this is the grim reality that's playing out across the continent, as governments chase foolish strategies to collectivize the suffering, rather than target those who truly need protection.

to each according to their needs.

that's what the state should be developing policy around, right now.

if you weren't an anarchist before, the state's baffling response to this situation should turn you into one, now.

stay away from old people. please. for fuck's sake.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-covid-19-kills-nine-infects-34-staff-at-bobcaygeon-nursing-home/

just let me eat & shower, first.

i will be getting some more ram for the 90s laptop. 

but, for now, it's just too slow to be functional, even as a split gateway.

so, i'm going to need to work from the pc.

so, i've found a work around to this that should increase my productivity dramatically.

i did a last run through february, and found some more typos. yeah, i know. i'm ready to write that review, now.

and, once i get caught up, this time, i should be able to stay caught up.

the 90s laptop is locked down, but the restrictions on it are also apparent.

so, am i giving up on this horribly busted 7 install? i want a clean machine. maybe i can move it into a virtual machine, although....it's 64 bit, and that's a problem for me.

keeping in mind that i know the bios is probably infected, if i just completely format the boot partition and then mash a bunch of buttons, i should get the thing to boot from disc, if it can, right?

hrmmn.

let's finish what i'm doing first.

it's just that the next step is going to be very, very difficult to carry out on a machine with 256 mb of ram. i guess i get paid on tuesday. is the easiest thing to do to try to find some more ram? i've got the other machine running at 2, remember. but, i might be able to resolve that with a fresh install.

i never really got to reassembling it.

ugh. 

so, that means i'm inside for another day.

i think i have enough food to last another week, if it has to.

i really don't want to leave my computers unattended until i'm done what i'm doing and can easily reinstall if i have to.

so, i finally got the isp to escalate.

and, that means i'm going to give them a few more hours to figure it out before i rip the lines apart.

this could conceivably actually be a major breakthrough, if i can physically locate and dismantle a splitter in the line.

i've been complaining about crippling surveillance, now, since 2015 or so. before that, really. in hindsight, i was attacked almost as soon as i moved to windsor, i just didn't recognize it as such.

i've lost two laptops to what, in hindsight, seem like malicious attacks, already.

and i don't understand why this is happening.

"you only get 700 kb/s download speed?"

i don't download anything!

i'm 39 years old, and i look like i'm 23, but i think and act like i'm 84.

well, why else would the cops come in here when i'm gone and mess with my internet?

they installed something. the data suggests that whatever they installed is now producing an almost nonstop stream near the maximum data rate.

i don't have a fast internet connection. 35 gb is a lot relative to the infrastructure in place - nearing the maximum amount possible.

i have a 6 mbit/s maximum limit, which is about 750 kb/sec. in practice, i get something more like 700 on average.

the data from 2:00-8:00 is measured separately. let's say that i downloaded nonstop at 700 kb/s from 8:01 to 11:59.

then, i could have at most downloaded (700 kb/s)*(60 s/min)*(60min/hr)*16 hr = 40320000 kb.

converting this to gb means dividing by 1024^2.

that is roughly 38.5 gb.

as noted, the website claims i downloaded 35 gb. this would only be possible if somebody was streaming something almost constantly, all day.

....like a webcam, perhaps?

do you know what the usage stats are on the teksavvy website for the 28th?

35 gb downloaded.

who downloads 35 gb in 24 hours? i would need two or three months for that.

so, i'm going to have to find the splitter and dismantle it. that's ridiculous. what the hell are they even doing?

so, i'm on the 90s laptop, running firefox 24 on windows xp with 256 mb of ram. i wonder if that's upgradeable...

yes. i can take this up to 1 gb of ram,  if i can find the right kind. well, why not? it'll probably be around $5/stick at this point, if they don't pay me to take it.

hey - how much ram does your phone have?

i was able to transfer over my tabs from the 7 machine, although i can't pretend that i'll be able to stream anything on this, or really even do basic google searches. i'm really restricted to doing the precise task at hand, which is getting the blog cleaned up.

i can do basic internet tasks on the chromebook, for now.

and, i'm going to need to work out the last month by booting into the pc.

*sigh*.

they're going to get bored and leave me alone eventually, right?

to be clear: i am not uploading files anywhere right now. if i was uploading music or books anywhere, i would post the links. the only thing i'm "uploading" right now are posts to this blog.

there's no torrents or file-sharing apps running.

there's really no apparent explanation for this that i can see, right now, besides somebody fucking with my network, and no doubt from close quarters.

my landlord claims he's out of town, but i can hear and smell somebody upstairs. i think it's the stinky female, again, who i am fully aware is a police officer.

she's probably watching netflix and smoking drugs, because i'm so boring, and then uploading reports about how boring i am. like, fuck off then...

i had this on all day today, and you can see the dramatic difference in what is being sent to me v. what i'm requesting:

wan: 3076719 / 897149

lan: 1798325 / 1360694

wireless: 0/0

converting, 

wan: 4.4 gb down / 1.28 gb up

lan: 2.57 gb down / 1.95 gb up

wireless: no traffic

did i download 2.57 gb? did i upload 1.95 gb? that seems way too high, but by a smaller margin than i'm no doubt going to see in the official metrics. that tells me that i should be concerned about a hacker or virus, but i know that already. based on previous stats, if i downloaded 2.57, i would only expect to have uploaded around 0.5 or so. so, there is definitely some unexplained traffic on my router. i'm going to have to look at this when the rain clears up in the afternoon.

note, again, that 42% of the traffic directed to me was blocked or otherwise redirected by my router. that's indicative of some serious problems.

let me do some typing this morning and go from there. 

so, i napped this evening. i guess i needed some rest.

i'm going to try to get to work, now. for a bit, anyways. let's check my usage for the day, first.

this is an example of mutual aid - you help somebody when they need it, and they help you in return.

scheer is an idiot.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-19-coronavirus-pandemic-china-medical-supplies-isolationism-1.5513203

michigan has a population of roughly 10 million, and 110 deaths last i checked.

canada has a population approaching 40 million, more comparable to california (although less.), and roughly 60 deaths.

in fact, the number of cases in california and canada are roughly the same, but the death rate in california, which is much warmer than canada this time of year, is almost twice as high.

california has been under a state of emergency with strict lockdown rules for weeks. canada only recently introduced basic travel restrictions, in a fit of stupidity, to appease the scientifically ignorant, the evan solomons. no, he's the perfect example of somebody to not listen to. 

how long will this go on for?

i have a feeling it's going to be a long time.

is social distancing working in bc?

well, i don't see anything flattening.

but, all the reports i've seen out of bc are about how everybody's ignoring it.

this seems to be some kind of "alternative fact", perhaps intended to increase confidence in the system. but, this isn't a market; the virus won't react to confidence.

the most pessimistic analysis is that they're trying to distract because they know this is going to get bad.

but, i actually think the issue in bc seems to mostly be about retirement homes. as elsewhere, lax restrictions on entering these facilities is likely to have created some serious issues, and the government should be held responsible for this. but, that doesn't translate into an issue with the general population.

but, is this working? is it proof that the sacrifices people are making are demonstrating results?

i'd challenge the premise....

what do i do?

everything's closed.

and, if i march down the street, they're just going to put me in jail.

this is the best i can do, for now: i can raise awareness and wait for critical mass.

they could theoretically overrule section 2.

but, i've been clear to point out that i oppose these policies because they aren't evidence-based. and, i consequently would argue that these restrictions would fail the oakes test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_2_of_the_Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms

they can't even override this with the notwithstanding clause.

it's a complete affront against the rule of law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_6_of_the_Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms

rights to assembly are under attack.

so, what do we do?

stand up, fight back.

rights to free movement are under attack.

so, what do we do?

stand up! fight back!

i was hoping that i could get out around the side of the house to find the splitter or transformer this morning, but then i noticed it was raining - in fact thunderstorming - out. the forecast suggested it would break up around 15:00. so, i took a nap, and planned to get out in the afternoon.

while it's broken a little, everything is no doubt very wet, and it's going to start back up again in a few hours. i'll need to wait until tomorrow, i guess.

there's a high tomorrow of 17 degrees, but there's nowhere to go, and nothing to do. 

so, let me get back to cleaning before i get to work, like i keep planning i will.

i have a lot of posts to clean up, now. 

for those of you that cannot project images from data on your own, and i know it's most of you, and i'm not trying to be smug, this is the graph you need to see for south korea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_South_Korea#/media/File:2020_coronavirus_cases_in_South_Korea.svg

does that make what i've been saying more clear?

"we need strict rules to keep us safe from the virus"

yeah, that's what hitler and every other fascist, ever, said - just replace virus with whatever other excuse. jews. communism. etc.

don't fall for it. 

fight for your freedom. fight for your rights.

and, who enforces it?

a team of brownshirts?

do you get the conductor or driver to beat the passenger up if they argue?

it's the worst kind of panic-driven policy that you could imagine, the most blatant abrogation of a dedication to evidence, to reason and to science.

we can't be letting the government pass laws supporting this kind of mindless vigilantism without pushing back against it.

i sneeze a lot; i tell people i'm allergic to nitrogen, and nobody ever gets the joke. although, somebody once asked me before i took a hit of nitrous - hey, aren't you allergic to nitrogen.

it was a good joke before the hit.

are you going to leave it up to the bus driver to figure out if i'm suffering from allergies, have the common cold or have covid-19, based on nothing but his or her own intuition?

i couldn't imagine a policy that is less rooted in evidence or science.

what absurdity.

what nonsense.

these 1000 year floods are becoming yearly events up the st lawerence, and the ottawa, as well.

floods. diseases. authoritarian governments. it's almost like we're a third world country, or something.

https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news-story/9795555-high-water-levels-on-lake-ontario-expected-to-continue-into-2020/

well, it's at least consistent. 

the science has never upheld banning international travel, and i've demonstrated this point repeatedly - people just avoid the checkpoints on their journey from a to b. this is well researched and well understood. but, the logic only ever applied at the very beginning, before the onset of community spread, which was weeks ago. if you know the virus is circulating, banning international travel is just erecting a scapegoat, as you're just as likely to spread it via domestic travel.

so, it is at least consistent.

but, it's a consistency of failure - if you do something wrong in a way that affects a small number of people, expanding it to a greater number of people is just being more wrong.

why is our government looking towards fascist states to model a solution to this? does it not expose an alarming tendency to embrace authoritarian models? is this the worst kind of pragmatism, or is it just an excuse to carry through with long held aspirations towards fascism?

if you tell me i can't take a train or a plane, then i'll take the bus instead. this is a slower means of travel and will consequently infect more people. and, if you tell me i can't take a bus, i'll hitchhike at the truck stop. are you going to put me in jail? i'll sue you for infringing on my constitutional rights, as soon as you reopen the courthouses. 

again: we need to stop trying to control the spread of this. this is basically the common cold on steroids. have we ever been able to contain the common cold? would we ever be so arrogant as to try?

this virus is a new fact of life, and something we're going to have to learn to adapt to. we need rules restricting access to the vulnerable, not rules restricting the flow of people.

and, those that refuse to adapt, including those named trudeau, will die off in time.

he was doing well at first, really. but, he caved to public opinion, to appease the scientifically illiterate, the evan solomons of the world, rather than follow the science, as harsh as it sometimes is. and, i hope that the thuggish, hamfisted approach he's adopted is his undoing, in the end. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/coronavirus-covid19-canada-world-march28-1.5513542

i am shutting down though now...

yeah.

i'm convinced of the nature of the problem, and i'm convinced that the isp isn't taking it seriously, so i'm going to have to dismantle the lines myself.

when the sun comes up.

and before i take that overdue shower.

the isp has me logged at 14gb total usage yesterday, including 1.61 down/.19 up when i had the modem disconnected overnight.

my exact total usage according to my router was 2.35 gb downloaded & 1.06 gb uploaded, between 13:00 and 23:59.

i can't jump to the spoofed address yet, but we're another day from disproving the ddos attack as the cause of this. see, i don't know when that 14 gb is being logged. 

....although, i suppose it's hard to cram 12 gb into the 6 or 7 hours that happened before i renewed, given that bandwidth from 2:00-8:00 is counted separately.

it's pretty clear that i got cloned. but, i need to be rigorous.

you're going to see a lot of dying elderly people in michigan in the next few weeks, and they're going to blame it on everything and everybody they can find - kids at parties, restaurant goers, drug users, sinners, whatever the reverend says...

the actual reason that these people are going to die is that the governor refused to order the care facilities closed to the public. 

she's responsible. don't let her blame it on trump.

but, the president needs to be sending supplies, anyways. if he can...

stop.

were gretchen whitmer's policies effective in slowing the spread of the virus?

no, they weren't, were they.

did i tell you that they would be ineffective?

yes, i did.

so, clearly i was correct to criticize her policies as being driven by politics, rather than science, and being doomed to failure - because that's what was true, and that's what actually happened.

over here on the left, we've been pointing out for decades that, as bad as the republicans are, the democrats are often even worse. and, what's been happening over the last few years is that the democrats are getting worse and worse with each passing year, while the republicans are - very - slowly getting better.

right now, they're both terrible. 

send her the supplies - her policies have created a mess, and she needs them. then, make a big deal out of how incompetent her handling of the situation was, and how she needed to come begging to washington for help, because she couldn't figure it out on her own. i'd support that; that's reflective of reality.

but, don't make old people suffer for the mistake of the governor. that's not fair...it's not their fault....

and, there's no such thing as "central europe".

are the czechs eastern or western?

well, it's the sudetenland. obviously.

sarcasm aside, hitler was actually making sort of a valid point - while the area may have been cut out of the austro-hungarian empire, it really was a historically german region called bohemia within the second reich, named after a celtic tribe called the boii, like bavaria. while it was just over the danube, and technically outside of the general boundaries of the first empire, it was also a border region that was deeply dependent on roman hegemony, like the regions around the black sea, or the regions up and down the red sea; these people were barbarians, but only just barely, and they formed a core of the people that crossed the river, at the last end of history.

one could make the same argument about germany, of course - it was technically outside of the empire. but, it was the centre of charlemagne's reich, and the new focal point of western culture in the middle ages. the right argument is that germany became roman, and what i want to do is absorb bohemia along with them (this isn't necessary for the austrians, who were south of the danube, and in the empire the whole time), which is easy to do because they are in the second reich.

in fact, the same argument applies to the slovenians, who i maybe should have included, but didn't because i didn't want to open a can of worms. but, slovenia has a small enough population that you can throw it in there without messing around with it very much - it's 2 million people, and you're looking at another 632 cases and another 9 deaths.

the reason the czechs are considered eastern europe is that they were behind the iron curtain in czechoslavakia, but so were the east germans and nobody considers brandenburg or saxony to be part of a panslavic state. nowadays, the area is primarily slavic speaking, but it's also dominantly r1b, which throws kind of a wrench into it. but, if your argument is that it must be eastern because of the cold war, that's not taking a long enough view of history.

but, i'll acknowledge some ambiguity.

you might disagree. and that's ok.

i'm just closing down tabs.

in all fairness, the united states is not the size of any country in europe. italy, the uk and france each have around 60 million people, which is about the size of the great lakes megaregion, at it's broadest extent (including the gta). spain has about 50 million people, which is roughly equivalent to the bos-wash corridor, and germany has about 80 million which is more than any megaregion in the country, except for the entire eastern seaboard.

but, the european union as a whole has twice the population of the united states, almost. so, getting a good comparison means cutting a piece out of it.

adding up continental western europe is:

portugal -  10
spain - 47
france - 67
italy - 60
germany - 83
switzerland- 9
belgium- 11
netherlands- 17
luxembourg- 1
austria- 9
czechia- 11
==========
325

this is essentially the western empire, and excludes the british isles & scandinavia, which kind of make up their own region, as distinct from the area governed by western emperors, popes, carolingians and napoleonic pretenders. together, the brits & swedes have historically represented the opposition to roman hegemony in the west, wherever it's been localized (more frequently in paris than rome, over the last several millennia).

the population of the british isles & scandinavia, together, make up about 93 million people. there are parts of eastern europe that could historically be considered a part of scandinavia, but are better understood as satellite states of russia, in a pan-slavic kind of union, as a successor to the eastern empire. the baltic states are the ones in between.

but, what are the stats in this block of continental western europe that really is it's own thing?

(numbers from the wiki page, as of the date of this post - this is never up to date, take it as a snapshot, i'm trying to make a point)

portugal - 4268 cases / 76 deaths
spain - 56,197 / 4,145
france - 29,155 / 1,696
italy - 80,589 / 8,215
germany - 47,373 /285
switzerland- 12,311 / 207
belgium-  7,284 / 289
netherlands- 8,603 / 546
luxembourg- 1,453/ 9
austria- 6,001 / 58
czechia- 2062 / 9
=============
255296 cases & 15535 deaths.

& this is a little behind.

so, the united states has a ways to go before it catches up, still.

the 90s laptop is functioning. it's slow, and i might uninstall some plugins, but it works.

there is no wireless in this device, so i should be able to catch them, at least. there's no backdoor. and, the image is exceedingly minimal; i winlited it years ago to essentially only be able to stream. most cli tools are missing, outright. and, i can reinstall it quickly when i have to.

the windows 7 machine was not winlited; that might be a required step, moving forward.

after scripts, which includes dropping sysinternals exes in, the system32 directory is only 300+ items and 150 mb. the entire iso is 200 mb. it loads with about 40 mb of ram in system processes (and then has to load firefox...). so, this is a winlited xp that has the same resource footprint as a minimal linux distro, which is what i was going for when i built it - and what i'm going to default to if i can't get it to stay stable.

the internet is full of resource-greedy ad servers, but if i just stick to my blogspot site, i should be able to avoid them bogging the machine down. 

installing this image on my other laptop is going to be a problem because it needs sata drivers, and i can't see the install screen. i'd need to find a way to send the setup disc out through the projector out. i'm going to have to try, soon. i'm going to need to flash the bios, though, too. i want to get what i'm doing done, first.

so, i'm going to do some dishes, take a long overdue shower and then sit down and hopefully get some work done this weekend. maybe i can get out for some groceries some time mid week.

i just downloaded my router's log of my usage today, which is since 13:00 and is 1.5 gb lan traffic (downloaded) and 2.4 gb wan traffic, also downloaded. 

is it accurate? it seems like a lot of extra traffic on the wan, but 1.5 gb isn't that outrageous for me (2.4 would be a heavier day than today, i would think). that extra gb from the wan is probably all dropped packets. let's see how close it is to what they tell me.

i'm more concerned about the supposed 800 mb of upload traffic. i don't understand that. that doesn't seem right.

so, i'm going to powerwash this again and i'll be back in a few hours...

my off the cuff calculation suggests there's probably closer to 100,000 cases in michigan right now.

again: this is what you have to do, however slowly it's actually getting across.

1. suppression. 
2. mitigation.

3. adaptation.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-trump-generalmotor/trump-says-gm-efforts-never-seem-to-work-out-idUSKBN21E2J6

the president should allow the declaration, send the money and point fingers afterwards - being incompetent in her response to the crisis is not a reason for michiganders to die due to a lack of resources.

but, i've been starkly critical of what i've seen, and have to point to the facts of the matter, which are that the governor's reaction was not science-based.

the first thing she did was close bars & restaurants, while allowing hair salons, markets, places of worship, factories and, most crucially, retirement homes to stay open, as though this was being spread through extra-marital sex, or something. it was a bizarrely political reaction, designed to scapegoat a category of people; worse, it left open the most vulnerable groups to transmit the disease over the most obvious vectors of transmission - work, church and contact with seniors.

so, yes - whitmer botched this terribly, and she should be held accountable for it. but, that's not a reason to withhold supplies when she asks for them. it's not the sick peoples' fault that the governor is an idiot....

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/clinical-trials-begin-week-york-coronavirus-treatments-health/story?id=69817703

this is truly insane.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/clinical-trials-begin-week-york-coronavirus-treatments-health/story?id=69817703

some clear thinking.

good.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/us-now-top-site-of-corona-infections-as-a-control-plan-emerges/

it's a time buying mechanism - it's not a vaccine and it's not a cure, and this blood is a finite resource that you can't manufacture in a lab.

but, in some way it's another argument to maximize exposure - the more immunity you develop, the more blood you can collect.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/hospitals-in-nyc-will-start-testing-therapy-using-plasma-of-those-infected/

so, you want some solidarity? 

i've got plenty of it.

and, i have a lot of it for those that are dealing with institutions that are trying to restrict their speech.

if you're old or have aids or something that's one thing.

but if you're a healthy young person then cowering in fear inside right now is literally equivalent to not going outside because you're afraid you're going to get hit by a car.

it's not clear thinking.

and, our governments are not following the science.

we need to have broader public debate on this topic, clearly, because, right now, people are just being scared into doing what they're told, and that's not a healthy situation for a democracy. people need better access to better information to make better choices, and they're just not getting it, right now.

it is times like this when it is especially important to push back against authority, and challenge censorship - and especially important to stand together in solidarity with those that are being shut down or otherwise oppressed by totalitarian governments or corporate institutions.

mr. torvalds seems to be more concerned about presenting tips about how to work from home (something he understands) than presenting his views on how to stop the coronavirus (something he probably doesn't really understand, even if his expertise in writing kernels is somewhat transferable).

that's actually probably the right answer, even if it's a difference of scale less salacious.

i mean, talk about a surreal twist of irony.

here we are in 2020 and are asking bill gates, of all people, his advice in how to stop the spread of a virus, and it's trending, and people are listening and taking it seriously.

baffling.

i still think he could have beat trump, though. and i'm really not confident that biden can...

also: bill gates is an expert on virology now, apparently?

judging from the efficacy of his flagship product in stopping the spread of viruses, i'd suggest you consider the source.

i mean, c'mon. what's the logic, here? that he's famous? that he's rich? it's the one thing everybody knows about windows: you get infected as soon as you connect.

my windows xp machines have been practicing social distancing for years, now. and, i'm about to give up on seven and move to linux...

i bet linus torvalds has a more interesting take on this. i wonder if he even supports the herd immunity line; no, hear me out, this makes some sense, because it's kind of like an open source approach. in the world of linux, we get security through transparency. and, it actually works. let me look this up....

the point i was trying to make is that i think that these covid-19 parties are a good idea and that i do support them under a few conditions.

(1) people need to be aware of the risks. there should be a bouncer at the door with a checklist that is sending away people that are old or have conditions.

