Blackmoor Vituperative

Just finished watching Gaslight (1944), with Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten. It’s interesting to contrast Cotten’s performance in this with his role in Shadow Of A Doubt, released the previous year. If you’ve not seen these two films, I suggest that you do.

And is that a very young Angela Lansbury as the saucy house maid with aspirations “above her station”? Why yes, it is! In truth, I did not recognize her. I only know this because I read the credits.

When confronted with the “antis” — anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-gun, anti-women, anti-science, anti-South, anti-sex, etc. — who seem so devoted to their agendas of hatred, ignorance, and irrational fear, I am reminded of a line from Anaïs Nin‘s “Seduction of the Minotaur” (echoing a much older idea):

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Just watched Lucy with Susan and Vixen. Vixen and I LOVED it. What the Matrix is to computer science, Lucy is to biology. No, it does not make sense, and in fact it’s absurd on several levels, but it is nonetheless AWESOME and perhaps even mind-blowing. And much like the Matrix, any sequel(s) would be both superfluous and inevitably disappointing.

Vixen agrees.

Stop the madness! Write to your federal and state representatives and ask them to do away with so-called “Daylight Saving Time”. It costs money, it costs lives, and it accomplishes absolutely nothing.

I was having a problem with my home network. I have a static IP address from my ISP, and I have that IP address mapped to a domain name through DynDNS. Yet, periodically, I would discover that the network was no longer accessible.

Initially, I thought it was due to a recent server upgrade, and that I had my firewall settings or selinux settings wrong. But those were correct. I looked at the port forwarding settings in the router (Advanced Settings >> WAN >> Virtual Server / Port Forwarding), and those seemed correct, too. On a lark, I clicked the “Apply” button on the port forward settings page in the router’s administration screen, and suddenly the network was externally accessible again.

A few hours later, it happened again. This time, I logged into the router’s port forwarding screen and clicked “Apply”. It worked. Then again, this morning, it happened again.

A great deal of searching later, I have discovered that there is a bug in the Asus RT-AC87R router port forwarding — it simply stops working from time to time. Why, I do not know. I have the most recent firmware, so there is no fix to be found there. The only way to prevent this from happening appears to be by disabling the “NAT Acceleration” (which is called “Hardware Acceleration” in some routers): go to Advanced Settings >> LAN >> Switch Control >> NAT Acceleration, and set it to “Disable”.

This also applies to the Asus RT-AC87U router (which is the same router in slightly different packaging).

I think people who persist in clinging to theories that have been soundly refuted by facts should not be called “economists”: they should be called “philosophers”. The consensus among economists is that raising the minimum wage has little or no effect upon employment — because the evidence demonstrates that it does not. The reasons why that is the case are varied, but a major one is that at the lowest-paid end of the employment spectrum, the demand for labor is inelastic. If it takes three people to perform a task, paying them $10/hr won’t make the task require fewer people.

The chart above shows the results of more than 1,400 different studies. The x-axis shows the size of the employment effect, and the y-axis shows that statistical power of the analysis.

The results have clustered around the finding that a moderate wage increase — in line with the administration’s proposal to increase the minimum rate in 95-cent increments — has zero effect on total employment. And the higher a study’s statistical power, the more likely it is to fall on the line showing zero effect.

“I really think that’s a very compelling takeaway,” said Hall, who has testified before multiple state legislatures on the issue. “It puts the lie to the notion that it’s going to be a tremendous job killer.”

(From 1,400 Real World Minimum Wage Increases Show No Impact on Employment, Fiscal Times

Personally, I would go with $15/hr. There is no reason in the world that taxpayers should be footing the bill to make up for the below-subsistence wages paid by employers like Wal-Mart (Report: Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion In Public Assistance). Increase the minimum wage to a responsible level and put the cost of doing business on the business, where it belongs.

Systematically oppressing the bulk of a population is not only morally indefensible, but terribly short-sighted. There are not enough firearms in this country to protect the rich (or just the reasonably comfortable) from the poor, if the poor decide they’ve had enough. Personally, I’d favor raising the minimum wage to $15/hr, eliminating loopholes that allow employers to pay even less than the minimum wage, and then pegging it to the Consumer Price Index (although someone should take a close look at how CPI is calculated to make sure that’s not being manipulated).

I was at a restaurant once, and the widescreen TVs were set to non-widescreen stations, with the image squashed vertically (or stretched horizontally, potayto potahto) to fit. That was bad enough. But then the show itself had a person standing in front of a TV (it was some kind of “news” show or something), and THAT TV was a widescreen TV showing a squashed 4:3 image.

How can anyone not notice how wrong this is?

WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? STOP DOING IT!

I do not paint miniatures anymore. It takes me a very long time, and I simply have too many projects as it is.

Still, by the time I stopped, I think I had gotten pretty good at it. Below are the painted figures I have held on to, from oldest to newest. The oldest was painted in the early 1990s. The most recent was painted in 2009 or so.