stubbornness & caffeine

YGO happy doodlage and only one OC cus I’m a human trash. ( :D )

On Saturday morning, the white stone buildings on UC Berkeley’s campus radiated with unfiltered sunshine.  The sky was blue, the campanile was chiming.  But instead of enjoying the beautiful day, 200 adults had willingly sardined themselves into a fluorescent-lit room in the bowels of Doe Library to rescue federal climate data.

Like similar groups across the country — in more than 20 cities — they believe that the Trump administration might want to disappear this data down a memory hole.  So these hackers, scientists, and students are collecting it to save outside government servers.

But now they’re going even further.  Groups like DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which organized the Berkeley hackathon to collect data from NASA’s earth sciences programs and the Department of Energy, are doing more than archiving.  Diehard coders are building robust systems to monitor ongoing changes to government websites.  And they’re keeping track of what’s already been removed — because yes, the pruning has already begun.

Tag It, Bag It

The data collection is methodical, mostly.  About half the group immediately sets web crawlers on easily-copied government pages, sending their text to the Internet Archive, a digital library made up of hundreds of billions of snapshots of webpages.  They tag more data-intensive projects — pages with lots of links, databases, and interactive graphics — for the other group.  Called “baggers,” these coders write custom scripts to scrape complicated data sets from the sprawling, patched-together federal websites.

It’s not easy.  “All these systems were written piecemeal over the course of 30 years.  There’s no coherent philosophy to providing data on these websites,” says Daniel Roesler, chief technology officer at UtilityAPI and one of the volunteer guides for the Berkeley bagger group.

One coder who goes by Tek ran into a wall trying to download multi-satellite precipitation data from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.  Starting in August, access to Goddard Earth Science Data required a login.  But with a bit of totally legal digging around the site (DataRefuge prohibits outright hacking), Tek found a buried link to the old FTP server.  He clicked and started downloading.  By the end of the day he had data for all of 2016 and some of 2015.  It would take at least another 24 hours to finish.

The non-coders hit dead-ends too.  Throughout the morning they racked up “404 Page not found” errors across NASA’s Earth Observing System website.  And they more than once ran across databases that had already been emptied out, like the Global Change Data Center’s reports archive and one of NASA’s atmospheric CO2 datasets.

And this is where the real problem lies.  They can’t be sure when this data disappeared (or if anyone backed it up first).  Scientists who understand it better will have to go back and take a look.  But meantime, DataRefuge and EDGI understand that they need to be monitoring those changes and deletions.  That’s more work than a human could do.

So they’re building software that can do it automatically.

Future Farming

Later that afternoon, two dozen or so of the most advanced software builders gathered around whiteboards, sketching out tools they’ll need.  They worked out filters to separate mundane updates from major shake-ups, and explored blockchain-like systems to build auditable ledgers of alterations.  Basically it’s an issue of what engineers call version control — how do you know if something has changed?  How do you know if you have the latest?  How do you keep track of the old stuff?

There wasn’t enough time for anyone to start actually writing code, but a handful of volunteers signed on to build out tools.  That’s where DataRefuge and EDGI organizers really envision their movement going — a vast decentralized network from all 50 states and Canada.  Some volunteers can code tracking software from home.  And others can simply archive a little bit every day.

By the end of the day, the group had collectively loaded 8,404 NASA and DOE webpages onto the Internet Archive, effectively covering the entirety of NASA’s earth science efforts.  They’d also built backdoors in to download 25 gigabytes from 101 public datasets, and were expecting even more to come in as scripts on some of the larger datasets (like Tek’s) finished running.  But even as they celebrated over pints of beer at a pub on Euclid Street, the mood was somber.

There was still so much work to do.  “Climate change data is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Eric Kansa, an anthropologist who manages archaeological data archiving for the non-profit group Open Context.  “There are a huge number of other datasets being threatened with cultural, historical, sociological information.”  A panicked friend at the National Parks Service had tipped him off to a huge data portal that contains everything from park visitation stats to GIS boundaries to inventories of species.  While he sat at the bar, his computer ran scripts to pull out a list of everything in the portal.  When it’s done, he’ll start working his way through each quirky dataset.

Americans aren’t told this shit. 

The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.

Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.

She’s 60. She never heard of this.

As I was explaining this and how, during the Regan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region, one of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed.

He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods.  Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.

And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?”

And she just looked floored.

“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”

“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink. “

She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.

“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.

And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”

She lived through it.

All Rates Are Scientific and Use Real Maths.

ur tablet pen literally fucking dematerialising

forgetting to eat bc you were drawing

being unable 2 draw for 2 weeks and then drawing for 3 days straight

sai crashing without saving

saving every 0.3 seconds so it doesnt happen again

“look at all these cool brushes! i’ll like them and use them later” *never uses them*

ur pen nib eroding down to a stub

The Reuters news agency this week recognized the challenges of covering Donald Trump’s presidency by comparing it to authoritarian regimes like Egypt, Yemen and China.

“It’s not every day that a U.S. president calls journalists ‘among the most dishonest human beings on earth’ or that his chief strategist dubs the media ‘the opposition party’,” Reuters Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler wrote in a message to staff on Tuesday.  “It’s hardly surprising that the air is thick with questions and theories about how to cover the new Administration.”

He cited the organization’s work in “Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia” as an example of how to report on the Trump administration.

Adler said that reporters could use experience learned in “nations in which we sometimes encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and even physical threats to our journalists.”

