Today, immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than are U.S.-born individuals who are white, the study finds. And when the analysis is expanded to include Black Americans — whose prison rates are higher than the general population — the likelihood of an immigrant being incarcerated is 60 percent lower than of people born in the United States.
Geometry Nodes For Regular Geometry
2024-12-22 16:40
As I’ve written about before, I’m quite interested in node programming and in particular Blender’s geometry nodes. I have been doing fancy things with geometry nodes for several years now, even professionally. I wanted to write about this topic to explain what it is all about and why I find it so interesting. Also I hope to share a genuinely useful technique I came up with for solving a very common real world modeling problem. Even if you’re not in the graphics business, I hope you can at least get a sense for the kinds of heavy lifting that is done behind the scenes in modern video games, animated movies, visual effects, etc.
The Problem Of Complicated Graphics
Computer graphics are hard. Attending to enough light physics details to produce a convincing image requires an enormous amount of computation. AI training and bitcoin mining also require a lot computation and this is why those things are typically done on GPUs — the G stands for graphics, the original king of burning through computation. Having a special sub-computer — the GPU — just to calculate graphics is only one trick. The graphics business is filled with trickery!
To get a good look at the normal tricks used in computer graphics let’s take a look at a very difficult programming challenge: making a AAA game in 1998. Here’s a shot from the original hit game Half-Life.
Ignore the characters and think about this environment. By my count the hallway has 10 rectangular surfaces or quads (which breaks down to 20 triangles). The crate has 4 or 5 quads. This means that (until the next hall) the entire foreground scenery is about 30 triangles. This extremely low polygon count is what allowed Valve to create a game where one could move through an environment rendered dozens of times per second. Obviously the big illusion here is that for each of those 15 quads they calculated the transformation of 15 rectangular bitmap images to provide the surface appearance. (Actually some are reused.) They distorted those images to fit the perspective and view and placed them that way onto the screen.
That was 1998. Back then, all of the actual fine surface geometry was completely absent (except maybe in the viewer’s imagination). Note the regular pattern of slats on the crates, the ceiling, and the baseboards. There are also regular patterns in the hall section seams, the lights, and the floor tile. All of that is just colored in with texture images painted onto entirely flat geometry.
Modern games have tried to push the graphics quality by eliminating the visual problems caused by limited geometry. Today there are even fancier tricks. Check out this example of a very simple rectangle.
On the left it is painted with a complex texture as described. On the right, an additional calculation is done based on some precalculated map. This map could be a height map telling the height at each pixel (e.g. stones are high, the spaces between them low). It could be a normal map letting the rendering engine know what direction light should bounce off that particular pixel. There are many other maps that can impart impressive trickery to rendering pipelines (roughness, specular, gloss, metalness, opacity, emission, subsurface, bump, ambient occlusion, etc.). But all of that is just dressing up a single quad in ever more sophisticated ways.
Clearly the results can be quite impressive. But it turns out that there are some scenes where this kind of approach has some challenges. Consider trying to render computer models of the following scenes.
(That last one is actually computer generated by this game.)
It is true that you could go deep into the bag of mapping tricks and define an opacity/transparency map or use alpha channels that might be able to somewhat approximate this kind of thing. But the whole idea of this kind of scene is that there’s an outside and an inside and that means the thickness of the wall boards can not be a convenient zero. In a scene like this that will be obvious, especially at shallow view angles. Here’s what that looks like as seen in a 2003 game ( Prince Of Persia - Sands Of Time).
Note the very flat door bars on the left. Also note that to give the illusion of the thickness I’m talking about, they used two quads on the platform and painted them both with their flat texture. Note also that this scene is full of regularly spaced elements.
Is there a better way to achieve a higher quality realism other than to dress up a single plane with rendering tricks?
Yes there is! The answer in Blender is…
Geometry Nodes
Ok, so what are geometry nodes? Geometry nodes are a way to generate more geometry based on some kind of algorithm or recipe. This allows you to keep that simple single rectangle as the only geometry you need for the basic definition of a surface (e.g. the ceiling of the hallway) and if the finer geometry (e.g. the vent slats on the ceiling) can be defined with some kind of logical procedure, that finer geometry can be generated on-the-fly at rendering time. The advantage is that you get temporary real geometry that looks correct at any angle and scale — as many polygons as it may take.
