Response to Pierre de Vos article on Discovery Bank's racist share scheme

This is a response I wrote to a Pierre de Vos article defending Discovery's scheme. Unfortunately the Biznews mods haven't approved my post. Maybe it isn't ragebaitey enough?

Pierre, I think I can answer your first question. The reason so few people who hold one set of views but not another that superficially resembles those, is that different principles are at work. None of these people are denying that race or other foci of identities exist. What they/we object to is codifying the mere existence of those foci into inequality before the law. I think you simply misinterpret an admittedly sometimes poorly expressed objection: we oppose race-based redress measure not literally "because it requires racial classification", but because of what use that classification undeniably is intended to be put to: creating inequality of opportunity, by treating people differently before the law.

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "construct" or "anything essential", but I believe you are mistaken to say that race, gender, or sexual orientation are "constructs and do not say anything essential about who we are as individuals". Or at least, they are not only constructs. What is a construct is how much these categories should matter in various contexts.

On to the meat of your article: you are a constitutional law expert and I am not, so obviously I must defer to your legal analysis. But I need not defer to your moral analysis. What you have convinced me of with this article is not that Discovery's share scheme is just, but that SA's constitution as written (or maybe only as interpreted in the tests it has been put to?) is contaminated by ideas I want as far away from me as possible. I used to think that the constitution is "basically okay, in no need of repair or other tinkering", but now my view is changed, if it (or maybe rather its interpretation) approves of the unequal treatment before the law of people based only on superficial identity differences. Andile Ramaphosa (Cyril's eldest son) must be in the top 100 of privileged people in this country, but merely because he is black he should attract even more privileges wherever he goes, being able to step into jobs or win tenders or pursue academic qualifications, opportunities which are closed to me merely because my skin is white, even though my net worth is maybe a thousandth of Andile's? If you cannot see that this is obviously not right, then I don't know how to persuade you. Perhaps you will point out that the "overwhelming majority" of prospective Discovery Bank clients are not Andile Ramaphosas. But how exactly are Andile, and more broadly black members of the middle and upper class, discriminated against today? Which opportunities are denied to them because they are black? Where are they denied respect in ways that giving them free shares will remedy? How does this compare to the opportunities denied to white youngsters born after 1994, who get told they are "not demographically representative" and can't have this job / can't go to medical school / can't win a tender?

Perhaps I should leave my disagreement here: "You do not have to show that the scheme is necessary to achieve the redress goal, but only that the measure must be reasonably capable of achieving the desired outcome of redress." I wonder if it may turn out that Discovery know something about black consumers' financial habits that they can't afford to talk about publicly. Something that, were it more widely known (or admitted), would undermine the condition that this scheme be "reasonably capable of achieving the desired outcome." Time will tell, but don't say I didn't warn you if in 5 years you squawk about Discovery "oppressing" its black customers through higher interest rates on loans or something like that. Without ever explicitly having to base that credit decision on race.

Ways the City of Cape Town lies to you: registering off-grid solar power systems

Lately the City of Cape Town is driving me up the wall with its intellectually dishonest defenses of its increasingly invasive regulations. I suspect this is in no small part due to the Democratic Alliance's strong results in the last few local elections. They simply don't feel that they need the consent of the governed, so they make up whatever regulations and bureaucracy-serving edicts they see fit, with little to fear from a captive ANC-phobic electorate. They cynically wield this fear (largely justified, but prostating ourselves to the DA is not the only way to protect ourselves from ANC predation) as a weapon - a thought-terminating cliche.

My criticism in this post is centered on the front page article of the Constantia Bulletin, 19 July 2018, by Karen Watkins. As usual, this Watkins article reads like a press release from whomever she was interviewing. Exactly zero probing and challenging of rationales, barely even lip service to counter-arguments. This would no doubt be different if the article were about some pseudo-scientific BS like "electromagnetic hypersensitivity".

1. Presumably quoting Xanthea Limberg, Watkins writes that "off-grid systems, or systems not connected to the grid directly or indirectly through a building's internal wiring, such as a solar-powered pool pump, must still register with the City so that they are not mistaken for an unauthorised SSEG installation".
   
   My response: not being mistaken for an unauthorised SSEG installation does not constitute a reason to force residents to register such systems. In our legal system, we are generally presumed innocent until proven guilty. Under that principle, a couple of solar panels on someone's roof should be presumed to not be an unauthorised SSEG installation until proven otherwise.
   
   In fact there's a very large class of households that the city must realise cannot be the home of an unauthorised SSEG installation: all those with prepaid meters. Prepaid meters are (or were, at least, when they were a new thing) designed specifically not to allow reverse power feeding: they do not allow power to flow from someone's rooftop PV installation onto the City's distribution grid. That's one very easy way to eliminate many cases of "mistaken for an unauthorised SSEG installation".
   
2. "Ms Limberg urged people to register their systems for the safety of occupants and City staff, for grid stability and quality, the legal risk and grid cost."
   
   Bullshit, Ms Limberg: a solar power system that is not connected to the grid does not endanger City staff at all - that's inherently what "not connected to the grid" means. The safety of occupants is a valid concern, but maybe that should be up to the occupants to negotiate with the property owner? And who says there even are occupants besides the owner or the person who installed the oh-so-scary photovoltaic panels?
   
   Registering generating systems also has zero effect on grid stability and quality. Registering only creates a paper trail; it doesn't move electrons around in an electricity grid. Besides, we're talking about systems that are not connected to the grid!
   
3. "Dr De Decker said the City could readily see transgressors on aerial maps and could check the address to see if owners had the necessary approval."
   
   Maybe just bad journalism from Watkins, because Dr De Decker is a system installer and has a commercial incentive to scare people into engaging their services. If instead this is a true reflection of the City's intentions, I would be very curious to know if such action would constitute a legal search. Spying on us like this, which is ostensibly justified to produce maps, but more recently also to inform municipal rates valuations, sans any concrete suspicion of wrongdoing, does not feel like justice. It feels like enduring the Stasi of East Germany.
   
4. "Dr De Decker said ... She explained that if several houses were generating and using solar power and a cloud passed overhead, there was a resultant surge of electricity demand on the City's power. The City has to make provision for this as it puts pressure on the electrical transformer in the area."
   
   What nonsense is this? The Sun shines best at noon, which is nowhere near the morning and evening demand peaks which do stress the electrical infrastructure. And at worst, the full demand of these houses suddenly appears on the grid, just as it would in the absense of solar power and for which the electrical infrastructure is sized anyway. This sounds just like the thought-terminating cliches that I expect from a municipality, so I have to wonder if Dr De Decker is simply repeating City materials.
   
   If anyone incurs problems from sudden fluctuations in load, it is Eskom. I fail to see how City-owned infrastructure suffers from such fluctuations. And in any case, most solar power systems I've seen come with a storage system: a bank of batteries, that can certainly absorb the miniscule load variance that a cloud passing in front of the Sun would cause.
   
5. "There is currently no fee for registration itself" HAHAHAHA and I have a bridge I'd like to sell you, it goes all the way to the moon you see, if you believe that there won't be a fee in future, once people are registered and captive to the City's predations.

David Lipschitz, apparently the only person not bought into his own lies in this story, "believes this new legislative requirement will drive more people away from providing electricity for themselves and, worse, it will drive away a massive opportunity for homeowners and business owners to put in bigger systems than they need so they can supply excess electricity into the grid, day and night." Indeed. Just finding out about this requirement today has made me lose interest in installing any solar panels on my roof. Luckily I've barely spent any money on supplies so far.

But I'll have my petty revenge. From now on, when I turn on my water heater so that I can shower in superarctic temperature, I will do it when it is least convenient for the City's "grid stability" pseudo-concern: at 7am or at 7pm.

My objection to the City of Cape Town's proposed budget changes

I just sent this objection to the City via www.dearcapetown.co.za's one-stop whinging interface:

The City's "ideas" for plugging its funding hole are going from bad (drought levy) to worse (meter fees). Not to mention arbitrary and irrational.

Water meter fee: It is arbitrary, irrational, and unjust to charge residents for the historical accident of what size connection was used (typically decades ago) to connect the property to its water meter. The proposed fees are far in excess of any reasonable "cost of capital" considerations. To me it seems fair to apply "punitive" usage-based increases to water usage: what happened to the "user pays" principle we usually hear so much about?

At some point the City must consider asking the "poor" (poverty is not binary) to pay a little more too. It is not fair to ask me to pay R150+/month for 1-2 kiloliters/month when people defined as "poor" merely by the value of the property they live in pay zero for up to 6 kiloliters/month. This is not an "anti-poor" sentiment (I am "poor" too by the income metric) - there is nuance and a middle ground here.

Electricity meter fees: Similar objection to the water meter fee. Charges should be usage-based, not existence-based. The already progressive property rates should be considered to already incorporate costs of maintaining infrastructure such as electricity distribution networks. If this bogus fee gets passed, I will see an effective 250% increase in my average monthly cost of electricity over the last two years. Just the meter fee alone exceeds what I was paying on average (based on actual usage, not the City's bogus "average" based on selectively tallying purchases) a year or two ago. Do I have to sell my home and register as indigent (which I would qualify for except for my home's valuation) to get the City to stop financially abusing me?

Like everything I do, I left this to the last day. If you see this in time, please support Cape Town residents' push against the City's abusive budget proposals. Send your own objection, perhaps inspired by some points you agree with in other objections, either via dearcapetown's one-stop shop or by directly emailing the City.