Among other advice, the news agency pointed out that reporters should “[g]ive up on hand-outs and worry less about official access.”

“They were never all that valuable anyway.  Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access.  What we have are sources,” the memo said.  “Get out into the country and learn more about how people live, what they think, what helps and hurts them, and how the government and its actions appear to them, not to us.”

The letter encouraged reporters to “never be intimidated” by the administration.

“Don’t vent publicly about what might be understandable day-to-day frustration.  In countless other countries, we keep our own counsel so we can do our reporting without being suspected of personal animus.  We need to do that in the U.S., too,” the message to reporters said.  “Don’t take too dark a view of the reporting environment: It’s an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve learned in much tougher places around the world and to lead by example – and therefore to provide the freshest, most useful, and most illuminating information and insight of any news organization anywhere.”

If you are originally from one of the countries in Trump’s ban and moved to the US, got greencards, and decided to go on a vacation recently, you won’t be allowed back in the US. Permanent residents are being effectively kicked out.

If you are MARRIED to a US citizen and only have a green card and haven’t gotten citizenship yet, you can’t come back if you’re outside the US. You could have kids waiting for you, but you can’t come back.

me:

And I don’t mean that as “actually he knows what he’s doing.”  I mean it as “he has been committing one of the longest running and most blatant cases of fraud in the history of business and it’s only due to the limitations of our legal system that his entire business history is not classified as a Ponzi Scheme.”

Because he didn’t just bankrupt a casino.

He bought two casinos in Atlantic city, exaggerated the shit out of their profits to lure in investors, and began work on building a third casino.  He was overextended in the market in a way that had him competing against his own businesses.  He also snubbed contractors, threatened and litigated a ton of small businesses out of their jobs, and raised capital through issuing hundreds of millions of dollars in junk bonds (high risk high reward, they’re below investment grade but some people like to bet on them because the interest rate in the case of a payout is very large).

So what happened?  He leveraged his ownership in a way that allowed him to strip out a ton of assets (which he legally owned), while leaving the corporate side totally overloaded with debt financing from the junk bonds, and then he drove all of it into the ground.  Hard.  

He went to bankruptcy court like 3 separate times over casino projects.  While in bankruptcy court, he relentlessly fled from personal liability (his equity stake in the companies was extremely minimal because of the debt financing strategy) and managed to pay back a tiny fraction of his actual debt (this is why he always handles his debt in bankruptcy court; you can get away with paying back pennies on the dollar when you supposedly have no money).  He also issued like 300 million more in junk bonds to pay himself and his legal fees, then went back to bankruptcy court and frauded all of THOSE investors.

Now you’ve probably heard the term Ponzi Scheme before, but if you’ve never heard a proper explanation of how one works, here’s a basic breakdown.  First, you borrow money from one investor.  Then, you borrow money from a second investor, and use that money to pay back the first investor at an impressive interest rate.  Then you can start selling the scam to people by showing them how good your investors are doing, and hook more people in.  You pay back earlier investors with the influx of cash from the new ones, while raking in the profits for yourself.

Now think about this business model.  Use debt financing to start up a business.  Litigate, fraud, or drive your contractors out of business so they don’t have enough money to sue you for what you owe them.  Leverage the capital structure so you have minimal liability personally invested in the company.  Strip out assets before a collapse because hey, you own it.  Raise more debt capital to keep the illusion running as long as you can, and when you can’t keep up with what you owe your investors anymore, file for bankruptcy and pay them back scraps.  You’ve made a ton of money, frauded a ton of investors, and they can’t come after you for it because you were leveraged behind a corporation and your personal liability was very small. You make more money off a flop than a hit.  Rinse and repeat.

BUT YOU CAN’T GET CAUGHT FOR SETTING UP A PYRAMID SCHEME BECAUSE IT DOESN’T LAST LONG ENOUGH.  YOU NEVER SET UP THE CYCLE OF INVESTORS AND INSTEAD YOU GET OUT OF PAYING THEM BACK BY ACTING LIKE YOUR BUSINESS WAS AN ORDINARY FAILURE INSTEAD OF BY STEALING MONEY FROM SUBSEQUENT INVESTORS.

That’s what happened in Atlantic City.

Now think about the rest of his business failures.  Trump Airlines?  That’s an industry that requires huge startup investment (debt financing) and the owner gets to sell off expensive assets when it fails.  Trump Steaks?  He sold those at THE SHARPER IMAGE, where it was guaranteed to fail because it was completely the wrong market for that kind of business.  Trump University?  Never even TRIED to be successful with that, he just tricked people into giving him as much money as he could squeeze out of them, and provided no actual service in exchange.  He paid a $25 Million settlement on the lawsuit, but MADE $175 Million off the actual scam, so he walked away with $150 million for doing absolutely nothing.  A LOT of his businesses, if you look closely, were practically DESIGNED to fail.

Because that’s how he operates.

Donald Trump is not a good businessman.  He never even tried to be a businessman.  What he is, is a con artist.  Everything he ever made was fake.

The only really successful business he owns is the real estate business … which he inherited from his father and has grown at a slower rate than inflation even as he drives contractors out of business and targets undocumented laborers so they have no legal grounds to sue him for fair wages or working conditions.

Donald Trump is the CEO equivalent of The Producers.

Further reading and WILDLY paraphrased (from memory, from last year) source for the above commentary: