for this word, but there literally is not a word for what I mean in English) transformations only occur once every few hundred years. The last came about as a consequence of the printing press, and I was not around for that one.

It’s intensely difficult if not impossible to truly understand these metamorphoses as they occur. Foucault attempted this and he only got it less than half-right. He didn’t experience much of the internet, which vastly intensified what he’d already observed in more unhurried form. So I’m reading all I can about old worlds of nous, now departed and nearly incomprehensible, to try to grasp something of the new.

Back to polarization and the world being built now — or the one that is constructing itself. I’m considering surveillance and self-surveillance in a loop of recursivity. I’m thinking about how algorithms have replaced state actors at many levels. I’m pondering that information is now as solid (which it say, not) and shifting as Saharan dunes reconfigured by a samoon. As a result of this, what we see is not polarization, but performative certitude that is just as likely to mutate not due to new evidence but because of the results of algorithmic proddings, self-surveillance and that recursive spiral, and the nature of shame in an intensely-surveilled culture.

*p. 134 of the OUP 2018 edition

Prog Bord

Chill Uncategorized

The liberal idea of open borders springs I think from their conception of diversity, which is “people who think, act, and dress just like I do, but who have different skin colors.”

Open borders can only work with countries roughly on the same level of socioeconomic development and culture. Otherwise, it essentially destroys both countries and cultures over time. But…I am not so sure the left is against this destruction. That might be the point for some of them?

Anyway, belief in open borders is totemic and aspirational rather than based on anything real. It’s a way of signaling commitment to harmful ideas as a proof of allegiance. It’s nothing more than that, and when it is more than that, it’s invariably from someone who’d experience no consequences from the terrible “open borders” idea.

That said, I am for open borders.

Doesn’t that seem to contradict the above? It does, but I am for it in a world where the socioeconomic and cultural status of societies is closer to convergence. If climate change doesn’t end civilization, I’d say that’d occur in about 500 to 1,000 years from now.

KDM

Chill Uncategorized

Kevin Drum, if someone cut off from all forms of modern communication didn’t realize it yet, is a moron.

“There Is No Retirement Crisis,” he claims.

And if you average together the net worth of everyone (the one-percenters included), you can disappear the lack of retirement savings for many pretty easily. Which, of course, because he’s Kevin Drum and full-blown dipshit, that’s exactly what he’s done.

Let’s look at some numbers that aren’t distorted by a fucking fool. Here’s the average and (importantly) median retirement savings for three age groups:

•Age 45 – 55:

Average retirement account: $215,800

Median retirement account: $82,600

 

•Age 55 – 64:

Average retirement account: $374,000

Median retirement account: $120,000

 

•Age 65 – 74:

Average retirement account: $358,000

Median retirement account: $126,000

Think anyone can retire on $120,000 total? If so, you must already live in a refrigerator box, because that’s what they’ll be doing.

Of course, some workers (not included at all in the numbers above) have no retirement savings of any kind.

Young workers aged 18 to 29 are less likely to have savings, with 42% saying they have nothing stashed away, while 17% of those aged 45 to 59 say the same thing.

For those hard of reading, I will emphasize it: 17% of workers age 45 to 59 have zero retirement savings of any kind.

What is Drum’s malfunction? Can’t he do something, anything, other than be the mouthpiece for the status quo? What an assclown.

Slick Slack

Chill Regular-ass Post

Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want?

Absolutely fucking not. Slack is like a phone call — people loading you with tasks you have to deal with immediately. My job is a cognitive one. I don’t need to be getting pings about every little thing constantly. That way leads to destroyed productivity and tons of wasted time.

Slack is a scam that causes people to get addicted to the immediate feedback. The company of course does not care about productivity at all — they care about people using Slack.

Avoid at all costs.

About Lib

Chill Regular-ass Post

About liberal hypocrisy re: Obama and in general, I don’t give a fuck that the other side is worse. I’m not on a goddamn team and this isn’t a football match. Obama was a monster and terrible person and leader and so is Trump. Obama made bad decisions that hurt the country, decisions that directly allowed Trump to win. Trump is a different kind of evil — exactly what kind remains to be seen. If he goes to war with Iran, then worse than Obama. If not, about the same.

The lesser evil bullshit ignores that you’re still choosing evil. That framing leads down some terrible, untenable paths.

Again, I’m not on a team and I won’t choose the lesser evil to avoid liberal tears. Cry all you want, delusional libs, some of us (more of us all the time) don’t keep score on your scoreboard.

Most US liberals are truly conservatives, anyway, but they just don’t have any antipathy to gay people. That’s not inconsequential but nothing new will be born out of their confused admixture of fantasy beliefs, especially with climate change barreling towards us.

Stop Frontin’, Back Up

Chill Uncategorized

I can answer this!

But first, most places are terrible at backups, and it’s (usually) not the fault of IT. It’s often lack of budget — leadership does not prioritize backup as it looks expensive on paper and isn’t needed often. But when it is needed, damn you really need it.

So let’s look at a small city like Riviera Beach. It’s got about 35,000 residents and probably around 350 city employees (full and part-time). That’s at least 400 workstations to back up. The workstations, though, aren’t that important comparatively. Still, we’ll include them.

