[Into the black hole this went:]

What to do about Putin's war against Ukraine? Go after the Saudis. Tell MBS he can't buy any more American weapons. He can only barter for them. Oil on the barrel head, as the joke goes. But the Saudi oil starts with a barter value 10% below the current market price, and the value drops 10% for each month Putin's war continues. MBS will be forced to flood the market with oil and Putin couldn't possibly stand that. Time for peace.

[The % sign turned out to be yet another block against citizens writing "to" the White House. The WH webform rejected the submission, but with no explanation. How did I guess that a "special" character could be the problem? Because I used to program with PERL. Hasn't everyone? Doesn't everyone know all about poisoned webforms and query insertion attacks? So what other special characters black hole the black hole?]

For my next joke, let's all try to imagine the House of so-called Representatives passing the required legislation to do the right thing. Most people want to do the right thing, but can you imagine Congress doing the right thing? No matter how obvious? LOL. But that still doesn't mean the president can't ask Congress to do the right thing, right? ROFLMAO.

Now for a joke about the White House website and how it became a black hole. My fuzzy recollection of the history is that there was a brief period at the dawn of the Internet Age when you could just email president@whitehouse.gov and there seemed to be a live human at the other end. Painless at the sender's end, but apparently an overwhelming nuisance, so Dubya's people switched to the tedious webform with the tiny character limit. Much more tedious for citizens, but MUCH easier to black hole the ideas while still harvesting the one-way email addresses that are so convenient to the point of rudeness. Is there anything funnier and ruder than email from a noreply email address? I don't think so, but that's the sick joke the president@whitehouse email address is now.

So now it's time to get serious. Just kidding. Now I have to laugh about the new classified documents scandal. What was bad for TFG the goose feels worse for the gander Biden, eh? What can anyone do but laugh?

But it isn't funny. If mishandling classified documents is bad, then it's bad no matter who does it. It doesn't matter how incompetent TFG is and how much I disagree with him. It doesn't matter what a nice guy President Biden is and how much I do agree with him. "Mistakes were made" is no excuse, even if the mistake was thinking TFG was above the law or Joe Biden is too nice to do such a thing.

[Early in that paragraph is where it hit the character limit.]

So here's what you should do, Joe. Let the Department of so-called Justice (time for another LOL) deal with TFG's clear and obvious crimes. For your OWN little classified-document fiasco, you need to call for a complete investigation and demand that the culpable person be penalized, even if it's you. Let's face it. If you can't keep track of classified documents, you shouldn't be handling them. There's some wiggle room if there was a mistake by some member of your staff, but even then your culpability is going to get endless debate, and we don't need more fake debates in the House of fake Republicans. We're in for two years of it anyway, but that's too sad to even be funny.

No insult intended, Joe, but your biggest problem is the TMB thing, even if it ain't true. TMB stands for Too Many Birthdays, which is a kind of doctor's joke for what ails you and me and anyone who lives long enough. Maybe the truth is that you haven't had too many birthdays and you're as sharp as you ever were. I sure want to make that claim for myself, though I have to concede on the physical side--and I ain't nearly as old as you are. When I was a young whippersnapper I couldn't even imagine I'd live as long as I already have, but now that I'm old and whippersnapped, I still feel like I have some good years left to me. But I don't feel I could handle the pressure of the American presidency, and that makes it really hard for me to imagine you can... So far I think you've proven the doubters wrong and done a good, even great, job of it, but you had the House on your side, and now you don't and things are going to get much worse. If that's possible, now that I've been reminded of Putin's war on Ukraine...

Frankly, Joe, I think you should promise to resign if the latest document fiasco turns out to be your own fault. If the evidence clearly shows you messed up, then admit that protecting classified documents has become too much for you to handle and you need to step back. Or maybe that's a threat? Not sure I see any solution along the path of making the laws about classified information more restrictive if they don't apply to certain people, eh? And the government is already too secretive and classifies way too much stuff that the public should know about.

Next joke? I actually admire and even like VP Harris and think she'd do a good job as president, but the polls say that makes me rather special these years. Then again the polls have become another kind of sick joke. There are a few honest pollsters out there, but the valid data is buried under the flood of manipulated and crooked survey results. It's easy to create a worthless poll, but only a tiny effort is required to produce whatever results are being paid for. Why else are so many of the biggest and best liars working as pollsters these years? Getting the truth with a survey is actually quite difficult. Why would anyone bother with the truth now?

For my final joke of the day, let me try to imagine my vote matters. Oh wait. That joke collapses because the fake Republicans finally managed to cancel my vote. Why should I even try next time? And my very "own" Representative doesn't even care about that. He's safe in a sacrificial district of level two gerrymandering, and now that sick joke is working so well I think it has created a concentration of Democratic nonvoters who are completely correct to believe that their votes don't matter. No more jokes, eh?

