By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Killdeer, Marmon fields, Williams, North Dakota, United States.
“Why does Pantone have a color of the year? It started with … birds” [National Geographic]. From 2023, still germane: “Robert Ridgway, an ornithologist and artist at the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum from 1886 to 1929, was tasked with describing the country’s diverse bird life. To do that, he needed first to accurately describe birds’ color, from the vibrant reddish orange of an American robin’s breast to the wine reds of the purple finch. That’s harder than it might sound, as a color can appear different from moment to moment based on ambient light and other nearby shades. (Read: Tracing the roots of beautiful bird hues.) To solve this problem, Ridgway published two dictionaries of over a thousand different colors, from mustard gold to peacock blue, featuring page after page of hand-painted color swatches. These humble beginnings—Ridgway self-published the latter volume at his own expense—ultimately gave rise to the Pantone Color Institute in the 1960s. ‘There wasn’t this common vocabulary about color until Ridgway created it,’ says Brian Ellis, president of the Illinois Audubon Society and portrayer of Ridgway in living history skits. ‘He had a very specific need, but what he created quickly found a very broad use.'” • I’d like to know a little more about “gave rise to.” But nevertheless:
The bird based colour system that eventually became Pantone. An effort to describe the diversity of birds led to one of the first modern colour systems ….this is wonderful. ( well I think so) pic.twitter.com/aVttyziIKX
— helen warlow (@HWarlow) June 4, 2024
In Case You Might Miss…
(1) Georgia Trump case delayed.
(2) Joe and Jill Biden at Omaha beach.
(3) Don’t try this at home….
Look for the Helpers
“Creating Communities for Disability Activism” [JSTOR Daily]. ” Returning home for his senior year of high school after seven months at Warm Springs [Institute in Georgia], [Fred] Fay noticed that the physical and social accessibility issues he faced were the products of his environment, not an innate part of being disabled….. When Fay enrolled at the University of Illinois, known for its strong Rehabilitation Education Services Program, he met other Warm Springs alumni who had had similar experiences. They established a coed fraternity, Delta Sigma Omicron (DSO), and two publications that focused on educating the public about disabilities and fighting discrimination… [Lindsey] Patterson writes that DSO members evaluated the campus buildings and infrastructure and lobbied administrators to improve accessibility. They also took direct action. Timothy Nugent, the disability administrator, joined a small group of disabled students in going out at night and smashing curbs with sledgehammers to force the university to rebuild them with ramps…. As they graduated, the student activists from all three states, and others like them, extended their networks and expanded their work into fighting for disability rights at the state and federal levels. In 1972, after President Richard Nixon vetoed a bill to extend civil rights protections to disabled people, Heumann and fifty other activists used their wheelchairs to stop traffic in Manhattan, in just one of many militant actions across the country. The following year, Nixon signed the first law offering federal protection against discrimination on the basis of disability. ;Disability rights constituted a genuine grassroots movement that built momentum from successes at local levels,’ Patterson writes.” • “Direct action brings satisfaction” (but not as a lone wolf effort).
My email address is down by the plant; please send examples of “Helpers” there. In our increasingly desperate and fragile neoliberal society, everyday normal incidents and stories of “the communism of everyday life” are what I am looking for (and not, say, the Red Cross in Hawaii, or even the UNWRA in Gaza).
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
2024
Less than a half a year to go!
A mixed bag for Team Trump, this week with some Swing States (more here) Brownian-motioning themselves back toward him, including Pennsylvania. Not, however, Michigan, to which Trump paid a visit. Of course, it goes without saying that these are all state polls, therefore bad, and most of the results are within the margin of error. If will be interesting to see whether the verdict in Judge Merchan’s court affects the polling, and if so, how.
* * * Trump (R) (Willis/McAfee): “Georgia appeals court stays Trump election interference case until at least October” [NBC (Furzy Mouse)]. “A Georgia appeals court on Wednesday officially stayed until at least October the racketeering case alleging Donald Trump and others conspired to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election — making it impossible for the case to go to trial before November’s elections….. McAfee had not set a trial date for the case and was not likely to do so while Trump and the others appealed his ruling that Willis could remain on the case provided that Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she’d appointed to the case and with whom she had a romantic relationship, resigned.” • Unfortunate for anti-Trump forces that Willis shot herself (and, I assume, her chances for higher office as the next Stacey Abrams) in the foot. I have always felt that this was the most dangerous case for Trump: The Bragg trial proves what every 2016 voter already knew: Trump is a letch. But Willis’s case should have shown that innocent parties, “civilians,” were sucked into an election theft scheme as “contingent electors,” which is quite another thing from having a vivid personal life. But now that chance is gone.
Trump (R) (Smith/Cannon): “Court stops taking ‘orchestrated’ complaints against judge overseeing Trump documents case” [South Florida Sun Sentinel]. “A federal appeals court has stopped accepting public complaints against U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, many seeking her recusal from the U.S. Government’s classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, citing a flood of 1,000 filings in recent weeks that appear to be part of ‘an orchestrated campaign.’ The court acted after a general order from Chief Judge William Pryor Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which is based in Atlanta and covers Florida, Georgia and Alabama. A link entitled, ‘Judicial Council Order In the Matter of Judicial Complaints Against Judge Aileen M. Cannon,’ appears on the court’s home page. ‘Many of the complaints against Judge Cannon request that the Chief Circuit Judge remove her from the classified-documents case and reassign the case to a different judge,’ Pryor wrote in an order dated May 22. He added that many ‘also question the correctness of her rulings or her delays in issuing rulings in the case.’ The judge instructed the clerk of the appeals court ‘not to accept further judicial complaints against United States District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’ on or after May 16 ‘to the extent they are similar to previously filed complaints.'” • Blue MAGA?
Trump (R) (People vs. Trump): “Trump supporters try to dox jurors and post violent threats after his conviction” [NBC]. “Advance Democracy, a nonprofit that conducts public interest research, said there has been a high volume of social media posts containing violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, including a post with Bragg’s purported home address. The group also found posts of the purported addresses of jurors on a fringe internet message board known for pro-Trump content and harassing and violent posts, although it is unclear if any actual jurors had been correctly identified. The posts, which have been reviewed by NBC News, appear on many of the same websites used by Trump supporters to organize for violence ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. These forums were hotbeds of threats inspired by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, which he lost, and that the voting system was ‘rigged’ against him. They now feature new threats echoing Trump’s rhetoric and false claims about the hush money trial, including that the judicial system is now ‘rigged’ against him. ‘Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,’ one user wrote after Trump’s conviction on a website formerly known as ‘The Donald,’ which was popular among participants in the Capitol attack. (That post appears to have been quickly removed by moderators.)” • Hmm.
Trump (R) (People vs. Trump): “Trump wants the Supreme Court to toss out his conviction. Will they?” [Vox]. “Assume, for just a moment, that a majority of the justices are partisan hacks who are determined to remove the stigma of a felony conviction from the Republican presidential candidate before the election. Could they actually invalidate his conviction before the November election? The answer to this question should be ‘no.’ Under the rules that apply to criminal defendants who are not named Donald Trump, two state-level appeals courts should review Trump’s conviction before the justices could intervene. Both of those courts would ordinarily take months or longer to review a criminal appeal. To toss out Trump’s conviction before the election, the Court would have to take such extraordinary procedural liberties that this outcome is probably unlikely.” And: “The Supreme Court does have a process, known as “certiorari before judgment,” which can be used to bypass an appellate court and bring a case directly to the justices, but cert before judgment is supposed to be granted only in the most exceptional cases, and it’s only supposed to be available to parties challenging a federal (not a state) court decision.” • Oddly, when discussing “the basis of a recusal motion against Justice Merchan,” Vox entirely omits any discussion of section 100.3(E)(1)(d)(iii) of the Rules of Judicial Conduct for the New York State Unified Court System:
Since Merchan’s daughter is a Democrat consultant, any entity that wished to reward the Merchan clan for services rendered could launder money through her firm. I’m not saying that happened. But we have ethics laws exactly to prevent this sort of speculation.
Trump (R) (People vs. Trump): “‘We, the jury, have a verdict'” [Lawfare]. “Justice Merchan thanks the jurors for their service. And he tells them that they are now free to discuss the case with anyone they would like to discuss it with. ‘But you’re also free not to,’ he continues. ‘No one can make you do anything that you don’t want to do. The choice is yours.'” Not a peep so far. And: “Turning to Joshua Steinglass, the judge asks about Trump’s bail status. ‘There is no bail,’ Steinglass replies. Mr. Trump remains released on his own personal recognizance, Justice Merchan says.”
* * * Trump (R): “Disengaged Voters Did Not Immediately Respond to Guilty Verdict by Abandoning Trump” [Slate]. The deck: “But then again, they’re not engaged.” More: “Add everything together, and Trump’s lead over Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average has moved ever so slightly from 0.9 percent on the morning of the verdict to 0.5 percent as of Monday afternoon. What a roller coaster!” • But–
Trump (R): “A polling do-over finds Trump’s lead shrank after guilty verdict” [Politico]. “In a redo of a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, Trump’s three-point edge over President Joe Biden before the jury rendered its verdict shrank to just one point when respondents were quizzed after the decision. The re-canvassing of the 2,000 voters provides a data-based reflection on the first conviction of a former president, and presidential candidate, though it may be no more than a snapshot this far out from the election. Before the verdict, most Americans, polls showed, viewed the hush money case as less serious than Trump’s other legal cases. The slight shift from the initial polls in April and May was especially prominent among young, nonwhite and less engaged Democratic-leaning voters, according to the new analysis. Twenty percent of Trump’s previous supporters who are Black are now supporting Biden while only 2 percent of non-Black previous Trump supporters decided to back Biden.”
Trump (R): “Donald Trump Is Plotting His Next Crime” [Marc Elias, Democracy Docket]. “In 2016, Donald Trump seemed to pull an inside straight by narrowly winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin while losing the popular vote by three million. We now know, Trump committed 34 felonies to win that election. Without these crimes, he seems almost certain to have lost to Hillary Clinton.” • “Almost” doing a lot of work, there. Consider the source.
* * * Jill Biden wastes no time leading a dazed Joe Biden away from the Normandy veterans, leaving Macron to frantically make up for the awkwardness pic.twitter.com/RalCouBMop
— RT (@RT_com) June 6, 2024
Best sourcing available at press time, which doesn’t say much. Readers?
Biden (D): “Pelosi slams Wall Street Journal article on Biden’s mental acuity as ‘hit piece'” [The Hill]. Well, she would, wouldn’t she? “‘Many of us spent time with @WSJ to share on the record our first-hand experiences with @POTUS, where we see his wisdom, experience, strength and strategic thinking,’ Pelosi wrote. ‘Instead, the Journal ignored testimony by Democrats, focused on attacks by Republicans and printed a hit piece.'” Pelosi, unlike Trump, disdains the Oxford Comman. More importantly, the Journal did interview Democrats, albeit anonymously. The interesting question is why they were willing to throw Biden under the bus.
Biden (D): “Colbert mocks Biden’s border shift, joking border will have ‘gluten-free’ wall and ‘pro-choice’ barbed wire” [FOX]. • So useless.
* * * Kennedy (I): “RFK Jr.’s VP choice ties herself to Tucker Carlson during Kittery rally” [News Center Maine]. “Those gathered to hear Shanahan represented a broad coalition from across the political spectrum, in many cases bonded by a support for the Kennedy campaign’s many conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines, as well as a desire for a different type of political figure. ‘He seems to be kind of a rare person in the political sphere who can learn,’ Dr. Christobal Alvarado, a retired physician, said. ‘He thinks for himself, he questions,’ Cathi Mavodones, another supporter, added. This unity in thought among supporters, however, was put to the test when news broke during the rally that a New York jury had convicted former president Trump of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. For some voters, like Darrian Lewry, who leans Democratic, the verdict powerfully represented Trump’s character. ‘I’m not surprised, just with who Donald is,’ Lewry said. But across the RFK camp, Mavodones disagrees, calling the case ‘irrelevant’ and ‘sensationalism.'” And: “Now, with the Kennedy campaign planning events around Maine to attempt to tap into a wide coalition, the question of ballot access—the tool needed to compete with Trump and Biden—hangs in the balance. Four thousand signatures are needed to land on the presidential ballot in November. A campaign official would not disclose how many have been collected so far in Maine, but said they are drawing close. Currently, the Kennedy ticket will appear in seven states, with enough signatures collected in eight others, according to the campaign.” • Picked this up from the Daily Beast, which leaves out the most important part: ballot access.
Kennedy (I): “RFK Jr. seizes on Trump verdict to bolster support” [The Hill]. But:
Democrats en Déshabillé
“Not All Peaceful Protests Constitutionally Protected, Police Chief Says Ahead Of DNC” [Block Club Chicago]. “Police Supt. Larry Snelling warned organizers that not all peaceful protests are protected by the First Amendment ahead of August’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, drawing immediate criticism from local civil liberties groups. ‘First Amendment protection is only there if you’re not committing a crime, and you can be acting out peacefully but still breaking the law,’ Snelling said at a press conference Tuesday to discuss safety at the political convention. Snelling went on to list blocking a roadway or venue or protesting on private property as examples of what he called crimes.” Picture caption: “A Chicago Police officer shoves a journalist after dozens of Chicago Police officers began forcibly removing the student Gaza solidarity encampment at DePaul University at 5:30 a.m. on May 16, 2024 in Lincoln Park.” More: “[Ed Yohnka, director of communications and public policy at ACLU of Illinois] also urged officials to release the convention’s security footprint, which has been a point of contention with groups wanting to peacefully protest. Without it, it creates ‘an environment where we are just going to go anywhere,’ Yohnka said. The security footprint around the convention will be designated areas where traffic will be limited or cut off. The Secret Service creates the footprint, and it will not be released until the end of July, officials have said. Part of the city’s reason for denying four protest permit requests around the DNC was the city does not know where the footprint will be; therefore, officials cannot grant access to an area that might be deemed restricted at a later date.” • Lovely.
