XCOM2 is great

I don’t yet have any of the DLC, so I’m playing plain vanilla. But man vanilla is a wonderful flavor! 😀

It’s kind of funny – I didn’t really take to XCOM(1). I’d tried installing it on Steam on Linux, and wow did the mouse control ever not work. Just impossible, so I turned my back on it and muttered under my breath “stupid game” and patted myself on the back for avoiding the trouble.

A couple posts back, I talked about other strategy video games that I tried or liked. Stellaris was definitely a disappointment; so I was looking. Because I was looking for something I liked better than Endless Space and Stellaris, I was going through some game review sites. There was some mention of XCOM2 as “Best Game of 2016” somewhere.

Steam happened to have XCOM2 on sale.

I can tell you are shocked. 😉

Man, this game is good.

The only downside seems to be that it it a little buggy. Sometimes screens just fail, and there is rarely a way to see why or an ability to recover. So I completely understand where people use the Bronzeman mod, because Ironman would make me swear off all games forever if they trashed my game on the final scene. Which, by the way, XCOM2 did. Thankfully, I was able to load the most recent savegame, and then play my way through the ending again. This time, it turns out there are a four page statistics summary that was interesting.

I also see two almost completely black screens where cut-screens ought to go. But there are tiny little dots of white, and sometimes some swirly stuff going on. I kind of wish I knew someone on X Box or Playstation with the game so I could see if there really is supposed to be something there.

But bugs aside, the game play is great. The game is challenging. It is also interesting to try out different strategies and methods. There is a large variety of scenarios, and the timed ones add pressure. The game is just great. 😀

What I would suggest for Fireaxis / Take-Two for XCOM3 is to enhance the character modification process so that I can customize my character faces to look exactly like myself or people I know. So do the whole face customization thing, with 18 face shapes from oval to square to round; let me pinch or spread eyes, ditto the relation between eyes and end of nose, end of nose to centerline on mouth. Twelve different nose styles with 50% – 200% size scale, and yes, even for the mouth, there should be styles (including RBF). Gobs of eyebrow styles, and a better selection of hair colors. BTW, I’m pretty bald, but I don’t shave my head completely. Could that be an option? For the eyes, there should be the ability to set the eyeballs deeper in to, or out of their sockets. Turns out that’s a primary skull difference between females and males: the skull ridge above the eyes. So, can we get that customization? I want to take a picture of myself, and be comparing it to the face sculptor in XCOM3 and keep tweaking the settings until it looks exactly like me.

That would be wonderful.

Web browsers and automation, oh my!

At work, one of my job tasks is e-discovery, which means logging in to an email archive web application, doing searches, and tagging the items that meet the search criteria. The web application was originally written by one guy (I think) and although the back-end stuff is amazing, the actual web pages I interact with are twitchy. There are more than 110 million emails in this archive; and the search and indexing features are great. But the results pages? Sometimes I have to deal with a lot of them, and the smart way to go is automation.

(As I write this, the one automation script is working it’s way through 88 pages of results, and the script tells me it will likely be done in about 15 minutes)

When I say the results pages are twitchy, what I mean is that the buttons on the page move, after they have been clicked. Usually, but not always – and that is dependent on the web browser.

I’m using WinBatch to automate driving the web page. Specifically, there is a start cycle process, where I go through the motions of which buttons to press; but, I don’t press them, WinBatch does. To signal WinBatch that the mouse co-ordinates are correct, I tap the Shift key. There is a super tight loop in the WinBatch script which is recording where the mouse pointer is (it’s a 1000 * 1000 virtual x-y coordinate system). It reads the x-y coordinates, checks to see if the Shift key has been depressed, and if so, it records the coordinates for that button, and then moves through to the location of the next button that needs to be defined.

This works fine if the buttons do not move. But under some browsers, clicking a button moves elements on the web page. I’m sure this is a CSS / Javascript thing that happens because the initial development was all about how to wrangle millions of emails, and not about web page design.

So, under Google Chrome, the web page is the least twitchy. But Google with their Chrome browser are a bunch of rat-bastard bullies, so I can’t really use it. We have an internal (private) domain name, which means our SSL certificates are self-signed. Yeah, Google Chrome hates on that. Most recently, the problem is that the server is old. We ran into a problem trying to upgrade, so we didn’t. But that means the SSL on the web page is TLS 1.2 – to which Google helpfully tells me to go kick rocks.

