Incoherent ramblings

Partisan political spam from the CEO of an expense reporting company

October 22, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , ,

Check out the following unsolicited email that I received at work from the CEO of the expense reporting software that is used by our company:

I know you don’t want to hear this from me. And I guarantee I don’t want to say it. But we are facing an unprecedented attack on the foundations of democracy itself. If you are a US citizen, anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy.

That’s right, I’m saying a vote for Trump, a vote for a third-party candidate, or simply not voting at all — they’re all the same, and they all mean:

“I care more about my favorite issue than democracy. I believe Trump winning is more important than democracy. I am comfortable standing aside and allowing democracy to be methodically dismantled, in plain sight.”

If the polls are accurate, there’s a roughly 50% chance that you agree Trump needs to go. You know what to do: show up on November 3rd and vote for Biden. Or even better, don’t wait until then: vote today. Go to Vote.org if you need help figuring out how.

The rest of this email is intended to address the concerns of those who disagree, and I’ll try to take the most likely questions in turn:

Q: Why do you care so much about democracy?

Democracy is core to our business success, in a variety of ways. Internally, we are a famously “flat” organization — nobody reports to anyone else, and advancement is the result of meeting well defined criteria as judged by the vote of those who have already advanced. How we compensate each other is left up to a team vote as well. Even our external business model depends on individual employees “electing” to adopt XXXXXXX as individuals, and then “campaigning” internally to get it adopted companywide. At every layer, democracy is our core competitive advantage — both as a company, and as a nation. But that advantage is only as strong as the clarity of our rules and the fairness of their application. Any attempt to disrupt the rules or apply them unfairly is a direct threat to the strength of our company, and the strength of our nation.

Q: What gives you the right to tell me what to do?

The first amendment. To be clear, you don’t need to listen. But the first amendment exists to encourage people like you and me to find some way to talk about the issues that matter, set aside our differences, and find a common ground on which to collectively govern 331 million citizens. Yes democratic self-rule can be inconvenient. But a burden of democracy is that this is literally our job, so I’m asking all of us to take it seriously.

Q: But you’re a company, shouldn’t you remain neutral?

XXXXXXX depends on a functioning society and economy; not many expense reports get filed during a civil war. As CEO of this business, it’s my job to plot a course through any storm — and all evidence suggests that another 4 (or as Trump has hinted — 8, or more?) years of Trump leadership will damage our democracy to such an extent, I’m obligated on behalf of shareholders to take any action I can to avoid it. I am confident our democracy (and XXXXXXX) can survive a Biden presidency. I can’t say the same about Trump. It’s truly as simple as that.

Q: Don’t you think you’re… exaggerating a bit?

I truly wish I was. I wouldn’t be sending this email if this election were just about “normal issues” — taxes, legislative priorities, healthcare, etc. But it isn’t. This election is a referendum on what limits, if any, we place on our elected leaders to govern us in a fair and representative way. This election will decide if widespread voter suppression is an acceptable governing tactic.

Q: Doesn’t everyone suppress votes?

Not like Trump. This is the most heavily litigated election in history, with over 300 lawsuits rushing through the courts before election day. And in every case, Biden is pushing to enable voters while Trump is pushing to suppress them. The trend couldn’t be more clear: Biden wants democracy, Trump does not. A vote for Trump is to endorse voter suppression, it really is very basic. This isn’t about party politics: if Biden were advocating for half of the voter suppression that Trump is actively doing, then I’d be fighting against Biden, too. This is bigger than politics as usual: this is about the very foundation of our nation.

Q: Isn’t Trump just trying to prevent voter fraud?

Voter fraud is virtually nonexistent, as overwhelmingly shown by data showcased by the White House itself. That data comes from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank counting every single known case of voter fraud since 1948, which adds up to only 1,290 distinct votes over 78 years. In 2016 alone there were 138 million votes. There is just no credible argument that voter fraud is significant, even based on Trump’s own data.

