Monica

US cell phones will get noisy alarms tomorrow (overriding silent mode)

2023-10-04T01:39:15Z

If you are someone in the US who needs to keep the existence of your mobile phone a secret -- for example, someone in an abusive relationship who might need to be able to call for help -- then you might want to turn your phone off for an hour or so tomorrow. A test of the national emergency alert system will hit all phones (and TVs and radios), making a loud noise even if you have it in silent or vibrate mode. Scheduled start time is 14:20 Eastern time (UTC 18:20) and alerts could come for half an hour after that time.

Also:

Smartwatches, tablets and other connected devices might also receive the alerts depending on how they are set up and if they’re connected to cellular service directly or tethered to another device that is.

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today's news

2023-08-02T18:26:03Z

The person who murdered my friends at Tree of Life has just been sentenced to death. There will presumably be years of appeals, but it still feels like there's some closure. I mean, as much as there can be when people we cared about are gone and obviously aren't coming back.

I have complicated feelings about the death penalty. In this case I found the defense's arguments wholly unconvincing. We're supposed to believe that someone who spent months planning an attack, who talked coherently about it on social media, who carried it out methodically, and who showed no remorse -- should get a pass because he had a difficult childhood? Lots of people have difficult childhoods but don't turn into bigoted murderers, y'know? I'm no expert, but it seems to me that he was clearly capable of forming intent, and did. I guess the defense made the best arguments they could; they just didn't have much to work with.

I've noticed that the local Jewish newspaper does not use his name, and neither shall I. We don't need to give him word-fame and help make him a martyr. He's a nobody, a murderous nobody -- Ploni.

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Snow disaster in Crestline, CA

2023-03-07T01:30:46Z

Yikes. I knew from the news that the snow in California was bad, but I hadn't realized how bad. From this account:

We are used to snow here, and most residents are well-prepared for a typical snowstorm. Crestline normally gets six inches to two feet of snow. We got over nine feet of snow. Individual residents are not prepared for that, and we are overwhelmed.

Some people are literally trapped inside their homes by snow blocking their doors. Others can leave their homes but not their yards because the snow is over their heads. Many streets are not plowed, so no vehicles can drive. When streets are plowed, the snow is pushed to the sides and forms 10’ – 20’ walls of solid ice which block cars and driveways. The official statement of San Bernardino is that there will be no help breaking down the ice walls or shoveling paths to homes – they are only willing to plow the streets. These are not normal ice berms and individuals cannot break them down! We need help with this.

Many people are running out of food, as the only grocery in Crestline collapsed due to snow and the one in the next closest town partially collapsed. [...] Residents are allowed to drive down the mountain (if they’ve dug their cars out), but if we leave, we will not be allowed back up. No one is saying when we will be allowed back, but officials have hinted it will be at least a week and maybe a month or more. So anyone who drives down to get medical help or food is trapped away from their home with no idea of when they can return. Because of this, everyone is afraid to leave, so we have no way of replenishing our own supplies and no way of lightening the load in general by going to stay with friends. Residents need to be allowed back up the mountain!

Homes and businesses are collapsing from the weight of snow on the roof. [...] As gas vents are blocked by snow and gas pipes are breaking from the weight, a number of houses have exploded or burned down.

According to this account, the emergency response has ranged from non-existent to harmful.

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Putin Khuylo

2022-06-10T21:40:30Z

Confirming what many suspected, the media reports that Putin likens himself to Peter the Great, conqueror role and all. I learned an interesting thing about Russian grammar recently in a fascinating post that's worth reading in full. "Peter the Great", Пётр Вели́кий, also means "Peter is great" -- the grammar is ambiguous.

There is a phrase that has been popular in Ukraine for some time, Пу́тин хуйло́ - "Putin khuylo". Or, perhaps, "Putin Khuylo". Which means "Putin [the] D*ckhead".

