Ric Locke's Blog, page 5

Mark Udall is in touch with his base

From Roll Call, via Reynolds:

Both chambers must vote on a Constitutional balanced budget amendment by the end of the year under the law, but they don't have to be able to pass it. Udall's amendment is unlikely to attract the two-thirds majority necessary to advance because of a provision that would outlaw tax cuts for people making more than $1 million a year unless the country has a budget surplus.

This perfectly encapsulates the sine qua non of the Democratic "base". That is, everybody should have a good job at high wages –

BUT

Anybody who has the ability to pay high wages is a CRIMINAL who MUST BE PUNISHED by taking away that ability.

Does any of that seem the least bit off-kilter to you?

More Self-Publishing [WITH UPDATE]

Around midnight, Amazon KDP sent an email saying that, as a result of "a quality assurance review", Temporary Duty had been "unpublished". Several people had complained of formatting errors, so I suppose that was the problem.

So this morning I reviewed the current .mobi on my hard disk, uploaded it, and ran quickly through where I thought the bad spots were. There's still a typo, but the process of correcting it has become so cumbersome that I left it. One typo? Bah.

Now the page for the book gives a 404 "No Such Page" error, and listings elsewhere say "currently unavailable". This seems like a piss-poor way to handle it, but it's within their rights according to the contract. If you want a copy you can still get the .epub at Barnes and Noble[1], or other formats directly from me — hit the for $2.99 or more (Amazon say I can't sell it for less than their price) and include a request (and desired format) in the remarks.

Sorry about that. With luck it'll all be resolved soon.

UPDATE: Around 2:00 PM EDT, everything's back on track.

[1] If you buy or have bought the book at B&N, I'd appreciate a review there if you have time.

More Self-Publishing

Around midnight, Amazon KDP sent an email saying that, as a result of "a quality assurance review", Temporary Duty had been "unpublished". Several people had complained of formatting errors, so I suppose that was the problem.

So this morning I reviewed the current .mobi on my hard disk, uploaded it, and ran quickly through where I thought the bad spots were. There's still a typo, but the process of correcting it has become so cumbersome that I left it. One typo? Bah.

Now the page for the book gives a 404 "No Such Page" error, and listings elsewhere say "currently unavailable". This seems like a piss-poor way to handle it, but it's within their rights according to the contract. If you want a copy you can still get the .epub at Barnes and Noble[1], or other formats directly from me — hit the for $2.99 or more (Amazon say I can't sell it for less than their price) and include a request (and desired format) in the remarks.

Sorry about that. With luck it'll all be resolved soon.

[1] If you buy or have bought the book at B&N, I'd appreciate a review there if you have time.

This.

Read it!

What is capital? Capital is a thing (or service) that is produced not for consumption but for further production. The existence of capital industries implies several stages of production, or up to thousands upon thousands of steps in a long structure of production. Capital is the institution that gives rise to business-to-business trading, an extended workforce, firms, factories, ever more specialization, and generally the production of all kinds of things that by themselves cannot be useful in final consumption but rather are useful for the production of other things.

[...]

As Hayek emphasized in The Pure Theory of Capital, another defining mark of capital is that it is a nonpermanent resource that must nonetheless be maintained over time in order to provide a continuing stream of income. That means that the owner must be able to count on being able to hire workers, replace parts, provide for security, and generally maintain operations throughout an extended period of production.

[emphasis mine]

Mr. Tucker might also have noted that capital is a red flag (literally!) to the covetous. There's a lot of money there! Gimme some of it! For the CHILDREN (after suitable deductions for reasonable expenses, of course)! The real tragedy is that Sean Penn, who is "…actually living there, chugging up and down the hills of a shanty town, unshaven and disheveled, being what he calls a "functionary" and getting stuff for people who need it", will never figure that out — or, if he should, would be cast out by his fellows as a pariah. There's more than one Sean Penn out there.

What's Up with Botnets?

A friend manages an Internet list, and got some of the spam so familiar at other sites. She doesn't follow geekdom, so after bouncing the spammer she asked

"…would I be safe in assuming that there is a way that he could simply set things up to post to every thread sequentially, without the intervention of human hands?"

O yes, and in fact it's worse than that. Antivirus software sellers always make their pitch by referring to loss of data, compromise of identity, and such, but the most malicious computer malware nowadays goes out of its way to do no damage and remain as unnoticeable as possible. All it wants is a few processor cycles and an Internet connection, and once it has those it communicates with other computers thus infected and with the master controller of what is called a "botnet". (The neologism is derived from "robot", of course, but for those of us with horses the resonance with the little yellow eggs of the botfly, found on the hair and capable of maturing into a parasitic pest, is remarkable.) The function of a botnet is to send email messages and posts to blogs and the like, and the reason for that is search engines.

