Socio/psycho-illogical something or other

I bumped into a hilariously offbeat opinion piece online last week.

"Your Refusal To Date Conservatives Is One Reason We Have Donald Trump"

https://thefederalist.com/2017/09/19/refusal-date-conservatives-one-reason-donald-trump/

Yes, on The Federalist.

It's reasonably short, so you should read THAT before reading THIS.

Skip the OkCupid aspect, which isn't actually relevant, other than as a convenience facilitator.

The question underlying this whole silly idea, is whether you want to be married to someone with whom you find some fundamental attitudes totally abhorrent. When you come home from work (or whatever) do you want to be getting into a verbal battle with your spouse?

I certainly don't. We occasionally have some serious disagreements here at work about technical details of this or that, often about someone's not knowing something. I wouldn't want to go home and have another argument about something or other. 

Eventually you'd stop talking to your spouse. It'd be too much work. Of the few couples I've heard of with seriously opposing political views, home life sounds...tricky. 

How much do you want to tiptoe around topics that are going to anger your spouse?

How much should you sacrifice of your own personal "security" to prevent the possible rise of another Trump? Would it even work? How?

There's a hint in that "headline" that conservatives are malleable, and that dating non-conservatives will change them enough that another Trump will be avoided. Is that even possibly true?

Would it take an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out? Hmm. No. It won't. 

But it's not going to happen. Who's going to specifically go looking for that kind of difficulty?

"Will you go out on a date with me so I can change your political persuasion?" 

The only way I'm changing my voting for someone else is if its Scarlett Johannson, and she's having sex with me every day. And I'd find out in advance what her politics are, just so I could say mine were different, if I thought that'd work out that way.

Assortative mating is when members of a group specifically seek other members of that same group as mating/family partners. Group membership can be defined however you like. This is as opposed to completely random selection. We have always behaved this way, usually based on skin color, but ultimately it is related to your ability to even meet other people. That aspect leads to economic sorting--you meet/mate with someone of similar economic background because that's who you can meet. Meet a woman at work? She likely has similar financial situation. Grow up in a big enough area, and the kids you meet at school all likely have approx the same economic status.

If you're a really pretty female, you can escape a lower economic status based on that alone. Probably true for males, altho I'd guess to a lesser extent.

Just Cause games...

I've played these...all 4.

Good fun, but eventually I reached a point in the first three where I lack the skill to go any farther.

Didn't feel like I didn't get my money's worth for them, took long enough to reach a required mission that I simply couldn't do that I didn't mind.

Just Cause 4, however...

Repeated annoyances, almost from the very beginning. 

Timed missions. I hate timed missions.

No difficulty adjustment.

Checkpointed game saves. Random respawn points.

Really awkward UI. Way too complex.

It runs weirdly slow. I think it is stuck on the 4K settings somehow. I changed resolution down to regular HD, with medium textures, but it didn't seem to help much, if any.

They did at least get rid of the "collect the little white boxes monkey-biz".

Played about 12 hours. Haven't figured out what some aspects are even about. Squads? What are they for? Looks like I won't be going back to this one...

Fallout 76, one final time.

So the updates a weeks ago...well, I'm done with this game.

Why? They are ratcheting up the issue about carry weight, having already bungled it more than once.

Now, while they aren't forcing you to drop stuff immediately in order to walk at all, you cannot eat anything to solve the hunger need. Food level low? Previously: eat dog food. Now? Eating only destroys something, it doesn't boost your food level. Solution: Drop everything you are carrying. Now eat. Next: decide what all you are taking with you, and leave 90% behind.

No thanks.

So today, when Bethesda email'd me to take a survey, I ripped em a new one.

I was a B.E.T.A. participant, but now FO76 is first on the chopping block when I need disk space.

Maybe if Linda Carter calls me personally and says they changed the weight stuff the right way I won't...

----

Later, Spring 2020.

So finally Bethesda released an FO 76 update that is in fact the game they should have released originally.

A friend and I agreed we would do the update and start over. There was clearly no way I was recovering the old character.

This is better, they are a number of newly interesting things going on. My character is approaching level 100, but I feel like i've more or less run out of interesting, and have reached repetitive. It's not clear where anything is going that is changing, probably because that can't happen.

My friend went with the "First" upgrade, but I can't say that's necessarily exciting, other than you aren't bumping into any other players who are either going to murder you and take your stuff or cause weird side-effects.

Where is it all going?

Why is there still trash everywhere?

Why is there a limit on the size of my stash?

Deep Fake Photos...

While I agree that there's a problem here:

WaPo story on them

It also means that we will be able to make and watch the movie sequel to The Maltese Falcon.

THAT is something I do want to do.

What's the plot, you ask? Well, think about where the original leaves off...they don't have the Falcon, and Sidney Greenstreet is going to continue looking.

So, a few years later, Bogey is in his office, fiddling with some paper clips. The phone rings.

Bogey: "Oh. It's you, fat man. What's this about?"

SG: "Ha ha. So you are still there. I must tell you, I have a lead on the Falcon. But I am the wrong man to retrieve it here. You must come to Vienna. Immediately. I will have a car meet you in Paris. You can be here in two days."

Bogey (while fiddling): "I'm kinda busy here. Two cases today."