Geometry nodes are actually a generalized Blender modifier — the most complex one. To understand this modifier idea let’s first look at a very simple modifier. Consider a lathe. If you’re going to be turning parts on a lathe, you don’t have to really talk about all the resultant XYZ 3d geometry of your table leg or whatever. You can just define its 2d profile and say "and then we turn that on a lathe". That’s obviously an enormous simplification in conveying that idea. Letting a computer take care of the details also tends to reduce errors as a bonus. It turns out that the Blender Screw Modifier does exactly this lathe kind of expansion of simpler geometry (i.e. the 2d profile to be turned into the full 3d object).
So that’s a particular traditional modifier doing a particular comprehensible and sensible thing. Geometry nodes are like an omnipotent modifier that can do anything you can dream of that can be programmed — including re-implementing the screw modifier.
While geometry nodes can do pretty much anything (I believe they could literally model the physical tape of the Turing machine that demonstrates this), the reality of the situation is that there are some things that are easier to do than others. Here is a collection of very typical "Geometry Nodes How-To" video thumbnails I collected. Can you spot a theme?
As you can see, Blender artists are delighted to put geometry nodes to work creating random geometrical elements. For example if you have a field and there are rocks strewn around the field, where do you put those rocks? In the past the artist would have to manage the random placement explicitly. Today you can not only have Blender geometry nodes impartially fling the rocks into place, you can have the same system create the rocks from scratch!
To understand the emphasis on random geometry, consider one of the simplest geometry node setups possible. This demonstrates why so many applications of this tool look like this.
As you can see, implementing a random placement is pretty easy. I think it is actually easier than putting things in a non-random location — and that is what I usually need to do.
Non-Random Geometry Nodes
The ability to place random geometry is pretty cool and can certainly be helpful filling in naturalistic environmental details. However the scene I proposed modeling with the boards is not really random at all. A lot of my projects are architectural modeling and I find it requires a lot of non-random geometry. This is stuff that’s easy to describe and hence suitable for geometry nodes, but just not random.
Take a look at some example use cases I found around my house.
How To
Let’s focus on that last one, the siding. Or course I could model a piece of siding and then use an array modifier to replicate it.
All done! Right? Well, unfortunately, no. The array modifier just puts multiple instances of the original in a regular rectangular pattern and that is not going to actually be useful when working on real projects where the complexity will be more challenging. For example what if we need this siding to be trimmed on an angle to fit under a roof? What if we need a door or a window or some other element that can not have siding?
Basically this siding needs to be trimmed to fit in a somewhat similar way that a contractor would install it. Now you can see how things can get very messy very quickly. And it’s no good just modeling all the siding pieces by trimming the geometry using Blender’s normal editing tools. First off that would blow up the polygon count in the basic model. But there’s a worse problem. Imagine you model a 5" piece of siding and then laboriously go around every window and door and nicely trim it to fit. Not super easy but it’s doable. But then you realize you really want 8" siding or siding with a slightly different profile or vertical siding, etc. Now you can appreciate how having a programmatic way to fill in the siding to cover an arbitrary surface is so valuable.
There are essentially two major problems that need to be solved. First, you want the siding trimmed neatly to any irregular perimeter shape, and second, you want it to be removed from any window or other insular penetration. At first I thought these were basically the same problem — trim to the right shape — but no, Blender is a bit fussy about faces that contain holes.
Let’s address the hole situation first then. What worked for me was simply throwing in a boolean modifier and subtract the hole out. For example, if you have a 3’x4' window that needs to be cut out of a wall face, I found that just creating a 3’x4’x1' "cube" at the window location and then using it as the difference object on a boolean modifier totally solved the problem. I put the boolean modifier first, before any geometry node wizardry.
(By the way Blender nerds, I name my Boolean cutting shapes with
AAA- so they show up first in the pull down list in the Boolean
modifier. And after years of doing that, I instantly recognize such
objects for their intended purpose.)
Geometry Node Overview
Now we have defined the face that needs to be covered with regularly arranged geometry. This face can be quite complex — in the case of our house wall, it could have windows and doors and roof angles. Now it’s time to put the siding geometry on the wall face using geometry nodes.
