The Blackest of Heresies

OK:

I had to go out and buy a new laptop.  The Compaq that I bought back in 2007 finally gassed out and I needed something to work with. 

So, over to Dell to see what they have on sale.  Nice 17 inch monitor laptop with a reasonable processor, 500gb of hard drive and 4gb of RAM.  $335.00

Sweet.

But it came with Windows 8.  Shit.

So I say to myself, what the hell.  I’ll strip off the windows and install Linux.  No harm, no foul.

I get the machine and start playing with it to see what all the fuss is about.  The interface is a touch odd, but that is about it.

So I get to the point of starting to install the latest flavor of Linux Mint and I find that the spiffy new computer also has a spiffy new BIOS called a EUFI.  Doesn’t like a lot of the flavors of Linux.  The Linux community currently has it nipples out of joint because Microsoft is taking care of the digital signing of the EUFI interface and selling the license for $99.00.  Now, just so you know, I don’t see how this can be anything but a pain in the ass for Microsoft.  The Linux community has a tendency toward going gibbering batshit whenever you mention Microsoft.  I think that if Microsoft had a lick of sense , they would offload the job to someone else, but hell, who really cares.

I am sitting here with a nice laptop that I can’t install Linux on without 2 days of sitting on my ass (It is beautiful outside), mucho cussing, and several pots of coffee.  

As I procrastinate,  I begin using the system as it stands.  Now it is a week later and I have come to the conclusion that It really is not that bad.  It really is just cosmetic changes to Windows 7 which I use all the time at work.  The start button is gone, but once you get it into your head that the lower left corner is a big ol’ start button, I can’t really see a lick of difference.

Look Microsoft is now back in the realm of the mortal.  They are trying to get back to their glory days of earth-shakers, but they really don’t have the gas to do it.  I think that we can review their products without the histrionics.

Windows 8 isn’t bad.  Seems to be stable.  Using it is not really all that different from using anything else.  The learning curve isn’t that bad. 

Sure as hell beats RSTS on a PDP-11

The Return of the New Yorkers

Long Story, Mostly uninteresting but I though that I would take the time to explain why I am more uneasy than usual about the current state of affairs.

So, I have some friends/long-term acquaintances in New York City who I have been dealing with for years.  The company I worked for back in 1999 went through some self-inflicted hard times  back in 1999 during the tech boom and these folks bought the company, adopted me, and I helped them get the product line moved back to New York.  During this first dealing with the boys from New York came the tech-market crash.

Went to work for myself after I finished the move for them, built a company and sold same.  I was working for the firm that bought the company and they were getting into some hard times.  This was 2007.  The boys from New York called me up and convinced me to go to work for them.  OK sure, beats travelling.  Moved over, started doing the work and bang came the 2007 crash, Lehman Brothers and all.  The work lated about a year, then I said to hell with it and went looking for my current gig with the fedguv.

So two months ago, the Boys from New York called me and asked me to go to work for them again.  I told them that I was keeping my day job but I would work for them on the side (Note my lack of blog posts and you can probably even figure out when I started).  Anyway, list night I started thinking.

What if these guys are bellwethers for bad times?

Every time I go to work for them, the money moving around gets easier and easier.  They really don't have a clue of what they are doing, but the money is there and they have to do something with it.  So they bring yours truly in to flog the dead horse for them.  They pay me until things get weird and then cut me loose.

OK, so this time the money is just gravy money to me, I have kept my day job and it doesn't look to be going anywhere, but the principle remains the same.

Hot money is going crazy right now.  People are trying to park money anywhere to get a return. The crappy plans of the world get trotted out and dangled in front of hot money hoping for a nibble.  The boys from New York may well be at the level of bottom-feeding which, when they start feeling they can get a share of the hot money, actually coincides with the level of oversold and stupid the market requires for a blowout.

None of this matters per se, I still have a garden to plant and have to wake up to go to work every day.  But if the market goes South again in the next six months, I will be amused to know that I may have a candidate for a signal.

Been a while

I think that I will start writing again soon.  The mood is starting to take me and workloads look to be slowing down soon.

I hope that you are all well, and will forgive me for my poor manners in not keeping you posted.  Truth be told, blogging should be a "I want to do this today", not a "I have to do this today" type of activity.

When I get back I might even have something interesting to say.

But don't get your hopes up.

How can you not be impressed

Time to Grow Up

1415

The last time that a pope resigned and went home.

We kind of stand back in awe and think that this is a long time ago and put it out of our minds.  But perhaps one should look back at the history surrounding that resignation.

Della Rovere, Piccolomini, Medici, Caraffa, Costa, Basso, Zeno, and Cibò.  These aren't household names any more, but when you go back and root around dusty books and odd nooks of the internet, you will find a litany of perversion, power-grabbing, lust, simony, and greed that would fit into Washington, Brussels, Moscow, or Beijing without raising an eyebrow.

The church goes through cycles of perversion and restoration.  It is pretty obvious which way it is drifting now.  The moral authority of the church is undermined with every sex scandal and bank failure.  It will need to take strong measures to right itself, but the prissy, well coiffed functionaries that stalk the halls of the Vatican will resist the need to reform in order to cement their perquisites.

