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The Internet

Journal Journal: Masters-level Last-post-itis? 14

Journal by damn_registrars
I don't know if two weeks has always been the duration that JE discussions are open for or not, I can't say I really paid close attention to the time span before. I do recall back in the day there would be times when active discussions were axed by the limit without concern; this doesn't seem to be the case as much now but only because almost none are active that long any more.

In a recent JE of mine someone dropped a couple self-congratulatory comments just before the discussion was automatically closed out. Now I can't say what that person does with their time aside from dropping snide remarks here on slashdot, but the coincidence is interesting.
United States

Journal Journal: A slightly different tax rant 26

Journal by damn_registrars
Yes tax season is upon us. Joy upon joy. I doubt there is a single person in this country who is 100% satisfied with how taxes work, and perhaps we can take some comfort in that. I'm not going to rant about how much taxes we pay, or what they go to, or anything along those lines. We've all heard plenty of people gripe about that.

I'm agitated by e-file.

I was a taxpayer before e-file became a thing. I went from 1040EZ to the big boy 1040 form before e-file became a thing. I once had to send a check for less than a dollar to my state revenue department when I was still using 1040EZ for fed, but that is a different matter.

What irritates me is that not once since e-file became a possibility have I been able to use it. There have been a variety of reasons why this has been the case, possibly even some as a result of my own direct actions (at least one was because I had an employer who didn't know the difference between FSA and HSA, which caused years of destruction).

Now this year I thought for sure I would finally be able to e-file and life would be great. I'd still owe money as I always do but at least I could e-file.

Except I can't.

This year to e-file I needed to get my AGI from last year's taxes. So I dutifully went to irs.gov and used my id.me login. I got the number and entered it. Let's just say the number was 88,666. I took that number from last year's taxes and entered it into turbotax to e-file this year. And there it told me that 88,666 is not equal to 88,666.

No I'm not joking. The number the IRS gave me to enter was not equal to the number that they gave me to enter. This is also the number that turbotax suggested (as I used it last year as well) as my AGI.

So back to the post office I will go, with large envelopes and hand written checks looking for postage.

I can't help but be left wondering if having one situation that excludes you from e-file puts you on a lifetime e-file "black list".
The Internet

Journal Journal: VPN service recommendations, especially for a Roku? 1

Journal by damn_registrars
This might be one of the less interesting applications of a VPN but I want to watch my local MLB team. However the cable network that carries them is only available through cable or satellite and I don't want to pay for either. My cell phone carrier gets me free MLB.tv every year, but of course local restrictions apply.

This leads to the revelation that of course MLB.tv should give me the local team if it thinks I am somewhere else.

Naturally there is no app on Roku for VPN, as it would violate the terms of many of the services that it connects to. I need to look at setting up a VPN in some other way to get my Roku to identify to services as being somewhere else. In my case I just want to tell it I'm in another state, I don't need to tell it I'm in another country.

I haven't shopped for VPN before, and of course some services are careful not to mention too much about using their service to get around regional lockouts. Does anyone have a recommendation? For me it's really just about the Roku for now. My priority here is to make it as easy to use as possible so that my school-aged sons can make use of it to watch baseball at home when I'm not at home. It looks like some services might make it happen just by paying for a different DNS address to point my home router at, which seems like it would be pretty darn easy.
Republicans

Journal Journal: Where's the commentary on Dilbert / Scott Adams? 2

Journal by damn_registrars
I'm a bit surprised to realize we don't have a "Dilbert" topic for JEs here. The strip used to be referred to quite often in discussions around here (side note that would be easier to mine if Slashdot had a search engine that was worth its own weight in horse shit).

That said we've all head that Dilbert is being pulled this week from almost every newspaper that was still carrying it. Briefly, Scott Adams let his racist flag fly and got canned as a result. At that point he became pretty much radioactive to sensible people so newspapers dropped his strip fairly quickly. His 30 year legacy is now nearly worthless for many many people.

Naturally he's not apologizing, rather he's lamenting over his loss of income.

I'm more surprised though that this hasn't drawn any front page attention here at slashdot. Certainly plenty of conservatives are crying "wokeness" (which is a topic Adams frequently attacked in his strip) or "cancel culture" (which is a topic he blogged about extensively) or making hollow claims of "DEI run amok" (which he also dedicated many strips to). The conservatives on slasdhot used to love to rally around those flags as well.

Did all the slashdot conservatives run away? They had a supermajority here for some time (at least in commenting volume), and they've gone strangely silent in the past 6 months or so.
Republicans

Journal Journal: Whos is Gutfeld (trying to be)? 6

Journal by damn_registrars
One of the only ads that ran multiple times during last night's Super Bowl (my wife, brother-in-law, and his wife wanted to watch it; hence in spite of the NFL's best efforts I watched it anyway) was for a Fox News talk show "Gutfeld". I already know the general premise that he's trying to host a late night talk show to compete with Colbert, Meyers, and Kimmel. I already know that he's getting high numbers because conservatives overwhelmingly hate all three of them and so they flock to the only conservative on late night while the liberals are split between three choices.