Okay, what about my favorite browser, Firefox? It is the most friendly when it comes time to just get things done; but, it is the most twitchy. Sometimes the email archive server gets in a state where the web page dialog boxes pop up off screen; this only happens with Firefox. I had actually opened up a technical support ticket with the email archive vendor for this, and they told me to stop Tomcat, Apache, MySQL, empty a cache directory, and start everything back up. That worked, so the vendor never actually tried to figure out what was going wrong. Recently, I’m having to share the server with people doing email exports, so I can’t just willy-nilly bounce the services. If the services have been bounced recently, Firefox works fine. But if it’s been a few days, then I can’t. I don’t want to re-write a portion of my WinBatch script to try to find the top of the web page, then the bottom of the web page, just to support this twitchy behavior by Firefox.

Okay, what about Microsoft’s Edge browser? It’s based on Google Chrome, so it might have better HMTL element layout like Chrome has. Alas, during the loop to track where the mouse pointer is, Edge just really doesn’t like refreshing the screen / sharing anything with any other program (WinBatch). So I could not actually get the location of the buttons on the web pages to play the mouse clicks back later.

Finally, I have tried the Brave web browser. I’m not terribly fond of it. It looks to me rather like a front by Google to try to get people who are suspicious of Google’s privacy violating lifeblood to use the Chrome browser anyway. But, it has the advantage of being based on the Chromium engine (which creates the least amount of twitch).

Nicely enough, it isn’t trying to be the bully that gives me the finger for trying to access a self-signed cert web site over TLS 1.2. I can actually get work done now.

Weirdly, it’s the only browser that causes the “Next” button (to advance to the next page of search results) to twitch horizontally. I need to position the mouse pointer over the “t” in Next, let go of the mouse, and tap the Shift key to set the position. Sometimes the Next button shifts to the right, and sometimes it does not. But if it does, then when the mouse pointer gets played back to the same position, is still over the “N” in Next, and the button press does work.

Civ6 versus Tropico 6 versus Endless Space2 versus Stellaris

Civ6 is my current favorite, although I haven’t been playing it much, because it takes so long to finish a game, and seems a little too much like work.

Tropico was my favorite for a really long time. Early on, the humor in it was great. It still manages to be a funny once in a while. The combination of humor with discovery worked really well. When Penultimo yells at you “Presidente! The people are starving!!!” it really motivates you to figure out What is going wrong‽ How do I fix it‽‽‽

But recently, Tropico has been a bummer. Okay, watching a YouTube video helped me figure out why my previously winning strategy is now a losing one; but, the secret seems to be that unless one executes a perfect strategy of all the upgrades, one loses. I’m not perfect, and this is not fun.

So, I started looking for alternatives. The two I have tried are Endless Space2 and Stellaris.

Endless Space2 is gorgeous. The music is superb. The screen is responsive and smooth. And best of all, there was an excellent tutorial. I played 115 hours of it before looking for something else. Eventually, it seemed to me that I was not going to be able to win, ever. There seem to be two problems:

  • If the Grand Random Number Generator in the Sky took a disliking to you, there was absolutely nothing you could do to fix the problem. Time to quit and start over. This isn’t generally a problem with Civ6; if by mid-game one strategy isn’t working out, you can (usually) switch strategy and still pull out a win. Endless Space2 takes a while to figure out that the initial roll was poor – like 30 minutes. 🙁
  • Rather like Tropico, even with good RNG placement, execution needs to be perfect in order to not lose. I never did win a single game.

That said, one YouTuber said that Endless Space2’s use of the right mouse click as the {back} key is brilliant, and I agree. The game was a pleasure to play, even though I never won. But that I never would win, caused me to give up and look elsewhere.

Enter Stellaris. Although it says it got great scores by people for being a great game, it didn’t work for me.

I did love that Stellaris used the mouse to move the map around by nudging the edges. I had noticed that this was missing from Endless Space2, and found that first interaction with Stellaris pleasing. But nothing after that worked for me.

On one hand, I like Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Indeed the most exhilarating game I ever played was a LAN game of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 against one of my boys. Thrilling!

And Tropico is an RTS, too, and I like it okay. Perhaps Tropico works for me as a game because the clock runs pretty slow. There isn’t a constant pressure to perform or die. If anything, once you’ve got things set up, then I want to speed the clock up, to see how things are holding together (or not).

I’m old, so Turn Based Strategy (TBS) are more my speed. Civ6 and Endless Space2 are both TBS games.