SG: "Do not worry about the money. This is far more important that--this is THE FALCON. I shall expect you on Thursday. I have already bought your tickets."

click.

Bogey holds the phone handset out and looks at it, cocks his head slightly, smiles that smile, and puts it down. "Well."

The door opens, his secretary comes in and says "a courier just left this envelope for you."

Quietly in the background, a few notes of the theme from "The Third Man" play as the light fades out.



Yeah, I want to see that.

Star Trek Discovery

Got the DVD set for xmas. I think the first episode (2?) were on regular broadcast back in the beginning, some of it felt familiar...

So finally did a binge watch of the entire first season.

This is probably the best that Star Trek has ever been.

And I say that as a guy who watched TOS as a kid. AND the cartoons 5 years later. AND the movies. AND the other shows (TNG started way too slow/weird, etc). Have seen all the TOS episodes more than once. The other shows, well, not so much.

I would argue that none of the prior series had an entire season that was a good as Discovery's entire first season.

And Discovery may not be able to repeat that. Season two doesn't start as strong, but I've only seen two episodes so far. So we shall see.

But S1 is fabulous. TV Sci Fi may never have been quite this good (although I need to rewatch Farscape for comparison). I've seen a lot of tv sci fi over 50 years, none of it was this good.

S1 has a coherent story line (well, multiple, really) that advances every episode. In addition, if you've seen TOS and know your lore, the tie-ins are clear.


I don't normally stay up all night for something like that, but damn that was good.

Artificial Stupidity

You've heard of Artificial Intelligence of course...

This is artificial stupidity :) 

A friend and I had a joint xbox session of Fallout 76. We went to the Red Rocket large truck station, grabbed the workstation, and got several waves of attackers a little later.

Those attackers were the stupid Chinese head-crab "liberator" robots. The station has a few Protectrons. Generally those things aren't very capable, but these liberators are the epitome of Artificial Stupidity here.

In this video, you can see some of those head-crabs and a protectron (aka "red robot"). Red is standing there shooting some head-crabs. The head-crabs are too stupid for words. So stupid that they're funny, doing their very own Morris dance (imagine photo from The Holy Grail here that has those jumping ninnies from Launcelot's solo scene at the castle rescuing Alex Herbert; I couldn't find it and don't have time to frame-rip the entire movie and then hunt for that bit)

Similarly artificial stupid: when your NPC companion steps in between you and a target just as you shoot a massively hard range attack while zoomed in such that you can't see where your companion is and your companion gets killed instead. Or when a bunch of opponents stand around looking at you, but doing nothing, because altho they can see you up close, they can't figure a traversal path to get next to you to hit you--but they jiggle back and forth because they're in a weird math spot where they can't do otherwise.

2018 Elections

It's two years later. Been a crazy time. What do I think about the elections? Recall that last time, Sept 2016, I said I thought Trump would win. 

This time? Next week...I think there's a very good chance the Republicans will retain control of both sides of Congress. [OK, I was wrong this time, yay]

It didn't look like that a few weeks ago, but then we had the Kavanaugh episode. Now we have the "Executive Order terminating birthright citizenship". 

Recall that Kavanaugh was quoted to have said "there's no such thing as 'settled law'". This is correct, regardless of what anyone wants.

The thing folks most want to equal "settled law" is the Constitution. But it's possible for an amendment to overturn any piece of it, including another amendment. We've already done that once. (Remember Prohibition?) You know Trump picked Kavanaugh because he's likely to go along with the "self-pardon" idea.

So if there are things said, whether "constitutional" or not, that cause supportive voters to go vote to keep the power structure exactly as is, well, you know what that means.

If an XO can negate one thing, it can negate another thing, and then the entire document means nothing.

So do I think this will happen? The slippery slope has already begun...I can readily imagine that the XO doesn't get challenged, some shenanigans occur, and Trump decides to alter some other things.

What happens when he decides news reporting cannot contain what he considers "fake news" ? And that the purveyors of such can be eliminated?

Or when he decides that people who voted against him are, well, need to be removed.

Given that there are clearly people in the law-enforcement arena who are more than willing to follow orders like those of separating little kids from their parents (and probably enjoy it, or they'd refuse), what happens when he decides that the names on the lists of registered Democrats are just as much a threat? 

Do you really think that no one would go along with it?

Came to an interesting conclusion just now...

Was reading a WaPo anti-trump piece, on Election Day, and there's a comment:

"[trump] massively overestimates his abilities so he is forever driving things into the ditch, and ends every venture with disaster but still manages to walk away as everyone else is carted off the emergency room"

Remember the book "A Spell For Chameleon" ? By Piers Anthony. One of his best.

I read that when it was new, 40 years ago. The book is about a parallel universe zone in Florida near Okeechobee where magic is a real thing. Each person there has a magic skill. Except the hero. He has nothing. The book is a classic "voyage of self-discovery" in that he DOES have a skill, but it's a passive skill, not an active skill. That passive skill is that he cannot be harmed by magic. *Something* will happen to negate or block any magical attack on him. It's not a thing he controls, it just happens. 

The quote in the comment feels like this. His actions may produce disasters, but he emerges largely unaffected by the outcome, and always claims a win.