(2) if you're certain you have it, you have an obligation to avoid vulnerable people, and you'd better take it seriously.

i don't want to sit in my room for the next two years; it is in my self-interest to support tactics that will help speed up this process.

so, i am in solidarity with the people organizing these parties, so long as they're following certain guidelines.

nowadays, we have a chicken pox vaccine, and if you live in every developed country except for one of them, you should have relatively easy access to a vaccine for your child.

chicken pox is also a disease with a low but substantial mortality rate amongst children, even if it's curve is more similar to covid-19 than it is to the flu, which is particularly hard on children.

i would argue that it's a better idea to vaccinate your children for chicken pox, in 2020.

however, we don't currently have a vaccine for covid-19, and we know the death rate amongst young & healthy people is on par with every day occurrences like crossing the street - it would be a risk, but it would be on par with the kind of risk that we effortlessly embrace on a day-to-day basis.

blocking an article like this is the kind of mob mentality stupidity that twitter is known for, and just another reason to stop using it. this is in fact a well reasoned article that brings up a number of questions that a large number of health experts have been articulating for quite a while, questions that we need to answer. shutting down the debate doesn't make it go away.

and, if people are not given forums to have these kinds of discussions, they will eventually take matters into their own hands.

again: the labels on the spectrum are what they are. but, as a libertarian leftist that values freedom and data, it is clear to me which side of the spectrum is ignoring science and giving into fear and authoritarian thuggery, and which is trying to follow the evidence in order to maximize freedom in the best way that it can.

here is the article:
https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/25/how-medical-chickenpox-parties-could-turn-the-tide-of-the-wuhan-virus/

& get off twitter already...

but, again - the longer it takes to ramp up the number of cases and get immunity into the general population, the longer this lockdown goes on for.

if you want this done with asap, you should be doing what you can to immunize yourself by exposing yourself, if you are confident you can beat it.

and, if you care about the old and the weak (and the fat and the stupid.), stay away from them while you're building your immunity.

# of deaths in the united states: ~1693

# of actual cases at estimated mortality of 0.1%:  1693000

and as a percentage of the population: 0.52%

# of deaths in south korea: ~150

# of actual cases at estimated mortality rate of 0.1%: 150000

and as a percentage of the population: 0.29%

this is perhaps expected, as south korea does have a universal system.

the growth rate in the united states is much higher right now.

but, if you follow what the science says about how south korea reacted to this, you should expect the small increases we've been seeing to drastically pick up fairly soon.

that said, because south korea is much smaller, both geographically and in terms of population, the challenges it faces are much less, and you probably shouldn't expect it to be quite comparable. the south koreans would have to be doing particularly badly to see these numbers stay roughly equal, and that's perhaps a pessimistic suggestion - no matter how poor their tactic, you would expect them to do a little better due to the geography, if nothing else.

but, you need to be careful about what the media tells you. 

this space exists to keep them honest, and i'll keep doing it.

population of south korea: 52 million (2017)

population of united states: 326 million  (2017)

factor: 6.3

# of known cases in south korea: ~10000.
% of population: 10000/52000000 = 0.00019 = .02%. 

# of known cases in the united states: ~100,000

% of population: 100000/326000000 = 0.00030674846 = .03%

"i'll get you next time, gadget"

no, you won't.

this is a good test case. really.

what's an empirical analysis of dr. claw's actual success rate in getting gadget? 0%. 

now, you could argue that if dr. claw tries infinitely many times to get gadget, he'll succeed eventually, so long as the actual probability is higher than 0. ok.

but, there's only a finite number of episodes.

so, what is the probability of dr. claw getting gadget this time, given that he failed n times before?

lesson: you need to be careful of statements made by authoritarian bodies.

again: you want as many people as possible to get this as quickly as possible in order to burn it out as fast as possible. you don't want this to drag on until we get a vaccine - that will lead to a higher death toll, in the end.

but, you do want to test aggressively so you can track it properly, and ensure it isn't mutating or recombining too quickly.

and, you do want to take special steps to ensure that particularly vulnerable groups are kept in strict isolation.

i know: i'm yelling at a lorentz equation. this already happened. i'm not a trafalmadorian, i can't see at all points in time. it doesn't matter anymore - we already made the mistake of not acting aggressively enough to protect the weak (and instead trying to stop the spread, so grandma can go grocery shopping on her own...the stupidity...), and we're going to see the consequences very soon.

but, the poor response in the united states may actually work out to it's benefit, in the end.

president gadget dodges another bullet, perhaps. gogo gadget corporate bailout....

current mortality rate in the united states: 1.53%

current mortality rate in south korea: 1.49%

current mortality rate in germany: 0.69%

they were slow to react, but the americans do appear to be testing, now - and they should see their mortality rate fall below south korea's within a few days.

it is of course the mortality rate that matters when talking about a pathogen like this, not the total number of cases.

now, what's the average cost per patient?

i agree that the two most important things to do right now are:

(1) keep young people away from old people

(2) cancel all religion, permanently

but, what's the use of banning visitors if you let the staff in and out?

again: what's defining the public response to this issue across the board, everywhere i look, is this tendency to pay lip service to science, while more or less discarding it in practice. and, the proper analysis of this at the end of the day is going to be that we overreacted in all of the wrong ways, and we underreacted in all of the wrong ways because we lacked the intellectual tools, collectively, to process what it means to follow what the science says.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-at-least-16-ontario-nursing-homes-have-covid-19-cases-yet-families/

if this mess with the virus goes on for a while, i'm going to find myself with some extra spending money, and i guess i'll have an opportunity to go down to a pawn shop (or maybe on ebay) and see if i can find a new system board as an access point.

i've basically decided that i shouldn't boot back into the laptop's hard drive until i'm able to do a fresh install. maybe i can parallel into the bios at some point, but if i can't reinstall then i can't use it.

i just want to stop wasting my time on this and get back to work. let's hope the new install on the 90s laptop is a stable enough workaround to let me do that for a bit.

so, i ended up spending yesterday morning trying to figure out how to get a new ip address, which turned out to be rather difficult. in the end, i decided to just turn the modem off again around 14:00 - and i got one when i finally reconnected after 13:00.

my calculation of my total bandwidth for the calendar date of the 26th would be around 650 mb. my isp is trying to tell me it was closer to 8 gb. 

i have a new ip address now, so we'll see if it tapers off today. again - i was physically disconnected for the first 13 hours of the day, so i should have exactly 0 bytes of usage over night, which i can measure from 2:00-8:00. that will at least help me understand when the ip dropped.

but, what did i do?

after i turned the modem off, i slept for the afternoon and was up a little bit before midnight. i've had to think some things through carefully, regarding what's actually going on here. what exactly are the police doing, here?

as mentioned: this started after i got a spike in electrical usage when i was gone. if changing my ip address doesn't help, it must be a cloned mac address or otherwise some kind of split in the line.

this is just relentless. they're insistent. and, i don't remotely understand the purpose. all they've managed to do over the last week is watch me try and figure out what they're doing to spy on me; when surveillance loses it's stealth, it becomes pointless. like, i know...

but, how do i adjust? what do i do?

they've tried hacking in over wireless, and i managed to mostly get around it. so, now they've apparently spliced my cable wire, and i haven't the slightest clue what they're actually doing - only that a large amount of data is moving from some unknown source to some unknown destination, and it's being assigned to my account, incorrectly.

i think i have to face the facts with this broken laptop that i keep trying to bandaid over - it's too infected, or too compromised, or too vulnerable. i keep booting back into it, and thinking i can just fix it enough to use it, but it just keeps getting worse; the more time i spend trying to bandaid over it, the more i realize just how bad it really is. the last time i booted it up, i found all kinds of scripts in the system directory of what i designated as my clean install that i'm certain were not there before, indicating that somebody has logged into my desktop and dropped all kinds of scripts into it. they must have the password. so, i decided that i'm not comfortable connecting it to the internet until i understand what's going on with the bandwidth.

i can powerwash the chromebook between uses, but i want to stop troubleshooting my computers and get back to finishing what i'm doing. this chromebook is intended strictly for traveling & emergency use and doesn't have the software i need to do any actual work on it. so, what windows machine do i not mind exposing to the storm? the 90s laptop...

i mentioned previously that i realized the 90s laptop appears to have been hijacked, but i decided i didn't care because i don't do anything on it of any interest. i just connect to youtube and watch educational films. does the government want to know about that? whatever. but, the more i looked at it, the more i realized it was more or less the same kinds of things. 

there's a difference, though - i can reinstall the 90s laptop with a winlited xp, and that's what i decided to do. but, i had to tweak it a little, so that's what i spent the morning doing.

the source for this is a physical disk, and it comes with a script that i initially wrote in 2008. this machine will not be difficult to hack, but i'm less concerned about stopping them from hacking in and more concerned about ensuring that i have a clean image i can push down to undo it.

i have no interest in getting into a hacking war. that's fucking boring. i want to work on my art, i don't want to be a hacker. and, i don't imagine i'd have the aptitude for it, either. for all my focus on math, i'm well aware that i'm starkly right-brained - i'm quite confident that i would lose a hacking war pretty badly. and, i could get taken down over the next few days more than once.

i don't care. i want to focus on my art, which means i need to have an easy way to reinstall from a stable source, and i think i've got that.

i'm going to get something to eat, and may sleep for a while. hopefully, i can get to writing that man or astroman review before midnight.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109370/

trump'd better be careful about putting troops on the border.

we still have the corpse of john candy to fling, monty python style.

....although it's maybe more about all of those south park republicans.

we shouldn't have closed the border, and the people that made that decision are responsible for any consequences resulting from it and need to be held accountable for it. that was colossally stupid....

this will blow over, of course. but, you can't be treating trump like a rational actor, and you should have figured that out years ago.

let me turn the log on and see if i get anything other than the usual stream of dropped packets.

i mean, it would be kind of stupid to ddos me.

i don't have a server running. i'm not even torrenting. my router seems to be able to handle it. it's just increasing my bandwidth.

there's nothing to knock offline. somebody would be missing the point.

yeah.

what if i'm under a denial of service attack?

and, if i am, why?

so, i quickly found the cd-r i remembered getting with the modem, but it literally just has a ten page pdf on it. useless...

i do have a chrome book here, and i should be able to log into a terminal. i don't know how much access i'll have. i'm a windows user; i'm used to being admin, i'm not used to being told i can't do things. linux has this weird hierarchy that i've always found to be sort of oppressive. but, if i can get into there from here...

have i ever done this before?

the answer is no.

i worked very briefly for fortinet, but i was really a new hire. some manager from st. louis came in one day and fired me because she didn't like my hair; she called me a "worthless musician". well, she struck me as a corporate nazi, so we can agree to dislike each other, that's fine.

but, i didn't build up the kind of experience working there that i did working for vista. i was with vista for almost a year; i didn't get through training with fortinet.

so, i have a vague idea of how to terminal into this, but....

if i can find a good sight, i should be able to figure it out. and, hopefully, it can give me better logs....

it's times like this when having all these old machines around is useful, it really is.

the best machine for me to use to try to hack into this router is the 90s laptop. let me get that swapped over.

according to the isp, i downloaded over 13 gb of data yesterday, which is obviously wrong.

my modem came with a cd-r. let's see if i can load it on the chromebook.

i also just checked my electrical, and i got my new bill with the credit on it.

the credit was $56.86. yeah. so, my balance went from $67 to $10. i knew this would work out, eventually....one more, and it's a credit rather than a balance....

if i understand the billing process, and my average bill is around $18-20 with time of use pricing worked in, then i have the following variables in my new calculation:

usage: $20

fees: $30

fees: $1

rebate: 31.8%
oesp: $45

...and my new bill is:

($20 + $30 + 1)*(1-.318) - 45 = -$10

also, this:

https://globalnews.ca/news/6723418/ontario-hydro-rates-coronavirus-covid-19/

if that cuts usage down to more like $10-15, and the fees to close to $20, i could see rebates closer to $20-25 a month for a while.

that while give me the credit i need to use my gear for free.

this is of course not very fiscally responsible, but i think we've learned that putting a price on carbon doesn't work, and doesn't actually have a point. just convert the fucking grid, already.

ontario is actually pretty good, with almost all of the generation being generated carbon-free. we should close the remaining natural gas plants immediately. but, we have no coal; it's mostly hydro & nuclear.

so, i ate very slowly, trying to avoid the issue, and have finally logged into the teksavvy account.

it's not updated, yet.

what does my modem say, though, for the evening? well, it's interesting:

wan: 718810 packets ~ 1 gb

lan: 389351 packets ~ 0.57 gb

so, i'm receiving almost twice as many packets from the internet as i'm transmitting locally. that should be wrong....

i watched a little bit of youtube, so i can handle if today is in the middle of my normal usage range - 1-2 gb, total, from the start of the day. the lan option seems more accurate, if not somewhat higher than i'd guess. we'll see what the site says.

i should get a full log for today, and we'll compare.

what if i can explain the situation by pointing to this external wan traffic? can i do any diagnostics on this modem? can i find logs?

i've been pointing out for months that it seems like somebody is trying to control my machine remotely. is this some actual proof of it, if i can get into the modem and find it? 

if i turn the modem off, and the attacker has my mac address or ip address, will their attempts to log into my machine end up as traffic logged by the isp?

i've turned the pc off for the night. i'm going to work on this, instead.

again: i wish i didn't have to do this, but i clearly do.

i mused a little about the potential of immunity to the new virus as a consequence of exposure to the previous one - they were getting partial binding from the old antibodies, so maybe getting that pile on effect would have been easier than starting from scratch. white blood cells will do that, they'll hunt in packs, and take the pathogen down like lions swarming an elephant.

(technically, they're cooperating in neutralizing open electrons. so, if the first antibody gets 10 out of 15 electrons, maybe the second antibody snags the rest. remember - this is a geometry problem first. it's a physics problem second, and a chemistry problem third. then it's a biology problem.)

so, in the end, maybe that was a factor in the slower ramp up.

but, i need to be absolutely clear when i state this: the immediate suppression, followed by the steep onset of disease, is exactly what the literature would have predicted would happen in these east asian countries, and exactly what actual experts would have warned was imminent. if you look, you can even find a few msm articles - even if they didn't get shared on social media.

so, you shouldn't be surprised or disappointed. it was both predictable and obvious; this is actually well understood.

this is why i got off facebook. it's an algorithm for the spread of ignorance. you're not immune to that because you're an enlightened liberal, or something - your shit stinks just as bad. really.

these ideas like "flattening the curve" and "singapore beat covid-19 by embracing fascism" are just the anti-vaxxer movement of the present. and, i hope you like that comparison - i hope it sinks in, and i hope it leads you to do some independent research next time, instead of just singing with the choir.

now, we need to look at what the scientists are actually saying, which is that we need to adapt.

why were cases so low in east asia (excluding that spike in south korea) to start?

because the people that live in these countries are so fearful of their governments that they evaded care until it was too late.

that's the truth.

deal with it.

the reality is that people flouting the "east asian model" are really just spouting ignorance spread by social media, and have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

guys.

