Punkie

If I could, I think I can explain why they feel this way. This is not justification, but some insight. I believe all people should be allowed to live and flourish to the best of their free will and ability without harming others.

Those with siblings, think of this: it’s your birthday party. You’re 8. Your younger sibling is 5. All day, your younger sibling has been whining, complaining, and ruining “your day.” You are forced to share with this sibling, this sibling has stolen and broken your stuff, and embarrassed you. You are forced to play with this sibling, let him hang out with your friends, and this has translated into a kind of inner resentment. Anything that they do wrong, things that you would get punished for, is excused and waved away. “He can’t help it, he is young.” Then, as your birthday cake is being served, he gets the bigger piece. You have the feelings and emotional control of a small child. How does that make you feel?

The deepest feeling of rage and anger, the unfairness of it all, the entitlement that was taken from you.

This is how they feel about “the others.” They see handicapped and poor people “getting away with something.” They feel they worked hard to achieve their position in life, and now someone just hands them food and shelter. A kind of jealousy of them skipping some process. That they didn’t earn it. It’s a sense of revulsion usually reserved to rotting meat. But above all, they are projecting all their unaddressed issues of playing second fiddle to someone they perceive as having it easier than they had. And this is what the liberal side fails to address, because they are like the parents in this scenario. “They can’t help being poor/handicapped/disadvantaged.” They are right, of course, but that doesn’t address the feelings. The rich know it, as they themselves have the same emotional disconnection. Unaddressed childhood pain distanced by nannies, au pairs, and “please don’t play in the main areas, Stewart. You’ll soul the Matisse.” Raised by parents who have kids for prestige and legacy.

The conservatives listen to their inner, unresolved feelings. And those are very easy to manipulate by the rich, wealthy politicians. And being different makes it easy to label.

Keep in mind, whenever you think too hard about these sorts of things, this is one of those operations that could apply to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Many people make the incorrect assumption of something like, “They must have done some clever supply-chain wizardry," or “There’s a smart cost-reduction plan behind this.” When in reality, a lot of times, the actual explanation is something like a mid-level manager wanted a slide that said “cost savings," then procurement was pressured due to some personality ego problem, engineering objections were ignored, the math was never checked, and in the end, nobody involved actually understood unit economics. Maybe exchanging a $6 part for a $4 looks good in volume, but they only did this 20 times, resulting in $40 of savings which was erased by their reputation and incompetence.

I have worked government contracts. I have worked with shitty project managers. There’s a lot more of these mistakes than you realize powering economies.

The US National Park service frowns on people tossing anything into the volcanos. But the deep, deep ocean has no enforceable jurisdiction.

I would imagine that they see your country as small, unable to fight back, and “full of savages.” I am SO embarrassed at this administration, they live in some weird childish fantasy land like 1950s cartoons. These are people with huge paintings of cowboys in their offices, like “Custer’s Last Fight” by Cassilly Adams, showing Custer somehow fighting off Indians dressed as Zulus (a lot of 19th-century artists sometimes portrayed Plains Indians in “Custer’s Last Stand”-style paintings with elements borrowed from Zulu warriors due to ignorance, theatrical flair, or lack of good references). Deporting these people to your country, which is probably seen as “generically Africa” in some undefined manner, “put the savages back with their kind.”

These politicians are a stain on anything good and decent about Americans. Again, on behalf of America, I am deeply sorry this administration is so immature and reckless. Reminds me of this joke from Johnny Dangerously

Specialization can breed a narrow limit of scope when it come to general knowledge. Sometimes the best lawyers and surgeons are complete idiots when it comes to falling for things like, say, internet scams. I am not sure if that’s what’s happening here, but I have known enough assistants of big skilled people that they always say “This guy is a brilliant surgeon, but doesn’t know how to cook or even how to shop for his own groceries.”

All over the map: Barracuda, SkyHawk, Ironwolf, Constellation, Cheetah, etc…

Three companies, kept track, but not after I left. It was always funny to me that they bought out Atlas and Maxtor. “Of course they did. Why not dominate the market on shitty drives? lol” I am surprised they hadn’t bought Deskstar.

“Don’t you think he looks tired?”

Yeah, but it’s Seagate. I have worked in data centers, and Seagate drives had the most failures of all my drives and somehow is still in business. I’d say I was doing an RMA of 5-6 drives a month that were Seagate, and only 4-5 a year Western Digital.

It’s the “not handling” part that gets us as kids. We knew better. Adults didn’t. In my case, I was in high school, but it was on a “Teacher workday, student holiday” we had each semester. I watched it live on NASA TV, which we had on channel UHF 55 in the DC area. Even the voice of mission control delayed about a minute or two. I remember thinking, “THAT didn’t look good…” but then they said nothing but normal speed and temp readings, so I thought it was just the angle of the chase plane. Only when the famous “forked cloud” appeared that the announcer said, “we have an apparent major malfunction,” or something.

I’d compare LLMs to a junior executive. Probably gets the basic stuff right, but check and verify for anything important or complicated. Break tasks down into easier steps.

I was in a discussion the other day about this, and someone brought up the “freedom vs. security” as the kind of “trade” someone assumes if they would, with complete freedom, fuck up someone else because they had no restrictions. We were discussing how the reason most laws exist is because somebody fucked it up for someone else.