The problem in the book was that "sticks and stones could break his bones, but magic could never hurt him". Most of the rest of folks had what could be attack magic, which was rendered useless, but everyone could use a stick.

Trump feels like that, a bit. Reagan, the "teflon president", kinda did too. Altho Reagan's disasters were not on the same scale. 

That'd lead to some weird personal assumptions--like "everything I do works out good", even when it doesn't. 

Another weird episode on my Mac

I'm not sure what brought this on...

Some months ago (less than six, but more than one), after an OSX update of sorts, Messages stopped showing peoples' names and began just showing the phone numbers.

Quite irritating. For any given messager, for the very few I have a photo of, I could see that, or, if the number matched a Contacts entry, I could see first and last initials ("AB"), but that darn number was always there in place of the name.

For computers, it's more efficient to use the numbers. But for people, well, we don't work like that. Partly because we tolerate duplicated names ("John Smith") where the computer cannot.

If you look online you can't find a solution. Apparently talking to Apple Tech Support won't get it done either. (???)

Well, ok, you CAN find solution online.

Here's my situation: all works great on my iPhone. But suddenly not on my Mac. Mac running High Sierra.

Nothing I do/try fixes it.

Until this:

1. Close the contacts app. Close Messages. Close Mail.
2. Go to ~/Library/Application Support/ (in Finder, using command-shift-G)
3. Rename the "AddressBook" folder to something like "AddressBook-old" just to be safe
4. Open the contacts app. Wait a couple minutes for it to resynchronize
5. It will create a new AddressBook folder that syncs to icloud properly. Wait until you see all your contacts re-appear.
6. If it's all dandy delete the renamed AddressBook folder

OK, if it's NOT all dandy, quit Contacts, delete the NEW AddressBook folder, and rename the old one back to AddressBook.

But this worked for me. (other folks found that making sure the phone number format lined up exactly the same did the trick--but I would argue that that is a different problem)

Really don't know why. If *I* were the author of the software, Contacts, Messages, all that contacts-using stuff, this wouldn't ever happen, and some other annoyances would also go away. 

All this "Account" stuff in OSX has got some fundamental issues, primarily associated with what happens when you have a bunch of accounts and old ones go away.

Mail has never had this problem for me, but maybe that one is better about multiple accounts.

The inconsistency is annoying.

3D work on-screen

Just discovered this:

OpenJSCAD

If you've used OpenSCAD, and you are comfortable with programming, you REALLY need to check that out.

It is NOT an online OpenSCAD, although it's very similar to such a thing. You type in your code, which in this case is javascript plus all the OpenSCAD functions, and you press F5 or Shift-Return, it renders something using the OpenGL interface in your browser.

the basics:

your code has to include:

function main() {

   itemA = cube([1,1,1]).translate([-2,-2,-2]);
   itemB = sphere({r:2,center:true});

    return [itemA, itemB];
}

The return there is what gets drawn.

This is pretty nifty. Although you might feel like it takes an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure it out.

Note that the ".translate([])" is like, but not identical to, OpenSCAD:

translate([2,2,2]) cube([1,1,1]);

The .translate is a Javascript-style coding. Same thing gets done, but the syntax approach is different.

Looks like it can generate STL output, for going straight to 3D printer (yeah, agreed, you probably have to do the triangle correction step somehow).

It will generate an STL file you can download. I have no idea if it's any good, but the ASCII version is readable.

What you probably cannot do (nor, really do I think I would try) is load/copy/paste your existing OpenSCAD into OpenJSCAD. Not going to work--you'll have to fix it up quite a bit.

Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. and released game

This game is several things right now (Nov 1 2018):

1) multi-player, which I do not do.
2) Aggravating, which I do not like.

I'm playing on the Xbox, a 1X, on a 4K TV, so it looks beautiful. Far more detail that F4/etc, and apparently a much larger map.

It really seems like you MUST do it as part of a team, because what happens a lot is that you get swarmed by opponents 10 at a time--by yourself you are dead fast. And while you can respawn, you dropped all your "junk" at the death place. You can go back and get it, which is good. But the swarms are aggravating.

It is like playing survival-mode F4. I did not do that mode--the excessive focus on food/water/rads is aggravating--you spend way too much time worrying about them. I don't personally burn through food and water anywhere near that fast, IRL, so it's quite aggravating here.

The card-based "perks" system is aggravating. The Skyrim approach to all this is best; F4 is ok...but it really should be the case that you get better at lockpicking by doing more lockpicking, not by finding a perk card.

You can do PvP if you want, or you can turn that off. Which is good, or the aggravation of having others attack you would lead to servers all being populated by assholes who go around killing newbies.

As it's the Beta, there are problems. One of the worst is that there is a serious issue about clipping. More than once I have found myself "inside" an opponent, that is doing melee hits on me, and because I'm inside it, I can't even see it, so I can't shoot, but I can't even know that it's there.

Do I recommend this game? Well, no, I guess I don't. Not yet. When it's $20. It needs to become less aggravating. Am I going to continue to play? Well, yeah, but not a lot. Can't really play at home, don't have enough bandwidth--or a 4K--but of course the worst thing about multi-player is how to you put together a team? Clans? Not interested even slightly. So if you play solo some, and team some, your team is going to be level-lopsided. That said, it does feel better than ESO; I have that, may have played 4 hours. It wasn't interesting. Only paid $10, not sure it's worth even that. ESO seems very weighted towards teams, too.

