A well-considered rebuttal of critics of the school board in Tennessee who removed Maus from their middle-school curriculum.

My friend in NY laments the lack of a model of cooperation in his software work.

http://scripting.com/2022/02/08/164711.html?title=whereAreTheBeatlesOfSoftware

Hmm. Kernighan and Ritchie?

When I was young, I lived in a State house. This is a house that was built 50 years earlier by the NZ government for the purpose of satisfying the need for low-income housing. The houses are solid, if unremarkable, and spread all over the country.

In the 1980’s, the Government offered a bunch of these houses for sale, with first right of refusal going to the occupants. Many people took them up on it, and bought into the housing market for a low cost. Effectively, the Government subsidized the purchase of peoples’ first house. Many of those people are now in the fortunate position of owning a house in one of the most unaffordable markets on the planet.

In the US, there’s an agency constituted to help rental tenants own their first house, too, that was set up under the New Deal, Fanny Mae (FNMA). Their charter was to make available and administer the newly-invented 30-year mortgage, a tool that was created at the time specifically to allow people to buy their first home. Some time later, a sister organization, Freddy Mac (FRMC) was set up by Congress for similar reasons, as a way to support buying a house for regular people.

After the bailout of the finance sector that happened after 2008, Wall Street used a chunk of the money given them by the taxpayer to buy up newly-available houses from people who suddenly couldn’t afford their mortgages. They are running them into the ground for a quick profit.

Today, many of these purchases by Wall Street are financed by Freddy Mac at a below-market rate. So the US government, unlike the NZ government, has chosen to use low-cost loans to subsidize the purchase of homes not by the tenants who need the break, but by finance whose incentive is to badly manage the asset for an immediate profit (hiking fees, rental rates and skimping on maintenance) and flip it on.

Pluralistic article “Wall Street’s landlord business is turning every rental into a slum”

This follows a standard playbook for the US government. A problem for some segment of the population is identified, and legislation passed to fund a solution. Rather than simply distributing those funds to the population, however, a private partnership is entered into whereby companies are asked to do the work, and the funding given to them. Oddly enough, this generally leads to corruption, mismanagement, an enrichment of a few smart enough to get on board, and a failure to fix the problem.

The money distributed for relief of suffering during the pandemic is a good example of both approaches. One program, paying families for the cost of child care while schools were not safe to open, was administered as a direct payment to recipients’ bank accounts, and has been reckoned to be the single factor most responsible for pulling 40% of children across the poverty line. Another program, the PPP “loan” for small business (a grant, if used for its intended purpose of furloughing workers) was administered by the banking system in conjunction with the federal government; at least one bank is now being sued for demanding repayment of loans in violation of the conditions of the program.

The US government has a problem with simply giving money back to people. This is an ideological approach to government support of the population for whose benefit the government exists, based on the idea that people who need help don’t deserve it. In contrast, giving money to business is viewed as legitimate. This is a quite different outlook on the function of government to that of the New Zealand I grew up with.

Shelley’s idea (from Bernie Sanders): break up the Build Back Better Act into single issue components. Once a week, introduce a bill in the House for one of the components, pass it, send up to the Senate where it’ll die. Each Friday, hold a press conference describing the bill and it’s content, identifying it as having been killed by the Republicans in the Senate (and any other members), and preview the next week’s bill. Get the media talking about each issue as it comes up. Challenge the Republicans to introduce their solution or tell people why the issue is not a problem that needs solving.

Start now, and run through November. Make it clear what the choice is.

The Internet giants are a whole bunch of middlemen. Amazon doesn’t make stuff, they sell it to you and deliver it; sort of a bad Sears Roebuck (at least they had installation and repair services, and you could buy an entire house through their catalog along with everything in it). Google don’t make stuff, they find it. Facebook doesn’t make stuff, they let you share your own stuff. All of these guys wait for someone else to make something compelling, then buy it or copy it and “monetize” it.

You gotta wonder how long it takes people to realize they don’t need these guys.

Saul Griffith is an Aussie engineer living and working in California. He’s written a clear-eyed book about a possible way through the climate emergency, keeping things to +2 degrees C, and it goes like this:

• electrify everything with solar and wind
• start now
• keep a little nuclear for evening things out, although we probably won’t use it
• a bit of R&D into blue-sky solutions like fusion, because the payoff will be big, but don’t rely on it
• remove regulatory impediments, fossil-fuel subsidies, buy the stranded assets for (average profit + a small margin), … non-technical tweaks to law, finance

Unlike most of this literature, he backs it up with numbers. It’s like talking to Paul Mathews; arguments based on data, with charts to make it comprehensible.

The short version is at https://www.otherlab.com/blog-posts/how-do-we-decarbonize. The longer version is in a book I found at the library, “Electrify”: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/electrify-the-book

It’s doable. First thing I’ve seen that makes me think so.

New Zealand delivered a water desalination plant to Tonga to provide fresh water after the volcanic eruption.

The US delivered 70 tons of “lethal aid” to Ukraine around the same time.

Different priorities, I guess.

interop between satellite providers, ground stations and Azure.

At the end, they show it coming together to use a predictive model to identify ships from orbit and build predictive models. They’re really doing lots more than I know about with Azure.

“That Was Then… NAD 3020 | What Hi-Fi?” https://www.whathifi.com/features/that-was-then-nad-3020

Yup, nailed it. Ready for the next step, but a little rueful about moving on.

Went down the rabbit hole this evening, starting from a post on CDM

My friend Martin turned me onto this David Sylvian album when we were young, and listening to some of the raw stuff triggered bits of memory. I didn’t know he came out of the band Japan, and the Bryan Ferry/Eno/”My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”… connections. When I did music, I used to listen to Jon Hassell and Holger Czukay, both in this video (I didn’t remember that they were part of this album!) so off I go to find them. Czukay died, I find, in 2017, and there’s pointers to things like this

which I’d never heard, nor that he was a student of Stockhausen (I think everyone ended up being related to Stockhausen, eventually). Memories of Can, and Sylvian, and Roedelius and all. Nice way to spend a couple of hours.