ok, so i'm officially uncomfortable with sanders' age. the question mark in 2016 was about two terms. i can't imagine him serving until 2024. so, if you're going to be voting for the vp, why not just do it directly?

and, i'm worried he's going to split the vote.

so, i want a younger candidate. but, who else is there?

i've already ruled out warren. biden is a non-starter. see, but the thing is that i know their politics, they're understood quantities. the others are less clear.

i'm willing to listen to kamala harris, but she doesn't strike me as being very "progressive". that's a first impression. i'll give her a chance.

i'm a little uneasy with tulsi gabbard's history regarding social issues - she has a history of running as a social conservative - and would be hard-pressed to actively support somebody with military credentials. i think that civilian control of the presidency is kind of paramount. i haven't ruled it out, but it's unlikely.

kristen gillebrandt's takedown of al franken was shameless, and she's consequently a non-starter, in my view.

i'v historically supported people like sanders, kucinich, nader....even jello biafra. that person is currently not on any radar i've seen....

in years past, this is the role that canada was known for.

one wonders if we're in a giant switcheroo with mexico, right now.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-mexico/mexico-says-willing-to-mediate-in-venezuela-political-crisis-idUSKCN1PJ1WV

history doesn't record any migrations into the steppes.

stop.

look at a map of the old world. run a line through the 45th parallel. what colour are the people on top of it?

the luxuries of modern urban existence largely negate this. but, rural canada is about as attractive to your average brown person as siberia is.

if you want to people this region, you need to attract people that can actually thrive in it.

this makes more sense, and aligns more with canada's historical immigration priorities of getting people on the ground to stop the americans from invading. it seems like they're listening. that's good.

the thing is that rural canada is a cold, dark place, full of dangerous animals, eight month winters, angry natives (still.) and minimal access to services. despite our large expanses of forests, we're one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and something like 80% of us live 100 km from the united states border. this is a 200 year old problem that we've had minimal successes in resolving.

the one thing that worked was trying to attract immigrants from similar geographic spaces, which is why we have these spaces in western canada with large ukrainian, finnish, russian and norwegian populations. there's no longer a czar to escape from. russian nationalism is at a historical peak.

the reality is that population density is kind of sparse at our parallel, and in our climate. maybe that might change, over time; for right now, rural canada is a hard sell.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/hussen-immigration-rural-pilot-1.4990875

the x7b error is something that came up a lot when i did vista support, and what i learned is that the training documents don't really reflect what you see in real life. what it means is that something is interfering with the boot process, but it could really be anything. the error codes refer to specific  symptoms, but they say much less about actual causes. the actual truth of it is that there consequently isn't any way to really know what causes a x7b other than to look at the situation critically and take a bunch of educated guesses.

file system corruption was a good guess, because i think i rebooted during a chkdsk that i had forgotten i scheduled, and i've experienced some issues with the drive in the past. and, it did fix a couple of errors. if the laptop boots right up tonight, i may conclude that the chkdsk had some effect, or that the disk was otherwise corrupted in some way (i took the opportunity to reformat the drive, and that itself may have helped), but i'm broadly going to be left with a mystery.

and, the more mysterious it seems, the more that the boot sector virus idea opens itself up, as it would necessarily exist behind a wall of abstraction i can't get at. some kind of stuxnet-like worm could have jumped from the boot sector on the drive to the bios in the pc. and, you'll recall that my bios died on me, apparently randomly. but, a bios virus needs electricity to exist, and if one existed then whatever it was has been drained from the capacitors. the reformats also cleared out the boot sector on the drive, so i think i can state with some confidence that the disk is clear, at this point. is there still something hiding in the bios in the laptop? we'll find out. at the least, it doesn't seem interested in attacking my actual data.

but, i ruled out the boot sector as best as i could, using the tools that existed, as best as i could remember them - both the automated fix (which never works) and the command line tools. there was no sign of anything wrong at this stage.

the next thing to check is a "driver error", but that's an incredibly vague term that necessitates a huge amount of trial and error. i've seen x7bs connected to things like raid setups, sata drivers, video cards, chipsets - essentially anything at all that throws an error before windows loads is going to throw out an x7b. boot logging rarely works properly, and can lead to wrong answers if you take it too seriously. so, what you normally do in this kind of situation is try to figure out what changed and take a good guess that this is the cause. in this scenario, i was taking a hard drive out of a system that wouldn't boot and putting it into a known, working system where windows had access to all of the correct drivers. so, if it isn't booting due to a driver error, it has to be because the driver itself is corrupt or because something is corrupted in the registry - which could have been anything at all. and, the aborted chkdsk produced a potential cause.

so, i backed up the broken install, reinstalled to the questionable partition (to verify that a clean install was capable of booting out of the box - that i wasn't missing a driver, just in case i was wrong), then replaced chunks of the new install with the broken one, waiting for the x7b to come back. this allowed me to check for corruption in the actual drivers by copying them back; it continued to boot, indicating the drivers themselves were not compromised - i didn't have a broken driver, and the error must be in the registry.

normally, a tech agent would tell you to run a system file scan rather than backup, reformat and copy back to find the problem via trial and error. but, that wouldn't tell you what the problem is - and i wanted to know what was causing the issue. on top of that, an sfc would restore all of the system files i had altered or deleted, possibly to old versions from before an update. it's a brute force solution that might fix your computer quickly, but i would advise avoiding it, because it could cause further problems over time.