Although my first interaction with Stellaris was really nice, it quickly gave me two things that annoyed me greatly – first impressions and all that.

  • Wow this game needs a keyboard.
  • The tutorial is terrible.

The need for a keyboard, oh so much keyboard, was not what I wanted. I have a big monitor that I can pull a recliner in front of, and play video games. This works best when the game is mostly mouse driven. I’ve got a Logitech Wireless Trackball Mouse. I don’t have to move the mouse; my thumb moves the trackball. It’s wireless, so I can use it on the arm of the chair, or my leg, or my belly, or even my chest. Needing a keyboard is cumbersome. That first poking around at the interface showed that Stellaris really wants to be driven by a keyboard. Civ6, Tropico, and Endless Space2 all work fine with mouse-only.

The user interface wasn’t great for me, either. They picked a font that has readability problems; the letter “t” for example, barely has any width to the crossbar. Is that a “t” or an “l”? Hard to tell. The text was small, and my eyes are old. Endless Space2 had larger, more legible text, which made it more enjoyable.

If I have to squint to read the screen, that is frustrating and takes me out of just enjoying the game.

The tutorial is terrible:

  • The robotic voice: let’s take the recording of a perfectly fine voice-actor, and muddle it through a robotizing filter so that it is difficult to hear the words. “But it’s so cool!” No, it isn’t. It was like I needed to squint, but with my ears. Well this is unpleasant.
  • Instead of a guided tour, the “tutorial” was nothing except a voicing of the button name. Well that’s unfair: it was a voicing of the button name, and some explanation that this is where the very important (button name) stuff is done. None of the text shown in the tutorial text linked to the related item that was mentioned. (So why color the text differently if it isn’t a hyperlink?) I’ll admit: I had never watched a single YouTube video on Stellaris, never read the subreddit, never opened a Readme doc if there is one. I installed the game and said Yes to the tutorial. And it lead me nowhere. About six or eight steps into the game, it just stopped. So what do I do now? No clue. Well, there was one big clue: the words “PAUSED (space bar)”. Huh.

I figure out that the tutorial was to click on every button and hear the the name of the button. Somehow, I managed to click the speed-up button a couple times (while paused) (which doesn’t have tutorial speech for it) (it is a filled circle with a plus, next to the same with a minus; for all I could tell, I was adding a something to a something else). Eventually I un-pause the game, and it’s throwing an awful lot at me with no time to process it. And … my scientist is dead.

Well this is just peachy keen. Not.

I asked Steam for a refund, which they granted me. I’d only played about two hours of it, and could clearly tell that I wasn’t going to be playing any more of it.

If I wanted to sit at my desk computer and drive the game with the mouse and keyboard, then it probably would have worked. But I work at this desk. I don’t want to play here. And the play machine has a more comfortable chair with no place for a keyboard.

So I’m back to looking for a TBS game which is mouse primary and has a guide-through tutorial. Suggestions?

What are the fools at Facebook thinking?

Banning Doctor Ron Paul? Don’t these idiots know he is one of the few good politicians in Congress?

Doctor Paul is famous for having a sign on the edge of his desk in his Congressional office, designed to stop lobbyists in their tracks: “Don’t steal. The government hates competition”. Any time a lobbyist asks for a meeting and offers to donate to Doctor Paul’s re-election campaign in exchange for a yes vote on some piece of legislation, Ron points to the sign and says “If it was a good piece of legislation, you wouldn’t need to come in here with this bribe. Sorry for wasting your time. Goodbye.” And then he informs his secretary to never book a meeting with that lobbyist ever again.

Ron Paul is famous for voting no on every piece of legislation that wastes your and my tax money. As such, he has gotten the nickname “Doctor No”.

A signature joke by Jay Leno waits until the beginning of the congressional summer break. Then on that day, Jay says “Congress has begun their summer recess. The realm is safe, once again.” Ron Paul is working this problem from the inside.

Ron Paul quote number one: “War is not popular. It may seem popular in the short run, when there appears to be an immediate victory and everyone is gloating but war is not popular. War is not popular. People get killed, and body bags end up coming back. War is very unpopular, and it is not the politically smart thing to do.”

Sure, the congresscritters getting lobbyist money from the military industrial complex will tell you that war is great. Well, it’s great for funneling money into the pockets of the people in the military industrial machine. Quote: “War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.”

Ron Paul also understands the basic truth of all government. Quote: “Values in a free society are accepted voluntarily, not through coercion, and certainly not by law… every time we write a law to control private behavior, we imply that somebody has to arrive with a gun, because if you desecrate the flag, you have to punish that person. So how do you do that? You send an agent of the government, perhaps an employee of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Flags, to arrest him. This is in many ways patriotism with a gun – if your actions do not fit the official definition of a “patriot,” we will send somebody to arrest you.”

And, we use tax money to pay for that agent. Regarding intervention in Sudan, the quote was “… I have no right – no moral right or constitutional right – to come with a gun and tax the people and say: “I will take money because I want to do good”.”

Quote: “The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence. All initiation of force is a violation of someone else’s rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it’s supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals. Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense.”

This is true for all government action. Government has been described as a bunch of do-gooders, doing good with other people’s money. You can do good with your own money. And then, you aren’t guilty of robbing me of mine.

Here’s another quote about government power: “What we give up on is a tyrannical approach to solving a social and medical problem, and we endorse the idea of voluntarism, self-responsibility, family, friends, and churches to solve problems, rather than saying that some monolithic government is going to make you take care of yourself and be a better person. It’s a preposterous notion, it never worked, it never will. The government can’t make you a better person. It can’t make you follow good habits. Why don’t they put you on a diet? You’re a little overweight, and I think you need government help!” (pointing out the absurdity of the ideas of some about government power).

Quote: “The theory of the IRS is rather repugnant to me because the assumption is made that I, the government, owns 100% of your income and I permit you to keep 5%, 10% or 20%. You’re vulnerable, you’ve sold out. The government can take 80% if they want, which they did at one time.”

I like to make a joke that in a year, working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year computes to 2080 hours. Is it coincidence that the IRS form is the 1040 ? (fifty percent)

Quote: “Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons.”

Doctor Paul voted against the PATRIOT Act because he was only given one hour to read it before the vote, and it was a 400 page bill. That shows he has integrity, even in the face of taking unpopular action.

And the fools at Facebook banned him.

I can only believe that they’ve turned off their brains, and are listening only to the pro-government-growth scare mongers and empire building lobbyists and bureaucrats.

What do they know about Ron Paul? Nothing. But their “friends” say he is a bad man. So they practice a principle which cannot fail to keep them in everlasting ignorance: that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

Shame on you Facebook.

TIFU

I know I’m a bit of an ass, but this has been tickling my funny bone ever since Microsoft Teams suddenly appeared on my workstation and started automatically launching itself (uninvited):

This is the splash screen that shows for a little while, as the machine finishes starting up, and Teams wants to let you know that it is loading.

Anyone else see (with perhaps a bit of squinting and imagination): TIFU

? 🤣

Search for the acronym TIFU.

Working from home

I know: I’m late to the game.

My employer had let me continue to report to work after the pandemic hit. Many of my co-workers immediately opted-in to working from home; but I wasn’t one of them.

I am thankful for that I got to keep reporting to work, because I like the normalcy of the routine. I loved the peace and quiet of no co-workers at all.

Other departments in my employer’s organization had brought all their staff back in September. Then reported infections started happening, and they would have to send everyone home for a few days while the work site was disinfected. Turns out each one of those events cost $2,000 – $5,000. My department decided that everyone should work from home, no exceptions, until further notice.

They ordered me a VPN appliance that extends the network into my home. I brought it home, hooked it up, and it worked perfectly on the first try. Apparently our Networks team is very good.

The last few days, my “commute” has been from my living room to the spare bedroom I’m setting up as my home office. I’ve tried adjusting my alarm clocks and such, but with mixed results.

Regarding my commute: I put $10 of gasoline in my car yesterday. This will probably be the last gasoline I put in my car for many months. My car is mostly electric; but even with the heater going for my nightly trips out, I’m never draining the battery to zero.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I am under more stress now. It’s probably due to a big project at work entering it’s final laps, and there seems to be more work to do than there are hours in the day. But I can definitely tell that my shoulders are tight all the time now; an eye twitch that I get has come back.

I’ve done some shopping for the new home office. Parts are starting to dribble in. I wanted a new desk that was large enough to hold all my stuff; but apparently there is not a market for that short of $1,000+. I’m using a four person dining table with the extension leaves put in. The space is still too small. I need to shut my laptop in order to see the bottom half of one of the desktop monitor screens.

My ass hurts at the end of the day, because the wooden chair is not meant for eight hours of use per day. The real chair is on order, but won’t arrive for two to seven days.

