Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Technology

  • A Deep Dive into Cryptocurrencies and Their Operation: Part 2

    In Part 1, we talked basic computer science. I highly recommend reading/re-reading Part 1 before reading this article if you don’t have a firm grasp on the basics of computer science.

    We’re going to start here in Part 2 by talking generically about some of the hurdles that cryptocurrencies have had to overcome, then we’ll define some terms, and finally we’ll put all the pieces together into a basic model of how a blockchain-based cryptocurrency works.

    Traditional Ways of Passing Data through an Untrusted Medium

    Let’s do a quick survey of a few ways that important data can be passed through an untrusted medium (i.e. the Internet). You’ll recognize some of these from Part 1.

    Encryption

    Pretend you have a secret message that you want to send from your computer to your friend’s computer. An easy example may be a message including your credit card information to purchase Glibertarians pink footie pajamas. How do you send that information from your computer, through a bunch of network devices (routers, switches, etc.) that are owned by neither you nor your friend, and to your friend without being intercepted by a nefarious third party?

    The easy answer is cryptography. Let’s change the message in a way that only your friend has the “key” to unchange it. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most common is public key cryptography. If you want more info on public key cryptography, check out Part 1.

    Secured Channels

    Sometimes, you’re sending a bunch of secret information across the network to the same place. The most common example is when you’re working from home. You’re transacting a bunch of secret information with your corporate servers, and it may be easier to just establish a secure channel between your computer and the corporate network so that you don’t have to manage the overhead of encrypting the info piecemeal. What am I describing? VPN.

    This doesn’t really have anything to do with blockchain, but it gives you a bit of context about how security can be implemented over the Internet.

    Trusted Authorities

    Trusted authorities also have nothing to do with blockchain, except to act as an opposing contrast to the way blockchain works. We talked in Part 1 about the two ways that public key cryptography can be used. One way is to securely send secret information across an untrusted link. Another way is to sign a message and validate that the message came from the person you think it did.

    What if I want to know that you’re legit before I send you all my personal information? STEVE SMITH could easily insert himself between  you and me, send me his public key, and then intercept and decrypt my response. This is called a “man in the middle” attack. Rather than just trust that the public key you supposedly sent me, I can reach out to a trusted 3rd party, who has your public key on file. I request your certificate from this trusted 3rd party (called the Certificate Authority), and compare the public key in the certificate with the public key you sent me to make sure it hasn’t been meddled with. The weakness of this method is that you have to trust the security of the Certificate Authority (the most well known CA is VeriSign).

    Blockchain uses some of the encryption technologies we have discussed, but specifically cannot use VPN or CA technology because blockchain is implemented in a completely trustless environment. Why is it a trustless environment? Because authority is distributed rather than centralized.

    Centralized, Decentralized, and Distributed: A Libertarian Way to Organize Things

    I’m going to keep this focused to the tech realm, but y’all are smart enough to expand these concepts outside the realm of computers. There are three main ways of organizing tech in order to accomplish a task. Centralized systems involve everybody reaching out to one single node (e.g. server or cluster of servers) in order to accomplish the task. Decentralized systems involve everybody reaching out to one of a small number of nodes in order to accomplish the task. Distributed systems involve everybody reaching out to everybody else in order to accomplish the task.

    Centralized

    Centralized systems are what we use on an everyday basis. I want to buy something from Amazon, so I connect to an Amazon server and make the purchase. You want something from Amazon, so you connect to an Amazon server and make your purchase. This is a centralized system*, everybody connects with an Amazon server in order to complete their transaction.

    * You could argue that Amazon runs a decentralized system, because there are Amazon servers all around the world to share the load of so many people shopping simultaneously. However, for this description, “centralized” refers to only one “entity”  being involved, no matter the number of physical servers.

    Decentralized

    Decentralized systems are less common, but are still used on a regular basis. I want to refinance my house, so I go to LendingTree or any one of the other online insurance brokers. I input my information, which is sent to a handful of banks and other lenders, and each lender returns the request individually. If one lender doesn’t respond, it’s not quite as efficient, but I still have access to all of the other lenders.

    Distributed

    What if we take it a step further? Rather than a handful of entities, everybody can be an entity and everybody interacts with everybody. For example, Uber. You submit a ride request, and other people choose whether or not they want to fulfill that request. Uber isn’t perfectly distributed, as there is a barrier to entry before you can drive for Uber, but the barrier is low enough that it’s essentially distributed for our purposes.

    How Transactions are Verified when Nobody can be Trusted

    We have two obstacles to get over before we can verify a transaction. The first obstacle is ensuring that nobody has stepped in and altered a legitimate transaction. The second obstacle is ensuring that legitimate creator of the transaction isn’t trying some funny business.

    We’ve already discussed a method for tackling the first obstacle, using public key signing. The person who is giving the money signs the transaction with their private key, and the public key is included in the transaction data. Then, anybody in the public can check the signature using the public key to make sure that the transaction was approved by the originator.

    What about the second obstacle? Well, that’s a little more complicated and involves some economic incentives. We’ll get into this in more detail in Part 3 of this series, but suffice it to say that pulling off a con to steal somebody’s cryptocurrency involves an impossibly large amount of computer resources, and an immense amount of luck. The incentive to steal is way overridden by the costs of acquiring the raw processing power required to make such a con even remotely possible.

    How does bitcoin get stolen, then? Usually some currency exchange website is hacked, and the private keys of users’ accounts (wallets) are compromised. It’s not a flaw in cryptocurrency, but in the exchange’s security. Blaming such hacks on cryptocurrency is like blaming the US Dollar because Chase’s system gets hacked.

    Definitions and Terms of Art

    Blockchain (Sometimes called distributed ledger technology)  – A list of connected messages that contain transaction information. The blockchain is copied to every node (computer) in the blockchain network, allowing each and every participant in the blockchain to examine the blockchain for inconsistencies.

    Cryptocurrency – A financial product that is transferred between people using a blockchain. Some people view cryptocurrencies as investment products (commodities). Others view cryptocurrencies as a currency. Many cryptocurrencies use a mathematical algorithm for “printing” new money that is rather deflationary, making them attractive long term investment vehicles.

    Bitcoin – The original cryptocurrency that is trading for somewhere in the neighborhood of $11k per Bitcoin at the time of writing. You don’t have to buy full Bitcoins, but can buy as little as 0.0000001 Bitcoin.

    Smart Contract – Some uses of blockchain are less tightly coupled to currency. Ethereum, for example, is a broader use blockchain system, and includes smart contracts, which are publicly inspectable contracts that are mostly self-executing. For example, if getting the wifi password is keyed to paying your rent, the smart contract will retain the new month’s wifi password and will not release it to the tenant until rent is paid.

    Fork (of blocks in a chain) – A condition of the blockchain where two blocks are created and verified by different nodes in the network at substantially the same time. In such a situation, there is a “fork” until the next block is verified. Whichever forked block is retained by the node that verified the next block is the “winner”, ending the “fork.”

    Fork (of cryptocurrencies) – A split off of a new cryptocurrency from an old one. Usually this happens because the older cryptocurrency has some limitation or flaw that the new cryptocurrency resolves. Depending on the specific situation, the older currency may transform into the new currency.

    Merkle Tree – A type of binary tree (a hierarchical linked list where a “parent” node has at most two “children”) used to organize the cryptocurrency transactions stored within a block. Each leaf node (i.e. nodes without children) of the Merkle tree represents a transaction, and the parent nodes represent a combination of multiple transactions. Each node has a hash, with the root node (the parent of all parents) containing a transaction hash for the entire block. These hashes can be used to verify the accuracy of the transactions, and the transaction hash for the entire block is used in creating the hash for the block.

