Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:43 on 8 January 2017

It’s something I’ve been pondering ever since the results of the election last November. Not whether or not to be part of the resistance, of course: it’s a given that I will be part of it. But how (and more importantly how much, particularly initially) to be part of it is still an issue.

It’s a given that I shouldn’t simply cling to my class privilege and let that compromise my activism. In turn that means I must be willing to risk my home and my material possessions. When I decided to try giving being more settled one last try, it was always on the basis of giving it up and bailing if it didn’t work out. I never anticipated it not working out in this particular way, but the nature of the future is that you cannot always anticipate it. Unexpected turns of events happen.

But, as with many things, it’s not so simple. Let’s play with Establishment economics a bit; it’s still very relevant, considering we still have an Establishment economic system.

It’s possible Trump will start a trade war. Some talk as if its a certainty. I disagree; the capitalist class has a lot of influence in Washington, DC, and a trade war would be bad for business. But it’s definitely a possibility: the capitalist class has gambled — incorrectly — that it can control a fascist more than once, only to later regret its mistake.

If a trade war happens, stagflation is the likely result. That’s because free trade has been the modus operandi for three decades or so, with the result (as Trump keeps correctly pointing out) that US manufacturing jobs have been decimated. Most of those factories closed a decade or more ago. The machinery has been removed and shipped abroad and the buildings have fallen into ruins. It’s called the Rust Belt for a reason.

The result is that at present there simply is not enough domestic manufacturing capacity to supply anything near the domestic demand for manufactured items. If tariffs increase the cost of imported goods buy 25%, 33%, or more, it simply won’t be possible to dodge them by shifting to now-cheaper domestically-made goods. In fact, the few remaining domestic manufacturers will now earn super-profits, because the tariffs will raise the market value of their goods to the price of the tariffed imported ones.

Those super-profits will attract investment in expanding domestic manufacturing, of course, but such expansion cannot happen immediately. It takes time to plan and build a factory. Moreover, building a factory takes extensive amounts of manufactured goods to accomplish (and remember, the trade war has just increased the price of those).

So a trade war will cause a series of price shocks for manufactured goods to hit the economy, much like OPEC caused a series of price shocks for energy to hit the economy in the 1970’s. The result will be the same: stagflation.

That will cause many people to suffer, as prices increase and economic opportunity declines. Hanging on to my home will serve me as a hedge against inflation (and a very effective one, since it’s a leveraged purchase). That will leave me better equipped to financially back the resistance. Moreover, I have room to host a roommate, and can use that space to host a fellow member of the resistance at a below-market rent.

So the correct course to take is at this time unclear. Maybe there will be a trade war, maybe there won’t be. Even if there is, maybe the resistance will most need my help in ways other than financial and housing.

It’s also quite likely that Trump will be impeached and not serve out his full term. Many observers have already predicted this, including both Allan Lichtman and Michael Moore, both of whom correctly foresaw that a Trump win was either likely or possible. In that case, the struggle will be transformed into a far more mundane one of opposition to a more traditionally conservative administration.

All I can say is, at this stage, it is not the time to make any rash decisions with my life. I suspect the correct course to take will manifest itself within six to twelve months.

Published at 20:02 on 8 November 2016

She’s probably going to win Michigan. She’s trailing, but not by much and the votes in Wayne County (i.e. Detroit) are being counted slowly, there’s a lot of them, and Detroit is of course heavily Democratic.

In Wisconsin, she’s losing by a bigger margin, and Milwaukee County counted its votes faster than the norm for the state. I don’t see a way for her to make up her deficit there, and if she loses Wisconsin, she loses the election.

She could pull a rabbit out of her hat and make up for Wisconsin by winning Arizona, but odds strongly disfavor that on an evening where it’s become clear that the polls underestimated Trump’s strength.

I wrote long ago that the lesson in the Bush Regime getting away with lying its way into an Iraq war (and torture, and extrajudicial executions) was that the rule of law was now irrelevant in the United States, and the lesson in that was that leaders can ignore democratic norms and get away with it.

I wrote less long ago that Hillary’s tone deaf pandering to the Establishment wing of her party could end up proving very costly to her.

Looks like both predictions have just been proven all too correct. Though I will admit that going into this evening I expected Hillary to win despite them.

Personally, this really sucks for me, since the capitalist class doesn’t like Trump, either. That means they will probably have self-fulfilling expectations that will cause a recession. And I’m currently between jobs.