To give you a rough idea of what’s involved, here’s an overview of the node setup.
I’ll include more details at the end for people who are interested in recreating this kind of setup. For normal people this should convey the main strategic approach to creating a system like this.
Test Result
So what can we do with this? Here is the original mission of getting a sensible system for applying siding to simple house wall definitions.
Here’s a closer look showing that I actually created a procedural material with the faux wood grain on vinyl. But the important point here is that the siding’s complex shape is all synthesized on the fly too. A faux asset for a faux house part!
That seems to work very well. How about the spaced barn boards like I show in the reference photos? Here is a very simple scene of a barn I threw together to show how this kind of system can instantly add a lot of detail to what is really a very simple geometric model.
As you can see there is nothing complex about the construction of this barn. All the windows and the broken area were blocked out with quick boolean modifiers making them easily repositioned and modified. Switching from horizontal siding to vertical boards is quite simple. Once I applied the geometry node setup as described, I can get results like this rough animation I threw together .
This shows the results in different lighting and views. Note at the beginning how the boards have a proper thickness. Remember, this barn model is exactly the simple one shown above. All the geometry of the boards is magically generated on the fly. That’s the power of geometry nodes!
Other Potential Applications
Hopefully this technique inspires you to consider the possibilities of procedurally generated geometry. This technique is quite powerful and I think it can be applied to even fancier situations. I’ll leave you with some other possible applications for techniques like this. Maybe you can think of more.
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Slightly crooked items - My house’s real siding is definitely not perfectly horizontal or aligned! By doing some very slight random transforms I think that ostensibly regular objects can be made to look more natural like they were installed by humans and not robots. It can help sell the look of age and wear.
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Randomly selected from objects - Imagine that a fake wood laminate floor comes with a finite number of patterns. Geometry nodes and my technique could randomly pick one of the, say, ten patterns for each board placement. This would help you spot how repetitive the pattern might become and how much care would be needed to avoid bad looking placements. Or randomly go through placement combinations until you find one you like.
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Semi-random placement - Sometimes objects seem kind of scattered around but they are actually installed with some kind of logic. One example would be a procedural way to generate and place cemetery headstones. You could have adjustments for how disordered you want the headstones to be.
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Some randomly missing elements - Sometimes some bricks are missing from decaying buildings or ruins. Geometry nodes could allow you to place the bricks as described but leave them out if a generated random number exceeds a threshold.
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Hand packed tessellating surfaces - I’m undecided about the feasibility of creating surfaces like the cobblestone streets (shown in my texture example). A real cobblestone street or a stone wall is constructed deliberately and with some rules in mind, but there is also a lot of randomness. What makes this hard is making sure everything comes out nicely tessellated. I suspect it’s doable and valuable since so many game assets use this kind of look, e.g. castle/dungeon walls, rough paving stones for roads, British style stone walls, etc.
Geometry Node Details
I’ll include a complete description of this node setup here so that Blender people can try it themselves. Normal people can skip this part, unless you’re especially curious about the details.
Here again is the general overview of the geometry node system organized into tidy groups.
And here are the node groups expanded and explained.
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Input nodes accept the face to cover with the grid object. In our example, the face is a house wall (with windows cut out and doorways and roof lines shaped properly). The other inputs are specifications to synthesize the grid object — in our example, each piece of siding.
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Create Cookie Cutter Outline will extrude and shift the input face (e.g. the house wall) along the normal a little bit so that its outline becomes kind of like a 3d cookie cutter shape. You can think of it as making a stamp with which to cut out the final shape of the house wall.
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Compose Grid Pattern takes some of the input values and constructs a grid on which to place the siding.
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Trim Grid Items To Outline will first place all the grid items (siding panels) onto the rectangular grid. Then it will take the rectangle of siding and stamp out the house wall’s shape, trimming any overhang. This uses a Mesh Boolean node to do the trimming. The result is that none of the siding which was on a rectangular grid will extend past the boundaries of the wall cookie cutter shape.
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Generate Piece To Replicate is optional. This node group actually synthesizes the siding profile from a Bezier Segment. It is also possible to just explicitly model your grid item and use it in place of this node group. But this shows that you can not only position items on your surfaces; you can also synthesize those items from nothing. This has the added advantage of being easily modifiable and letting the software do the math so that errors are minimized.
