I am not an economist (although I've taken a few graduate classes) so take the following with a grain of salt...
1) It strikes me that if Japan is selling large amounts of debt, and it's almost all being bought domestically, they have a problem with their tax structure. Selling interest-bearing bonds seems like a very inefficient way to do income redistribution.
2) As I recall the basic welfare theorems that justify the use of prices to match supply and demand, they say "There exists some initial distribution of wealth and set of prices that maximizes utility." Soon after, the initial distribution of wealth assumption disappeared from the discussion. This seemed a shame, since to paraphrase someone, the US government is primarily an income/wealth redistribution system with a very large military tacked on.
3) The answer to all of the problems the experts claim shrinking populations or shrinking worker-to-retiree ratios will cause is productivity: getting more out of the available resources (labor, electricity, land, water, etc).
4) Can't speak to Japan, but one of my long-standing complaints about the US is that forcing the elderly back into employment doesn't work if "employment" means eight hours plus commuting time five days a week, 50 weeks per year.
5) With respect to #3 and #4, I have been known to complain bitterly that US business management has gotten incredibly lazy and cheap, unwilling to be flexible or invest in education and productivity tools.
USA Fencing (the national governing body for sport fencing in the US) starts Veteran categories at age 40. They keep adding higher age categories, recognizing that 60-year-olds can't generally keep up with 40-year-olds. At this year's national tournament, there was a Vet-80 category. There are online videos of the finals bouts in Vet-80. Some of the age-related health problems -- eg, many forms of cancer -- just come with the territory as things wear out at the cell level. More of the elderly health care problems are related to people just going sedentary at some point.
I recall visiting a club where one of the members was an 84-year-old who won a silver in epee at the Olympics in the 1950s. All of the local members seemed to be ignoring him despite his being dressed out, so I made a point of asking him to fence. He couldn't move and fence both, so he stayed in one place. But his eye was sharp, his wrist was quick and strong, and if you left any sort of opening on your weapon arm, he hit it. The club owner thanked me later for taking the time. I never did find out how an 84-year-old Eastern European fencer ended up living in Lincoln, NE.
For some reason, there are no fencing clubs within a reasonable driving distance of Fort Collins. This strikes me as particularly odd since it's a university town. I miss it.
On a more serious note, I know some WP, but mostly things related to attaching odd bits of PHP to the standard hooks in various ways. For pulling stuff out of the database -- eg, some subset of comments -- I only know things that have PHP shorthand calls, not SQL. I know about get_comments(), but nothing about the underlying database calls.
I'm a long-timer Perl programmer, so I just think of PHP as Perl with a lot of the useful stuff stripped out.
Throughout my tech career, I always said that I was glad there were people who seemed to be interested in database design, because it meant I didn't have to worry about it.
...could anyone, even Ezra Klein, assert that Charlie Kirk was “doing Christianity the right way”?
Tony, I believe there are tens of millions of people in the United States who believe in straight white male nationalism with a side of selective interpretation of biblical texts and assert that Charlie Kirk was doing Christianity the right way.
Ah, topology. When I was in graduate school I took a topology class where the professor used the Moore Method. No textbook. For each unit there was a handout with a bunch of definitions and a few examples. Then a list of theorems. Prove the true ones, find counterexamples (or proofs of falseness) for the false ones. Class time was students at the board going through their results. If no one had a result, a random student was put at the board while everyone gave suggestions.
I was amazed that there were smart people who had that many years of school behind them and didn't understand the basic management skill for that sort of class. If I had a proof for #3, and nothing for #4 or #5, I was already on the way to the board before the professor could finish asking, "Does anyone want to take a crack at #3?"
I'm glad Disqus isn't being considered. The Lawyers, Guns & Money blog switched to Disqus because handling their large comment volume was beyond the capability of the WordPress built-in system or available plug-ins. A very regular comment is someone asking, "Is it just me, or is Disqus more screwed up than normal today?" From time to time I add a comment there to the effect of, "If I weren't so lazy, I'd round up some of the commenters who are also retired geeks and we'd write a system to be what Disqus wanted."
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland.