I'll add that I don't have cable. I'm not terribly interested in watching his youtube videos either.

I do suspect that he's trying to do one of a few things in general though as he seems to be openly going for the "entertainment" side of things:
  • He's trying to be the new Dennis Miller (openly hostile conservative host) portraying the old Dennis Miller (equal opportunity basher with an intellectual flair)
  • He's trying to be the new Dennis Miller (openly hostile conservative host), portraying the new Dennis Miller (openly hostile conservative host)
  • He's trying to be the new Bill O'Reilly (conservative host with journalism background)
  • He's trying to be Tucker Carlson (conservative lunatic pretending to be a legitimate muck raker) portraying Johnny Carson (talk show host with comedy credentials who largely leaves his politics at the door)

Or am I missing an option for him there? Can someone who has watched his show offer up a take?
China

Journal Journal: What if China wanted the balloon shot down? 5

Journal by damn_registrars
We took down the Chinese Spy Balloon over the Atlantic coast off the Carolinas. We might - or might not - ever hear from our government what was actually on the balloon in terms of monitoring equipment.

Lots of people are playing Armchair General over when we should have shot down the balloon, and of course lots of them are getting important facts wrong about who said what when. I'm interesting in proposing a different hypothesis on the matter here; I'm confident others have considered it but I haven't heard it brought up.

What if China sent it specifically for us to shoot it down? It sounds a little odd at first, but something like this makes for an interesting penetration test for a country's military. Considering all the different weapons we could throw at it, a certain decision had to be made on which weapon to use - as well as the where and the when. If the balloon was operating in or above the jetstream (which google suggests to be 4-8 miles above the earth), that does restrict the weapon choices somewhat.

It would of course be really useful to know what was on the balloon. I fully support the notion that it was monitoring something from up there, and likely wasn't just taking pictures as China has their own spy satellites in orbit do to that. I do wonder though if being shot down might have been one of the operational goals of the balloon's mission.
Republicans

Journal Journal: Smitty's legal theory falls flat in a jury trial 4

Journal by damn_registrars
Smitty has previously argued that his philosophical brothers-in-arms who were charged with conspiracy over the January 6th insurrection were somehow not guilty of anything by virtue of not having done so with notarized affidavits of their shared intentions.

Well, it turns out the jury didn't find that excuse to be air-tight at all . After the main leader of their group was convicted, a jury turned in guilty verdicts on 4 of his lieutenants. They'll be under house arrest until the sentencing phase is complete, though they won't be able to play with their favorite weapons for quite some time now.
The Internet

Journal Journal: Someone got new scripts for Christmas? 3

Journal by damn_registrars
We noticed that our internet connectivity hasn't been great at home lately. I didn't have a lot of time to tackle this right away so I started with the usual song and dance of resetting the modem and the router. This brought some relief and then it got worse again.

Then today I checked the auth.log on the RPi that runs as our webserver / gateway. In the last 6 days, we've seen at least 23,047 unique attempts to log in to our server as root from across the internet. This of course excludes other attempts made on other accounts that we don't allow to access our system from the outside world (people may call me crazy but I'm not enough of a maniac to allow remote access as root).

What I find interesting is that we had a very quiet 2022 up until right around Christmas, then all of a sudden we're getting hammered from all over the world.

Quick sample of IP addresses attempting to get in:
  • 61.177.173.27 - China
  • 157.245.40.103 - USA
  • 79.10.178.226 - Italy
  • 159.89.19.21 - USA
  • 209.45.73.18 - Peru
  • 143.198.94.205 - USA
  • 146.190.46.226 - USA
  • 128.199.141.33 - USA
  • 43.153.89.150 - Japan
  • 190.104.25.217 - Bolivia

And of course those don't indicate that the person who is running these scripts is actually in those countries; I suspect more likely it means these addresses belong to compromised systems in those countries that are running the scripts for amateur hackers in other countries.

I finally bit the bullet and installed fail2ban. Hopefully this locks out a few of these idiots, for a while at least.
Earth

Journal Journal: What did Putin gain by freeing an arms dealer? 5

Journal by damn_registrars
We've all see the news that we did a prisoner swap with Russia, bringing home Brittney Griner in exchange for releasing Viktor Bout to Russia. What I haven't found much of an explanation on so far is what Russia gained by getting Bout back? He's been imprisoned long enough that it doesn't seem his connections and activities are likely to be that valuable to Putin.

While Putin might be a bit crazy, he's not an idiot. I'm sure Putin had something to gain here by getting Bout back; was it just simply to show that he could force the US to negotiate on this matter? Or was there something else that I'm not yet seeing?
The Almighty Buck

Journal Journal: What Could You Do With $54B ? 11

Journal by damn_registrars
People went bananas over the recent $2B powerball lottery. There is however an even larger number I'd like to share that is truly and completely wasted from our US economy every single year.

$54,000,000,000
Every. Single. Year.