Events are weird things. Every so often, in various places, there's an "event", like X is attacking Y, help out for 20 minutes. Morgantown Airport has one, where five waves of "scorched" attack. You kill all scorched in all five waves, in the time limit, you get goodies, and there's a large goodie-box dropped on you. I did this battle once with a friend, and bumped into it solo...turns out if you don't participate, it times out, there's only the first wave, and they stand around being stupid.

You have a portable "C.A.M.P." that is a "base" location. You can build walls, crafting stations, etc. In fact, you really kinda need to. But it's portable, so if you DON'T build stuff, you can relocate the camp.

Excess weight doesn't slow you down, but it takes Action Points to run. Power armor is just like F4: there's a frame, takes fusion cores to run it, and you can eventually put armor pieces on it. I have seen some power armor crafting frames, but no armor, although I know of a place where it does spawn, because friend got it there. Not really that useful unless you are able to find/make fusion cores. In F4 I have approx 100 cores, perked them up to double-duration, and I use PA non-stop. In F76, not clear that you EVER use it.

As much as anything, F76 is about finding or creating useful loot. Occasionally you do find really interesting things: I have a piece of armor that does health regen--I love that stuff.

I think the BETA agreement is that I don't publish anything about the game until it's officially released, in a couple of weeks. So this waits until after that.

Have seen critters attack each other; saw a mirelurk fighting some rats today. Robots fight each other, too. This is good; it can't be true that all the opponents are friendly towards each other. One of the robot varieties is rather much like a headcrab, all jumpy and bitey.

Apparently there are giant bats that look like dragons that somehow create[d] the scorched. A swarm is scorched is aggravating, but they carry guns and ammo. (OK, that giant bat is the ScorchBeast, L50).

Not enough merchants, so you probably do more scrapping than selling.

-----

Released game

Not enough merchants. For sure. Altho I did bump into an L50 Super Mutant wandering Merchant named Grahm; he's friendly, you can trade/sell. Saw him getting attacked by the other SMs at Grafton Steel and doing nothing. Eventually he "woke up" and beat the snot out of them (they were L10, so there was no way it was going to go well for them).

Have found things to be glitchy. The released game seems to have more trouble than the BETA; I would bet that is server issues related to the sudden large increase in players.

It has "crashed out to desktop" on me several times, leading to the conclusion that the BETA was more stable. Well, the server load was less.

Found an L50 Queen Mirelurk. And a L40 "glowing one" protecting a loot cache crate.

A weird thing I've experienced a couple times: some actions suddenly cause the respawn of a batch of opponents. Right next to you. Which then kill you fast.

The weapon swapping UI is terrible. FO4 did ok with this. FO76 is bad. They need to change to the FO4 approach.

You can play OK by yourself. You will want to be careful and stealthy if you do, there are plenty of places where you can get unexpectedly overwhelmed by a crowd.

I don't think the ability to have a "Permanent CAMP" is going to work. Today I wandered past someone's camp...if that is permanent in all map/world instances, one of these days the entire map will be filled with CAMPs. How could it not? Imagine 100 thousand players, each makes a permanent CAMP, that will dominate the landscape as far as the eye can see.

Power armor shows up here/there randomly. You'll find it before too long. I have a frame, have seen several others (which is nifty because you can take the fusion core from each one, and they have had a couple of other pieces of armor...Armor that I can't use yet, but I do have T46 (L25) and T51 (L30) armor pieces.

This is a survival game. You have to manage your food, water, rads all the time. This is really mostly annoying, because you can find enough stuff to drink and eat that there's more or less zero value to having to craft it, or be extra careful about what you're doing here/there. It interrupts game flow.

I did find a piece of "regenerating leather armor" that I am wearing. It seems not to work in power armor? But I do like these items, they let you not have to use your stimpaks all the time. Sleeping works too, but I never do that--where would you be safe? (OK, your CAMP, if you built it in such a way that it was virtually inaccessible from the ground; seen this done...it of course violates physics and construction realities--in essence the weight of all walls/floors/etc is zero, but their strength is infinite...so you can build in a choke-point corridor killing field where a wad of turrets can shoot anything on an approach vector, because you control the vector)

Incorporating H2 database into Eclipse

So I finally did this.

Here's a decent explanation.

https://ibytecode.com/blog/eclipse-dtp-configure-h2-datasource-using-data-source-explorer/

but it goes wrong at the end.

(This is for Eclipse Oxygen; Eclipse Mars can't even do this, on my machine at home; Eclipse Luna doesn't do it either. This is curious, it doesn't feel like a new thing.)


Here's much the same thing over again:

Menubar File->New->Other...

Good god. My pasted-in pictures all got lost. Yeesh. Gotta do them over, saved as files. Yeesh.

Choose "Connection Profile" and "Next"

See this: and click Generic JDBC

Type "H2 JDBC" for the name. (When you try to do this again, you can't use the same name, you'll get told it exists). Click "NEXT", and get a new dialog window.

Click on the strange icon inside the red circle:

See this new dialog:

Click on Generic Driver. Enter H2 JDBC Driver for the name.


If you don't click on Generic, you can't do the next thing:

which is click on "Add JAR". Find your H2 jar file.



Now comes the absurd part. Click on the H2 jar file name. Click on Properties tab button. It's blank. Go back to JAR list. Click the jar file. Click Properties. Still blank. Back to JAR list. Click the H2 file name.

The Edit button will now be active. Click that, the click Cancel in the file dialog. Now click Properties. Yay! props table.

Driver class is org.h2.Driver (capitalized just that way). URL is jdbc:h2:tcp://localhost/wherever-your-db-is. Name is whatever you want as a name. I'm not sure what this is for. Click OK.

enter a password, click "save", click "test connection" to be sure you don't have a typo somewhere.

The tab for "Optional" parameters would be something like mvstore=false; or other jazz.

I don't recommend turning on "connect every time". Regrettably, you'll have to go through this again every time you have a new database, but the end result here is that you can create a .sql file in a project, and connect it to this database, and run sql live right there from in the buffer.



I should have done this years ago...but Eclipse is not really the best of all possible interfaces to H2. Especially since it won't show the result from "SELECT * FROM my_table;", just whether or not it executed error-free.

I have some other tools I wrote for real database interface work, but they don't do text-edit buffer.

--------------------------------

Of course, H2 already has to have that database created...I was trying to get a CSV dumped into a single table to practice some SQL with. Just the load was trickier than I wanted.

How to load a table from CSV into H2:

(Yep, I'm looking at some FCC data.)

H2 doesn't give a very good explanation for CSVREAD to load a DB. Tried it before, and spent an hour today trying to guess what it wanted for syntax. It's actually really simple, simpler than it looks in their doc.

INSERT INTO table(col, col,col...) SELECT col,col,col... FROM csvread("file-location.csv");

There's a simpler way if your table will have exactly the same columns as the CSV, but mine had that extra "ID" column first.

Even supposed whiz-kids get it wrong

So I needed to try to export Contacts info in OSX High Sierra to a CSV file. Sounds simple enough, right? If *I* had written the Contacts app, this would be a direct thing off the file menu.

Apple, however, in its infinite wisdom, has completely failed on this. You cannot. Full stop.

You should NOT need an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure this out. But apparently you do.

OK, that said, there is a way, but it's really stupid to have to do it. OK, there might be two. I only tried one.

You have to open Contacts, figure out how to "Select All" (or whatever subset you like), then you open Numbers (yes, Numbers), and click/hold/drag that bunch of contacts over into Numbers (and not just anywhere, you have to land on the actual cells grid. Then you wait a few moments, and poof, the cells are filled with your data. 

From Numbers, you can then do a CSV save. Ye Gods.

That is pointlessly over-complex. CSV is a basic output flavor for contact info--even if you don't look at it in a table (come to think of it, why is THAT not an option? What happens when I need to look at two at once?), it's a table, and. you can always output a table as CSV.

Especially when most things that import tabular data want either a CSV or XLS. Like something I'd need to dump contacts info into.

-----

Looks like Automator might be able to do it. And there maybe is an app in the Store that reads the regular abbu export and makes a CSV. 

Seriously?

Supremes

Well, today is the day that Republicans will nominate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

It will break exactly on party lines. The infamous Collins and Murkowski pair will NOT grow a pair and vote against him. They never do.

Dr Ford could have come in yesterday with witnesses, DNA and photographic proof that Kavanaugh did satanic sacrifices of babies and then ate them, and they would still be voting him onto the SCOTUS this morning.

Why?

Because there are some other goals being attacked here.

We have quite a few people who are very uncomfortable with some things that have happened in the last 100 years (well, more, really, we all know what), and the SC is the "long game" approach.

The "long game" is:

1) Repeal Roe

2) Repeal Obergefell

3) Repeal Civil Rights Act

4) Repeal SS and Medicare

5) Repeal Obamacare

6) Make (white) America Great Again (via getting rid of brown people): be a bully around the world. Because that's great. It's how you make friends.

7) Make it ok again say certain words again when referring to those disgusting people that all need to leave the USA or die.

So Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed. No matter what. Because the Republicans in Congress (and the voters they are afraid of) want those things.

Why is it so many folks need to act stinky towards others?

-----

Update: Yep. Went as above, except that Murkowski got a safe out where she got to do a harmless NO vote. Had it not been harmless, well, she'd have voted yes. And Manchin voted YES--otherwise he was going to lose re-election.


There's another subtle item. Trump wants someone there who will agree that he can pardon himself. Because you know that could end up being important, once all his past "deals" get fully exposed. You know that is going to turn out to be full of shady-to-illegal aspects. Back in the day (and maybe even now) you didn't get things built in NYC without the mob.

You know why there are so many unemployed people here?

Well, one reason is that we fired them from their phone-answering jobs and replaced them with really stupid software, and then hired dummies with foreign accents to answer the phones.

Bought a piece of software today, that is delivered via download. That wasn't easy itself. I created a login with the software vendor, that part is ok.

Tried to register the software. That wouldn't work. Not clear why, but after it failed, there's a dialog window that says "Please call XXX-XXX-XXXX so that an agent may assist you".