I think many people would be pleased to see that catch on, and the recipient of this title has no one to blame but himself. History should record not "Putin the Great" but "Putin Khuylo". Even if schoolbooks have to bleep out a letter to get past vulgarity checks.

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Trolling Wall Street

2021-01-29T02:19:56Z

This is oddly fascinating, even though I don't understand all of it. If I understand correctly:

A "short" is a bet that a stock price will fall: you promise to sell it on a certain date at a certain price, but you don't actually own the shares. On that day, the idea goes, you'll buy the shares at the lower price you expect and then turn around and fulfill your contract, pocketing the difference. I don't know if regular folks like you and me can do that, or if only investment funds and professional stock-market people can. There are some rules that are different for the big players and the little folks; I don't know if this is one of them.

So... some big Wall Street hedge funds (one often mentioned is Melvin Capital) placed vast quantities of shorts on a gaming-gear company that isn't doing well (GameStop). A bunch of people on Reddit observed this and said to Wall Street: hold my beer.

They bought the stock. Hundreds of thousands of people on Reddit bought the stock. At that scale, any individual participant doesn't have to buy a lot; you could play this game for $20 back when it started. And it's not like you can spend that $20 going out to a movie right now, so there was probably an untapped market of bored people looking for fun.

Did I mention that this subreddit bills itself as "like 4Chan for investers"? And did I mention that Elon Musk tweeted about it to his 42 million followers? That subreddit has way more than "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers now.

What happens when lots of shares of a stock start getting bought? The price goes up. The price for GameStop shot up from less than $20 to, at one point, $347. And I think it was higher; I was only able to find daily closing prices, and the hour-by-hour swings have reportedly been wild. There's some background information on CNet.

The stock price, of course, won't stay high. It's a ridiculous price for that company, and eventually the market will bring it back down. But in the meantime, those hedge funds holding shorts have lost billions of dollars -- remember, they still have to buy the stock on "short day", at whatever price is then current, and then sell it for $10 or whatever the bet was.

The Redditors and crew, meanwhile, have turned their sights to other stocks; Blackberry and AMC have been mentioned as other companies in trouble that investors have considered prime candidates for shorts. Stock exchanges and Robinhood have stopped trading at times or restricted purchases.

By the way, the people rallying against Wall Street have a song -- a sea shanty:

I don't know what a "tendieman" is (Google has been unhelpful), though I assume it has to do with tendering, in this case selling at the right time. Ryan Cohen is a major investor in GameStop who's recently been investing more and trying to change the company's business strategy, though I can't tell if he has an actual position there. (The song implies he's on the board.)

As far as I know, the people organizing on Reddit and wherever else aren't doing anything illegal. They're not insider traders with privileged information -- quite the opposite. They're just...massively trolling big investors who traditionally make a lot of money with these kinds of bets. Some of them seem to be in it for the laughs; some are trying to make money riding this (but a lot of them will probably lose money, including anybody who tries to join in now). The line between a movement and a mob can be fuzzy; I'm not sure which this is. I wonder what the other damages are going to be. They're pitching this as little people versus big investors, but will little people with modest retirement funds end up taking some of that damage in those funds too? Or are hedge funds more esoteric and not usually part of IRAs and suchlike?

Bizarre, fascinating, and unsettling.

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election

2020-11-09T01:57:53Z

( Read more... )

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out of control

2020-07-20T21:47:20Z

According to Trump, liberal cities are "out of control" and their leaders are "afraid" of the "anarchists" ("these are not protesters", "these are people who hate our country") and that's why they don't want the federal government to "help".

No, I don't think that's it.

What is happening in Portland is appalling, and Trump just threatened to send his goons into other cities over the objections of local governments. The people he's sending in are wearing generic fatigues (making them indistinguishable from mobs of neo-Nazis and other civilian thugs), driving unmarked rental cars, and snatching people off the streets. There is no due process, no accountability, and plenty of reason for those being targeted to fear the snatchers. You just can't tell. Even if you could tell, what they're doing is so far outside the bounds of the law that it's hard to believe it's happening and hard to believe there won't be further abuses even if you comply with these "arrests".

