But apparently John Common can not pay his employees, not pay his suppliers, not pay child support, and get nothing but a slap on the wrist. <SARCASM> This really makes me think the justice system is working properly. </SARCASM> What are we supposed to do when faced with people like that? Our ancestors would’ve said, “Don’t do business with John Common, don’t work for him, and tell everybody you know he’s a slimeball,” and that would have (eventually) made it impossible for him to continue behaving like that.

However, the sheer number of people in the modern world makes that difficult. It’s also possible now to only read or watch news sources that cater to your biases, which used to be very difficult. If you think that the Alien Lizard Vampires are indoctrinating elementary-school children into building landing strips for gay Martians, you can find a website/community that believes those things and reinforces that belief. So people with various beliefs could/would self-segregate, and reject everything that didn’t come from their community as subversive or unclean or something. If you had a bunch of communities like that, and made it so that at least 40% of the people belonged to one of those communities, you’d have effectively Balkanized the body politic, and made it easy for a powerful or manipulative group to do whatever it wanted to everybody.

I don’t think we’re in that situation yet, but it’s one of those things that could happen. (In Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, this Balkanization is how the intelligent machines eventually destroyed human society, though this is a pretty minor plot point in the series.) But it does seem that right now, it’s possible for a sociopath to gain more power and have more freedom than an ethical person. I wonder how this could be fixed (or even if it could be fixed) since having amoral self-interested people controlling everything doesn’t seem like it’d work well in the long term.

Saturday: Stephanie and I are going to watch the Coyotes take on the Kings. This should be interesting. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a hockey game, and I’ve never been to a pro hockey game—just college hockey. This entry will probably post while we’re at the game.

An interesting quote I saw a few days ago:

The real complexity of the tax code comes from the big lie that some income is more desirable than other income, and that some expenses are more desirable than other expenses. Thus most capital gains and dividends, which are deemed desirable, are taxed at lower rates than labor, presumably because people are not supposed to work. The profit that you get by investing your money in someone else’s business to buy goods and having that business sell those goods is supposed to be better than investing your money in your own business and selling those goods yourself. The money spent on maintaining machinery for a business is more deductible than the money spent on maintaining yourself. These are examples of where the unfairness and complexities comes in.

Monday itself was fairly normal. Stephanie and I went to the first Tempe Symphony concert of the season on Monday night. They played Beethoven’s Symphony #1, which was interesting and fairly well done, even though it’s not as famous or catchy as his later compositions. We left at the halftime intermission, though, because it was 8:30pm at that point and we both had to go to work on Tuesday.

Tuesday was pretty normal at work. It was great to not get any delayed trouble tickets, at least.

While waiting for Stephanie to show up on Tuesday, I saw this small protest march. Didn’t have time to talk to the marchers. Didn’t have my real camera with me, so the picture quality’s terrible. But I guess people are still protesting, even though I’m not sure that it’ll do any good.

Sunday had less stuff than Saturday. Stephanie made lunch for us; sandwiches, chicken soup, and deviled eggs. This is a lot more elaborate than what I usually get for lunch. I made dinner; chicken, pasta, and salad. This is not a very elaborate dinner, but it’s inexpensive, nutritious, and tasty.

The “Occupy Wall Street” protests have jumped to Europe, and a lot of people are a tad upset about that. What’s interesting is that there’s an “Occupy Phoenix” protest scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 15. I’m really curious about these protests now, mostly because of the comments I’ve seen on the Net about them. One Farker said that Google, Yahoo, and Twitter were censoring stuff related to the protests. This is sort of difficult to verify, naturally. But all the talk on the Net about these things has made me want to attend the protest Saturday and see what the heck is really going on. If so many people are irritated, it might be worth paying attention to. Not sure if I can go there though.

Ever wanted to know how to disrupt an Internet forum? Follow this handy guide! Really, though, all the Net fora I’ve seen don’t need to be disrupted. The participants generally have the attention span of a retarded fruit fly, and will scatter off to whatever topic is newer and/or more interesting.

Not really that much else that’s interesting. As of 8pm MST, the whole debt limit/taxation/spending cuts situation is still unresolved. I think the legislature will get their act together and pass something that will keep things moving along for at least another 6 months, though it’ll take them until the very last minute to do so. If the USA’s credit rating goes down, then a whole bunch of very rich people who can afford to buy Congressmen will lose a lot of money, so it’s unlikely that any default will happen. I think. I Could Be Wrong.