[And one of my replies from a public discussion elsewhere:]

Maybe I should have included something explicit about "And good intentions are no excuse, either." Seems to me like these days there are too many crimes that are dependent upon the bad intentions of the criminal and it's too easy for clever lawyers to muddle those waters. Yeah, Joe Biden knows his intentions were good, but no one knows just how bad (and criminal) TFG's intentions are at any moment.

Or maybe a joke along the lines of "There are times for the president to be a nice guy, and there are times when the presidency is no job for a nice guy. And this is not one of them." With the usual apologies to the fictional Inspector Clouseau, who is always trying so hard not to be a nice guy... The American presidency has become one of those jobs that isn't fit for human consumption or occupancy?

Or maybe the biggest joke is that the part you're reacting to didn't even make it as far the black hole? But it doesn't feel, even to me, that it's worth the effort of reloading the webform to finish the job. Seems like we're in one of those places where things are going to keep getting worse, much worse, before they might start to get a little less worse. Depending on the insanity level of the fake Republicans' nominee in 2024?

Back on the Putin topic, I'm doubting that the financial approach would be likely to work. The premise of putting pressure on the Saudis was that Putin actually needs international money for his war, and therefore cares about the price of oil. On the one hand, it's true that a lot of Putin's key supporters are concerned about the money, on the other hand that hasn't stopped Putin from murdering them for murmuring anything along such lines. I actually think the last pair (that I heard about) were ordered suicides. Something along the lines of "I have decided you need to die now. You have one week to do it yourself or you will be helped to do it along with your entire family. My assistant Ivan Ivanovich is here to answer any questions you might have about where and how to kill yourself without creating any complications. I'll see myself out, eh?"

It would be interesting to get some accurate data on how the Russian people feel about all of this. I actually think lots of the older ones miss the "glory days" of the USSR and a lot of the younger Russians might agree with various statements about how making Ukraine part of Russia would benefit their own wallets. However I really doubt any significant number would agree it was worth a war--but maybe that's why Putin is so afraid of that label? No truth in advertising, eh? However the key poll question should be "Would you be willing to go fight and risk death in Ukraine to help make it part of Russia?" I'm pert' shure the positive answers to that kind of question would be extremely scarce.

Putin is really stuck now. Putin can't win. Could never occupy and pacify Ukraine, even after he assassinates Zelenskyy. But Putin can't afford to lose, either.

Hmm... Maybe Biden should just guarantee the Ukrainian resistance fighters will get at least as much support as we gave to the mujahideen in Afghanistan? Though you can also argue that one didn't work out well for anyone...

[And it isn't like I'm expecting a constructive solution discussion on Slashdot...]

So this one is mostly just a recommendation of The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr. Same excellent author who wrote The Shallows about how the Internet is making us stupider over time.

Thematic collision with my thought of the day, which is a new extension to my General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff. I thought I'd already written about that topic on [Slashdot], but if so, then I can't find it, so I'll recap it here and then extend it. The basic idea is that we laugh to learn, and I think it applies in general to all people. For example, children are extremely easy to amuse and they laugh a lot because they are great learning machines (and I envy them for that status). Slapstick is universally funny because it is educational. Watching slapstick lets us learn how to avoid injuries by seeing bad things happen to other people. Even though the injuries in slapstick are faked, they are close enough to the pains we've suffered so that we can take them seriously and therefore watching slapstick helps us avoid injury. At the other end of education, most of my best teachers had a sense of humor and knew how to use it, even in the classroom when the opportunity appeared. And for today's new wrinkle, I realized that old people may earn that reputation as humorless curmudgeons because some old people have mostly stopped learning. (So maybe that's the real reason I have been playing with the performance of standup comedy in recent years? I still want to learn?)

Now how to bring it home to Carr's books? Well, The Glass Cage is fully of funny stories about things that go wrong because of poorly considered uses of computers. Not funny in the ha-ha sense, but still quite amusing and the tone is almost jovial, even when dealing with tragedy. As it applies to The Shallows the problem might be described as "most cat videos are unbearably cute rather than funny", though some of the most popular ones are the funny ones, and I think those are the ones that tend to have educational aspects. (So right now I'm contemplating the famous one of the startled cat leaping into the wall.)

Not much to say on a page-wise basis about the book. Can't recall noticing any typos, though there were lots of references to interesting books and new authors. Unfortunately few of the books seem to be available in the local libraries. Most striking may have been the 2008 question from George Dyson quoted on page 113: "What if the cost of machines that think is people that don't?" Even worse than that, I think a lot of them can't think, and yet worse, don't even want to.