Realignment and Legitimacy
“Liberal Blindspots” (interview) [Chris Shaw, Phenomenal World]. “What is it about liberalism that makes it particularly unsuited to dealing with the climate challenge? ‘There is no society,’ as Margaret Thatcher put it. Hence the focus on individual change and market solutions in liberalism that guards against any systemic change. Fossil energy provides individuals with a great deal of independence from other people. Fossil fuels give individuals the ability to make choices and buy items without relying on others. One doesn’t have to work as part of a group to hunt for food each day. Instead I can go on my own in my car down to the supermarket and buy what I want. That is a lot easier than having to work with my neighbors to build a different world. And one’s consumption can be used as proof of one’s status. So fossil fuel-enabled individualism in the West is seen as sacrosanct, as it enables freedom from constraints of social obligations. ”
Syndemics
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
Sequelae: Covid
“US training centre for Hong Kong’s Cathay halts cadet solo flights after serious blunders” [South China Morning Post]. “A US training centre for Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways has halted solo flights for cadet pilots after an “alarming” rise in serious blunders in which students were involved in a wingtip collision, a bounced landing and an erroneous exit from a runway.” • One can only wonder why…
Elite Maleficence
Great place to work, if you can get along with eugenicists:
Morning yoga on the lawn at CDC’s Atlanta campus! 🧘💪 pic.twitter.com/LvwWQMB2Ze
— Mandy K. Cohen, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) June 5, 2024
“New ‘FLiRT’ COVID Variants Could Be Driving an Uptick in Cases. Here’s How to Avoid Them” [Lauren J. Young, Scientific American]. As far as the “avoid them” part, IN THE FINAL [FAMILY BLOGGING] paragraph: “Chin-Hong also recommends wearing masks[1] and packing COVID rapid tests[2] during summer traveling and vacations[3]. And vaccination is still crucial for prevention[4]. ‘Everybody I saw in the hospital,’ he says[5], ‘the common feature when they were very sick right now with COVID is that they didn’t get a vaccine in the last year.'[6]” • I filed this under “elite maleficence for a reason: [1] as opposed to N95 respirators; [2] of which the CDC says you need at least 3 test to confirm you don’t have Covid, or one PCR test; [3] and not as a usual practice in crowded, close contact, closed spaces, of course; [4] but not transmission, and in any case at best prevent hospitalization and death, as opposed to Long Covid and cumulative neurological and vascular damage; [5] selection bias, since those who neglect non-pharmaceutical interventions are more likely to end up in hospital in the first place; [5] no mention of ventilation generally, or CO2 monitoring, or (again) the advantages of avoiding crowded, close contact, closed spaces, where SARS-CoV-2-bearing aerosols build up. I don’t question Young’s credentials; I just wish there wasn’t an unfortunately high likelihood that credentialed opinion-havers are going to get people sick or killed. What a debacle. Hard to believe and editor let this through.
Lambert here: Patient readers, I’m going to have to rethink this beautifully formatted table. Biobot data is gone, CDC variant data functions, ER visits are dead, CDC stopped mandatory hospital data collection, New York Times death data has stopped. (Note that the two metrics the hospital-centric CDC cared about, hospitalization and deaths, have both gone dark). Ideally I would replace hospitalization and death data, but I’m not sure how. I might also expand the wastewater section to include (yech) Verily data, H5N1 if I can get it. Suggestions and sources welcome. UPDATE I replaced the Times death data with CDC data. Amusingly, the URL doesn’t include parameters to construct the tables; one must reconstruct then manually each time. Caltrops abound.
TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts
| Cases | |
| ❌ National[1] Biobot May 13: | ❌ Regional[2] Biobot May 13: |
 |
 |
| Variants[3] CDC May 25 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC May 18 |
 |
< |
| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data June 4: | National [6] CDC May 11: |
|
 |
| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens May 28: | ‘ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic June 1: |
 |
 |
| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC May 13: | Variants[10] CDC May 13: |
 |
 |
| Deaths | |
| ‘ Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11]CDC May 18: | ‘ Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12]CDC May 18: |
 |
|
LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (Biobot) Dead.
[2] (Biobot) Dead.
[3] (CDC Variants) FWIW, given that the model completely missed KP.2.
[4] (ER) This is the best I can do for now. At least data for the entire pandemic is presented.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Slight leveling out? (The New York city area has form; in 2020, as the home of two international airports (JFK and EWR) it was an important entry point for the virus into the country (and from thence up the Hudson River valley, as the rich sought to escape, and then around the country through air travel.)
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). This is the best I can do for now. Note the assumption that Covid is seasonal is built into the presentation. At least data for the entire pandemic is presented.
[7] (Walgreens) 4.3%; big jump. (Because there is data in “current view” tab, I think white states here have experienced “no change,” as opposed to have no data.)
[8] (Cleveland) Going up.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Flattening.
[10] (Travelers: Variants) KP.2 enters the chat, as does B.1.1.529.
[11] Deaths low, but positivity up.
[12] Deaths low, ED not up.
Stats Watch
Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of people claiming unemployment benefits in the US jumped by 8,000 to 229,000 on the week ending June 1st, well above market expectations of 220,000, to record the highest reading since the eight-month high of 232,000 from early May. In the meantime, outstanding claims unexpectedly rose to 1,792,000 in the earlier week, the highest in seven weeks. The results were further evidence of a softening US labor market, strengthening the case for the Federal Reserve to deliver multiple rate cuts this year should inflation progress in converging to its target. ”
Employment Situation: “United States Challenger Job Cuts” [Trading Economics]. “US-based employers announced plans to cut 63,816 jobs in May 2024, 1.5% lower than in April and 20.3% below the level seen a year earlier, as companies assess performance and make plans for Q3 and Q4, Entertainment/Leisure announced the most cut (9,180), followed by Technology (7,771), Utility (7,400) and Services (5,184). Meanwhile, hiring announcements are at 4,326, their lowest levels in a decade. “The typical churn in a healthy labor market appears to be stalling”, said Andrew Challenger, Senior Vice President of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. ”
Here it is. If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files – it is time to cancel Adobe, delete all the apps and programs. Adobe can not be trusted. pic.twitter.com/LFnBbDKWLC
— Wetterschneider (@Stretchedwiener) June 5, 2024
I’m assuming this only works if you gullible enough to use Adobe’s Cloud storage, and that Adobe isn’t inserting its sucking mandibles into your storage device and slurping down data. But the agreement doesn’t say that, does it?
Tech: “Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects” [The Register]. “A study has found that software projects adopting Agile practices are 268 percent more likely to fail than those that do not. Even though the research commissioned by consultancy Engprax could be seen as a thinly veiled plug for Impact Engineering methodology, it feeds into the suspicion that the Agile Manifesto might not be all it’s cracked up to be. The study’s fieldwork was conducted between May 3 and May 7 with 600 software engineers (250 in the UK and 350 in the US) participating. One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed. In comparison, one of the four pillars of the Agile Manifesto is “Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation.'” • Famously: “You guys start coding. I’ll go find out what the requirements are.”
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 44 Fear (previous close: 45 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 43 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jun 6 at 1:53:46 PM ET.
“We Don’t Deserve Dogs”
I can testify to the cat part:
A lot of this is very true…. pic.twitter.com/mrQ3nbw16t
— Heckin Good Dogs (@HeckinGoodDogs) June 6, 2024
Class Warfare
“COVID-19 Can Be Occupational Disease, Colorado Court Says in Worker Death Case” [Claims Journal]. “The appeals panel commented: ‘The novel virus raises a unique consideration under Colorado workers’ compensation law. Because of the nature of a virus, it cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt precisely where or from whom an individual had the exposure that transmitted the disease. Like the ALJ, we believe a reasoned statistical analysis can determine where the site of exposure was most probable. The ALJ concluded that it was more probable than not that the exposure site was within the facility. In our view, the ALJ used the appropriate burden of proof.; Under the law, an employee is entitled to compensation if ‘the injury or death is proximately caused by an injury or occupational disease arising out of and in the course of the employee’s employment and is not intentionally self-inflicted.'” • More like this, please.
News of the Wired
— Rothmus 🏴 (@Rothmus) June 4, 2024
News you can use?
Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From AM:
AM writes: “An exotic looking tulip (I presume) in the garden of Dyffryn, a National Trust property in Southern Wales not far from Cardiff.” It looks like a cross between a thistle and a tulip, so maybe it’s a Scotch tulip? That migrated south?
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Gone Indefinitely Joe…
What an embarrassment to all involved-
Max Blumenthal mentioned speculative reports that Biden had a “diaper accident” in Normandy today on Judge Napolitano a little while ago. So, definitely embarrassing but also potentially malodorous.
Tim Pool
@Timcast
Oh my god
he’s pooping
https://x.com/Timcast/status/1798700172740116509
Depends, it could have been urine.
“Depends” [tm] … Kudos for starting off with that brand name with context to the event.
Well the bending over forward and look on his face suggests number 2 and not 1. Anywho … it sort of underpins my observation that before any dramas with currency make things wobbly … humans acting badly proceed everything else.
Trump in the debates: “Well, Joe… that DEPENDS… (pauses, winks at camera) on…”.
Wins the nets – !!!!!
Hey ho, Say you didn’t go
hey ho, say it’s just nothing Joe
hey ho, Joe is a doddering away
hey ho, Jill keeps at it today
Mel Brooks to the courtesy phone !
Where is my chair? Bizarre moment Jill covers her mouth as Joe suddenly bends down during the 80th anniversary D-Day speech
The video looks so bad. Like so much worse than the description.
Snip:”The move seemed to prompt First Lady Jill Biden to cover her mouth – raising questions about whether she quietly tried to offer him advice.
As Biden bent down towards his chair, the music suddenly cut out, and a loudspeaker told the gathered ‘distinguished guests’ that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would now speak.
That prompted Biden to pause in his squatted position. He then slightly elevated himself as if to stand, before again lowering himself down.”
A few years ago I experienced occasional syncope. I was in and out of a deep squat all day as an older, slow burn, wake and bake stay at home dad for a kid under 4. Eventually I learned to deep breathe into it, and more importantly to breathe regularly while squatting — usually during some fine motor building play where I’d otherwise default to holding my breath.
But initially I would moderate the head rush by moving my head into different elevations or just sitting down. Can’t say I didn’t enjoy the sensation but it was weird, and I didn’t want to alarm the Fam. So it was a good habit to break.
Since it would be irresponsible not to speculate, it looks like that’s exactly what old Joe is up to in that vid: intentionally walking a pleasant, nitrous-like tightrope when standing up straight for five seconds might drop him like a rock. Side effects of the cocktail?
Lately I’ve been experiencing vertigo so I move very slowly between down and up. It could be that or actually he kind of looks like he’s in pain. Or else just moving slow like the old folks do…
“Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects”
Agile, devops, all exist so that architecture astronauts are shielded from nay-saying managers and sysadmins.
Having gone through training for Scrum, and just watched an intro course on DevOps, combined with job searches looking at “Agile project management” I don’t know that I’d put all the blame on the tools here (agile in this case). My interpretation of most of the Agile PM roles is that they are very selective in what parts of “Agile” they adhere to, and that doesn’t include much autonomy or input from the dev team. Instead it seems to be used as a way to cut overhead for things like documentation, spending staff time doing QA instead of automated tests, etc. In essence I agree with what they say at the end of the Register article: most of what’s called Agile isn’t, at least if you’re looking at the Manifesto.
As far as I can tell, the main reason DevOps exists is management sucks and can’t get multiple teams aligned…so they created a kludge to force it. Now I’m sure that’s going down the same track as Agile and Lean.
The nonsense I have seen called Agile software design is nothing like an early description of Agile software I read about over almost two decades ago: small team of 5-6 people making incremental changes to improve software given specifications and immediate feedback from an on-site or proximate representative of the end-user community. As I recall the earlier Agile method included testing, and continuous updating of the code comments and documentation as software was slowly and incrementally modified. Another aspect of the early Agile technique indicated making use of development tools beyond a simple compiler and make program. The idea of an Agile project manager running a giant team of programmers working against a big master schedule runs contrary to the early Agile process I read about. The early Agile process described the software development process as it was before the days of giant teams working on Waterfall programs running on Gantt charts and micromanagement against a weekly schedule for assessing progress.
I remember informal meetings with the other programmers working on a block of code together to hash out problems. Now that simple meeting has become a “Scrum”. It might seem silly, but I was especially put off by the training people showing up with a whole new set of terms for old programming concepts. It was like a bad variation on the JAVA mania for creating new terms for software development or the strange concepts,terms,and wasteful coding forcing simple procedural coding problems to fit into an object-oriented multiprocessing glass slipper. Many of the early compilers for object-oriented languages were notorious for introducing code bloat, complexity, and obscurity to the code produced.
Once Agile arrived on the scene, giant Waterfall programming efforts were transformed into giant AGILE programming efforts by renaming and making minor tweaks to the Waterfall technique. New development tools did not extend beyond a compiler. The build process and project management got tools with flaky tools programmers were compelled to use for reporting their daily progress and posting code for the software build. These new project tools generally had horrible user interfaces and similarly horrible access via cloud servers — sometimes local — though moving to increasingly remote locations. The managers still micromanaged week-by-week. The user feedback was formalized but seldom to the extent of specifications. When there were specifications they were either vague or impossible to meet. The only thing remotely Agile or efficient about the new Agile fad was its name.
