Grey Matters

“We have tried an experiment for the last 250 years and it’s failed miserably and we have to start a new approach. The new approach has to be guns should not be available to people generally, except if they have a significant need.

“If I could write the Bill of Rights over again, I would skip amendment number two. We’re the only country in the world that puts in our Constitution the right to bear arms. It’s an absurd thing to be in our Constitution, but it’s in our Constitution. We have to live with it.”

<http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/28/alan-dershowitz-2nd-amendment-an-absurd-thing-in-our-constitution/>

Dershowitz misses the point entirely. The “experiment” that he claims to have “failed miserably” created one of the longest lasting governments currently on the face of the Earth. The “absurd thing” – the constitutional protection of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (RKBA) – is very likely the single feature of our Constitution that has let us avoid military coups, dictatorships and other oppressive forms of government, unlike most every other country in existence today.

As “gun control” becomes more restrictive, the USA devolves to the point where oppression becomes more possible and thus more likely.

Dershowitz has no sense of history, ignoring the hundreds of millions of people killed by their own governments just in the 20th century, with the victims barred the right to own arms beforehand in every case.

Throughout the world, all the victims of criminals, terrorists, homicidal serial killers and all the others from which “gun control” is supposed to protect us (and from which Dershowitz ostensibly wants to protect us) can’t begin to compare to the orders of magnitude greater numbers killed by their own governments. 

Dershowitz feels that The People cannot be trusted with guns. The numbers, however, demonstrate that government cannot be trusted to wield sole power. It’s all right there in the history books, Alan.

“Political power grows from the barrel of a gun.”

“Power to the people.”

Apparently, Dershowitz does not believe in a government of the people, by the people and for the people, otherwise why would he want people powerless before government?

Currently on hold to talk to someone about my Nest thermostat.

The recording said: “Current wait time is less than fifteen minutes. This is very rare and we apologize.”

My Nest thermostat was going into Away Mode (raising the cooling set point) while my wife, a day sleeper, was present. So I disabled Auto Away Mode.

It was also not good at guessing our schedule, so I disabled that too and we’re using it as a non-smart thermostat for the time being.

That being the case, I raised the set point way up when we left town on Friday, expecting it to remain set high until I decide to set it down again.

Bored, killing time 300 miles away from home until we see a surgeon on Monday, I accessed my thermostat today to find it set to 74. Strange, since I turned off auto scheduling. A check of History shows that it “used more energy than normal” on Saturday, “due to weather conditions”. But it should have used little, if the setting had remained at 84 where I left it.

So, I’ve been talking to support, who has put me on hold three times so far, while they try to answer two questions for me.

1) Why, if auto-scheduling is disabled, did my thermostat set itself to a lower temp than I had set; and
2) How can I set it to Away Mode manually? The support site states several times that it is “easy to do with the mobile app” but I’ve been unable to find that setting. Once I find it, I suppose it will be easy to turn on Away Mode. But finding that setting is a challenge both for me and the support person who still has me on hold while she checks with others.

The answer I got to question one is that the thermostat will lower the temperature “if it sees it getting too hot“. Uh-huh. She suggested that I log in periodically to see if I need to lower the thermostat.

She checked with a senior tech and they confirmed that auto scheduling is indeed off. They have no idea why the set point has been lowered.

Finally, as I was finishing this post, Char from tech support called back. She’d figured out the setting of Away mode from the mobile app. It is indeed easy. What it is not is obvious. Not obvious that it is even a setting on the screen; it is not amongst the Settings.

Anyway, I was amused by the auto-announcement / recording that apologized for a wait time of “less than fifteen minutes“, it being rare and all.

Oops, The Donald said that John McCain is not a hero.

Opinion: “hero” is over-used. Anyone dying in the line of duty is branded a “hero”.

Now then, is McCain a hero? Is being a P.O.W heroic? Personally, I’d have found McCain escaping from a P.O.W camp more heroic than sitting it out for the duration. Yes, yes, I know it was no holiday, but was it heroic?

It may be politically correct to call McCain a hero, but is it correct correct?

Besides, John McCain’s “hero” wore off a long time ago. It is commonly known that one “aww shit” negates all previous attaboys. McCain lost his luster and his heroic mantle when he started voting like a Democrat.

The NBC Nightly News tonight noted, regarding that Chattanooga shooting of military recruiting sites by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, that “authorities are still looking for a motive“.

I burst out laughing.

Here in Page, Arizona, we are remote from the big cities of Arizona. There is no fiber-optic cable bringing us Internet. There is no cable coming here at all. Phones and Internet all get here via microwave, 140 miles of relay stations from Flagstaff. It is expensive to build, is fussy about the weather and you have to deal with the bureaucracy of the Navajo tribe to build it across their reservation.

Before the cable company brought Internet, most people had dial-up accounts and some had continuous connections via 2.4 or 5 GHz radio. The T-1 connections needed to service such connections cost in excess of $2,000 a month. Each.

Now, even the lowest tier cable internet connection is rated at 3-5 Mbps, though it’s impossible to get that throughput. The local (weekly) paper had an article on pages 1-2 explaining just how bad it is. (Capitalization and punctuation as in the original.)

“Nationwide averages 36.1 Megabits per second (Mbps) of bandwidth. Arizona averages 38 Mbps. Page has 1.5 Mbps, the same as Cuba, a country that’s locked in the 1970s.

“Netindex.com, a company that tracks global broadband speeds and measures and ranks internet service/bandwidth ranks Page dead last out of Arizona cities. …

“In fact most third world countries and isolated islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean have better internet than Page. Afghanistan has 2.5 Mbps, Uzbekistan has 3.9 Mbps. Iceland had 43.5 Mbps. Fiji, an island in the South Pacific has 13.3 Mbps. Nigeria has 6.0 Mbps. Ethiopia has 10.3 Mbps. Remember, Page has 1.5 Mbps.”

And my wife wonders why I resist getting a Netflix account. Heck, I can’t get YouTube videos to play without interruption.

I was on the phone with my cable company’s tech support people (300 miles away in Phoenix) a week before the article came out and they had me run a speed test. 1.4 Mbps down, 600 Kbps up. The test site (speedof.me) reported latency of 133 msec. The tech I had on the phone was appalled at the speed test results, convinced my home network was the problem. I’m supposed to be getting 3-5 Mbps.

The growth of streaming services is bringing the system to its knees. I cannot imagine a more inefficient distribution system for television. Drop cable? Not I.

1.4 Mbps is almost a T-1, which was great Internet decades ago. I can still remember the first time I hit 50 Kbps. These days I seem to have third world Internet.

Until 2010, I had my own servers (mail, DNS, ftp, http, etc) in my home for the sites I host. It was quite frustrating when the power went off, my servers kept running on a 2.2 KVA UPS, but had nothing to talk to, since the cableco’s equipment is not likewise on UPSs.

Given reliability problems with my network connection, and the cost of maintaining my own hardware and software, I moved my sites to a provider in Ohio.