Slow Week [DOT 11/1/23]

11/1/23 MegMegMcGee 40

Is it just me or does this week feel sloooow? Maybe it’s because the holidays are over and it’s dark and cold.

These guys need to get a life

House Republicans form committee to investigate the government
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/10/house-vote-republicans-committee-investigate-government/

I’m guessing none of these people have actually tried to call the IRS lately. Hour long hold times, outdated tech, waiting forever on refunds…The IRS owes one of my clients multiple millions of dollars and the longer it takes them to process it, the more it’s costing them in interest.

House Republicans pass legislation trying to block new IRS funding
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/house-republicans-set-pass-law-block-irs-funding/story?id=96319864

He should go to jail because of his name alone!

Far-right influencer known as ‘Baked Alaska’ sentenced over Capitol attack
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/10/baked-alaska-anthime-gionet-sentenced-capitol-attack

Stonks!

Wells Fargo, once the No. 1 player in mortgages, is stepping back from the housing market
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/10/wells-fargo-once-the-no-1-player-in-mortgages-is-stepping-back-from-the-housing-market.html

Yes!

Today in cuteness:

Have a great day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

40 Comments

  1. Baked Alaska should go on RuPaul’s Drag Race with a name like that, although it’s not punny or fabulous, it’s just…strange. Not as strange as X Æ A-12 but what is? Did you know that Ed Sheeran has reproduced? His child is named Lyra Antarctica. The mother’s name is Cherry Seaborn, which is a pretty good name in and of itself.

    • To paraphrase Mao, let 100 Benghazis blossom. When Mao did it in the 1950s, people who were stupid enough to take him at his word (he’d only been in power for less than a decade) were eventually rounded up and sent to reeducation camps or just executed, to save time and resources. Americans can do similar next year at primary/election time. If only we had the ability to round up the ringleaders and force them to major in an aspect of cultural studies at a small, private liberal arts college or, failing that, ship them off to the solar panel factories.

  6. “I’m guessing none of these people have actually tried to call the IRS lately. Hour long hold times, outdated tech, waiting forever on refunds…The IRS owes one of my clients multiple millions of dollars and the longer it takes them to process it, the more it’s costing them in interest.”

    Same. Except with us it’s hundreds of clients. My boss came out in support of the funding in an industry publication and three or four idiots started babbling about the 87,000 agents, which is a lie. It’s a complete Republican bullshit fabrication.

    I mentioned this before but most of the funding would go to infrastructure. The IRS uses some computer systems created in the 60s and the people who developed them are pretty much all dead. It’s a testament to their work that the systems still function. But we are one catastrophic failure away from losing millions of tax records.

    Republicans don’t care because rich people would be thrilled with this outcome. It’s everybody that’s NOT rich that’s having problems and can’t get refunds. Rich people do a Trump and just let that stuff sit in limbo forever. I also mentioned before that more than 90% of low and middle income taxpayers are fully compliant (it’s an incredibly high rate). Almost all the tax cheats are at the top end of the income curve. They’re the ones who don’t want the IRS staffed.

    Fortunately funding can’t be affected by the House of Monkeys since the Senate and Biden would never agree to it. It’s posturing.

    • …dumb posturing at that

      …the same people claiming they need to offset new spending by cuts want to make a cut that’s a net expense…even without the cui bono element that’s just…dumber than shit…though very much standard operating procedure, I guess?

      • It’s a replay of the failed attempt to kill Obamacare in 2017. It’s worth noting how that went.

        Paul Ryan, who got despicable press fluffing for being supposedly smart, focused on real numbers, concerned about people, and reallyreallyreally worried about the deficit, knew that his centerpiece goal would blow up the deficit in addition to the massive human cost.

        So he jammed through repeal in violation of house rules before CBO could come up with its analysis. Because that’s how the GOP rolls.

        When CBO was able to make its estimate later, the GOP simply tried to gaslight it away, and then dumped the director at the first opportunity.

        https://rollcall.com/2019/06/03/gop-blew-obamacare-repeal-not-us-former-cbo-director-says/

        It’s worth noting that the Republican mentioned, Mike Enzi, was one of the people the press called moderates back when Obamacare was first being debated, who supposedly was negotiating in good faith for GOP cooperation in passing a bill. And of course back then he was  trying to kill it all along.