I have been retired more than a decade and I am truly appalled and a little surprised that this so-called Agile programming is still a hot rock with management. Management I recall had a short attention span and soon found other ‘silver bullets’ and shiny new tools and development packages usually not containing any useful tools to actually support their programmers.
Tend to agree WRT DoD software. Having “grown up” in a DOD-STD-2168A world the claims that Agile would solve all our problems seemed a bit over the top, in particular given our requirements for flight, ordnance, and nuke weapon safety which I don’t think really work well in an iterative requirements process.
It’s like Boeing MCAS — get feedback from users and tweak it in the next round. As my boss would say about “rapid prototyping”, “if all your system fires is a diode, you can afford that process”.
DoD is working towards Agile. They had a major Software Acquisition and Practices study in 2019 at https://innovation.defense.gov/software/
There are various summaries there, as well as vignettes, concept papers, etc.
Apologies up-front if this accidentally double-posts (I think my first comment got eaten).
I’ve had the chance to work on a few projects that were Agile(TM) in name and/or spirit, and I can totally believe the high-failure rate. Like JM, I doubt the process is directly making anyone’s work worse, but the issue with (genuine) Agile overall is that it’s a fragile process (in a Taleb-ian sense). Also, I suspect there’s some selection bias where decision makers are more likely to loudly push Agile onto divisions or projects that are troubled. Which is arguably the exact opposite of its original motivation (to free high-performing developers from the more mind-numbing sides of bureaucracy and keep them in a flow-state).
If you have a well thought-out project with a good, open, cooperative team, I’ve seen first-hand where it can amplify that by making the project more fluid, collaborative, and (*gasp*) kind of fun. And if you have a poorly thought-out project with a dysfunctional team, customer, etc.? It rapidly implodes into people throwing out all the hard but positive aspects, gaming the metrics, and generally flailing about. I’ve also seen that first-hand.
And then there’s Franken-Agile, where the customer & bureaucracy still demand a dozen boilerplate, process documents that nobody actually reads and will chew up 50% of your time. But you start before anyone has done even basic engineering studies or pinned down top-level requirements. At least you get to track all the directionless churn in Jira though!
Agile is not a magic bullet, but what’s called the Agile process nowadays is one that has undergone enshittification, just like everything else including democracy, science, pandemic management, you name it, etc.
Around 15 years ago, I joined a software project that was run according to the Agile Manifesto, and till now it still ranks as the best project I have been a part of. The people who managed that project understood that “Working software over comprehensive documentation” does not mean ZERO DOCUMENTATION. The project ended up being successful because:
1. Every iteration would have clear identifiable goals documented as a set of comprehensive test cases, including exceptional conditions.
2. There’s enough backlog items to last through at least two iterations, but not more.
3. There was true collaboration from both the technical team and the business team which led to number 1.
Ultimately there is nothing in this world that can survive people who don’t care or people who are just interested in expanding their own empire. Agile, Waterfall methods, REST architecture, they are just tools to climb the ladder for those people.
Over the last decade I have been involved in two programs with a European company that used the Agile process. On one program I was an end user, an instrumented lab rat. On another I gathered several dogs to see if the dogs would eat the dog food, as end users. Both programs got good results due to a tight feedback loop but we did have confrontations that had to be worked out.
What my user group of several customers enjoyed was as the Agile process worked out there was some slack for side projects, so each delivery had some fun surprises.
At this point we (developers and end users) are not connected like we were in the past and we would like to be dancing together again.
If you look at the Agile Manifesto, what you call “tight feedback loop” is definitely one of its primary tenets. Individuals and interactions, working software (which only end users can attest to), and customer collaboration are pretty much missing from pretty much every software project nowadays, and instead most people focus on the performative, but measurable aspects of the Agile process like two week Sprint’s velocity, stand ups ,etc. By that argument, there’s nothing wrong with any democracy, because people get to vote every 4/5 years, am I right?
Agile = Move fast and break stuff
Agile, the latest “silver bullet” that some consultants talked management into believing could solve their software development woes. Every ten years we’ve been getting another one of these, since the 1970s at least. I can’t wait to see what the next one will be. Maybe we can combine Agile with AI with microdosing psychedelics…?
I hate to reiterate that 90+% of big IT projects fail. Thank you Bill Gates and digital capitalism running into frictionless markets created out of whole cloth without any social productivity. Same thing applies to how finance was white anted so absentee share holders could make unearned gains and then squirrel it away in some tax haven whilst society crumbles.
So mates of mine in the 90s were making stoopid[tm] money debugging Corp code after off the shelf software was so bastardized for ad hoc management reasons it was near useless, but hay bonuses all around for the C-suite for reducing a critical line item by extenuating it off into the unknown future ….
I do wonder if Adobe reserve the right to transfer a copy of any file you open with their software to their servers for “review”.
Probably. The ONLY time I ever used my G-Drive for anything other than gmail storage was to upload some resarch materials to the cloud as a backup. The next time I opened G-Drive it showed me images from that upload, images in a zipped .pdf. Google unzipped the folder, opened the .pdf and extracted images for some bizarre “marketing?” reason. “Here’s what you uploaded last time, just wanted to let you know that we examined it.”
Daunting to say the least and I use Kim Dotcom’s MEGA for all my cloud backups now. Adobe has a terrible reputation in the creative community, the depths of which can only be appreciated by those forced to use a “dongle” to operate software they’d paid for (not realizing they were only ‘renting’).
Adobe subscription service:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/must-you-be-logged-in-to-use-individual-subscription/td-p/12399054
Sounds like you must be logged into Adobe’s homebase to use the subscription service versions of any Adobe product. That’s my impression.
As I commented in links this morning, I own non-scription versions of Adode products on disks with valid install license. No need for me to log in. I don’t need the latest and greatest features or to share to a widely dispersed group.
Adding: why any business would accept what could constitute in essence industrial espionage programs – no matter the “guarantees” of the software vendor – is beyond me. I understand first mover advantage. I also understand due diligence. There are alternatives.
> I own non-scription versions of Adode products on disks with valid install license.
Are these still available anywhere? Legitimately? Thanks!
Adding, it ought to be possible for some sort of sniffer to detect traffic back to Adobe. They’d have to be sucking a lot of data off a local hard disk; some clever person might write an app to detect that….
Yes, they are, on the secondary markets. These are new or used-old-products that were created for the existing operating systems at the time they were released. Important to know your op sys and version, and double-check the Adobe product release version op-sys requirements/compatibility of the Adobe version you’re considering. This can be referenced online. Easy. Also important to verify a valid (unused or correctly uninstalled) license comes with the product you’re buying, and (important) the ability to return product for refund if the license doesn’t work for whatever reason. If anything in the above doesn’t make sense or sounds foreign then don’t go there. Really.
re sniffer back to Adobe: there are traffic monitoring programs that can monitor daemon activity and i/o traffic.
edit: “new” should read “new old stock” (NOS).
noting that a photo of a boxed set and its serial number is not the license number.
adding, and sorry to go on. But for important reference, the Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) and its individual programs was the last Adobe set of programs available as stand alone, disk installed, licensed programs, now discontinued and support has stopped. It’s final release was in 2012. It continued to work and be supported for several years after the final release. Everything after that is new Adobe Cloud and subscription.
The newest MS and OS op sys might not run something that old. Memory management issues, etc. Double-check.
> sorry to go on
This is all extremely helpful, and not only to me, I am sure.
I can vouch for this. Luckily bought CS5.5 suite, and bought PS CS6 on ebay.
Canceled my Adobe Sub initially for bug reasons, their latest ‘update’ of PS broke, and could NOT get it or any other version of PS to work after that on that machine. I’ve seen so many people with very fast, newer machines have Premiere and even PS slow to a crawl as they just don’t work on certain systems. A foul company, the Boeing of software.
I’m working on migrating off of Adobe bit by bit, started to use Krita for drawing (really nice prog), and next to try DaVinci Resolve for video editing. I find Audacity works better than the old Adobe Audition CS version in any case.
Not sure if Photopea would be a usable browser replacement for serious PS type work, but worth a try sometime.
> I’m working on migrating off of Adobe bit by bit
I use Lightroom a lot, and InDesign somewhat. Advice on alternatives would be appreciated. For InDesign, Scribe seems to be the competitor, which I’ve used before for small tasks. I’m not sure if it would be suitable for book-work; it’s good with styles and frames, but I need to be able to create a table of contents automatically, and I also need an index function (and I want to index the book myself page by page, and not farm it out to other software. I suppose there’s always TeX… .
Lambert doesn’t need to hear this but I need to insert this comment somewhere…
Bill Clinton’s DOJ could have dismembered Microsoft in the 1990s and of course chose not to. All the subsequent proprietary IT evil flows from that decision.
If this govt is dissolved, I hope its replacement(s) go open source. Any decision otherwise will be a tell that nothing’s really changed.
Last year I bought a suite of programs from Affinity (Publisher, Designer, and Photo) for a 200+ page book design (with about as many pictures). Cost about $150 (program download, not a cloud thing). A little bit clunky, takes some getting used to, but perfectly functional. Pretty good. I think they have upgraded a little in the meantime. The only drawback is that the output/export is PDFs.(I think you can import .indd files, but I didn’t try to.) Printers like to receive InDesign files because it is easer for them to do the little fiddles, prepress. Not sure about your TOC and index requirements.
Probably posting this too late for anyone to see but updating Acrobat Reader will disable old versions of Adobe installed programs like CS6, heads up.
Good point. Thanks.
Welp… maybe it’s time to bite the bullet and learn GIMP.
I was glad to see this in the Water Cooler. My art friends are freaking out. Here’s another article discussing it for some context.
The best that can be said about this is the content moderation and access Adobe will rely on are ambiguous. Hard to believe that a company that was built on serving artists has become the oppressor. Waiting to see similar things roll out in Word…
Thanks.
Adobe has always had one of the most stringent licensing protocols out there, imo, outside of some very, very high cost and narrowly tech specific softwares used by mostly large govt agencies. On the one hand, Adobe’s softwares were never pirated (afaik). So that’s good. I don’t approve of software piracy. On the other hand, they’ve now boxed themselves into the corner of my-way-or-the-highway demand and people are starting to look for alternatives, which do exist.
Adobe’s products used to be highly pirated, btw. At the dawn of digital photography, everyone I knew who had a camera had a copy they hadn’t paid for.
Thanks.
That sounds like Adobe was copying the MS Windows/Office marketing plan: let everyone pirate our software and it will become the widely accepted standard, after which effective market saturation we’ll clamp down and make book. Software dumping, anyone? heh. And it was very successful. / ;)
But doesn’t that marketing plan only work in business situations where MS and Adobe lawyers can bring the hammer down?
As I say below as an amateur photographer I’ve never really used Photoshop (it used to come in the back of books). But aren’t they really selling a user interface since the algorithms for image manipulation are almost all long standing and open source?
The Gates reasoning, ironic given his open letter to hobbyists, was that it was better for people to use MS software in pirated form than get familiar with the competition.
This way MS could sell their software to businesses claiming employees would need less training as they were familiar with basic operations from home. It also helped make their proprietary file formats the de facto standard.
Also, corporations are easier to audit for license violations than consumers. And less likely to produce nasty headlines.
That said, i belive the Business Software Alliance, the industry equivalent of RIAA and MPAA, got so tired of MS’ lax attitude that they threatened to kick MS out.
Hence why Windows XP introduced “genuine advantage” that is basically an automated license check. Multiple ways around it though, including OEM codes that would always clear. And these days any pre built laptop or desktop has the key embedded into the UEFI.
Never mind that i think they dropped the duration check on Windows 11 test installs. All you got to live with is a watermark in the corner asking you to register your install. Basically making Windows 11 shareware.
Frankly Windows 11 would not be so bad if not for the TPM requirement and forced cloud account (and accompanying Bitlocker footgun).
Thanks.
For my modest requirements, GIMP 2.10 gets it done. I also have Inkscape installed, but the learning curve is pretty steep for an occasional user
Just wait until Adobe changes the terms of conditions so that they have the right to use your designs and artwork for themselves and to sell it commercially. This has happened before with Flickr where, much to people’s shock, the terms mean that Flickr had the copyright for photos and and the like stored by their customers and then went to sell some of them on the open market.
I’ve been using the same versions of Photoshop and Bridge since 2018, and haven’t seen any reason to bother with an alleged upgrade since they run pretty flawlessly on my reliable dinosaur 2015 Macbook. I swear by the more reputable file-sharing sites offering earlier (and free) versions of the photo processing software I use because [family blog] them greedy bastitches at Adobe.
How serendipitous that both Adobe and Pantone gets mentioned in this Water Cooler.
Here’s Cory Doctorow explaining both how Software as a service will always be misused and how Pantone became an IP company holding your colours for ransom (from 2022):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/
Mexico Confirms the First Human Case of Death From Bird Flu
The Mexican citizen who died from the H5N2 variant had no known contact with poultry.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/mexico-confirms-the-first-human-case-of-death-from-bird-flu/
Do we have a betting-pool yet?
“liberal blindspots” article. It isn’t just liberalism. Any system relying on exchange value, replication indefinitely of the capital-labor relation, and the further accumulation of capital from an ever-rising base is going to be ill-suited to the task.
And this encompasses all variants in existence.
Today’s Plantidote is a tulip cultivar in the Fringed group. See https://www.gardenia.net/genus/tulip-types for a review.
To me it looks like a cross between a Tulip and a Venus Flytrap. Yes there are many weird looking tulips out there and that one is a dandy tulip that I would be proud to see in my garden. I would like to know the exact variety.
Taking off on the Pantone color chart, I see 11. Phlox Purple, 14. Magenta and 17. Solferino in the petals.
Found this nice link showing Robert Ridgeway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature.
https://library.brown.edu/create/concentrationfieldguide/material-of-the-week-robert-ridgeways-color-standards/
Taibbi’s latest.
