Progressive reporting preliminary figures exceeding $1B for losses in Florida due to Helene and Milton.

The $200 million estimate includes what are known as “allocated loss adjustment expenses,” which can include such things as adjuster costs and legal fees.

Yeah, the part where they invoke the "heads I win, tails you lose" rule.

Anyway, I'm no actuary or insurance expert, but that sounds like a lot to me. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's couch change to Progressive.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 14:59 Tuesday, 15 October 2024

Passing the time, as one does, I moved the Sierpinski program over to the Floppy Emu so I could run it on the Apple IIc.

On the IIc, it runs just as it does on Virtual ][, but there's still something visceral about running it on real hardware. I can recall what it felt like forty-some years ago, seeing hi-res graphics being drawn on a 13" Hitachi color TV that I'd bought to use as a monitor.

It felt like, "the future."

I guess what it feels like now is, nostalgia.

But I can definitely recall that feeling of excitement. Nothing excites me about technology anymore. Well, maybe SpaceX and the Super Heavy landing at its launch tower.

Maybe semaglutide. Heh. But nothing about computers. Or tablets.

Or phones.

Anyway, figured I'd go ahead and run it under Beagle Compiler. Whoa! Takes about 7s compiled, about 8x faster, which means it'd run in about 2.5s on the IIe with the SpeedDemon. That was kind of exciting.

There's a little binary called FAST.HPLOT on the compiler disk that probably substitutes an ampersand-routine (a way of calling a machine language routine from BASIC) for the built-in HPLOT command. I'll have to have a look at that.

Anyway, it's a beautiful day today. The kind of day that makes people think of Florida as paradise. Makes you forget about it taking everything you have from you and leaving you homeless. Makes you forget about the cruelty of the state government here.

At least we got that goin' for us.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 14:26 Tuesday, 15 October 2024

The Yellowstone card does not play well with the McT SpeedDemon accelerator card, even setting its slot to "normal" speed.

It remains somewhat possible that essentially upgrading the IIe to the "enhanced" version may resolve the issue. But the Yellowstone card doesn't require a 65c02, so that isn't the incompatibility.

BMOW points out that there is an incompatibility with an unenhanced IIe and the Yellowstone insofar as the "unenhanced" IIe will not boot from the Yellowstone card automatically. You can issue a keyboard command "PR#n" (where n is the slot number), and it'll boot. The ROM update might be my last hope, if it is compatible at all.

I've got a ROMxe coming, so I'll be able to switch between the "unenhanced" ROM and the "enhanced" ROM.

As I had the IIe configured today, I had the Disk II controller in slot 7, the Yellowstone in Slot 5 and the SpeedDemon in Slot 4. At first, I couldn't boot from the 5.25" floppy, until I recalled I hadn't set the dip switch for Slot 7 to "normal." After I did that it booted right up. Scared me at first, because the drive would spin with a strange sound, and I'd get an "Unable to load ProDOS" error message. I didn't associate that with an accelerator incompatibility at first. How was it able to realize it was a ProDOS disk?

Anyway, once I set the dip switch correctly, it would boot to the ProDOS splash screen, then crash into the monitor. (I didn't pay attention to the memory location. I may do that if the 65c02 and enhanced ROMs don't work.)

Removing the SpeedDemon, I'd get a normal boot from the 5.25" drive, and it did automatically recognize the Floppy Emu with a 32MB hard drive image mounted in Slot 5. So, while it may not boot unenhanced, without a keyboard command, it's otherwise recognized automatically by ProDOS.

I think having the Yellowstone's smartport capability is more useful than having a faster cpu. But the faster cpu makes things more fun. With the smartport, I should be able to boot into Pascal 1.3 from a 3.5" floppy smartport image, and run a script to move everything to the RAM disk and run the OS from there. (The 800K 3.5" floppy is large enough to contain all the files you need to run UCSD Pascal on an Apple II.)

That makes doing anything in Pascal a lot quicker and more convenient, especially compared to using a pair of 5.25" floppies.

But the ideal case would be able to do that with the accelerator. The great advantage of Applesoft as an interpreter in ROM is that you get immediate feedback from any changes in your program. With Pascal, there's moving back and forth between the editor and the compiler. It's almost transparent with the RAM disk and the accelerator; less so without it. But still far better than relying on floppies.

It is something of a small disappointment, but I can't say enough about how valuable it is as a way to occupy my time.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:07 Tuesday, 15 October 2024

I've received the new Floppy Emu, so I'm probably going to spend some time with the IIe today, and not devote a lot of time to the Sierpinski program.

But if you want to play along, here's the program as it is with the "RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB IN 190" error. You can copy the text and paste it into this Javascript Applesoft emulator, which doesn't seem to mind the POKE command to get full-screen Hi-Res Page 1 graphics.

It runs a hell of a lot faster than on real hardware.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:35 Tuesday, 15 October 2024

A risk index from the feds. Testing to see if the link will produce the report. This is for St Johns County, Florida.

Here's Schuyler County, New York, where our "summer home" is.

(Obviously, it worked.)

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:23 Tuesday, 15 October 2024

I was wondering when or if we'd hear about how these Florida phosphate mines fared. I'm not sure we'll really know, but it doesn't seem near the scale of the Piney Point disaster, which is still in the process of being closed.

That's to say nothing of all the septic tanks that failed. Again, Florida is flat, so as those septic tanks fill with floodwaters, and it flows out into the leach fields, it just spreads out over the landscape. Some of it eventually flows into the waterways.

Awesome.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:56 Tuesday, 15 October 2024

The audio on this report drops out briefly in a couple of places, but it's illustrative of something important.

If you live in an area that may be prone to flooding (or any disaster), you need to educate yourself on what you will do in the event of a disaster.

This is something the state of Florida and the federal government could do much more, ahead of this, to help fight disinformation. We're going to be dealing with much more of this in the decades to come, and we need to get much better at it, and fast.

At the state level, I'm sure it's not congruent with efforts to "promote growth," but making sure people understand how to respond in a disaster, the process, what resources are available, how fast they're available, and what they will have to do on their own while they're waiting, is important.

Watching some of the videos in North Carolina, there are dozens of volunteer organizations trying to help, and no coordination among them. We need to get better at this. Local emergency management officials should lean forward and ask for lessons learned. Plan for how to establish communications networks between volunteer organizations. Let them know how to become part of those networks.

And what is the long-term recovery process? Who oversees that? Implied in this video is that people who were flooded may be eligible for FEMA grants to elevate their homes. How does that work? I'm certain it's a much slower process than the one speaker seems to think it is.

And Florida is just incredibly vulnerable. If you can leave, you probably should. I want to, but I'm only 49% of the vote. Otherwise, be ready to be just like these folks if you don't plan for becoming a victim of a natural disaster.

We have at least one advantage now, someplace to go if we get flooded out here. That's a privilege, for sure, and it has brought me at least some peace of mind. Yeah, it's not ideal in terms of managing things here. I was watching mail get delivered to flooded out, uninhabited homes on the gulf coast, because the Post Office can't just store it all, and the mail carriers feel bad about it. So we need to plan to get a mail forwarding request in as soon as the Post Office resumes operations.

Maybe everyone needs to have a mail forwarding record on file that gets activated in a disaster declaration?

We need to figure this out.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:23 Tuesday, 15 October 2024

Made some progress today. I had left out a line, which didn't seem to matter for single curves. I could get multiple curves plotted, but the 2nd and 3rd and 4th order curves weren't aligning correctly with the first order. The fourth order curve was only about two thirds the size of the preceding three plots. It'll plot up to the 5th order, but it gets so busy, you have to plot it by itself. And that takes two and a half minutes.

Since the Apple II hi-res screen coordinates go from 0 to 191 in the y-axis, division by 4 was going to give me a decimal value that would be ignored. I made the quotient an integer value, but I forgot to round up.

H=INT((H0/4)+.5)

Once I did that, everything aligned properly.

I still have a "RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB ERROR," but I'm taking a break.

I turned on the virtual printer and added a TRACE command and got three pages of line numbers being executed. (16 #s per line of print, 66 lines per page!) I tried following the "push" and "pop" on the stack array, but it started to make me go cross-eyed. Anyway, it's working. I may do some debugging later.

