Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:48 on 15 July 2015

The day warmed up rapidly as I worked my way north from Wenatchee on US 97. By the time I was in Tonasket the temperature was between 95 and 100 (a bank thermometer said 112, but no way was that correct). A black cloud loomed over the highlands to the east, my destination for the day.

As I drove up into the highlands, I noticed winds, evidently downdrafts from the thunderstorm ahead, were blowing. I opened my window and it was about 70 degrees outside, a good 25 degrees cooler than it was just minutes ago. No more need for the air conditioner.

Soon the road became damp, then outright wet as I chased the rain retreating southwards (I only ever experienced light showers on this drive). More and more runoff was evident; the storm I had just missed was a real gully-washer. The temperature fell into the sixties.

Ground fog loomed ahead. I knew what that probably meant: hail on the ground, creating a temperature inversion close to the surface. Indeed, my hypothesis was soon verified. The temperature was now in the fifties and I had my headlights on as I crept through the fog in a white landscape. In July, in eastern Washington, at 2:30 in the afternoon.

The campground that was my destination for the day was in the heart of the hail zone. It was about three inches deep when I got there, and didn’t completely melt until the next day.

Published at 07:57 on 15 July 2015

I mean, even the IMF (hardly a radical-left source) is saying the austerity the Greek ruling party is pushing for is too much and Greece needs more debt relief. So much for the “radical left” Syriza party.

I guess there’s another lession about Establishment politics corrupting everything it touches here. Even “anti-Establishment” parties really can’t be trusted to accomplish much if the ever get power. The seats corrupt whomever happens to sit in them.

Published at 05:48 on 10 July 2015

Because the austerity is continuing, odds are the depression there will continue, and so will a lack of ability of Greece to repay. Though the beginning of the process of writing off those bad loans is encouraging, the can has merely been kicked a few more years down the road.

And I’m outta here to for a few days to do botanical surveys in the Okanogan Highlands. It’s a part of the state I haven’t seen in about twenty years.

Published at 16:22 on 8 July 2015

For my paid work, I maintain a program which runs for a long time (essentially, indefinitely) making millions of socket calls per day and doing extensive amounts of text parsing (it’s a web crawler).

What impresses me is how often problems in my code are not really problems in my code: they’re problems in some library that my code calls. One time it was even a problem in the system libraries; socket I/O would work fine for a day or two, then some time from two days to a week in, socket calls would simply and mysteriously hang. Another repeated source of headaches was the LXML library, which tended to cause me all sorts of issues with memory leaks and indefinite looping and recursion.

This is in the open source (Linux) world, so it underscores a general lack of thorough testing. I consider it unacceptable that a program which makes about 2 million socket calls per day will fail due to a library bug after about 10 million calls on average. One should be able to make an indefinite amount of system calls (absent system quotas and limits, of course).

But apparently I’m somewhat unusual in having high standards like that. LXML has a (totally undeserved, in my opinion) reputation for robustness, and that faulty system library made it into a major CentOS release.

Or maybe I’m being unreasonable in expecting that a program which runs for an hour without running into issues should run for a day, a week, or a month without being cut down by memory leaks in the code it calls. (I assume it was a slow memory or other resource leak in the socket call case; it presents itself as a classic symptom of such.)

Published at 09:27 on 2 July 2015

Some basic points:

1. Yes, there was irresponsible borrowing and spending on the part of past Greek governments, which ran up a huge deficit which caused the current crisis.
2. It takes two to tango: Irresponsible borrowing is not possible without irresponsible lending. Part of the responsibility of lending money is doing the due diligence necessary to minimize the chance of lending it to a party who won’t be able to pay it back.
3. Greeks has suffered greatly for their past government’s role in creating the current crisis. There’s an actual depression going on there. The unemployment rate is 25%, and public sector services like health care are collapsing.
4. The capitalist class is suffering very little for their role in creating the current crisis.
5. If the Euro didn’t exist, currency devaluation would have stopped this crisis from getting to the current point. There still would have been unpleasant repercussions from the significant devaluation of the drachma, but they would have been less severe and more equitably shared between the Greeks and the banks.
6. Therefore the existence the Eurozone is responsible for turning a merely unpleasant crisis into a severe one.
7. If Greece stays in the Eurozone, there will be further unpleasant consequences. Austerity and the associated austerity-created depression will continue.
8. If Greece exits the Eurozone it will also cause further unpleasant consequences. Greeks will lose a big chunk of their wealth as Euro assets get converted into devalued drachma ones. But, the devalued drachma will make Greek exports and vacations cheap for foreigners, which will stimulate the Greek economy and end the depression. The humiliating status quo of having Greece’s domestic policy dictated from abroad by the “troika” will end.