        Of course trying to kill Obamacare backfired horribly for the GOP, despite the DC media’s desperate hatred of national healthcare, and we can only hope the GOP screws up again.

        • …wonder if that’s what inspired truss & kwarteng to fire off their un-budgeted-budget & blow up a different national debt

          …because they were the first not to let the OBR run their numbers before making their announcement?

      • It is just a way of fundraising off of grandstanding.  No chance it could get past the Senate and Biden.  However, it will definitely get a few more rich assholes to open their wallets.

  7. Said before, will repeat: It’s a remarkable sales job the right-wing has done to make common folk afraid that they’ll somehow bear the brunt of the IRS’s wrath rather than the people who, y’know, don’t pay their taxes on their second vacation home in Fiji. They’ll also have to pay more to fill in those gaps! But, again, great marketing on that by Fox News.

  8. These are a couple of interesting articles about 5G and the Consumer Electronics Show CES (sorry brand overlords for mentioning the old name instead of how you IBMed it).

    https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/7/23541118/5g-ces-2023-qualcomm-iot-wireless

    https://www.lightreading.com/5g/i-went-looking-for-5g-at-ces-and-heres-what-i-found/a/d-id/782595

    Both talk about how litle play 5G is getting. At the last pre-Covid shows it was being hyped endlessly. Now, uh, not much.

    As they note, 5G phones are all over, but the hype for exotic uses for 5G are disappearing.

    There’s a funny bit in the second article about Musk’ tunnel and how it depends on human drivers putt putting Teslas, which points at why 5G hype is drying up. Useful applications of networking that go anywhere beyond the most basic things are incredibly hard.

    Using a phone to turn off a toaster is easy. Networking an entire kitchen to handle an entire family’s breakfast in a predictive way is astronomically harder. And the volume of single or narrow tracked wireless tasks is reaching saturation. They need the next level, but developers have no idea how to get there.

    • …5G was always going to be something of a damp squib iirc…it’s not like the 5G in wifi, where the G is for GHz…it’s just fifth-generation mobile data somewhere nearer the 3GHz spectrum, I believe…which, yes, came with added bandwidth allowing for greater throughput along with some other advantages & thereby some things being easier to do or worth doing over mobile networks that didn’t make so much sense before…but most of the fuss made about how everyone should want it always seemed to have more to do with how much the networks had been induced to overbid for licenses to bits of that spectrum

      https://www.economist.com/business/2021/01/02/why-american-telecoms-firms-are-splurging-on-5g-spectrum

      …& there’s a decent chance it’ll be superseded before they balance those books…what with increasing numbers of manufacturers turning to satellite connectivity…I forget quite where but somewhere like singapore leapfrogged to satellite data when most places were in or around 3G territory because the use case made it cost-effective since they didn’t have existing terrestrial infrastructure to upgrade…might not have been singapore …but somewhere archipelagic in southeast asia, anyway…so customers went from no mobile connectivity to world-leading speeds in one fell swoop…

      …it was indonesia I was thinking of

      The past handful of years in Asia have seen tremendous growth in usage of satellite to connect the unconnected. Satellite demand for universal broadband services was multiplied by five between 2016 and 2021 when it reached 160 Gbps across Asia-Pacific. This has been broad-based across many countries, but unquestionably there is one country that has led the charge, and as has been the case for satcom in APAC since at least the 1970s, that one country is the world’s most populous archipelago: Indonesia.

      https://spacenews.com/connecting-the-digital-world-by-re-connecting-in-the-physical-world/

      …in any case elsewhere the incremental generations have been a hard sell on the consumer end when most people just want their video feed to stream & don’t care a lot once it does aside from not wanting it to cost them more…which the whole overbidding thing pretty much required it to…so the fact that the apples & googles of the world are making noises about getting on the satellite bandwagon might turn some of those costs into write offs of a sort for the networks that bet big on 5G

      https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/162507-satellite-communication-smartphones-ntn-availability-specs-details/