Here’s the thing: Trump may has said he allowed it via executive order, and whatever. But you come after data I was sworn to protect? Come here with a judge-vetted legal warrant and court order. Oh, you’ll fire me? Then I did my job. I’ll be arrested for doing the right thing, not cowardly giving in “because they might yell at me.” Yeah, I did that once, and I got a big fat nothing out of it. I got out before the S&L crisis, but I saw it coming a mile away. I have no loyalty to some rando from South Africa. I have a loyalty and duty to my job and country and fellow citizens.

My hope, and it’s a thin hope, is that they really can’t fucking do anything with the data because they don’t understand it. Or lied they have it, and we let them believe this lie as part of the protection. They only have 200 copies of “WideWorldImporters Sample Database for SQL Server and Azure SQL Database” and think it’s real. Or whatever. Unlikely, but I gotta have hope somewhere. Part of this is because I know how PII is stored, and it’s not like one large file. It’s multiple systems with “just in time” joins and a horrible complex mess that’s a wonder it works at all. A bunch of 19 year olds and a rich liar are monkeys with baseball bats hitting a random laptop as a comparison. Millions are spent on contractors to work with it, and rarely does any single one person know how it ALL works. Just pieces of it. And some of it was in COBOL. What, one of those kids has a spare PDP/11 in their garage? But, maybe that’s thinking too hopefully.

Even if they suddenly stopped, it will take decades to undo the damage they have already done.

Side note: “the launch codes” are not like, two hex keys to launch nuclear missiles. It’s so much more complicated than that, that I used to fear in the 1980s that the Ruskies would bomb us flat before someone with the right laminated notebook was located. “What? The keys didn’t work? Didn’t anyone test if the keys fit? NO???” I’m not saying that’s an exact case, but an example of shit I have run into. I have to also hope for sheer incompetence saving us, like out of the movie Brazil or something. God damn, this is a bleak dystopia.

I had the same thing happen at a bank, my manager threatened to fire me if I didn’t hand over my login and password. After being trained to never give anyone, even your boss, the login and password. And why? Because she was doing illegal things under the teller’s logins. If she had gotten caught, I would be blamed. So I quit that job. And then the whole S&L scandal happened, and I was unsurprised. After that, I learned never to give anyone a login and password. I tell myself it’s a test. I’ll be fired for giving them the login and password. And if they fire me, well, get another job. I have skills to get another job these days.

And yeah, “well, your director will just give it to them.” That’s on my director. I will at least lose my damn job without a guilty conscience. I know I did my part for the right reasons.

This doesn’t anger me as much at the people just letting this happen at this point. Those of us who have taken the DISA training about PII and such are told never to share this info. But someone is allowing it. I mean, maybe if they have a gun to your head or jailed your family, maybe, but who the fuck is rolling over and just going “okay?” If these fuckers can do it, this data was never safe.

A friend of mine started the anime meme “Is this a butterfly?” She’s actually employed as a translator for anime, so it made sense.

I have done a lot of personal study on this. There are “Christians” and there are “Team Christian.” Actual Christians usually practice what they preach, or try to. The “Team Christian” folks are like people who have a favorite football team: they wear the jerseys, watch the games, and claim the tribal aspect of “I am good, they are bad.” But know nothing of the philosophy or inner workings any more than the average football fan plays professional football, or runs the corporation end that manages the team.

Also, like most bullies, they love saying the opposite just to make you mad. “If Jesus were alive today, he would have shot all the immigrants with a machine gun,” so you go “NO HE WOULDN’T HAVE YOU EVEN READ A BIBLE YOU HYPOCRITE GRRRR!!!” and they laugh at how mad you got. Like a bully saying “nice hair!” because they know it will make you angry, and they’ll act all innocent.

Saw this coming from a mile away. I was wondering when this ax would drop. What a shame; I grew up to PBS/NPR.

See, I think one of three scenarios might have happened:

• Luigi didn’t do it. He was framed and set up because out of the hundreds of prank tips, this guy looked “close enough.”
• Luigi did it, but the evidence was made up to make the case solid and the police look competent. Luigi wasn’t stupid, but he’s boned anyway.
• Luigi did it, and he really was that stupid.

As a writer, one of the aggravating tropes we have to follow is, “make the story believable,” when reality sometimes doesn’t align with “a good story.” Some criminals are really that stupid, and some armchair theory, based on decades of movies, books, and TV shows, you expect “hey, this is what they SHOULD have done is.” And they didn’t. It’s like when a chessmaster has to watch complete amateurs play chess. “Obvious strategies” are ignored, and basically both players are just not thinking past their last move.

“Another option” meaning what? Drive thru coffee? We do have Dunkin’s here, but none of them are drive-through. This may be different the further north you go, however.

Going to Starbucks doesn’t mean I have to look down on people. Life’s too short for that. I judge people on the complexity of content of character, not “Oh look, a ‘basic bitch’ with Starbucks and Ugg boots. How droll.” Having “no taste” and “too lazy” are classist statements anyway, “no taste” according to what standard? Lazy compared to what? What standard are you adhering to to “be proud of not being a tool?” Anyway, independent of your personal judgement of people just trying to get through their day, they are going to keep doing it and not caring about any of the complexities.

Starbucks is a service. You don’t have to like the service. I don’t get my legs waxed, but I don’t look down on those who do. Same thing. People are more than just their personal choices of our selective judgement. I recognize that Starbucks is popular, even if I don’t care for it. My reasons are basically I am cheap, and have to watch my sugar intake, so most of those milkshakes-posing-as-coffee are off limits. But if I am on a Starbucks run with someone, I am not going to patronize them like somehow I am some intellectual balloon rising above the mists of their complacency. Life is too short for that nonsense.