Do I understand the recursion? Not really, but I'll play with it some more. There are some other curves I want to try.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 15:10 Monday, 14 October 2024

Here's another unique feature of Florida that makes intense rainfall events more destructive: It's flat.

You don't get the kind of extreme, swift-water flash flooding that happens in mountainous regions where water rushes downhill. Instead, it slowly drains through the watershed. If the soils are saturated, it very slowly drains, eventually reaching the rivers and streams, which rise as they, themselves, move slowly, ultimately making their way to the sea.

Florida. A flooding paradise.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:35 Monday, 14 October 2024

Ron DeSantis is an ambitious man. He's not unintelligent, but his ambition has made him a fool and he does a disservice not only to himself and his reputation, but to all the people of Florida he supposedly "serves."

Discounting the role of climate change in Florida's repetitive extreme weather disasters, DeSantis recently said:

“I just think people should put this in perspective,” DeSantis said at Thursday’s news conference. “They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it’s something — there’s nothing new under the sun.”

He's a fool. There is something new under the sun. THIS CLIMATE.

This climate, the one we inhabit today, has never existed before in the history of this planet. This amount of atmospheric CO2, with these polar caps, with this landscape has never existed before in this history of this planet.

Should I repeat that again?

Yes, there have been hurricanes before.

But there have never before been hurricanes that formed in these climatic conditions.

Because this climate has never existed before in the history of this planet.

I wish people could get this through their thick skulls.

Especially intelligent people who should be able to understand this.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:26 Monday, 14 October 2024

I'm glad that this type of coverage is becoming, at least temporarily, more prevalent. All of this was foreseeable. But developers and the counties that benefit from the property taxes only saw the money, not the risk. We're over-developed, and it's probably uninsurable at this point.

Our premiums are still affordable, for us. We're nowhere near that $11K "average." If it ever does get that high, I think Mitzi would be more amenable to leaving. I don't know what's going to happen, but we're going to find out over the next 12 months, as insurance companies pull out of the market, go under, raise premiums and fight the state and policy-holders. This is a slow-moving catastrophe.

One thing the report doesn't mention is that many people can't afford to leave. They're tied to jobs, mortgages, and schools. They won't be able to sell their homes because they'll be uninsurable, so that keeps them stuck here.

This is a "cascading climate catastrophe," which I used to tweet about often when I was on Twitter. Where one domino tips over hundreds more.

What's going to happen to the housing market in Florida when mortgage companies won't lend because insurance is unavailable or unaffordable? What happens to home prices? What happens to that "wealth"?

It was all utterly predictable.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:12 Monday, 14 October 2024

Hadn't done one of these in a while. Went out to look for the comet, but suspect my horizon is too cluttered, or sky is too bright. But it was clear and there was the moon.

Switched over from fidget spinner to doing some hi-res graphics stuff in Virtual ][, at least until I can figure out what's going on, then I'll play with it on the IIc. I need to look at an old issue of Creative Computing magazine, which is easier to do here at the iMac.

It's from the July 1984 issue, The Sierpinski Curve: A Lesson in Debugging and Conversion, by David H. Ahl. I'd link to it, but Archive.org is still offline after being hacked. If you google Sierpinski, you get a lot of stuff about the triangle, not so much about the curve. The article includes a nice capsule summary of the curve. Wikipedia does too.

In the article, Ahl is trying to convert a version of a program written in BASIC for the NEC 8801 computer, a Japanese computer, to some other variant of BASIC. Ahl wasn't very clear on which version of BASIC he was converting from and to, but both seemed ultimately to be some variant of Microsoft BASIC, which Applesoft is as well.

Apart from just being kind of interesting to watch as it is drawn onto the screen (which takes ~2m40s for the 5th order curve, at stock Apple II speed), it also deals with the concept of recursion. I have some notional understanding of the concept, but since I seldom do any real programming, as a practical technique, it remains kind of opaque to me. From the article:

This program, incidentally, takes advantage of the feature in MSX Basic and MBasic that permits a subroutine to call itself. This is known as recursion. It is often said that languages such as Basic and Fortran do not permit recursion. This is simply not true. While not all versions of Basic permit a subroutine to call itself, there are other ways of achieving recursion, but that is a subject for another day.

There are several subroutines in this program that call themselves.

The program that Ahl was converting would overlay curves of different orders, so you could have the 2nd order curve appear over the 1st order curve. It makes for a somewhat more interesting display. So far, my version works in drawing a single curve of orders 1 through 5, but it gets buggy when it begins to overlay two curves, so that's what I'm trying to figure out.

Ahl implemented a stack array to keep track of, well, something. I was confused because he didn't dimension (BASIC "DIM" statement) the stack array first. Looking at the Applesoft Reference Manual, apparently Microsoft let you get away with this and it assigns memory for 11 subscripts (elements 0 to 10) automatically. I'm not getting a BAD SUBSCRIPT ERROR, so I don't think that's the problem.

Anyway, it's something to distract me from the election. I cannot fathom how this thing can supposedly be this close. On the one hand, I'm somewhat encouraged by Harris's consistent, albeit slim, lead. I'm also encouraged by the evident lack of enthusiasm for Trump exhibited by my neighbors.

Four years ago, my street, and many if not most of the streets in this development, were positively festooned with American flags. This was code for Trump supporters, since the HOA doesn't permit partisan flags of any kind. Nothing like that today.

We were also having regular weekly "Trump flotillas" and boat parades. None of that has happened. Yet.

I don't see a lot of golf carts or pickup trucks driving around flying enormous Trump flags.

I'm rather certain that most of those folks will vote for Trump again; but they're not proud of it anymore. They don't want to own it.

Which is of absolutely no comfort.

"Plausible deniability."

It's almost more chilling.

And it's not just "rural Americans" who support this monster. These are wealthy suburbanites who embrace this fascist.

I'm eager to cast my mail-in ballot, so I can go online and verify that it has been counted. Then, if I have a stroke between now and election day, at least I'll have done what little I can to stop this catastrophe.

In the mean time, I'm going to distract myself by playing with old computers.

I need to order a 16-pin ribbon cable to plug into the Apple IIe in the garage. I want to bring those signals out to a breadboard to play with. This program is nothing but subroutines. Maybe add a line in four of the subroutines to ping one of the four annunciators available at that connector to light a different colored LED for each subroutine and see which one is lit most?

Well, mostly just because blinky lights are cool.

Something to look at...

Instead of staring into the abyss.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:53 Monday, 14 October 2024

Rather than continuing to harp on the ongoing, unstoppable, slow-motion train wreck that is Florida, I thought I'd write about my return to the Naval Academy for the first time in 45 years.

It was the 45th reunion of the class of '79, and I'd never previously attended any of them. My experience at Annapolis was, shall we say, complicated. To make a long story short, I went there full of hope for success and achievement, quickly settled for "survival."

When I went to the academy, the model was "attritional." I'd never heard it expressed that way before, until I attended the Superintendent's brief to the class. But, yeah, it was definitely "attritional." Much like the Navy's "up or out" career path.

Well, they have a new model today. I don't recall specifically what she called it, but it's more like "recruit and retain." About 10% of the people who apply to Annapolis are admitted. I was surprised it was that much, but I guess that after almost a generation of a "Global War on Terror," a military career isn't as appealing as it once was. Vietnam wasn't that long, though it was far bloodier.

Anyway, the idea is to select the best candidates, and then help them succeed. That seems like a much smarter approach than the one I endured.

Not all of my classmates were as impressed. "Coddled" was a word that was mentioned.

But it's not "coddling" someone to help them succeed. Midshipmen must still accommodate themselves to military discipline, the physical demands, and the academic ones. Some can do this more readily than others. It's not that those "others" are unsuited for service in the military, it's just that they may need a little help getting started.

It was a pleasant surprise to learn how much affection I still have for my company-mates. The campus was almost unrecognizable to me, it's changed so much over the decades. Bancroft Hall, "Mother B," remained much as I remembered her, and the chapel. I wasn't much of a church-goer at the Academy. Plebe Summer I went every Sunday, because it got me out of Bancroft Hall, where danger lurked around every "squared corner." Once academic year came around, Sunday was a day to sleep in.

Whatever success I enjoyed in my Navy career was, in many respects, in spite of my experience at Annapolis, rather than because of it. But nearly all of the important lessons I've learned in my life, I learned in the navy, and that began at Annapolis.

That took nearly a lifetime, but it was worth it.

In case you're just tuning in, here's the short version:

Big picture? Life is meaningless.

If you're looking for meaning in your life, you're wasting your time. You won't find it. You must make it. We bring meaning to life.

The greatest opportunity to make meaning is through service to others.

Everything we have, all this stuff, all our awards, our titles our achievements can be taken from us in heartbeat. One day, life is pretty sweet. The next day, you're dragging all your stuff to the curb and looking for a new place to live. See: Current events.

The past is out of reach, the future is unknown. All we have are moments to live. One at time.

All we have are moments to live, and each other. Because we're all in this together, and none of us is getting out of here alive.

Power? It's an illusion. The only power that exists is the power to choose. It's a very weak power. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces of the universe. (Five, if you count irony. As I do.) Yet it holds the world together.

Our cognitive abilities? Our capacity for rational thought? We flatter ourselves. They're far more limited than we suppose. Most of what we do is habituated, unconscious. Stimulus and response.

The space where power exists is between stimulus and response, where you can choose.

That faculty that affords that space is attention. It's a resource, like time. And just as finite. Use it wisely. Pay attention to your what you're giving your attention to. Don't waste it. (Though we mostly do. But small investments yield huge dividends.)

The "ties that bind?" Faith.

Love.

Love is faith in action. Honor is the act of "keeping faith." Honor is love in action.

"Love your neighbor," is an act of service. It makes meaning. Makes your life "full" and not "empty." (Rick Scott, like most politicians, doesn't know this.)

Desire is the source of all suffering. It's glib and unfair, but suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we want them to be. Life is unfair. Arbitrary. Capricious.

COVID, Helene, and the shit we do to each other. It's all unfair. But it is what it is. The tautological tension that is "the harmony of binding opposites." Faith and fear. Love and anger. Honor and hate.

Yin and yang.

Existence and nothingness.

We live on the razor's edge.

Hold on.

To each other.

We're all we've got.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:12 Sunday, 13 October 2024

Lots of stories about people who've endured Helene and Milton and saying, "Enough."

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:54 Saturday, 12 October 2024

I confess to watching too many videos of the disaster in North Carolina. I didn't spend any time looking for those in Florida.

My correspondent yesterday asked, "And how about all that sand burying houses down SW." I replied that I hadn't seen any videos and we don't have cable anymore.

But this morning my YouTube page is filled with Florida disaster videos, and this one showed sand in houses. (Sand in houses is at the 3:00 min mark.) "Storm Chaser Aaron Rigsby" and his trusty drone. Keeping the world informed.

Or something.

Maybe we should mandate that all homes in Florida be essentially grass huts. That way, when they're washed away, there isn't so much unnatural debris that has to be carted to a landfill somewhere. It's not like we've got an abundance of land we can use to dump our disaster shit on.

And rebuilding shouldn't take as long. I guess we'd still need sewers though.

What happens to all those boats? Are they all repaired? Do they just wind up in a landfill?

Beats me. "Out of sight, out of mind," as they say.

Maybe Storm Chaser Aaron could expand his franchise to include Disaster Debris Chaser. Get a close look at the Florida landscape that has to receive all the sad consequences of our folly and hubris. I'm sure it'd make for compelling viewing. Maybe we could find a big enough sinkhole to drown it all in.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:30 Friday, 11 October 2024

It was just over 60 years ago. There are a few people alive today who recall Dora. But this area has grown immensely since 1964.

Florida has been filling from the bottom to the top, and it's damn near full now.

Most of those folks have never experienced a hurricane of any kind.

There are people here who believe that we can't get hit by a hurricane.

We can. And if we stay here long enough, we will.

And then we can share the experience so many Floridians have had. Evacuating. Sitting in traffic for hours. Waiting. Then returning home and dragging all of our water-soaked possessions to the curb, to be taken away to some landfill somewhere. Waiting on adjusters. Meeting with FEMA reps. Filing claims with our insurance companies. Picking up the pieces. Trying to find reliable contractors. Waiting for our turn to get rebuilt. Trying to find temporary accommodations. Maybe the HOA will allow FEMA trailers?