      …could be I’m barking up the wrong tree…but the IoT stuff seems like it was one of the hooks they tried to hang the benefits of shifting to 5G onto…the better bandwidth management of 5G allowing for less bottlenecks/congestion & thus more devices could be simultaneously connected without downgrading the user experience…so why not wire every-damn-thing to a network…even if for a lot of people that just led to things like improperly secured “closed-circuit” stuff like security &/or baby monitor systems being hacked with trivial ease

      https://iapp.org/news/a/theres-a-website-that-links-to-73000-unprotected-web-cams-around-the-world/

      …if we’d gone in for mesh networking in a big way I guess that could have turned out pretty differently…but it creeps most people out as far as I can tell……what with seeming like a privacy nightmare where everyone is “in” everyone else’s systems/business…so the ways that a mesh-networked urban environment might be one of the infrastructure layers that could potentially enable a…well, perhaps not autonomous in the sense they’d probably need to be remote controlled from a traffic management hub somewhere…but non-manual-driving kind of vehicle system that actually could eliminate crashes & gridlock…is probably a non-starter

      …but at least once everyone’s phones link back to satellites beyond just the GPS thing we’ll all be much easier to track…so…yay, progress?

      • Right, IOT was the thing that got the big money really drooling about 5G.

        There are problems, though, like batteries which mean a lot of stuff dies if it’s not plugged in, which limits what and where things can go.

        And bigger, people get saturated with feeds and connections. There are only so many unintegrated smart devices people can deal with, and figuring out how to make an integrated system of them is fantastically hard.

        Big tech money kept waving away the challenges, but now that people are actually trying to figure out basic level stuff like keeping firmware across multiple devices synced they’re choking. That doesn’t even get into stuff like coordinating and prioritizing feeds for just a few devices, let alone the dozens that they want to sell.

        • …could be I’m just a contrary kind of a sod…but I guess I had that the other way around, to be honest

          …the internet of things was a pre-existing solution in search of a problem before 5G hoved into view…so it struck me less as providing something for proponents of 5G to drool over than a fig-leaf behind which to conceal their shame about having been suckered into a bad bet?

          …there never really seemed to be a logical reason why adding internet connectivity to everything was necessarily a bonus…or even not a distinct disadvantage…those adhesive labels with embedded wiring that allowed for tracking/inventory stuff got around the battery issue by being essentially passive in power terms…& that seemed to work pretty well for some use cases…but even in a world where a smart fridge seems like a helpful thing instead of a world of potential breakdowns that could interfere with the primary purpose of keeping things cold enough not to spoil…the same sort of connectivity in your coffee mug is entirely pointless as far as I can make out

          …it’s definitely a variable mileage thing, though…I know someone who is very much in the early adoption demographic where smart home stuff is concerned…they have the doorbell thing…& the networked thermostat dealie…smart lights everywhere…a bunch of networked cameras…some rooms actually have multiple smart speakers tied into different ecosystems…last time I checked even their kitchen clock was hooked into alexa…&…I just don’t get the point of pretty much all of it

          …the lights are pretty neat, I guess…& it can be convenient to be able to adjust the brightness/colors/what-have-you from your phone…but if someone uses the wall-switch they default back to coming on as regular-white-light at full strength rather than the state they were in when they got switched off…which can be mildly blinding if you’re not expecting it…& having a wall-clock show your alexa-based countdown isn’t actually much of an advantage over any number of kitchen timers that don’t take ages to configure every time something knocks it offline

          …the ecosystem/walled garden thing is also kind of a point where the reality doesn’t measure up to the billing…because everyone wants you to use theirs & thinks making sure it won’t play nice with others is how to make you only use theirs…it’s worked pretty good for apple over the years & vertical integration is always going to appeal to the people counting the beans…but the whole point of something like bluetooth was to get us past that kind of silo approach & let things be platform/OS/manufacturer agnostic…so a lot of it seems more like two steps back than one step forward

