Where in Hell is Carmen Sandiego?

 

At the dawn of the Computer Age, roughly the 1980s, people started writing programs of spectacular complexity for the purpose of amusement — games.  There was a Star Trek game where the player captained a starship at war with shadowy Klingon opponents.  There was a Moon Lander game where the object was to play your descent rockets so as to end on the Moon's surface without running out of fuel.  There was a 'Dungeons and Dragons' spin-off in which the player navigates through cunningly described caverns and chambers acquiring practical or magical assets.

Whole families of games were written for equipment like the Atari game console and the Commodore 64.  Among these was one called "Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?".  Here, the player is a detective tracking the infamous eponymous thief hither and yon based on clues picked up along the way.  'Carmen' spawned an unauthorized version written, it was rumored, by one or more classically-trained intellectuals.  In "Where In Hell Is Carmen Sandiego?", the villainous thief has escaped into The Underworld, and it is said that if one doesn't know Dante's 'Inferno' like they were born there, they have little chance of bringing Carmen to justice.

The original game (not "Where in Hell...") has now been ported to the current PC world, and retains all the annoying characteristics of the original, hokey music and all.  For anyone who wants to try their hand, I've located a current link.  Abandon hope, all who enter here.

 

More Anti-war With Each Passing Day

 

I ask myself why we're in such a mess.  The only answer I can imagine is that we have put ourselves here by making bad decisions, and those bad decisions are coming home to roost in the form of a warped economy and the great bugaboo, income inequality.  Those who actually make the decisions have a penchant for making decisions that work to their advantage.  Your advantage?  Please, don't make me laugh.  This is how Congress and the DC upper crust can justify spending trillions 'to keep the government running for a few months while we sort everything out'.  Much of... most of that money benefits the average Joe not one whit.

Meanwhile, Congress is at war with its citizens because those idiot citizens insist upon staying warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and they want to drive their cars to work and play instead of staying home or taking public transportation.  To make us behave as we should, the economy will be throttled (both senses of that word) to deprive us of the wherewithal of modern living.  It seems as if the elites want us living in a 9th century village so that there will be enough jet fuel available for them to visit the Côte d’Azur.

And no one can stop them from pillaging our own assets right from under our very noses.

I ask myself where are the heroes.  We subject ourselves to costly election campaigns every two years, and we try to send heroes to Washington to fight for us, but the heroes we send often turn out to be weak-kneed liars who, within years if not months, prove to be in it for no one but themselves.  The exceptions to this are almost too rare to warrant mention.  It's the old canard about the 99% of villains giving the 1% of heroes a bad name.

When there's a dust-up in some foreign country (where we typically have no national interest) there's always some Congressman who will stand up and berate their fellows for not defending the oppressed peasants of West Wheresoever.  And the result?  We send the Army.  We send the Marines.  And we send them a few trillion dollars to help them make ends meet.

And sometimes we brush up against some country that can actually fight back.  And the heroes we sent on a mission that had no 'payback' other than more power for those who did the sending... those heroes don't come home from the mission.  Ah, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

I ask myself who is profiting from all this.  It isn't me, and I suspect it isn't you, either.  Congressmen, meanwhile, have an alarming tendency to become millionaires or billionaires during their term(s) of office.  How does that happen?  Well, it's a fairly simple process, actually. 

• get involved in a war
• send billions or trillions in foreign aid
• that foreign aid is redeemed (laundered) via domestic arms manufacturers
• who make lavish campaign contributions to those who voted correctly
• which money can be kept if left over after a campaign ends

We've just witnessed a new variation on that theme involving family members or relatives — Hunter Biden is merely one such example — who gain employment in countries that are recipients of foreign aid:

• send foreign aid to country A
• get relative hired by company B
• that is financially connected to country A
• and is paid with (laundered) funds originally marked 'foreign aid'
• some of which makes its way back to a politician who voted correctly

I ask myself when are we going to learn.  I suspect the answer is 'never'.  'Learning' in this context means grasping that 'spending money' does not equate to 'fixing problems'.  Americans, by and large, do not yet understand that.  They think — I'm using 'think' here in its broadest meaning — that all problems can be solved with sufficient greenbacks.  Decades and centuries of adverse experience has not yet penetrated into their consciousness.  They continuously send off to Washington representatives who believe — we have only their actions to inform us of this — that their job is to spend money as fast as possible.  The soldiers who march off to war in countries they've never heard of to fight for reasons of which they are either unsure or deluded will come home to us, if at all, broken physically or mentally or both.  Yes, some lives were lost, some careers ended, some families upended, but it was a very beneficial tactic, financially speaking (if you're in Congress).

