Many people whom I listen to, and read from, have eschewed the idea that the #USA can slip into autocracy, but also many I get news content from were warning early on that it definitely can—and is—happening here.
The "jury" is out and the facts are in. We had a near miss, and it is not over. The woefully, dangerously, well-armed, misguided people who were effectively footsoldiers in this attempt did not see the errors of their ways and recant their thinking. They saw it as a tactic to growing their movement and are planning the next stages.
When comparing #Now to #Then, many experts rely on #Historians for guidance.
That is a convincing argument, but it's one that has hindsight as its aid. Suppose the historian had to decide what the cohesive ideology was as they were evaluating the aggregated news of the time as they first saw it instead of evaluating it many years after it happened.
Well, #MashaGessen has done something similar to that. I felt his words deeply when he said it and talked about what was seen in diaries and journals of the day as #Germany was becoming its worst. Those diaries match our perception of current events.
Compare the following two episodes of the #Throughline #Podcast. The first is an interview with a Historian specializing in inter-war Germany named Timothy Snyder. The second is with a Russian-American journalist, author, translator, and activist named Masha Gessen.
note Timothy's words at the 26:00 time mark
note Masha's words at the 15:00 time mark
Perhaps it's not obvious that I'm not denigrating Timothy's work based on his interview, so I'll specify that I liked what he said. I'm only picking at a little bit of it because Masha's thinking is superior about that point.
It's comparable to a lead section in Jordan Ellenberg’s wonderful book, “How Not To Be Wrong,” when he wrote about where to armor warplanes based on the bullet holes.
Military officers had gathered and studied bullet holes in the aircraft that returned from missions. One early thought was that the planes should have more armor where they had been hit the most— fuselage, fuel system, the rest of the plane— but not on the engines, which had the smallest number of bullet holes per square foot.
Abraham Wald, a leading mathematician, disagreed. Working with the SRG (Statistics Research Group) in Manhattan, he asked an odd question: Where were the missing bullet holes— the ones that would be all over the engine if bullets were equally distributed?
They were on the missing planes, the ones that had been shot down. So the vulnerable place wasn’t where all the bullet holes were on the returning planes. It was where the bullet holes were on the planes that didn’t return.
Restricting your measurements to a final sample, excluding part of the sample that didn’t survive, creates what statisticians call “survivor bias.” It can cause you to come to conclusions that are entirely wrong.
The commonality is using incomplete evidence and hindsight to determine truth/reality. Masha added more evidence.
Because of that recent #PlowedBoiz & #QerNon attack on #Democracy in the #USA, a prolific amount of retrospect was undertaken by content creators of all kinds. Many seem to reflect on the claim, "This isn't us," and have discovered, "Actually it is us, and it's us often."
I'm not sure if Mastodon users see long replies from Friendica correctly, but...
I spun-up a mastodon server for potential business purposes after making a couple of accounts on other mastodon servers because somebody told me it was normal to make an account on each server you want to be on. Their reason for that was you don't get to see the local community feed of an instance if you aren't on it. I didn't know it at the time, but that is a bit against the grain of the Fediverse, despite it being true in practice.
I wasn't that into having multiple accounts. I let a few of them go fallow, and at least one server isn't on anymore.
My instance hit a wall during an upgrade and stopped working. They made it more for Nginx systems than Apache systems, and I have a lot going on Apache. I looked all over the Fediverse for what to do instead of Mastodon and settled on Friendica.
The reason I took you on this diversion is the main reason to have multiple identities on the Fediverse should be based on how you want to express yourself. Friendica has a Facebook level of posting, where you are writing microblogs to interactive long blogs including embedded content. Pixelfed is the new cool kid and is a replacement for Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and other photo-heavy social media options. There are so many nuanced choices, but Mastodon, Friendica, and Pixelfed get you pretty far.
Since you can follow anybody on any Federated system and get their updates, the reading aspect of content is independent of the platform. How you produce content is very platform dependent. That's where multiple accounts matter, but you won't have the same followers on the various accounts, so that makes your outgoing content distribution iffy.
Like you said though, business and personal life seem to be a natural separation. Wherever a person does "code-switching" is a place they would want a different identity. I spin two Friendica instances now; this is the business, and the other is personal.