This is in the same category as "who are your people?" questions.
At a party once, standing on the outskirts of a conversation and not really paying attention, someone asked, "And what about you, Mike? Who are your people?" I think the answer was supposed to be something like the English, or the Baptists, but what popped out of my mouth before I had even thought about it was, "The applied mathematicians."
At some point, with any luck at all, an administration which actually believes in the law may try to arrest and try those responsible.
In my honest but non-lawyer opinion, not a chance. US Navy action in international waters: the legal questions that may reach civilian courts will be about authorization to use force; those under the UCMJ will be about rules of engagement. Obama and Biden weren't as bad as Bush and Trump, but all four stretched the hell out of Congress's AUMFs on terrorism including rules of engagement. To be blunt about it, from 2001 the US military has been in the assassination business. My prediction is the best we might expect is that suspected drug smugglers outside of US waters will be made non-targets going forward*.
Part of me says that this is an inevitable outgrowth of drone technology. The idea has been kicking around for many years. In Real Genius (1985) the purpose of the 5 MW one-shot laser is assassination from a bomber flying tens/hundreds of miles away. The main piece of military porn in Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000) is smart bombs that can be dumped from high altitude, then autonomously identify targets and strike straight down, wiping out whole divisions' worth of armor while the top brass watch from the other side of the world via a drone called Marilyn Monroe.
* I have an occasional nightmare that my kids probably and my granddaughters certainly will live to see the day when the 20 km on the Mexican side of the border will be labeled a no-go zone. Spotter drones and artillery will enforce it against climate refugees. And yes, in the nightmare Tijuana and Juárez and all the smaller cities have been reduced to rubble.
The Academica theme is oriented a little more towards discussions. It's what I used when I was fooling around at the beginning of the month and trying to recreate the old layout. I prefer the new look overall. My main complaint (with my script disabled) is that there's way too much vertical white space.
WordPress provides an "Additional CSS" textbox in one of its configuration places that's a convenient way to override the theme's styling. Of course, using it requires that you have some understanding of the theme's use of CSS classes, ids, etc. Or you can define a plug-in that has just enough PHP to load a CSS file that overrides the style. I probably haven't said this here before since the old site was Typepad, but between the core/theme/plugin model, PHP, and CSS, WordPress has managed to recreate all of the development nightmares of late-90s Microsoft Windows.
I won't be of any help here. I have a piece of JavaScript that runs on every page that I download. It forces my own choice of fonts, sizes, vertical spacing, and color adjustments on the text. I've already changed the small part that is specific to Obsidian Wings. Between a good adblocker and my script, my view of the Web is much more consistent and less garish than what non-fanatic people see. Y'all may decide that Papyrus is the official Font of Moderation, but I'll still see Noto Serif.
The JavaScript thing got started one day when I encountered too many pages that made you want to find the designer so you could ask, "Did you study ugly and unreadable in school, or are you just naturally gifted?"
I'm a believer in the original spirit of HTML -- the writer gets to specify structure, but presentation decisions belong to the reader. If it's important that the text be rendered in some obscure spidery gothic font, well, that's what PDF is for.
The Constitution already gives power over them exclusively to Congress.
Who delegated some amount of that power to the President, in the event of an emergency. Congress didn't specify what was an emergency and what not. The current SCOTUS seems inclined to the position that absent a specification, an emergency is whatever the President says it is.
For someone soon to turn 72, I seem to have remarkably few aches and pains. My sister is younger, and I have quit comparing notes with her because I feel guilty. Given our two histories, I'm the one you would expect to have painful worn-out joints*. All of mine seem to be cranking along fine. She's replaced both knees, one hip, one shoulder, and had an ankle rebuilt.
For the record, last time out on the bicycle I did 20 miles. I have had to admit that I will be the slowest person on the trail from now on, because the people I used to pass have all got e-bikes. I'm old-fashioned, I guess -- the goal is to conquer the uphill bits on your own, not to pass the job over to some batteries.
* Bicycling since I was six with the inevitable falls, plus off-and-on golf, racquet sports, soccer, basketball, softball, hiking/climbing, fencing, lugging around children (and now grandchildren). A variety of joints occasionally sprained, with only amateur stretching and PT routines during recovery. Tossed down the side of a mountain by a horse once.
