One would have thought that Trump’s recent “shock and awe” statements towards lil Kim and the Norks would have firmly sealed the lid and buried the coffin that contained any hope that Trump was any different to anyone else.
Of course surveys says 60% of polled americans believe the norks are a direct threat to the continental USA…
In what may at first seem to be a totally irrelevant detour, the current and ongoing squeeze, still can’t fault the bitch, hasn’t even glanced in the wrong direction much less put a toe there or a foot there, and is doing a damn good impression of someone who thinks “there” is a toxic radioactive wasteland of pain and misery.
Me being me I was always the guy who would “loan” a loser a 20, sometimes you get surprised, 99% of the time you don’t, what you do get is proof absolute, and I like that, it’s the moral binary filter for me, it sits easy, and I’ll sit easy and drink my cocktail while you drown 6 feet away, no doubts, no qualms, no heartache.
So about a year ago, because sewing and mending is generally a good thing anyway, I bought a sewing machine.
Me being me I did my research, I figure if you’re going to buy one, buy the best, so a couple of weeks later a £950 Pfaff Ambition 2 arrives, then a bunch of extra feet and accessories, and scads of Gutermann threads and Schmetz needles and so on.
Yesterday she bought some fancy fluffy fleecy material, it’s got a name that I can’t remember, and all her research online tells her that this material is an absolute fucking bastard / nightmare to sew, literally hundreds of web sites and you tube sewing / crafting channels all say the same thing.
An hour later the item in question has been cut and sewn, properly, all the edges serged before the main assembly stitches etc, and her reaction?
Well, it isn’t a case of she doesn’t understand what all the negativity online was about, she doesn’t understand what any of it was about, it could have been bog standard polyester / cotton as far as she could tell, it was as simple as it could be, there couldn’t have been less problems or issues, because there were none.
Which makes it hard to understand the online echo chamber of universal negativity.
I was asked to explain, so I did.
You couldn’t sew, had basically never sewn, your mother suggested you buy a 120 quid singer machine, I said no, over ruled her, did some research and I bought a 950 quid pfaff… and a bunch of accessories and threads of similar quality.
You still couldn’t sew, you still basically had never sewn, but now you knew for a fact (or rather I did, and I told you) that all you had to learn was how to sew, you did not also have to learn how to accommodate the peculiarities and limitations of any particular machine or thread etc.
Since then there have been opportunities where I have said ok, make two, one with this thread that is 25% of the price of the gutermann, and one with the gutermann, do not ask me why, just do it, because this is the only explanation I will give you as to why the stuff that is four times cheaper to buy isn’t four times cheaper to use.
Two hours later she can explain to me better than I can explain to her what the differences were, doing it my way you are not fighting the machine and the thread and the materials and everything else to produce what you want, all those things disappear and you just concentrate on what you want.
Now, like I always was, she can’t walk into a shop and not look at the threads and seams and so on, and having looked, you can’t persuade her to buy, it’s all orders of magnitudes lower quality than what she can now do at home, and it doesn’t matter if you are in primark or marks and sparks, it’s all “down there” quality wise.
Now she understands why I can say “this towel is 40 years old, this pillow case 45, this tablecloth 50, this shirt 20” and it isn’t just because I care for them, it’s because they were made to last, and the sewing is a big part of that.
So, back to the echo chamber that said x material was a fucking nightmare to work with and sew….
Most people will draw a common split between those who have done something and those who have not, eg those who have never driven a lorry and those who have… A and B
Some people (me) will draw another split, between those who can *really* drive a wagon, and what they can do in a well designed and specced and maintained wagon, and everyone else. B1 and B2
So really it’s not A and B, and B1 and B2, it’s A and B1, and B1 and B2, and right away you can see how both earlier comparisons were fallacious, everyone was comparing the wrong things, so everyone was getting the wrong results, even those who were getting actual results of their own, as opposed to those who were just repeating what they had been told.
You can also see that only those with first hand knowledge of B2 even knew it existed.
And yet B2 is the gold standard that everything else should be measured by…
B2 knows that the USA has been at war with the norks for 60 years, and back then it was the USA that was the aggressor, and for their part when the USA packed their bags and went home, the norks refused to sign the peace agreement, why the fuck should they, we didn’t start it, it was these assholes from half a world away who came over here and started it.
I have had “arguments” in the past with people who did not know that;
- the three countries bordering north korea are south korea, china and russia
- to get from vietnam to north korea you basically have to drive north, and cover half of china, before getting to your destination.
Of course these are the same people who lack clue #1 about just how high tech south korea and china are, at best these places will be credited with making shitty copies of stuff to be sold for 4.99 in walmart.
Hell I know people in IT who both pride themselves on knowing such things and whose very job depends on knowing such things, why flatly disbelieved me when I told them the chinese fastest computer in the world was 100% home grown, cpu’s and all… they were convinced it had to be imported Sparc or x86 or something massively paralleled, so even if t was technically faster it would be inferior by some other metric and bigger and heavier and more power hungry than anything in the west.
But never mind, let’s rattle sabres with a country bordered by russia and china and south korea, because this despot in a country so advanced it is a big black blob when seen from orbit at night is a danger to all in the western world, and we know he is threatening us all with nuclear Armageddon because he said so himself, we are told.
You know, fucking ISIS were a shower of shit, they were supposed to terrorise the west until 2019 at least, and they fucked up and are becoming as relevant and mainstream as fucking Rin Tin Tin, so we need a new boogieman real quick.
Google street view works in Vladivostok and Seoul, not Pyongyang or Shenyang, which doesn’t align well with the alleged geopolitical situation, it should only not work in NK, or it should not work in both russia and china, but as we can see from the attached image, there are all sorts of places where google / CIA aren’t welcome, India, Pakistan, China, Burma, Kazakhstan and Vietnam, Cambodia and NK, and all sorts of places where it does, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Taiwan, South Korea, Philipines, Japan and Russia.
Yet there is no mention of this anywhere of note.
The closest thing I have read anywhere is the great firewall of china, everything else is just pop pieces about various backward countries that individually hate us for our freedoms and google access…. and even in the great firewall of china stories I never read anything about my ability to contact a manufacturer in china and order a CNC linear slide directly from them to be sent to me.
As I type this I’m tracking an item
So what *is* the great chinese firewall… nobody in tech does not know what a firewall is, and nobody in tech thinks a firewall is a bad thing, it’s a fucking essential thing, so why is it bad when *some* countries do it, but not others?
Being a *real* old hand at the whole It thing I can tell you this, the whole argument always boils down to;
“How dare you influence your users thought proceesses by deciding who can access your users, to influence their thought processes!”
and
“My network, my rules!”
And that’s 99.999% of all arguments I have ever heard in 37 years working with IT…
99.9% of sociopolitical ones too, come to that.
The real change is we are moving into an era where strife is being formented in high tech / manufacturing areas of the globe, and that was always the split between wars that were just police actions in bum fuck nowhere that didn’t affect life “back home”, and wars that affected stuff everywhere.
Hitlary, had she won, wouldn’t be doing any different.