KILL ALL HUMANS!

BenderKillallhumans

After careful consideration and study.

The inevitable conclusion is, to solve climate change we must kill all humans!

After all, the California Delta Smelt, The Wyoming Sage Grouse, The Spotted Owl, and innumerable other species deserve to live in peace with their habitats intact.

As I’m sure you’ll all agree, the only viable solution is we must all die.

To that end, extermination booths will be set up in your neighborhood. When you see the booths, be the first of your friends to step in and die with dignity. It’s quick, painless, and fun!

StarTrekATasteofArmageddon

Persons not stepping into the booths voluntarily, will be hunted down and shot.

Do Mother Earth a favor, kill yourself!


That’s what goes through my mind every single time I read about another EPA or BLM report describing the plight of some creature, in an attempt to guilt us into … WHAT?

Accepting Climate change is real? Irrelevant! 

Paying some stupid ass carbon tax? Pointless!

Turning over yet more control of our daily lives to a bunch of bureaucrats? There it is! That’s the reason for the guilt ridden landfills full of newsprint.

bueaucrats

I get pissed off.

Species come and go all the time on this planet. They have done since before we came down from the trees, and they’ll no doubt continue to do so long after our bones and our civilization is dust.

Stop guilting us!

If we all resolve to live taking actions daily that minimize our impact on the planet, things will get better.

Stop pumping out children that you simply throw away!

forest

That goes for you Catholics, and you folks in India too.

Stop rushing out to buy the newest latest and greatest of whatever widget is out this month to replace the widget from last month. Come on folks, how much packaging do we really need to fill our landfills?

If you’re so damn worried about carbon emissions… Allow next generation reactors to be built. Take a look at a documentary called Pandora’s Promise. I’m not saying base all public policy on one documentary, but stop dismissing a viable energy source out of hysteria not facts.

Here’s an idea, plant landscaping that is appropriate for your environment. Cacti are adapted to grow in the Southwest for a reason, your weeping willow and Kentucky bluegrass is not!

earthafterhumans

My point here is that we should all be less wasteful, not because it’s mandated, or because we’re terrified, or guilty, but because it simply makes good sense.

If you’re less wasteful, and adapt your habits to the natural world instead of trying to make the natural world adapt to you, things are likely to work a lot more smoothly. 

An additional perk is that climate change becomes part a natural cycle and it no longer has to be terrifying. It no longer matters if its man made or not, because we’re all by choice, making decisions that minimize our impact.

The alternative is…

For the good of the planet…

KILL YOURSELVES!


Update 6/10/2015

And once again I’m ahead of the curve.

I can’t believe that there’s actually a “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement”.


http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/06/10/wipe-out-humans-to-save-the-earth-group-says/

WIPE OUT HUMANS TO SAVE THE EARTH, GROUP SAYS

Crowd

 

Human beings urgently need to wipe themselves out to avoid ecological catastrophe, the leader of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement has claimed.

In an interview with the Big Issue magazine, Les U Knight (pseudonym assumed) said that the extinction of humanity would be a good thing for the planet and that humans need to reduce their numbers before they run out of resources.

Mr Knight, who in his day job is a substitute teacher in Portland, Oregon, said that his main motivation for wanting to see the extinction of his own species was “preservation of Earth’s biosphere”.

“Diversity is the strength of the biosphere and the fewer species there are, the weaker it becomes. We’re pulling strands from the web of life and at the same time putting more pressure on it due to our increased consumption.”

He added that increased human population was making it harder to feed the poor around the world.

“People are not doing too well. Two billion people don’t have potable water, almost a billion are experiencing food insecurity – we used to call it hunger – it’s not a pretty world for half the people on the planet and it won’t be easy to improve their lot as long as the progress is gobbled up by our increased numbers.”

One solution, Knight said, could be for the West to introduce a “one child policy” banning couples from having two or more children, as China does, although even this may not be enough.

“One is twice as good as two as far as procreation goes but our population momentum would take a while to start decreasing. In terms of energy consumption, when a North American couple stops at two, it’s about the same as an average Indian couple stopping at 30 or a Bangladeshi couple stopping at 97. At least China has done a lot to control their increase. There would be 400 million more of them today if they hadn’t instituted their policy.”

Knight followed his own logic at the age of 25 when he underwent a vasectomy. He claims he “never regretted it for a moment” and “I only wish I’d done it earlier.”

“It’s dangerous having those wigglers,” he added.

If humanity does not voluntarily wipe itself out, Knight warned, it will face “involuntary extinction”, either through ecological catastrophe or nuclear Armageddon:

“The end of humanity would be good for humanity. That seems contradictory but as we phase ourselves out, the lives of those left behind would steadily improve. And those of us who don’t exist won’t know the difference.”

Not everyone is convinced, however. Dr Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs told Breitbart London: “Apparently, Les U Knight believes that his statement is incredibly profound and thought-provoking, but it is really just a slightly more extreme version of the lame old eco-miserabilism which has been the conventional wisdom among Western ‘intellectuals’ for more than a generation. Fretting about overpopulation and overconsumption will guarantee you approving nods at every dinner party, but fashionable though those run-of-the-mill greenish views may be, they are theoretically and empirically wrong.

“Over the past three decades, we have seen a spectacular decline in global poverty. If you use the World Bank’s definition of extreme poverty – having less than the equivalent of $1.25 per person per day – then as recently as in the early 1980s, over half of the world’s population were extremely poor. Today, that share has dropped to just below one fifth.

“Poverty is not ‘caused’ by overpopulation. Poverty is the natural state of mankind. Up until about two hundred years ago, virtually everybody in the world would have been poor by the World Bank’s standard. It was only then that we began to grow out of poverty; initially only in what we now call the industrialised West, and over time, more and more countries joined in.

“Malthusians like Knight have an unrealistic view of economic activity. They see human beings as akin to locusts, but human beings are not just passive consumers of whatever they happen to stumble across. We are active problem-solvers, we are innovators, and we are producers.

“For example, the reason why the world can sustain a much larger population than ever before today is that agricultural productivity has improved so massively. It could improve much further still if we dropped our childish paranoia about innovative farming techniques like GMO, and if we moved towards untrammelled worldwide free trade in agriculture.

“Population growth is irrelevant. What matters is institutions and economic incentives. Countries move out of poverty to the extent to which they adopt the basics of a functioning modern economy: the rule of law, impartial courts, and secure property rights. They also need to allow the free formation of market prices, so that prices can act as signals of scarcity, providing incentives to overcome that very scarcity. With rising prosperity, we also grow more resilient to natural disasters, and we can afford to adopt production techniques that go easier on the environment.

“If we continue on anything like the current trend, we may well come close to the eradication of poverty within our lifetime, although doomsayers like Knight will no doubt find some other ‘impending catastrophe’ to moan about.”

Follow Nick Hallett on Twitter:  or e-mail to: nhallett@breitbart.com

One of these days Alice, POW! Right to the moon

oneofthesedays

No, I’m not advocating violence towards women. I’m just frustrated by the constraints of this future. When I was growing up, the Future was about everyone being closer.

Yet our technology is having the opposite effect. There’s far less human interaction today, than in my youth. 

The weird thing is that in our technological isolation, instead of allowing each of us more freedom of thought and expression, is often being used to enforce an homogeneity that is rather oppressive.

At least Ralph and Alice talked to each other in the same room.


The isolation was highlighted for me recently because I needed some help with a misbehaving bit of software. So I went to the manufacturers website looking for a phone number to give them a quick call.

I know,, I know, I obviously thought I was still living in the 20th Century, instead of the 21st Century. Phone numbers? You want to call us?

Villan1

Ohhhh No Mr. Bond, I expect you to email!

In reality, I ended up on a chat application. Thrilling! At the end of the Chat session, I got to answer a survey too!

After waiting for about 5 minutes, I ended up with a “Technician” in chat.

I explained my problem, He, She, It? put me on hold then came back after a couple more minutes. Then sent me a PDF file that was instructions concerning how to fix my problem. 

Okaaaay, the instructions were all about Windows, and the PDF had a link back to the website for the solutions to the Mac version of the problem. Unfortunately, their explanation of the cause of the problem was in no way true on my system. So I couldn’t follow the instructions to resolve it.

It was only an activation number that wasn’t being accepted. I figured there was something simple like wiping a configuration file then trying again. Apparently that was beyond this chat “Technician”. 