I remain a registered Democrat. However, here in Colorado we recently passed the point where more than half of all registered voters are registered as "unaffiliated". My first reaction when I read the story in the local paper was to wonder if people were hiding from the nastiness.
Indeed, I will be unsurprised if NO Korean companies are willing to consider new facilities in the US.
One big question is the massive integrated circuit fab Samsung is building in Texas. It's supposed to cost $17B to build fully, and some small parts are preparing to open soon. The motivation behind it is, of course, both Biden and Trump's insistence that Samsung and TSMC bring their bleeding-edge technology to the US. The fab complex is so large that some of Samsung's primary Korean suppliers have also started building large operations nearby.
So this is by way of a test, to see if posts with links automatically go into moderation:
WordPress has a stock filter that puts comments with more than n links into moderation automatically. Somewhere in the settings the value of n can be changed.
Iirc it was the post right before “What to do?” but the wayback machine’s last entry is for Aug 23, and it was later than that
Right after "What to do?" I have it w/o any comments in a different file and will send that to lj. By the time I tried extracting it with comments, Typepad had gone into partial failure mode. I'll keep checking from time to time in hopes that they get it running properly for a few more days before the final shutdown.
Spam filters are part of each hosting service's "secret sauce". Wherever we end up, I can pretty much guarantee that legitimate comments will still go into spam, but for a different set of unknown reasons.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Japan unleashed”
I am not an economist (although I've taken a few graduate classes) so take the following with a grain of salt...
1) It strikes me that if Japan is selling large amounts of debt, and it's almost all being bought domestically, they have a problem with their tax structure. Selling interest-bearing bonds seems like a very inefficient way to do income redistribution.
2) As I recall the basic welfare theorems that justify the use of prices to match supply and demand, they say "There exists some initial distribution of wealth and set of prices that maximizes utility." Soon after, the initial distribution of wealth assumption disappeared from the discussion. This seemed a shame, since to paraphrase someone, the US government is primarily an income/wealth redistribution system with a very large military tacked on.
3) The answer to all of the problems the experts claim shrinking populations or shrinking worker-to-retiree ratios will cause is productivity: getting more out of the available resources (labor, electricity, land, water, etc).
4) Can't speak to Japan, but one of my long-standing complaints about the US is that forcing the elderly back into employment doesn't work if "employment" means eight hours plus commuting time five days a week, 50 weeks per year.
5) With respect to #3 and #4, I have been known to complain bitterly that US business management has gotten incredibly lazy and cheap, unwilling to be flexible or invest in education and productivity tools.
"
USA Fencing (the national governing body for sport fencing in the US) starts Veteran categories at age 40. They keep adding higher age categories, recognizing that 60-year-olds can't generally keep up with 40-year-olds. At this year's national tournament, there was a Vet-80 category. There are online videos of the finals bouts in Vet-80. Some of the age-related health problems -- eg, many forms of cancer -- just come with the territory as things wear out at the cell level. More of the elderly health care problems are related to people just going sedentary at some point.
I recall visiting a club where one of the members was an 84-year-old who won a silver in epee at the Olympics in the 1950s. All of the local members seemed to be ignoring him despite his being dressed out, so I made a point of asking him to fence. He couldn't move and fence both, so he stayed in one place. But his eye was sharp, his wrist was quick and strong, and if you left any sort of opening on your weapon arm, he hit it. The club owner thanked me later for taking the time. I never did find out how an 84-year-old Eastern European fencer ended up living in Lincoln, NE.
For some reason, there are no fencing clubs within a reasonable driving distance of Fort Collins. This strikes me as particularly odd since it's a university town. I miss it.
On “Ad futurum”
On a more serious note, I know some WP, but mostly things related to attaching odd bits of PHP to the standard hooks in various ways. For pulling stuff out of the database -- eg, some subset of comments -- I only know things that have PHP shorthand calls, not SQL. I know about get_comments(), but nothing about the underlying database calls.