listen.

the transmission of disease is a well studied topic. this is not a new field. and, the reality is that the experiments have already been done and that it's very well understood that this "east asian model" doesn't work, except maybe to slow statistics about the onset of the disease (perception, rather than reality), at the expense of a steeper curve in the end.

we could look at empirical studies, and i'll leave it up to you to look it up. i'm a logician, remember. i'm happy to present an argument. why doesn't this work?

because you just end up fucking scaring people. the context that these policies are generally employed within are authoritarian states, where if you end up in a cell, you're probably never getting out. if you think the cops in north america are scary, imagine getting arrested in a country like iran....

so, when you set up these checkpoints with armed guards with thermometers, people go out of their way to avoid them, thereby making it more difficult to control the spread of the virus.

the initial numbers look promising. "look", observers will say "we have found and isolated the cases and neutralized the problem". but, it only appears that way because the actual carriers are avoiding the checkpoints like the plague.

what the literature actually states will happen if you employ this model is that you'll get a steep curve in the end, once the effects of evasion have made themselves known. and, that is what we are seeing right now in countries like singapore and taiwan - as well, increasingly, in south korea.

i know that there were some media reports early that pointed to these countries as models, and that these reports were spread widely on social media. this spread of information over social media has consequently constructed a narrative about an east asian model, and the need to surrender individual civil rights for the benefit of collective security.

but, these reports were written in ways that are starkly ignorant of the literature on the topic, and everything that we know about how diseases transmit.

we want to be able to track disease, that is true. that means that we want people to come to the checkpoints, rather than avoid them. and that means we want to avoid scaring them, by doing things like publishing their credit card history on social media, or putting them under forced lockdown for days or weeks.

it's your governor or premier that threw you out of work.

is your governor or premier compensating you for it?

what do i think about the stimulus package in the united states?

i don't tend to oppose things like emergency loans, or research & development. but, it would appear that the package is indeed a little skimpy on help for workers.

it's not that i don't believe in class war - i do. there's a class war, and the capitalists are constantly fighting it, and workers always need to act as though they are directly in conflict with capital, even considering malatesta's critique of syndicalism.

but, my position on something like this is that the package is unbalanced - i thing the state should be funding everybody, right now.

the canadian government is in a minority parliament, but the opposition is a lame duck, and they are deciding to collaborate, instead. the balance is maybe a little better, but it's the same basic concern.

there is a big difference here, though - our health care system may actually end up mostly prepared. they're spending a lot of money on ventilators, for example. 

i'm more interested in getting this thing done with asap than i am in arguing for bigger and bigger welfare checks. and, i'm more likely to criticize local governments for overreacting than i am in criticizing the federal government for undercompensating.

cancelling church services is actually the kind of targeted action i'm calling for to protect the elderly and.....psychologically vulnerable. 

but, if donald trump is a religious demagogue, he'd be a suicide cult leader wouldn't he?

so, maybe you should go to mass, and drink the koolaid.

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/25/headlines/defying_medical_advice_trump_calls_for_return_to_normal_and_packed_churches_on_easter_sunday

no, the swedes are smart. good for them. let's hope they don't cave - and let's hope their population follows the logic.

this isn't ragnarok. you just need to follow the data...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/swedish-pm-warned-russian-roulette-covid-19-strategy-herd-immunity

we will need to see on the order of 20 million cases in canada before this starts to slow down. 

and, we will need to see on the order of 200 million in the united states.

why do i continue to cite these low statistics - 0.5% mortality rate of those infected - when the official numbers are higher than that? won't msnbc be angry with me?

because i'm statistically literate. i know better.

i think it's widely understood now that there's a lot of people evading medical attention, which was initially a point of contention, and is why it's impossible to actually stop. it's also why travel restrictions are more about the government finding a scapegoat than they are about actually reducing the spread of anything. a proper empirical analysis would be that we should stop trying to prevent this thing from spreading and spend more time adjusting to the new reality: this is here to stay, and at-risk people are going to have to change their lifestyles as a result of it. you can blame vacationers or foreigners all you want, but it's not a science-backed policy position. this thing is everywhere, and it's going to be everywhere forever.

so, you want to look at the cases that come in as a representative sample, and then build a model from that representative sample, not just take the data at face value. unfortunately, self-selection produces kind of a shitty bias.

i've suggested doing random sampling to get a real understanding of this...

most of the places where there are a lot of cases are dealing with overburdened health care systems, which means the weak cases aren't getting tested, which is producing these high morality rates. the highest rates are in italy, spain and iran, right now - over 7%. china has reduced this number quite a bit, but the fact that it still has a mortality rate much higher than 4% indicates that there are a lot of unaccounted for cases.

there are some countries that have seen very low mortality rates, as a consequence of extremely aggessive testing.

in germany, the mortality rate is 0.6% - still, even after almost 40,000 cases. austria, which directly borders the affected area in italy, has many fewer cases, but the same 0.6%.mortality rate. norway is at 0.5%, after 3000 cases, as are the australians after 2400. after less cases, but still more than 1000, the czechs are at 0.4%, luxembourg is at 0.6%, ireland is at 0.5%, chile is at 0.3% and pakistan is at 0.8%.

and the jews, who have border security that works, are outsmarting everybody at 0.2%, after 2369 cases.

these are the best health care systems in the world, clearly. but they're also the countries doing something right. but, careful - they might also be doing things that are wrong or ineffective. causality is not the same thing as correlation.

nobody else has 1000 cases yet, which seems arbitrary, but you could work this out using the central limit theorem - there is an n that is enough. i'm guesstimating 1000. other countries are nearing an n>1000, and many of them have mortality rates <0.5%, too.

but, i'm chery-picking, surely! no...

if x (i can't use fancy greek letters here. sorry.) is the true mortality rate, an example of the actual term statistic, then you'd have to estimate it being less than anything observed due to the nature of the study. if you do two hundred real-world hospital studies, x would have to be some kind of limit of the minimal values, because even in the best real-world hospital studies you're going to miss patients. if you did studies in places like dorm rooms or fitness centres, you'd overshoot the other way. so, i'm pointing out a sampling bias, here, i'm not cherry-picking the best results. if you're lucky, you'll get pretty close - but it's essentially impossible to overshoot it.

so, that would mean that the actual mortality rate is less than the 0.2% in israel, unless you think that the jews are the master race, or something. no, really, that's your argument.

so, generating a bound for x, x<0.002, means that these other countries that have mortality rates higher than that, and especially higher than 0.01, are missing a very larger number of cases, and this is likely to get worse as the cases spread. they don't know know where they are....

there's an upside to that, though.

if there are 7500 deaths in italy, and the true mortality rate is 0.1%, that would indicate that there are over 7.5 million cases in italy, right now - not the 75,000 they know about. most of these will be in the lombardy area.

the population of lombardy is 10 million people.

they may be nearing herd immunity, and that's when this slows down and stops - not in spite of their failure at containment, but because of it. 

it would also indicate that there's only 35,000 cases in canada, and we have a very long way to go before this burns itself out.

i don't know what's really going on.

but i have a bad feeling about it.

and, i suspect we might have to end this by standing up for our rights in a way we've only experienced in history books and films.

you're stuck inside.

you want to read something?

read the handmaid's tale first. i don't know if the tv show is any good, but the book is eerily relevant.

i need to eat, and then i need to fight back the anger and depression and hate and try to focus on bandaiding up this laptop as best as i can.

trying to lock down the whole world to save the weakest 0.05% was fucking stupid.

and, if you thought it was going to work, you're a fucking idiot.

the governments are going to blame it on the people for refusing to react. but, this is disingenuous, and deflective - they need to take responsibility for a failure in policy.

it's not up to the people to do what the government tells them, it's up to the government to interpret reality correctly and act intelligently to protect the people that need it.

but, we will probably learn all of the wrong lessons, and we will probably make the same mistakes again.

if they die nice and quickly, this needless economic mess should at least become an opportunity, for some. if it drags on, that won't happen.

welcome to collectivism, kids - the system where we all suffer equally, for the benefit of the weakest in the herd.

due to the tactic they've chosen, this isn't going to be over in the summer - unless we revolt.

if we stay quiet and do what we're told, it might not be over until the end of next summer.

the tactic that they've taken is going to drag this on for months. the only conceivable exit strategy is to wait for a vaccine, which will be ready in mid 2021 if we're all lucky.

so, you should probably plan around things like the 20201/2021 school year being outright cancelled.