More than anything, we here in the US and the other continental-scaled powers should look at the long-term problems of the church.  Perversion, simony, and greed will always accompany centralization of power.  The regard for the poor will wither and progressively be replaced for the demands for Peter's Pence to glorify the center.

Just Checking in

Sorry about not checking in more often, but there is really nothing to say.   Sequestration has occurred and the world is still spinning.  A comedian has done remarkably well in Italy and this is a new thing (someone should inform Senator Franken). The environment still continues to degrade.  

I guess that I am trying to figure out something new to say.  I sometimes consider writing about my work and the vicissitude of working at the FedGuv ranch, but that seems a little close to crapping in my own nest, so that isn't flying.  I sometimes consider writing about the teen aged angst and antics of the progeny, but that is a drum that is pretty well beaten and there is nothing novel there.

Nope, what is left is taking of my feelings (look, I am shuddering!!!), or speak of the adult version of the same teen aged antics that populates stage reserved for world leaders.

If I come up with something worth writing, I will write it, but right now, the whole mess is so silly I think that I will ignore it.

Compromise

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

I think that the issue at hand in Washington is that there is a consensus there that the little people need to get screwed a little, but there is disagreement about how to screw the general populace and still retain the perquisites of power.

But what I am thinking is that there may very well be a need for the little people to get screwed.  The amount of money flying out Woodlawn is astonishing.  In 2003, before the baby boomers started coming home to roost, the amount amount paid out by the Social Security Administration was 37% of all government expenditures and 7% of GDP.

I kind of doubt that that percentage of expenditure has gone down in the last ten years.  That and a couple more wars that we lost followed by some real crap economic times and I would not at all be surprised to see the outlay at more like 45% or so.

So, we have this huge outlay for old folks and folks who can't quite deal.  I know you think that this is being harsh, and in a way you are right, but that is the demographic served by the SSA.  Now, I think taking care of old folks and the folks who wouldn't make it otherwise is a fine thing to do.  But the current system reflects what I feel is a mistaken belief that the program is an "insurance" that you buy during your working days to help in your dotage.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah....I can already hear the flames a comin'.  "I paid for it", "Of course it is insurance, it says so right there on the label".  Yada yada yada.

Look folks, when the government takes your money by edict, it is a tax.  If you like what the government does with the money, it is a fair tax, taken for the public good, for a just and reasonable purpose.   If you don't like it, it is an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties, taken against our will by jackbooted thugs, placed there to oppress us.   It really is your call, as these appear to be the only two applicable and acceptable modes of thought in our current political discourse.

So, we have all been paying this tax, I have had the money coming out of my meager paychecks for over forty years now.  Its a tax, the money is gone.  I have received a whole bunch of benefit for the privilege.  My Mom (84 years old with stage 6-7 Alzheimer's) is being taken care of in an excellent home with caring and professional staff.  That expense took all my SSA deductions, as well as Mom's and my two sisters and then spent some more.   Even if you factored in the "interest" on the government bonds, the money is gone, gone, gone.  We are more than even, the program has been a benefit.

Now, there are those of you who would sneer at my taking the easy way out, but, there wasn't much else to be done.  My savings wouldn't have kept here there for a single year, she in on year three.  I would have had to quit my job or had one of my boys stay home from school to take care of her.  There was only the social security option open.

Now you are probably thinking that I am being disingenuous in saying that something has to be done with the benefits.  After all, didn't I just describe how the programs saved my sanity and possibly my mothers life?

There isn't any conflict in my mind.  The program has been very good to my mother.  But the truth is the amount of money spent is merely being transferred to my sons by the magic of compound interest.

We will all die.  It would be interesting to know how much money is being spent prolonging lives like my mother's?  How much is being spent to keep fellow-citizens from starving when the economy has no further use for them?  How much is being given to comfortable bourgeois to pad their already healthy recreation accounts?  How much of their share is not being paid by the wealthy?

But I think that the first thing that has to be done is a simple statement that the programs supported by the SSA are not an insurance program.  They are a struggling and divided government's attempt to deal with complex and conflicting goals and a fractured body politic.  They are paid for by taxes and the money taken in over the last 83 years has all been spent and we are paying for the services extended by the money taken in from our paychecks every week.

I don't know is Social Security can be saved.  I think that if it cannot be saved, it may well serve as the catalyst for the process that will result, years down the line, of the Balkanization of the US.  It came into being as a means of holding together an angry nation and a broken economy.  It may well go out as failing in its goal.

Head over to Russell's

I have been in a bit of discussion over at "reflexiones finales" on farming in a non-mechanized manner

Russell started out with this:

India's rice revolution
John Vidal, The Guadian (U.K.), 16 February 2013 (hat tip: NC)

Instead of planting three-week-old rice seedlings in clumps of three or four in waterlogged fields, as rice farmers around the world traditionally do, the Darveshpura farmers carefully nurture only half as many seeds, and then transplant the young plants into fields, one by one, when much younger. Additionally, they space them at 25cm intervals in a grid pattern, keep the soil much drier and carefully weed around the plants to allow air to their roots. The premise that "less is more" was taught by Rajiv Kumar, a young Bihar state government extension worker who had been trained in turn by Anil Verma ofProfessional Assistance for Development Action, an Indian NGO which has introduced the SRI method to hundreds of villages in the past three years.