Sorry to hear that @Michael Rupp. Hope you have a speedy and completely recovery. Thus far the four I personally know who have had covid-19 recovered relatively easy. Kind regards. -Randy
5 Reasons Muslims Convert to Christianity The lifestyle of Christians. Former Muslims cited the love that Christians exhibited in their relationships with non-Christians and their treatment of women as equals https://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2008/winter/9.13.html
Your statement sounds like a claim of something that is universally true. It is not. I believe strongly from my experiences that it's just as easy to find somebody of a Christian collective that wants to harm Muslims, and just as easy to find Muslims who will protect and harbor Christians as it is to find the reverse, or the same for any pairs of religions.
Your experience and that of your collective may bear out the truth of your statement, but I know it's wrong with some of the people I know.
I do a lot of content consumption on the #Twitter, and only rarely reshare it in the #Fediverse, but this one I am. Seth Abramson, the well-known author, dropped a hell of a thread on Twitter yesterday. I read it this morning. He puts together the longer story of International #Corruption but centered on one of the #USA's biggest mistakes in history, Donald #Trump. November he knew about the pandemic and for "thirty pieces of silver" he sold out the world's people to get dirt on the #Biden kid to help his reelection.
Thread by @SethAbramson: (THREAD) This thread summarizes the major-media investigative reporting on the TRUMP-CHINA SCANDAL, a bribery scandal Trump's hunt for dirt on Joe Biden in China, his debts to the Chinese government, and his decision to ignore…
This week, PJ looks into a theory circling the internet about who might be behind QAnon. The investigation takes him back to the beginning of the QAnon scam, and to the message board trolls who started it.
#Amazon #Lies. If you haven't heard the #Reveal #Podcast yet, you are missing a LOT. It's some of the best detailed, coherent, in-depth reporting on a wide array of subjects. Their only #Bias is that they generally report on the situations where the few empowered inflict harm on the many for profits.
This episode Al Letson gets to take another swing at Amazon and I'm pretty sure he 'sent it over the fence'. #Bezos had publically stated that he welcomed scrutiny, so Al delivered it.
If you think this story is just about Amazon, don't worry, they are just the main course. The dessert is the whole for-profit siloed networking system on the Internet.
@Crispin I'm not positive that this message went to you correctly so I'm using a private post to redundantly ensure you get it.
I saw you tried to create an account on this server. Sorry that it didn't work out. Maybe you mistyped an eMail identity? I deleted the four similar attempts in case you wanted to give it another go. The sign-up process sends a default random password to your given email address so the email address must be typed accurately.
However, you need not have an account on this server to interact with it. That's the beauty of the Federation. The main difference is you can't easily filter down to the posts on the local community of a server that you don't have an account on. Not really a big deal. My servers have the public posts available on the Community page for the server anyway.
Hosted by Michelin-rated restaurateur, Josh Kopel, Full Comp features engaging interviews with restaurant owners, experts and thought leaders within the hospitality industry. Featured guests offer up stories and advice, giving listeners the tools and knowledge they need to succeed
When you first install your own #Webserver on your own #Hardware, everything pretty much goes easy and right. Over time you get more complex with things. Then upgrades start to roll in. Eventually, you make a mistake and nobody notices anything. Because you care about the content on the #Server, you spend time on that, not reading logs and outputs of cron jobs. You miss some things that would have been great to know. Then in what seems like a flash, you are in Murphy's Law territory.
It's stunning how much a person doesn't know about things they know so much about.
Hi @Michael Rupp. There is a lot of value is casual system observation, right? Just poking around looking at logs, noticing runtime on processes, etc. Having a "feel" for a system then helps when changes create issues not visible to higher levels. Take & stay safe. -Randy
And as I usually say in Github Issue posts, "I'm a hack admin..." I thought I had all my problems sorted out till this morning when my smart-phone couldn't upload a file to the Nextcloud server I manage. device: "You don't have permission to upload into this folder." me: 'THE HELL I DON'T!!!' device: "We are occupying two different realities. Mine Matters." me: '...' Back into the NULL pointer go I.
Hello @Carol Kehoe I regret to inform you that while experimenting with the OutsourcedMath.com email server it has been noticed that two messages are stuck in the queue trying to notify you that EverythingElseNews has posted things. It might be another week of trying to serve eMail directly before I give up and start relaying it through MailGun again.
I didn't think any users on the system would be having eMail notifications turned on.
This is a good post for the !Stock Picking Discussion forum because every #Investment decision is based in #Statistics for the purpose of limiting #Risk. Said another way, finding facts to predict outcomes, or at least to predict what can't happen. However, as was made famous by this quote, …
Linked at the bottom is a famous book that teaches people how to see the lies that duplicitous people will tell through statistics. The embedded podcast here is a recent episode of #TheGist by #MikePesca where during the interview portion (time 6:00 to 22:00), we hear the guest indicate a lot of the perversions of the data which helped the new Gobbels—William Barr—make his recent statements that there isn't #InstitutionalRacism.