Most of the items on this list could be at the Consumer Electronics Show, but I bet they aren't. I've never gone, but there must be a few folks around here who still love the CES? (Just a c&p. Of course. You didn't think I'd make this kind of effort for the sake of today's Slashdot, did you?)

I didn't even get any coal last time, so I'm already waiting for the next visit of Santa Claus. Not really, since I don't believe in Santa, but these are just some of these goods and services that I would be glad to give to other people if I could. However, I must confess I also want these things for my own use. I guess I must have been a bad boy or I would have gotten them already? It's not like I'm such a good boy (or Christian) that anyone should give me a (Christmas) gift, but I'm not so bad I shouldn't be able to have any of these (wondrous?) things... (Only a few of my older ideas have been satisficed over the years.) Nicest response would be a URL to the store or website where I could buy or use any of them, but I guess I'd settle for an explanation of what's wrong with these imaginary goods and services. At least I could then understand why not? (Much of my thinking about these ideas has been related to discussions on WTS, so thanks for that, though not sure specifically who should be thanked... However, most of these ideas are much older than this website.)
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Santa's List in short form:

  1. A CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) so I can help pay for the creation and operation of all of these ideas
  2. A social website with proper MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) and relationship evolution of cross-validated REAL friends
  3. A spammer-fighting website because I want to be a spam fighter when I grow up!
  4. A relative rating website, especially for restaurants
  5. A three-level shiritori-style literacy development game app
  6. Books I want to read: The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
  7. Possible books I want to read: Ekronomics 101, Pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation book, no-loser equal-representation elections book, SCOTUS reform book, "Cryocide Crybabies" short story collection, and Chinese Granny Amazons as a novel (and I'm sure there are others I've thought about)
  8. A book-writing support website (that might help create some of those possible books)
  9. A better book tracking database
10. A transparent mask that doesn't look like part of a spacesuit from a cheap SF movie
11. A one-and-done Covid vaccine
12. TIDI to pay for all kinds of disasters (including Covid)
13. A modular smart chair
14. A modular smartphone hat
15. A modular better-sleeping belt
16. A better memory for the other ideas I've misplaced (fighting TMB?)

The ordering of the list is problematic, but this time I shifted to a topical grouping "system", with bigger and smaller stuff mixed within topic areas. The next section expands the items on the list, but the goal of the short list version above is to save your time. If an item doesn't seem interesting, then you probably don't want to look at the expanded version below, right? These were supposed to be elevator versions, but apparently I got to thinking about a space elevator.
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Santa's List Explained:

        A CSB so I can help pay for the creation and operation of all of these ideas

        The CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) is an old idea. Basically I'd donate a lump sum and then the CSB would let me pick the projects I want to fund until my account runs out and I can think about donating again. Just a thought, but I think the shares should be about 10 bucks and limited to one per donor per project, so a $10,000 project would imply 1,000 donors, etc. The CSB would vet the project proposals to make sure they have feasible schedules and budgets, along with sufficient resources (including people) and clear success criteria. After each project has completed its schedule, the CSB will apply the success criteria and report the results to the donors and the world.

        Originally the CSB was intended for OSS, but now I think the biggest application would be to support solution-oriented journalism. Some projects might create software tools, others might address problems more directly, and still others would be ongoing-cost projects. Imagine three to five solution project proposals after a story (or a video) that tells you about some problem in the real world, with each funded proposal replaced with a lower priority one... The CSB and journalists would be funded with a fraction. Perhaps a tithe from each funded project? (But I suffer from delusions of grand solutions and this is just the grandest.)

        A social website with proper MEPR and relationship evolution of cross-validated REAL friends

        The underlying ideas of social websites are nice, but the current crop reeks like the big dog's m0e. MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) would be a way to track the various dimensions of human beings based on the symmetric relationships between actions and reactions. Simple examples: Post a funny joke and your own reputation for being funny should go up but if you post a rude comment then your politeness dimension should go down. Useful for filtering and time management, though I'd mostly want to see how my dimensions differ from those of people I admire so maybe I can change things for the better...

        MEPR is another oldie, but the new wrinkle is cross-validation as a kind of identity check. The kernel idea would be to exchange memories with old friends to build up shared timelines, but with an auto-quiz feature to track how the information is flowing while each side is automatically verified. Think of it as a personal trivia game you could play with the people who were there. While checking their authenticity it would also help you check your own recollections. (Most obvious possible abuse: How to deal with trolls and sock puppets? They would be detected where their fake networks fail to anchor to real people. However, per Godel and Turing, the battle will never end. Ditto re spam.)

