October 22, 2015

The Autonomous Winter Is Coming

This is a long but good read and makes a convincing case as to why autonomous vehicles are going to change everything. It's written by the same guy who just road a Tesla, autonomously, from LA to NY: http://www.cnet.com/news/alex-roy-tesla-autopilot-record-57-hours-48-minutes/

August 11, 2015

Did you know you can support Sanders and BLM at the same time?

Because you can.

You can support Sanders' civil rights activism all his life and support his legislative efforts to those ends. You can support Sanders marching with MLK, doing sit ins, getting arrested for civil rights causes, and that's great. You can support and even champion Sanders economic message.

But you can also support the movement that points out that 7 times more unarmed black men are killed than any other peoples, you can support the movement that points out the fact that incarnation rates overwhelmingly target black men, you can support the movement that points out the fact that black people have higher incidents of poverty.

These things are not mutually exclusive.

I live in a visceral pain in my gut, politically, like I did when Dean lost the nomination, when I hear that Sanders is somehow against this sort of thing, and people arguing against BLM, for whatever reason. Granted, a lot of it is emotional. A lot of people are trying to split up BLM to different groups. The pro-Sanders or anti-Sanders groups.

As far as I see it Sanders was only targeted because, unlike every other Democratic candidate, he makes himself readily available, he's there, you can see him in public speeches or rallies relatively easy. This makes him, and I know its controversial to other Sanders supporters, a prime target. This doesn't bother me. It encourages me, because Sanders puts himself out there.

Clinton hides behind either $2,700 fundraisers or very specifically defined talks in high schools or middile schools or whatever, where no one, not a freaking single non-vetted soul is going to be within 20 feet of her. With the secret service not far behind. (And our pathetic media doesn't talk about this nature of her public appearances one iota.)

I wholeheartedly disagree with the actions of Seatle BLM members, and am on record saying their actions disgusted me, but that is over with, it's done. What happened happened, and what followed followed. Sanders had tens of thousands show up to the next events (online and in person). Sanders isn't going away. BLM didn't crash him nor was its intent. It wanted to make the news, that's all. That's really all militant action can do.

I'm left in complete disarray, because I'm not in the bubble, I know Sanders' campaign is doing extremely well. I believe Sanders has a better shot than any (I won't lie or be disillusioned and say he's a shoe in but I will repudiate anyone who says he can't win).

I'm telling you now, from someone who supports Sanders and BLM at the same time, it sucks to be of this mindset. Would it be that I could bash BLM because of some militant actions by a few (which were not denounced by BLM leaders). I can't.

BLM matters just like Occupy. And BLM isn't solely against Sanders. BLM is against not being heard by the establishment which they overwhelmingly support in elections. That's it. Accept that BLM wants its voice heard by the party which it feels has left them behind despite their votes, and you'll truly feel what they are about.

May 18, 2015

Experiment: Hide DU names CSS script:

I've been trying an experiment recently whereby I hide almost all identifying information about DU posters.

I downloaded the Stylish plugin for Firefox (there's also one for Chrome), and added the following code:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("www.democraticunderground.com&quot {

}

table.default-table .author {
display: none;
}

table.reply-table td.author {
display: none;
}

p.post-author2 a.author2 {
display: none;
}

p.post-replyto {
display: none;
}

.post-sig {
display: none;
}

p.post-author {
margin: 0px;
display: none;
}

p.post-avatar {
display: none;
}

div.content-container {
padding: 17px 0px;
margin: 0px 13px 0px 20px;
min-height: 34px;
}


table.input-form-table tr:nth-child(1) {
display: none;
}

h2.usersection {
display: none;
}

a.mp-author {
display: none;
}

This code will remove all usernames of all posters except on their profile pages (because that uses a common CSS code that the rest of the site uses and I couldn't figure out how to fix it). This includes in PMs, in My Posts, in the main forum author pages, everywhere I can find on the site. This code will also remove all signatures and avatar pictures (and make a bit more space for the forum display so it's not ugly when removing the avatars).

I literally don't know who is replying to me or who I am replying to without going to the effort of figuring out who it is. So far I have found myself doing it twice when I felt attacked (just by turning off the style or by going to the profile page).

Try it out, it can be quite refreshing. And telling about some others. And before anyone asks, yeah, it's actually pretty hard to differentiate posters by writing style, only a few ones stand out, so I really don't know who I'm responding to.