via a few sneaky tricks to get the right comparisons over trial and error, i was then able to determine that the issue was specifically in the system hive. but, that is narrowing the issue down to a wormhole in a haystack - i found the right file on the pc, only to have that file be a 30 mb database with thousands of entries, any one of which could be the problem. last known goods weren't working; both control sets seemed fucked. so, it's down to trial and error to pinpoint the problem, yet again. i was eventually able to find the problem in the services directory.

now, you can argue that this was obvious, and be right in some way, but miss the point altogether. it happens to be that the end fix was simple enough, and didn't require sorting through all of the more exotic registry keys. but, this is kind of just luck. if i had gone directly to the services key and checked trial and error, and found it was, say, a video card driver i needed to get vga, i would have then needed to check through all of the subkeys that the vga driver calls, which would have created a complicated tree. this is more of a question of approach than anything else. trying to pinpoint the cause using logic may have led me on a time consuming wild goose chase that would have ended with an offline driver install through importing registry keys - a crazily complicated thing to reverse engineer from scratch. approaching the issue with a gauche trial and error probably actually saved me a lot of time. call it the monte carlo approach to finding registry corruption. but, if you've studied search algorithms, you realize this - that a sequential or randomized algorithm can often find something much faster than a sophisticated data-driven model.

in the end, what i found out was that the registry wasn't corrupt at all - that nothing was broken and the computer was doing exactly what it was told to do. there was no way i could have guessed that, or at least not effectively. i mean, i could have set every single driver to ignore on a lark, but then i'd just have to work backwards, anyways. i wasn't looking for a corruption of data, i was looking for careless programming...

again: i still don't know why the laptop didn't boot. it's almost 7:00, almost time to find out. if it was a physical disk problem, or something in the boot sector, it's gone and i'll never know. if it's something else, i'll learn soon enough.

trump caved at the worst possible moment - when the backlash was at the highest point.

i mentioned that the backlash was obvious, but i maintain the view that it isn't sustainable. what i was getting across is that you should have expected the backlash to hit a peak and then fall quickly, at which point the democrats would be facing serious resistance. trump might not gain from it directly, but the democrats completely collapse when faced with apathy - and because trying to equate a border wall with white supremacism is stupid on a good day, it had no potential in the form of a popular struggle. primaries are starting, soon. democrats are going to want to talk about things that actually matter to them, like universal health care. support for immigration reform in a broader sense is a niche issue in a small geographic area that alienates potential democratic voters more than it revs them up.

but, now, he just looks like an idiot for wasting everybody's time, which is a kind of feedback cycle that the democrats can take advantage of in mocking him for the rest of the cycle.

i thought this guy was supposed to be an expert at negotiation?

the capitalists can only break the back of labour when we are divided.

we must stand united across international borders. if we squabble amongst ourselves, the bastards will win.

see, this is the stupid way to do this, because it buys right into the divide and conquer from the top - this is exactly what they want workers to do. competition just results in a race to the bottom, and the more that the unions push for this kind of thing, the worse off they'll be.

i know that canadian workers are angry, but boycotting their comrades in mexico doesn't make any sense. canadian workers are not in competition with mexican workers for jobs, they are in a class war with international finance that wants to maximize profits by slashing labour regulations. the solution is actually to stand in solidarity with mexican workers, and help them fight for comparable living standards, thereby taking away the utility of the mobility of capital.

it is the responsibility of labour activists and union leaders to teach socialism, not to give into fascism.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/oshawa-unifor-gm-plant-boycott-mexico-1.4992989?cmp=rss

actually, i think that muslim women should stop appropriating basic canadian winter wear.

it's called a ski mask. and, if you're going to bicycle in january in canada, you're going to need one.

i was able to track the blue screen down to a device driver set to reboot upon fail, which i'm willing to claim is an error on the manufacturer level, although that might be my microsoft training speaking. it was a driver related to the motherboard.

the thing is that i've taken this hard drive out of the laptop and had it boot in the pc before, so there wasn't any reason to think this would happen. further, the issue was not related to a missing driver - windows was able to find my hardware and boot into it just fine. in a scenario where windows has all of the right drivers available to it, it should be able to find the right ones and correctly boot - and it did. so, you shouldn't have to worry about removing the wrong drivers, so long as the right ones are accessible - and, technically, i didn't have to do that, either. but, somehow, this driver - which is needed to boot the laptop - got set to "reboot on fail" rather than "ignore on fail", and it was blocking the boot.

what should have happened is that the boot process should have found this driver, said "we don't need this" and just tossed it aside, then found the right driver and booted - that was my assumption, and what a properly installed driver does in this scenario. but what actually happened is that the boot process found the driver, said "i can't use this", stopped looking for something it can use and tossed out a blue screen.

the answer was to change a specific value in the registry from 3 to 0. that's it. it boots on the pc, now.

it doesn't answer why the laptop wouldn't boot, though. i'll have to figure that out tonight.

i've filed the complaint with the privacy commissioner online, rather than mail it. so, that's done. and, i'll have to get on with the calls on monday.

trudeau was supposed to be putting a focus on rehabilitating canada's image abroad in the face of so many years of disastrous policy from stephen harper.  and, he had a mandate to do this - it was a key issue in the election, a ballot issue, something that got people out to vote.

supporting the overthrow of a legitimately elected government in latin america - one that is in fact quite compliant - in order to wag the dog for an unpopular american president isn't exactly what people had in mind.

canada's reaction to the situation in venezuela is truly embarrassing.

i am going to reiterate my request for the ndp to focus on ousting chrystia freeland and sending her back to new york.

yankee go home, chrystia.