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Output is the resulting wall composed now of properly trimmed siding shapes. There is a join geometry so you can optionally toggle the cookie cutter shape being used for trimming and troubleshoot that.
Another Perspective On When Human Driving Will End
2024-12-11 13:47
The AP reports that GM to retreat from robotaxis and stop funding its Cruise autonomous vehicle unit. While the headline says all you need to know, this bit is also interesting: "Since GM bought a controlling stake in Cruise for $581 million in 2016, the robotaxi service piled up more than $10 billion in operating losses while bringing in less than $500 million in revenue…"
Ok, fine. We knew it was an R&D project really, so losing astronomical sums of cash was expected. What is interesting is the bigger picture insight into what the car industry thinks of automous vehicles. In 2016, sure, GM and the rest had no idea just how magical the tech wizard magic was. They could read sci-fi stories like anyone else and if the magic really was powerful, they had a legitimate FOMO.
Compare GM’s apparent feelings about the future of driverless cars with Waymo’s. A month ago The AP reported Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles. And a few days ago, they reported Waymo unveils plan to bring its robotaxi service to Miami. That article also reminds us: "Having periodically promised a fleet of Tesla robotaxis for nearly a decade, Tesla CEO Elon Musk renewed the pledge again in October when he predicted the electric carmaker’s Cybercabs will be on U.S. roads in 2026."
Let’s ignore Musk for the moment and consider what these conflicting developments mean. I propose it is one of these.
One possibility is that GM is managed by fools who have come so close to having the most transformative product since the automobile itself and have stupidly thrown it away. Maybe their bad luck with a notorious non-fatal pedestrian injuring accident and clumsy handling of that incident left them too depleted to carry on (report here). That’s basically what happened to Uber (my analysis of that). But that’s roughly the first possibility: GM being generally incompetent at transportation.
The other possibility is that Waymo’s hype and limited fair weather "robotaxi" service is not as ready to take over the streets as the positive sounding deployment news suggests. For example, none of the Waymo deployment locations (SF, Phoenix, Austin, Miami) ever see snow or ice. And, as Waymo’s own web site says, "Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment." In other words these vehicles have a non-autonomous fallback mechanism.
My opinion on the matter has remained unchanged since 2016 — I think that getting computers to drive cars like humans in a human environment is tantamount to designing a computer that can do any particular thing a human can do. And for many things — especially those spatial control things that animals interacting with each other are good at — the technology is just not there.
So are Waymo and Tesla right (optimism), or GM and Uber (pessimism)? It’s possible that if Waymo can deploy enough constrained examples of mostly autonomous fair weather driving that it could conceivably move the general expectations in their favor. This would mean that finally dedicated lanes/infrastructure/rules/planning would be a plausible political reality. Of course if they could really saturate a market somehow past the critical threshold, the problem (which is and always has been idiot human drivers) cures itself.
I don’t really know what the idiot humans writ large are going to decide about this. What I can advise is that you should view the situation with more pessimism than Waymo/Tesla. But you should also be more optimistic about autonomous vehicles succeeding than GM/Uber.
I Voted
2024-11-04 17:44
I have voted in every presidential election I have ever been eligible to vote in. On Saturday, I cast my first vote for president.
And here in the wild places of Michigan (as John Oliver highlighted) I got this delightful "I voted" sticker which it turns out reflects a lot of my feelings about this election.
But first, there is so much to unpack.
Let’s start with this ridiculous Maga talking point: Democrats are bringing in foreigners who will presumably vote for Democrats. To which I say why can’t Republicans simply appeal to those immigrants on their merits with good policy sense? Could it be the unhinged xenophobia and racism? That’s not an immigrant problem — that’s a Republican problem.
This Magaland fear of importing foreigners is beyond un-American. It is fatuous. Foreigners can not vote. Magahats believe, however, that an illegal foreigner can vote in the same way they showed up in the country — illegally. Uh huh.
As a former (mildly - 8 USC §1304e) illegal immigrant let me tell everyone exactly how this works. Generally people come to the USA for dollars. They do not give a single shit about anything else. They are certainly not going to explore ways they can fill out more complicated forms in the presence of government officials who jeopardize their freedom and those dollars. It makes no sense on first principles and this never happens. For all practical purposes it is not a thing.