Therefore it’s best for Greece to exit the Eurozone. Ditto for Spain, for basically the same reasons.

The Eurozone was a mistake. It created a tightly unified currency without a tightly unified governance structure, which spanned a region with significant cultural and economic differences. Such a thing was pretty much fated to collapse. Let it shrink to the point where it only contains the most affluent and developed European countries. Or let it gradually disappear entirely; the choice is up to the Europeans.

As difficult as the process is, it’s better to let it begin now than to dig the hole deeper and make the inevitable more difficult in the future.

Published at 10:39 on 1 July 2015

So, the one that came with the home I bought is starting to make strange noises in the present heat wave. It’s obviously on its last legs.

It was made in 1993. I did some quick research and it’s easy to find utilities that are offering low-income households to replace for free perfectly good refrigerators made before the year 1999. They’re that inefficient compared to current models. So it’s obviously not worth throwing money at trying to repair the refrigerator I have.

At this point, I start researching efficiency. A super-efficient refrigerator used to mean buying a SunFrost of a VestFrost. But efficiency of the normal big US brands in the USA has increased so much in recent years that you basically gain nothing (except a far lighter wallet) from purchasing a specialty, energy-efficient brand these days.

If you get an EnergyStar model, particularly a smaller, no-frills fridge without energy-wasting features like a built-in icemaker or an in-door ice/water dispenser, you’ll do as well as one of the specialty brands. Plus you’ll have one with standard US dimensions that fits in your existing kitchen without having to remove overhead cabinets (refrigerators built for the European market tend to be taller). So that’s what I did.

The rub is that smaller, no-frills fridges are not carried in stock these days. Everyone wants big and feature-laden. Not me. Not only do those features cost money and waste energy, they also reduce reliability; they are just something more to break. (That’s particularly the case for automatic ice makers.)

When one gets to reviews from Consumer Reports, it’s basically the same story. The smallest model (other than super-tiny dorm-sized fridges) they reviewed was 18 cubic feet. The largest size I am willing to consider is about 15 cubic feet.

So I’ve been compelled to order one sight unseen, despite my worries about noise. The model I chose only had one review I could find complaining about noise, and the noise was caused by for a factory defect and went away when the unit was repaired under warranty. By contrast, several reviews mentioned quietness. Plus, it’s a Frigidaire, and Frigidaire is owned by Electrolux, a Swedish corporation, these days. European brands tend to be better on noise than US ones.

So I’m cautiously optimistic about the noise aspect. We shall see.

Published at 18:58 on 28 June 2015

So, I ordered my replacement KVM switch from Amazon well over a week ago. Being a cheapskate, I opted for the free shipping. Which, of course, was the slowest shipping option.

It ended up being as slow as possible. The surprise was how it ended up being so slow: the item didn’t even ship until Friday, and Amazon then paid extra for a Sunday delivery so that the arrival date could be honored. Seriously, now: WTF? Why not ship it using the slowest, cheapest possible service the day they get the order?

Since it shipped from one of their Seattle-area warehouses, that would mean I got it about as soon as if I had paid extra for expedited shipping. But so what? The worst-case arrival date is just that: a worst case. There’s nothing wrong with making a package come sooner than that, particularly if it costs Amazon less money in the first place.

Then a thought occurred to me: What they did is botch a process (shipping a package) until it became a crisis and then spent extra money on heroic measures to deal with the crisis. That’s exactly how Amazon handles managing their technical staff. Instead of having procedures guaranteed to ensure routine, smooth operation, they pay people extra (Amazon has a reputation for having generous salaries) to work long hours in endless crisis mode (something else Amazon has a reputation for).

So, while consistent, both their shipping and their employee management practices still mystify me.

I can’t find the old post at the moment, but I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about this (mis)management style before. Since then, I’ve come up with the term “techno-sadism” to label it by. It’s as if management believes that productivity is managed by making people work as hard as possible, which is done by ensuring that teams are in perpetual crisis mode.

How absurd it is becomes clear when you think of the manufacturing sector. How many manufacturers consider it a good thing to have routine operation of the assembly line to be disrupted regularly, to the point that heroic amounts of overtime and speed-ups are needed to compensate for the disruptions?

Published at 15:40 on 24 June 2015

I see Cliff Mass is now backpedaling from his earlier pooh-poohing about the abnormal warmth and low snow levels ever since last autumn implying ominous things about the coming fire season.

It’s just as well. His earlier dismissal was based on the assumption that fires would only really be a problem east of the Cascades. That’s indeed normally the case, but this is far from a normal year, and there have sometimes been truly epic forest fires on the west side.

And the first one of the season is already under way, in June, far earlier than such things normally prove an issue.

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.