My telephone headset has a faint hum in it that I don’t remember from before. But perhaps it was always there, and the work room air conditioning set a minimum noise level the headset hum never cleared. I did buy some LED light strips because I need light first thing in the morning and at night. Those definitely added some hum; so I’ve moved them far away. Then I discovered I ordered the wrong part, and want the ones with Amazon Alexa built in. I’ve also ordered some quarter-round aluminum channel to mount in the upper corner of the room between wall and ceiling. The LED light strips will go inside the channel. When the diffuser is snapped in place, I should get a nice broad light source that illuminates the room without much (if any) shadow.

The alarm clocks have been more work than I had expected. Because I used home automation (I bought it; I might as well use it), there are way more things to be reconfigured now, just by not needing to wake up quite so early in the morning. Some of the stuff is in Amazon Alexa, and others of it are in Philips Hue.

OpenSUSE 15.1 → 15.2 upgrade; with nVidia it’s a disaster due to nouveau

Upshot is, the installer has two different options depending on if you are in graphical mode (init 5) versus text mode (init 3). Graphical mode (which was not recommended) at least had the possibility of working.

Back story: at work more than a decade ago, the whole team got new computers, but one of my co-workers preferred his MacBook laptop. After his PC sat unused for a couple years, I got the idea to ask him if he minded me having his dual monitors. He was okay with that. Of course, to drive those two monitors, one needs a dual monitor video card, so I took that too.

Now my machine had two identical video cards and four identical monitors. It was pretty sweet. The nVidia drivers had handled that just fine. Well, until ….

Then some upgrade happened (in 2017), and suddenly the nVidia driver could only light up one of the two video cards. I really liked having four screens, so I went and bought a single nVidia card with four outputs – NVIDIA Quadro P600. Life was good.

However, with this configuration, all the upgrades to OpenSUSE since then are just miserable. This weekend, I tried again. Awful, as usual.

The problem is that the install wants to replace the nVidia (proprietary) driver with the nouveau (open source) driver, but that never works right.

The other, bigger, problem is that if (in text mode) you don’t agree to let nouveau foul over your machine, you don’t get to upgrade at all.

I’ll try to illustrate the steps:

In text only mode: zypper dup, and at the end I was warned that the nouveau driver was going to be used. The prompt says “do you agree? yes/no: “

If you type “no”, the upgrade stops.

If you type “yes”, the upgrade continues and then trashes the graphical mode configuration. It installs the nouveau driver which doesn’t work with a single card and four monitors.

After banging my head against the problem for too long, it gets time to give up, download the ISO, burn a DVD, boot off the DVD, and choose “install” – completely wiping out all sorts of needed stuff. 🙁

But doing that (a fresh install), I get a graphical install. I get to the point where one of the prompts warned that the nouveau driver was going to be used. The prompt says “do you agree?” There are two buttons: “I agree” and “I disagree”. But most importantly, there is a checkbox for “Install using software emulation only”

That checkbox disables nouveau from breaking the system. Well, it disables nouveau completely, which prevents the system from being broken by nouveau. During the install, I saw a log line that nouveau was being locked from zypper updates, and that a blacklist entry was being added for nouveau to prevent start up.

Finally, I had a system that would boot. It wasn’t particularly stable, but at least it could boot and present the graphical login prompt. The graphical session wasn’t stable or working well, but at least it wasn’t booting to a single blinking text cursor in the corner of one monitor.

It turned out it was easiest to ssh in from a different machine, run the zypper command to add the nVidia repository, and install the nVidia proprietary drivers.

One more reboot later, and I’ve got a stable, four monitor, graphical environment once again. Hooray! 😀

One thing a person should always to with Linux: use a separate hard drive for /home

This way, installing a new operating system (whether it is Mint, OpenSUSE, Kubuntu) does not mess with your files. The new install sticks to the Operating System disk, and doesn’t mess with your /home disk.

So, all my VM guests are fine, my Perl scripts are fine, my login environment (KDE) is fine. That’s all good.

What’s bad about replacing the OS because the upgrade trashed the system is that my personal crontab file is not stored under /home.

I didn’t remember to go find and back up that file, so now it’s gone. I’m going to have to re-invent it from memory. All the scripts I write output log files; but, those get written to /var/tmp – which also gets wiped out when a fresh install happens.