But but but!, say Maganerds, here’s a case where a Chinese national voted illegally!! Oh my! So obviously it is "A Problem". In fact, because this freak occurrence has happened, Magafriends have elevated it to The Problem Of All Problems. I’m sorry but this is like believing that the biggest threat to the USA is Indians aboard container ships taking out critical bridge infrastructure. That also happened exactly once and deserves to be taken a lot more seriously than one Chinese kid voting.
And that container ship accident was an accident. I’m a little weirded out to not hear a follow up about the motive for the Chinese kid voting. Was it an unfortunate ESL cultural misunderstanding mistake? I used to work in a factory that printed PhDs for people to hang on their office walls in China and even at the PhD level, English to Chinese is a tough conversion and I can all too easily suspect simple prosaic confusion. Several times in my life, I have been handed a stack of forms by university officials and told to complete them all or Bad Things will happen. The only alternative to that obvious explanation is some kind of bizarre Chinese performance art.
But if this is the case to be made that filthy swine foreigners are illegally voting in American elections, I’m relieved and satisfied that for all practical purposes, it is not happening.
For a very large number of Americans to justify some very Hitlerific nonsense and demonizing foreigners, something is very amiss.
Just like all four of my grandparents — who all spent several years of their lives actively trying to kill as many as possible — I’m obviously worried about Nazis too. You know, like all sane people. But I have to confess that (because it is so obvious) repudiating odious failed political ideologies from 20th century Europe can be overshadowed in my mind by something more personally aggravating — the hypocrisy.
Apparently Maga needs an outgroup; while the OG Nazis went with Jews, and gays, Maga goes with foreigners and, uh, gays. Ok, fine. Obviously everyone hates those vermin who didn’t have the good manners to be born in the USA.
Obviously. Except…. Hang on a sec… Uh, isn’t Dear Leader’s mother a filthy immigrant from the filthiest shithole archipelago in the entire world? Yes, true. And isn’t his wifebot unit a Slovenian? Just saying. I’m pretty sure he’s had two foreign wives. (Three if you count a bromance with Elon Musk.) Can you imagine if every Magalad imported two foreign wives? Chaos and barbarism! Lock up your pets! Ok, fine, Dear Leader is "special" and gets some exemptions. (Like being the only devout Bible enthusiast — a Bible publisher in fact! — who doesn’t want to talk about the Bible! Now that is a miracle!)
Surely the rest of the Maga faithful faithfully shop American when looking for wholesome women. But, astonishingly, no! JD Vance’s wife was the daughter of Indian immigrants — apparently her Telugu-speaking mother also worked at the same San Diego PhD factory I did. Well, fine, but that’s technically an American wife, right? Obviously I think so, but some Magafriends question the Vances' commitment to the whole hateful xenophobia agenda. Do JD’s in-laws eat pets? Because I have pet owning family members in San Diego who need to know!
The parents of Marco Rubio’s wife are from Columbia. Though good ol' boy Bobby Jindal was born in Louisiana, his wife was born in India. And what about the Hypocrisy GOAT? Oh yes sir! He is the undisputed hypocrisy champion precisely for over-the-top exploits like marrying serial US cabinet official Elaine Chao — who was born in Taiwan. The people of Kentucky must be so proud of their champion hypocrite — well done, Mitch McConnell!
It is not hypocrisy that I think it’s beneficial when Americans marry foreigners. And unlike the 37% of 2016 voters who would rather have a beer with Hillary Clinton, I would prefer to join the 45% of voters who would prefer to have one with Donald Trump. No, that’s not hypocrisy, my friends — n.b. Trump does not drink beer.
But those are easy cases of hypocrisy. What about the tricky subtle stuff? The big one I get caught up on is Magaland’s simultaneous obsession with xenophobia and crime. For example, here’s an article (which I’m not even going to bother reading) on The Heritage Foundation’s website titled "Secure America’s Borders and Reduce Crime". Obviously these are the big concerns over in red hat country.
Well, it turns out — as some of you already know who recall my review of Bryan Caplan’s book on immigration — that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native born populations. Shocking, right? Here’s some recent research from Stanford expanding this to include the last 140 years. They say facts like these which I have yet to see contradicted:
Is this because immigrants are smarter and harder working and therefore harder to catch? Obviously if you say that 100% of illegal aliens commit the crime of being illegal, sure, that will pad the stats the other way, but that’s not really a good faith representation of the criminality of the economic migrants out picking your food.