I made dinner, and then it rained for about 15 minutes. That’s always good, but we wished it would’ve lasted longer.

Monday, I worked from home. Moira enjoyed that, at least. She got to sit on my lap while I tried to debug obscure problems with rsync and deal with a raft of software updates. It rained again in the late afternoon, but only for about 10 minutes.

Quartzsite, AZ is doing some seriously dumb stuff. I know, small town governments being as corrupt as rancid week-old roadkill is nothing new, but it’s just distressing to hear about things like this happening. What I’d like to see is every government expenditure made public. Seriously. Every check the {town, city, state, federal} government writes, every payment they make, every dollar they spend, and the names of every recipient of any taxpayer funds get published to the whole Net every month (or every two weeks, or something.) It’d cause all sorts of consternation. But it’d lead to better accounting, or at the very least to people keeping their malfeasance much less blatant.

There was no rock on Wednesday, because Steve had other stuff going on and said it’d be better to have rock next week. Stephanie and I had pork chops and “Babylon 5″ instead.

Thursday, there was more silliness, at least in the morning. I got it all working properly, but it took about an hour, mostly because it took over an hour for a piece of monitoring software to realize that stuff.example.com was now 5.6.7.8 instead of 1.2.3.4 because we’d made a DNS change. The rest of the day was fairly routine. I did find a typo in a set of disclaimers, though: “. . .including technical failures of any king.” Dangit, I tried to transmit data through Richard III, and all I got back was “My kingdom for a horse!”

I got about halfway through Madame Prosecutor before giving it up. You’d think prosecuting people accused of genocide in Yugoslavia and Rwanda would be an interesting story, but the writer or editor of the book seemed determined to remove all the bits that would make anyone want to keep reading. Instead of interesting details, there’s page after page after page of bureaucracy, name-dropping, and tedious boredom. I skipped to the epilogue, since I thought there’d be a summary of stuff. Carla del Ponte says that war crimes should be prosecuted ASAP, even if war’s still going on in (wherever), because justice is orthogonal to peace. Current geopolitics says “Peace first, at whatever cost, then justice,” and Carla says this doesn’t work at all and actually encourages and prolongs conflicts. I don’t have the experience necessary to judge whether that’s true or not.

It does make me wonder whether some folks want to prolong conflicts instead of solving them, though. Governments and politically-connected people can reap great political and financial benefits out of prolonged hostilities.

Monday was relatively ordinary, though. Some security software had a dang cow on Sunday, for no real reason, but once I got a good look at the log files, it was easy to figure out and fix. And it’s apparently possible to store garlic bread in a sealed plastic container for at least 48 hours before it starts going stale.

And on Kari’s suggestion, I’m going to try posting the links to these entries on Facebook for a while. Hey, Patty does it, and it appears to work. . . .

Sunday: Not really that much, though I got a call from work at about 8am thanks to something that went FUBAR with networking. It’s really annoying when things like that happen. At least it wasn’t that hard to get 90% of the stuff up and going again once I’d managed to log on.

I also went over to Stephanie’s place and attempted to help her with a plumbing problem. Apparently, the control knob on her shower had broken, and she was trying to replace it but not having any luck. I tried to help, but I couldn’t get the collar piece off the pipe. I must’ve been doing it wrong. Well, I managed to help install a new control knob, though I couldn’t replace the internal valve. It must be something really simple. I’m just not a plumber; I’ve spent most of my time in the last 11 years doing stuff with computers.

Monday tomorrow. Bleah. Well, that’s par for the course. . . .

Thursday was Veteran’s Day, and the bus that I usually take to work wasn’t running at all. So I worked from home. That was actually OK, though the corporate-approved IM server barfed ingloriously for an hour or 2 after lunch. It’s actually had a lot more downtime than any technical person would tolerate. This is only to be expected; most suits would rather spend lots of money on something with a fancy marketing campaign that doesn’t work well than spend $0 on something with no marketing campaign that just works. There must be some sort of psychological reason for that.

And, of course, I have to do more work later tonight, because they’re going to do a bunch of maintenance at 0-dark-thirty in the morning. Arrrrgh. The weekend can’t come soon enough.

I still haven’t managed to get that SCSI disk working properly, since it doesn’t like AHCI and I haven’t managed to get the kernel for my desktop to find its root partition while the motherboard’s using IDE mode. Will keep trying. It’s just. . . frustrating, since I’m beset by so many problems that I’m responsible for, and I can’t get help for the vast majority of them.