Google, et. al., use complicated algorithms to decide which twenty of the 2,349,994 results of your search to display first, but down at the root of all those methods is popularity. The more often a term appears, and the more often it is referred to from elsewhere, the more popular it is assumed to be. This gives rise to a minor sub-industry called "SEO" or "search engine optimization", which tries to insert keywords and other search terms in such a way as to raise visibility to the search engines. If there are millions of emails, blog comments, and other items out there, all of them with links to a particular site and associated keywords, then a search on those keywords is more likely to return the site on the first page of the results, and it's therefore more likely a person searching for that item will go to that site to buy. Botnet controllers use their hijacked networks to spam the URLs of their customers to as many places as possible, so the search engines will see that URL as "popular" and promote it to an early place in the search results list. If they did it all from their own computers they'd be easy to frustrate. Having thousands of computers, each with its own Internet Protocol address, doing the spamming makes it hard to block them.

So unknown and invisible to you, your computer may have been incorporated into a botnet. If so, it's the source of some of the spam emails we see every day. The first bots were resource hogs; a computer thus infected ran notably slower. Newer ones are more discreet, even noting your usage and shutting down while you're downloading, so as not to be noticeable. One of the things you can do to help the fight is CTL-ALT-DEL or otherwise call up the "Windows Task Manager", and learn which "tasks" are normally there. Even the most discreet bot has to have a task name, and if it's running it'll be on the list. If you don't know what a particular task is you can usually Google or Bing for it, but be careful about spelling, especially single-letter substitutions.

Many years ago the magazine InfoWorld carried a cartoon showing a massive atomic attack, followed by urgent inquiries from the Kremlin. The response was, "Oh, never mind, we're just nuking a spammer," and the Russians reply, "Da, need more rockets?" The kicker, in the last panel, was the spammer himself emerging from the rubble, battered and scarred but with his precious disk of fruitful email addresses in hand. It always seemed to me that the useful approach would be to track down the "Johns", the people who profit from hiring spammers. Find out where the credit card payments go, and nuke it from orbit… recently a slightly more pacifistic approach has been used, working back from who got paid to the operators of the botnets, and several such nets have been shut down in the last few months. It's a story that stays under the radar except among the geeks, and that's just the way the geeks like it.

There are still vandals around who giggle at having screwed up other peoples' computers, and probably always will be, but when you send your money to the antivirus people the main thing you're supporting nowadays is the bot-battle. This is because a botnet doesn't have to be a relatively innocuous spammer — the bots have taken over computers at the deepest possible level, and there's no reason the Master Control couldn't simply issue a command to disable everybody. Remember the Stuxnet story? Shutting down Iranian nuclear research by poisoning the computers that run it? That isn't even the tip of the iceberg, it's more like the sun-glint off the tippy-tip of the ship-wrecker. Needless to say the Intelligence and Military Intelligence people are deeply concerned, but their main value is that, of late, they've been willing to deploy goons to deal with the offenders in meatspace. The expertise in tracking them down belongs to Aspies in dim rooms, surrounded by empty Jolt Cola bottles and flat screens, with OC3 connections blinking on the nearby wall.

Dammit, Doesn't Anybody Ever NOTICE?

Our President threatens to cut off Social Security payments if Republicans don't agree to tax, tax, TAX!

It happens every time at every level, and it astonishes me that they continue to get away with it. The Government starts running short of money, and their immediate response is to cut services. Their own inflated salaries, their even more inflated expense accounts, their Government-supplied cars and other perks, the legions of bootlickers and butt-kissers that inflate their egos, the kickbacks to their buddies, the "social programs" that primarily serve to add to their legions of admirers and reduce the need for "campaign contributions", all these are sacrosanct. What must be eliminated post-haste to Save Money if the taxpayers won't cough up is pothole filling, street cleaning, fire and police protection, and staffing of the multitude of offices mere citizens must salaam to in order to get permission to do anything more public than cross the street. And the citizens cave, but do the potholes get filled? Hell, no. The Mayor gets a new Escalade.

This is just more of the same on a more-advanced level. Of course Obama can't use the pothole trick; they've already cut off any funding for anything resembling road and highway improvement, in favor of a new electric train set for Little Joe and other Progressive pie in the sky. That's OK if they can scare my contemporaries into insisting on More Taxes To Protect Social Security!

I don't want a "Balanced Budget Amendment". I want an amendment requiring that if, at any level of Government, the finances go into negatives, the head of that particular level of Government be executed by firing squad. At dawn. Against an east-facing wall, so the sun's in their eyes. Pour encourager les autres, don't'cha know?

Self-Publishing, Again

Temporary Duty is now available from Barnes & Noble as a Nook eBook, for the convenience of those who don't use the Kindle and don't want to do their own format conversion. I like Barnes & Noble despite their being one of the causes of the demise of the independent bookstore and a lot of other changes for the worse in publishing in general. Their stores used to provide me with a lot of free or low-cost entertainment back in the days when I was traveling.

Fulsome and gladsome thanks to those who helped with the publicity. Thanks to you, Temporary Duty has been in Amazon's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy for 31 days as I post, and for a brief shining moment last Sunday night (10 July) it was #10, beaten only by Robopocalypse and George R. R. Martin, who occupied the first eight slots thanks to the HBO mini-series. My only disappointment (if it can even be called that) is that it doesn't seem to be interesting to readers in the UK, but it's so US-centric that that's entirely understandable, and there have been a few intrepid buyers there.