Pelican 22 engine run

This last Saturday I went to Air Force Base Ysterplaat to attend an amateur radio club meeting. Before the meeting the museum unit hauled out the last airworthy Avro Shackleton for an engine run. This thing just barely fits in the hangar; it clears the steel pillars by less than a meter on each side.

I remember seeing this plane (and/or others of its type) flying during airshows, and I think I've even seen it depart for or arrive from its former maritime patrol missions.

The engines seemed to have some trouble starting, but they did eventually all get up to speed. Engine #1 in particular really didn't want to get out of bed, but the crew persisted and eventually it ran on its own power, although it seemed then to run significantly faster than the others before the cockpit crew did something and brought it back to a similar speed as the others. One of the volunteers keeping this thing alive mentioned something about "over-revving", so I hope the engine didn't take any damage from this run. He also confirmed my suspicion that the engines weren't doing so well, and explained that that was why they cut the engine run short. (I was at a similar engine run in 2014, which seemed to last much longer than the 10 minutes here.)

I hope this wasn't Pelican 22's last engine run.

Fire in a dam

I always enjoy the drive from Cape Town to Worcester via Villiersdorp, although it is a bit longer, so I don't go that way often when I visit my dad. About halfway is the Theewaterskloof Dam, that I remember being completed to some fanfare when I was a child. Wikipedia says 1980, so what I remember is probably the post-completion Nationalist euphoria.

On one trip in September 2010, I remember it as a gloomy, overcast day, I noticed something odd while driving past the dam:

There's a stand of dead tree stumps still standing in the dam (I could have sworn there was; I can't find it in satellite pics), and seeing one aflame right in the dam was quite bizarre. I wonder if the fire started when a lightning bolt hit the stump, or if it was a human-made fire.

A scorpion

Back in September 2010 I once hiked up Lion's Head with Sonja and Aleks in the evening (but apparently nowhere near full moon??) and on our way down I spotted a scorpion on the footpath.

I think it was the first one I'd seen in 20 years, and it was a glorious one. About as textbook an exemplar as I could hope to see. According to some pub wisdom it might have been a non-venomous one, judging by its large pincers and relatively small tail. (I wouldn't stake my life on pub wisdoms, though.)

Book review: The Rules of Dating

About a decade ago I bought this book - it seemed interesting. It's definitely been food for thought, and while my first impression was that it seemed like mostly good advice, over time my opinion has reversed and I now consider it the memetic equivalent of eating glass shards.


Many of my current thoughts are expressed in a reddit thread about a "modernized" edition of the book.


Overall I now think that the book contains kernels of truth, but its message gets terribly corrupted by the time it gets put into practice. There's also a sampling issue: I don't yet know what it is about this book, but it seems to positively attract unempathic users as its readers / practitioners. Wherever I've found fora where women focus on this book, I've found a vast majority of them to be deeply broken people. Sometimes they're broken in an innocent kind of way - they're hurting, and they're trying to find a way not to hurt, and they find themselves there. But to me the majority seem to be broken in a way that telegraphs misanthropy / misandry / psychopathy - a danger to others, if not always actively evil. This book should rather be taken from shelves and burned, lest it be the instrument of more people getting fucked over. As for the redeeming kernels of truth in the book - well we'll just have to find some other way to teach those truths. This book isn't it.


My most serious concrete concern about this book is that it seems to encourage women to think of and actually treat the men they date, and claim to want to marry, as relationship objects. I don't think the more darkly dysfunctional fans of the book really see men in general, and the men they date in particulat, as persons, people with feelings and needs and desires of their own. Instead these men are just objects to be used to check that "Married" checkbox, to fill that dark hole in their souls, and to reassure themselves that they're desireable.


As for all the tactical advice, taken merely at face value? That's probably not the worst part of this book. Having a life is indeed a good thing (and a little bit of faking it till you make it is forgiveable - but don't be just a fake!) as is communicating in moderation (but maybe not to the point of observing radio silence). I think there's a point that wants to come out of the book, but nobody really addresses it properly anywhere: training people (men, in this case) to treat you well. It's fine to "punish" people when they treat you badly, but don't forget to also reward them when they treat you well! I think this latter point tends to escape most Rules fans. Even though the book itself hints at it in its advice on how to act after the Rules Girl has gotten herself a husband. But I think reward should be applied more liberally than just as a treat for performing the grand trick of marrying the girl.


TL;DR: burn this book.

Caught a mouse!

About a week ago while I was cooking something or talking on the phone I thought I saw a little mammal skit across my kitchen floor. Probably a mouse, I guessed, and sure enough, in the next few days I started noticing signs of mouse co-habitation. No, it didn't nest in my couch or do any other damage (AFAICT). There were the semi-creepy noises coming from the chest-of-baskets and from my daily compost bucket - but I never saw the source of these poltergeist sounds. Then I found mouse poop in one of the baskets and I laughed a little, thinking, "Oh, so it's my turn now."