....unless they just die quickly, so we can all move on.

so, i'm officially bored with this virus, now. 

governments across the board did everything wrong - when they should have been focusing on protecting the weak, and letting immunity build in the general population, they instead tried to turn the issue into some kind of stupid exercise in empty solidarity.

in the process, they've ruined the economy for no reason - these actions were not useful, and we're going to watch all of these old people die, reardless of how many bars we close.

now, the best we can hope for is that the weak, fat, old and stupid die quickly so the rest of us we can get on with life asap.

i'm going to be keeping usage down until i figure this out, so i'm turning this chromebook off for the night, until after midnight.

i wish i could break down the stats hourly, but teksavvy only gives you one number at the end of the day.

how can i log this? i don't know.

i know that all data through the connection should go through the router.

i connected for a few hours this morning and sent a few emails and made a few calls. i might have used 100 mb of bandwidth. max. it was probably closer to 20.

i then turned off the router, but left the modem on. we already know i'm getting bandwidth with the modem off. does it get worse if i leave the modem on, disconnected?

i turned it back on at 17:18, and my router oddly logs packets rather than bytes so i need to make a rough calculation. i just rebooted it at 17:45 to correct the clock for dst, so it's restarted again. but, there were about 30,000 packets over that roughly half hour of basically doing nothing, indicating about 60,000 packets are streaming in when it's idle.

the maximum packet size in tcp/ip is 65K, but i'm transferring over ethernet so whatever packets means, here, is much smaller. i don't know how to ask the router what packet size it's using. it's probably less than 2 K. so, a max calculation would be:

(60,000 p)*(2 kb/p)*(1 mb/1024k) ~ 120 mb/hr when it's idle, or very mild surfing.

120*24 < 3 gb. as can be seen from my stats, that is still a lot for me.

i just reset it again. so, we'll determine what the bandwidth from 18:00-00:00 is, and then start fresh tomorrow.

i'll need to spend the night experimenting with certain things in the image, mostly stopping files from loading and disabling hidden drivers.

there is one way to salvage the situation - maybe the server is a day behind. if that is true, i should expect it to come in at 0 tonight.

so, i'm going to get back to doing surgery on my laptop.

what do i do?

i don't want to open it up.

there's a large number of system files that i basically just want to delete, in order to wipe out the backdoor, but i'm going to need to try a few things, slowly, first.

i was doing well this morning in clearing it out, but i made a mistake in shutting down an svchost to clear out some authentication software. it didn't recover, and i'll have to reimage.

that may have been overkill. but, i'm going to see what happens when i try to boot with the file deleted.

we're going to do this on the pc, where concerns about backdoors are minimal.

i'd rather be doing something else, but, as we can see, i'm dealing with an escalation, here.

i may take the hard drive with me next time i go shopping.

when i've broadcast concerns, in the past, about trudeau having an authoritarian streak, i wasn't concerned about the power of the purse.

i think i've been clear that i support government spending in the best of times.

i've also received some further clarification that the divisional court in toronto is for real closed - that there is nobody in the office, phones aren't being answered, etc. it's closed, closed, closed.

*shrug*.

i have to ultimately get the judge to look at the evidence, and i don't think he actually did. it feels more like they're trying to make some kind of sophomoric point about consent - as though human rights legislation doesn't exist, and all of these clauses about filing without notice aren't meaningful.

consent is a nice idea, but it's not what our laws are written around, and i would not agree with you if you were to argue that it should be. i can come up with a thousand examples where insisting on consent is unjust, or even doesn't make any sense.

i'm suing the police for harassment - it's not a situation where consent motions are reasonable, it's a situation where i want to prosecute them as aggressively as i can. we're not in a cooperative relationship; they are my opponents, and the trial that follows will be adversarial in nature, through as many appeals as is necessary. there is no compromise at the end of this, the court must rule, and somebody will be wrong when they do. it's a civil case, but it's a rule of law issue, and the ultimate outcome i'm seeking is that charges be filed against the officer.

so, i filed a motion under 38.0.6. you can look it up. it's very specific. it doesn't require notice, and it doesn't stipulate the need for consent. it's the staff that fucked this up; all evidence suggests that the judge never saw the motion. but, the ruling is essentially that i file under s. 37 instead of s. 38, which is just sort of blatantly stupid. so, what i'm going to need to do is file a motion under s. 37 to ask the judge to comment on the validity of s. 38. and, we can do this with notice, if we wish to waste everybody's time - but, in the end, we will need to file this properly under s. 38 like i did in the first place, or not file it at all. but, if the judge won't accept the validity of s. 38.0.6 - a rule in the book - i think he has the burden of proof to explain why not. so, i'll give him some slack on his bad legal judgement because i don't think he saw the motion, but i have filed a complaint with the cjc (which has been received and is under review) for refusing to look at the data. and, we'll see what they say about that - and whether i have grounds for appeal to the divisional court, if it justifies it. if this drags on, that might be the best way to get a new judge....at the least, he's going to have to excuse himself, due to a conflict of interest, for right now.

i also filed for leave under rule 61, which asked for the consent of the court, which was required to file a document that has no specific place in the rules; there is no set of rules to follow regarding how to file a reply factum. the court instructed me to ask the parties for consent, but the issue at law is if the court consents, and not if the other parties do - the court can decide i can file if i get consent, if it wishes to evade the issue, but it doesn't change the nature of what the actual legal question here, is. and, as mentioned, it comes off as kind of sophomoric and childish.

worse is that i can get all the consent in the world, and it won't matter, because i can't legally consent, myself - i will need to present the issue to the judge and have them rule on the matter, regardless, because i am legally disabled. my consent is irrelevant, in context.

so, the immediate issue in front of the judge when this issue comes back is to have the court acknowledge that i cannot sign the legal consent form required to file a consent motion, and will need to put any and all such issues in front of a judge, to rule, due to my legally disabled status.

as mentioned repeatedly, the weak link here is the coordinator, who keeps filing everything incorrectly. i am entirely confident that i filed both of these motions correctly, but i can't do the coordinator's job for her, and if she's going to misrepresent or falsify motions then i just need to gather the evidence for the judge. this will eventually come out right, in the end.

right now, it's looking like my hearing will need to be rescheduled, and my bus ticket won't get refunded. i'd be happy to exchange it. so, i'm going to ask about extraneous conditions.

but, if i'm stuck with the ticket, i'd might as well go in with as many motions as i need to get this fixed - and i'm a lot harder to misrepresent when i'm standing in front of you.

i need to state again that the numbers in south korea - which spiked due to a religious ceremony, and then fell once that particular issue was under control - are not as good as some news reports are suggesting.

it's perhaps taken a little longer than might be expected, but the numbers are stubbornly trending higher.

if that one short-term outbreak hadn't happened, which was easy to contain, they would really look just about the same as anywhere else - just shifted a little.