    Wallet – A data structure built around a user’s private key that retains all of the cryptocurrency that has been transferred to it.

    Exchange – A website that retains a cryptocurrency wallet for each of its users. Exchanges are like a cross between a bank and an investment broker.

    Blockchain? Is That Some New Type of Jewelry?

    Blockchain is the technical underpinning of cryptocurrencies. A blockchain is a linked list of data structures. Each data structure includes a header, a transaction ledger, and a pointer to the prior block.

    Here is a very high-level view of what a blockchain looks like. You have ledger of transactions arranged in a tree form (a tree is a linked data structure kind of like a linked list, but with more than one relationship saved in the structure. For example, in a binary tree, each “parent” data structure has two “children”). The actual transactions are located in the leaf nodes (a leaf node has no children), and the root is the top parent node. The Merkle tree (the specific type of binary tree used for blockchain transactions) calculates the hash of each transaction, and then continues to hash the combined hashes up the tree until we get what’s called the Merkle root hash (shown as “trans: H( )”). The specifics of how all this works isn’t super important, and it’s fairly intuitive once you understand hashing. You’re essentially taking hashes of hashes until you get one single hash that represents all of the transactions in the block. Why do we want that?

    Because the hash of the block (used for security/verification purposes) isn’t the hash of the ENTIRE block, but only of the header of the block. The actual transactions and the Merkle tree are contained in the transaction ledger, and are not taken into account when calculating the hash of the block. However, the Merkle root hash (which takes into account all of the transactions) is located in the header of the block and is thus taken into account when calculating the hash of the header of the block. If a nefarious actor tried to change one of the transactions to route currency to his wallet, it would change the Merkle root hash, which would change the hash of the block, resulting in it being obvious to the blockchain network that something has been tampered with. We’ll go into more detail on this in Part 3 of the series.

    The last concept I want to bring up in this article is the increasing security over time. How does that work? Well, it has to do with the linked list of blocks. Let’s say we have three blocks that STEVE SMITH wants to corrupt in order to steal some cryptocurrency.

    STEVE SMITH will have the easiest time corrupting block C. Why? Because all he has to do is change the transactions and calculate the new hash for C. I say “all he has to do” as if it’s easy. We’ll talk in Part 3 about why this is nearly impossible to do. However, let’s assume for a moment that STEVE SMITH has a ton of computing resources and it isn’t quite nearly impossible to corrupt C anymore. Now, let’s see why the older a block is, the harder it is to corrupt.

    STEVE SMITH sees a huge transaction of cryptocurrency in block A and wants it for himself. In order to pull of his heist, he alters the transaction in block A, but now A’s “My Hash” is wrong (we’ll discuss tomorrow how the network knows it’s wrong). STEVE SMITH then spends a bit of time calculating A’s correct new My Hash. Once that’s done, there’s still a problem. B’s “Prev. Hash” is wrong, and the network will see the obvious inconsistency. STEVE SMITH changes B’s Prev. Hash to match A’s My Hash. Great! All fixed!

    But wait! B’s My Hash is calculated in part using B’s Prev. Hash, so now B’s My Hash is glaringly wrong. With a sigh of frustration, STEVE SMITH begins the time intensive process of calculating B’s new My Hash. STEVE SMITH, being one of the smartest of his race, sees that block C is going to have the same issue, so he quickly updates C’s Prev. Hash after figuring out B’s My Hash, and begins cranking on C’s My Hash. Finally, after a bit of time, STEVE SMITH has updated the blockchain and his crime was a success!!

    Or not. See, while he was cranking hard calculating new hashes for three blocks, the blockchain network was adding new blocks every few minutes (10 minutes for Bitcoin). His fraud sticks out like a sore thumb because blocks D through L all have the wrong hash when his “modified” blocks are included. In order for STEVE SMITH to succeed in his nefarious plan, he would need to control a significant portion of the entire world’s computing power, something on the order of 45% of the blockchain would need to be controlled to give his plan even a dismal chance.

    I’m going to stop here. We’re going to dive down to a place where giant octopi and fish with bioluminescent lures live in Part 3. We’ll discuss the details of how hashing is extensively used in the blockchain, how incentives are used to increase security through mining, how blockchain can be used outside of cryptocurrency, a description of the major cryptocurrencies and what they’re useful for, and some of the drawbacks of cryptocurrencies.

  • A Deep Dive into Cryptocurrencies and Their Operation: Part 1

    What this is

    An in depth perspective on how blockchain and cryptocurrencies work, along with a running commentary on social value, libertarianism, and whatever the heck fits my fancy. I’m attempting to write this at a high school comprehension level so that those who haven’t sat through 4 years of computer engineering classes can make sense of all of this.

    What this isn’t

    A primer on Bitcoin, an economic treatise, or a how-to. (Although, elements of all of those things will appear)

    For those who don’t feel like scrolling through pages and pages of my ramblings, here’s the TL;DR. Blockchain is a bunch of messages with security built into them. The security isn’t perfect, but each message is increasingly secure as time passes. The list of messages is saved on every computer that participates in the blockchain, and the lists are constantly being compared for agreement. Blockchain relies on a bit of a gambit. They essentially say “you may be able to break the security on one node, or even a few, but after a few the increased security that comes with time passing will catch up with you, and you’ll be stuck well before you come close to succeeding in fraud.”

     

    A Survey of Computer Science

    Numbers in an Array

    Computers are complex and simple at the same time. It takes millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of man-hours to put together the latest Windows or OSX version, and yet everything a computer does is simply a whole bunch of numbers saved in an array called memory.

    Let’s look at an example computer memory:

    Whaaaaaaaa??

    Let’s ignore all of the writing for a moment and discuss what we’re looking at. Memory is “byte-addressable,” which means that you can access information 8 bits (there are 8 bits in a byte; a bit is a single value of “1” or “0”) at a time. If I want to access the byte at address 0, I write some code that properly references address 0, and I have access to the value in that address of memory. If all data was 8 bits long (e.g. a number between 0 and 255), then we’d have a pretty easy go of accessing data. Just remember the order you put it in, and you just call the number that you put it in (minus 1 because the addresses start at 0).

    However, as shown in the above image, data can be much larger than 8 bits. The yellow 2-byte data is a short integer (e.g. a value between 0 and 65,535). The purple 4-byte data is an integer (e.g. a value between 0 and ~4.3 billion). There are other types of data that are even longer, like decimal numbers (called floating point numbers). Here’s more info on memory and how it works. Now it gets a bit more complicated to remember where things are in memory.

    Arrays: A Simple Way to Store Large Amounts of Data

    When dealing with simple data, like an integer, storing it in memory is relatively simple. As long as you know what address it starts at and how long that type of data is, you can access and retrieve the data. However, what are we to do when there is a bunch of related data?

    For example, what if we want to store the daily profits for the week from our monocle and top hat shop? Now we don’t have just one piece of data to deal with, but seven. We could just toss each day’s profit into memory as we encounter it, but the accounting program we’re running may store additional info in memory: temporary values, user credentials, and other information needed by the program will also reside in memory.

    We can remember each address for each individual day’s profit data, but these values are related, and it’s hard to manage access information on seven values, let alone 70 or 700 or 700,000. Treating each value individually doesn’t scale.

    As shown above, Sunday’s Profit is separated from Monday’s Profit (both in red) by intervening unrelated data (in green). In order to access the week’s profit, you need to know the address of each and every day’s profit, and you have to individually retrieve each data point.