Splashing Down on a Mountain of Racism
Barr isn't lying through his teeth, he's lying through other people's statistics. Please do whatever you can to educate yourself about statistics. It will help you to see the lies promoters of securities will tell. (skip to 8:25)
Attorney General Barr Denies Claims Of Political Interference In DOJ
Okay, this one is going into !Stock Picking Discussion but I don't think it's obvious as to why, so I will explain.
During the course of the show, they have a very wise discussion of the possible reasons so many #WhitePeople joined #BlackPeople in the #BlackLivesMatter protests. It's all sound reasoning. It's not what my point it though, but the details they discuss will be worth memorizing for your future.
Social Unrest is one of the most #powerful #indicators of how the real #economy is doing and also how well the current #Politics, #Laws & #Regulations are serving the people the #government is supposed to represent. It takes a lot for people to get off their asses and #protest in #hostile #environments. That's a big indicator of a shit economy and/or shit politics. So the #financial #news may tell you one thing, but the #social #unrest tells you the truth. The #Stock #Market has a generally repeating set of patterns after presidential elections, and I urge you to try doing some charting with the S&P500 to see what things look like and segregate your results by the type of leaders running and who won. They tell a story you should know.
What they discuss in the podcast will add to your personal set of market predictors. Leading indicators like this are valuable.
I'm extremely fond of the hosts Kai Ryssdal & Molly Wood as well as the content of the show even though I'm about to criticize a moment of Wednesday's show below. Their work is great, their humanity is exemplary.
Something triggered a visceral & bad feeling when I heard the quote of the venerated Adam Smith
Adam Smith wrote:
"Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production."
Here's the gist of the content of the show before the quote:
audience question about the work-from-home market ...
high pay workers moving to low-cost locations ...
Apple can not/should not pay American level wages in China ...
can't have the same labor wage across the globe ...
why not?
WORMHOLE ...
some distracting banter ...
audience question Can has Economy not based on Consumerism? ...
Kai says no, then quotes Adam Smith...
Molly and I simultaneously have our brains go into skeptic mode and Molly's went too fast ...
There is a lot to unpack, and I'm going to come back to why I reacted to the spurious idea inside the quote later.
If Silicon Valley people move to rural places with big money flowing to them because teleworking, some of the excess money will drop on the scene, it's going to splash off onto the people that live there. Like Yacht's are disgusting opulence, but the people who built them got paid. You won't have a lot of friends in town if you tip small but they find out you are earning 1,000x the local wages. If you ask the local builders to make an ice-ring addition on your 2,000 square-foot home, you will be charged more than if the town commissioned the job for public use.
Molly, if you are reading this, write labor is not an invasive species on the chalkboard 100 times. the population of high paid people is small and if they do diaspora it's not going to change much. The place they leave will feel it more than the place they go to.
Geography dependant wages have a plethora of reasons behind them. For one, Silicon Valley with all their secrets and espionage wouldn't be able to secure their ideas if people could work from everywhere; e.g. the CIA will not move their headquarters to China. Also, the biggest players need the best people to stay ahead of the competitors, so the talent moves to where the geography pulls it to (depending a lot on the economic and moral value system of the talented). In the type of labor that requires the production of goods, or the performance of in-person services (think factories, mechanics, carpenters, lawyers, doctors, and so on), the topography of wages across the Earths surface will be dependant on supply and demand of the thing adjusted for the population density and some other factors. Land is a scarce resource and that's why in cities you have to manufacture land by creating taller buildings. Too many people want the same land, so you take the footprint of the land and multiply it by the number of floors you set on top of it to try making the footprint cheaper per square unit. This base cost of doing business raises the ask for all goods and services and has to be higher as a consequence where the population density is higher. Density decides the price of the wages, not the wages deciding the price of the land. The more economic engines a location has to attract people the higher the density gets. If your product can be delivered from afar, the owners of the company get a bigger share of the selling price, this is because they can absolutely underpay but relatively overpay a worker in Flint to build an item they sell in NYC for full price; build in low density, sell in high density. The ability to move to where things are produced to a location where people are more disadvantaged and/or the cost of living is lower can only lower the wages, never raise them. Where it moved away from becomes more desperate so asks for less to do something. When the production moves again is when the new place becomes skilled and has enough money and power to ask for more. The wages will not go up till industrialists without morals run out of downtrodden people on the Earth; better pack a lunch.