So when I call in on the phone to do this, I do get someone. An ESL person. First problem: their system software is stupid. I have called in on the primary phone that is registered with the vendor. But apparently this guy can't (doesn't?) know or see it, so that instead of having the number itself include my registration info, I have to tell him this over again. Then I explain what I'm trying to accomplish. Again.

I am trying to accomplish "Online Registration". The software itself has asked do I want to phone in, or do online. I want to do online--in theory, that should go A LOT faster.

He says "I need to have someone in this other department help you". OK, that's not necessarily a surprise, happens often enough.

The problem is, he's misunderstood the word "online". Partly because the vendor has misused this word in a way that encourages this misunderstanding.

Vendor has an "online version". I want to do "online registration". BUT NOT for the "online version", it's the desktop version.

So first guy shifts me over to the "online version" Helpdesk. As he is doing this, I realize his last words to me are taking me the wrong place.

So that's where I go, I explain immediately that we have done the wrong thing and that I need to do "online registration of desktop version of software". Which eventually does take place properly. But it took nearly 90 minutes to get there.

But really, vendor people, your phone software sucks, your support software sucks, your name choices lead to poor results with your Helpdesk people. Yeesh.


Most other places I have had to call in, they know me from the phone I call from, there's no asking over again why my name/info is, etc.

----

So the software above is QuickBooks. It was/is at least as much a nightmare getting QB connected to my bank account. Something is not working correctly.

And now I'm back on the phone with QB. Their software is still terrible. Good god. And this particular problem is a paid solution--I have to pay them to have them to explain why their software doesn't work. (Pretty sure I can write better software than this)

It's now just under two hours on the phone. Today.

I'm going to have to go to the liquor store on the way home.

The Bat is Dead

in case you didn't know...there was never just one.

took that picture ~2015.

Another Game: Elder Scrolls Online

Have been waiting a while for circumstances to line up properly before acquiring this. MMOs aren't really my cuppa. Played Guild Wars for a while, some years back. That seemed to have a slightly better aspect about forming an adhoc group.

I waited until I could have my games PC on a really good internet connection (I have 175 MBits, at work (home is abysmal)), and the price was good ($10 on Steam summer sale).

So here's a couple of pictures taken on my phone because I don't know how to screen-snap the game and deal with it afterwards (I know, not hard, I just haven't tried).

Here's something funny, and not even slightly new:

Bethesda has been making games for a long time. Their 3D is excellent. But they still have a few issues--either that or their mages can float everywhere. Granted, the setting IS Morrowind, and the mages DID fly there. Or, as Doc Brown said once "Is there something wrong with gravity?"

Here's a another classic:

What do you know? Somebody feels a disturbance in the force...Vivec: "that would be me"

The setting is still the island of Morrowind, and it's WAY prettier than I remember...and it's WAY more dangerous, too. The mudcrabs aren't all angry and can be ignored, but virtually everything else wants to kill you.

Party formation is weird, it's simpler to do the routine of wandering wherever, wait for others to show  up to kill things you don't want to fight, grab the target loot while they're fighting, and run away. (Guild Wars was better about the party formation...there were meet points where you could find others waiting like you, and agree to go somewhere together. Once that was done, you were back at the meet point.) That way you weren't stuck with a group where folks couldn't agree on what/how to do (shades of Leroy Jenkins).

I haven't tried talking to anyone here yet. You can just join in a fight, get credit for the kill, grab the loot, and move on, without even talking to anyone. Did that yesterday.

A stupid, but interesting tactic...work a task solo, grab the loot, then let yourself get killed...you get to respawn at a waypoint that is somewhere away from danger. I did this today by accident and got out of a cave place where I didn't see how to escape and it was jammed full of opponents. That probably cost me something, but I don't remember what. Probably now I need to get armor repaired.

This game takes place before Dagoth Ur arrives, but the Red Mountain is leaking lava. No ash storms yet. Lots of giant mushrooms. I'm playing as lizard-man again, because of the water-breathing attribute. That has always been very useful.

----

Four weeks later: well, I haven't played more here as I got sidetracked pretty hard at work. Can't say this had felt interesting enough to hurry back to.

I bought SpellForce 3 during Steam Summer Sale. The graphics are better but I think the UI is distinctly harder to use.

Things that aggravate me in computer games...

Well, it's probably just one, really.

It's the situation in a game where the creators force you to play it *their* way, as opposed to allowing me to go at it *my* way.

Especially bad when you don't even know what you're doing at first. 

Cases in point:

Because I'm leading up to playing Wolfenstein 2...on Xbox:

1) Wolfie: New Order -- I played up to the point where you come back from the moon, and end up facing Mr Stompy. This is an arena fight, your ability to aim and do some other funky controller things that I am not good at, really it's the run+slide+shoot = too many things at once. So that's where I had to stop. My patience for these things is getting lower. I did, however, play through this successfully on the PC a few years ago, although I remember that being tricky then too.

2) Wolfie: Old Blood: You have to fight Jager, in the tavern. It's another arena, and it's tiny. Jager is in power armor. It turns out that you have to shoot the blue power nodes on his shoulders a few times; he powers down for a short bit, you have to go pry a piece of armor off while he's in that state. Then you have to do it again, several times. There's really not enough cover of significance to work with, the power armor seems to have dual-wield miniguns with infinite ammo, and he's in motion all the time. And this is after he smashes down the front door, but it's still blocked so you can't run outside where there's better cover--because you know he's going to come after you: you killed his dog.