But Mr/Ms Mouse (say, what are mice's pronoun preferences?) revealed their hiding place when s/he tried to drag a bit of toilet paper into a gap behind the tiles above my stovetop. With the hiding place exposed, I hatched a plan to catch the little squatter.

Like in a caricaturized mousetrap, I set little cubes of cheese along a path to the far end of an ice cream tub lid, which teetered on the edge of the kitchen counter over and old pool chlorine bucket.

Hipster ice cream - not just vanilla

Within a few minutes of my first trap, I heard a thunk and felt so proud that my humane trap had worked so perfectly. It was so easy. Too easy. As I turned around to open the back door, I heard another, softer thunk and already half-knew what had happened: the mouse had simply jumped out. Must have been gathering its strength for a minute and then bounded out. Or maybe it ran around the perimeter fast enough that it could stick to the side walls and escape with a gravity-defying parkour stunt. I wish I had seen it.

Luckily I have taller buckets too. My second trap worked just as well overnight, and didn't yield to the mouse's parkour prowess. By the time I got up, the mouse had found its way into the bucket again, and this time I was able to convey it outside. It learned to fly as I tried to make it my neighbour's problem, but the universe conspired against my subterfuge and I mis-timed the release, and the mouse landed on my side of the wall. I haven't seen or heard it since, though, so I'm sure it's telling all its buddies at the mouse bar about that one time that an alien abducted it.

Arbeit macht frei

I'm writing this as I have a cathartic fire going in the yard, burning much more wood than I really need to braai some kebabs. Cathartic because about two weeks ago I threw in the towel and decided to come to terms with a disappointment. I should have done this a long time ago; I've just been hurting myself trying to do this with acceptance-lite where I try to muddle along with crumbs while wanting bread. Bummed at probably losing a friend in the process.

So no, I'm not exterminating peoples; I'm distracting myself from my disappointment by getting busy. I've been sieving the gravel from my driveway, and made more progress in the last two weeks than in the last two years:

Foreground-background: Clean gravel, gravel + soil, cutting, newly spread gravel

(I'm sure it doesn't look like much to anyone else. Take my word for it: shaking all that gravel over my sieve is backbreaking work. Many evenings after an hour or three of this my back aches. It's getting less now as my body gets used to it - just as the project nears completion.)

Even as I throw myself into the physical labour, my head spins with what-ifs and second-guessing my interpretations of events. But at least the exercise keeps the feeling-like-shit at bay and gives an outlet to the desire to physically "get it out of my system". Physical exertion seems to have that magic ability.

My dark web drug marketplace (no, not really anything to do with drugs, I'm no DPR) also has been making progress. I've had a few black triangle moments by now. I still haven't completely figured out the important bits of the site, but the unimportant ones that I have need doing too at some point so that's what I do.

Even my ceilings are looking better. I've scrubbed them to remove marks left by swatting mosquitoes. And a few spiders are homeless too. I'm not exactly a neat freak, so this is new territory for me. Hell, even a blog post.

TL;DR I asked for something, didn't get it, coming to terms with it only now, getting busy as a distraction.

Inaccessible accessibility

A few years ago the City of Cape Town spent some money upgrading the area next to the Plumstead railway station. A new parking area, prettier paving, a raised pedestrian crossing.

Also, ramps up and down the sidewalk to get onto the crossing. In theory this is good, providing better access for the wheelchair-bound to the station. But then I noticed something:

Someone had planned the ramps, apparently without regard to where the lampposts were. And now we have a wheelchair ramp with a lamppost right in the middle of it. That money spent on the ramp seems wasted now. I wonder if anyone thought anything of it during the construction?

#HandsOffOurInternet: My response to the Draft Online Regulation Policy

I am submitting the text below as public comment on South Africa's Draft Online Regulation Policy. Read more at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Deep Links blog and at the Right2Know Campaign's website.

This is the first time I am submitting comment to draft law. Normally I consider myself too unimportant and too uninvolved in lawmaking for my commenting on draft law to be a good use of my time. But this draft policy is simply so bad that I feel compelled to comment, lest the FPB underestimate how offensive this draft is, by even one person's response.

My stake in this matter is both as an occasional content creator, and as an ordinary South African who feels offended at the idea of a supposed constitutional democracy's government insisting on inserting itself into every transaction between consenting humans (adult or not), where it is not wanted. Wherever government impinges on my life, I have stress, and by impinging itself onto every instance of sharing a creative work, it maximizes the harm its regulative efforts do.

I cannot respond to every element of the draft which I find problematic. There is simply too much. In almost every sentence I find an offensively obstructionist, parochial and regressive provision. This is the year 2015, and the draft harks back to PW Botha's 1986 government. It too seemed to have the view that every publication which is not explicitly allowed, must be forbidden (or at least classified).

What I want the FPB to do instead (although cynically I cannot expect this to occur) would be to repeal its empowering laws and then disband itself. The few shreds of law that I would like to see remain can easily be absorbed into other ministries' laws - but as for the vast bulk of it, I wish it were simply gone.

The first thing the FPB should, in my opinion, do is to toss the Draft Online Regulation Policy in the metaphorical bin where it belongs, and start again. It might start again by amending the Film and Publications Act. Ideally by replacing 90%+ of its content with blank space. Any concerns of platform-neutrality are immediately addressed if the FPB had the commitment to democratic principles to give up on its (false) ideal of classifying every publication. Mandatory classification of publications is a Soviet bureaucrat's lifeblood, not the sort of stuff that a modern democracy is made of.

The FPB must choose. It must choose whether it wishes to be an embarrassment to South Africa, Africa, and humanity as a whole, or if it wants to be a respected entity in a respected democracy. Sticking to this draft policy is the former, and abandoning it and trying again is a step in the direction of the latter. It must choose between regulatory capture, and meaningful civil liberty.

A mallet made from wood pruned from backyard trees

A year or two or three ago, I pruned one of my Australian brush cherry trees, and had a few forearm-sized logs lying around. Recently I saw an episode of The Woodwrights Shop where Roy makes a mallet. It's a perfect match: the short piece of a random log becomes the head, and a slightly less short piece of cork oak (from a tree I planted in about 1987) becomes the handle.

Usually one wants longer, straight logs, but for a mallet, short pieces are good enough, so it doesn't matter if the logs aren't very straight.

The brush cherry is clearly a dense wood - one notices immediately that even a seasoned piece is rather heavy. Upon working it, it becomes clear that it's also quite hard. Mortising the hole took a lot of effort, especially lacking a mallet to drive the 1 inch chisel. (I simply used another random length of long I had lying around - again wood from the same tree that's the source of the mallet's head.)

I've left the handle slightly oversized, since it might not have finished doing all the shrinking it's ever going to do. Maybe in a year or 10 I'll bring it down to final size so that so much of it doesn't stand proud of the head:

The taper is quite visible on the handle, and when I make another mallet (a bigger one - this is just a baby) I might use a more acute angle. On the other hand, the rather strong taper makes it easy to knock down the mallet if I want to, yet is gentle enough that the mallet doesn't spontaneously disassemble in use:

This little mallet seems perfectly capable of doing its job. It's light enough to not be tiring to use, and the lightness permits better control than a more anvil-like model would. But I can foresee a need for a heavier, anvil-like mallet. Something to drive a 1 inch chisel to mortise some extra-hard wood. That would've come in handy while making this junior mallet.

Biltong cabinet

A few days after Christmas I noticed silverside beef going for R50/kg at Pick n Pay, so I bought some, figuring that I'd make biltong out of it. Only one problem: I didn't have a biltong cabinet! What I do have is wood and tools with which to work it. So off to the garage I went and found two scraps that seemed just right to become the frame of my biltong cabinet-to-be. What became the top and bottom was an oak plank I bought for R10, and the side pillars came from a random piece of oak I think I found in my garage when I moved into my house. The random piece from the garage has come full circle; here I'm gluing it onto the cabinet top and bottom with some dowels for a better joint:

Gluing the biltong cabinet frame together

Gluing it up was a bit tricky at first, because the frame was so wobbly at first. But once the first pillar was glued and set, the others followed more easily. I use a loop of webbing tied loosely around the article I'm gluing, and then twist the loop with a stick to tighten it, finally locking the stick with another random piece of wood so the webbing doesn't untwist.

Because I was in a rush, I simply lined the inside of the frame with one contiguous piece of fabric. I want to redo the lining, and install a door in one of the side panels. The current access (through a hole sawn in the top, which also holds the ATX PSU fan) is very inconvenient. Also, the holes I drilled for installing the skewers from which the meat hangs are perpendicular to the pillar's face. Because the plan of the cabinet is not square, these skewer holes aren't collinear, which makes it difficult to impossible to install the loaded skewers into the cabinet. (I ended up poking holes through the fabric just to be able to install the skewers.)

Still, the cabinet does its job: it keeps insects out while allowing air movement past the drying meat, and despite several days of rain, my strips of silverside dried quite nicely. It took about a week for the meat to become recognizably biltong-ish.

A cross-eyed stereogram of the cabinet in operation

I ran the fan when I remembered to put the PV panel in the Sun; the panel is a bit too big for the little fan; its maximum-power output voltage is 15V (at 0.46A) while the fan only wants to draw 0.2A at 12V, to the fan gets overdriven somewhat. So far it has survived the abuse.