So now, what if a person is a factory unto themselves who can build in one place and deliver in another place? They are the owner and the labor of their system. If their product/service is unique enough and has value to more people than it can be produced for, they can ask whatever they want to make it wherever they want and deliver it to wherever they want. That type of person/product/service is rare indeed. Most of us and our abilities are commoditized, so if we say we won't do it another person will replace us fairly quickly. Most of also can't leave an area because we are emotionally attached to people places and things in an area and languages, and foods, and so on. We can't move like a factory and that is a disadvantage for labor.
I'm finally circling back to Adam Smith and Kai. When he said it, it sounded like it was right; like truthiness. But it bothered me like to me it felt like a broken clock that is right twice a day and close to right a lot of time in the day depending on how accurate you need the time to be. I also feel like I'm hearing a man tell me that he saw a cart pushing a horse up a street. I think Molly started to do the mathematical thing where you generalize the statement testing for counterexamples by asking questions, like what is "production", like does a mom produce babies.
I think it would be more accurate to say, extending one's life and culture is the sole purpose of all human activity and most human activity is the production of goods and the performance of services. I could be easily taking Adam Smith out of context, but I don't think I'm taking the way Kai used it out of context. Kai just finished reading parts of a nuanced question and called TLDR then quoted Adam Smith. The word "consumerism" which the audience questioner used is nuanced, the ideas of production & consumption stated in the Smith quote are nuanced, but it got whipped out there in a declarative way that was intended to stop discussion on the topic. I know nearly nothing about producing a radio show, time constraints, and so on, so I'm not assembling a posse to right this wrong, yet it compelled this post and the things linking to it.
Is a metal tool with a lifetime guarantee that you have multiple generations using ever consumed? Do I consume art when I look at a painting? Do I produce smiles for the consumption of others? Has nobody ever failed at trying to produce something? Like built something they thought was great but nobody bought/consumed it? You can't consume what has yet to be produced so consuming can't start the production.
How about this instead? Solving problems and making life easier is the sole driving force behind all innovation/invention, and popular inventions have a strong calling, so production must be done to satisfy that demand, and if the invention is difficult to make or scaling it up can lower the cost it will be produced in mass, and if the product doesn't last long it will be consumed repeatedly.
Let's think about food & shelter. We consume food, but we don't really produce it, the Earth produces it and was doing that before us, we just sort out the bad planning of nature in order to have the Earth get more made per square foot (I'm not saying that's healthy for us though.). And we do produce shelter, though we don't really consume it. Sure we use it, but the intention is not to make it deteriorate from us using it so not a consumed good. This one is for Molly, we produce babies, but not to consume them, we do it because we are compelled to.
Regarding the specific thing about consumerism from a listener, think about the parallels between illegal drugs and all other products. Illegal drugs have almost no lasting value, and if they were never introduced into the world, we would all have been better off. They are marketed in a way that people who shouldn't consume them do, and the value they cost the world is greater than the value they give their consumers. Many legal products fit that form. Advertisers, like Steve Jobs hacked brains and forced people to think they needed something they didn't, overcharged for it, and left a lot of environmental degradation in the process of doing that. So very many products would not be consumed if they weren't marketed with psychological hacks, they cost much and they deliver little. They warp culture into something it doesn't need to be and it makes the majority of people worse off for the benefit of the few.
Kai, you should have said, "yes, we could have an economy without consumerism, it just would be a different one than what we have now. I don't know if it would be better or worse, but it would probably be better the way you asked the question."
This is the embedded audio player for the show attached at the bottom of the post.
Due to some acts of omission, or neglect, by the admin (thats me), people who opted for eMail notifications to Introduction Requests were not getting them. It was discovered Friendica had been sending them out as noreply@outsourcedmath.com but that wasn't an existing account for eMail on the server. It still isn't, but I believe the SMTP handler for the system—MailGun—will now permit the outbound notifications from this Friendica instance.
If you discover that Introduction Requests made after this announcement did not subsequently send out an eMail notification and your settings are specifically set to have eMail notifications, please complain directly to me.
To address the "#WTF does this have to do with 'Stock Picking' since it's posted there (here)?", I'll first say corruption in a #social #system for any set of collective living things is the equivalent of #friction or #drag in #Physics; energy is dissipated in a way that it cannot be recovered. This means value is lost ubiquitously within society in a way that could be avoided where loss due to depreciation and wear of capital goods cannot be avoided. That loss damages the overall #Economy, and more starkly effects the subsystem of all things directly connected to the specific acts of corruption.
