Blackcap Blog

Published at 19:38 on 23 June 2015

When I noticed this, at first I thought “WTF?” — it’s obviously a preposterous assertion, as anyone with much experience in the US West (where private lands have been clearcut, strip mined, and overgrazed routinely) can see. In my own state, it’s typically obvious when one moves from private to public timber lands: the public lands — while often still abused — are abused less harshly, typically much less so. Political pressure on the agencies that manage said lands has caused restrictions on the worst logging practices. Private corporations, in contrast, exist to maximize shareholder profits, not to cater to the public’s political preferences.

Moreover, the bit about “patience” is bogus. The chief factor in determining ability to invest in any business is personal wealth, which in a class society is not distributed equally. So the private lands will be owned disproportionately by a wealthy elite, who in many cases won’t even live anywhere near the resource lands themselves. The incentive will exist to do precisely the sort of things the Pacific Lumber Company did in redwood country when they were bought out by corporate raiders: liquidate assets and maximimize short-term profits. The investors won’t care about what’s left in their wake; they’ll have taken their profits and moved on to their next profit-maximizing venture.

I was away from the article over the weekend, and came up with two theses as to how anyone could come up with such an assertion in the first place:

1. Inexperience, coupled with ideological bias. If one is biased in favor of capitalism, and one has little or no actual personal experience in a natural resources economy (say, because one works in some big East Coast city), then one would have both the motive to make such a proposition and be largely shielded from any contrary information as to how preposterous one’s assertion actually is.
2. Kleptocracy. In a kleptocratic state, it’s actually possible private ownership could come out on top. The backroom deals giving access to exploit public land might be less certain than a title deed giving one possession of the resource lands in perpetuity, so the motive would exist to extract as much as possible as soon as possible from the public lands. This would be the case if the state is kleptocratic yet relatively stable; in an unstable kleptocratic situation the value of land titles themselves would be questionable, so the incentive would be to plunder as quickly as possible regardless of ownership. Also note that in a kleptocracy, the government is much less subject to public pressure than in a less corrupt society, eliminating the chief mechanism by which public lands get steered toward wiser management.

And lo, when I checked today, I see the article cited was authored in Russia by two Russian economists. Mystery solved.

Published at 23:00 on 19 June 2015

This is interesting. The normal state of affairs, of course, is for even nominally “radical leftist” governments to cave to the demands of the capitalist class. But the Greek government — so far, at least — has refused to simply cave.

At this point it’s brinksmanship. I would expect at least a few more “temporary” loans to be made before any final outcome happens. And the “final” outcome might not be so final; it may well just kick the can six months down the road. A real final outcome may well be years off.

Published at 11:20 on 17 June 2015

Well, scratch what I just said earlier about Synergy being a viable stopgap solution. It’s not even that.

It’s simply beyond awful. Not only is it slow and laggy, but keystrokes and mouse clicks randomly vanish and fail to get delivered at all. Programs start acting in bizarre and unpredictable ways: windows fail to show up when the keyboard shortcut that should make them appear is typed, cursors mysteriously vanish and reappear, the normal behavior of the finder when windows are clicked on becomes erratic, and so on.

I’m better off manually switching cables than subjecting myself to the user interface horrors of Synergy.

Published at 10:19 on 17 June 2015

Don’t let the techno-cheerleaders for products like Synergy fool you. KVM switches still are very much relevant.

For openers, they let you switch a monitor as well as a keyboard and a mouse. That’s a big plus for me. One of my computers is a laptop with a limited amount of on-screen real estate. It’s a huge plus to be able to add my desktop’s screen to it.

Second, there’s the hidden catch of network-based keyboard and mouse sharing: lag. Even though slight, it’s quite noticeable, and very annoying. The keyboard lag in particular has an adverse impact on my typing speed.

So it looks like Synergy’s place is as a stopgap solution until the replacement for my now-dead KVM switch arrives.

Oh, and if you’re interested in downloading Synergy, it pays to go to the link above and not the one that shows up at the top of web searches. That latter site tries to zing you for the privilege of downloading a version that’s more recent than a year old (and such versions are clunky and difficult to configure, at least on a Mac). You’re much better off using the recommended version from the site I linked.

Published at 20:29 on 11 June 2015

Things like this.

I’ve noticed the hypocrisy before, and how “family values” seems only defined in a rightward direction by politicians. Even Democrats typically concede that issue to the other side. So it’s refreshing to see a candidate talk about what ought to be obvious.

Mind you, the chances of Sanders actually winning are slim to none. And if he wins, Congress will still be controlled by the same Establishment politicians (of both parties) that it currently is, and his agenda will basically go nowhere.

There’s also the missing piece of mass radical pressure from below, something that has accomplished other periods when reformist politics “worked”. Because it never really worked by itself — reformism only works when the likely alternative for the ruling class is to lose everything.

No, the advantages of the Sanders candidacy are precisely moments like these, where the overall political dialogue is brought back in a more rational direction.

Published at 12:49 on 10 June 2015

Despite how Tacoma has had a successful, municipally-owned cable TV and Internet utility for years, Seattle’s idea on doing anything vaguely similar is a big no-can-do. It’s basically the same attitude that made Seattle about forty years late to the game when it comes to building a rail mass transit system.

Of course, any time a billionaire wants pet projects for that entire neighborhood which he owns, or a taxpayer-funded sports stadium for his team, the City of Seattle sits ready and eager to bark on command. Same if it’s a freeway project, even if it uses a risky, unproven technology and it’s a road which would normally be the state government’s responsibility, anyhow.