        Probably help to describe one possible implementation, though I'd look at website with something along these lines. My imaginary MEPR would be a second icon paired with whatever random avatar the identity picks for itself. The avatar icon would link to the profile with whatever data the identity wants to offer, but the MEPR would be a standardized summary based on how the world has reacted to the identity. I usually imagine a tiny radar diagram with some of the most important dimensions visualized in a way that I could easily compare between avatars. The MEPR icon would link to details, including links to the data that makes up the MEPR. (And just to make sure time isn't forgotten, the data should age over time. (And it should be customizable, too, but maybe as a paid extra. (Oh yeah, and with privacy options based on "Your identity can only see the details of my MEPR if I can see yours.")))

        Another feature I want is a "Why?" button response to so-called "friend" requests. This could even be used for self-categorization. In my case I would probably set up "old friends", "former coworkers", and "former students" as the main categories people could choose if I responded with a "Why?" click. This actually came from a discussion on WTS as an extension of the pre-friend dialog idea. (I'd link, but WTS search...) That's a feature I'd also like to deter spamming scammers. (This feature could also mesh with a celebrity email system? For example, for fans of a particular book or song.)

        This kind of website is something I've been seeking for decades, but the disappointments have been overwhelming. Latest dashed hope that seemed to get slightly beyond the flash-in-the-pan stage is this selfsame WT.Social. (AKA WTS.) However WTS seems pretty well stalled out these years and I blame the lack of a motivating financial model. CSB anyone?

        But it's been a long search and I expect to keep looking...

        A spammer-fighting website because I want to be a spam fighter when I grow up!

        I hate advertising, but especially stupidifying spam. Almost no ads are educational, but spam creates idiots. Another oldie, but the basic idea is to follow the money and take it away from the spamming scammers.

        Obvious Proof of Concept: The pump-and-dump stock-scam spam you no longer receive after the money was removed. More concretely, I imagine this website as using an iterative spammer-fighting tool where the automatic analyses are corrected and refined in stages by the human volunteers. The numbers should work because there are few suckers but lots of spam haters who can be recruited as wannabe spam fighters.

        A bit of additional philosophy about ads: When was the last time you saw a thoughtful and educational ad? I forgot, and I bet you, too. Honest ads only apply for the best product and there 'ain't no such thing' for most of us. We're too different from each other, so we get satisficed rather than satisfied, but the ads try to fool us about every angle. Examples: Create demand for junk we don't need and inflate the price for mediocre merchandise. (The upper increments of quality are MUCH more expensive than ads claiming high quality.) There's an imbalanced scale with a lot of bad ads on one end and a few good ones on the other, but the spam is merely the most terrible part of the "bad ads" end of the scale. The advertisers are paying the piper and the marketing experts WANT and are actively training the targets of their ads to be bad judges of quality and value. (Bill Hicks was too polite about the marketing people.)

        And here's a more academic angle on the topic fresh from a book I'm still reading, The Intelligence Trap by David Robson. One of his main points is that we can teach people to think better and make fewer mistakes, but the unstated implication is that we can also teach people to think worse. Guess which side is funding most of the Internet these years? Remember "He who pays the piper calls the tune." Each technology remains morally neutral with a double-edged blade... He's actually building on The Enigma of Reason by Mercier and Sperber, though he only cites their earlier work. Extremely short summary of their research, but we mostly act without thinking. Reasons of the "myside" sort evolved later, initially to justify our actions to our group, but later on to persuade the group to take action, and now we need and use defensive myside reasoning to block the liars and spammers. (Another of Robson's topics is the area where those defenses lead us down rabbit holes.)

        Conclusion? Or maybe it's the real problem we need to fix? Stop making more mouth-breathing marching morons. (Need I reference TFG?)

        A relative rating website, especially for restaurants

        Because the 5-star ratings are so unreliable, I want a review system that offers binary comparisons between restaurants (down to the level of menu items). My four stars may mean nothing to you, but if you say one restaurant is definitely better than another, then I can understand that. From a mathematical perspective, it would involve sparse matrices with traversals for arbitrary comparisons. Everything would effectively be benchmarked up and down against the most frequently rated ones. (And yes, it should orient your recommendations by considering the people who's comparisons match yours. But this part will get messy because there will be many nontransive cases and strange loops. (With apologies to Hofstadter.))

        A three-level shiritori-style literacy development game app

        Here's another old one and it's hard to keep it short... Starts with the old joke about the three bricklayers, but as a literacy development game the first bricklayer is working with words, the second handles grammar, and the third is for reading (in the cathedral?). Biggest use would be for children learning to read, but also suitable for L2 learners like yours truly. Though it would mostly look like a (shiritori word-chaining) game, the real objective would be to optimize the individual playing parameters to maximize the learning speed and quality of each student. (Probably not a good enough description to ring any bells (in the cathedral?), but the optimum degrees of challenge for best learning turned out to be another one of Robson's topics.)