Although I had printed the names of all the repositories I use (and put that file on /home) I was in a hurry and didn’t realize that the screen didn’t list the URLs. Whoops.

And of course, since the way out of the broken system was a fresh install, all the Perl modules I’ve installed in the last few years need to be discovered and installed again.

But, I’m running OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 now. Leap 15.1 is planned to go end-of-life next month, so I thought it about time to get to 15.2. That’s done, but man was it painful.

Lightsail + Bitnami has changed the underlying image – I get to learn debian now :-)

So far, it’s been easy. I have a post about How to make Ubuntu have a nice bash shell like OpenSuSE and it barely needs any update.

But it does, a little.

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

In the menu that was presented to me, Option 2: 2 /usr/bin/vim.basic was the right one. There’s nothing there to tell me the difference between vim.basic versus vim.tiny (I wanted whatever vim.fullsuperduperthrowinallthebellsandwhistles is) – but vim.tiny was not it.

touch ~/.bash_aliases
vim ~/.bash_aliases
(insert mode)
alias ll="ls -la"
alias ..="cd .."
(escape)
:wq

and lastly, the step that is the same:

sudo vim /etc/inputrc

Find my way down to where the comments say alternate mappings for “page up” and “page down” to search the history and then hit the x key a few times to delete the characters which comment out the functionality I want.

Log out, and log back in. It’s good. 🙂

Why I would like to see the U.S. Postal Service privatized

  • I could pay to have junk mail thrown in the trash at the source
  • The USPS often gets used for corruption
  • Being government employees, bad apples last forever

No more junk mail

The number one reason I would love to have the USPS privatized is that it would become possible for me to pay a fee (to whomever takes their place) to trash any junk mail that gets put in the queue to be sent to me.

At work, we spend a rather large amount of dollars to combat email spam. Everyone’s life is better for it*. But that’s not an option with physical snail mail. Why the heck not? Because the USPS is a government agency. They are very specifically not allowed to “censor” mail by just throwing it in the trash.

If they tried, they would get sued, because if you’re a scumbag with a lawyer, you want to sue the really big organization with the large checking account.

But with a private company, I could buy in to a Friend of the Environment subscription plan, where I pay the delivery company a small monthly fee, and they chuck the junk mail into the recycling bin. They don’t want to spend the money on fuel to transport it. They would have a financial incentive to do the right thing early on in the process.

Indeed, it would take almost no time for the people who pay for snail mail spam to ask the privatized company “How many of these should we print? How many are actually going to get delivered?” The end result would be less trash generated; less trash to be wrangled. It’s a win-win-lose for me, the mail carrier, and then the spammer, er advertiser.

One problem of course, would be predatory advertisers implementing junk delivery, as a protection racket (to collect the fee to not deliver it). They’d hire an Uber or Lyft driver to put trash in your mailbox, along with a flyer that suggests you pay them for no more trash.

I’m going to have to puzzle out what antidotes there might be to a pristine mailbox protection racket. If you have any ideas, please feel free to make a SQRL identity, and login and post.

USPS as a political corruption tool

This is not the USPS fault. But, because they are a government agency, they are the tail on the dog that is Congress and their buddies. Congresscritters love to commission a new post office building to line the pockets of their buddy who has some land for sale. Whether that buddy then kicks back some of the overpriced payment back to the critter is an exercise for the reader.

Back during the Reagan and (first) Bush era, every post office building had a Novell NetWare server in it. When Bill Clinton got elected, every one of those NetWare servers were replaced with Microsoft Windows servers. It was a gift to Microsoft, at the expense of Novell.

Because email started replacing some snail mail, the overall volume dropped. Suddenly we didn’t need so many post office buildings. And magically, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband’s company was awarded the contract to broker the sales of 60 USPS facilities (one report says 600 were on the list to be considered for sale).

The problem is, that as a Federal agency, if there is corruption there, there is no incentive to get rid of it as long as it doesn’t become embarrassing. Did the CIO of USPS get a kickback from Microsoft? Nobody has incentive to rat the guy out, and, they do have incentive to keep their jobs by keeping their mouths shut. Did someone at USPS get a kickback from Richard Blum (Feinstein’s husband)? Nobody has incentive to rat the guy out, and, they do have incentive to avoid retaliatory employment decisions.

My local postmaster

So, my dad was a member of the California Young Republicans back in the 1960’s and 70’s. I would learn that the postmaster in town was on the Democratic Central Committee. I remember my dad suddenly going in to a rage one day; I had followed him out to the mailbox. “Do you see this‽ Do you see this‽”

The post office was reading our mail.