Q: Isn’t Biden just using more widespread voting to get elected?

Absolutely. This is the heart of the issue. Biden believes that enabling more people to vote will help him win. Biden wins by promoting democracy; Trump wins by suppressing it. A vote for Biden is a vote for democracy.

Q: So what if Trump gets elected by voter suppression, all’s fair right?

Well that’s what we’re going to decide, on November 3rd. Do you want your elected official to win based on the merits of their ideas? Or based on the ruthlessness of their voter suppression? And if you’re ok with “just a little suppression” — where do you draw the line?

Q: Why send me this when the polls say Biden is going to win?

The polls said Trump was going to lose last time, and he didn’t. But even if the polls can be trusted, that might still not be enough. Trump has stated repeatedly he will only honor an election that he personally feels is fair. So much depending on his personal judgement is worrying, because he has rejected the overwhelming expert consensus that voter fraud has been negligible historically, and has also said he believes it would be impossible to lose a fair election. Accordingly, the only way to ensure a peaceful transition of power is to ensure this election is an overwhelming, undeniable landslide in favor of Biden. Any excuse to question the election is an opportunity for Trump to refuse to leave the White House, plunging this country into a Constitutional crisis bordering on civil war. No matter how slight that risk might be, the consequences of it happening would be so catastrophic to society and the economy, we need to do all we can to prevent it.

So one final plea. As a fellow citizen, I fully support and respect your Constitutional right to disagree — and as an avid supporter of democracy, I value that disagreement. Constructive, well-informed debate (hopefully using the most accurate, least biased news source available) is what makes this nation so exceptional.

But the Constitution is only as strong as the respect we give it. I’m asking you to cherish it close to your heart, and demand that those you elect do the same.

-XXXXX
Founder and CEO of XXXXXXX

PS: Agree or disagree? Reply to this email to share your thoughts with Concierge, or hit me up on Twitter @XXXXXXX to discuss!

PPS: Want to do even more? Support the National Popular Vote to make every vote count equally toward the presidential election, even if you aren’t in one of the 12 states deciding this election.

PPPS: Are you annoyed that you received this as a non-US citizen? If you’re lucky enough to live in a democracy, then I’d encourage you to protect it and be willing to do uncomfortable things — like emailing millions of customers — to defend it.

I found this severely annoying, and fired off the following quick reply:

Shame on you for spamming corporate customers of your company with a politically partisan opinion piece!  I’m just a worker bee in this company, but if I was a purchasing authority, I’d be severely unimpressed.
I’m not a US citizen, but still find this incredibly offensive, not because I agree or disagree, but because of the shear unprofessionalism of your action.  This has no place being pushed out to random people in their workplaces.
Do you really think you will do any good pushing your unsolicited opinion on people when you have no idea what their beliefs are, or the reasons for their decisions, should they be opting to not vote your choice?  I’d expect that what you are doing will just increase polarization, and not have the objective that you are hoping for.  I’d be amused if the actual result of your unsolicited email is to push Trump supporters that were on their butts out of their chairs to the voting booths because they felt that they had to protect their clown from pushy democrats that are sending out panic laden emails like this.
As it happens, I consider both the lead clowns of the US blue and red parties both horrible options.  You aren’t doing your “save democracy” argument much good when you are pushing either option.  If anything, this just serves to illustrate how much of a fraud democracy is.  Perhaps the democratic party should stop repeatedly sabotaging their candidates that have actual popular support?
Are you a US citizen?  It is too bad that Monty Brewster is not running:  “Don’t vote for any of us. We’re assholes! We’ll only make things worse. That’s a promise!”

Lockdowns are starving kids to death

October 20, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , , , , ,

It’s been clear since our petty dictators started imposing COVID lockdowns that these are actions that disproportionately target the poor. I’d been thinking of that in terms of people in the city, waiters, cooks, theater and gym staff, …, who have lost their jobs, will lose their homes, and will rack up debt.  However, this is much more than a first world problem.  There is real cost to blind fear.