        Books I want to read: The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

        There are actually many bookmarks in my browser for books I want to read, but these two books are of special interest. Mukherjee seems to do a major book every six years, and his last two were great. Pretty sure Mukherjee's new one will soon be in the libraries, but not sure what's delaying the local libraries from getting Hari's new book. (But I'll keep trying...)

        Possible books I want to read: Ekronomics 101, Pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation book, no-loser equal-representation elections book, SCOTUS reform book, "Cryocide Crybabies" short story collection, and Chinese Granny Amazons as a novel (and I'm sure there are others I've thought about)

        Can't think of any reasonably short description of most of these imaginary books. The first one is related to an old joke I call "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your free time". It also relates to "time >> money", though not limited to money. The concrete part of the second imaginary book involves detecting monopolies (and monopsonies) from the perspective of the choices available in the markets. The third one is complicated, but I think the fourth one could be short. The last two are speculative fictions, but it's a shame I didn't learn to write fiction when I had the great opportunity way back when... (Another long and tangential story there, but the short form is that it turns out Hemingway was right about the deeper truths.)

        A book-writing support website (that might help create some of those possible books)

        Everyone is supposed to have a book inside, but only a few people produce any. So my idea is to partition the various parts of the production process and let people pay for the bits they need. (Or give them as gifts with Santa's help?) In my own case, I think I mostly need an expert interviewer who can find the interesting bits and help with the structuring, with the results converted to text for me to edit and tweak. Other people might need various other kinds of support, up to the level of coauthors or ghost writers (or AI versions thereof?), though I still think interviewing is likely to be the most useful part of it. Projection? Or just another tribute to Studs Terkel?

        A better book tracking database

        This one has a LONG history. There was actually an pre-1971 list written by hand. Then there was a typewritten list. At one point there was a PL/C (dialect of PL/I) version where each book was on a Hollerith card. The dBase II version may have started before that version, but later it was moved from CP/M to DOS (where part of the backend still lives in a tiny partition). The last major work involved a new frontend using PERL, which runs locally or via CGI remotely. Most recent but minor work involved a new statistical module in JavaScript. I've also looked at websites that have similar tools, but the one I played with the most was basically useless for importing the data because ISBN is too newfangled. (Okay, some ISBN stuff did start earlier, but ISBNs didn't become popular until much later on.)

        Time for a page-one rewrite of the entire thing, but I barely program these years so I'd rather find a system that does everything already. I think I can manage one more data import... However I'd also consider weird options like mangling a Python source or maybe something in JavaScript that can handle files... (The PERL thing actually started as a little contacts database that the late James Liu gave me when we were working at an Internet startup many years ago. Now I'm recalling he had some relation to Fusion Japan and then Sun?)

        A transparent mask that doesn't look like part of a spacesuit from a cheap SF movie

        Starting with the Kantian joke: I know the mask doesn't do much to protect me from your germs, but it does a lot to protect you from my germs. As a categorical imperative, if everyone wore masks, then there would be less diseases in the air. Or maybe I should make a joke like "It ain't virtue signalling. I'm just too selfish to share my germs!"

        But the basic white mask does look boring and we like to see each other's faces, too. Facial expressions are part of communication. So why isn't anyone selling a good transparent mask? There are LOTS of flexible and porous plastics to work with. Or maybe some way to treat the white masks to make them transparent?

        A one-and-done Covid vaccine

        This is a mixed bag topic. Yeah, amazing we got any kind of vaccine so quickly, but there are vaccines and there are vaccines. ("And this is not one of them", with apologies to the Inspector...) Measles and polio and smallpox and lots of other diseases have one-and-done vaccines, but we need constant boosters for this one? Partly I blame the "brute force" tactics, but at a higher level I think the strategy is wrong, and it goes back to the money. I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect the drug companies favored the repeated-booster lines of research over the one-and-done lines. (So how about it, Santa?)

        Time for another twisted hypothetical conclusion? I think we were incredibly lucky with SARS-CoV-2. That pandemic could have been so much worse. And yet we might have prevented the entire fiasco with more international cooperation of constructive flavors. But we (mostly America, but not limited to) were mostly going the wrong way at the time, and I think that has helped lead to the current mess with Putin trying to replay the Crimean War so Russia wins this time. And I sadly doubt that either Putin or Biden deeply appreciate the real threats of cheap CRISPR kits. The next time could be really bad.