Yeah, probably not.

Then watching the tropics next year. If we're even back in our home.

But hey. Winter isn't bad and there's no state income tax.

Fuckin' paradise.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:01 Friday, 11 October 2024

A reader brought this to my attention from Craig Pittman, a Florida columnist. A review of what Florida learned back in 2004 when we were hit by four hurricanes in one season.

There's a lot of happy talk from the folks who are, perhaps justifiably, proud of their work. But I'm far less sanguine. Jeb mentions learning to prepare special needs shelters, but it was years later, under Rick Scott's watch that seniors died in assisted living facilities without backup generators and air conditioning. So I'm not really sure what Jeb's talking about.

Meanwhile, Florida has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party of Florida for the two decades since 2004, and I think their record speaks for itself. Unrestricted overdevelopment in vulnerable areas. No action on addressing climate change. A lot of lip service toward "resilience" as sea levels rise, hurricanes intensify and temperatures grow hotter.

I take it back. It's not "no action on addressing climate change." The legislature took action to remove any mention of it from Florida's statutes this year.

So, yeah, they've got their eye on the ball.

Florida is fucked.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 21:10 Thursday, 10 October 2024

Apple News+ link so apologies if you can't read it.

To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

A super-computer in everyone's pocket, networked to everyone else's.

What could go wrong?

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 21:06 Thursday, 10 October 2024

Slow start, but builds to a fun climax. Loved it. Good movie for a rainy October day.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 20:38 Thursday, 10 October 2024

I seem to be finally over the last of Covid. Apart from the tooth. (I can inhale through my teeth right now, and it's not screaming at me, but who knows? It might be better. It was actually worse yesterday.)

There's nothing going on in my sinuses and no upper respiratory congestion. My voice doesn't feel/sound hoarse. I slept well last night. At least, as well as I usually do.

I think Mitzi has a bit of cabin fever, sitting around here for the last few days, watching and waiting for Milton. So we're throwing caution to the wind this afternoon and going to a movie. The Beetlejuice sequel. Hopefully something mindless.

I've ordered my mail-in ballot. I want to get that turned in, just in case I stroke out before election day. Mitzi's already voted, and her vote has been counted. "Rumor has it," they're really scrutinizing the signatures. Jesus. I never sign my scrawl the same way twice. Should be fun.

Slow Horses wrapped last night. Some high spots, though I thought the overall storyline was a bit thin. I'm going to watch it all again because some of the plot points remain unclear to me. They've already made the next season. Sucks that we'll have to wait a year to see it.

There wasn't much of Oldman in this one, but for what there was, it was pretty good. Maybe I'm mis-remembering how much he'd figured in previous seasons. But I liked the way this one wrapped. He looks after "his Joes."

Bad Monkey wrapped as well. Vaughn was a bit too much with the "banter" in a couple of scenes, but mostly it was good. Pretty high body count, which surprised me. I don't know if they'll make another season, but I'd probably watch it.

It's been cloudy all morning, but the sun's beginning to peek through. Raining pretty much all the time. I want to get out and take a walk around. I don't expect to see anything in the way of "damage," but it would be nice to get out.

Spent some more time with Fidget Spinner. Found out that "Restore" in Applesoft always goes back to the first line of data in a program with any number of "data" statements. So you can't use multiple "data" statements to control the color sequence in a program with a number of different graphics routines, each designed with a different color sequence. Could use arrays instead. May try that later.

Anyway, the beat goes on...

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:46 Thursday, 10 October 2024

Along with the automobile, I'm convinced that future historians, should we be so fortunate as to preserve a civilization that can afford the study of history, will regard "social media" as one of the worst ideas in humanity's history.

Technology changes how we do things, it doesn't change what we do. While it can empower people to do greater "good" things, it also empowers them to be stupid. It empowers bad actors to do more harm than they could otherwise. We don't have the faculties to manage this. We inhabit a culture and an economic system that seizes our attention and refuses to let it go. We can't think at all, let alone, "critically." We're too busy checking our "likes" and responding to outrage.

We have precious little in the way of rational cognitive capability. We're habituated creatures responding to emotional cues stimulated by economic and political entities competing for their own aims.