It’s hard to know the exact IT infrastructure of a town — it varies too much. But we can make some guesses and generalizations. A small town will be keeping long-term records (usually in PDF or TIFF format), do GIS, HR, etc., and all the ancillary data to support that. Say it’s 50,000GB, total, just for the server systems. That’s 50 terabytes of data that would be vital to city. Again, that’s just a guess, but I bet I am not too far off (been working in IT a long time).

If their IT department is competent enough, they can build a 100TB NAS dedicated to backup for about $7,000. Use something like Veeam Backup and Replication to back up the vital server systems — that should enough to keep about 180 days worth of backups. Veeam would add about $10,000 in licensing to that cost.

There’s $17,000.

For long-term backups (usual dance of monthly/yearly/every seven years), you would need to go offsite, of course. Backblaze B2 storage is a good choice for this. A year of this for 50TB of data plus monthly increases would be about $3,050 a year.

The 400-ish workstations are a harder task, but also far less important. I wouldn’t consider backing up the entire workstation — too expensive what you get. I’d set a policy of only backing up user profiles, and only certain folders at that. That’d be about 10TB of user data also on our NAS, which should fit fine with de-dupe and compression. First, I’d put it on that aforementioned backup NAS and then I’d move it also into B2 storage, with a 180 day-retention period.

That’s another $640 a year.

So, let’s look at our backup costs:

Server/infra backup: $17,000.
Offsite long-term: $3,050
Workstation backup: $640
Labor/setup (est): $40,000 (assuming two employees take two months to set up all this and cost is $100 per hour. This is probably an overestimate because I could set this all up by myself in about two weeks)

Cost of decent backup, including labor: $60,690
Cost of paying hackers: $600,000
Savings from good backup: $539,310

As I noted, there a lot of assumptions and unknowns here. I can guarantee, though, that my costs and estimates aren’t that far off.

But How Do You Feel

Chill Regular-ass Post

Should we stop calling people ‘overweight’?

MPs think the terms have a negative impact on body image and self-esteem, and want doctors to promote broader health and lifestyle messages instead.

Sure, because we must be more concerned with self-esteem than health or having a foot rot off due to obesity-related diabetes at age 45. Makes total sense. If people cared more about improving their lives and their societies instead of getting their precious feelings hurt, the world would be a lot better off, and not just in this arena.

There is a difference between respect, discrimination, and treating people like fragile children. We should not do the latter.

Vanitah

Chill Uncategorized

Vanity exercising? What a numpty.

A very, very small percentage of people exercise for vanity. Most do it to feel better and be healthier. Sure, I don’t mind looking better, too. But I’m not Chris Hemsworth. I’m not going to be playing Thor any time soon in a Marvel flick. I mainly hit the weights so I’ll be healthier for long enough to spend more time with my partner and living in good health in general.

Exercising buys you time, not steals it. It’s about a 5 to 1 payback on average.

If this dude really cared about seeing his kids long-term, he’d be doing some “vanity exercising” in the gym. Again, what a numpty.

Speechify

Chill Regular-ass Post

Puerile objections that, “Wah, Facebook censoring isn’t real censorship because the government didn’t do it!” ignore that the state has essentially ceded regulatory powers and public space to a cabal of large corporations, Facebook and Twitter among them, and this alters the parameters of our social contract greatly.

Shallow glosses of large systemic changes are all that most people seem capable of now; the world has shifted but all most can see is the after-image of the antediluvian relic imprinted on their retinas. This is changing, but too slowly — the old has already departed but the shape of the new can’t yet be credited to a viable reality by most people.

I would recommend some books to read, but those won’t help. If people wanted to get smarter, they would. It’s not that hard. As with Bernie Sanders and his campaign, most are describing a bygone past that has no chance of restoration, but oh they yearn for it because it is understood, at least illusorily. It had been quantified and the homilies about it sounded like truth. But those bromides no longer work and read as ridiculous with even a moment’s thought, yet still they attempt to apply them. But those spells don’t work, don’t cohere, and it makes these people dismissive and angry as the obsolete world is already long under the waves and the new creation, risen all around them, is invisible and inaudible to them yet controls their lives utterly.

Not an Ad

Chill Uncategorized

I love the backup software my company is now using (thanks to me) so much. We can restore any server or laptop to Azure, or Hyper-V, with a click:

Screen Shot 2019 06 20 at 4 31 34 PM

This gives us a nearly-foolproof backup strategy and makes us immune to ransomware attacks. Even if the entire company is wiped out and every file we have encrypted, as long as we catch it within 30 days (we’d notice within minutes), we can have the entire company’s essential infrastructure back up and running in a matter of hours.

The software is Veeam Backup and Replication, if anyone is wondering. While it’s not the easiest to set up, it works perfectly and never does anything unexpected.

Most small companies have terrible backup strategies. There’s no excuse for that anymore, though. It’s just too easy to do it right these days.

None At All

Chill Uncategorized

Obama administration arms sales offers to Saudi top $115 billion.

Fuck these hypocritical fuckers have no shame.

The above is one of the reasons I no longer really call myself a liberal or a Democrat or a progressive. I don’t want to be on any damn team. I want to be morally right, not right on paper, not cheering for some jerkwad because other people are cheering for him despite his crimes and transgressions.