it's when it starts spreading undetected that it gets hard, and that's what looks to be setting hold.

again: these tactics should fail. 

for the moment, turning the modem off doesn't accomplish anything....

i don't know if you're even in town or not, and i'm not going to write a long email, but i'm going to give you an opportunity to explain the situation.

i noticed the other day that my internet usage had gone up dramatically starting on the morning of the 13th, which was a friday. the first picture is me realizing this:

my internet usage is extremely low, because i just spend a lot of time typing, or reading the news. i don't have a cell phone. and, i'm not exaggerating when i say i haven't watched a movie or a tv show in 20 years (the last tv show i watched regularly was the xfiles when it was still on fox, and i think the last film i saw was the first lord of the rings). when i stream, it's low quality educational videos or news reports at 240 p on youtube, because my computer is too old to handle anything more than that.

so, these are tremendous spikes.

my usage is generally around 20 gb or so. february was mildly atypical and got me all the way up to 40, still much lower, but i'm going to show you january and december for examples of more typical usage:

so, i somehow downloaded more on sunday than i do in an average month.

the next thing that i checked was my hydro. is that unusually high too, all of a sudden? it's not. but, i did notice something unusual on the morning of march 13th, when the increase in usage developed:

you'll notice there was a peak around 2:00-3:00 am. i was in detroit at the time. if there was a rise in electrical when i was in a different country (something i could prove by accessing my nexus records, which indicate that i entered the united states around 7:00 on thursday night and came back at about 8:00 on friday morning), it would mean somebody must have entered the unit.

so, i have at this point put together a strong hypothesis that somebody came in here and essentially spliced the lines. how can i test this? one way would be turn the modem off, and see if can cut usage to 0.

so, i turned my modem off around 11:30 on the night of the 23rd and didn't turn it back on again until this morning. that should man my data use for the calendar date of the 24th would be exactly 0. however, i checked it when i logged in and this is what i found:

so, somehow, i used over 9 gb of total bandwidth - even though the modem was turned off.

this would indicate that somebody has installed something to my line in parallel, and for what reason or purpose i do not know. but, i have contacted my isp, and i'll need to get a tech out here to look at it.

if you can explain what happened, maybe we can skip the tech - or maybe we can make the process easier when the tech arrives, by already knowing what happened.

on first glance, it would appear as though you're just stealing my internet. but, i'm led back to thoughts about law enforcement, and left wondering what is actually going on.

the other option would be that maybe you made a mistake and put the wrong lines together (i know that mess of lines is a mess), but i would need it corrected relatively fast.

see, everything else aside, i only have a 200 gb limit on my account, on what is a $25/month internet fee. it would take a long time to download that much at 6 mbit/s, too - which is my max speed (about 100 kb/s). at an average of 9 gb/day being siphoned, 9*30=270. that is way more than my limit of 200 gb, before i even use it myself. maybe somebody thought that this wouldn't be that much and i wouldn't even notice, but the actual reality is that this is an up to 50x increase on my normal usage of less than 1 gb/day. i'm glad i caught it, because i otherwise would have ended up with an expensive bill that i can't afford to pay.

and, you know, i could have even been willing to sell you 100 gb/month for a small rent reduction - which clearly isn't enough. 

but, as of right now, there is a tech coming, and if something has been spliced, we're going to find it. if you can provide any information upfront, it could save us some time. 

for reference:

regarding the laptop...

i'm convinced somebody unscrewed it and installed a chip on the board. it's loose in places that indicate somebody took it apart. and, i'm noticing all kinds of files are running again that i thought had been deleted.

so, i'm back to square one on that.

as for the chromebook, it is powerwashed, and you can't do much better than that if you want to wipe something.

so, it's going to be a few more days before i can get back to work, unfortunately.

so, we've got a mess here, it turns out.

i turned my modem off around 11:30 or so last night - more than enough time to ensure that nothing would carry over. and, i turned it back on again around 4:30 this morning, more than enough time to make sure i didn't jump the gun. and, this is what happened:

so, even with the modem off, i have 9 gb of transfer.

the modem is physically turned off.

the only possible explanation is a spliced line. so, i'm going to have to call them to get a tech in here.

and, i'm going to send the landlord an email to ask him to fess up.

so, i cleaned up the blog up until the man or astroman? show on the 24th, and there are clear signs of intrusion, so i'm turning off the modem and reimaging a bit early.

i'll talk to you again on the 25th.

we're having some definitional issues, again, apparently, and i'll just briefly point them out and then continue to define words properly, rather than the way they're used in the backward american political spectrum.

so, conservatism is a right-wing ideology that believes in centralized power and authoritarian leadership. historically, the democrats have been the conservative party in the united states, and it is governors like gretchen whitmer and gavin newsom that are producing the most conservative reactions to the crisis.

liberalism counters conservatism by opposing centralized power and authoritarian leadership, insisting instead on individual freedom and civil rights. it argues that markets are the best way to do this. historically, the republicans have been the liberal party in the united states, but they have flirted with a kind of nihilism over much of the last hundred years that has seen them cynically move to the right of the conservative party.

what that means is that the political spectrum in the united states allows you to choose between the democrats on the right and the republicans on the far right.

what is a liberal - or a socialist - to do? they may weakly lean towards the democrats, but rarely with any conviction. but, they mostly end up disenfranchised, and forced to try and figure out which individual politicians are lesser evils, regardless of party alignment.

in the current crisis, those who are advocating stronger government powers and controls are conservatives and fall on the right of the spectrum; those that think that civil liberties are paramount and that the situation doesn't justify curtailing them are liberals and fall on the left of the spectrum.

the language produced by the media will no doubt be very confusing.

but, the political hats that i wear - hats like civil libertarian, anarchist, socialist and social liberal - are in absolute agreement: individual civil rights trump collective security, which is the statement that defines the left of the spectrum.

we'll have to see how key voting groups like young people react to this and align, in the end.

i need to get as much as i can done before 00:00, because i'm shutting down for 24 hours.

focus, jess.

i can do some offline writing....

i've been clear that i don't see any reason to think that slowing the spread of this thing is desirable - i think they should protect the elderly, and otherwise just let it run it's course.

i'm a civil libertarian, and i believe singularly in the direction of science. authoritarian government lockdowns based on flimsy evidence really aren't my cup of tea. 

this discussion is many weeks too late at this point; it's kind of hard to undo what's been done. if he eases up now, all the damage he created was essentially pointless, but you don't expect better from this guy.

they need to key in on specific groups, regardless, and they're not. if they keep up the fascist lockdowns, and they don't implement smart policy, then people are going to die, anyways. so, you'd might as well ease up. and, if they key in on the right groups, then there's no reason to make the many suffer for the benefit of the few.

this is no doubt not his reasoning, so it's a stretch to suggest i agree with him. but, i don't see the scientific justification underlying this, i think we've given into fear and unreason, and i agree it should end asap.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/politics/trump-coronavirus-15-days-social-distancing/

i've had the modem turned off all day.

no response from the isp, yet. they've indicated that they're busy. i can wait a little, but not too much.

i'm going to powerwash the chromebook, and check the other account. i'm going to try to get a few things done this evening. and, then i'm turning the modem off for the full calendar day of the 24th.

i can catch up on sleep.

the spike in electricity on the morning of the 13th is consistent with somebody messing with the chromebook. so, it seems like they came in, realized that the laptop was disassembled and fucked with the chromebook, instead.

the device is easily reset, by design.

let's hope it's that easy. but, i need to be able to prove to myself that all traffic is being directed through my own modem, and not going through some secondary path to the cop upstairs.