Preparing for nuclear war - Launching my radiation monitoring station

Today is Remembrance Day. The day when we're meant to celebrate the end of the first world war and to remember those killed and maimed in that conflict. The message was meant to be that even at best war is a necessary evil, but it is always an evil and we need to exert ourselves to prevent it from happening again.

Subsequent history has shown how well that message has been taken on board, and today I celebrate this date by publicly launching my Radiation Monitoring Station in anticipation of a possible nuclear conflict.

You can view radiation readings from the station at this link

The Radiation Monitoring Station

The Abominable Snow Monster

This Halloween a seven foot tall Abominable Snow Monster visited.




His home in the Arctic had melted due to climate change and he was here searching for those responsible.


 I also carved a pumpkin.

Halloween Pumpkin 2017

Be kind to Bots - Part 2

When I wrote the first Be Kind to Bots post, I had initially intended to continue on with a discussion about Artificial Intelligence and whether a machine could be thought of as being conscious. I ended up not doing this because it wasn't immediately relevant to the point I was making. It would simply have diluted the message while making the post harder to read.

Source and they want me to link:
Technology image created by Kjpargeter - Freepik.com

The tl;dr version is that I believe:

a) Machines are (to a very small degree) conscious; in so far as that term can reasonably be defined.

b) There is no reason to believe that machines are not inherently capable of being made mentally equivalent to human beings.

c) However, the concept of robots rebelling against humanity as a consequence of having "gained consciousness" is not something we need fear.

The Delusion Of Gainful Employment

Since this will be a long post, I'll briefly outline the points that I'm trying to make:

1) Criticism of unemployed people on the basis of not contributing to society, or being in some way a burden, is unjustified and irrational; even if considered on a purely economic rationalist basis.

2) Many jobs are deliberately structured to be inefficient and unproductive and this is at least partly a consequence of how the system works.

3) Creating or maintaining a harmful industry in order to "create jobs" is not a legitimate thing to do as the level of employment is regulated by others factors.

4) An age of leisure, where people can live in comfort while working only short hours or none at all, will never happen with the current system, regardless of how far automation progresses. If fact, we have already had the technical capability to make this happen for a considerable time.

A Rant

There are a number of things I have intended to post about on this blog, but it seems that every time I get close to finishing something, I'm overtaken by events.

The main thrust of the blog was intended to be shining a light on things that one takes for granted and showing that there is more to the story than it may appear. Something to challenge people's assumptions, make them uncomfortable, and hopefully make them think.

Not to say that I have any profound wisdom to impart, or that I'm necessarily even right, but if I can at least make people think, that's surely a good thing.

The difficulty I face is that every day I see so much outright idiocy, and jaw-droppingly evil decisions being made, that I don't know where to start or what approach to use. Ideally, I would like to construct robust logical arguments, with carefully selected references, and illustrated with relevant examples, but this approach is just simply not valid when I'm faced with things that are plainly ludicrous to anyone capable of thinking.

What sort of logic works when people are not only claiming that 1 + 1 = 3, but are going around and beating up anyone who says otherwise?

What can you do other than point out that it's stupid?

Let's just look (in no particular order) at some of the things going on at the moment:

1) We have the ongoing Centrelink Robodebt lunacy. I would have thought that since this malicious and disastrous policy was so plainly exposed, the Coalition would at the very least have thrown some scapegoat (probably the unfortunate intern who coded the logic [and BTW, I take back my suggestion they used COBOL, more likely it was something like Brainfuck to save on using all those expensive letters and numbers]) under the bus. Instead, they're not only defending it, but seeking to expand it to aged pensions.

The whole Robodebt business is like the punch-line of a joke which begins "Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller and George Orwell walk into a bar...", and the fact that it's one of the lesser evils we face just shows how bad things have become.

2) We have the government proposing laws to weaken encryption so that it can gather even more confidential data on its citizens, at the very same time as their Medicare records were found to have been hacked. This on top of the still-unresolved Census debacle of last year.

It gets worse though; in the process of proudly announcing these proposed laws, our prime-minister claims that that the laws of Australia override the laws of mathematics.

For FUCK sake, this is literally a scene out of 1984.

3) And what the HELL is going on with the Carmichael Mine?

Here we have a corrupt foreign billionaire seeking to open one of the biggest coal mines in the world. This at a time when we've just had two consecutive massive coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, and at the same time as an ice shelf larger than Kangaroo Island has just broken off Antarctica.

The mine is not even economically viable; they're going to give Adani a billion dollar handout, not even collect royalties for decades and give them unlimited free water, at the expense of farmers.

The only justification given for this is "jobs". Now I want to write more about this in future since it's wrong on a number of levels, but for the moment I'll just say that the intention is to automate the mine to the max. We will probably have trucks driven by remote control from India, by people paid 50c/hr. There might be a bit over a thousand local jobs. If it were simply about jobs, then it's a ludicrously inefficient use of money; it's costing us nearly a million dollars per job, which is more than the people involved will ever earn back.

It's also amazing that a racist/xenophobic place like Australia isn't upset that Adani is an Indian. Seemingly, being a billionaire makes you an honorary White Man or something.

If it were just to Coalition supporting the mine, that would be understandable - they are after all irredeemably corrupt and evil (we're taking about people wearing hi-vis shirts in parliament; no longer even trying to hide their corrupt ties to the mining industry, but flaunting them) - but both the state and federal Labor Party are behind this. Why?

What are the Greens doing about this? Busy falling on their swords, one after another. First the hissy fit with the NSW branch, then Scott Ludlum and now Larissa Waters gone. They are the closest thing we have to a sensible political party and their very best people are abandoning their posts one after another, just at the time they're needed the most.

It's heart-breaking, and makes me not a little suspicious that something underhand is going on.

4) And let's not get started on fracking and Coal Seam Gas. The phrase "fugitive methane emissions" should in itself be enough for anyone with a brain to demand that it be banned outright.

5) Now we have the terrifying prospect of a massive new paramilitary police force; merging the incompetent ASIO, the politically motivated AFP, the Nazi thugs from Border Farce, and more, all under the control of the worst possible person to wield such power: my nemesis, the anti-Possum Dreaming; Peter Dutton.

What's going on? Even in banana republics, an aspiring dictator would have to be smart enough to sweet-talk the colonels into staging a coup d'etat. Dutton is far too stupid to do this, but somehow he just gets handed the power on a plate, while sitting there like a useless potato.

We can only hope that he's too incompetent to wield such power effectively, but this is a very thin straw to grasp at; like giving a toddler a machine-gun and hoping he's not a very good shot.

6) When considering ludicrous idiots getting handed extraordinary power, one's mind is naturally drawn to the clown that the United States has seen fit to elect to its highest office.

There is no excuse for this in a country which claims to be a democracy.

The guy is outright corrupt, he is ridiculously incompetent at everything he does and he has a particularly obnoxious personality. For FUCK sake, the guy is a fucking rapist, which should in itself be enough to disqualify him from leading any civilised country - and should surely disqualify him a hundred times over in a prudish country like the US where they pretty much crucified Bill Clinton for much less. Trump's personal "qualities" have been known for a long time. Here is a page from a Robert Crumb comic from 1989:

HUP No. 3, page 20 
[click for readable image]

So nearly thirty years ago he was widely considered to be "one of the most evil men alive".

No one can say they didn't known what he was like, and don't give me that rubbish about "The Russians Done It" either. Do you think that the vast array of US spy agencies, with almost unlimited money and power at their disposal, would allow a country, that had traditionally been their mortal enemy - a threat they had been specifically built to counter - to interfere with such a critical process as a presidential election and do nothing about it?

The only possible argument you could give for voting in such a person would be that you believed The System to be so irredeemably bad that the only alternative is to wreck it as quickly and thoroughly as possible. But this would be a desperately dangerous game to play. Who knows what the outcome would be: Handmaid's Tale territory? Nuclear war?

What is worse is that Trump is only a symptom of a much more fundamental problem. Like Tony Abbott, he is just the most prominent pustule on the face of a plague victim.  Getting rid of him (and don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen) might reduce the chance of some immediate disaster caused by extreme stupidity, but won't really fix anything.

7) And this disease has seemingly spread everywhere. The UK is in chaos with Brexit and a minority government dependent on religious extremists. The Middle East is an ongoing disaster area that's been getting steadily worse for the last two decades. Turkey is rapidly falling into dictatorship...

.   .   .

Anyway.

The point of this rant is not so much that everything is hopeless and we should all slash our wrists, or that we need to rise up in revolt at once, but more to give an excuse as to why I haven't been posting so much. Things keep happening which make me feel that what I'm writing is lame and irrelevant and I get discouraged.

I'll try to do better in future.

Bargain!

You can get some wonderful bargains if you shop around.

What is 2 x 7.95?

Here you see two bottles of wine on offer for ... twice the price of one bottle of wine.