Published at 15:07 on 19 October 2016

Just by chance I met him as he disembarked from the ferry, and he shared the news with me. The short story he gave (it had to be short, as the ferry loaded soon thereafter) is that hs was demoted, saw that as completely unacceptable, and walked out the door for good.

My educated guess is that he was demoted for failing to achieve the impossible: bringing some of the least-maintainable code I have ever seen up to snuff. The only way to fix its problems is a complete rewrite, which is something that may in fact not be possible given the resources available to the firm in question. At any rate, it’s something that firm is unwilling to seriously entertain. The latter two facts were some of the things that was playing through my mind when deciding it was time to part ways myself.

The upshot of this news is that things would have gotten significantly worse had I decided to stick it out (he’s definitely one of the best people I’ve reported to, odds are the next guy wouldn’t be so good, plus morale and continuity would have suffered). I’d probably either be quitting myself of soon be asked to leave under that alternate scenario. In turn that would have put me in pretty much the same scenario I am now, but without the benefits of being able to make that late-season trip to Wyoming.

It all goes to show that honesty (with oneself as well as others) is almost always the best policy. Buying into a lie that there was a future in the work I was doing there would have simply made me worse off.

Published at 19:15 on 14 October 2016

More precisely, back from a nearly 2-week road trip that went as far east as western Wyoming. It involved seeing a part of the country I had always wanted to see, revisiting the place I finished up my college degree, helping a friend collect environmental sensors from the field, a quick swing through Yellowstone National Park, seeing a significant chunk of Montana for the first time, and visiting some of my companion’s friends in rural Idaho.

I had always wanted to see the Malheur basin ever since the area caught my eye on highway maps as a teen. Alas, it’s been a dry year, and the Federal government is still (understandably) jittery that right-wing extremists will try re-occupying the refuge headquarters, which meant that:

• The area was nowhere near as lush as I imagined it; water levels were sufficiently low that many of the wetlands had dried out, and
• It was impossible to see Malheur Lake itself, because the only road providing access to it passes through the headquarters compound, which is still very much off-limits.

Before we got there, I was studying the DeLorme Atlas of Oregon while my companion drove and noticed a place called Glass Butte that our route would soon skirt. I surmised (correctly) that the name alluded to obsidian deposits, so an impromptu side-trip was scheduled in the hopes that it might prove to be the place where one can find the rare red-and-black obsidian I’ve seen in collections from Oregon (as opposed to the more common plain black kind). Indeed it was.

I did then visit a real oasis in the desert: the Cache Valley of northern Utah and southern Idaho. It’s an area I’m very familiar with, having attended Utah State University for two years. It was a nice surprise that the valley was still very much rural and had not filled in with houses. The extensive wetlands in its bottom were, in contrast to the mostly dried-out ones at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, very lush and green.

The college campus had of course changed a lot since I had visited, but I chose to focus on what had not changed. The administration has done a good job of preserving the integrity of the more historical parts of campus, focusing on putting the new buildings where large parking lots used to be, so many campus views were precisely as I had remembered them.

It’s little-known except by locals, but that region also has some of the most spectacular fall colors in all of North America: in the surrounding mountains, the red and oranges of maples and the clear gold of the aspens contrast with the sombre green of firs. Nowhere else I can think of has all three elements (northern New England comes close, but doesn’t have the large numbers of aspens). Alas, it’s a short display that comes early, and true to form a storm and cold spell the week before had already left the trees mostly bare and blasted, despite it being the first week of October.

Then it was on to western Wyoming to collect the data loggers. That’s a place I visited a few times on day trips in my college years, so I got to see what Kemmerer (not much different) and Jackson (lots of new construction) looked like after about thirty years. That involved learning the hard way that my partner will call just about anything a “pretty good road,” even a rough track only suitable for four-wheel drive vehicles (my truck is only two-wheel drive and not suited for such routes). No lasting harm was done, and he did readily agree to cover the resulting towing bill. The weather was cold with snow flurries.

Then a short trip through Yellowstone. We spent a day watching geysers and saw about ten different ones erupt. They were all frequent performers. I can’t really be disappointed that it fell short of what I saw thirty years ago. That involved a simultaneous display of four major geysers (including Giantess, which erupts only irregularly) jetting hundreds of feet into the air.

I wish I had studied the maps more on the following day. Had I known we were going to pass through Butte, I would have scheduled a detour to some labor history sites, including the grave of Frank Little. My efforts at trying to do something impromptu were frustrated by it being both a Monday and a holiday; both the visitor information center and the labor history museum were closed.

We camped just east of Lolo Pass and that night were treated to the heaviest snowfall of the trip. That may sound dramatic, but even that just amounted to a light dusting. There was actually more snow at our campsite than there was at the summit of the pass! Highway 12 west of the pass has to be one of the loneliest highways in the lower 48 states; we drove for hours through forested mountains before we finally reached the small town of Lowell. Traffic was very light, maybe one vehicle every five minutes.

After spending the night with my travel partner’s friends near Riggins, we resumed driving west. It was a relief to see the sign welcoming us back to Washington as we crossed the bridge from Lewiston to Clarkston, even though it was the opposite side of the state and many more hours of driving lay ahead. It was nice to see things get progressively greener and greener with each passing mile from The Dalles to Cascade Locks.

My travel partner lives in Portland, where I had planned to spend the night. After hearing about the series of storms due to hit (high winds, heavy rain) I changed those plans and decided to rest a few hours then press on and try to beat the worst of the weather. I’ve been unpacking and tidying up since and after spending over a day doing so, it was time to type in this post.

It was fun, but it was also time to end when it did.

Published at 18:14 on 17 September 2016

New insights which should have happened to me long ago (given how obvious they are) keep happening to me. Take yesterday, for example. There was a solidarity rally for the Standing Rock Sioux and their struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in downtown Seattle then which I happened to attend.

One insight that’s not new to me is that ecological consciousness can be a struggle to adopt on a widespread scale in the United States because we are such a new nation. We don’t have a long history of inhabiting the land here. 200 years is a long time and 500 years is an extremely long time. Yet even 500 years isn’t very long at all when one takes geological or ecological time scales into account. Americans simply lack anything approaching the long-term view that one needs to adopt a truly sustainable society.

Of course that’s only really true for the majority that is descended from primarily European settlers, which is the delayed insight that I had. Native Americans have been living here for thousands of years. While they don’t have a long history (history is a written record, the vast majority of tribes were pre-literate, and the few that were literate had virtually their entire corpus deliberately destroyed), written records are not the only records. There are oral records, something which every people has.<

Yes, oral records are imperfect, but so are written ones; the latter are typically distorted by servitude to power and authority (freedom of expression is a relatively new invention, and even in open societies there is a lot of self-censorship and acquiescence to power). Moreover, the orally-transmitted knowledge of how to live and survive on the land tends to be accurate, because it is continually subjected to a process of testing; if such knowledge becomes faulty, the outcome will involve hardship at the least.

The process of social contact with Europeans was extremely traumatic for most tribes, and they are only now starting to bounce back from it. Many tribes have had success winning back ignored treaty rights in recent decades, then came the economic success of tribal gaming (no small thing; it’s been a source of funds free of the paternalistic and bureaucratic encumbrance of Federal sources), and now in the NoDAPL struggle we finally see a degree of Native American unity really starting to develop; tribes that have historically (and prehistorically) been enemies have joined forces in this struggle.

The latter is an amazing and encouraging accomplishment, one that I think offers all of us, Native American and not, some real hope. We need the voices of those who have lived with this land the longest.

Published at 07:59 on 15 September 2016

On schedule, my current (soon to be most recent) stint of employment is all over as of today. It’s a relief that it’s happening on schedule: I’m already starting to make plans for the next month or so, and a delay in the start of any free time would complicate them.

Published at 18:50 on 23 August 2016

Last spring, I had serious doubts my current job was a good match that would (or should) last. Some changes were made, it got better, and I persevered.

Recently, however, it’s been increasingly evident that’s not enough. I’m not really culturally a good match for where I am, plus the work, while better than it was, is still not as good a match as it could be. Plus I have some real doubts about the long-term viability of the place; it would not surprise me much if things suddenly collapsed, and in a way that tainted all current employees with a stench of failure.

Yesterday, in fact, I had been planning my exit during commute hours. I was going to break the news to them next month that I wanted to depart some time in the fall. Instead, they broke the news to me today. Nothing’s happening very soon, but it looks like my ideal target date of sometime in the first week of October will be my last day. There’s a final project I want to wrap up; once that’s in place I’ll be able to depart on good terms, having made a positive contribution during my tenure.

I don’t have anything lined up to replace it. First, the nature of my current job means I really haven’t had the time to do a good job search (I’ve done some, but not much). Second, I really feel I need some time to decompress. The risk is pretty low in my field, so I’m not that worried.