Of course, in school I was educated that one’s mail was sacrosanct, and the Post Office never read one’s mail. That turned out to be total bullshit.

What my dad was shaking in front of me was an envelope with a return address stamp of CYR California Young Republicans. The top of the envelope had been sliced open (all the way across the top, and not gently, either), and then lots of cellophane tape had been used to close it again. There was a rubber stamp on it: Damaged During Handling.

My dad would later go to the post office and speak with the postmaster, telling him that someone in the post office was reading his mail. The postmaster feigned an apology, but the mail reading did not stop. It was the postmaster himself who had ordered that all the CYR mail get routed to his desk first.

When I was younger, pretty much the very beginning of mass-shootings in America was in Post Offices. A new term entered the vernacular: “Going Postal”. What was happening was that guys were in line for promotion in every post office, and (some of) their bosses were real assholes. They would torment an underling for decades, and the underling couldn’t do anything about it, because his hopes for advancement would then be destroyed. 20 years later, it’s finally time to get the promotion to Postmaster of the Office, and the outgoing asshole gives the promotion to a junior bootlicker. The next day, the spurned postal worker would come in and shoot up the place. Institutional assholism works in government, because one cannot go to other bosses and say “This asshole is losing us money”. It’s a government agency. It’s not supposed to make money. If it’s making money, then it’s competing with the private sector who could probably do the job more efficiently anyway.

In my dad’s case of systematic invasion of privacy for political gain, there was nothing to do but to hide. The mail from CYR started using a fake return address. It was some sort of charity / orphanage, if I recall correctly.

That doesn’t mean that the California Young Republicans never sent another envelope with the old CYR rubber stamp. Indeed, one went out with “Remember that the big all-state dinner meeting will be held at the Black Oak Restaurant in Paso Robles at 7:00 PM on (whatever date)”. Our copy was opened and read and taped shut and rubber stamped with fuck-you-we’re-reading-your-mail as per usual. In the envelope with the charity return address, the letter said the meeting was still in Paso Robles, but it had been moved to a different restaurant. Someone from CYR did go hang out in the lobby at the Black Oak, and sure enough a total stranger walked up to the hostess and asked to be seated with the California Young Republicans group. Confusion ensued for the hostess and spy, although the CYR member got the chuckle he was expecting.

My bigger point is that management assholes exist in larger organizations, but, when that organization is private sector, the organization suffers enough for it that there is financial incentive to change (not always, due to monopoly power). But in public sector organizations, it is almost impossible to remove bad apples. There is no real incentive to change. The person who reports is asking for a target on their back and henceforth will never get another promotion, ever.

If Congress couldn’t manipulate USPS (because now they are UPS or Fedex or whatever), that would be a good thing. If bad apples didn’t have the career public sector employment worth suing over (for wrongful termination), that would be a good thing. And if I could pay to auto-trash junk mail, I would love that, and it would be the best thing.

*I would even argue that the spammer’s life is better for it: if you are a spammer, you are a loser who thinks there is a easy / low effort / low quality way to get rich. The quicker we clobber your delusion, the better for you.

Advertising sucks (again)

I don’t know how much money there is in tracking people and selling their online profiles / behavior patterns. My guess is that a huge amount of folly has people convinced that their folly is worth it. I hope that they are severely disappointed.

I first noticed with WordPress, that Automattic (the company behind WordPress), really wants to track your every move. They created the Gravatar system, and it is something that you cannot opt out of. You as a WordPress admin were not allowed local profile pictures – you had to use Automattic’s avatars or use nothing. And now it’s gotten worse. Your web site won’t run right without reporting in to the Automattic servers.

Every visit of yours to any WordPress site will generate a “hit” of you going to that web site. It’s worse than cookies, because at least you can delete your cookies.

What I’ve noticed is that if I have uBlock Origin turned on and “Block remote fonts” turned on, then WordPress does not render the admin panel correctly. Remote fonts are a way for the web site to get your machine to “phone home” to someone else’s servers. Apparently, Dahsicons have been a thing since WordPress 3.3.

Why should my web site make a call to Automattic’s servers just because you visited my web site? It does that with Gravatar (unless I try really hard to block that).

Other web sites appear broken when remote fonts are turned off.

I have a hard time believing that there is any good value to me for my web browser to retrieve on every page load an image file from a remote server just to show a button.