Our televisions constantly bombard us with pleas for The Wounded Warrior Project or something similar, the sub rosa message being that you're a patriotic American only if you feel sorry for those who were maimed in a place they shouldn't have been, fighting a war that benefitted their fellow citizens not at all.

Those who march off to war these days fall into two broad categories: the blindly patriotic, and the weak-minded.  The blindly patriotic go because we must, in their minds, push back against any threat to the country no matter how ephemeral.  The weak-minded just do what they're told.  It's a rare thing these days that anyone goes to war because the nation has been attacked.  In a nuclear age, the major powers are not going to do that to each other.  The risk is simply not worth it.  That's why all conflict for the past 75 years has been 'strong vs weak'.  Put another way, it's 'bully vs nerd'.  On those rare occasions when the nerds score (9-11-2001 springs to mind) the bully goes crazy, lashing out wildly and generally making things worse.

If we're to work our way clear of the colossal mess we're in, we must stop making things worse.  How?  Step number one has to be 'stop spending money'.  We have to find all those places where we're spending money foolishly, and stop that.  (Yes, Pentagon and military suppliers, I'm looking at you.)  Then, we have to find all those places where we're spending money wisely and... probably... stop most of that, too.

We'll need another batch of heroes, I suppose.

 

The Last Time I Saw Ciudad Juarez

 

ElPaso and Juarez are much in the news lately.  The mayor of ElPaso has declared a state of emergency because of the influx of thousands of immigrants flooding across the border.  I've only been to ElPaso once, and only once to Juarez, its sister city across the Rio Grande.

My father passed away in March 1958 while I was in my first year of high school.  I was 14.  Newlyweds Jerry and Peggy were in California where he worked, and Peggy was very pregnant with their first child, Elizabeth.  Mom and I flew out to spend some time there and to help them pack up to come back east because Jerry had taken a job with GE in Utica, NY.  It was my first airplane trip; 4-engine TWA Constellation; it was a thrill.  We drove back east, the four of us, mostly along Route 66.  The next year, we took a train up to Utica for Elizabeth's birth.

I met my Aunt Marjorie (Meagher pronounced 'mar') for the first time ever later, but I'm not sure precisely when.  Marjorie was a teacher of special needs children, mostly hearing-impaired, in ElPaso TX which was appropriate since Marjorie herself was quite hard-of-hearing.  She swung by our Brooklyn home on the tail end of a vacation road trip from EP up the Pacific coast, across Canada west-to-east, and south to visit relatives before heading back to Texas.  She stayed with us at 441 for a day or two, convincing my mother during that time that she should visit ElPaso.

It may have been 1960 that we actually did the trip.  I recall seeing "North By Northwest" at a cinema in downtown ElPaso, so it could have been as early as 1959, but I doubt it.  Mom and I boarded a bus at the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan and spent three grueling days in 'coach' seating, rolling day and night.  I've spent 60 years trying to forget that trip and it's still with me.  Marjorie had always gushed over ElPaso and its wonderful climate, hot but bone-dry, and how much we were going to love it.  On the day our bus pulled into the ElPaso terminal, the temperature was expressed in three digits and the humidity was almost as high.  It felt like drowning.

The one thing I distinctly recall from that trip was that much of it was through the South.  At one point, we stopped at a terminal in God-knows-where, and I got out to use the restroom.  There were two: a white restroom and a colored restroom, and I wondered why one would choose a painted facility over an unpainted facility or vice versa.  It took some time before I realized that I could only use the white restroom.  Such things didn't exist where I was raised.

Marjorie loved to pack us all into her car and take us for a ride somewhere.  We went to White Sands; it was stunning.  We went to Carlsbad Caverns; it was breathtaking.  We went to Juarez.  On a few days, there was little to do (or little that would interest a 16-year-old) and I was left on my own.  That's how I managed to head downtown for a movie.

On our trip to Juarez, Marjorie drove across the International Bridge into Mexico, found a parking spot, and the ladies began to shop.  I, of course, was bored to tears.  At one point, the adults decided to stop into a cantina for some refreshment.  Inside, the walls were papered — literally — with centerfolds from prominent men's magazines.  To prevent me from being scandalized, I suppose, Mom slipped me a wad of cash and told me to see what the local shops had to offer.