While the "green revolution" that averted Indian famine in the 1970s relied on improved crop varieties, expensive pesticides and chemical fertilisers, SRI appears to offer a long-term, sustainable future for no extra cost. With more than one in seven of the global population going hungry and demand for rice expected to outstrip supply within 20 years, it appears to offer real hope. Even a 30% increase in the yields of the world's small farmers would go a long way to alleviating poverty. 

For a better explanation of the method used, go here

There were some other comments, but the debate got me thinking.

Farming is hard work, but the methods that we use are depend of burning fossil fuels to decrease the workload and increase the yield.  Before that, farmers used many other methods to increase yield, but they all centered around a series of technologies that were pretty poorly understood at the time (composting, fertilizing, monoculture, etc.)

I highly recommend that you go here and download a full text copy of "The One Straw Revolution" by Manusobu Fukuoka. 

You will have to go out yourself and read it, you will have to decide whether there is merit (I would highly recommend the "scientific method", while it is somewhat out of style, it is pretty reliable)

I think that the old gentleman who wrote this book knew what he was talking about.  I spent some time in my Asia-travels to got to his farm and look.  I does appear to work well.  It is very hard work, but it is a lot less labor intensive than the methods used by peasant farmers in the past.  It requires no fossil fuels, no chemical fertilizers.

I would highly recommend trying the method on for size.  It does seem to work.  It does offer a lot

Exxon Hates Your Children

No Comment Required

The Epicurean Dealmaker: Table of Contents

I have always admired T.E.D., he says things that interest me in a clever and erudite manner.

The Epicurean Dealmaker: Table of Contents:

His last couple of posts intrigue me.  He questions the personal value of what he is doing here in Bloggoland, and now he comes up with another idea that intrigues.

In my case, the table of contents will allow me to go over older work, update them, and place them is some kind of whole.  I think that there are some interesting technical issues to be solved as well as refreshing my memory as to the subjects I have already beaten to death.

Gonna do a little work and make some changes

SO...

I am trying to figure out my relationship with this medium.  In a real sense, this blog is a vain affectation.  It makes an assumption that the public commons is a fair outlet for ideas.  I would have to agree that this is true.  But my numbers for folks coming to visit seem to show that either my ideas are stale or my presentation is lame.

Oh well.

The ideas presented here aren't particularly palatable.  When I sit down to think of them, even I am not fond of the conclusions reached.   That overpopulation seems to be at a tipping point.  That resource depletion is getting some firm traction.  That the environmental consequences of these first two points above are going to lubricate the decline we are entering.

What everyone here in Doomerland seems to agree on is the idea that badness happens.  Serious armed-survivalist preppers stock up beans and bullets and hope that they can outlast and outgun the opposition.   The vegan-prepper-survivalists are trying on the idea that being a agrarian peasant is an economic/environmental niche worth exploiting.

What seems obvious to me is that we are very close to a time of compression.  Barring some currently unforeseen and historically unique event, I don't think that the fall will be precipitous one, leading to the Mad Max scenario so adored by the survivalists.   The beans and bullets have a 99+ percent chance of going unused for their original purpose.  The vegans will discover just how hard and precarious the life of an agrarian really is.

The compressive decline ahead of us will be a long-drawn out affair.  The industrial age started around 200-odd years ago.  We have used up right around half of the fossil fuels and even more of the industrial resources.  I won't be a symmetrical bell curve with a 200-year tail, but will probably be asymmetric with a tail on the order of 80-100 years.   The exact term is a negatively-skewed distribution.

So, what I think is that we need to get a firm grasp on the idea of a decline that will take generations.  This in not sexy.  It has no heroes.  It will just take hard work and adaptability.  We will see the unrealistic goals and rewards of the current system be replaced (sometimes forcefully) with something different.  There will be errors made, and scrambling done.  Some lives will be happy, most won't.

In other words, we are going to be returning from Never-Neverland.

Arithmetic on the Frontier
Rudyard Kipling

A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe --
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villanous saltpetre!"
And after -- ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station --
A canter down some dark defile --
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail --
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow
Strike hard who cares -- shoot straight who can --
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

One of my favorites

I am quite disappointed this year by the lack of complaints about football and America’s obsession with football.  The usually peak about this time.  They are remarkably thin this year.
Not that I agree, I love watching football, warts and all.  I loved playing even more. I agree that the game definitely needs to get safer. The head injury issue needs to get worked on and changes have to be made to the rules to lower injury rates.
Naw, that bit went through it’s 24 hour wash-rinse-repeat cycle during the last couple of months.  The hystericals seem to have shot their wad then and are quiet now.  That is too bad, I have really come to appreciate the over the top antics of the “Football as an American Evil” crowd.
Naw, gonna watch some football on Sunday, then the TV gets mothballed for the year