    In comes a better way to handle such data: Arrays! Much like memory is an array with addresses referencing each byte, array data structures store related information sequentially so that each piece of information can be referenced with an array address.

    The difference is clear. The array groups the related data together, and you can simply reference the array to get to any of the data. Array address 0 is Sunday’s profit, which is located in memory addresses 0-3. Array address 1 is Monday’s Profit and is located in memory addresses 4-7. Rather than needing to remember all of the memory addresses for each day’s profit, you can simply remember the starting memory address of the array, and use the array address to calculate where each piece of information in the array is located. For example, array address 1 translates to the array starting memory address (0) plus one array element (which is 4 bytes long), resulting in a memory address of 4. If you look at the above image, array address 1 starts at memory address of 4. NOTE: I haven’t included all 7 days of profit in the above image so that it won’t get too complicated and confusing. Here is some additional information on arrays.

    However, you can also see a limitation in the above image. It works great if you know exactly how much data you need to store, but look at where the Temporary Data and User Credentials are stored. If you need to include one more piece of information in the array, you’re hosed. Either you have to start moving a bunch of stuff around in memory to make room (which is not ideal), or you have to continue the array somewhere else in memory and keep track of 2 array portions (which is also not ideal).

    Linked Lists: Good for dynamic data

    You may be wondering what the point of all of this is. We’re talking about blockchain, not about memory management, right? I promise, this is where we connect to blockchain.

    Let’s see if we can combine the best of both worlds. Writing each day’s profit to memory separately allows you to add additional days without having to shuffle data around in the memory. On the other hand, preserving the relationship between all of the days’ profits without having to keep track of each day’s memory address allows you to scale up to large amounts of data without overcomplicating things.

    One of the “best of both worlds” solutions is called a linked list. A linked list operates much like writing each day’s profit to memory separately, but preserves the relationship between the different days by including an additional bit of information pointing to the location of another day’s profit in memory.

    As you can see, we have expanded Sunday’s profit and Monday’s profit from 4 bytes to 5 bytes. The additional byte (in yellow) points to the previous node. Since Sunday’s profit is the first node, its previous node is NULL (meaning it doesn’t have a previous node). Since Monday’s profit is the second node, it points back to Sunday’s profit. Previous Node 0 points to the starting memory address of Sunday’s profit.

    Visualized another way, the linked list looks like this:

    This is the basis of blockchain. A data structure with a payload and a reference to the previous block in the chain. Now let’s talk about security.

    Hashes: Breakfast for the Masses

    I dunno about y’all, but I’m sick of reading. Let’s take a quick break before getting into hashes by enjoying some pictures

    Breakfast Hash and some red meat for the audience.

     

    Hashes: Preserving Relationships and Security

    Alright, back out of your bunks. Time for some more learnin’. Hashes are conceptually simple, but mathematically complicated. Since we’re not diving into the math, this section should be a breeze!

    No, not that kind of Brees!

    Let’s take a look at the array again:

    If we call Array[0] we get Sunday’s Profit, and if we call Array[1] we get Monday’s profit. However, we don’t always have a situation where we know exactly what order the data will be put into the array. Imagine, for a moment, that instead of 3 days of profits, we have 3 years of profits, entered manually by an employee who isn’t guaranteed to get everything perfectly in order. How do we find Monday’s Profit in that deluge of data?

    The traditional way is to search for the data in the array. Here is some more information on searching.

    The fun way is to use hashing! How about we use some relevant characteristic of the data to access the data instead of the array index (“index” is another term for array address number). All you need is two math equations: one to determine the hash from the data, and another to determine a memory location from the hash.

    As you can see, Sunday’s Profit data was hashed to “Sunday”, which is a characteristic of the data (specifically, the day of the week), and “Sunday” was computed to be connected to array address 0. Now, instead of accessing Sunday’s Profit data by loading Array[0], you can access Sunday’s Profit data by loading HashArray[“Sunday”].

    If this is a bit confusing, another simple hashing algorithm that appears in everyday life may clarify things. Placing medical records in alphabetical order by the first letter of the last name is another hashing algorithm. If the last name is SMITH, the “algorithm” for obtaining the hash involves looking at the first letter of the last name, “S”. Then, the hash “S” points to a specific shelf in the fileroom (the “S” shelf, for lack of a better name). SMITH’s folder is placed on the “S” shelf. When I want to retrieve a folder starting with “S”, I pull a folder off the “S” shelf, and I have SMITH’s folder.

    But there are many people with a last name starting with “S”. What happens when SMITH’s folder is stored on the “S” shelf and I want to store Slaver’s folder? This is called a “hash collision.” Depending on the specific situation, a hash collision is either an inevitability or a disaster. In cases where hash collisions are expected, we could simply change the data stored. Rather than just storing one piece of data for each hashed value, we can store the data for each hash in a linked list. Now, the “S” shelf looks like this (pointer is just a fancy term for the memory address):

    This is great for categorization hashes like the alphabetical sorting of medical records, but isn’t the best for cryptographic hashes like are used in blockchains. Instead, cryptographic hashes rely on another protection from hash collisions, small data density.

    Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies use what is called SHA-256 hashing. In SHA-256, a message of any* size is hashed using really fancy math into a 256 bit number, which means there are 2^256 possible hashes (1.1×10^77 for you scientific notation folks, or roughly 1/10 of the total number of atoms in the universe). Hash collisions are so rare under SHA-256 as to be practically nonexistent.

    *Technically, there is a maximum length of message, but it’s enormous.

    But I mentioned above that hashes are based on characteristics of the data. “S” is the first letter of SMITH, and it’s fairly easy to see the relation. What is the relation between some seemingly random 256 digit number and a Bitcoin block? Well, it has to do with math well beyond my ken, but you can go here for a bit of an explanation (as well as a look ahead). In essence, the math takes all of the data, divides it into chunks, and does a mathematical transformation on each chunk before assembling the results into the hash.

    Okay, assuming you’re following along so far, you understand how categorization hashes work and that cryptographic hashes are different, but how do cryptographic hashes work?

    Cryptographic hashes work on the principle that it’s much easier to do the math to hash the data than to derive the data from the hash. Let’s look again at the medical records example for a picture of how this works. If you’re given the last name SMITH and told that the hashing function (fancy term for the math to calculate the hash) is the first letter of the last name. It’s trivial to calculate a hash of “S” from the data “SMITH.” However, let’s go the other direction… if all I give you is “S”, you have thousands of last names to choose from. The chance of you guessing “SMITH” is extremely low.

    The same principle applies to SHA-256 hashes. It’s relatively easy for a computer to calculate the hash from the original data, but (practically) impossible to derive the original data from the hash.

    We’ll discuss the specific way cryptographic hashes are used in blockchains later on.

    Let’s take another break. Things are getting a bit intense. In the spirit of the glib baby pics from a while back, here’s me in a sombrero.

    Cultural Appropriation from a Young Age

    How about some relaxing pics from a backpacking trip I took a long time ago?

    Public Key Cryptography

    Alright, back to talking security! We’ve laid the groundwork for explaining the structure and security of the blocks in a blockchain, but let’s talk about individual currency transactions and how they’re secured. If I want to send 50 bitcoins to ZARDOZ, we create a transaction to transfer the bitcoins from my wallet to his. The details will be covered later, but it’s important to notice that without any security, STEVE SMITH could read the transaction, and use the information contained in the transaction to create a fake transaction to send the 50 bitcoins to him instead of ZARDOZ.

    What sort of security is used on these transactions? Public key cryptography! Public key cryptography uses the same concept of “one way” algorithms, just like the cryptographic hashes. In fact, in some cases, the mathematics for generating cryptographic hashes is used in public key cryptography.

    How does it work? Let’s assume I want to send a secret message to ZARDOZ. I’m sending it over the Internet, which isn’t a particularly trustworthy place. I can’t just send the text in the open. ZARDOZ decides to generate two “keys.” In this context, one of the keys is used in combination with fancy math to encrypt the message so that it can’t be read by STEVE SMITH. The other key is used in combination with more fancy math to decrypt the message. The cool thing about public key cryptography is that you can’t figure out the decrypting key by looking at the encrypting key or at an encrypted message. This is called asymmetric cryptography.

    In contrast, symmetric cryptography can be “broken” by looking at the encryption key and the encrypted message. Of course, that means you shouldn’t broadcast your symmetric encryption key on an insecure channel. For example, if my encryption algorithm is addition of the encryption key to the data, and my encryption key is 4, then if my data is the number 10, the encrypted data is the number 14 (10+4 = 14). I send 14 across the unsecured network to ZARDOZ, who uses the symmetric decryption key (the number 4), and the decryption algorithm of subtraction of the decryption key from the data, and ZARDOZ gets the original data, the number 10 (14 – 4 = 10).

    Seems secure enough, especially when we use something more complicated than “add 4” as an encryption. But why are we talking about asymmetric cryptography instead? Well, because we have a problem. The Internet isn’t particularly secure, and we’re not gonna VPN with the entire bitcoin network, most of whom we don’t trust, to send them our secret key. With asymmetric cryptography, the encryption key (called the public key) can be known by everybody. It doesn’t matter if half the world can encrypt messages intended for you. As long as they’re not able to decrypt those encrypted messages, the system is secure. That’s why the decryption key is called the private key. The private key must be kept secret by the receiver of the message.

     

    As shown above, I have sent ZARDOZ the message “Molon Labe!” ZARDOZ has vomited forth (published) his public key, which allowed me to encrypt my message and send it across the Internet securely. As you can see, STEVE SMITH can try his hardest to intercept my message to ZARDOZ, but all he gets is a bunch of gibberish. Then, once ZARDOZ receives the encrypted message, he uses his private decryption key (secreted away in the Vortex where nobody can access it except ZARDOZ) to decrypt the message and read “Molon Labe!”

    Now, this is great and all, but isn’t blockchain about publicly accessible data and verification instead? Well, yes. Let’s take this public key encryption and flip it around. Now, instead of keeping the data secret, we want to make sure the data is from the right person. I’m expecting a message from ZARDOZ, and want to make sure that it’s legitimately from ZARDOZ and not from STEVE SMITH.

    As you can see, the message stays public the entire time, but there is extra data added based on ZARDOZ’s private key. This is called a signature. Upon receipt, anybody can verify the authorship of the message by using the public key.

    What happens when STEVE SMITH tries to meddle again?

    As you can see, STEVE SMITH, in his ham fisted way, has altered the message before I have received it. When I try to verify the message’s authorship, I find out that it’s not from ZARDOZ, and thus it’s a suspect message to be ignored.

    This is the basis for verifying cryptocurrency transactions. We’ll put all of this book learning together into a workable model in the next article or two, but this article explains most of the theoretical underpinnings of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

  • End of The Road – Truckers are soon to be replaced by Robots, but the State has already been Roboticizing The Driver

     

    Much has been made in recent years of the looming replacement of human drivers with Robots Self-Driving Trucks.  I, for one, welcome our new Overlords of The Road, and my concerns lie less in the inevitable evolution of technology, and more in how the state, and large, corporatist, Legacy Carriers, have been slowly chipping away at the autonomy of the individual, Over The Road, Long Haul Trucker.  In this article I hope to illustrate the history and recent trajectory of this trend, and explain the extent to which the regulation of the Trucker has destroyed a once honored and noble occupation, and caused me to give up on it for good …  even though I’ve had a pretty successful 20 year run in the business.  Perhaps, if you wonderful Glibs will have me back, I might comment on why I think those robot trucks are a bit further away than their cheerleaders anticipate, and give some insight as to why certain sectors of the business will probably never be fully automated.

    Jimmy Carter Deregulates The Business End of Trucking

    Back in “The Old Days”, getting into the trucking business was extremely difficult.  A prospective trucker had to seek a license, much like a taxi medallion, to even operate, and any rates you negotiated with your customers were mandated to be public knowledge, and could be interfered with by the Interstate Commerce Commission.  Most trucking was done by in-house transport; many shippers had their own trucking fleets, or hired lease operators who had to run exclusively under those shippers’ operating licenses.  Of course, this lead to unnecessary inefficiencies, inflated rates, and a rather noncompetitive marketplace.  And that’s not even considering the effects of one James Riddle Hoffa. *(Warning, shameless plug for one of my favorite commentators and pod-casters, well known to the readers of this site.

    All of this mess in the marketplace was somewhat corrected, and the field further opened to competition, by the passage of The Motor Carrier Act of 1980, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on July 1, 1980.  Similar legislation followed, both provincially and federally, in my homeland of The People’s Soviet Republic of Canuckistan.

    Of course, this momentous bit of de-regulation was met with howls of protest by the dominant legacy carriers, who were now losing their oligopolies, and, to this day, is also complained about by that portion of the truck driving community who do not understand what free markets actually mean in practice.  God knows I’ve been wincing at their economically illiterate commentary since I was a kid, especially given that de-regulation allowed for once small, independent operators, like my former employers here, to grow from a tiny, family run operation, to having a fleet of nearly 100 tractors and 300+ trailers, a warehousing division, and to such size that they now employ over 200 people.

    That’s the good news part of this article.

    Any Action Will Be Met With an Equal and Opposite Reaction

    The late 1980’s and early 1990’s saw a massive increase in the competition in the trucking marketplace, which also saw the growth of 3PL’s, also known as load brokers.  Many more new companies were opening, many more independent owner/operators were hitting the roads, and the marketplace continued to evolve.  Things at the operational end of the business, however, were also evolving, and not always in a good way.

    The state, as it is want to do, can never leave a good enough thing alone, and major increases in roadside enforcement operations began to take place.  One thing that had not changed over this period of de-regulation of the marketplace was the hours-of-service (HOS) rules governing the amount of time a Trucker could work, how much rest was required, and when.  What had also not changed, since their introduction in the 1950’s, was the use of paper log books, by which truckers were supposed to record their driving hours, location, odometer readings, commodity being hauled, and base of operations, such that enforcement personnel could keep an eye on us.  The Nanny State was not satisfied with this arrangement, and through fits and starts in the early 2000’s they began to dismantle a regulatory framework, which, when matched with the ‘pliability’ of paper logs, allowed for an easier to manage compliance situation for most drivers smart enough to work with, through, or around the rules.

    From the linked wiki –

    Between 1962 and 2003, there were numerous proposals to change the HOS again, but none were ever finalized. By this time, the ICC had been abolished, and regulations were now issued by the FMCSA. The 2003 changes applied only to property-carrying drivers (i.e., truck drivers). These rules allowed 11 hours of driving within a 14-hour period, and required 10 hours of rest.[9] These changes would allow drivers (using the entire 14-hour on-duty period) to maintain a natural 24-hour cycle, with a bare minimum 21-hour cycle (11 hours driving, 10 hours rest). However, the retention of the split sleeper berth provision would allow drivers to maintain irregular, short-burst sleeping schedules. 

    The most notable change of 2003 was the introduction of the “34-hour restart.” Before the change, drivers could only gain more weekly driving hours with the passing of each day (which reduced their 70-hour total by the number of hours driven on the earliest day of the weekly cycle). After the change, drivers were allowed to “reset” their weekly 70-hour limit to zero, by taking 34 consecutive hours off-duty. This provision was introduced to combat the cumulative fatigue effects that accrue on a weekly basis, and to allow for two full nights of rest (e.g., during a weekend break).[2] 

    In 2005, the FMCSA changed the rules again, practically eliminating the split sleeper berth provision. [10]  Drivers are now required to take a full 8 hours of rest, with 2 hours allowed for off-duty periods, for a total of 10 hours off-duty. This provision forced drivers to take one longer uninterrupted period of rest, but eliminated the flexibility of allowing drivers to take naps during the day without jeopardizing their driving time. Today’s rule still allows them to “split” the sleeper berth period, but one of the splits must be 8 hours long and the remaining 2 hours do not stop the 14-hour on-duty period. This rule is confusing and impractical for most drivers, resulting in the majority of drivers taking the full 10-hour break. 

    The split sleeper provision, such as it was, was the tool in our HOS regimen which gave us the flexibility to meet the demands of life on the road, shipping schedules, traffic, you name it.  If you were held up at a customer, unpaid and with nothing you could possibly do about it, as is a common practise and endless source of frustration for the average trucker, you could at least log that time in the bunk, and make up the driving time later.  No more.

    In 2005, the FMCSA changed the rules again, practically  eliminating the split sleeper berth provision.

    This rule change, as well as the introduction of satellite linked electronic log devices, or ELDs, which become the law of the land this month have pretty much eliminated the possibility of most truckers being able to work around any schedules, traffic, weather, or this little thing called ‘life’; and to my great disgust, further remove any autonomy one might have as a trucker.  As has been posted here in a thread by yours truly a few weeks back, this is certainly not good news to the over 3 million truckers in North America who are being affected by these changes.  I mean, who doesn’t want Uncle Sam riding shotgun with you, telling you when you can eat, sleep, or shit, or undermining your fourth amendment rights against your privacy?  Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

    Some anecdotes from my last trucking job about how that effects your life on the road –

    Situation a – I am dispatched from my former employers home base in Syracuse, New York, to a trailer manufacturer in Cheeseheadville, Wisconsin, to pick up a brand new trailer.  Around midnight, I get tired, and pull in to the Petro Truck Stop at Angola, Indiana.  No problem, right?  Yours truly wakes up at a little after 630am, pre-trips the truck, has breakfast, and is ready to roll at 730.  But according to Uncle Sam, and the mandated logging device in my truck, I cannot go anywhere til 10am, when the minimum required 10 hour break is up.  So I have 2 and a half hours to catch up on the fun and excitement to be found here at Glibertarians Dot Com, but not make any fucking money, all because some enlightened public servants pieces of shit at the FMCSA have deemed that my sleep patterns must fit into what they believe is a proper regimen of rest.

    Situation b – Yours truly is on his way back to Syracuse, on a similar trailer retrieval mission as situation a.  Approaching Cleveland, I am about to run out of available driving hours, and pull into the last service plaza on the Ohio Turnpike prior to the 90 splitting off into the west side of Cleveland.  Guess when my ten hour rest period allows me to drive again?  Right in the middle of morning rush hour.  Under the old regimen of paper logs and the split sleeper provision, or if I worked in a civilized place that allows for 16 hour (or more) windows for your drive time to be completed, or allow more driving time (such as Canada, where it is 13 hours, or Western Australia, which is quite similar), I could have kept driving through Cleveland in the evening, and parked on the east side of town, thus avoiding contributing to rush hour traffic.  The next time you are sitting in traffic in some major metropolitan area, and you’re wondering why all of these trucks are on the road at the same time, you know who to blame.

    And there are millions of situations like this taking place every day, in every subdivision of the trucking industry.  Imagine being a cattle hauler, and you have a full load of calves on board, and it’s winter time.  You run out of your 11 hours driving time, and have to stop, in the middle of winter, most likely at a location where you can’t unload your cargo and get them inside somewhere where they won’t freeze to death.  Or imagine that you are me, or one of the many other people who used to run The Ice up North (remember this stupid piece of crap of television?), and your run basically can’t be done, because it’s 16 hours from Yellowknife to the mine under optimal conditions.  In fact, there are so many of these situations, that dozens and dozens of industry groups that depend greatly on trucking are lining up and begging for exemptions to the rules.

    And the trucking industry continues to wrestle with a driver turnover problem, that, although it has decreased slightly through 2015, appears to be on the rise again.  Gee, I wonder why?

    It also seems that many of the older guys on the road, gents who have been trucking for many decades and are used to managing their own schedules, regardless of what Uncle Sam has to say about it, are going to take early retirement or find something else to do.

    At Werner, as Leathers explained, the number of drivers in the 60-67 age group had held steady for “a long, long time,” as a few would retire and about an equal number would move up. 

    In the 90 days leading up to the hours-of-service change, that number fell by half.

    “It’s my belief that’s a representative sample across the industry of drivers who just said, ‘I’m out. I’m done. Thanks, but I’m moving on,’” Leathers said. “That’s been the silent victim of these changes: The drivers that are probably some of the most-qualified we have are saying, ‘I’ve had enough and I’m not going to do it.’ That’s concerning.” 

    Steve Gordon, COO of Gordon Trucking Inc., offered a similar take. 

    “The thing that’s most unfortunate is we’ve worked very hard to build a better lifestyle for our drivers – more out-for-a-week, home-for-a-weekend opportunities. The new restart has been most painful for those folks,” Gordon said. “They can’t leave the house until after 5 a.m. If they get hung up somewhere, they lose that time the next week. So the very people we’re trying to tell, ‘we’re going to do right by you, we’re going to get you home to see your family,’ they’re the ones paying the price.” 

    Think about this for a minute.  A job which attracts people who typically want to be left alone, or have some kind of ‘adventure’, or at very least not be  under the nose of their boss all day, is being regulated to a degree which gives you very little room to schedule your day, virtually dictates your sleeping patterns, penalizes you for taking naps or otherwise attempting to make the most efficient use of your time, and provides the government with an instantly accessible record about where you have been, 24/7, and gives them unlimited access to review your HOS compliance and issue fines at will.  WHERE DO I SIGN UP?

    Where Do We Go From Here?

    For the liberty minded professional driver, the situation looks bleak.  I doubt very highly that the FMCSA is ever going to change the HOS regulations to match more humane and productive provisions in places like Canada or New Zealand, where a guy can drive 13 hours a day and, at least in Canada, has a bit more flexibility with shifting hours around.  And I also doubt very highly that the FMCSA or any state level DOT is going to give up on the rolling cash cows that are ELDs.  If you are an owner operator and you have a truck with a model year older than 2000, you are exempt from the ELD mandate, but that doesn’t help with the stupid HOS regs, and many large carriers won’t take on owner operators who choose to run older equipment.  (And don’t get me started on the EPA rules and how they have completely screwed up the engine marketplace, such that Caterpillar quit making on-highway diesel engines.  Another article entirely …. )   Trucking is an ultra-competitive marketplace for rates, and the little guy has an enormous hill to climb in competing against legacy carriers, who benefit both from economics of scale, and being large enough to enjoy the privileges of regulatory capture.  Hell, some of these arseholes, through cronyist organizations like The American Trucking Association, go right along with all of these stupid laws because they know they can comply with them.  The Provinces of Ontario and Quebec instituted mandatory truck speed limiters, restricting trucks to 105km/h (65mph) by law, even for carriers not based there.  These rules were not proposed by the Ontario Ministry of Transport, or it’s analogs in Quebec; they were proposed by mega-carriers like Challenger Motor Freight, and their crony mouthpieces in the Ontario Trucking Association.