I'm a long-timer Perl programmer, so I just think of PHP as Perl with a lot of the useful stuff stripped out.
"
...or some knowledge of mySQL?
Throughout my tech career, I always said that I was glad there were people who seemed to be interested in database design, because it meant I didn't have to worry about it.
On “Ezra Coates DESTROYS Ta-Nehisi Klein!!!”
...could anyone, even Ezra Klein, assert that Charlie Kirk was “doing Christianity the right way”?
Tony, I believe there are tens of millions of people in the United States who believe in straight white male nationalism with a side of selective interpretation of biblical texts and assert that Charlie Kirk was doing Christianity the right way.
On “Gnarly knot, dude!”
Ah, topology. When I was in graduate school I took a topology class where the professor used the Moore Method. No textbook. For each unit there was a handout with a bunch of definitions and a few examples. Then a list of theorems. Prove the true ones, find counterexamples (or proofs of falseness) for the false ones. Class time was students at the board going through their results. If no one had a result, a random student was put at the board while everyone gave suggestions.
I was amazed that there were smart people who had that many years of school behind them and didn't understand the basic management skill for that sort of class. If I had a proof for #3, and nothing for #4 or #5, I was already on the way to the board before the professor could finish asking, "Does anyone want to take a crack at #3?"
On “Precursors continued”
I'm glad Disqus isn't being considered. The Lawyers, Guns & Money blog switched to Disqus because handling their large comment volume was beyond the capability of the WordPress built-in system or available plug-ins. A very regular comment is someone asking, "Is it just me, or is Disqus more screwed up than normal today?" From time to time I add a comment there to the effect of, "If I weren't so lazy, I'd round up some of the commenters who are also retired geeks and we'd write a system to be what Disqus wanted."
On “Rule Six, there is NO … Rule Six!…”
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland.
This is in the same category as "who are your people?" questions.
At a party once, standing on the outskirts of a conversation and not really paying attention, someone asked, "And what about you, Mike? Who are your people?" I think the answer was supposed to be something like the English, or the Baptists, but what popped out of my mouth before I had even thought about it was, "The applied mathematicians."
On “IANAL, but…”
At some point, with any luck at all, an administration which actually believes in the law may try to arrest and try those responsible.
In my honest but non-lawyer opinion, not a chance. US Navy action in international waters: the legal questions that may reach civilian courts will be about authorization to use force; those under the UCMJ will be about rules of engagement. Obama and Biden weren't as bad as Bush and Trump, but all four stretched the hell out of Congress's AUMFs on terrorism including rules of engagement. To be blunt about it, from 2001 the US military has been in the assassination business. My prediction is the best we might expect is that suspected drug smugglers outside of US waters will be made non-targets going forward*.
Part of me says that this is an inevitable outgrowth of drone technology. The idea has been kicking around for many years. In Real Genius (1985) the purpose of the 5 MW one-shot laser is assassination from a bomber flying tens/hundreds of miles away. The main piece of military porn in Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000) is smart bombs that can be dumped from high altitude, then autonomously identify targets and strike straight down, wiping out whole divisions' worth of armor while the top brass watch from the other side of the world via a drone called Marilyn Monroe.
* I have an occasional nightmare that my kids probably and my granddaughters certainly will live to see the day when the 20 km on the Mexican side of the border will be labeled a no-go zone. Spotter drones and artillery will enforce it against climate refugees. And yes, in the nightmare Tijuana and Juárez and all the smaller cities have been reduced to rubble.
On “Time for a makeover: a webpage design thread”
The Academica theme is oriented a little more towards discussions. It's what I used when I was fooling around at the beginning of the month and trying to recreate the old layout. I prefer the new look overall. My main complaint (with my script disabled) is that there's way too much vertical white space.
WordPress provides an "Additional CSS" textbox in one of its configuration places that's a convenient way to override the theme's styling. Of course, using it requires that you have some understanding of the theme's use of CSS classes, ids, etc. Or you can define a plug-in that has just enough PHP to load a CSS file that overrides the style. I probably haven't said this here before since the old site was Typepad, but between the core/theme/plugin model, PHP, and CSS, WordPress has managed to recreate all of the development nightmares of late-90s Microsoft Windows.