        As an optimist, I want to think there are survivors of the Fermi Paradox, but I also feel that the bookies are taking more and more smart quatloos against us as we find ourselves on the short end of a rapidly shrinking stick and we just keep on digging the hole deeper. I thought I'd written on the topic here, but can't find it, so here's an old external link with some thoughts on it.

        TIDI to pay for all kinds of disasters (including Covid)

        Hard to describe this one briefly, and it isn't really for me, but for everyone. The basic idea of regular insurance is that you pay in advance for problems you know are coming, which means the problem is that disasters are defined by our not knowing in advance. As a result, too often governments are effectively forced to act as insurers of last resort, and they usually do it badly. Look at Covid-19 and the financial crash of 2008 for examples.

        The basic idea of TIDI (Time-Inverted Disaster Insurance) is to pretend we knew all along. Or just acknowledge that we don't know the future and disasters are going to happen? So with TIDI the government would still borrow the money for the response (and every government is too good at borrowing money), but instead of spraying the money at the disaster, the insurance companies would be used. They are experts in assessing the validity of claims and quickly paying the valid damage claims. The borrowed money would go through the insurance companies, and later on the government would pay the premiums from the tax revenues received because the disaster had been handled. At that point the insurance companies will be able to pay back the original government money and the loop in time will disappear.

        There are a lot of bedeviling details, but I think the basic idea would be to set a coverage level, say 75% of damages, for most of the losses and then put special cases around it. In the example of Covid, a company might qualify for 80% coverage by not laying off employees. Or get bumped up to 85% by finding new revenue streams (like making transparent masks). These details would be negotiated (mostly before the disasters appear) between the government and the insurance companies that want to participate, and then the victims of the disaster would get to pick an insurance company.

        A modular smart chair

        Not wanting to go too deep into this one, but imagine having a set of chairs for various purposes such as working or reading or even sleeping. Now imagine a cover for each chair. Now remove the chairs and imagine one chair cover that can take the shape of each of the missing chairs. The modular part of this one would have two aspects. One would be smaller granularity for regions that need to bend more, and the other would be special features like an arm to hold a book or a massage module. Think of triangular surface tessellations in 3D imaging?

        A modular smartphone hat

        This is another old one... I'm basically imagining a watch cap with a smartphone built into it. The two original modules were for noise cancelling headphones and different lenses, including dark ones for sleeping. However now I'm sure some people would want to be able to hang VR glasses off of it. And how about some rearview cameras?

        A modular better-sleeping belt

        This is a new wish... The belt would have batteries and record the basics like torso orientation, movements, pulse, and body temperature while sleeping. That's already enough data to get a pretty good idea of the quality of sleep, but additional modules could handle blood pressure and maybe even an EEG. (Philips already has a SmartSleep product.)

        A bit of a diversion, but I'd like to see timing-based blood pressure rather than the intrusive pressure cuffs. Pulses vary enough to track their timing differences at various places on the body... Or maybe solve from blood velocities? Perhaps supplemented with audio data?

        A better memory for the other ideas I've misplaced (fighting TMB?)

        Not sure what to say about this one except for the old TMB joke: "There are two big problems when you get old. First your memory starts to go, but I've forgotten the other one."

        In a later edit, I decided this is also the place for a few things that have come to pass, at least partially: Medical diary website, different kind of solution-oriented search engine, and time-based email. There are some apps (sometimes linked to websites) that help track various medical things, but no website that links it all together in a searchable way, with links to medical records and even guided questioning. (Too patient-centered to get past the marketing droids?) There have been lots of variations of websites that seek solutions, but I've never seen a good one. (The original idea was also to feed patents for the missing solutions, but now I think patent law is so broken it needs a page-one rewrite and I even hope (or believe?) all of the ideas in this email fail the "non-obvious" or "prior art" tests.) Time-based email should remind you of the Schedule Send option if you use Gmail, but they implemented it SO badly. (No relative times and no courtesy-of-the-recipient time options, including more options for defaults.) And I think I was pushing variations of all of these ones years before they appeared... (So my personal time dysfunction has a long history? (I blame the SF. (And Lisp.)))

So much for Santa Claus. Too much. As noted, I wish I had been "such a good boy" before I grew up...

Best joke you've seen lately: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/artificial-incompetence about why things aren't as bad as they seem. However, it forgot to consider the storage requirements of all the "sleepy cat" videos... Clever callbacks? Optimistic sarcasm? Whatever. Enjoy.

I just got kicked off of Facebook. Anyone else?

No idea why. The email announcement of my death sentence didn't say why. Not a hint. Nor any prior warnings or cautions.

If I did commit some odious crime, then I should be able to figure it out. My Facebook timer is five minutes. Per day. So not much of a strain on my memory. My last few comments on Facebook were encouraging people to vote. That covers the last week or two, since I didn't visit every day. Doesn't seem to justify "Death to the vote encourager!"