    So what’s a guy to do?  As reported above, many older drivers who were already close to retirement are just going to pack it in.  Some, like myself, are young enough to move into other fields of pursuit, and some, perhaps, already have training or qualifications in other fields.  Unfortunately, due to the nature of the business, and the demographics of people who it typically draws from, this is not the case for the majority of people behind the wheel.  What are they going to do?   What was once considered a free-wheeling, adventurous, decent paying gig, looks more and more like a rolling prison from which many may not escape.

  • An Introduction to Bitcoin

    There’s a scene in Neal Stephenson’s “The Baroque Cycle” in which the 17th Century English economy is described as almost completely run from lists of debts due to the lack of circulating coinage. Welcome to the wonderful world of Bitcoin!

    There is no such thing as a bitcoin. When someone says “I own a bitcoin,” what they mean is “I know the code or codes that can authorize the transfer of up to one bitcoin.” If you buy a “loaded” physical token for 0.01 bitcoin on eBay, the token contains a code. Neither the token nor the code is “bitcoin,” but the code enables you to transfer amounts adding up to 0.01 bitcoin to other accounts.

    Bitcoin’s foundation is a public transaction ledger called the blockchain. Every bitcoin transaction is recorded on the blockchain and anyone can inspect the transaction history going back to the creation of the first block of the chain. Because the blockchain is public, bitcoin transactions are not as anonymous as some people currently in prison had hoped. Every new account is anonymous, but that anonymity will probably be compromised by the first transfer of bitcoin into it because the bitcoins in the source account probably have a history–and there are companies whose business plan is to delve through the blockchain to link accounts to owners and sell the information.

    Here’s how the blockchain works: people with codes that control bitcoin create transactions. Transactions can have one or more input accounts and one or more output accounts. Newly created transactions are sent to the cloud of computers running bitcoin protocol clients and added to a list of pending transactions. Anyone can download a bitcoin protocol client and run it on their computer, but running a full “node” takes a lot of disk storage space and Internet bandwidth.

    Some of the computers running bitcoin protocol clients are “mining” bitcoin. To mine bitcoin, one selects transactions from the pending list and packs them together into a binary blob called a “block”. The block is then scanned to create a “hash” value. The last digit of a 16 digit credit card number is a hash value calculated from the first 15 digits. This is how web sites can automatically determine if you’ve mistyped a credit card number.

    The hash value created by scanning a block isn’t a single digit. It’s 78 digits long, and it’s unlikely that the first hash value created for a block will “mine” the block because there’s a trick. The bitcoin protocol tries to make it so that a block is mined every 10 minutes. To do this, the protocol periodically adjusts the difficulty of mining by specifying a maximum value for the hash value. In addition to the selected transactions, the block contains a counter. When a block is first created, the counter value is zero. The block’s hash value is calculated. If the hash value is less than the current maximum value, then the block is “mined.” If the hash value is greater than the current maximum, then the counter is incremented and a new hash value is calculated. Subsequent hash values created by incrementing the counter are essentially random values from zero to 1.16×10^77. The process of mining a block is repeatedly incrementing the block’s counter and calculating the next hash value until the hash value is less than the current maximum value.

    “… What?”

    When a hash value is less than the maximum value, the winning block/counter/hash combination is sent to the cloud of computers running bitcoin protocol clients, and the block is added to the end of the blockchain. The transactions in the block are considered complete and removed from the pending list.  All the miners start the process over again, create a new block from transactions in the pending list, and commence mining it.

    As incentive to mine, the account of a miner who successfully mines a block is credited with (as of this writing) 12.5 bitcoins. This is how new bitcoins are created. The number of bitcoins created for each successfully mined block declines slowly over time. Miners can also keep any change left over from a transaction. If a transaction specifies an input account that contains one bitcoin and specifies the output account should get 0.99 bitcoin, then the remaining 0.01 bitcoin is kept by the miner. This is incentive for miners to include the transaction in their blocks.

    Most mining is done by groups of miners who join together in a mining “pool.” A central computer creates the block which is sent to the members of the pool. Each member mines using a different initial value of the counter.  If a pool member mines the block, the result is sent to the central computer and the pool members share the reward in proportion to their effort. Anyone can buy a mining rig on eBay and join a mining pool.

    Bitcoin mining is almost exclusively done by specialized mining equipment, and the price of bitcoin is directly related to the cost of the electricity required to mine blocks. If the exchange value of bitcoin rises to the point where it’s very profitable to mine, then existing miners buy more equipment or new mining pools are created. This makes mining faster and blocks are mined more frequently than every 10 minutes. This makes the bitcoin protocol increase the mining difficulty by decreasing the maximum hash value. This means miners have to mine longer to mine a block using more electricity and reducing profits. Miners must sell some of their new bitcoins to pay for the electricity used, so the price of bitcoin is ultimately related to the cost of electricity.

  • Mother Theresa Makes $4/hr at Burger King

    By compgrokker

    This is from a long, far-ranging discussion of economics and politics a former friend and I had on Facebook, and this post was originally written in 2013. I think this still stands up well, but this is not a new post.

    My friend has a BA in Business Administration, hence the reference at least once to his business degree, and presumed cluefulness about how businesses operate and how business owners think. This jumps into the middle, and I’d rather just post this as-is, so I’ll paraphrase his points leading up to this. We wandered over to minimum wage via government regulation (which in turn stemmed from a discussion of the incestuous relationship between business and government); I’d said that most regulations are obsolete and hurt business, he pointed out that yes, some are obsolete, but others are there to protect people, and voila, minimum wage is an example of protecting workers.

    My response:

    You and I are coming from the minimum wage question from 2 completely different angles. You believe in (federal) government protection of workers. I believe in the (federal) government sticking to the Constitution… and minimum wage isn’t in the Constitution, even under the commerce clause (what Joe Shmoe is paid in Wichita, KS, has nothing to do with a different franchise in Kenosha, WI, selling their burgers). If it was a state minimum wage, it’d be a different thing… although I’d still be against it, the “it’s not a role of government” argument wouldn’t apply.

    However, setting that argument aside, I’m still coming at it from the side of “personal responsibility”. You have 3 options as a burger flipper: either find an employer who will pay you what you think a burger flipper is worth at whatever quality of burger flipper you are (I’d assume shoddy, since you feel you need some kind of protectionism to get paid a ‘decent’ wage, but I may be wrong and you may just be ignorant and unaware that you can switch jobs without your world shattering), be the best damn burger flipper you can be and justify that raise you’re asking for (what everyone making over minimum wage does when they want/need to make more money), or learn a skilled trade or get a higher education in something and stop being a burger flipper and start being something like a carpenter or architect.

    Again, I’m not talking out my ass, or in theoretical terms about things I only vaguely observe from some mystical ivory tower somewhere… I have the t-shirt. In high school and through college (and after college for a couple years, because of the recession) I worked really crappy jobs. Food Lion and Walmart didn’t pay minimum wage (even McDonald’s doesn’t), but it was bloody close. After I moved out, I didn’t make enough most of the time to cover my gas and such (I was in college by the time I moved out)… so I did the best job I could do and got raises every year. When I could, I got promotions. And when I found a job that paid me well and needed my skill set, I changed jobs and came to work at my current job. I didn’t ask the government to make anyone pay me more, or wish minimum wage was $12/hr… I made myself a better employee and justified the money I was getting, and went above and beyond so raises and promotions would be justified as well.