Initially we saw many virtue signalling rich celebrities blindly parrot “stay at home” while their personal shoppers and cooks procured their needs.  Later the peons got into the act and made themselves feel good by spouting meaningless catch phrases like  “flatten the curve”, “exponential growth”, “stay safe”, “stay apart”, and “follow the science” (the irony of this last one is amazing!).  Somehow, this was all exploited by media and power hungry politicians to mobilize enough fear that people clamored to have their freedoms taken away, creating illusions of safety.  I  don’t really understand how the COVID fear porn has reached these comprehension defying levels.  The media and politicians who have been pumping the mindless fear really need to step back and take ownership for the chaos, death and misery that will result from their actions.

For months, there have been WHO projections of millions who will die of starvation in developing countries as side effects of lockdown policies.  I had naively envisioned that this would be economic fallout, believing that developing countries would not be foolhardy enough to attempt to replicate the rich country lockdown strategies.  As it turns out, stupidity is more contagious than I imagined it would be, and there are poor countries that have imposed lockdowns on their people, despite the fact that their people have much bigger dangers to battle in their day to day lives.

For a taste of this chaos, check out this Tom Woods episode with Gret Glyer, the founder of DonorSee.  The episode talks about lockdowns in Africa that are killing more kids than COVID, and lockdowns in Sierra-Leone that are so severe that kids are not being allowed to get food available across the street.  Crossing the street was prohibited since it would have required them to cross an imaginary line drawn by an idiot bureaucrat. Seeing the images of the skeletal Sierra-Leone kids is heartbreaking.  Gret predicts that despite continual decreases in child mortality over the last 30 years, there will be a massive spike in excess child mortality in 2020. This spike isn’t going to be due to COVID, but because of fear based political responses that are starving kids to death!

Future generations will look back at the pathetic people of 2020, and shake their heads at how uninformed fear and group-think lead to so much death worldwide.  The death that are being focused on are the deaths of those over 80 years old, labelled “covid deaths”.  These are people that generally have multiple pre-existing conditions that were the root cause of the death, with coronaviruses possibly pushing them over the top (and getting the blame.)  Some of those deaths may have been accelerated by COVID, but were likely not preventable.  What could be prevented are all the surplus deaths due to the evil lockdown policies themselves (these deaths in developing countries, deaths by suicide and drug and alcohol abuse in response to financial ruin and demoralization, …).  Children, statistically speaking, are not dying of COVID, but they are being killed by the lockdowns.

It is, incidentally, confusing and heart breaking to be glad that my mother and my mother in law passed away in 2019, and did not live long enough to die this year.  In order to “save grandma” we are consigning family members that are at the end of their lives to die in misery isolated from their families.

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Glamping CanyonLands is open for business!

October 15, 2020 Incoherent ramblings

 

My brother and his wife are awesome and fearless. Despite the all the uncertainty and chaos in this climate of dictatorial lockdowns, restrictions and pervasive fear-porn, they have opted to start their own glamping (glamous camping) business, Glamping CanyonLands. They’ve bought a bare bones desert property in Utah that literally had nothing.  They’ve now transformed this nothing into a facility with a washroom and shower (and everything that was required to do so, like water heaters, pumps, septic, …), built parking, and are currently providing three sets of luxury tent accommodations.

This video highlights some of the surroundings and the facilities.  They’ve only been open for a couple of days, but already have a nice set of reviews.

During the night, the location is perfect for viewing the milky way. During the day, it can be your staging area for awesome desert hiking, sightseeing and photography.

My Kiva loan stats and rationale.

October 2, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , ,

For most of the time that I was at IBM (before leaving to LzLabs), I was enrolled in the Employee Charitable Fund (ECF) program.  The ECF was a really easy way to do charitable donations, as the donations were small biweekly payroll deductions.  As all the charitable options were official Canadian charities, I also got that tiny little tax deduction kickback as well.