TWITTER FILES Extra: The Defaming of Brandon Straka and #Walkaway
Smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to “#Walkaway” from the Democratic Party, Twitter documents suggest @BrandonStraka and his followers were set up
https://www.racket.news/cp/145383773
> “A US training centre for Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways has halted solo flights for cadet pilots after an “alarming” rise in serious blunders in which students were involved in a wingtip collision, a bounced landing and an erroneous exit from a runway.” • One can only wonder why…
Nah, can’t be COVID. That is known to impair executive function, and these cadets aren’t executives. Now, the Boeing C-suite; that’s another matter. /s
There is of course a way (vote for Dr. Jill Stein), but most aren’t going to vote for her regardless, which was my point.
The next best thing is to not vote.
The worst thing is to vote for those awful people, and that is what they will do.
I’m voting to vote for local candidates to the school board, the city commission, the state education board, and the state lege. My vote actually makes a least a tiny difference in these elections. And, I know the local candidates and their records. ymmv. / ;)
Related to the Adobe thing, I sat through a presentation from Dell yesterday regarding AI. Specifically, they talked about Microsoft’s AI implementation, Copilot+PC and Recall. At one point, co-worker asked a very pointed question about privacy, specifically with regards Recall taking and indexing constant screenshots and essentially got a stammering “well, it’s encrypted but I’ll have to get back to you about that” in response.
Long story short though, however bad people here have been speculating it’s going to be, it’s looking to be much, much worse. I’m not trying to cause panic or anything, but I’ve been in IT a long time and what’s coming sounds like a security and privacy nightmare the likes of which I have never seen. And the parts that seem familiar smack of “trust us!” which is familiar because I can’t trust them. I really wish it was otherwise, but every “feature” they talked about had me shaking my head and thinking “who asked for this?” and “no way this ends well.”
But getting back to Adobe, yeah the wording on that statement is slippery. IANAL, but I certainly wouldn’t be giving any tech company the benefit of doubt at this point. SkyNet is real. Stay safe out there.
“well, it’s encrypted”
Didn’t someone already find that the Recall data was stored as an very not encrypted sqlite file? Or do they mean that it is encrypted in the sense that MS force Bitlocker on fresh W11 installs unless very specific precautions are taken? With the recovery key stored in the MS cloud no less?! Already seeing tech support frustration venting about people showing up with a error message on a new-ish PC that they can’t do anything about because they can’t access the cloud login to recover the encryption key.
Good questions! As someone who will have to support this stuff, I’d love to know the answers. You’ve already illustrated a couple of the ways this could go very, very wrong and I can think of a bunch more. But, again, it was basically a “trust us!” situation. I’m so old, I remember “the browser wars” and when the government sued Microsoft to have them debundle Internet Explorer from Windows. That seems so long ago now.
Yep. And the latest TPM push is not the first time MS has done this play (Palladium i think the branding was back then). But i guess ubiquitous smartphones have softened people up.
Not really encrypted.
I’m adding something that just dawned on me. We had people in this meeting remotely. Dell wouldn’t let us stream the PowerPoint part of it to them. Confidential Dell information that someone might try to record or screen so, dontchaknow?
Jesus Christ! Well, good I’ve begun the Linux migration process, (MINT, cannot speak highly enough of it).
I’ll keep using Win10 until I can’t, then it’s bye bye Win. If I need to use a win app I’ll do it on a non-networked machine.
Joining you soon from the Mac side. My 2012 build mini is still a great computer (thanks to putting in a solid state drive in ’18) but is being bricked by arbitrary Operating System decisions that are made to keep standards evolving in a way that keeps shutting out legacy systems. I don’t understand why it’s OK to sink lots of energy into building computers that get bricked halfway thru their normal life cycle.
Are you aware of Opencore Legacy Patcher? It’s freeware and it works. I’ve got a late-2011 MacBook Pro happily running Monterey when it theoretically maxed out four OS generations previously (i.e., High Sierra). I initially installed Opencore on that Mac as an experiment, since it was pretty much retired anyway. Now it’s still contributing on my home LAN as a file server.
Thank you, just googled up some links. Still thinking Linux as I simply no longer trust Apple but this is something I’ll have to consider.
Be careful with Windows 10 updates. They’re going to bring some of these “features” to 10 as well, though mostly on the Copilot side, not Recall.
Not the public facing Recall feature, but perhaps the internal surveillance functionality.
My Windows brother is up in arms about Recall. And what is Recall?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/retrace-your-steps-with-recall-aa03f8a0-a78b-4b3e-b0a1-2eb8ac48701c
Apparently it only works on certain recent PCS, can be turned on and off, uses local storage, unclear if it can be removed altogether.
I told him he should switch to Linux. Maybe he will.
At the psychiatric practice where I work we are writing into our policy that no computer or laptop or smart phone on which any of us work or use the EMR may download the Recall app.
Re: Latest Microsoft crapification…
Looking forward to the Rekall app Arnold “schizoid embolism” memes (yes, with a “K”).
https://healthcareuncovered.substack.com/p/unitedhealth-ceo-sold-56-million
UnitedHealth CEO Sold $5.6 Million in Shares the Same Day as Ransomware Attack
Other senior executives also cashed out as the company faced a $1.6 billion threat that wreaked havoc throughout the health care system.
All this time I thought insider trading was illegal. I suppose United Health’s C-suite executives sold their shares based on a lucky hunch.
Bitcoin once again proves it’s worth!
I added orts and scraps. Not enough syndemic material, I will try again tomorrow!
The biggest supercomputer in the world being built by Elon Musk in Memphis. The site of supercomputer is less than half a mile from the TVA powerplant to NE, half mile to the water treatment plant N (1 million gallons a day to cool the computer), 1/2 mile from Mississippi River W, 1/2 mile to intermodal connection (rail and barge) S.
Supercomputer it too mundane. Supersupercomputer. Hypercomputer. Starcomputer. Gigafactory of Compute.
> The biggest supercomputer in the world being built by Elon Musk
I guess that’s why Must diverted NVidia chips from Tesla to X…
Without those chips, what will happen to his Tesla robo taxi fleet? The supposed launch is only two months away, https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/23/24138580/tesla-robotaxi-ride-hail-app-preview-earningsq1-2024 ………..
Oh wait, he’s been promising us Sky Fleet only for the last X years.
Well at least he isn’t building it in the damn desert
Booker T. Jones: “Down In Memphis”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5RARd31dzE
so reads the description of this video (1:46:44) from the International Manifesto Group published today. https://youtu.be/ens6hTc94is?si=mjyTt2uOkVaJUiE7
I haven’t watched it yet…
Uhh, bigger than the Bolshevik Revolution??
“certiorari before judgment,” . . . only in the most exceptional cases.
If this doesn’t qualify as exceptional, what does?
But first, Trump only has to file an appeal. There’s no rush to do that until his team has sounded out the Supremes.
For those using Adobe products who may wish to reconsider, and for those who only wish they had access to such high end tools, there’s GIMP a free and open-source image editor that is similar Photoshop.
While I continue using Photoshop, it’s CS6, the version just before they got greedy and instead of being satisfied with my upgrading every time a new version came out, they switched to a subscription business model. And despite them making it difficult to keep using, I jump through the hoops each time I upgrade computers and have to reinstall because my muscle memory after 12 years is deeply ingrained/embedded, but come the day they make it impossible, then GIMP is the tool of choice.
There’s even a Gimp Android app from a few years back. Easy to use and useful but don’t think it’s still on the Play store if it ever was. Would probably have to be sideloaded.
On Linux if I just need to batch process some size reductions I use Image Magick which is a console program that has been around forever. It works as well as the GUI editors since all these algorithms were invented long ago.
The one program I’ve almost never used is Photoshop itself.
And for photos there is Darktable instead of Lightroom.
Some good health care news, after 8 days and 15 phone calls I was actually able to speak to the person who handles referrals and now have an appointment with an orthopaedist to look at my trashed right hip.
That referral was supposed to happen in October ’23…
Bravo! Endless phone calls and endlessly seeming phone menu hell is a test of endurance. Bravo, you!
Eight months, not quite an embryonic journey. Good luck with the referral.
More Biden gaff-o-matic while in France
https://www.rt.com/news/598892-biden-claims-40-year-relationship-with-putin/
And link for Jill and Joe.
https://www.rt.com/news/598869-biden-normandy-awkward-video/
D-Day. June 6, 1944. From NPR.
They were there on D-Day, on the beaches and in the skies. This is what they saw
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/06/1242605005/d-day-normandy-invasion-memories-veterans
These men gave us what we in the West now know as our modern world.
Agile is a religion. And daily meetings to talk about what you’re working on is pointless, we have work tracking systems now. It’s not sticky notes anymore. I’ve never seen anyone actually implement agile correctly anyway. It’s whatever people glue together.
Agile cannot fail, it can only be failed. But it is very to find a true
Scotsmanagile development implementation.“Not All Peaceful Protests Constitutionally Protected, Police Chief Says Ahead Of DNC”
I think that that police chief misses the days of George Bush when protestors were forced to go to a designated protest area and when they got there, saw that it was surrounded by a tall chain link fence.
I think that that police chief misses the days of George Bush when protestors were forced to go to a designated protest area and when they got there, saw that it was surrounded by a tall chain link fence.
Echo, echo, echo…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CahNAauFgys
Turns out, yoga is even more effective than vaccines against Covid.
Yoga joins Masks, nasal sprays, gargle….why shouldn’t yoga be more effective.
Remembering IM Doc’s mantra through all of this regarding exercise and eating right it makes perfect sense to me that yoga would be a good strategy. For those that can do it, it improves the respiratory system and oxygen processing, it improves circulation and is a very effective exercise system. And the breath exercises are almost to actually meditative.
About the only way yoga wouldn’t be as or more effective than the so-called vaccines is in making a huge profit for a limited number of people.
Sorry
Boy who knew that a known horndog hiding his affairs would be the entire reason he could win a state or two devastated by trade policies pushed by the other candidate who couldn’t even be bothered to campaign in those states.
Not sure the false statements denying the influence peddling by his opponent was really less important..I’m sure Bragg will get right on that.
And I think.I live in a fantasy world because I like to imagine I might find a lamp with a genie.
I’m at one Black Bear sighting on the year, a 7 month old that scooted across Mineral King road a couple weeks ago while I was driving-a classic 3 second scene and down the embankment it went, out of view. The wildlife highlight of the last 10 days car camping was a squirrel…and so it goes~
I’ve seen over 900 Black Bears in my life and never have I felt danger in their presence, well except that one bruin near Rock Creek who growled at us after not getting our counter balanced food hang-leaving it swinging like a pendulum as he retreated and voiced his displeasure over us not having him over for a midnight snack. It put a fright into us to the effect of packing up camp and walking 3 miles @ 1 am to where there was a bear box to secure our edibles, and everything was jake.
The last Californian killed by a bear was a Grizzly in 1875, and never one perpetrated by a Black Bear, that is until now.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-06/first-deadly-black-bear-attack-in-california
Some years back a woman hiker in the Smokies was killed by a black bear who had three cubs and they then partially ate her. Since there were no witnesses it’s unknown whether she provoked chase by running away or otherwise aggravated the situation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9744485/
February, 2023
Yoga for COVID-19: An ancient practice for a new condition – A literature review
By Denise Capela Santos, Sónia Jaconiano, Sofia Macedo, Filipa Ribeiro, Sara Ponte, Paula Soares and Paula Boaventura
Abstract
A substantial proportion of people with acute COVID-19 develop post-COVID-19 condition (previously known as long-COVID) characterized by symptoms that persist for months after the initial infection, including neuropsychological sequelae. Post-COVID-19 condition frequency varies greatly according to different studies, with values ranging from 4 to 80% of the COVID-19 patients.
Yoga is a psycho-somatic approach that increases physical, mental, emotional and spiritual strength, and connection. Yoga practice enhances innate immunity and mental health, so it can be used as complementary therapy in the COVID-19 treatment, namely the post-COVID-19 condition.
In this article, we conducted a literature review on yoga and COVID-19, finding that an intervention comprising asana, pranayama, and meditation may be a strategy of choice for these patients’ recovery. However, further studies are needed to show its effectiveness in this, still unknown, context.
“Agile” today is yet another attempt at creating a methodology to systematize individual engineers’ intelligence away so that management can treat people like cogs. It’s stupid. The waterfall methodology was the same, and most likely, so is the snake oil this guy peddling.
The sad truth is, if you have great engineers, things go as smoothly as they possibly could. If you have bad engineers, they don’t. Just like if you great artists, you end up with great art, otherwise you don’t. But I recall even at University, professors claiming writing good code was something any “code monkey” could do. Of course, these professors’ own “academic” code was proof they wouldn’t have known good code if it hit them in the face.
Ironically, the original Agile manifesto recognized this saying “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. But once you had people whose job it has been to please management, it got distorted beyond recognition and has indeed become “process and tools over individuals”.
The problem is management. They won’t stop trying to cogify their best engineers because relying on people who actually develop expertise is threatening to them. The latest attempt is what is called “AI” but really are generative large language models. Microsoft now claims its latest models can answer “Ph.D. level questions”, and the unspoken goal is clearly to replace everyone with a team of AIs led by a management type. At best, the result will be tons of laundered open-source/GPL’d code but since management only cares about “IP” if it benefits them, that’s of no concern.
Saw the D-Day events on the news tonight, thought you might like to see the event 20 years after D-Day. It’s much less grandiose, just two guys. I’ve skipped to the end, but you can rewind and watch it all:
CBS Reports (1964): “D-Day Plus 20 Years – Eisenhower Returns to Normandy”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaxTXfjfXk&t=4505s