    And since you have a BA, I assume you know as well as I do that businesses aren’t charities– they aren’t there to give workers the money they ‘want’, or deserve for being a special snowflake human being. Businesses exist to make money, and as a side effect pay people to make money for the business… and that pay is in proportion to a person’s value as an employee. If Mother Teresa sucks at flipping burgers, then dang it, Mother Teresa deserves minimum wage… or to be fired. It doesn’t matter to Burger King that she’s Mother flippin’ Teresa, man. She’s a terrible employee, and her pay reflects that.

    Also worth noting is the point he’d made earlier about employees being replaced by automation if they get too expensive to employ. This is a very valid point that most minimum wage workers and people who advocate for them don’t seem to understand. Again, people own businesses to make themselves money. If they can’t make enough money, something’s got to give. And when there’s no more non-employee overhead to cut, they need to start cutting people. As a general rule of thumb, it costs about twice an employee’s gross pay to employ them (given employer shares of FICA, certain states’ income tax, worker’s comp, benefits, etc.)… so that $10k/yr employee actually costs the business owner around $20k. I’d imagine Obamacare penalties and/or post-obamacare insurance premiums have upped that 2:1 ratio. So if it costs less than $20k/yr to set up an automated ordering kiosk and a burger flipping robot, guess what a business owner is going to do?

    And then there’s the economic effects of raising the minimum wage. Less than 10% of workers make minimum wage, so this would have very little direct positive effect on people. However, in short order, it would have great negative effects on a large number of people. Artificially raising the wages of one segment of the population increases cost for certain businesses, they raise their prices, which raises costs for other businesses, and so on down the line until prices have increased across the board, and we’re right back where we were. This is how raising the minimum wage is a driver of inflation.

    In this country, like most countries in the world, we have a fiat currency; that is, a currency whose value is not linked to a commodity (like gold, silver, or salt), but is based on the trust that the country issuing the currency can pay its bills. By its nature, fiat currencies are subject to almost constant inflation through devaluation of the currency. Especially when the country in question is engaging in… let’s say non-optimal monetary and economic practices. In our case, budget deficits, a high national debt, and things like quantitative easing. It’s part of the reason everyone’s parents have stories of “I remember when gas was $0.35!” (for my generation’s parents) or “I remember when gas was $0.98!” (the story I get to tell if/when I have kids and they’re old enough to be regaled with tales of ‘the good old days’). Another factor in inflation is artificially raising wages– you’ve arbitrarily decided that the dollar is worth less than it is, so people need more of them. And by deciding that one segment of the population needs more, less valuable dollars, everyone else needs to have and spend more, less valuable dollars to keep up with the sudden devaluation of a dollar for a certain segment of the population.

    So, with a rough idea of how inflation works in mind, it makes sense that raising the minimum wage (or even having one, I would argue) is detrimental to the economy as a whole, and you end up chasing your own tail. What happens when inflation catches right back up to you again? The cycle of artificial inflation begins again, and the minimum wage is raised, devaluing the currency and forcing business costs to go up, rippling down the supply chain, raising costs of end-consumer goods, etc. We aren’t going to rein in fiat-based inflation any time soon, but we can stop wage-induced inflation by not raising the minimum wage.

  • Why I hate the metric system and you should too: an uninformed rant based on no research whatsoever

    Honestly, I probably wouldn’t hate the metric system if I saw it in isolation.  Yes, it’s a little bit silly, like the tennis scoring system, but it’s just a system of measurement after all.

    It’s the fucking proponents of it I can’t stand.  More specifically, it’s the self-righteous more-sciencey-than-thou “educators” who will voxplain how it’s sooo superior and anyone who doesn’t recognize this is an inbred Luddite.  Before there were vegans, before there was crossfit, there were metric proponents. And even they wouldn’t be so bad if their arguments weren’t completely, absolutely, 100% full of shit.

    Myth #1:  “It’s more scientific”

    First of all, what does that even mean?  Seriously, what?  The closest thing I’ve found to an answer is that “it’s used by more scientists.”  Which is like saying Nathan’s hotdogs are “more medical.”

    Myth #2:  “It’s based on nature, not arbitrary units”

    Holy fuckballs no.  Not even.  Prior to the modern metric system, there was an idea to make a “natural” system wherein the unit of length would be the length of a pendulum with a period of 1 second.  This… is actually a pretty good idea.  And pretty close to a system based on natural laws.  Yes, there is still some arbitrariness involved with choosing the place where the standard will be set since gravity is inhomogeneous, but for the 18th century, pretty good.  This is not what we got.  What we got was a second set of arbitrary units with the pretense of objectivity.  To go into detail relates directly to the objections to:

    Myth #3:  “It’s self-consistent”

    Just stop.  Let’s talk about this “consistent system” for a while, shall we?   The meter, what is it?  “It’s 1/10,000th the distance from the pole to the equator.”  No, it’s not, shut up.  First of all, everything in this “consistent” system is based on factors of 1000.  Except for this, the principal unit of the system, which is mysteriously based on a factor of 10,000.  But of course it isn’t even that since it’s not 1/10,000th of anything, it’s 1/10,000th of a quarter of something.  So it’s really 1/40,000th of something.   What the meter is, is a juggling around with numbers until they could find a unit of measurement that is as close as possible to a yard, and then making a physical, constantly-changing arbitrary standard based on that.  If they weren’t trying to duplicate the yard, they would have made the meter based on some factor of 1000.  If they were determined to use the earth, they could have taken 1/1,000,000th of the circumference of the earth and gotten a serviceable unit of about an inch and a half, or 1/1000th the radius of the earth and gotten something close to 4 miles, but those units are just too weird and exotic and we need to make this change easy for the peasants to digest while we’re force-feeding this change to them and we really need to sharpen the guillotine again and… sorry, I was getting too deep into the revolutionary mindset for a minute there.  Anyway, a meter is a Froggy yard and I don’t care what anyone says they‘re just trying to post-hoc rationalize it.  Now moving on in our “self-consistent” system, we have the base unit of mass, the kilogram.  Does anyone else see the problem here?    We have a base unit… that requires a prefix.  Qu’est-ce que c’est le face-palm en francais?  And again, this base unit which is supposedly (but isn’t – it’s actually a terrible waste of platinum) the mass of a liter of water, which is a cubic decimeter.  A cubic decimeter of water… which is a liter… weighs a kilogram.  I’m so glad this system is so self-consistent.  And the most ludicrous thing about this inconsistency is that these last two are that they are derived units in the first place!  If they were self-consistent, and they kept with water, their base unit of volume would be about 264 gallons and the base unit of mass would be a long ton.  Which is simply inconvenient and puts to lie…

    Myth #4: “It’s easier to use”

    Here’s the speed of light as George Washington would have reckoned it:

    186000

    Easy to recognize, and it’s in miles/second because that’s really the only sensible combination of units to use for speeds like that.