And yet, it is happening. Just when you thought the shenanigans coming from Washington couldn't get any worse.

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abuses of the weak, and dominoes

2020-06-05T01:59:23Z

Our government is out of control; that's been true for some time but it's gotten worse. The murder of George Floyd is appalling. That he's one of many is appalling. That many police are trained to do such violence, and are supported in it, is appalling. That our government responds with more unprovoked violence and escalation is appalling. I keep using that word, and I feel like I should have better words and more coherent thoughts, and I don't.

But I have this talk that you should listen to -- under 20 minutes, and Trevor Noah has some insightful things to say about the many dominoes that have fallen to get us here and societal contracts and more.

What is society? Society is a contract that we sign as human beings. We agree on common rules, common ideals, and common practices that are going to define us as a group. And the contract is only as strong as the people who are abiding by it.

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pandemic

2020-03-20T03:19:52Z

Pennsylvania shut down "non-life-sustaining businesses" tonight. There's a link there with a detailed list of what's in and out -- some oddities (beer distributors are life-sustaining, apparently), but mostly what you'd expect.

And California extended the stay-at-home order already in force in San Francisco to the entire state tonight. Even so, their governor thinks half the state will be infected in the next eight weeks. I haven't heard any projections for PA, but cases here have been following the usual curve so far.

siderea posted a summary of the Imperial College report that might be spurring the government to take this more seriously. (The report is linked.) They ran simulations of a few response scenarios, ranging from "basically do nothing" to fuller responses. Even with stronger responses, it's looking grim. And it's (at the national level) self-inflicted; we saw what was happening elsewhere and dallied anyway.

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MacOS before El Capitan? Read on.

2019-09-26T13:43:58Z

According to this Gizmodo article, if your version of MacOS predates El Capitan (10.11, though the article says 10.9), a Chrome update might have broken your file system, preventing your machine from booting. Yikes! The article has more information and steps to recover. (I'm running Sierra so I haven't verified the claims or the recovery steps.)

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Notre Dame

2019-04-16T02:36:39Z

In light of today's sad news from Paris, here are a few not-very-good pictures I took in 2014.

( six photos )

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protests today against firing Sessions (find yours)

2018-11-08T17:17:28Z

Yesterday Trump fired Jeff Sessions and appointed a replacement. That replacement is now in charge of Mueller's investigation into Trump's manipulation of the 2016 election. That person can interfere with Mueller at will; Sessions had recused himself.

Trump is, essentially, trying to appoint his own prosecutor and investigators for the high crimes he is accused of. There will be protests across the US at 5PM local time; find yours here.

Mueller is not dumb and presumably planned for this eventuality. That might make what Trump is doing less effective than the president intends. It does not make it any less corrupt.

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attack on Pittsburgh Jews

2018-10-28T19:38:24Z

Yesterday at my synagogue we had just finished the torah reading and held a baby naming for a young family when the first cell phone rang. Some people carry cell phones on Shabbat and sometimes forget to silence them; you shrug and move on. Then the second one went off. Then the first one went off again. Then more. People started checking to see what was going on. And we learned that a nearby congregation, the one I attend for weekday services, was currently under attack and the killer had not yet been caught. Not only were we scared, but we all know people there -- one of the members of my weekday morning minyan was there with me yesterday (for the baby-naming), and we exchanged horrified looks. We locked the doors, hastily finished the morning service, packed up the nice kiddush spread that the family had prepared to celebrate their daughter's naming, and waited for news. (All of the staff and some others have had active-shooter training -- that we should need such things is terrible in itself -- so we looked to our rabbi for guidance.)

We couldn't get any police guidance (they were understandably busy). We heard that he'd been caught and waited long enough for that report to be disputed, which it wasn't. Eventually we had to decide whether to stay put or disperse. Most of us concluded that hey, we're in a synagogue so maybe we should get the hell out of here, and left. I asked somebody for a ride home to minimize my time on the streets. We made sure nobody walked home.

Later I heard more details (answering the phone seemed prudent that day), that the killer was a white-supremicist monster on a "Jews must die" rampage, and most horribly, that he'd succeeded in killing eleven people and wounding half a dozen more. Almost certainly that list included friends -- it seems plausible that the people who show up to a weekday morning minyan regularly would also be the ones who show up on Shabbat on time, and the murders were early during the service. Nobody knew who, though, and that was very tense.

There were phone messages from out of state before I even got home, and calls from out of the country soon after; I guess it's not surprising that this would be international news but, wow, that was fast. I made a judgement call, apologized to God, and posted a short entry here and sent a one-word tweet ("safe") to ease the concerns of people I know all over the world who would be worried about me. Yeah, the Internet is truly global and we form real communities and real bonds. (Last night I asked on Mi Yodeya whether I violated a biblical or rabbinic prohibition, and today I asked if, theoretically, a Jewish court could execute a non-Jew. I guess one of the ways I process horrifying events is through study? Today I learned.)

There was a vigil last night in the center of Squirrel Hill. The crowd was huge; I later learned about 3000, which is a lot for the intersection we overflowed. The police had blocked off streets and there was media there. Somebody organized that in about four hours, wow. I looked in vain for friends from Tree of Life and, specifically, the weekday minyan, but it was a large crowd and it was dark and I didn't find anybody. I sent email to my closest friend in that minyan and got no reply all night. Email and blog comments and tweets and direct messages and chat pings rolled in all day and evening. I didn't know what to tell anybody -- do I need anything? don't know! -- but I felt very comforted.

My minyan friend sent email this morning, thank God, and officials announced the names of the victims who, yes, included other minyan friends. (Aside: there is a special circle of hell -- I don't believe in hell but let's postulate it for the sake of this sentence -- for news services that write headlines like "names of victims announced" over articles that contain no names of victims. Took me three tries.) Some synagogues cancelled activities today and others said we will stay open and not let murderous terrorists win; of course everybody is clamping down on security. Tree of Life is closed and roads around it are still blocked off by the police; another congregation has already invited them in.

I heard that Trump said that if the synagogue had had an armed guard this wouldn't have happened. Victim-blaming, really? First, almost no houses of worship have armed guards so far as I know, and we for one cannot afford one even if we thought that was a good idea (we hire police for the high holy days only), and I don't know that a police officer with a pistol (or similar) could stop a rampaging neo-Nazi brandishing an assault rifle anyway. It'd just be one more body.

They caught the murderer, which means there will be a lengthy investigation (of the "alleged" killer, as if anybody denies it!) and trial and many appeals before, maybe, he gets the death penalty he deserves. It's times like this when I'm glad we still have a death penalty, even though it is often mis-applied. Part of me wishes that, when he was shooting at the police officers and SWAT team, somebody had blown his brains out on the spot. He doesn't sound like the sort of person who will be in any way moved by having to look the families of his victims in the eye and hear their testimony. If he claims insanity (despite the obvious premeditation) then he's a rabid wild animal who needs to be put down in the name of public safety, and if he doesn't claim insanity then he's an evil monster who ceded his rights to endless appeals of the obvious the first time he pulled that trigger.

I am sad and angry and shocked.

I don't blame God for what happened even as I say baruch dayan ha-emet, blessed is the true judge. God gave us free will and the evils humans do to each other are on those humans, not God. The rate of those evils has been going in the wrong direction for quite some time in our country and our world, sometimes organically and sometimes urged on by demagogues in power (White House I am looking at you), and I feel pretty helpless about that.

For those of you who don't know the neighborhood, somebody linked to this description of Squirrel Hill that's pretty spot-on. We're all connected here.

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