Faced with a climate crisis that demands rational action, we've diminished our capacity for rational thought to pad quarterly earnings statements and fight for political power.

Stick a fork in it. This civilization is done. It'll stumble along, getting progressively worse for a decade or so, then it's all just going to grind to a halt. "Influencers" will report on it through the lenses of their "augmented reality" glasses. "He who dies with the most clout wins."

It'd be funny if it wasn't so tragically stupid.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:29 Thursday, 10 October 2024

Some serious weirdness this morning with Tinderbox. I exported Passed and Opening and then sync'ed with the server using Forklift, as per usual. I checked the web page and there was nothing on the home page.

Went back to Tinderbox to make sure the agent that creates the index page was working and all of the archives were gone! There was nothing in the Main Page agent container, and there were no children under Archives, which contains all the years going back to 2013!

That seemed really weird, so I closed the file without saving, or "discard changes," (whatever this bullshit paradigm is now). Reopened the marmot and the Archives came back, but without October! Christ! ("Last saved" was 23 September.)

Okay, time to screw with "Revert To."

Sure enough, there was this morning's post and all the rest of October on the right side of the screen, outlined in blue, which I guess means it's "selected." Clicked on "Restore" or "Revert" or whatever the action button is and expected to get the same nonsense I got last time I tried this, with dozens of windows of prior versions.

Nope, just the spinning pinwheel of infinite futility.

Went out to the kitchen to give the iMac some time to be alone with its thoughts. Came back several minutes later and still pinwheeling.

Sigh.

I force quit Tinderbox and relaunched it. Opened the marmot from "Open Recent," and everything was there. Except I knew it was from a "version" because the file name in the window lacked the ".tbx" file extension, which breaks the Photos AppleScript. So I added the file extension, and then saved a separate copy just in case more weirdness happened.

Anyway, things seem to be functioning normally now. For how long, I don't know.

The tech stack we operate with today is miles deep, and who knows what goes on in there? Nobody, that's who.

It's all opaque. You just have to hope it works.

It used to be, "It just works." Not anymore.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:13 Thursday, 10 October 2024

Pressure bottomed out at 990.4 hPa at 0435, and is creeping up. Center of the storm is off the coast now. Lights are still on. My rain gauge is clogged, but a neighbor's is showing 2.5" in the last 24 hours, so it wasn't an enormous rain event, though the news says that parts of St Johns County had recorded 6" as of yesterday evening.

My wind gauge is useless, but it's very windy outside. Constant, you can hear it in the trees in the preserve. Saw nothing down in the limited view we have.

I think we're fine. My daughter is supposed to fly back to LA this morning, and they hadn't canceled her flight as of last night. Not sure how that's going to work.

A lot of time and warm water left in this hurricane season. Let's hope we've seen enough for this year.

I've mentioned before that Florida was one major hurricane away from an insurance crisis. Well, now we've had two.

This will be a slowly unfolding disaster, and the state government will be doing its best to obfuscate and deny. Gross incompetence and ineptitude, focusing on culture war issues, dividing people, ignoring the real threats facing Floridians.

But that's Republican governance in a gerrymandered, permanent majority state.

A political monoculture, like an ecological one, is vulnerable to disease, parasites and corruption.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:22 Thursday, 10 October 2024

Stumbled on this article from 1983 looking for something else. A lot of cool ideas for the fidget spinner.

And now to figure out why half of my web page is missing...

Update: And just like that...

It's back.

Weird.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 20:34 Tuesday, 8 October 2024

I should have used that fancy "markup" thing that MacOS has, but this is pretty easy.

Red is Zone A. Green is Zone D. (Yellow is Zone C. I initially wrote that my neighbor across the street was in Zone C. Nope. Zone D. D!!!)

Anyway, see that corner down there where green kind of stabs into the red? That's where I live. That bit of gray road that forms a loop? That's Wood Pond Loop. The south end of Wood Pond Loop, where there's another, fractal, little corner of green marrying up to the red? That's the point where the houses on our side of the street become part of ZONE D!

Despite being backed up to the same swamp that we are!

So, yeah, we're not going anywhere. If we have to, we'll go knock on our neighbor's door.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 17:25 Tuesday, 8 October 2024