Where does this number come from? This is actually a low estimate on what we spend just to bill insurance companies in the US for medical care. This is based on an older study that said clinics and offices averaged $60k per year per FTE provider (MD, DO, NP, PA, etc) just to bill insurance. These aren't the people who bill the customers, these are just the people who enter the claims to the insurance companies. Multiply that by approximately 900,000 practicing MDs in the US and you get a number around $54B per year.

It's worth noting that other studies have suggested much higher annual administrative costs from our system, upwards of $240B or more per year. $240B is itself more than the GDP of Scotland.

Regardless of which number you go from, this money is complete waste in the health care system. It does not improve health care in any way, shape, or form. Indeed in many cases it hinders delivery of health care as mis-entered information can disrupt billing and services. On top of that, these billions of dollars don't just materialize out of thin air, we the consumers pay it, every year.

Yet nobody seems the least bit concerned about this epic waste. We could spend this money to actually deliver health care - by shutting down this appallingly corrupt system and replacing it with an intelligent single-payer universal system - and come out way ahead in our economy on so many fronts. Yet instead we keep buttressing the broken system as if we the consumers owe something to it.
Republicans

Journal Journal: Like a broken, obscure time piece... 30

Journal by damn_registrars
The frequency is much less than twice a day, but once a while fustakrakich is actually able to make a point about something. However in his usual style it's not the text he writes directly that makes a point. He's dead wrong in his first sentence, but he does - in a strange roundabout way - make a different point.

He shows that he deeply distrusts some people, and insists that he knows what they are saying even if the thing he is so certain they are saying is the opposite of what they have actually said.

That stance is a pillar on which the current political schism of our country is built on. When people ask what it will take to resolve the deep tribal conflicts in our country, this is a big part of the problem. We see in our country right now people who insist that they are being lied to, because they refuse to give any credit to the actual statements from people they disagree with. This is exactly how we get to republicans who call Obama "the anti-christ" or Biden a "leftist". This is also how we get to conspiracies running wild and taking over the thought abilities of otherwise intelligent people.
Education

Journal Journal: On the NYU OChem Prof who lost his job... 2

Journal by damn_registrars
Naturally, slashdot editors got it pretty damned wrong when bringing attention to the case of Dr. Jones, the OChem professor fired by NYU.

I wanted wanted to bring some attention to what actually happened, but as nobody will read it there I'll repeat it here.

I love all the folks here who are telling us what they think about GenZ, or college students, or any other group of people they are not part of. No need to read the article to see what actually happened, that's way out of fashion here. There are political axes to grind instead, so let's get to it!

If anyone actually reads the article they'll find that the petition was not aiming to have Dr. Jones fired. It was a grievance about grades, in a course that was being taught in a different way than standard OChem.

As a biochemist who spent a lot of time in courses with pre-med students there is something I want to make really abundantly clear about how OChem is taught in the USA.

OChem instruction discourages comprehension

I'm not saying this as a disgruntled former student. I'm saying this as someone who went through OChem, and knows a lot of people who went through OChem at a lot of different schools around the country. OChem has for many decades been all about memorization and regurgitation. First semester OChem? Memorize and regurgitate the first half of the book. Second semester OChem? Forget the first half, memorize and regurgitate the second half. The students who did best often learned the least. The students who tried to actually comprehend the material drowned as there was not enough time to do so.

If you don't believe me, ask your physician, dentist, or even pharmacist about OChem the next time you see them. The overwhelming majority don't remember much about that class. Ask them about an anti-Markovnikov addition and I'll bet most of them won't remember much past the name (if even that). I can tell you none of the physicians I've seen in the past decade can.

So what happened then? Dr. Jones wanted to teach OChem in a way that encouraged comprehension instead of regurgitation. It appears a lot of students weren't ready for that, they were expecting the standard OChem pedagogy. Being as NYU has other OChem faculty, they should have made it more clear who was teaching in each way so the pre-med students could take the standard delivery and move on with their lives.

Hopefully Dr. Jones finds another school where he can continue working on his new pedagogy. This would be a huge improvement and produce better chemists for our country going forward.
Republicans

Journal Journal: MH42 vs MH42 (fascism proudly on display)

Journal by damn_registrars
All the way back on August 17th of this year, MH42 laid out his glorious plan for how he claimed to want the corrections system to work . There were, of course, a lot of problems with it. We didn't get very far into it before the JE he posted that to itself timed out for discussion and the discussion was automatically closed by slashdot rules.

More so, slightly more than a month later, he proudly contradicted himself in showing support for cops who perform extrajudicial killings of ex-cons , of course without concern for whether they are in any way committing a criminal act at the time.

Naturally, as fascists of his type tend to say, reforms be damned. He knows who he wants to get rid of, and he'll pay the police to go about and do it. Just wait until his party makes membership in any other party itself into a crime, then the purge can really be accelerated under his dream state.

Watching MH42 discredit himself reminded me a bit of Alan Dershowitz jumps in to attack the ridiculous theories of legal muttonhead Alan Dershowitz though on a much smaller stage.

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