What this means is that you can either be interested in reducing crime or reducing immigration — but mathematically not both. Pick one. Given these trends, if you let more immigrants in, then the crime rate must necessarily decline. If there is one note of consistency in these contradictory policy objectives it is the craven fear.
Fear that those of us who don’t own guns will take theirs. Fear that they’ll have to use those guns. Fear that some foreigners will offer a better value to their employer. Fear that they need to return to the good old days for any hope of being "great".
I have never really been too concerned about Donald Trump’s hypocrisy in the same way I don’t worry about the hypocrisy of tornadoes. I’ve said since 2016 that the only policy position you can be pretty sure Trump will consistently apply is enthusiastically firing people. Every other policy objective a voter may have is total wishful thinking if you think at some time in the future Trump will still be aligned with it. Nobody has any idea what crazy direction he’ll turn.
A president who is mercurial and chaotic can cause substantial damage. What does bother me from a policy standpoint are two main things. First is destabilizing the goose that lays the golden eggs: a predictable well regulated environment of fairness and trust that sensible capitalism and markets can make long term plans around. Trump has expressed a desire to do reckless things like fire all the experienced government employees, impose massive regressive tariffs, vindictively tamper with important institutions like the Federal Reserve, etc.
Magabros just fault the liberal media for spreading these rumors. The liberal media is definitely anti-Trump, right? Like that super leftist libtard hippy, Michael Bloomberg, right?
Fiscally I identify as a TheEconomistist — which is someone who respects The Economist and believes that what it says about complicated shit is probably as sensible as anything. And when The Economist says Trump is a wrecking ball, well, I take that seriously.
And tons of normal anodyne non-partisan news sources are showing measured reservations of Trump. Here’s the AP and Reuters.
And democracies around the world are cringing. For example, from Deutsch Welle we see Germans — who are pretty good at spotting Nazis — being nervous about Trump getting elected.
Clearly a lot of credible somewhat fiscally conservative economic sources are fearful of Trump destabilizing the US and its economy in ways that will be difficult to repair.
The other serious problem with Trump — which now is pretty obvious to those not in his cult — is that he has been very destructive to the entire project of democracy. Thanks to Trump there are now people in the USA who are having a hard time understanding why having their favorite guy simply control everything with absolute power is a bad idea. I guess they never had a chance to talk to my antifa grandparents.
The people who are in Trump’s thrall have no way to hear any evidence that he was properly voted out of office. If this is not scary to you, you may be in this cult.
…in my view we just cannot elect a president who is a pathological liar like Donald Trump, somebody who is working overtime to undermine the American democracy. And mark my words on Tuesday night, on election night — no matter what the vote will be — Donald Trump early on in the evening will declare, "Hey I’ve won this election and if there’s any state that I lost it’s because of voter fraud." That’s what he will say and that’s what demagogues do and that’s how you move a country toward an authoritarian form of society…
This situation is grave enough that if you’re an American and not doing all you can to stop this kind of autocratic thinking, then you are American in name only.
Maybe you are a woman, and/or someone who likes them, and you’re not keen on the normalization of Trump’s misogyny. Or you don’t need Trump telling you what you can and can’t do with your own body — "like it or not". For me, I’m blown away by the hypocrisy of calling immigrants "rapists" while losing court cases where he is accused of sexual abuse etc. Stacking the Supreme Court with unpopular anti-choice toadies is a serious injury to the government that will take a long time to heal.
I sympathize with real Republicans who are conflicted about voting Republican. But hey, I didn’t get to vote for the candidate or party I wanted to vote for either. I had to vote for Kamala Harris. Sometimes preserving democracy is important enough to go out of your comfort zone to suppress anti-American despotism. Here is a list of a zillion prominent Republicans who repudiate Trump. A lot of them were stupid to go along with him in the first place, but at least they finally snapped out of it.