Because, well, priorities. Duh.

This is another one of those days where I get to feel smug and satisfied about living outside the Seattle City Limits.

Published at 09:22 on 20 May 2015

There’s not much out there on how to do it, and what’s there is either flat-out incorrect (fails to produce a binary that’s actually useful for anything, because it can’t directly display data on the Mac) or needlessly painful (involves things like MacPorts which end up needlessly bloating your computer by building most of the open source Linux universe first).

1. Download and install the latest version of AquaTerm, available here.
2. Download the most recent production version of the source for Gnuplot, available here.
3. Type the following commands to build and install Gnuplot:

   ./configure --with-readline=builtin --with-aquaterm
   make
   sudo make install
   

Note the two options to configure. The built-in readline library in many MacOS releases is buggy and makes things crash, and the configure script is too stupid to automatically realize that Aqua Term is present. The hard part about building Gnuplot on the Mac is building a binary that’s actually useful; the configure script will by default merrily create a configuration which will crash on loading or cannot actually directly display anything on the Mac screen.

At least, this worked for me. I’d be interested in hearing whether or not it works for you.

Published at 08:28 on 11 May 2015

Much worse, in fact.

The reason is not nuclear contamination, but chemical contamination. Specifically, PCB’s. Yes, they are banned. But the ban started only in 1979. Indian Point dates back to the early 1960s. So it’s entirely possible that the transformer that caught fire contained PCB’s. One that caught fire there in 2011 did, in fact.

If so, there is now a major environmental contamination event in progress. Worryingly, there is no mention in the Establishment media that the transformer in question did not contain PCB’s. That makes me suspect that news that it did is being hushed up.

It’s the only reason I can think of for not bringing up the subject of PCB’s in the news about this event. If it was known that the transformer was in fact PCB free, it would be in the interest of plant’s operator (and its regulators) to make this fact well-known. Omitting such information only becomes in the Establishment’s interest if PCB’s are in fact present.

It’s much like the subject of asbestos (known to be widely-used at the time the World Trade Center twin towers were constructed) was conspicuously absent from news accounts at the time the 9/11 attacks happened.

No, this doesn’t prove anything, but it certainly raises valid suspicions.

Published at 07:35 on 3 May 2015

NPR just aired a piece on Saudi Arabia which goes beyond the territory of mere brown-nosing and might more properly be described as brown-tounging. It once again replicates the tradition of the Establishment media approving of tyranny so long as the tyranny happens to be pro-US-empire.

It was a discussion of the succession to the Saudi throne. First, they spoke in approving tones of how the first in line to the throne has extensive experience in the Ministry of the Interior. Imagine if Cuba announced such a successor; stories would be chock full of the ominous implications such a move held for the future of more openness in society (and rightly so). But not here. Instead, there’s praise for the Ministry of the Interior’s work on fighting terrorism.

And then they discuss how “popular” the second-in-line to the throne is, citing as evidence how billboards have popped up all over Riyadh with his image on them. Well, whoop-de-doo. There’s billboards all over Pyongyang with Kim Jong-Un’s image on them. Does this in any way prove he’s immensely popular with those whom he rules?

Keep all this in mind if Hillary Clinton wins the election and starts to amp up efforts to undermine the tottering government in Venezuela, and NPR fawns in approval because the government there is “authoritarian”. Which, of course, it is, but it is also far less repressive than the absolute monarchy they aired an approving story of today.

Published at 21:08 on 6 April 2015

It took a day’s exploring to find Kitsap Forest not long after moving to the west side of the Sound. The location is not publicized, because it’s a sensitive area and hasn’t been developed with visitors in mind, but it is public land and visitors are allowed.

The past winter I while studying my public lands quadrangle map of the area, I realized it probably would be possible to get there from the opposite direction that I found. So last February, I set out to do just that.

The results were less successful than my attempt from the other direction. I spent most of a day wandering around old logging roads, turning back after one dead end after another. Eventually I found the most promising old logging road of the day, but couldn’t fully investigate it because doing so would have meant completing my hike in darkness (and I had no light with me). So I made a note to return someday.

Well “someday” ended up being yesterday. This time I brought my knobby-tired bike, so I didn’t have to walk so much. Unfortunately, the promising old road gets very overgrown quite quickly, and it peters out before it reaches any interesting areas. Technically, it does reach the preserve, but at that point it’s not the old-growth forest yet; it’s just a buffer area of regrowing clear cuts.

After a lot of pretty intense bushwhacking, I realized that a) it was going to be very hard for me to follow my exact trail back, and b) if my GPS batteries died, I’d be pretty screwed (i.e. lost). And I still was in old clear cut territory. I had been chasing large trees, but they were all the occasional older tree the loggers had left behind to provide seeds to revegetate the area.

So I turned around; better safe than sorry. I did indeed promptly lose my trail, but it was of little matter because it was easy to home in on the waypoint I had entered at the end of the old road.

After downloading my GPS track and putting it in both a GIS database I have of Kitsap County and in Google Maps, it became clear that I had actually been only about 150 feet from the start of the old growth where I turned around. So if I had persevered for ten minutes or so more, I would have found what I sought.

But it is of little matter. Even with that knowledge, it’s so much more difficult coming from that direction. The first way I found has old roads going straight to the old growth. It’s a bit of a confusing maze, and I only found the correct way after eliminating virtually all other possibilities, but now that I know it, it’s a snap to get there. No bushwhacking involved.

So I don’t think I’ll be revisiting the more challenging approach any time soon.