If I did something wrong or made a mistake, then I'd even be willing to apologize for it. In public or to the victim, if such exists.

But I right now I suspect the sudden death sentence goes back to secret complaints. Almost surely from sock puppets. But if this is the case, then I'm proud of my enemies. I hope I properly earned the enmity of such people. Cowards hiding behind anonymous sock puppets. And stinking cowardice is their best point.

As far as Facebook goes, isn't it interesting that Zuck wants to escape into his very own Metaverse from the real world mess that he's largely created? Certainly Facebook has more influence on the real world than me or you. But I guess that's still nicer than cases like Musk and Bezos who confess to wanting to escape from the entire planet that they've screwed to the wall.

A conclusion? I admit that I don't think I care enough about being a nice guy. I'm too busy trying to be a good person. Whatever that means, it apparently includes offending some folks. If they deserved to be offended, then good for me.

Well, [the current] poll already seems to have outlived its usefulness. Not that I'm hating on the topic, but it's pretty clear almost no one much cares. So I got to thinking about a new poll question, which is linked to this poll if you take it as a poll about the "effective" lifespan of Twitter. (And I confess I'm hoping Musk will earn a #heilElon for killing Twitter.) Though (as usual), I am coming at the topic sideways:

And don't forget the implications for the data created and manipulated by the program (or Constitution) in question. I'm sure the options are intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, but here's my suggested list:

1. Short, on the order of 10 years. (If so, then you think Twitter has already lived too long?)
2. Medium, on the order of 50 years.
3. Long, on the order of 100 years, but maybe you want to go for geologic time.
4. Finite, but with an easy update process.
5. Finite, but with a difficult update process.
6. Until Captain Neal loses or zaps the decryption key and no one can use it anymore. Obviously.

[That's annoying. Can't even use an ordered list here?]

It's also coming from my time-centric philosophy: As far as the genetics go, we humans were created by evolving in geologic time. However as far as the software goes, we were created in a mutual bootstrap process running in historic time. At each phase of the bootstrapping, we created a slightly more complicated society that allowed us to bootstrap more complicated mental programs, leading to the current fine mess we've gotten ourselves into. But computers are changing and operating in quantum times that we'll never truly understand and certainly will never run in, singularity be darned. I used to think that "the image of gawd" in which man was made was basically a UTM, but now I understand there is no such thing as a UTM. For starters, you'd have to show me your infinite tape. It's just heuristics (and turtles) all the way down, where running time matters a lot and humans can't run with the computers. So have a nice day? You silly turtle, you!

And in case it isn't obvious, yeah, I got here as a result of contemplating the logical fallacy underlying the current alleged election in the States. If you believe in voting, then I hope you remembered to do your civic duty. But if you believe the elections are faked, then why would you want to vote for anyone so incompetent as to fail to collect any evidence of the YUGE fakery that you think took place in 2020? I know, I know. It's because you are full of theories about what could have happened, but that doesn't explain the incompetence. (This negative can actually stand on its own without the proof.)

Three Steps to kill Franklin's republic:

1. Forget how contagious Homer's lies were.
2. Develop psychological ads to twist voters.
3. Unleash the Kraken computers.

Won't matter if we #HeilElon as fascist or saint, he who dies with the most toys is still dead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1umoIGJ9A

I'm not against stroke victims, my father had a stroke 2 years ago and the fight back to competency is real.

Not everybody can succeed at coming back from a stroke to competency. This man, clearly is not competent.

Just another c&p. This time I'll go ahead and localize it a bit, since the same thoughts basically apply to Slashdot. Also, I am sometimes amused by the panic of trolls when confronted with the idea of MPER as a tool to discourage their trollish behaviors. (Kind of sad when your purpose in life has been reduced to trolling, eh? (Me? Naw. I think I've earned my obscurity. When too many people start paying attention to my mumblings, I regard that as a good reason to move on... (Little to no danger of that on Slashdot?)))

Just another c&p for whatever Slashdot has become these years...

Yet another c&p for Slashdot, though this one should be sufficiently self-contained to avoid the complaints about insufficient context... Rather against my better judgment, but I'll even click the "Publicize" option, though with a twisted preface and even twistier epilogue:

Preface:
If you love freedom, please vote!
If you don't believe in elections, then why should you bother with voting?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled "It's still about the economy stupid, but..."