I don't remember much of it, but I do recall buying a cheap switchblade knife for a few dollars.  I still have it, and it still works.  At a leather shop, I was admiring a beautiful black leather holster, intricately hand-tooled with swirls and flowers.  "Want to buy a holster?" a young Mexican boy asked.  "No," I told him, "I don't have a gun."  "Want to buy a gun?" he pressed.  I considered it, but back home in New York, the Sullivan Law would have sent me to prison for several years — just for possessing it — had I been caught with it.

We stayed with Marjorie for some time — a few weeks, perhaps — before doing the same trip in reverse.  For whatever reason, I have no memory (blessedly) of the return trip which could not have been much better than the first.  What I do recall from the trip is that each morning when we arose from sleep, the first task was to upend one's shoes and shake out any critters — especially scorpions — that might have crawled inside during the night.

 

Earth's Atmosphere

 

I just watched a YouTube video that touched on the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, and it caught me by surprise.  Our atmosphere is 78+% Nitrogen and a shade under 21% Oxygen.  Together, they account for 99% of the total.  (I thought it was 76-22, which isn't far off, but it's far enough off.)  I used to worry that if the climate alarmists got their way and sucked all the carbon dioxide out of the air, we might reach that magical boundary of 24% Oxygen where, it is said, Earth's forests would spontaneously combust.  Thankfully, there's no danger of that since atmospheric carbon dioxide represents a mere 0.04% of the total.  Phew!  Dodged a bullet there.

But wait...  atmospheric carbon dioxide is just 0.04% of our atmosphere?  And all terrestrial plant life gets by on that measely little sliver?  Of course, there's more carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans, perhaps quite a lot more, and that doesn't even get near the portion that's locked up as vegetation, including semi-fossilized forms (coal, oil, and natural gas).  I see a problem looming.  Can you?

Ultimately, everything we have in this existence is a gift of the Sun.  Plants rely on sunlight to photosynthesize carbon dioxide to grow and reproduce.  Animals (including human animals) consume those plants (and the animals that feed on them) as food.  If we reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we must perforce reduce the amount of plant life that we and our food animals subsist on.

I do not like where this train of thought is leading.

—==+++==—

Update 3/29/2024: I just watched a video that addresses the climate hoax.  Interestingly, I think the biggest take-away from the video is that CO₂ does not drive temperature, it's the other way around: temperature drives CO₂.

 

The Best Job I Ever Had

 

In 1979, I had stormed out of IBM White Plains in a huff, terminally miffed at being mistreated in ways that foretold (I supposed) the permanent end to my association with IBM.  In 1984, I rejoined IBM's National Service Division (NSD) in Tampa after about 5 years working for other companies.  I was hired by Judy Manowitz into her "Architecture" group that developed and enforced site-wide standards for the systems and operations staff.  It was really quite boring because it was mostly paperwork-related, but it gave me lots of free time to do stuff I actually enjoyed, like programming.  Since the early 70s, I had been developing an elevated fluency with a language called CLIST to the point that I could teach it better than the highly-paid technical staff that created it.  When the operations crew accidentally caused a horrible administrative catastrophe because someone forgot to update a particular control statement, they asked me if I had any way of preventing it recurring, and I solved it by writing a little snippet of CLIST that automated the update.  I developed a reputation as someone who could do wonderful things.

A year later, management concluded that there really wasn't much need for an Architecture Department since what we did amounted to "winding the clocks".  The Architecture department was disbanded and the staff reallocated to other managers.  Judy placed me with Bud Rowsey's newly-formed "Site Tools and Productivity Department" where my job was to write custom software to help the programming staff get through their work.  I was partnered with Karen McCloskey, and together we fielded requests from random staff members to automate this or that, and responded with CLIST-based processes that increased productivity across many functions.  I used to say that our real job was making programmers smile.  It was the best job I've ever had, and I still miss it.

Some time in 1988, some bean counter in Armonk (IBM Corporate HQ) discovered that while all the parts and manuals were warehoused in Mechanicsburg PA (and shipped from there) the software that ran the automated equipment that packaged and shipped parts and publications orders was all located in Tampa, and there was a real monetary cost to having software running in Tampa burning up the telephone lines to Mechanicsburg telling the warehouse gantries to fetch a packet of nuts and bolts and add it to an outgoing order.  They decided that all that software and the programmers who maintained it were to be relocated north.  The response from Tampa was a collective middle-finger.  It was said that Mechanicsburg made 141 offers and got six (6) acceptances, all from people who had been born in Pennsylvania.