3) Wolfie: Old Blood: Just before Jager, you fought the big mechanical dog out at the end of the bridge. This is really contrived, because you have to either be doing run-n-gun as soon as he shows up, or you have to find the one hiding place where he doesn't attack (except for the part where he does, and can hurt you *thru the walls*. I watched a couple youtube videos about this, and it turns out (at least on super-easy) that it takes two measly shots with the kampfpistole (which is essentially the single-shot grenade launcher). But I had to try various weapons a bunch of times to figure that out.

4) DOOM: there is the spot where, even on super-easy, there are two of those great big demons, it's an arena fight...

5) on PC: Wolfie: Return to Castle W: I'm in this cathedral thing, have to climb a ladder up a tower, and there's a grenade-girl at the top who is going to kill me before I get in position to aim at her. It's basically an arena except that it's really a tube, and the cover works against me. If I could actually turn around further...but you can't, your range of motion is explicitly limited.

OK, you get the picture, it's these arena fights. The arena is *always* a "locked room" and it won't unlock until your opponent(s) is dead. Mostly what I'd prefer is to be able to draw the opponent's attention and then run away. 

The problem on my end is of course that (1) *I* am not quite good enough to do this their way, and (2) the xbox controller isn't either, and finally (3) on PC I have to play left-handed for RSI reasons. That's less an issue on xbox, actually, b/c there IS NO left-handed-ness...on Windows, well, that's an imperfect modified key-mapping (but at least you can do that, which wasn't always true in the past).

This results in my preferring the Bethesda RPG vs FPS games, where I can fight and run away. 

The current situation with Wolfie is that I'm done playing those games. And not coming back to them later. Which is too bad, because I was near the end of (1), but not even halfway through (3) and (5).

Wolfenstein 2 is coming up, but I'm not sanguine about my chances there--it seems entirely too likely, in advance, that there will be some of this arena-battle stuff that I can't get through. (Later: yep, there was. The "courtroom" battle is an arena. With A LOT of opponents, and the scenery/furniture is destructible, which means you can't really hide behind it for very long.)

I played all the way through all of these things (exc Doom) on my PC when they came out. Mostly that was a few years ago and now I'm older.

Related to the "have to do it *their* way is the "I want to climb up to *right there*" but I can't. In (2), you're in the tavern, there is clearly a "trap-door" up some stairs to the second floor, but it's locked. (actually, it isn't even a door that *could* be opened, it's a visual decoration).

The visual aspect of "town" in (2) and (3) is fabulous--this is some really good-looking surface texture art.

-----

Later that night: played Wolfie 2 some. After the point, still on the flying platform, where you get the super-suit, you end up in an arena battle against *something* that is big, clearly tough, has dual-wield *something* that looks like big laser or railgun (well, not railgun, really seemed energy weapon, has a charge time with an associate noise). I've no idea how you take this one out, but it seems fairly stupid, and it certainly isn't fast--easy to outrun, but there's not really a safe spot. (OK, this is the "laser cannon", kinda like the minigun, you can't keep it). You need this weapon to burn a hole in a wall, so there's no way out of this battle. (At least it's not Jager in the tavern again). Ah, apparently there's a second one, a little later, before you get to leave the airship.



There's a play-style dichotomy in this game (as with the predecessors):
"You will see some icons with numbers appear on the screen. They indicate the positions of special enemies - the commanders - who are able to call in reinforcements. You should always prioritize these targets (preferably take them down quietly) first to avoid troubles."

This game is about killing nazis. Why would you want fewer of them? 

-----

Also: I hate "jumping games" where your jumping has to be perfectly timed/aimed/something in order to get around. You try to do that with wireless kbd/mouse...yeah, not so much.

I'd be more or less ok doing such jumping IRL, if I was, you know, 25 years old still (but I'm nowhere near)

European Economies and Economics

(cutting to the chase:) apparently it DOES take an Advanced Degree (tm).

Stardate: May 2018

A few years back Greece was having a real serious economic problem. Spending was out of control, government revenues were inadequate for debt service, yadda yadda. Heard it before.

All true, but not new. And still there.

The real issue was NOT that spending was out of control, but rather than federal tax revenues were inadequate to pay for services spending and debt was increasing to cover the gap.

Why were tax revenues inadequate? Why was spending so high?

Well, the spending was NOT so high. The revenues were short, for sure.

Why inadequate tax revenues? That is the real problem and question.

Citizens weren't lazy bums (altho others elsewhere certainly said so).

The problem is this: the gray-market economy is as large as the "real economy" (the reported economy). They don't trust the national government to be/do the right thing, to be honest and not corrupt, so the Greeks treat tax-evasion as a national pastime.

First off, what's gray market economy? ("black market" is illegal/stolen goods sold; white market is the regular market we participate openly, and is reported openly.)

Gray market economy is unreported financial transactions. Transactions that are handled as swaps, or all cash, un-reported as taxable income. You hire someone to cut your lawn, pay them in cash, they don't list that as taxable income anywhere, no one knows about it.

There is gray-market activity like this everywhere. You, as person hiring a lawn-cutter, do not know that the employee here is not going to report the income. You pay in cash, it's untraceable.