Dispatches from the War on the Environment

Recently we have been treated to the spectacle of members of the government front bench joyfully fondling a lump of coal, with Deputy Prime Minster Barnaby Joyce displaying an expression of such manic lust that your first instinct is to check that there are no sharp objects within his reach.

But while big attacks on the environment like this grab our attention, a termite-like army of smaller attacks quietly undermine us.

Here are some that have recently come to my attention:

Battery Bullshit

At first glance one would think these were the "World's First Recycled Batteries". (In itself a strange claim since lead-acid batteries have been recycled since approximately forever.)



but read the fine print...

 

Energizer are presumably claiming a dubious World First in producing alkaline batteries with an incredible "4% of total weight" being made from recycled ingredients. Can you contain your excitement?

Bear in mind here that a large portion of the world's steel production is (and always was) from recycled steel, as it's much cheaper to melt down scrap steel than smelt it from ore. So it's possible the metal casing and end caps of the battery already contribute a substantial amount towards this 4%.

Toilet Paper Scandal Redux

On reading a recent article in Choice Magazine, it turns out that I was too generous in my post "The Great Toilet Paper Scandal"

I had assumed that the paper labelled as "made from 100% recycled paper" did contain at least contain 30% of recycled paper as per the FSC certification.

It turns out that even this not necessarily true; the 30% requirement actually applies to the entire production run (of an unstated but probably fairly large number of products) covered by the FSC certificate. It is actually possible that the paper itself contains no recycled paper, as long as other products in the same line contained proportionally more.

I know many people don't think this is important ("who gives a shit" is one of the extraordinarily witty comments I've heard), but this is a product that everyone uses every day and none of it can be recycled. There are 24M people in Australia, if a toilet roll lasts a person 6 days on average, that's 4M rolls being flushed daily. Which is a lot of trees.

Garbage Bag Garbage

It would be fair to assume that recycled plastic, like recycled paper, is of lower quality than the virgin article. Since a garbage bag is intentionally something that's going to be disposed of in landfill, it's surely something we want to make out of the lowest quality of recycled materials, or out of something that bio-degrades, or preferably both.

So how do the supermarkets respond to this challenge?



Coloured and Scented garbage bags of course!

Looking in one small suburban Coles, there were eight different types of these abominable things being sold.



Of course none were made from recycled materials and all were non-biodegradable. They were however apparently recyclable - which I'm sure is a useful property for something that is intended to be disposed of in landfill.

(Finally) A Reason to Fly QANTAS

Virgin, until now my second least favoured airline, are asking me to "Celebrate our new partnership with EnergyAustralia".

 

That name sounds familiar...

Apparently they're in the planet killing business:

"Energy Australia, responsible for the Yallourn coal-fired power station in Victoria, is the worst offender at number one with a 20.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent gases."

Congratulations, Virgin, you've regained the hotly contested place of my No. 1 least favoured airline by teaming up with Australia's equally hotly contested No.1 polluter.

Even Environmental Organisations Are At It

It is sad that even an organisation like the Australian Koala Foundation is willing to resort to Greenwash tactics. They are selling these signs.

And they write:

"Protect your trees for koalas!  Bright yellow to stand out, made of degradeable polypropylene - lasts for years but will eventually breakdown and return to the earth.  Attach to your tree with a small tack or nail, or tie it on."

"Degradable" is not the same as "biodegradable"! It just means the stuff breaks down into small pieces. Small particles of polypropylene are in fact a considerable environmental problem; they end up in the sea where they're ingested by plankton and enter the food-chain. Recently, cosmetics containing polypropylene micro-beads have been banned for this reason.

OK, these signs are few in number and will ultimately (probably) end up in landfill where they won't do much harm, but, really, an environmental organisation should know better than to be party to this sort of misinformation.

Also, it's not clear why the signs can't be recycled. Polypropylene (recycle code 5) is definitely recyclable.

Turnbull's Victories

Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has had some big successes since his party formed government.

I will consider here only those successes related to the IT field, since Turnbull is considered by some to be an IT genius who brought the Internet to Australia (he bought shares in the now-defunct Ozemail and sold them a few years later at a massive profit).

To the uninitiated, it might seem that his actual performance has been more like a three-train wreck; that is to say, not only a disaster, but something where you marvel at how it's physically possibly for it to have happened.

[Based on an illustration from here]

But looking at it from the point of view of the Coalition, it has been instead a series of mighty victories.

Victory 1: The NBN

[Based on a stock photo from here]

There is no question that the wrecking of the NBN was deliberate.

Turnbull's FTTN (Fibre-to-the-node) network is inferior to Labor's FTTP (Fibre-to-the-premises) system in every conceivable way. It costs just as much to install, but is orders of magnitude slower, it's not upgradable, it won't last as long, it's much less reliable and it has enormous ongoing operating costs. The technical community - despite an intrinsic right-wing bias - are uniformly against it. Have a look the Whirlpool forum to see what I mean; whenever a Coalition troll ventures in to spruik Turnbull's FTTN, they are immediately shot down with technical arguments by experts in the field.

Not only is this obvious now, but it was obvious right from the start.

Soon after gaining office in 2007, the ALP's original proposal for the NBN was actually something very much like Turnbull's FTTN network. At the time, the Coalition correctly called it out as useless. The term "Fraudband" was actually coined by Nationals Senator Fiona Nash to describe this network.

So the Coalition knew, nearly 10 years ago, that FTTN was a dud.

So how come they ended up in favour of it?

It seems that just before the 2010 election, opposition leader Tony Abbott had a luncheon with his master Rupert Murdoch, whose influence and profits were being threatened by expanding Internet usage.

The very next day Abbott rashly announced that he would destroy the NBN.

I think he was then quickly taken aside and given a stern talking to by his handler Peta Credlin ("Not like that you fool, the NBN is popular; you need to destroy it by stealth"). He therefore entrusted this unpopular task to his main rival, Malcolm Turnbull. I think he expected Turnbull to fail, or at least come out of it looking bad.

Turnbull, however, exerted his lying skills to their fullest. He first proposed a wireless system as an alternative to Labor's NBN, and when that was laughed down, he then went with FTTN. He had a plan fully costed and worked out, he said, and ready to go the moment they won government. It would be a third of the price of Labor's system and would be finished much sooner. Their 2013 pre-election promise was for everyone to be connected by 2016.

The technical community saw through these lies at once (although some took a bit longer), but the Coalition had all of the mainstream media on their side. All of the traditional media stood to lose out as the Internet expanded, so they made sure to stifle any objections to the plan.

Now we can see how things turned out. Nowhere near finished, abysmal speed and reliability, $20B over budget so far; all as predicted. Last time I checked, Australia had dropped to 60th in the world in Internet speed. An appalling thing for a first world country.

In other words, it all happened exactly as planned and is a big victory to the Coalition. Those responsible for getting the Coalition into power  -  the mainstream media, and in particular Rupert Murdoch - have their influence and profits preserved for a little longer. Meanwhile, the NBN has been crippled to the extent of becoming a burden to the taxpayer, so no one will complain when it's given away to Telstra, to further cement their monopoly position.

What is the betting we'll see some Coalition politicians offered well-paid positions on the Telstra board when they lose their seats next election?

Victory 2: The 2016 Census

In 2016 there was a sudden increase in the number of people named Winston Smith in Australia
[won't reveal the source of this one ;)]

The ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) gathers statistical data on the nation. Reliable data is critical for running the country. If you are distributing resources, you need to know what resources you have and who needs them. If you are implementing a policy, you need to have some feedback on whether it's achieving its goals.

However, since the Coalition came to power in 2013, they haven't had any use for objective data. The decisions they have made have been based on a mixture of ideology and implementing the requests of their corporate sponsors. The problem with having objective data available is that it might contradict these decisions, and in that case there's the need to go through the tiresome process of suppressing the data, censoring or discrediting anyone who publicises it and so on.

Of course it's theoretically possible that, by chance, objective data might support their decisions, but why risk it? Far better to just invent the data as you need to; it's quicker and cheaper to do and always gives the right answer.

Therefore, in 2014, the Coalition made crippling budget cuts to the ABS. These came on top of a previous set of crippling budget cuts by the previous Labor government (who I am by no means defending as they were probably inspired by the same motives).

Things got so dire that when Brian Pink retired as Chief Statistician in January of 2014, they couldn't find anyone to replace him and the department struggled on without a head for several months. But then things got worse: the Coalition appointed David Kalisch as Chief Statistician. Now I don't know for sure that Kalisch is any more than a useful idiot, but there is some reason to believe he's a coalition stooge.

Firstly, Kalisch isn't even a statistician. He is an economist, which these days means someone whose role is to think up reasons why money should taken from the poor and given to the rich. Therefore it would be fair enough to assume that he at least sides with the Coalition politically.

Of interest is that the fact that his appointment was rushed through, along with a number of other partisan appointments, just before Christmas in 2014 - which is a traditional time of year to hide shenanigans.

In February of 2015, he was already spin-doctoring unemployment figures in the government's favour.

Soon afterwards, he was delivering the line that the 2016 census should be scrapped. Given that the census is critically important to the role of the ABS this would seem a very strange thing to say - although not so strange if he was testing the waters on behalf of the coalition.

There was some backlash about this and he was forced to change his tune. Then some Machiavellian plotter (I would like to know who) came up with a quite ingenious strategy: They would announce that, unlike previous years, the ABS would be retaining people's names for data matching purposes.

On the face of it, this didn't make any sense; why expand the scope of the census immediately after you've claimed there wasn't enough money to even hold it at all. Therefore there was much speculation that the motives were entirely sinister. Hitler used the German census data to track down Jews. More recently, the United States used census data to track down Muslims. With those on the left already nervous (if not terrified) about abuses of power by the Coalition there was therefore considerable outcry about this.

This was all part of the plan.

Either no one would care very much and people would fill out their census forms dutifully, thus giving the Coalition a treasure trove of data to use against its enemies, or there would be mass disobedience, which would render the census useless. Either way they would win.

Then came the online census debacle.

Before this happened, I had an inkling that something wasn't quite right. I had heard some people saying the encryption on the ABS server wasn't up to scratch. It's never a good idea to take rumours like this at face value, so I checked myself and it turned out they were right. Specifically; I ran an SSL security check on the ABS server and found the encryption protocols available did not provide Forward Secrecy. Forward Secrecy is something you particularly want with something like a census and it's not difficult to set up.

At the time, even my own personal Possum TV server provided Forward Secrecy. [And I'm not trying to make myself out to be a security guru here; if you can set up a server, it's really not rocket science to configure the encryption right. Literally all I did was Google something like "best SSL configuration for Apache" and followed the instructions on the first (trustworthy) site I found.]

When it came to the actual night of the census, things went worse than even I had thought possible. I have looked at a submission by the ABS to the senate enquiry on this embarrassing business, and despite spinning everything in the ABS's favour, it was still obvious that they were totally unprepared and flew into a flailing panic when things started to go wrong.

After the event, Turnbull beat his chest talking about how he would bring those responsible to account. Still waiting on that. Maybe he should look in a mirror.

Victory 3: Centrelink "debt" recovery

Centrelink's sensitive and understanding robo-debt-collectors
[source]

Words fail me when it comes to describing what a mess they've made of this; it makes even the census debacle look good by comparison. It's like they sent the intern to a short course on whatever retarded programming language they use there, probably COBOL, and asked him write a data matching program, with no oversight, then rolled it out with no testing and met all complaints with the unanswerable "The computer is always right".

However, to say that this incredible debacle is an unintended consequence of cost-cutting is wrong, and to think that it is hurting the Coalition is also wrong. I believe this is all deliberate and the Coalition is benefiting from it.

The people who are upset about this are people who would never vote for the Coalition anyway.

The Coalition is more interested in winning back voters who have deserted it for lunatic Fascist parties like One Nation. The average One Nation voter most probably considers those on welfare to be scum who should be put against a wall and shot. The idea of welfare recipients being mistreated is music to their ears.

The Coalition want this to hurt people. They need it to be unfair, and be seen to be unfair. The more the progressives scream about how evil and stupid it is, the more the One Nationists like it and the more the Coalition knows they are doing the right thing (at least for a certain value of "right").

The Overall Strategy

There is a common theme to all of these victories. They all involve interfering with, and under-funding, key public services to the extent that they become incapable of performing their roles, ultimately leading to spectacular failures.

Quite apart from the benefits to the Coalition listed above, these victories all have some additional benefits in common:

Firstly, the Coalition gets seen to be prudent economic managers because they are "willing to make the tough decisions" to save money. It's true the NBN disaster is costing enormous amounts of extra money, but since the NBN was originally a Labor initiative this can be blamed on Labor.

Secondly, these sort of things get progressives really riled up, thus taking the focus off other extremely important problems - such as the Coalition's bitter and relentless war against the environment and the crimes against humanity being committed in the refugee death camps.

Thirdly - and I think this is the most important reason - it opens the way for privatisation. Noam Chomsky summed up this strategy in a 2011 speech:

"That's the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."

I'm not sure what their ultimate aim is; possibly some Libertarian paradise where the only government services remaining are the police and military. In which case, future generations will think Orwell's 1984 was a historical novel, and will marvel at how good people had it back then.

Let's hope the in-fighting between the many crazies in the Coalition (e.g. that dickhead Bernardi who somehow thinks there's a need for yet another reactionary fringe party: The "Australian Majority Party". Off to a good start there, idiot - even the name is a lie.) prevent them from achieving this.