Whom would I have preferred to vote for? Astonishingly, neither major candidate paid any attention to what is likely the most important issue of our time. Bernie Sanders again…
…please understand Donald Trump thinks that climate change is a hoax originating in China. Which means that if he’s elected the United States will surrender the fight against climate change. China, Europe will follow and that whole effort is now gone. It’s over. We’ve lost the struggle against climate change. That’s what happens if Trump is elected…
So if, like me, you are concerned about the environment a vote for Trump isn’t just one of the two politicians who don’t care about the issue. It is a real endorsement of doing nothing and hoping you’ll die before your descendants come to openly hate you for your apathy.
I usually do my best to see both sides to an issue. I like that Trump’s not really religious — those of us who have studied the Bible are certain he is not. I like that he makes religious hypocrites look like fools. I like that he chaotically took a wild swing at the mortgage interest deduction (which strikes me as a bizarre welfare handout for mortgage originators). I’m impressed with his luck. I’m impressed that he is so brazen and mostly says what’s on his mind. I kind of like that he called Liz Cheney a "radical warhawk" (perhaps conflating her with her father, who certainly is one). I like how while being nearly incoherent with statements like that he still forces some macho bros to think a bit more carefully about the woes of traditional Republican war frenzy. I think that paying consenting adult entertainers to have sex with you should not, in principle, be illegal. I like that Trump is a non-drinker.
However, that’s it. That is all I can say about the guy that is not negative. I never watched his reality show which sounded like a waste of time to me. I never respected his business acumen which I consider kayfabe. I actually read "his" stupid book and fundamentally disagree with its sophomoric premise. Call me a snob but selling gold sneakers and faux emperor coins and scammy "luxury" watches and other ridiculous tat seems beyond gauche, c’est vulgaire.
He doesn’t even drink alcohol FFS!
Just to rub our noses in crapulent stupidity here is Vance, no slouch when it comes to hypocrisy, showing the Magaholics what the conceptual difference is between the two candidates.
Trump is a mean-spirited, hate-filled, abusive, callous, tone-deaf, impulsive, mendacious, divisive, anti-intellectual, hypocritical, insensitive, hubristic, xenophobic, tawdry grifter. He may be the GOAT of narcissists.
That’s pretty bad but, amazingly, it gets even worse. Trump has made suggestions that he would be comfortable using the military to deliver retribution to his political enemies. When his supporters defend this they must resort to the kind of logic that says something like, "Well, at least he’s not really good at following through with anything so you’re probably fine." I’m sorry, but that’s a little too insane for me.
Why am I even writing this? Why am I even giving this clown any oxygen? Well, that retribution thing really rubbed me the wrong way. Regular readers may recall that I have a creative voting strategy. This means — especially now that I live in the swingiest of swing states — that I get mailings intended for the Magahoard. And this one really is a challenge to my commitment to pacifism.
First, I’m going to just skip the raging hypocrisy of Dear Leader previously claiming that early and mail-in ballots were all fraudulent.
Second, yes, it turns out that your voting participation is a matter of public record. That can come as a bit of a surprise to people. I hadn’t really considered it. As the flier says, whom "…you vote for is secret." True. But it is also true that for reasons related to keeping people from voting twice, or letting ineligible people vote, there is a public list of who did in fact vote. Ok, that’s a bit weird but I’m an assiduous voter, so fine, no problem. You should be an assiduous voter too.
The insidious thing here is that the flier seems to be saying that because they know you’re a registered Republican, if you do not show up to vote, it’s an affront to Dear Leader and the Maga faithful may have some vindictive "consequences" in store for you. At the very least, the town’s Magabusybody (pictured?) will be shitposting on Facebook about you.
And to that, I will quote my favorite AI Taylor Swift-ish song: Eat a bag of MAGA dicks.
(Taylor Swift — real or fake — is not usually my scene, but I’ve lately been trying to buff the stats of patriotic memes. Driving the algo is probably the real "election" these days.)
Listen up Maga asshats - I did vote. And I voted as hard as I could fucking vote to immediately flush that orange shitball from the national consciousness. If that’s a problem, if you’re not happy with that and you’d like to send someone round from the local Maga Gestapo office to have a little chat with me, I’ll be here, in my swamp, humming a catchy AI Taylor Swift song, and waiting for you. Looking something like this.