Even if the worst comes to past, my whole exercise of buying a house and trying to settle down was something of an experiment that I wasn’t sure would work, so even that would not be a huge shock. It will be nice if it works, but it won’t be the end of the world if it doesn’t.

Actually, the “worst” won’t come to pass; the real worst would involve me lying and saying I’d be happy to do the old work that bored me to tears so I could stick it out there (thereby throwing more of my life away doing something I absolutely hate).

Published at 10:17 on 14 August 2016

Not much going on. Parents are visiting, as are both of my sisters, which means this weekend is the first time all five of us have been in the same place in a long time.

As is typical, my parents made a heat wave materialize when they came. They must think temperatures in the 80s and 90s are normal here, based on their experiences during visits.

Published at 08:22 on 3 August 2016

In a recent Guardian article about changing (in the direction of less of it) sexual behavior, we find the following:

“The new sexual revolution has apparently left behind a larger segment of the generation than first thought.”

“Left behind?” Really?

Wasn’t the Sexual Revolution about liberating people from socially repressive restrictions that interfered with them following their desires? Haven’t such restrictions continued to vanish in the past decade or so? Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. LGBTQ people can now serve openly in the military. And so on.

Just because some individuals choose to abstain from sexual activity is no evidence of their being repressed. Maybe those abstainers simply don’t want to be sexually active? If the Sexual Revolution isn’t about their right to remain celibate by choice, then it’s a revolution I want absolutely no part of. You don’t sexually liberate people by replacing an obligation to not have sex with an obligation to have it.

This cuts close to home for me because I’m less sexually driven than the norm, and the (by my standards) hypersexualized youth culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s and then the (again by my standards) hypersexualized gay male subculture always left me feeling out in the cold.

It took a long time for me to disentangle my internalized homophobia from my desire to not be steamrolled into conforming to a culture of casual sex that is simply not the sort of sex I desire. It’s why I identify as queer but not as a gay man; I fit in with the gay male subculture about as little as I fit in with the straight male one. Neither are geared to who I really am.

I’ve found the Millennials’ attitudes about sexual orientation to be much more in line with what I view as true liberation, in fact. They are much more likely to see sexual orientation as a multi-dimensional thing, not a simplistic one-dimensional gay/straight/bi axis.

So color me skeptical about the premise that less sexual activity automatically implies more sexual repression. It sounds like precisely the sort of thing an aging Baby Boomer who is clueless about what liberation really means would come up with.

Published at 07:59 on 13 July 2016

Those who most need help finding employment are those new in the market for a particular line of work, either as a result of recently graduating from school or a mid-life career change. But recruiters are hired at the behest of* the employer, and candidates with no experience are common as dirt, meaning employers need no special help in finding same. The candidates employers need help finding are those with specific, specialized experience.

But recruiters lack that experience, too, which seriously limits their ability to judge and match candidates with positions. Moreover, the positions being recruited for tend to pay better than the job of recruiting for them, so this state of affairs is inevitable. Thus if you’re an experienced candidate, recruiters are still of little or no help; they’ll just pester you with false lead after false lead.

I speak from experience here, having at one time been a freshly-minted CS graduate and now being a senior-level programmer. It went from recruiters being uninterested in me to me being uninterested in the (inevitably mismatched) opportuinities recruiters pestered me about.

Given that, is it any surprise that the low road dominates in the recruiting industry? Why seek people with any knowledge at all to recruit in a field? Just hire the cheapest workers in India you can find, even if they can barely speak coherent English.† They’re fated to do a bad job anyhow, so why even try? After all, doing a good job isn’t the point. Your business model is based on both candidate and employer making an unwise decision (i.e. to use you), not on providing value to either.

This leaves out the recruiters hired by busy employers whose staffing departments are themselves understaffed, of course. But when sleaze dominates an industry, the odds aren’t good. So if I see a recruiting agency’s name on a job listing, I pass. And when one cold calls me and leaves a voice mail, I just delete the message.

* Note I did not write “paid by”. That is because they are not. To claim otherwise is to state what I call the Recruiter Lie. Does anyone think employers have an unlimited orchard of money trees to harvest for paying wages and salaries? Of course not! They budget those costs, and the cost for paying recruiters ultimately comes out of the same pot for paying wages and salaries. One will come at the expense of the other.

† Which, given they are the cheapest, will be the case; competent English speakers will seek more honorable and better-paying work.