So of course no one knows the size of the gray market--it's not reported so it can't be measured. The *estimate* I've seen is that Greece's gray market is the same size as its white market. So if the gray market all moved to white, the tax revenues would be sufficient to meet national spending needs.

Everyone was worried about Greece at the time, but Greece is tiny. Problem not solved, apparently, but not in the news. GDP/debt ratio is bad.

-----

So that same problem exists in Italy now. Same origin, same reasons, same issues. You read about the problems here and there, will Italy remain in the EU? Can it? No one talks about the source issue. They talk about the Euro, as though unified currency is the problem, versus being able to devalue their own currency in the market. (Well, that might help, for a little while, but it's a terrible idea.)

The fundamental problem goes unspoken. Basically: the citizens are crooks. Well, that sounds harsh: they are tax cheats; they all know it. If you confronted one of them, you'd get an earful. Is/was the same in Greece.

The pure-cash/barter economy allows a lot of tax cheating.

I can't do it in my business, I need the proper openness of white market. But I see plenty of gray market around me. Participants drive around with snakes on their plates.

Italy's economy is 10X bigger than Greece. Had Greece folded, there'd have been much hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing, but the fallout would have been pretty small. Italy has a problem? That's going to be a bigger splash.

-----

This is a flaw in the economic models you hear about: why Alan Greenspan's view of economics was inadequate: the black and gray markets are things they can't think about, and are bigger than they imagine. When half the annual economic activity is unreported gray market, well, the white market has problems. The government cannot pay its bills.

And it's not like gov officials there don't know about it. The problem is that EVERYONE participates.

No, I don't know how to fix this. Well, get rid of cash. All transactions are electronic/online, therefore traceable. Otoh, that pushes people towards crypto-currency, which I'm not convinced is safe/secure.

-----

Later: this gray-market activity is also knows as "underground economy". All off-books, no-taxes-paid.

New Thinking in AI

I found this interesting:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/machine-learning-is-stuck-on-asking-why/560675/

(For those not knowing/remembering, he's also the father of Daniel Pearl, journalist who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan)

He invented a really good technique back in the 80s. We used it on the project I worked on 86-90. It's a good statistical basis for probabilistic reasoning, called Bayes Network. It worked.

Now he's talking about the reality of cause and effect. This is a good thing, and working it out probably requires...yes, you guessed it...

An Advanced Degree (tm). Let's start the process.

(I don't disagree with him, per se, and certainly he's been thinking the right thing, but I think there's a logistical failure)

I was working this problem too, mid-80s, for an activity called "Failure Modes and Effects Analysis". or FMEA (often pronounced feema).

An FMEA for a system (and a simulator to do the actual analysis) would require you to exhaustively describe all the failure modes (i.e., "causes") at the level of detail you want (or more properly "can afford"), and the possible "effects" that would occur.

The problem is that it's really really hard to do this to the detail depth that would be adequate to produce a valuable result. You need a really serious model of parts. So it's really expensive to do, time-consuming, and generally skipped.

And it isn't the most obvious failures that you really want to understand, it's the weird ones, like how leaving a wrench in the wrong place inside a 60s space capsule leads to a fire that kills astronauts.

Pearl is thinking about a larger problem, wants cause/effect descriptions, and complains about what he calls "curve-fitting", which is more or less about finding a limited model that describes a dataset, and allows a little bit of prediction outside that dataset (I suspect, really only accurate for first-order behaviors). He poses a couple of questions as examples: "what if I had finished high school?"

Well, there's no possible way to answer that, except by use of statistics data that we already have, and of course you only get an averaged answer (which continues to be speculative): you probably would have earned more money in your life. If you want more detail than that, like "you would have gotten a scholarship for UMD, graduated and then found a cure for cancer when you were 43 years old", how large a model would it take to do that? How many assumptions about random events would you have to make?

If you're into AI enough to know the historical aspects, recall Doug Lenat's work on Cyc. Remember what that was? They were trying to produce a knowledge base of some sort that was really a massive ontology.

Ontologies are hard. REALLY hard. Mostly you fail, or acknowledge that incompleteness is unavoidable. Generally what I've found is that creators try to do WAY too much, it becomes unwieldy and misses the target. (Pretty sure that was a blog topic a while back, but if not: micro-ontologies are the only thing that can work ok.) Remember SUMO? You can't put enough into it to make it usable without making it unusable.

So how will humans do what Pearl says, when we haven't already done it? I grant you, computers are bigger/better/faster/etc than Lenat had access to 30 years ago, but that probably just makes it possible to get too big sooner.

Back to the FMEA thing: although I was making an attempt at it, I was almost for sure going to fail because the amount of detail necessary to succeed wasn't going to be creatable. Why? Because it's not the obvious failures that you need to find, it's the really weird ones. And I was working in Lisp, where you work with symbols rather than numbers, so you can't run into the computational exhaustion of too many numbers. FMEA is pretty much never done because of the cost, and while a computerized version would be some faster, it'd be hard to create--the real benefit would of course come from being able to reuse component models, but you casually lead yourself astray by eventually thinking those component models are complete.

In any case, I applaud Pearl's thinking, but...problem still untractable.

Why? The simplest way to simulate the universe would be to build it.