          …my suspicion is that in terms of the actual networking it isn’t as hard as it seems to integrate a smarthouse’s worth of usefully-connective devices…& a decent mid-to-high-end consumer-grade router these days is probably capable of handling that kind of set up without needing a cupboard-full of switches & other bits of network hardware most people don’t want to get involved with…but the desire to leash people to “your” suite of products routinely negates the potential of anything that would be optimal when universal…whereas to the sorts of people who find tinkering with tech fun…you can homebrew some pretty remarkable stuff with “barebones” boards & things like GPIO that have been around for donkeys years…the stuff people have managed with just raspberry pi boards is pretty amazing, for example

          https://pimylifeup.com/category/projects/

          …but what most end users want is very much the plug&play end of things…& the people hawking this stuff all want to be the only game in town…hell, even just looking at the way handset manufacturers & carriers conspire to downgrade functionality by baking their own bits of bloatware & associated crap into android devices it’s obvious that the kind of more-or-less-literally “joined up thinking” that would be required to make an IoT approach genuinely useful is anathema to business?

          • IOT definitely predated 5G — the big selling point for the megabillion investment in 5G towers etc. was that it was the critical infrastructure needed to make IOT real.

             

            There was also a healthy amount of marketing around speed on the consumer side, but I think companies knew few people would see a huge difference over 4G in terms of regular phone usage. They could have gotten the same marketing effect by spending far less on some relatively minor fiddling.

            Likewise there was some selling in terms of improvements for non-phone usages as a sort of Bluetooth or wifi alternative, but that also wasn’t a big selling point for the massive infrastructure costs.

            The thing that really got the tech and finance bros drooling was the IOT stuff that 5G could enable, but you point out how limited the field is. There just aren’t that many things worth sticking cameras in, and only a limited number of feeds people can handle. And 5G loses its value as a part of networking if there aren’t enough pieces of the network to make it worthwhile.

            IOT would only get its real usefulness from a much higher level of intelligent  integration, and it’s wildly unclear if that’s remotely possible, let alone wanted.

            In short, 5G got a massive capital push because tech/finance bros thought it would kickstart IOT, only to find out all of the things skeptics had been talking about all along were much bigger impediments than the networking issues 5G might address.

            • …I’d say there wasn’t any question that “companies knew few people would see a huge difference over 4G in terms of regular phone usage” because they knew most folks in most places weren’t getting *actual* 5G in the first place…not only did it only apply to new devices that could take advantage of it…the actual network infrastructure they’d undertaken to help pay for still isn’t available everywhere

              …given that it offered speeds/bandwidth that exceeded what some broadband ISPs could offer it could have been a game-changer for places with shitty internet…but the only places I ever came across it being used as a primary home router set up were in well supplied urban environments where outside of business travel you’d be better taking a wired fibre option anyway

              …the networks basically had a bidding war to try to preserve their market share & then had to backfill some kind of post-hoc justification for why their customers should want to help them pay down the tab that left them with

              …not that there isn’t potentially a lot more to the IoT approach to some stuff than, say, the metaverse…but…most of the interesting stuff about that would probably be better off using the internet equivalent of trunk lines anyway

              …I mean…there’s a dude who managed to stream video over just the slice of network traffic dedicated to DNS stuff…& linux distros that can spin up a whole functional OS in what by today’s standards is a tiny slice of RAM…so if it was worth it I don’t think something that mostly only applies to devices not connected to a static network/wifi access point was ever going to be the deciding factor however much marketing departments trying to hard-sell something they knew they  weren’t in a position to deliver on might have wanted folks to believe it could be?

  9. If nothing else, he will be the most interesting man in congress?

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/revealed-george-santos-got-shady-campaign-cash-from-italian-busted-for-smuggling-undocumented-migrants/ar-AA16ddb5

    This will definitely give them some ammo, will be frustrating as hell to watch them spin how this is treason but Trump’s was A-OK!

    https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/10/politics/biden-classified-documents-iran-ukraine-united-kingdom-beau-funeral/index.html

    I have gas in my kitchen and gas heat.

    https://crooksandliars.com/2023/01/watch-gas-stoves-become-yet-another

  11. Shades of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go! There is yet more from Hazza’s literary masterpiece, a passage where he reflects on one particular (and disturbing) aspect of his role in the Royal Family:

    He said he understood his role was to be a “diversion” and “distraction” from his brother — or to provide, “if necessary, a spare part” to him.

    “Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow,” he added in morose detail.

     

Leave a Reply