Even more thanks to those who have actually bought a copy. If the current sales rate continues, sometime today the 5,000th copy will be downloaded. When I first put it up on Amazon, largely on a whim, I thought that well, maybe I have a hundred or so friends, relatives, and fans who might spare three bucks out of pity, then I could drop it to 99 cents and maybe see a few more go out. The actual result is so gobsmackingly unbelievable that I have trouble being as happy as I should be about it.

I Feel a Little Better

…knowing I'm not the only weirdo out here.

 

Another Place to Look

Dan Collins and Joy McCann are opening a new website.  It's a conservative talent bank and marketplace:

http://www.conservativecommune.com/

The site aims to connect people who have useful new media talents with folks who can use them. We've all seen or heard of people who couldn't get creative work out before the public because they weren't "in" with the Progressive arbiters and gatekeepers. We've all seen that begin to change a little, too, and Joy and Dan intend to provide another powerful nudge to that change.

One of the things that's missing from New Media efforts is coordination — not "leadership" that tries to take over, or (shudder) "management" that turns everything into the same ol' bland vanilla. Creative people need a place to meet and bounce ideas around, help one another sort out what's worthwhile and what isn't, and find people who can fit in and contribute. Even with modern software, decent presentations require inputs from people with multiple talents. You only have to scan through YouTube to find efforts from people whose ideas were obviously fresh and good, but who lacked the knowledge and experience to put the final edge on to make it great. One of the things Joy and Dan want to do is to provide those missing bits, either as a service or as a clearinghouse for people with the needed talents looking for people with creative ideas to use them.

They'll have people on tap with expertise in copywriting and editing, digital image production, photography, sound production, website development, video production, marketing, and related skills and knowledge. If you need help in any of those fields, or have skills in those areas and are looking for people with creative ideas to put them to work, have a look. To help pay the bills (yours and theirs) they'll be offering business listings, click-throughs to Amazon and other books, CDs and DVDs, unrelated goods and services offered by mom and pop operations, events listings, ride share and all the other usual stuff.

If that sounds a little like they want to be a combination Breitbart, indie angel, and Craiglist, well, aim high; at least you won't shoot your own foot. Joy (Little Miss Attila) and Dan (Piece of Work in Progress) have been around the blogosphere for a long time, and mostly know what's what. Give 'em a look, give 'em a try, buy an ad for your New Media effort if you're so inclined, or ask for help if you need it. You don't have to sit there with a great idea and no way to make it real!

Energy

It's odd seeing the word "energy" bandied about so freely. It's a truly abstruse concept.

The word was adopted, or perhaps co-opted, as a way of unifying some really odd things, common factors that showed up where there was nothing obvious in common. For instance, what do gravity and a fire have in common?

Think of an airplane. If you start thinking about airplanes in terms of how they work, it becomes fairly obvious that what keeps an airplane up is the engines. The wings are just a way of applying leverage against the air, so that the engines don't need the power to lift it directly.

If an airplane loses its engines, it doesn't just plummet straight down. Instead it glides, loses altitude slowly. Power is still available, and that power is being leveraged by the wings to keep the airplane from just falling. It's not enough power to keep the airplane up indefinitely, like the power from the engines was, but it's enough that a clever pilot can find a safe place to land gracefully. Engine power comes from fire, burning fuel. Where does the trickle of power that allows gliding come from?

If the airplane did plummet straight down it would make a hole in the ground when it hit. We know from experience, using a shovel for instance, that making a hole in the ground takes power. So wherever that power came from, it's the same as what lets the airplane glide — falling and hitting uses that power all at once, where gliding uses a bit at a time. The only thing around that the falling airplane and the gliding one have in common is gravity, the force of its weight pushing it toward the Earth.

There is something about gravity that can be converted to power. Equally, there is something about fuel that can also be converted to power. Either way, the power produced by the conversion keeps the airplane up until the source of whatever-it-is is exhausted. Engineers and scientists needed a word for "something" that isn't visible or tangible, "something" that lurks in gravity and kerosene and a lot of other things that are very different from one another, but that shows up as power when it's used.

That common concept is energy. Fuel contains chemical energy, so burning it produces power. Gravity contains potential energy, so releasing it produces power. Atoms contain nuclear energy, so splitting them produces power. Light contains electromagnetic energy, which a clever enough arrangement can convert to useful power. Wind contains energy of momentum, which can be used as power to turn a windmill. The only thing those wildly different things have in common is that they "have energy", but the energy itself isn't a "thing", isn't anything you can touch or feel or take a picture of. There's no way to detect it until it's used, and using energy is power. Power makes things happen. "Energy" is a unifying concept, a mathematical abstraction that's useful to find out where power comes from.

When we're told to use less energy, what we're being told is that we must have less power. Which makes it clearer, doesn't it? Power makes things happen. If we use less energy, we are less able to make things happen. When people who have power encourage us to have less power, their own will look better by contrast, won't it?