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.

[/rant]

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.

Classical mechanics notes on Amazon in paperback (but don’t buy a copy!)

October 13, 2020 math and physics play ,

I have a fairly monstrous set of classical mechanics notes that I accumulated when I was learning all about the theory of Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, and Noether’s theorem.

I also audited a few of the classes from the 2012 session of PHY354H1S, Advanced Classical Mechanics, taught by Prof. Erich Poppitz, at the University of Toronto, and have some notes and problems from those classes in this set of notes.

These notes are not self contained.  In particular, there is fairly heavy use of geometric algebra in many of the problems, with assumptions that the reader is proficient with that algebra.

These notes (436 pages, 6″x9″) are available in the following formats:

  • for free in PDF format (colour),
  • on Amazon in paperback (black and white),
  • as latex sources.

I’ve pressed the publish button on kindle-direct-publishing so that I could get a paper copy of these notes for myself.  An extremely vicious edit is required.  Until I do that editing (assuming I do), the price is set to the absolute minimum no commission price that Amazon let’s me offer (i.e. printing cost plus profit for Amazon.)  I wouldn’t actually recommend that anybody buy this in it’s current form — download the pdf if you are interested.

I’m actually toying with the idea of rewriting these notes from scratch, creating an “Advanced Classical Mechanics, with Geometric Algebra” book out of some of the ideas.  I could flush out many of the details that I explored originally, but add some actual structure and coherence to this mess of write-once-read-none junk.  Tying things to a geometric algebra theme would be the value add proposition that could distinguish things from all the other classical mechanics books in the universe.

That said, this idea would be a very tough book project (for me), as I’d have to understand all the material enough to present it in a coherent fashion.  I’d want to include and explore both Euclidean and relativistic Lagrangians, which would make the material tougher, but comprehensive.  I don’t like the idea of assuming the reader is familiar with special relativity, but the thought of me having to include a self contained introduction to that topic that isn’t complete garbage is pretty intimidating.  Especially if you consider that I’d also want to introduce STA, and help the reader understand the connections between all that material.  There’s a lot of ideas that would all have to come together!

Replacing some wall sconces. Electrical surprise!

October 3, 2020 Uncategorized , , ,

We had some wall sconces in the second floor hallway.  One of them sputtered and we didn’t trust it.  Sofia found some nice replacements a few weeks ago, and today was installation day.

I was rather surprised when I took off the old light and found a wiring hairball.  Here’s a picture after taking off (all but one of) the merretts:

I’d never seen anything like this, not even at my last house, where the previous owner (Mr. C) never found a ground wire that he didn’t like hanging loose.  You can’t really see into the back of the box in that picture, but all the wires are loose (no wiring clips securing the wires to the back of the box). none of the sheathing has been removed, and all the connections were jammed into a single tight cubic inch in an impossibly tangled mess.  The grounds were all tied, but Mr C would have been proud, as none of them were connected to the ground screws at the back of the box.  You can see things a bit better after a bit of unraveling:

Of these wires, I hadn’t yet identified which was switch, which went to the second sconce, and which was the supply.  I’m not sure about other locales, but the Ontario electrical handbook specifies that white is hot at the switch, so looking at this, I think the guess should be that the switch wire is the top left (i.e. when the switch is on, we have supply through the white, to and through the switch, and back through the black where it will power the load.)  That didn’t make sense since the switch is on the right down about a foot.  The only logical wire for the switch would be that bottom one.  I decoupled everything so that I could test the lines (carefully) with the power back on, warning everybody in the house to keep clear:

My tester showed that the top left was the supply, leaving the top right and the left as candidates for the switch and the other sconce.  A couple more trips to the breaker box, and some temporary connections verified what was what, and I was ready to start reconnecting things.  First step was stripping the sheathing off the wires.   I couldn’t use a standard stripping tool, since everything was already in the box, but had to carefully do that with a knife:

I’d never seen anybody not take the sheathing off, which was the major source of the hairball wiring.  This wire was either 12 gauge or just really old, but it was very stiff and hard to handle.  With all the sheathing still on, whoever wired this up originally must have had a hell of a job.  I got the switch’s white connected up to the supply black, and put in some clamps at the back of the box and secured the grounds all physically to the box.

I left one ground long to potentially connect to the new light, but it turned out that the ground wire on the new light was super long, so I ended up trimming that one back and direct connecting it to the back off the box with all the rest, instead of using a merrett for the ground.

Special bonus.

It seemed prudent to open up the switch too, and found that the ghost of Mr C was haunting that too.  Check out the nice floating ground lurking in the switch:

This single pole switch doesn’t have a ground screw, but it just seems really sloppy not to connect that ground to the back of the box.  This wire was also not clamped, so I did that too, and put in a brand new switch while I was at it.

 

EDIT: Before:

After: