Blackcap Blog

Published at 20:25 on 12 February 2022

Before I continue, a word of explanation is in order. I almost did not choose this title, because: a) 90% of Canadian truckers are fully vaccinated, and only a tiny fraction of them are illegally occupying downtowns and border crossings, and b) most currently participating in the occupations do not appear to be truckers.

Yet the protests did start as a truckers’ convoy, before they morphed into something else. That begs the question asked by the title above.

You see, if I were to pick a group of working class people adversely affected by the pandemic, it would have to be workers employed in the hospitality, travel, and live entertainment industries. Those industries suffered almost total shutdowns.

One working class group that it would definitely not be would be truckers. Trucking is a vital service; as truckers are fond of pointing out, whatever you buy in a store, at some point it travelled by truck. While restaurants, hotels, airlines, and live music venues were shut down, the trucks kept rolling.

In fact, if you type the phrase “shortage of truck drivers” into your favourite search engine, you will quickly discover any number of articles in reputable sources reporting just that. Basically, if you want to drive a truck, and you have the necessary training, and you are not banned for some reason related to safety, you have work. And your wages are going up, because that is how the law of supply and demand plays out during a labour shortage.

Truck drivers are, in short, about the last people one would rationally expect to be upset about hardship-inducing pandemic restrictions. Yet it was a truckers’ convoy, and not protests of upset restaurant, hotel, or airline workers, that inspired the occupations.

And, of course, the vaccinated and responsible majority of truck drivers are having no problem finding work and earning a living. It is the small and vocal minority, insisting (paraphrasing Isaac Asimov) that their ignorance be regarded as good as others’ knowledge, who are making all the noise.

But, again, why?

I have a theory and it relates to loners. Driving a truck is a great job for a loner because you will be alone behind the wheel most of the time. Now, not all loners are antisocial, but the vast majority of antisocial people are loners (they basically have to be, it gets them away from those other people they have such a disregard for).

So by simple virtue of the profession being a magnet for loners, being a truck driver is also a magnet for the antisocial, and the proportion of antisocial people amongst truck drivers can reasonably be expected to be higher than in society as a whole. This being the case, it is not a big surprise that within this industry a critical mass of selfish people formed. And they had tools at their disposal (their trucks) with which to use to express their contempt for the concept of being asked to consider the well-being of others.

Now we get into the mythology of the Trumpist right. (Despite being Canadians, it is completely fair to call them Trumpists. There has been no shortage of MAGA hats and Trump campaign flags at the occupations. But I digress.) They vocally proclaim themselves to be the majority, to be “true” Americans (or, in this case, Canadians), as if those with values different from theirs do not even deserve to be considered full citizens in their own country. No amount of data to the contrary will shake them of this belief.

Related to this, they believe themselves to be salt-of-the-earth, humble, regular, working-class type people, or at least that their movement is comprised of mainly such people. (This is also incorrect. The much-reported factoid of Trump voters tending to be less affluent is mostly an artifact of Trump voters being more rural, and rural incomes and property values trailing urban ones. Within rural communities, the affluent support Trump at higher rates than the non-affluent. Again I digress.)

But if facts were relevant to the beliefs of Trumpers, they wouldn’t believe most of what they do. Their myth requires them to be humble, genuine, “real” types, so that is what they are to themselves. A movement that got its start from a subset of truckers is therefore proclaimed to be a truckers’ movement, because believing it to be so is politically convenient.

It’s not because those poor truckers are having their livelihoods ruined by all those uncaring elites and city-dwellers. That is a right-wing myth, nothing more.

Published at 23:28 on 11 February 2022

If I were Trudeau, I would right now probably not be doing all that much differently, when it comes to publicly visible actions: simply making increasingly stern warnings that the occupations must end ASAP. Given that the worst occupations are in Ontario, I would probably try to get Doug Ford to issue a similar message. (Interestingly, Ford did exactly that today. I would not be surprised to later learn there was coordination behind the scenes.)

The one thing different I would do is I would not openly rule out the use of military force. Mind you, I would still try very hard to avoid it, but publicly I would be much more in “all options are open” mode. Something like “We would like very much to avoid using the military to end the occupations, but the occupations must end and we are willing to use whatever means are necessary to this end.”

The goal here is to instill a sense of uncertainty and fear amongst the occupiers, in order to encourage them to disperse. And definitely let them disperse, don’t make arrests as they walk away. Punishing people for doing what you want is not the way to get more of them to do it. Arrests can always be made and charges pressed later, after the occupation has dispersed.

Aside from that, though, openly I wouldn’t be doing much. Behind the scenes it would be a different story entirely. Plans would be being made and put into place to break the occupations up. The planning would be kept secret, with as little signs as possible of how concrete plans actually were, or what the time frame was. It is key to have the element of surprise.

So far as the time of day, sometime between midnight and dawn would be ideal. That is when most participants would be asleep and thus at their most vulnerable. Then come in aggressively but at the same time using non-lethal means only.

So far as the trucks go, they are not so easy to remove as those who drove them, but once the latter individuals have been removed, the trucks can be dealt with. Any motor vehicle can be hotwired, particularly if those doing the hotwiring are themselves the authorities and therefore do not have any reason to fear getting apprehended while doing so. Hotwiring is in fact not even necessary; give a manufacturer a VIN and you can often get a set of keys made. At that point, there are plenty of trucks in the military, and therefore plenty of military members trained in driving trucks. Drive them away.

So far as the time of week, early Monday morning would seem ideal. It would keep the story out of the weekend news for the longest. And I mean this Monday: the occupations have already gone on unacceptably long, and the occupiers are getting both physically and psychologically more entrenched with every passing day. Waiting another week would invite tragedy.

This would have to be a coordinated effort. Both the Ottawa and the Ambassador Bridge occupations would have to be broken up simultaneously. If they are not, the one not broken up first will have to be broken up later without so much benefit of surprise.

In other words, don’t be surprised if Monday morning dawns a big news day.

Published at 07:50 on 10 February 2022

So far, your chief strategy in confronting the spreading, increasingly disruptive, and increasingly illegal protests has been to show weakness. It’s not working. Well, it’s not working to limit the scope and impact of the demonstrations.

Nobody wants this to go to the point of violence, but the window is rapidly closing to resolve this via nonviolent means. The time for various levels of government to get serious about cooperating is now. We need to see things like business licenses getting pulled for those who disrupt trade and traffic, and cumulative fines starting to really add up (with special measures for expedited and aggressive collection). If we don’t, things will get to the point where such actions basically cease to matter anymore. Then the only options will be violence or total capitulation.

Make no mistake, they have a right to demonstrate, no matter how wrong I believe them to be. That’s a basic freedom in any open society. What they don’t have the right to do is to unilaterally call the shots for everyone else.

Let’s do a little math here. The most recent Canadian federal election was under a year ago. The general politics of the protests are right up the alley of People’s Party, so let’s assume that all their voters are behind them. That’s about 5% of the electorate. The Conservatives polled 34%, but not all of them back the protests. Just listen to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a pretty conservative Conservative, to prove that point. But let’s be generous and assume ⅔ of them do. That’s ⅔ of 34% or 23%. Add the earlier 5% to that and you have 28%.

Where is the “freedom” in letting 28% call the shots and telling the other 72% (who support COVID-19 policies distinctly more organized and interventionist than the 28%) to go lump it? That is what the policy of continuing to show nothing but weakness will get us.

Published at 22:05 on 9 February 2022

Or maybe I should say, “The Joys (Not!) of SonarQube As Implemented by My Employer.”

SonarQube is a code-analysis system. It analyzes computer code and enforces coding standards. If it doesn’t pass the sanity checks, builds don’t properly complete.

I have nothing in general against coding standards, and I fully admit that the code I write is not 100% perfect. I also have nothing in general against tools to help uncover questionable coding practices.

The problem is the automatic mandatory implementation, with it being like pulling wisdom teeth from an elephant to get any exemptions from.

Consider my recent use of a random number generator. It was in a bit of performance-sensitive code, and the random numbers were not being used for any cryptological or other security-sensitive purpose. The default (crap quality radomizer) Java ThreadLocalRandom class was good enough, plus it had lots of convenience methods for doing things like generating a floating point number within an arbitrary range. So of course I used it.

Nuh-uh, no can do! SonarQube says that’s a security violation. I start inquiring about what can be done to get an exemption, and learn that it’s such a pain I’m better off recoding. So I do that, blowing a half day in the process (I have to implement a bunch of convenience routines missing from the SecureRandom class).

It’s made worse by SonarQube itself being of generally shoddy quality. Its metric for there being enough test coverage so unreliable that a commit can pass muster on a branch, yet get failed when merged to master, even when the result of the latter merge is exactly the same as what was on the branch. That’s right: you have no idea if a merge to master will succeed or fail. Every merge might well prompt last-minute frenetic test-writing.

So I decide to write a boatload more tests, just to err on the side of high test coverage and avoid triggering the wrath of SonarQube. Everything works just fine on the branch, so I merge.

The build then promptly fails, because get this, the new code has insufficient test coverage.

That’s right, SonarQube is refusing to accept my test classes… because they themselves don’t have tests! Can you say “Catch-22” boys and girls?

Again, this wouldn’t be so bad (it would be more humorous than anything), if SonarQube were implemented in an advisory capacity instead of a mandatory one.

Actually, it’s still humorous. If they want to piss away their money on stupid policies that waste productivity, fine. I just make note of all the unnecessary busywork their policies cause and report as necessary when queried about why something takes so long. Their loss.

Published at 21:32 on 1 February 2022

What is it about those who write labels on bottles of household chemicals, anyhow? The recipes are always for ridiculous quantities. Honestly, how many people need 5 liters (or litres, if you prefer the Canadian/UK spelling) of cleaning solution?

So you just end up using the ratio, and that’s the point of this post. Quick, how many milliliters in a liter? So 60 ml per 1 l is a 6:100 or 1:16 ratio. And the other ratio is in the 1:20 to 1:40 range. Wow, that was simple, wasn’t it?

Isn’t that much better than cups per quart (quick, how many cups per quart?) or whatever it would be in the USA? Aren’t all those 10’s, 100’s, and 1000’s easier to deal with than a hodgepodge of 2’s, 3’s, 4’s, and 16’s?

I sure think so.

Published at 21:16 on 1 February 2022

It really does not look like I am about to get canned soon. They are starting to at least somewhat realize how impractical the whole onboarding process has been.

Published at 17:52 on 24 January 2022

The story is still in the news, in fact the situation seems to be escalating, so let’s look into it some more.

First, that it is escalating should be no surprise. As I wrote before, multiple factors favor Putin ordering the troops under his command to invade.

What could be done to stop him? Ultimately, not much. Putin is not stupid. To reiterate, knows that NATO won’t consider it worth their soldiers’ lives to contest the issue militarily. Putin is a dictator and the leaders of most NATO nations are freely elected. Putin does not have to answer to citizens nearly so much; this also gives him significantly more freedom to escalate.

Probably the best thing NATO can do is drive home that they are really willing to make Putin pay (via measures that nonetheless fall short of military ones) if he invades, even if that means some sacrifices on the part of the NATO nations. The question is how much sacrificing the European NATO nations are willing to make. Many of them are addicted to Russian natural gas; confronting Putin could well cause an energy embargo with all the attendant economic harm that does. The threats must be plausible; Putin will call the bluff for ones obviously unlikely to be followed through on.

Even for plausible ones, he may call NATO’s bluff. In that case, it is imperative to follow through. So it’s critical to get things right in terms of the sacrifices the NATO nations are willing to make. See how tricky this all is? It is why I believe Putin will go in.

All that said, if sanctions are tolerable enough on the NATO side to be followed through with, yet harsh enough to the Putin regime, they may well prompt a recalculation on Putin’s part as to the wisdom of aggression.(And note that the invasion would still happen. There would just be a recalculation on Putin’s part (and maybe, just maybe, the consequences would drive Putin from power). But all that, as they say, is a pretty big if.