Despite those benefits, I never really liked the ECF charity options, as it felt like my money was just going into a black hole.  I heard about Kiva on the “How things work” podcast, and decided to bail from the ECF for a while and make some Kiva loans instead.  Kiva is a microloan service, where you can loan selected individuals money in $25 increments.  You get to pick who you want to loan to.  As you get paid back, you can funnel those funds back into new loans.

Switching my funds to Kiva loans isn’t a charitable donation in the traditional sense.  In particular, it doesn’t count as an offical Canadian charitable, so I don’t get any tax kickbacks.  Those are usually just pennies anyways, so that’s not a big loss.  If you are in the US you can get a tax kickback for donations to Kiva itself, but not for your loans.  However, I treat my Kiva account like it’s a one way donation, funneling money in, and recycling all of it into new loans when I get payments.

In a rather timely fashion, as it’s was my end of month “Kiva donation time”, I got a notification of leanpub royalties today:


Leanpub is a pay what you want e-book publishing service that provides the purchasers with automatic updates, and purchaser only forums for Q&A.  I didn’t really expect anybody would buy my stuff on leanpub, since I also make pdfs of all those books available for free.  However, I don’t feel guilty about that for a couple reasons.  One is that the purchaser has freedom to pick their price, and most seem to go over minimum.  The other reason is that I have been funneling my leanpub royalties when I get them into my Kiva account.  Usually, y leanpub sales, as they are batched and sporadic, don’t cover my regular Kiva contributions, but this month, they did.

Having been making kiva loans and contributions for so many years now, I’ve got a pretty decent distribution of countries covered:

I regularly reset my ‘Saved Search’ to remove the most frequently leant to countries, and it looks like it’s time to do that again.

I’m pretty selective about the categories that I select my microloans, and that bias is obvious looking at the distribution of the loan categories I’ve selected:

I particularly like the construction loan category, since I can pick somebody looking for tools to improve their business.  I like the self sustainability of that.

This strategy of small regular loans that feed back on themselves really accumulates nicely.  I’ve been making only small monthly contributions, yet that has added up to $6K of total loans over the years, and I’ve now got $1500 of loans in the pipe.  I’ve lost only about $100, which compared to the management fees of a typical charity, is actually pretty extraordinary.  I’ve also lost a small amounts to donations to Kiva itself.  They are asking for lots per loan these days, and I cheap out those contributions, but that has probably still added up.

Attack took out my godaddy hosted wordpress blog for most of a day.

May 29, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , , ,

Guilty admission: The title of this post is click-baity, as the attack was not likely on my blog, but something colocated on the server that my blog happened to have been hosted on.  In particular, the math, physics, complaining about COBOL, rants, and other random garbage that you’ll find on this blog does not likely warrant a DOS attack.  This isn’t the story of my offending somebody enough to get DOSed, but is just the story of a painful interaction with godaddy customer support.

I used to use a wordpress hosted blog, and eventually decided that I wanted flexibility enough to pay for hosting.  I experimented a bit with amazon hosting, but the variability in price scared me off, and I ended up buying my hosting from godaddy.  I don’t remember anymore what other options I considered, nor why I ended up settling on godaddy’s “managed wordpress” offering, over any others, although low initial cost was a factor.  That hosting has generally been problem free, but their IT support, when there is trouble, has proven to be less than desirable.  Here’s that story in case anybody else is considering using godaddy for their own hosting.

Yesterday, I happened to notice that my blog was completely unresponsive.  I only noticed this because I wanted to make one small change to one of my pages.  All told, to get this resolved, I spent about 3 hrs with their IT support (1/2 last night, and the other 1/2 today).  Ironically, by the time I got to the fifth support professional, the problem resolved itself.  I am glad that I don’t run any sort of business off of this site, as the downtime was at least 16 hours.

My 1.5 hrs on the godaddy IT chat support with Parjeet, Jaspreet, and Shibin was a complete waste of time.  Parjeet (who’s name I am probably butchering, since I didn’t keep a copy of my chat log with him) managed to get the blog restarted.  However, it appears that he also disabled all the plugins at the same time without telling me.  He also didn’t identify the root cause.  Jaspreet insisted that the issue was the content I was hosting, even though that content was not an issue before yesterday.  He gave me various self help options (plugin tuning, …) despite the fact that the blog was performing abysmally even with all plugins disabled, and had been okay prior to the reboot, and despite the fact that even the admin pages were slow, which have nothing to do with the content being served for normal blog page or post content.  He also was not able to identify the root cause, and I insisted on dealing with his manager at that point.  That claimed-manager was Shibin, who was helpful seeming, but was not able to do anything, nor able to find somebody who had access to the server logs to diagnose the issue.  When I gave up for the night, he promised to email me the results of his investigation, but no such email materialized.

I was busy with work all morning, and at one point when I had a pause in my day, I thought of checking whether the response time issue had cleared up.  It had not, and the blog was still effectively down today, with 30 second response time for any page access.  Because of the complete ineffectiveness of godaddy’s 24/7 IT chat support, I opted for a half hour on hold to be able to talk with somebody directly.  With headphones available, that time on hold wasn’t a write off, since I was able to keep working the day job — but I have to say that godaddy has some of the worst “on-hold” music that I’ve ever heard!  Once I was finally off hold for the first time today, my support guy (I got today’s support guys names mixed up, and only recall that one of them was named Joshua) investigated what he could, and ended up having to pass the buck to their tier II support, because he didn’t have access to the server logs.  That put me on hold for another hour or so.  When I finally got to deal with somebody who had access to the server logs, the blog coincidentally became responsive without any intervention.  It turns out that there was an attack on one of the servers.  Either that attack, or the godaddy throttling that was instated as a response to that attack finally abated when I was on hold waiting for the tier II support.

The godadday response to an attack is pretty deficient.  If the server that your blog is running on is attacked, they throttle the performance of that server to mitigate the effectiveness of the attack.  The idea is that the attacker will eventually just give up.  That is done apparently done at the server level, and not just for the instance that is under attack.  It seems pretty dumb that godaddy doesn’t migrate the VMs that happen to be unfortunately colocated with attackee onto another physical host.  That’s not a good sign for anybody that wants a service that requires continuous uptime.

When I bought godaddy’s hosting initially, I do remember that it was one of the most cost effective options.  The godaddy hosting price went up considerably sometime after the first or second year of initial service, but I haven’t taken the time to figure out how to migrate to something else.  Perhaps amazon is worth looking at again? Basically, I’m allowing myself to be exploited financially a bit because the time cost to figure out how to migrate to other hosting is probably higher than the monetary cost of the blog hosting itself.

The support interaction that I had over the last two days might be enough of a kick in the butt that I’ll take the time to look at other hosting options, and how to do a migration.  One thing that I do recall was nice about amazon was they offered ssh access to the machine.  I only get sftp access on godaddy, which can be a pain in the butt, and is very inflexible.

You might wonder why I even bothered switching from wordpress.com hosting, which was free.  I did that to have the flexibility to install my own non-wordpress.com sanctioned plugins.  For somebody who is crazy enough to blog a lot of mathematics, that was very worthwhile, as I’ve been able to run a customized version of the Mathjax-Latex plugin, which renders very nicely, and allows me to replicate many of the latex macros that I use.  That streamlines my latex-to-wordpress conversion considerably, and has saved me many many hours.  That saving is in comparison to the time that would have been required to blog the same mathematics with the default wordpress.com latex plugin.  Recently, I also installed the Mathematica Toolbox plugin, which looks like it will allow some fun interactivity, much like the original Wolfram CDF plugin had before it became useless and eventually was no longer supported (i.e. it only worked in 32-bit browsers.)  So, I don’t think that I’m going to go back to wordpress.com hosting, but it’s definitely worth some investigation of the options.