Best Technology Of 2024
2024-11-02 18:08
It is now the future and we have positronic brains and flying cars. Oh my! That’s nice, but what cool tech gadgets caught my attention in 2024? What technology is actually useful to me? What are this year’s technology marvels? What have those tech wizards in Silicon Valley cooked up that is really impressing me these days?
For 2024 the Chris X Edwards Award For Technological Excellence goes to the inventor of this rake.
I live in a giant beech-maple hardwood forest. When the leaves fell recently it was kind of like a ton of bricks but much heavier.
Since I was a kid I have hated raking leaves but it turns out I hate the sound of leaf blowers even more. So, I picked up this rake as kind of an impulse buy not realizing at the time what a profound leap the state of the art in leaf removal had made.
But wow, I am astonished! This rake is incredible.
Remember the good old days (before the incessant sound of 24/7 leaf blowers) when you raked with a rake? If you can then you’ll remember that the majority of time was spent on this…
One of the more frustrating jobs associated with leaf or grass raking is the need to periodically bend down (or to reverse the orientation of the rake and bring up its head) and reach for the rake head in order to manually clean away material which adheres to the rake tines in the areas between the prongs. This has to be done very often—perhaps after only one or two strokes in the case of certain types of leaves or vegetable garden matter, or when the matter is wet. Repeated stooping is fatiguing and may even be harmful to the back, particularly in the case of elderly gardeners. Bringing the rake head up is also unsatisfactory as it disrupts the normal flow and repetition of the rake strokes.
That is text from the patent for this rake, US6009697A.
Sure enough this design is astonishingly good.
I raked at least a volume of leaves that could fill a bouncy castle and the number of times a leaf got hung up on the rake was zero. It never happens. Astonishingly, the efficacy of the raking action is not degraded at all. This makes raking so much more tolerable. It’s now way down on the list of most dreaded chores — not far off of sweeping with a broom.
So who is the heroic inventor of this amazing technology? Well the rake itself had the patent number embossed on it. I kind of have to wonder why because when I searched for the patent I was expecting to see "True Temper" or The Ames Companies. But no — it was Harry S. Billardo of Portsmouth, New Hampshire (further specified: "Individual"). He had applied for the patent in 1997 and waited two and a half years for it to be granted. Then he got the customary 17 years of protection. I am speculating here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the manufacturer of the rake simply waited until the patent expired in 2017 to start manufacturing them. If so that’s pretty awful to retard progress like that. Oh well, better late than never. If Harry’s still alive, bravo and congratulations!
BONUS
The runner up for the 2024 Chris X Edwards Award For Technological Excellence is this double wheeled wheelbarrow.
I was vaguely aware that there is some debate about when wheelbarrows were invented, but I can believe that it was non-obvious for quite some time because putting two wheels on one was not obvious to me all of my life. And yet now that I’ve used one, I can tell you that it is infinitely better! It is so much more stable that you can put more of your energy into moving the load rather than balancing it. One of my favorite tricks to do with it (empty) is grab one handle and walk it somewhere with, say, a shovel in my other hand. As with the rake, I’m not sure if these things have been available for decades and I’m just now discovering them but they’re new to me. And recommended!
Aurora Borealis
2024-10-10 23:26
Apparently the sun has been going crazy recently and the aurora borealis has been putting on quite a show in places I would not have expected. I lived in Alaska for years and never saw them. It seemed strange that at only about 46 degrees latitude it would be possible to see them but it turns out that they form a kind of ring around the magnetic north pole. And the magnetic north pole is actually in Canada right now meaning that indeed it can be possible to see the northern lights in the continental US. I managed to figure out the best time and go out and have a look. With our very low levels of light pollution (basically none) here’s what we saw in the sky over our house.
Note also that we still have stars in our sky.
I was tipped off by this forecast.
It was quite spectacular and we decided to take the canoe out on the lake to get a wider view than our normal dense forest. Quite a show! The photos are ok given how tricky this can be to photograph.
Here are some photos that some neighbors on our lake took two days ago.
If you want to see the northern lights, no need to go to Norway, Siberia, or Alaska. Check the space forecast and come for a visit to the wild forests of Michigan.
UPDATE 2024-10-13
Apparently the northern lights were recently visible quite farther south than usual in many places. While it is extraordinary, we seem to be at the peak of an 11 year solar cycle. According to this article, the prominent aurora will be making appearances until 2026.
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