Defeat

I'm out of runway. My freelancing stint never really took off the way it was supposed to. It's my failure: I simply didn't pursue work hard enough. So it's taken two and a half years to eat through my savings buffer that I was willing to sacrifice for this experiment, and now I'm at the end of the runway and the lift isn't there. Own damn fault.

Oh well, it was like a nice long holiday. I got a little certificate out of the inaugural 6.002x course that is now part of edX. I finally earned my amateur radio licence. Worked a lot on my gEDA fork. Wasted a bunch of time playing the mother of all Freeciv games with an eye to animating the replay of a minimap-like view. Spent a good bit of time with my niece over the 2011/2012 summer. Learned a lot about bitcoin, and refreshed my knowledge about cryptography in general in the process. Figured out how to take credit card payments for merchants through Payfast.

But it was too much fun and not enough work-work. Dull, boring, and frustrating work that yet pays the bills. The straw that breaks this camel's back is when I started noticing that Rocketseed (my ex employer and my anchor client over the duration of this freelancing experiment) started taking their time paying me. When Zanap was still in charge of accounts, I'd get my money within a few days of sending her the invoice. But the new regime was to pay me on the very last day of the month (or even missing that) even when my work for them was done, committed, and pushed by the first few days of the month.

I don't have the energy anymore, in this iteration of the experiment, to try and encourage more prompt payments. Besides, getting my invoices paid quicker only puts off the problem for a short while: my living expenses are slightly higher than what I'm earning. Unless a miracle happens and tomorrow my inbox is overflowing with people asking me to conjure up some C for them, I need to do the realistic thing and take the low-risk option now instead of doubling down on my bet like a gambler.

So I'm now on the job market. Let someone else figure out how to turn value into money, and just give me a regular payslip. What I've been doing hasn't been working, so it's time to try something else. At least for a while, so I can build a new runway and try again later.

Is bitcoin an ecological disaster in the making?

I've been thinking a lot about bitcoin mining lately, even considering building some mining equipment with Nasier. As exciting as it is, I have a new doubt over the enviro-ethical value of the bitcoin protocol as it exists today.

Right now, the total energy put into mining bitcoin is still small. The network hash rate is perhaps 7PH/s. If we take an average mining efficiency of 100MH/J (maybe generous, but I really only want an order-of-magnitude calculation here) then it means there must be 70MW dedicated to mining. It won't stay at just 70MW though.

The current block reward is 25BTC, or about 250000ZAR. Every 10 minutes in the long-term average.  That's the limit up to which mining costs can go before it becomes uneconomical - the point where miners decide to just switch off their machines. Right now capital costs are important, because average mining equipment efficiency is still increasing, which obsoletes current mining equipment in a matter of months. I don't think we can expect consistent increases in mining efficiency for much longer: Avalon's gen2 chips are made with a 55nm process, and I've seen talk of 28nm chips. Once we reach an efficiency wall, the only way to access a greater hash rate will be to consume more power.

Once we reach that point, there will be little incentive to replace older equipment with newer; the incentive for profitable miners will be simply to add more equipment to their operations. Capital costs then shrink as the economic lifetime of mining equipment increases to years instead of months, and electricity prices will become the dominant cost.

Domestic electricity costs no more than R2.50/kWh. 250kZAR per 10 minutes can fund the consumption of 100MWh every 10 minutes - that's 167kWh every second, or roughly half my monthly electricity consumption every second. In standard units, that's 600MW. Notice that this doesn't depend on average mining efficiency, but only on the block reward and on the price of electricity. Cheaper electricity only makes it worse!

Are you okay with that? I'm not sure if I am. Does the standard banking industry, whose death due to bitcoin we sometimes pine for, use that much? I doubt bitcoin would replace the banking industry's carbon footprint; it would rather add to it. Also, things get much, much worse if bitcoin rises to the $100000+ that some think is possible.

Block reward halves every 210000 blocks, or every 4 years. Next halving is in 2016. So we may see only two years of gigawatt-scale mining - if the price of electricity in bitcoin stays constant. What happens to the half of the exahash-scale mining network that would go offline due to being uncompetitive? Does it instantly turn into a 51% attack network, having to make ends meet by conspiring with double-spenders?

In the very long term, the block reward becomes insignificant or disappears completely. So I'm happy that bitcoin mining won't be an ecological travesty in eternity. But in the meantime, this looks like a serious problem to me.

Microwave steak

People react as if I'm proposing to put a baby in the microwave to keep it warm in the winter, when I speak of my microwave steak recipe. It really isn't a travesty; it works quite well in making a delicious steak ready to eat!

Here's what I don't like about conventional methods of steak preparation:

You end up with an incinerated outside, and a rare inside, and this gradient gets worse the thicker the steak is. The underlying problem with all fry-only methods is that they all involve heating the inside by transferring heat through the outside. This process inevitably results in an outside that is significantly more cooked than the inside. Some (but not all) cooking methods call for using lower heat. Maybe that works, but even if it does, I like my method better even if it's just for the way it hacks the laws of physics.

The crucial feature of microwave heating that my method exploits is that microwaves can penetrate the interior of the steak. If one were to simply nuke the steak for a minute or two, the steak would cook from the inside out, rather than from the outside in as when one fries it. Mixing the two methods gives me the ideal steak:

Medium rare throughout the whole thickness. Sometimes I've been lucky and there's been no perceptible gradient, other than having a very thin (<1mm) outer edge.

I've found these numbers to work well for me, assuming a single, modest steak (around 150g, just right for breakfast):

1. Heat a saucepan, using maximum heat on my "small" stove plate. Wait until the bottom reaches the Leidenfrost point. (Drip some water into the saucepan to see if it beads up without flash-boiling.)
2. Nuke the steak at 100% power for about 30 seconds. While it's nuking, wipe the bottom of the heated saucepan with an oiled piece of paper.
3. Fry each side for a minute - which is just about how long it takes for the steak to stop sticking to the saucepan.
4. Thick cuts may justify another 30 seconds on each side.

Update: It seems there are other people who use the same technique, although I should point out that "sear to seal the meat" is BS.

Fighting the demon, staying motivated

A few years ago I did the unthinkable: I asked the Internet to diagnose my ills. Specifically, I had somehow, though not specifically, landed on a list of symptoms of depression. Feelings of hopelessness and/or pessimism? Check. Persistent sad or "empty" feelings? Check. Loss of interest in activities or hobbies once pleasurable, including sex? Check. (Sex, LOL.) It seemed pretty clear to me that I had been depressed for years at that point - and that I had probably caught it (it's contagious, did you know?) from someone I interacted with on a daily basis.

I didn't like this diagnosis. I don't want to be depressed. I didn't want to face a future of a hollowed-out personality like the person I'm sure I caught it from. So somehow I managed to "snap out of it" through what felt like a conscious decision. Almost overnight my affect improved, and I started recognizing the seductive depression-thoughts: "You aren't pretty/accomplished/popular/etc. like those other people - in other words, worthless!" Or the most insidious one of all for me: "I'm smarter than all these other people, and I'm nicer than them too, therefore the tragedies of the world hurt me more. Being depressed as a result of how horrible the world is means I'm smart and nice."

Yuck, no more. I'm ashamed of having thought those ways for so long. So much time wasted. During the same period of my self-diagnosis, I was very much into psychology stuff in general. Every day during the long hours I spent at work in those days, I'd be poring over Wikipedia articles and other web pages. Cognitive distortions. MBTIs (I'm quite solidly an ISTP, apparently). Active listening. Models of communication. The meaning of a message is the response it elicits Understanding that, and coping with the ways that others' goals may not be aligned with mine. And always a background of more mathy/techy concepts to mine and repurpose. Game theory. Feedback.

So I have the intellectual tools now to fight the demon. I'm now aware that it's (like) a parasitic personality with "who I really am" as the host. (I don't really like "who I really am" as a concept - it makes a value judgement and mandates a static identity, neither of which I like.) But I still have to fight it - almost every day. I was just an emotionally vulnerable teenager when it started (and was probably a good host from the start), so it had its claws deep in my self-concept. Consciously, I reject that now - I don't want that to be part of "who I really am".

When I notice my mood darkening, I have a few options. Just feeling like I have options helps me to feel like I have some control over my life. Sometimes I go for small victories: I'll go to the garden and clear a little patch of weeds. Sometimes I just bail out and go to sleep, hoping to reboot overnight. And other times a walk with the dog does the trick to clear my mind. I suspect that going freelance has made it harder to find distraction from depressing thought: other people have their own needs, and the fact that they make demands on one's attention serves as an anchor - a sort of social regression towards the mean. I haven't figured out yet if IRC serves as a substitute to provide the grounding effect of having real-life people around. I think it might be channel-dependent: I'm happy when I'm in #Chatania, and less so in an unnamed channel I've finally given up on. Reddit seems to be affectively neutral, but it does tend to suck me in a bit as a displacement for boredom. I like /r/changemyview best so far.

I wish I could more regularly find the muse to do more productive things than reading Internet news, politics, and psychology porn (admit it - that's what these media categories are). There are so many things I could be doing - I could be working on my gEDA fork, or working on that damn MPH website that's been a steady irritant for two years now, or completing some of my woodworking projects. Even just blogging a little more regularly would feel more productive than getting my next hit of Internet. (Thanks A. for taking Essay Saturday seriously and prodding me into action with your entry.)

I'm off to go after a few small victories now. Making muesli and steak 2-course breakfast, then checking on my garden, and maybe sawing some firewood from pruned branches.

P.S. Diet must have an influence too. I seem to have more psychic energy since I've started having steak for breakfast. (Remind me to blog my microwave recipe.) And copious amounts of raisins too.

Building a furnace

I'm building a little furnace for backyard foundry duty, so I can cast parts for some of my zillion other hobbies. I'm not happy with all the brute-force furnaces out there on the Internet, that achieve all their melting power with a MOAR PROPANE! mentality, so I want mine to be one of those virtuous circle devices that work better the harder they work. Enter the air preheater:

Those holes in the side wall are air channels, for the incoming air to soak up some heat from the furnace wall instead of just letting it sink to ambient, unused. Unfortunately the side wall didn't slip out of the bucket as cleanly as I had hoped, and some fireclay got stuck in the corner, breaking out of the bottom of the wall when I turned the bucket over:

I'm glad the channels ended up mostly where I wanted them - parallel to the inside wall right to the bottom. (I made a little jig to help me line up the steel rod, that I used to make the channels, with the inner wall.)

Next I need to build a floor for this furnace, again with internal channels to communicate with the ones in the side wall. A roof might be nice too, but that can be (has to be) a separate part. I probably won't put air channels in the roof, in order to avoid plumbing problems - and so it will be possible to run this furnace without its roof.

Refreshing science fiction

Most sci-fi I see is either insufferably militarist, or hopelessly naive, and besides, most mainstream entertainment is boringly unambiguous. Not so with C 299,792km/s. You should probably not read further if you want to see the movie, there are spoilers below. But watch it again after reading the rest; I understood some things better only the second time, after I'd read some comments on the movie's vimeo page.

Here we have a grave, almost reluctant Malleck leading a mutiny on the Kestros IV, clearly a space warship. While certain in her conviction that her act is just, she is not merely juxtaposed as The Captain's moral opposite. The Captain seems like a reasonable man who merely does not (yet?) share Malleck's ideology: that humanity can do better than build space warships to blow stuff up and wreck planets.

My favourite line of the movie is "That's alright, I don't need them" - in response to the Captain's warning that he can't give her his "launch codes" (presumably for some superweapon). It's the first in-story hint that this is not the usual evil-terrorists-commandeer-superweapon trope-tripe that Hollywood loves dishing up. Immediately after, the film cuts to the retro-style Beyond the infinite "documentary" that's woven into the in-space arc hints at this beating-swords-into-ploughshares theme by negation, when Dr Harold Newman laments, "Since Man has been building tools, he has used them as weapons". It becomes clear with time that Malleck seeks to use the weapon as a tool, exactly as Newman vainly hopes (about untold amounts of energy), "or, to reach new [worlds]."

No doubt there are some hidden treasures in the film I've missed. There is a scene where Operator Hale searches for Lieutenant Kai, and a screen scrolls a list of names with short blurbs, some of them a bit bizarre. For example, there is "Unresolved conflict has led to extreme silliness" and "Bread crumbs are not as healthy as once [blurred]." No doubt some in-jokes among the film crew - and perhaps a nod to some of the Kickstarter campaign's funders?

Overall, I love the film. I wish there was more of it. Some people seem to be troubled by the acting, but it doesn't bother me. In fact, to me it adds authenticity - the characters are technocrats and soldiers, not orators and superheroes. The only scene I find a bit fake is where Kai figures out that something fishy is going on - that the ship is not awash with radiation but is, in fact, hijacked.

Even soldier Kai is human. There is a delightful scene near the end where he figures out what Malleck's motive is, and cracks the slightest smile, as if to say, "Yes, I like this script better than the wargames I signed up for!"

Watch it now, and then figure out a way to subvert your environment so that the world can become a better place.

Yesterday's mistakes and mystery words

guerre is a war. I should have inferred this from the capitalization of the phrase « Seconde Guerre mondiale ».

lors de la guerre then becomes "lors de la war", or "during the war" - a compound "transitive" preposition. (TIL about the idea of transitive and intransitive prepositions.)

fut is some past tense thing; seems to be the simple past of être (to be).

se déroula is like de-rolling - unrolling, in this use more abstractly as in "to unfold, to proceed", or, as Google translates it, "took place". I can't quite figure out the se part.

d'août is just the month of August!

était is the imperfect past tense, again of être.

près de is what you get when you press things together: they end up close to each other. Specifically, près de 40 000 militaires are nearly 40,000 soldiers.

il s'agit frustrates my attempt to find its idiomatic role. It's clearly the "it is about" meaning of the verb agir - to act, but I can't coax Google to translate "it is" back to s'agit without adding an explicit "about" which clearly doesn't belong in the context of "it is the largest deployment".

depuis is just "since".