you can't eliminate corruption from capitalism, that's crazy talk.

so, i don't want to talk about ending corruption, i want to talk about abolishing capitalism.

it's always funny to hear the conservatives put this charade on though, as though they aren't 100x more corrupt, right?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/scheer-trudeau-morneau-step-aside-1.5661717

what's the update on if it's safe to open schools or not?

my previous position was that it was a reasonable step to take to protect the staff of the institutions, particularly older professors. that said, i acknowledged that the early evidence suggested the virus posed little risk to children, and appreciated the midway point taken by sweden, where they allowed children under a specific age (i believe it was 16) to go to school.

i think the evidence as it has unfolded suggests that 16 may have been a little too old, if the intent was to stop the spread of the virus - that 12 might be a better age cutoff. that said, it would seem as though there is increasing evidence to be cautious even about younger kids.

it would be great if we had this early result and it withheld all kinds of scrutiny, and we could move ahead with confidence on it; that doesn't seem to be the case, here. rather, it seems as though the virus can sometimes affect children, and we're not quite sure what the reasons for it are.

you have to balance the level of risk in sending kids back to school, and this doesn't strike me as worse than a bad flu season, when it comes to young children, specifically; if anything, this seems to be far less dangerous to young kids than the flu is.

but, the virus could very well change, and what i'm getting at is that there is some indication that it might have.

so, i'd proceed with some caution.

the rt number really needs to be calculated experimentally, and that's exceedingly difficult without widespread serological testing. the modelling hasn't been very predictive, because they haven't been able to get very good data.

i know that the public health people keeping push this number as something to base policy on, and if you could find it easily then it certainly would be, but this is in truth a relic of the theoretical part of their academic training; the difficulty in determining it to the accuracy required makes it a metric of questionable relevance, in actual practice.

so, could the rt number be a key indicator? it could be, yeah - but you'd have to find it with a high level of confidence first, because it's a very delicate metric, and that's almost impossible.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/could-rt-number-be-a-key-indicator-of-whether-we-need-return-to-lockdown-mode-1.5037351

so, i think i've managed to save everything important. that's the most important thing.

on second thought, though, i am going to move to a new drive, and relegate this one to emergency backup. i probably should have done that some time ago, i guess i just needed the smart test to fail to get me to do it.

i mean, that's what this is there for - to tell you it's dying, and backup and replace. i have a backup that i was intending to move to soon anyways...

well, the chkdsk seems to have produced the mysteriously cut out folder entirely in tact, although i can't really know. it didn't cough up any chk files, either. so, let's hope it's fine.

i know that this seems like a good time to do a back up.

i just need to go back to the story about the guy in training for vista support, who repeatedly asked about how to stop physical attackers, and the eventual response from the trainer:

"scenarios where the bad guys can actually physically get a hold of the computer are not supported."

and, it's actually kind of an old trope.

so, my attacker is my landlord and appears to also be a police officer of some sort. he can physically touch the computer, when i am out. there is really no feasible defence.

i can only shame the officers into knocking it off.

so, i was fairly certain i got attacked due to looking at what happened to my install partition, but looking at what  happened to my data drive just confirms it.

the data corruption appears to have been targeted to the directories where i stored specific pieces of data. i can't read a specific directory, where all kinds of tasty stuff is stored.

rest assured, it is all backed up, repeatedly....except maybe some of the most recent edits to personal files. so, i don't expect to permanently lose too much, even if it is lost. but, i'm going to have to run a chkdsk and hope it's not too garbled because reconstructing the folder could be a pain. and you never know what you forgot until you need it...

right now, it doesn't seem to be finding much, which could be good - it could mean the index file just needs to be rebuilt. and, indeed, it is now telling me it is recovering unindexed files, so i guess i should get these in a found folder - i just hope it's pretty close to what it was initially.

of course, the other option is it runs through silently and recovers empty space, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

just on the jefferson specifically, and the washington somewhat less so.

it's not that they weren't racist. they were racist, clearly, and especially when they were younger. but, stop for a second and imagine living in a reality where everybody is racist.

it's not that it was just business. it's not that the times were different. it's that everybody was racist - and that ridiculous displays of overt racism were normal. so, people express the norms that they are raised into - and jefferson and washington both did, absolutely. for that reason, they were both racist.

but.

jefferson, especially (although also washington, later in his life) were amongst the first members of the aristocratic class to wake up and realize just how horrific what they were doing really was. and, before you can take steps to make changes, you have to actually realize the need to do so.

so, when i stand up for jefferson particularly (and washington less so), it's really not meant to whitewash the truth - they owned slaves, they were racist. it's just to point out that they were amongst the first to question the system as it existed, and that we might still have slavery, if they hadn't asked those questions and put in motion some of the first steps to end it.

it's subtle. but, it's a part of understanding how we got here to realize that, in the larger unfolding of history, some of those guys were really on your side.

so, that's going to slow me down a bit tonight.

yeah, it seems like i pissed the cop off upstairs, so he's launching some kind of attack on me when i go out for a smoke. my chromebook just rebooted, too. lovely behaviour.

i've got the laptop drive reading via xp and it seems like the chkdsk had to recover the entire registry, so i'm not booting back into that install. i'm concerned about data integrity first, and then i'm going to format it and reinstall.

these attacks are generally more annoying than legitimately damaging, but it's an infringement on my personal space that is quite disconcerting coming from law enforcement, especially.

the second chkdsk got the partition table back, anyways. i tried to reboot and i'm getting bcd errors, which is something i understand well enough.

i'm going to just do a quick perusal through the drive to get anything substantive off before i try a reinstall, but i don't think there's anything substantive in there, anyways.

i mean, i know the smart error means my time is limited, but if i can back a few things up, i might let it crash.

the first chkdsk aborted, which left the partition unreadable. i'm also getting a smart error on boot-up.

this drive has been up an down for years and i have a backup but i don't know if i want to move to it just quite yet. i'm going to try another chkdsk first and go from there.