So, the government won’t do it, at the local, regional, site or federal level. Let’s have the churches do it. Follow the example of https://boingboing.net/2020/01/22/a-pittsburgh-church-held-a-gun.html and pay money for guns. Fund it from the congregation. Hold it as a multi-day carnival. Point and shame the churches that won’t participate. Big finish, where guns are destroyed in a big metal press or something, to the cheers of the crowd. Freedom of religion, baby!

Donald Trump has been calling the press for decades using pseudonyms, passing on rumors that cast a favorable light on Donald Trump. Using this technique, he has inflated estimates of his net worth and his desirability amongst rich and powerful women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_of_Donald_Trump

There’s an article in Fortune magazine from 2016 that describes his practice. Apparently still doing it as President.

https://fortune.com/2016/05/18/donald-trump-fake-names/

One of the most interesting papers I’ve read this year, and it comes in at the end of December:

Is Inequality Inevitable, Bruce Boghosian et al, Scientific American Nov 2019

(Via a post from Brewster Kahle where he implements the authors’ model as a dice game, The Game of Oligarchy

It shows how a simple model of free trade between equals degenerates into classes of rich and poor, even when the trade is voluntary, the value of the trade to each partner benefits one or the other randomly and the mechanism is iterated for a large number, how this reflects many well-understood processes in nature where phase changes emerge from chaotic interactions between individual elements, and how a simple model of redistribution can (and does, in real societies) fix the problem.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.^[

Source: John Gall (author) – Wikipedia

The Economist notes that the median age in China is on track to exceed that of the US. Bit of a game changer.

http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/despairing-about-climate-crisis

In the conclusion she talks about the function of humans to sustain other forms of life, and I thought “that’s what my mum does when she’s working in the bush!”

Ian’s flying in from London, and he’s bought me a ticket to the MLS Cup in Seattle on Sunday. Going with him and Grant Neubauer; Ian and I have been watching the Sounders since they were pre-MLS and he was 8 or so. We’re going to have a ball.

That’s how he described this when he sent me the link

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Enterprise-Mobility-Security/Behind-the-scenes-How-Microsoft-and-Google-work-together-for/ba-p/987654

He came out to the Microsoft campus for a couple of days to shoot the video. The face of Google! I love it. Proud Dad.

Popula says it

“Civility” is code for “deference”.

I have a facility in my web application to publish RSS feeds for the most “significant” events. I built it so that I wouldn’t have to build some way of integrating those events with lots of different mechanisms for lots of different users.

I demo’d it to the guy who’s taking over tech for the company I’ve been consulting to. Started by asking “do you know what RSS is?”. His response: “oh, yes, that’s really old tech” and made some analogy with a tape player in his old car.

So I fired up Zapier, and showed him how to take the feed and plug it into a Google Sheet, and into Slack so that his customer support people got pinged with new items. Oh. I could see his brain start to whir. I said something about “old tech, but still good tech”.

Thanks, @davewiner!