"
I won't be of any help here. I have a piece of JavaScript that runs on every page that I download. It forces my own choice of fonts, sizes, vertical spacing, and color adjustments on the text. I've already changed the small part that is specific to Obsidian Wings. Between a good adblocker and my script, my view of the Web is much more consistent and less garish than what non-fanatic people see. Y'all may decide that Papyrus is the official Font of Moderation, but I'll still see Noto Serif.
The JavaScript thing got started one day when I encountered too many pages that made you want to find the designer so you could ask, "Did you study ugly and unreadable in school, or are you just naturally gifted?"
I'm a believer in the original spirit of HTML -- the writer gets to specify structure, but presentation decisions belong to the reader. If it's important that the text be rendered in some obscure spidery gothic font, well, that's what PDF is for.
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
Lest anyone think I'm asserting that I'm immune to aging, I have a list of things to demonstrate that I'm not. It's just that none of them hurt.
On “An experimental first post”
The Constitution already gives power over them exclusively to Congress.
Who delegated some amount of that power to the President, in the event of an emergency. Congress didn't specify what was an emergency and what not. The current SCOTUS seems inclined to the position that absent a specification, an emergency is whatever the President says it is.
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
For someone soon to turn 72, I seem to have remarkably few aches and pains. My sister is younger, and I have quit comparing notes with her because I feel guilty. Given our two histories, I'm the one you would expect to have painful worn-out joints*. All of mine seem to be cranking along fine. She's replaced both knees, one hip, one shoulder, and had an ankle rebuilt.
For the record, last time out on the bicycle I did 20 miles. I have had to admit that I will be the slowest person on the trail from now on, because the people I used to pass have all got e-bikes. I'm old-fashioned, I guess -- the goal is to conquer the uphill bits on your own, not to pass the job over to some batteries.
* Bicycling since I was six with the inevitable falls, plus off-and-on golf, racquet sports, soccer, basketball, softball, hiking/climbing, fencing, lugging around children (and now grandchildren). A variety of joints occasionally sprained, with only amateur stretching and PT routines during recovery. Tossed down the side of a mountain by a horse once.
On “Notes about commenting”
Final test, I'm now logged out but have had comments approved for this post.
"
The last one did. Testing to see if this comment goes to moderation while I'm logged in.
"
Testing to see if this comment goes to moderation or not.
On “Guestpost from Wonkie”
I remain a registered Democrat. However, here in Colorado we recently passed the point where more than half of all registered voters are registered as "unaffiliated". My first reaction when I read the story in the local paper was to wonder if people were hiding from the nastiness.
On “Hyudai, meet ICE”
Indeed, I will be unsurprised if NO Korean companies are willing to consider new facilities in the US.
One big question is the massive integrated circuit fab Samsung is building in Texas. It's supposed to cost $17B to build fully, and some small parts are preparing to open soon. The motivation behind it is, of course, both Biden and Trump's insistence that Samsung and TSMC bring their bleeding-edge technology to the US. The fab complex is so large that some of Samsung's primary Korean suppliers have also started building large operations nearby.
On “Excelsior!”
So this is by way of a test, to see if posts with links automatically go into moderation:
WordPress has a stock filter that puts comments with more than n links into moderation automatically. Somewhere in the settings the value of n can be changed.
"
At the archive, many/all of the comments are duplicated.
"
Iirc it was the post right before “What to do?” but the wayback machine’s last entry is for Aug 23, and it was later than that
Right after "What to do?" I have it w/o any comments in a different file and will send that to lj. By the time I tried extracting it with comments, Typepad had gone into partial failure mode. I'll keep checking from time to time in hopes that they get it running properly for a few more days before the final shutdown.
On “What to do?”
GftNC, most of the Olmsted links are dead, or will be come Sep 30. Some maintenance will be required.
"
So, adversarial AI training, out in the wild. What could possibly go wrong?
"
Spam filters are part of each hosting service's "secret sauce". Wherever we end up, I can pretty much guarantee that legitimate comments will still go into spam, but for a different set of unknown reasons.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.