Published at 08:31 on 20 January 2022

Let’s interrupt all this smug mocking of how stupid righties can be for a moment. Because yes, they were stupid for doing that. Big deal, they were basically selected for their stupidity. They are the rubes who fell for Trump’s rhetoric to show up at the Capitol. Then they do something else stupid as well. Big surprise.

What I am interested in is the big picture. Which party has more overall average stupidity? Anyone can pick the game of cherry-picking a particularly stupid subset of the other side’s adherents to make fun of, so exercises like the one engaged in by the linked article really do not say much.

So, which party, in the aggregate, is stupider?

• Which party is smart enough to figure out how to prevail (and prevail repeatedly) despite being at a minority when it comes to the popular vote? Which party repeatedly has its lunch eaten, despite having that popular majority?
• Which party talked about “build back better” and “bipartisanship” as it took office in the wake of a coup attempt, as if nothing fundamentally had changed?
• Which party blew a once-in-a-lifetime political opportunity posed by widespread public shock at a coup attempt conveniently aligning with a new president’s honeymoon period, by using that opportunity to aggressively push for measures to defend the basic democratic political order?
• While the above two things were happening, which party quietly continued consolidating its advantages, via legislation and redistricting at the state and local levels?
• Which party sets the political narrative? Which party willingly lets the other party set the political narrative, by answering the other’s allegations, thus participating in the other party’s narrative, as opposed to countering with narrative-setting of its own?

So spare me the self-satisfied smugness about how some cherry-picked members of the other party (generally, those without much power in it) are stupid, Democrats. If you want to see real political stupidity, look in the mirror.

Published at 09:25 on 19 January 2022

I mean, sure, he runs a disgusting right-wing authoritarian regime. I don’t like Putin either. Check.

That formality dispensed with, why wouldn’t Putin threaten Ukraine? It’s a far weaker power, so Russia can get away with it.

Russia is unlikely to invade all of Ukraine, for the simple matter that doing so would be taking a bite of something way too big to chew. There would be resistance. Russia might well be able to eventually prevail over it, but it would take a major effort. It would not be a convenient little war.

So Russia is more likely to whittle off yet another chunk of Ukraine by force. Russia already forcibly annexed Crimea, and got away with it. And Russia would likely get away with whittling off another chunk.

NATO members are likely to be upset about it, but the level of upset will not rise to the level where anyone is willing to put the lives of their own troops on the line. This is particularly the case when one realizes how much of a has-been power NATO is.

This is because NATO relies primarily on the USA, and the USA is a seriously compromised nation with an extremely powerful domestic fascist movement with pro-Russia sympathies, a movement poised to almost certainly take power soon. And you better believe that latter fact is entering Putin’s calculus, too.

Published at 19:01 on 14 January 2022

I have a performance review coming up at work next month.

To say I am pessimistic would be putting it mildly.

The root cause of the matter is that never have been hired at a position where I was expected to learn more, yet at the same time never have I been hired where management does less in the way of technical onboarding. I’ve basically been left to fend for myself while being expected to decipher terse assignments relayed in cryptic shop-specific jargon. And it tends to be like pulling teeth to get anyone to meet with me and explain what it is I am expected to do. Then, when I fail to deliver on a time frame commensurate with extensive in-company experience (surprise, surprise), the sense of disappointment is almost palpable.

Every other place I’ve been hired, there was much more onboarding for much less new position-specific knowledge. I’m at a loss to understand just what they expected to happen, given the general parameters of the situation they created for me. My best current theory is one of conflicting objectives: higher-ups wanting growth while my immediate manager is satisfied with the existing size and composition of his team. Result is an immediate manager under pressure to hire even though he does not want to. Solution is to hire someone but then engineer failure.

Now the question is what, if anything, I can do or say to prevent the coming performance review from being the corporate analogue of a Stalinist show trial with a pre-decided outcome.

That, and what this all will do for my current status in Canada under a temporary work permit.