Tampa management (in the person of Joe Rufin) found a project in another part of IBM that badly needed the kind of infrastructure that NSD was about to abandon — raised floors for mainframe computers and other devices, stand-alone power supplies, &c., and they agreed to requisition the entire crew of several hundred employees.  A team of senior logistics experts put together a plan to move all the NSD hardware from Tampa to Mechanicsburg aboard chartered 747 freighters, leaving the Tampa site ready to receive similar-if-not-identical ISSC hardware.  On December 5th, 1988, all of us changed our assigned division from NSD to ISSC, Innovative Systems Support Corporation, a wholly-owned sub of IBM.  The best job I ever had evaporated before my very eyes.

Because my skills had no defined spot within ISSC where they might be put to use, I, along with seven others similarly afflicted, were assigned to a spare department whose mission was to keep us busy and out of trouble.  Our new manager, Betty Ware who by that time already had over 35 years service with IBM, began to rent us out as fill-in employees assigned to random projects (often run by her many contacts within the company) where our particular skills would be useful.  All she asked was that the benefitting manager cover her salary costs.  In this way, she typically managed to use little-to-none of her annual budget for the eight of us.  I worked on projects in Poughkeepsie NY, Raleigh NC, San Jose CA, and Rochester MN over the course of the next few years until IBM offered a pre-retirement package that was just too good to pass up, and I left IBM for the last time in July 1992.

All my subsequent jobs have always included some portion of automation work that makes me more efficient — and that somehow make their way to other programmers who find my tools surprisingly useful.  I still like making programmers smile.

 

The Economics of Electric Vehicles

 

EVs are expensive because many of their parts are expensive, particularly batteries.  To make EVs appear affordable, governments subsidize their purchase, the subsidy being paid by everyone in the tax base.  Charging stations are likewise subsidized both as to their construction and installation as well as the actual rate per kilowatt-hour.

In contrast, fossil-fueled vehicles (FVs) are currently relatively expensive to operate because fossil-fuels are heavily taxed, the opposite of a subsidy.  Governments use the revenue from fossil-fuels to maintain the roads, but over time, that revenue will disappear as EVs displace FVs, and it will have to be made up from some other source, likely EVs and electricity.  At some point in the future, we can expect that all vehicles will be EVs, and their fuel, electricity, will have to be taxed at rates similar to that currently for fossil-fuels.  In other words, electricity is going to become very expensive.

Complicating that is the current push for 'renewable energy': wind and solar.  Barring some near-miraculous technological leap, it is clear to everyone who studies the available data that all renewable energy sources combined cannot supply enough energy to support even a 20th-century 1st-world civilization.  Failing to develop nuclear power, our standard of living is going to devolve drastically, perhaps to a standard that George Washington would find tolerable.  21st-century Americans will not like being pushed back 200 years.

So, if renewable energy can't handle even today's demand, where is all this electricity we're currently using coming from?  In large part, it's coming from coal and other similarly dirty fuels.  It may be that EVs are actually more polluting than FVs.

There is also the issue of facility availability.  People who own homes will have the option of having their own personal charging station, but renters, especially apartment dwellers, will probably not.  They will be forced to rely on public charging stations, paying a surcharge for the use of the facility and dealing with either long waiting lines or appointments.  While FVs 'recharge' in 5 minutes, EVs take hours.  This will also play heavily into the economics of 'road trips'.  Drive 6 hours, recharge for 3 hours.  That's a whole day of travel for some people.  A coast-to-coast road trip will take 10 days, 9 overnight stays in hotels along the way.  As of right now, long road trips are too expensive for EV owners, put aside the fact that recharging facilities may not be available where and when needed for such an adventure.

One proposed solution to the problem of "recharge time" is to make batteries easily swappable.  When an EV arrives at a recharge station, its battery is measured for charge, pulled, replaced with a fully-charged battery, and the driver pays the difference between charge levels, possibly with a fixed fee for labor to do the swap.  If the swap can be done reasonably quickly (less than 20 minutes) it gives the travelers time to visit the restroom, grab something to eat/drink, and get back to their car.  For this to be feasible, all cars will have to share a single interface to their battery.  There may be many manufacturers or brands of battery, but they all have to fit into the same space and connect the same way.

Along the way from here to there, we will have to maintain parallel service facilities, one for EVs and another for FVs.  The chain of gas stations we today take for granted took 120 years to develop, but we need the same thing for our EVs to be ready tomorrow.

Not going to happen.  It's especially not going to happen when the ordinary consumer realizes how much this is all going to cost.  EVs are going to prove to be economically unfeasible.

—==+++==—

Update 6/26/23:  It's starting.

 

How To Steal An Election

 

Over at The Conservative Treehouse a few days back, somebody posted a suggestion about how an election could be stolen, and I've been thinking about that from a systems standpoint. 

The way elections are run in Florida, to get a mail-in ballot, the voter must initially request a mail-in ballot.  Thereafter, all that's required is a check mark on the mailed-in ballot that asks to continue in that mode.  This year, I fudged my ballot — by using blue ink instead of black — and had to go vote in person.  At the polling place, I surrendered my mail-in packet in trade for a fresh ballot for my precinct after displaying both my voter registration card and my driver's license, filled it out, and then I fed it into the ballot-reading machine under the watchful eye of a poll worker.

Republicans won every statewide election, some by very wide margins.  Ron DeSantis beat Charlie Crist by 1.5 million votes, and that was known within an hour of the polls closing.

In Arizona, with a fraction of Florida's population, Democrat Katie Hobbs beat Republican Kari Lake by a few thousand votes after a full week of counting.  Maricopa County, with 83% Republican registration, split 50-50.  Unbelievable... literally.

So, if Secretary of State Katie Hobbs wanted to steal that election, how might she go about it? 

First, some assumptions:  every voter has a voter-id number.  It's on my voter registration card, and when my mail-in ballot arrived, the return envelope was bar-coded with my number.  I have to presume every state does something similar.  This enables the scanning equipment to know that this ballot came from a registered voter, and the state database can be marked to indicate "this voter-id voted by mail".  Presumably, when one votes in person, the poll worker inputs the number shown on the voter registration card and the equipment marks the state database to indicate "this voter-id voted in person".  The state database thus knows — in real time — which voter-ids have already been used, and which voter-ids have not been used, and can thus prevent any voter-id being used more than once.

Second, there may be registered voters who do not realize that they are registered voters.  This is the result of so-called "motor voter" laws whereby one can be quietly and involuntarily registered to vote because of some innocuous interaction with the state:  getting a driver license, opening a business, applying for a homestead exemption...  In some states, this can happen even if one is not a citizen — and thus ineligible to vote at all.  None of those newly-minted voter-ids are associated with either
(a) a photo id, or
(b) a signature.

Third, while the return envelope is marked to indicate my voter-id number, the ballot is not.  The ballot is identical for all voters in a given precinct.  There is nothing to indicate who cast this ballot.

Putting these facts together, we see that the state database not only knows who voted and who has not, but it can produce a roster of non-voters by precinct.  If you intend to steal an election, that's critical information.  With a roster of non-voters and a printer, you can print however many ballots are needed to make up the difference between the current winner and your preferred candidate.  All you need after that is a crew of ballot-markers who are given a list of voter-ids that have not yet cast a ballot, a stack of unmarked ballots, and time to produce the needed votes.  The ballot-markers fill in the appropriate spots on the ballot, and tell the state database "this voter-id voted".

As far as anyone can tell, all of those manufactured votes are legitimate.  Proof of wrongdoing simply does not exist, so there is no way to "prove the election was stolen".  It's the perfect crime.

How can this be prevented?  Certain pathways must be blocked to prevent their use. 

• mail-in ballots must be explicitly requested. 

  Sending ballots unsolicited must be forbidden.

• Voter registration must be limited to real persons who present proof of their identity. 

  This is why Democrats fight so hard against so-called "voter suppression" laws.

• Culling of voter rolls must be an ongoing process. 

  Voters who fail to vote in two consecutive elections must be culled from the registration lists.

• All ballots must be in the hands of the poll workers within some short time after the polls close. 

  Allowing days or weeks to pass, and allowing sudden discoveries of previously unknown stacks of ballots is exactly the thing that allows that perfect crime of stealing an election.  The critical ingredient is 'time'.  Whenever voting results are delayed, the outcome is a narrow victory, usually by a Democrat.  Same-day voting results are often characterized by huge margins of victory, often by Republicans.

All of these measures will be fought tooth-and-claw not because "they suppress voter turnout", but because they make it difficult or impossible to steal an election.  If you want to see honest elections going forward (and who doesn't?), we must get control of the process.  Failure to do that is the greatest threat to our democracy.