He/She/It,  couldn’t understand that I couldn’t execute their instructions because the initial condition didn’t exist. After being put on hold again (Hold on Chat?) He/She/It determined something was wrong. DUH!!!

Chats

After more pointless back and forth, I deleted the application, then re-installed it from the 6 original CDs. After the reinstallation, the application accepted my activation number without question.

It dawned on me that the Chat does a couple of things for companies.

The person only has to be able to type English. It doesn’t matter if they have a thick accent. They have to be able to figure out what document to send and then they hang up. That’s exactly what He/She/It did to me.

Once I confirmed that I’d gotten the PDF, He/She/It was gone.

southparkIndiansweat

Great way to save money and time for the corporation. The “Chatters” are in India or wherever. They’re probably being paid a 1.00 a day and after only 10 years are eligible to be considered by their company for an H1B1 Visa!

Lately, I’m feeling more and more on my own when it comes to problem solving. The really sad part is that I’m pretty high functioning when it comes to computer crap.

I hate to think of my poor mother chatting away with someone expecting help.

Welcome to the future.

Funny what missing a Zero can do

 As regular readers know, we switched to a satellite internet service.

Recently I’ve also been fighting my way through some computer woes. That battle led me to doing a clean install of my operating system. Yep, I flushed everything, reformatted my drive, then reloaded the OS. No big deal, except that downloading fresh copies of every application I purchased, and all the security updates happened to be significantly larger than 10GB.

This too isn’t a big deal if you’ve got 100GB of upload and download per month.

Except that I don’t!

I gllanced over the shoulder of the other half, looked at a little graph, saw lots of green and promptly misread the number. in fairness, the data was represented in MB instead of GB so it wasn’t like i misread the difference between 10 and 100. It was the differnece between 9756.00 and 97560.00. Still bad, and God knows I wish the bank would make that kind of mistake, (in my favor) however it’s easy to do at a glance.

I told my computer to download everything! After all that’s what cloud services are for, right?

OOOOPPPSSS!

Now we get to find out what the internet service means by “Slows your service down” for the next 15 days. My bad!

Getting dirty looks from the other half .

Maybe it was a bit excessive to be sitting on the couch, watching Netflix at the same time I was blowing through our 10GB monthly allotment in 2 hours. Maybe I should have double checked the plan just once more before pressing “ALL“. It’s all data through the wire now…

I hear a certain woman in my head, “What does it matter at this point anyway?”

My computer is currently re-installing applications. I know I have the serial numbers for all those non-cloud apps somewhere around here. Its just going to be a challenge to locate them all. In the mean time, my iPad is substituting  for my computer.

This probably means that I’m going to make the mistakes in spelling that I complain about all the time. Perhaps, this is simply a case of not being able to beat them – so I’ve joined them.

Have a great day and think kindly of me as I serve my pennance in digital Hell.

Tax day blues

TaxDay

Happy April!

Only 13 more shopping days until we’re fucked by the IRS again.

I’d suggest stocking up on personal lubricants that stay slippery for a very long time.

The IRS has been under fire and well, they’re likely to be wanting to pound out some frustrations!

AriForceOne

I know, I know.

Without the IRS, the festering behemoth that is our government wouldn’t have money.

Money that they’d be able to continue to misappropriate.

Money they’d be able to use to pay off or support the failing governments of our enemies.

Who knows? Stompy Foot might have to close public parks and national monuments to pay for gas in Air Force One.  After all he’s got a “T” time at Indian Wells next Sunday.

GolfCourse

Yeah, I’m for small efficient government, does it show?

Formatting… Formatting… Backing up… Formatting… Backing up… wasting time…

HardDrive

Ya know, we have it pretty darn good.

Our disk drives are super dense, super fast, really small, and amazingly reliable.

Except when they’re not!

Because of their data density, sometimes it’s really hard to figure out that the problem you’re chasing is a slightly corrupted file that you only access once in a great while. 

Or that a subdirectory contains a group of corrupted files that you never access but that the system knows are problematic and is trying to fix instead of telling you, “Those files there are a steaming pile of crap… Sorry!”

Old HD

I’ve been chasing a subtle wonky problem around my network for a while. Most of the time I was able to minimize the issue to the point that I forgot about it.

With the recent changes to the network, I caused a serious disturbance in the force! The disturbance was bad enough that I wasn’t able to minimize the problem anymore, its just as well, I hate “now ya see ‘em… now you don’t issues.”

Now that I’ve had to truly address the problem, I think I’ve narrowed it down to a bad drive in one of my TimeCapsules. This is of course the drive with backups dating back 4 years. Thank goodness I had a copy of that backup on a portable drive or I’d have been really bummed out.

GreatDisturbance

I don’t know what the Time Capsule drive was actually doing, but I can tell you that it wasn’t backing up properly, and was sending all kinds of network broadcast messages.

Those millions of messages were impacting network performance across the board. Ironically, none of those messages actually said anything like, “Hey I’m in trouble please fix me!”

Sigh, there are times when I’d love to slap some engineers! Then again I can see that they’re trying to make things simple and user friendly. I just wish Apple, in all their endless forums would publish something like “For those of you that want to see all the errors… Set these parameters!”

It would make things a lot easier sometimes.

NewTimeCapsule

After a lot of troubleshooting, isolating the drive and now reformatting it, my network is operating at expected and acceptable speeds.  Why reformat it? I’m just curious if any part of it is salvageable. Its possible that there’s nothing wrong with the drive, just that the data was corrupted by a power failure or something.

An example of the difference in speed is that 1GB backed up every two hours (Before Isolating the drive). Now 1 GB backs up in just a few minutes. You don’t really think about speed across your network until you have over 300GB of data that you want to back up. Then suddenly its a really big deal. 

I can’t complain even if the Time Capsule drive is bad I’ve gotten 6 years out of it. That’s a pretty good run on a drive that’s running all the time. Now the question is do I trust the drive IF it passes reformatting? I can and have, begun backing up on another NAS drive. If the Time Capsule drive checks out OK do I dare trust it? 

The really funny part of all the is that I never used to have backups. Typically when I delete something, I’m very Hillary about it. I mean for that shit to stay gone. But there have been times since I started using Apples Time Machine that I’ve pulled things back from the abyss. 

It’s funny to me how quickly I adapt to and become reliant on new technology. 

Then there’s the other part of me that doesn’t like change. That part thinks, “If the Time Capsule drive is really dead, I wonder if I could simply replace it with a new drive?”

After all if everything else in the TimeCapsule is still working why toss the whole machine? Although, a nice shiny new Time Capsule would fit very well in my wiring closet.


Update

 I was overconfident. I thought I had figured the problem out and everything was working properly again.

I’ve tried all the tricks I know, I’ve tried unwrapping the ball of fur that is Time Machine backup. Still the backup system is behaving completely abnormally. I can get the system working properly for one backup, when the next scheduled backup starts things go to hell again.

This leaves me in an interesting situation.

I have other things to do besides do unpaid QA on Apple products. 

I have a couple of websites that I must protect until delivery for example. I’ve got my own writing that I’d like to do.

Since I’ve resolved all the other issues, plaguing my network and have come to the conclusion that regarding the backups, the common denominator is my primary computer, as I see it I have 3 basic choices.

1) Turn off Time Machine, check its functionality after each release of patches to OS X. I believe that this problem was introduced with the last round of patches as I’m seeing log entires denoting bugs and failures that I’ve never seen before. Even after backing out the patches, the backups still only work once. I can make sure that the critical data is moved to offline storage manually

2) Hope that the backups I have are in fact reliable. Then reformat and reinstall my system from the ground up, paying attention to the partition table. As I recently learned with a friends computer, there can be partition table issues that cause Time Machine to fail arbitrarily with nothing more than a cryptically unhelpful message. That message, of course leads you right down the rabbit hole of wasted time and incorrect diagnostics. I suspect this is the loop I’m in right now. Like my friend, my computer is running just dandy although when it’s trying to do a Time Machine backup it does run a tad warm.

3) Locate, research, and then install, and use a 3rd party piece of backup software and retire Time Machine altogether. Time Machine is very convenient, and when it works, it works well. There are however other solutions and these other solutions provide more flexibility without some of the risks I’ve read of inherent to Time Machine. For example; there are multiple reports of corrupted indexing, corrupting the underlying data. This results in a backup being completely useless.  Worse than useless in fact, because you don’t know the backup is trash, UNTIL you need to restore from it.

Perhaps a backup solution that permits cloning of the computer’s internal drive is a better solution. This means that there is always a bootable, functional copy of the system’s disk and it’s easy to check that it’s a working copy.

Perhaps a combination of all three solutions is the best way to protect my data. If I start with 3 then execute 2 then perhaps 1 won’t be necessary.

I’ve been at this off & on for the last week, its time to move on. 

For those who are searching for answers, My experience with the Apple Forums has been next to usless, except as a time waster.

Here are the symptoms I’m seeing.

“Preparing Backup” <- This step can go on for hours. During this time the console log shows that the backup drive is mounted but there may be no log activity for 20, 30, or some random number of minutes. When activity is again shown in the log it is almost but not always a message saying;

Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs | new event db |

This happens even if you initiate a backup right after a successful backup, meaning there should be no need to rescan the system hasn’t changed. 

process backupd[751] thread 36644 caught burning CPU! It used more than 50% CPU

This message makes sense because the whole system is very busy during indexing. But it shouldn’t be required to index the entire drive with each backup.

The following log is closer to normal but this log results in the system taking 12 hours to copy 12 GB. The new full disk 350GB backup to the same volume over the same connection only took six hours to begin with.

com.apple.backupd[751]: Starting automatic backup
com.apple.backupd[751]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://UserName._afpovertcp._tcp.local./DriveName
com.apple.backupd[751]: Mounted network destination at mount point: /Volumes/DriveName using URL: afp://UserName._afpovertcp._tcp.local./DriveName
com.apple.backupd[751]: Disk image /Volumes/DriveName/ComputerName.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
com.apple.backupd[751]: Backing up to /dev/disk4s2: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
com.apple.backupd[751]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
com.apple.backupd[751]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
com.apple.backupd[751]: Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
com.apple.backupd[751]: Reading cached event database from: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/ComputerName/2015-04-02-074526.inProgress/15A09E54-6451-4E09-A947-4F7EBAF8DE21/.CFB31849-81AA-376E-BE44-9BE66ECE17D2.eventdb
com.apple.backupd[751]: Using cached disk scan
com.apple.backupd[751]: Saved event cache at /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/ComputerName/2015-04-02-074526.inProgress/38C9D5E1-C5B6-4F3F-BB63-19C909718795/.CFB31849-81AA-376E-BE44-9BE66ECE17D2.eventdb
com.apple.backupd[751]: Not using file event preflight for Macintosh HD
com.apple.backupd[751]: Found 415344 files (11.39 GB) needing backup
com.apple.backupd[751]: 14.63 GB required (including padding), 1.69 TB available
com.apple.backupd[751]: Copied 96408 items (1.03 GB) from volume Macintosh HD. Linked 335719.
kernel[0]: process backupd[751] thread 36644 caught burning CPU! It used more than 50% CPU (Actual recent usage: 61%) over 180 seconds. thread lifetime cpu usage 548.276287 seconds, (241.274677 user, 307.001610 system) ledger info: balance: 90003836101 credit: 536400616669 debit: 446396780568 limit: 90000000000 (50%) period: 180000000000 time since last refill (ns): 147338040650
spindump[444]: Saved cpu_resource.diag report for backupd version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/backupd_2015-04-02-082002_ComputerName.cpu_resource.diag
 

 I have no answers for any of you looking to find out what happened to your nice reliable Time Machine backup. I can only say that since the last patch mine has been completely screwed. 

The event logs look pretty much the same and the computers behavior is the same, if I’m backing up to a network attached drive or a locally attached external drive.

Virus scans show no issues, Malware scan shows no issues.  Deleting and forcing a rebuild of spotlight indexes on all drives does not resolve the problem.

Disk Repair indicates that the internal drive and external drives are healthy. I’ve run the repair disk option on all drives, reformatted external drives, and am confident that whatever the problem is, it is not the external drives.

Everything points back to this particular system which has led me to the three options.

One more point of interest is this. 

I have not been able to permanently exclude the backup drives from spotlight indexing. I’ve tried via Terminal and via the spotlight application in System Preferences.

The exclusions are deleted after a reboot.