Given my conclusion, why did I bother to try to vote? Civic duty and ritualism, but I don't think it mattered. Almost certain that my vote has finally been cancelled. But the punchline is that I was gerrymandered at the first level until this year, when I was moved into a sacrificial district. Continuing with my ritualism, I am fighting to find and fix the error, but that's probably precisely what the election riggers want. If I do recover my franchise, that will probably interfere with restoring several other votes that might have actually mattered in districts that were only gerrymandered at the safe level.

Another c&p to Slashdot from elsewhere, though the same ideas could, in theory, apply here. Or maybe someone will recognize similarities to a URL they can share?

I rarely share anything from twitter. But this rant of a father before a school board, on the subject of the fake 1619 curriculum and "Culturally Relevant Teaching" harming children, is EXACTLY what certain people need to watch.

https://twitter.com/JohnMStubbins/status/1579999010869612545?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1579999010869612545%7Ctwgr%5Eee18dd8a4fdb0740057fae07034497b4e988f4b6%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fnotthebee.com%2Farticle%2Flet-racism-die-the-death-it-deserves-black-dad-descended-from-slaves-says-woke-institutions-are-keeping-racism-on-life-support-destroys-crt-in-2-minutes-

American and like freedom? Please vote ASAP!

You don't like freedom? Then why bother voting just because you were ordered to vote? You don't really care.

Before the personal sob story, two higher-level comments. One about freedom and one about demographics.

Freedom is like TANSTAAFL. The payment consumes time and effort. If you actually want to be free, then you have to work at it. You have to collect data and figure out what it means so that your choices can be free. I think I love freedom, so I do the work.

The demographic research indicates about one third of the people (in every country) hate the idea of working for freedom. They are the wannabe followers of various kinds of authoritarian leaders and they just want to be told what to think and what to do. Makes their lives simpler and it doesn't really matter who they are following. (Usually they are scattered all over the place, but TFG's closest approach to a "political skill" is in getting lots of them into one angry mob.)

The rest of the people say they like freedom, but they are actually spread over a spectrum of how much work they want to do for freedom. I'm near one extreme, and at the other end you have people who don't actually want to do any work for their freedoms. Too bad that makes them easy to manipulate, especially in these days of computerized micro-targeting of ads and propaganda. At that end of the spectrum, they won't even think about which of their own personal buttons were pushed. (This means the Dark Money Boys can just buy as many votes as they need--which is why so many elections between vastly different candidates have become so close. The DMBs are greedy and don't like to waste money, so they don't buy excess votes.)

Now for the sob story.

I've voted by mail for most of my life. This year I requested my ballot as usual and was notified it would be sent at the proper time, which is now past. But no ballot has arrived.

I checked my voter registration at that time, and it looked fine. Same as it ever was. But now? Nothing. My voter registration suddenly went away.

There are actually several online systems that are supposed to help with voting. The voter registration system continues to insist I don't exist, but there are separate websites for tracking my ballot. But they also insist "Nothing to see here."

I contacted my registrar and was assured my ballot was in the mail--but at no point did the registrar include any information to indicate the status of my ballot had actually been checked. My theory is the registrar is just saying that to ALL of the voters who ask. Too busy (because of deliberate staffing shortages) to do any actual checking.

If I trust what someone in a different office said on the phone, then I might know one of the errors in play. Based on that data, my theory is that there was a bunch of registration data input by temps. Perhaps even by volunteers. But the instructions were something like "Speed is most important here." They probably gave prizes and bonuses for the fastest work. "Don't worry about accuracy. Our big computer will fix any mistakes." Meanwhile the programming of the "big computer" focused on finding EVERY error or inconsistency so those ballots could be frozen, with the highest detection priority of course given to the ballots of "bad" voters like yours truly. "Sterilize imperfections?" After the election, who cares why someone didn't get to vote?

All of this reminded me of why I voted AGAINST the incumbent whenever the candidates were similar enough. (These years the candidates have become so dissimilar that I'd forgotten about that old tiebreaker.) Unfortunately, the only thing all of the politicians were able to agree on was that they were personally "entitled" to job security, so killing democracy to protect their own "jobs" made perfect sense to them.

"Public service". No. It's just a "job". And now you suddenly understand how Congress can have incredibly low approval ratings while almost all of them get reelected every time. That was the only objective all of the bastards could agree on. (Not all of them are selfish bastards, but the the "principled public servant" caucus doesn't have enough votes to sneeze at.)

So if you are a freedom-loving American, I urge to vote. In memory of my dead ballot. Perhaps for the last time it actually matters? The very idea of democracy in America has been dancing on the cliff's edge for so long, maybe we didn't notice when it fell off? Maybe it's just been falling quietly and will hit the rocks RSN.

Ending with a joke? My quasi-mathematical definition of freedom: #1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} <> (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)

This interview with John McWhorter is interesting when it comes to the ridiculous victimhood of liberals.