kpop, tulsa & tiktok

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Empty seats are one of the most devastating things that can happen to him. He does it for the attention. The fear of people looking the other way, ignoring that gaudy tenants squeezer from Queens, is what he fears most. And it happened. By a long shot.

It is said that some K-Pop fans cobbled up all the tickets they could get. Of course he didn’t question that a million (think Dr Evil) people wanted to come and see him. For him it was just a surefire expression of the love of the people for their leader that so many of his righteous followers could not find a place in the BOK dome. His org was equally clueless. They planned for out door events. A day before the day people started to camp in line. Breitbart had a reporter live stream meandering up and down the white trash that conjugated with the sidewalk in the Oklahoma sun. More flags than in a home less camp, but maybe just a fews Mnuchin checks away from that final state of the American middle class.

Nobody questioned how all those K-pop fans suddenly turned into activists. How they all acted so swiftly and precisely and with intention. Egg on his face? Thats cool and enjoyable. New grass roots thing somewhere? Awesome. Something like this didn’t happen before. The fact that it worked so well should be noticed. The platform of choice of the organizers was Tiktok. Social media systems do not reveal how they guide attention. How they effectively manipulate people. Google search was the last time a social system (yes, it is that as well) was under some public scrutiny while it grew: Links are something one can discuss. And back in the 2000s there was enough tech literate public Internet left that actually had a voice. People don’t understand how they are being prodded by FB and others. Tiktok does so too. Probably a whole lot better. Its video based meme cauldron is complete opaque. And it is entirely AI based. Clearing the seats in Tulsa could have been just a test. To see what is possible. A dangerous experiment, since the results would be so publicly visible. Or maybe that was the actual experiment: how much manipulation can you yield without people noticing what happens.

the last draft

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What would happen, if this would happen today. How would young people feel about this? What they feel is the paramount guidance of their lives in 2020. How would recruits cope with the fact that they would be away from their phones for hours on end? Allot can change in 50 years.

John Adams said:

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“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

Sadly in the next generations things took a turn for the worse …

they fucking did

politics

I found it surprising that the US did so relatively well for so long. Given the material the states have to work with…

Display Port prevents PC from booting

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Connecting my LG 4K monitor to a generic Windows10 PC prevented it from starting. Only its Fujitsu boot message showed up, offering the option to go into BIOS setup. Which didn’t even work either. Once the machine started while being connected to a DVI monitor it happily used the 4k screen – even in its intended resolution.

PIN 20 of the Display Port seems to cary 3V from both ends, which prevents the system from starting since the graphics card gets utterly confused.

The simple workaround was to use a Display Port to HDMI adapter. That cable does not cary any 3V from both ends. I only get 1920 resolution, but thats fine.

Nightingale

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When I was a kid there were allot of birds around. In fairy tales there were Nightingale’s. For a while, whenever bird song could be heard I ask my parents if what we heard was that beautiful singing all those stories referred to. It never was. That, and the factoid my dad mentioned that these bird were extremely rare, made eventually give up to listen for one.

Growing up also seems to entail that one learns about wonderful things only then to eventually realize that they’ll remain elusive.

Decades went by, and I had still not heard a Nightingale sing, still had a very specific idea of how it must be sounding. And I thought this imagination would be the closest I would ever get to the concept I heard about when I was young.

Right now I hear them every day. I would have not expected to experience that. I actually was certain that it would be naive to expect that I ever would.

exactly what he aimed for

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Google News “US” section June 26th 2020. 4 topics. 4 timed him. Not all positive. That matters less than the exposure. This takes the air out of the room for anybody or anything else. Since not much of substance can come from his administration it leaves the US without any direction or impact. But for him it feels like victory: he minimized everything around him. Dragged the political culture in Washington down to his level.

another percent

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June 25th: The dow claims back a full percent in the late part of the session. The reason, and no, I don’t make this up: Many regulations put on banks after the 2008 financial meltdown were dissolved.

Again: The abolishment of measures intended to prevent another bubble – and therefor it inevitable bursting – actual fuels this one.

One more round. Bubble always aim for same thing: One more round. Just one new delivery of fresh blood. Robin Hood money gone already? How about another stimulus, or – no – wait – I know: The banks have to allocate billions as collateral for their swap deals. Just let them not do that anymore. All that money liberated. It will be peachy!

All the whilein the same time Covid-19 infection numbers in the US rise to levels that had not seen before. While there are zero novel approaches on the horizon to actually deal with it. 2020 will continue to be a very interesting year.

swamp crossers

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Turns out the danger wasn’t outside the boat after all. Made a little while ago by who some call the fascist Normal Rockwell this oddity did not age very well. Likelyhood is not really the painters thing (although he seems to think otherwise). So assisting here among others are: Nikki Haley, James Mattis, Jeff Sessions, Sarah Sanders, John Bolton and John Kelly. Aside from family and the VP this leaves just Pompeo and Carson. The later one no depicted with a visible belt …

how many people are infected in the US?

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The WSJ headlines today, on June 25th 2020: More Than 20 Million Americans May Have Had Coronavirus, Government Says

So, there are two numbers:

  • 2.3 million people are officially counted as infected.
  • 20 million says ‘the goverment’ might already have it

What we know is, that sadly 122,000 people died in the US from Covid-19 so far.

Herd immunity does not have the best reputation. For good reason. Since actual mitigation in the US is not doing so well right now, lets pick it as a working assumption here. Based on those two wildly different infection counts and assuming a 70% infection limit the US would end up with either:

  • 12 million dead, if it were really only 2.3 million that are infected, or it would, like the Government choose to believe, be rather
  • ‘only’ 1.3 million people who would succumb to that novel pathogen that keeps us on our toes this year.

What horrible bookends for this scenario! Both numbers are not cool. Neither for those who have to look at this fate personally, nor for their kin, nor for the country as a whole.

Sadly I don’t make this shit up. It is a grim possibility. One that is worth avoiding. Which can be done. Other countries are doing it. The US better start acting like it can as well. And soon. Any mitigation efforts take a while to take effect. During which the pool of infected people grows, and it gets exponentially harder to contain the outbreak.