Society can collectively address that corruption if it is informed of it and if it affects all the individuals' value systems enough to motivate them to demand change.
The policing systems in the #UnitedStates do not even need to be #Mindfully aware that they are corrupt for it to be de facto corruption. The mindset of the systems pawns/soldiers wearing blue and black shirts—based on training and direction of commanding officers and their manuals—are jamming the court system and the prison system with people of meager means for the benefit of for-profit prison systems, and the excessive profit handed to the few is being taken from all of us in a very costly way. The benefit to society locally—if those put into the system were even really guilty of something—is negligible compared to the cost we all bear collectively when we unknowingly support the corruption in the system. Books can be written about the details of the human value lost to our society when a poor person goes to jail for smoking #Marijuana or making a #FurtiveMovement. Think of the change in your personal economic burden if you went from just looking out for yourself, to taking care of a parent who suddenly had a stroke and is now in an immobile state. That example is more #economically pronounced than when your pot-dealer goes to jail, but it's only a matter of scale in difference. The big difference in that metaphor is that your parent would have to have been medically forced into the stroke by their doctor, and it's not really your parent, but the hospital decided you had to financially take care of them, and the hospital will bill you annually for their services through your taxes so you can't see that line item.
The good news is there is a way to remove an #Insidious portion of the #Mindlessly administered corruption of #PoliceBrutality and it's proven effective. You may know the promoter of this method by his sky-blue vest appearing at demonstrations and rallies like #BlackLivesMatter. He displays a type of #Genius that almost hints of Asperger's Spectrum; he's DeRay Mckesson.
I heard him speaking yesterday on the Pod Save America #Podcast at about halfway through the show (skip to 44:35 and he's done by 55:40).I heard him plug the webpage of his successful method, "Police Use Of Force Project", so I attached it below.
Spoiler Alert...
All it is is to alter the policies inside the existing bureaucracies for the use of force. Just 8 common-sense policy changes have reduced 72% of #Manslaughters / #Murders by the Police on our #Citizens.
So to bring this all back home, you can either think about who wins from the corruption and invest in that, think about who loses from the corruption and short-sell that, or start fighting the corruption and we all win together.
...or...
Do any combination of those including all of them.
While listening to The Congressional Dish #Podcast, I heard about The Dollop and couldn't resist sampling it. I'm drawing peoples attention to #Reagan aka: Ron Ray Gun. He has been deified by many #Conservatives, #Right-Winger's, and #Evangelical #Christians. I'll admit to being ignorant enough to think he was a good thing for #America when I was younger and I was more likely to swallow #Propaganda whole because it had #Truthiness. I'm older and wiser now and don't think in bumper-sticker sized ideas.
These two windows into the life and times of Ron & Nancy Reagan were pretty eye-opening to me and I already have a lot of #Economic reasons to detest him for his hidden agenda connected to his actions.
I hope you take the time to listen to them.
Ronald Reagan, Part 1 with Patton Oswalt | The Dollop #400
Ronald Reagan, Part 2 with Patton Oswalt | The Dollop #400
The NYT reports that Trump's chief election dirty trickster, Erik Prince, has been trying to infiltrate liberal groups through a nationwide spy network. Now Trump says violence by liberal groups should give him sweeping powers.
I don't know how long it was sitting in my #Netflix queue waiting to be watched, but The China Hustle is really on! It's a #GiveTheGameAway type documentary. It shows us that the King has no clothes and pulls away the curtain showing the Wizard of Oz is a meager humbug.
I didn't realize this show was a show at first. I thought it was a concept that was being talked about on shows I already listened to, but instead, it was the host describing where the title came from. They were making the show for almost 4 years before I started to listen to it.
"Code-Switching" is something almost everybody does. The more power you have the less you have to do it. If you change how you interact with people at work or school so that it's different from how you interact with friends in a locker room, a bar, a living room playing video games, and so on, you have done code-switching.
If you have interacted with a minority in an environment that you were in the majority and they were not, they probably had to code-switch to please you.
This podcast is good enough that you should just start at the first one and listen your way through all of them to get up to date.
Friendica software. To learn how to make your own, go look at https://friendi.ca
they interviewed Alexey Kovalev (Head of Investigative Reporting at MeduZa), about some fairly current events.
I was pretty impressed by the things I heard him say on the show so I took a look at their #News companies website. I like it a lot!