    Here’s the Macron version:

    30000000

    Or is it?  Do I have the right number of zeroes there?  And what units?  I mean km/s would be the analog to mi/s, but since one of the purported advantages to metric is adding and dropping prefixes willy-nilly, they could be anything.  Usually, I see the speed of light given in m/s, but I can toss a random number of zeroes and still be correct as long as I claim to be using a particular prefix-unit combination.  To be fair, there are instances where the metric system is easier to use.  Those instances are when you are:

    -performing a calculation

    -with a pencil and paper

    -with abstracted numbers

    But other than that, nope.  And part of that is because the Top Men promoting the system are promising completely contradictory things.  To claim that you can create a system of measurement based on natural laws that is convenient for humans is that quotidian mix of ignorance and arrogance that has categorized progressive thought since time immemorial.  Repeat after me:  Nature hates you and wants you to die.  Nature is supremely unconcerned about being convenient.  By picking one unit to be human-scaled (the meter) they pretty much guaranteed that any of the other measurable aspects of nature are going to be stupidly awkward when expressed in terms of that unit.  When was the last time you bought a capacitator measured in a whole number of Farads?  A magnet in Teslas?  (People who buy NMRs don’t count.)  If you want to quantify exactly how terrible of an idea it is to try and build a measurement system around the fundamental properties of the universe, take a looky here.

    So what is the metric system if none of those myths?  It’s the product of a decimal fetishist.  Which is frankly a pretty low grade of fetish.  It’s like being preferentially attracted to Americans while you’re vacationing in Prague.  Prague, Czech Republic, not Prague, Oklahoma.  They’re not even pronounced the same.  The metric system was made by shallow-thinking revolutionaries who thought themselves wise.  For them, the decimal system had totemic value, like black guns or Maggie McNeil’s “sex rays.”  Their cook could understand halves and thirds, and quarters, but it took a man of the proper social class to understand 3/10ths.  All the good things about the metric system happen because it’s tied to the decimal system.  Which is also its biggest problem, because the decimal system is pretty crap.  But in one of the most unfortunate examples of existence bias in history, Messrs. Haut-Hommes never considered that maybe the decimal system was what they needed to take forth on the tumbrel.

    We already have the basis of the dozenal system in our language (dozen, gross, great gross) and Glibs of a certain age may remember when multiplication tables ran up to 12.  Those of you with rugrats can let me know if this is still a thing, but freaking muppets were able to recognize the superiority of the dozenal system.  Even metric-loving Eurotards are starting to clue in; though the specific example in that video is also chock-full of existence bias.  Yes, you could keep Arabic numerals and add a couple of symbols, but it really would be better to replace all of the numerals so it would be obvious what system was being written.  That’s a system that would have been an improvement over an older one.  It’s not what the metric system was.   The metric system was a waste of a good opportunity for a bunch of hubristic murderous progressives (but I repeat myself) to make a positive change but couldn’t because they were stupid (but I repeat myself yet again).

    That is why I hate it.  That is why you should too.

     

  • Firearms Friday: Long Arms in Low Orbit

    When you first think about it, you probably wonder why you would ever want to take a gun into space. After you think about it a little more, though, you probably wonder why you would ever not want to take a gun into space. Thousands of miles from everywhere, in a hostile environment, with no chance of escape or rescue… sounds like exactly the kind of situation to require some ballistic backup. Whether you need to un-stick a broken escape hatch or simply quell an interplanetary mutiny, a gun is a must have for any space faring humanoid. Okay, in all seriousness, some astronaut crews did take a gun into space, at least for a period of time. They weren’t designed for use during the trip, however. Well, most of them weren’t, anyway. They were for use afterwards. The thinking was that if a capsule went way off course and landed in the middle of bumfuck nowhere the ‘nauts would have a survival weapon they could use to defend from predators and forage for food until the cavalry arrived.

    Jessie NOT hardest hit.
    The Makarov. Great against spies and dissident. Useless against bears.

    Shockingly, the Americans are actually not the most tooled up group of people outside of the atmosphere. I can find no record of NASA issuing or allowing any sort of guns on shuttle missions or the space station. There is a possibility that at one point they were equipped with M6 survival rifles or even Beretta 9mm pistols, but I can’t find any definitive proof of it so your guess is as good as mine. The Russians, on the other hand might as well open up a branch of the NRA on the moon, cause as far as I can tell every fucking manned spaceflight they went on had a gun on board. Originally they started out with Makarov pistols. These reliable little handguns carry 8 rounds of 9×18 (similar to .380) in a very compact package. This went on for a few years, until a mission went a bit off. One of the capsules missed it’s landing area by about 600 miles and ended up in the middle of Siberia. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Siberia, but it’s a bit like Australia or Florida, in that everything wants to kill you. Unlike Australia or Florida, however, most of those things would laugh at you for pointing a 9mm pistol at it before mauling you and eating your steaming intestines like spaghetti while you were still alive and screaming. Thankfully, the cosmonauts survived, and one of them, Alexey Leonov, apparently developed a lasting impression of that particular feeling of terror since he mandated that a new survival weapon be developed for the space program after becoming a major general.

    TP-82, with ammo and buttstock/machete.

    Thus was born the first gun designed to go to space: The TP-82. I will give the commies credit, when they design a rifle they really go all out. The TP-82 is a triple barrel short barreled shotgun/rifle combo. The top two barrels are 12.5x70mm shotgun bore (roughly 38 gauge), while the bottom center barrel is chambered in 5.45×39, the common caliber of the AK 74 assault rifle. The gun has a detachable stock that doubles as a machete (no I don’t know how they fired it without cutting their arms off either) and came with birdshot, rifle rounds, and signal flares. This gun flew with all of the cosmonauts from 1986 until 2007, and even made it into the space station according to rumors. In 2007, Russia announced that there was no more shotgun ammo for the gun and no more could be produced, and the weapon was officially retired, with the cosmonauts returning to a standard semi automatic handgun. Let’s hope their search and rescue response times have gotten better.

    An actual, honest to god, laser gun. Holy. Shit.

    Don’t think for a second that all space weaponry was for boring old hunting and survival, though. It turns out that the reds are much more ambitious than we like to admit, because these sons of bitches went full fucking Moonraker on us and actually developed and fielded laser pistols. That’s right. Laser. Fricken. Pistols. Take THAT, John Browning! They were magazine fed and used flashbulb technology. Their reported function was to disable enemy spy satellites, but it is said that they could burn through a helmet or fry someone’s eyeballs at 60 feet. Whether or not this is actually true or a load of crap is anyone’s guess, but hats off to them for bringing energy weapons into reality.

    And they STILL lost the war! Cucks.
    The R-23 autocannon used on the Salyut space station.

    So, what could top directed energy weapons in space? Oh I don’t know… how about an armed satellite? In the 1970s, the Soviets developed the Almaz program, which launched 3 manned reconnaissance satellites into orbit. These satellites were supposed to monitor comms traffic and do orbital imaging, but don’t think they were just for show either. Each one was fitted with a 23mm belt fed autocannon capable of 2000 rounds a minute. Of course, they didn’t carry very much ammo, but then again it doesn’t take much damage to really wreck your day in space. While they never actually attacked anything (there’s no record of it, anyway) they did successfully remotely test fire the weapon on multiple occasions.

    All of this research has led me to one inescapable conclusion: The Russians will eventually own space and become fearsome interplanetary pirates, while our hopeless and disarmed astronauts fall victim to their merciless supply raids and wanton destruction. If only we hadn’t elected Trump…..

  • Firearms Friday: Silencer Suppositions

    America, in general, is a great place for libertarians. It is not perfect, of course, but to my knowledge, it is the only place on earth you can legally buy an ounce of weed and an AR 15 in the same day (although you may not want to publicly declare it since the weed is still federally regulated). In particular, our gun laws are some of the most permissive in the world, for better or worse, and we can own damn near anything we like. Our silencer laws, however, bite ass. For those that just woke up out of an extended coma or are learning English as a second language, silencers are long tubes you screw or clamp onto the muzzle of a gun which reduce the deafening boom accompanying a shot down to a more manageable level. They are also called suppressors or mufflers, the latter being probably the most accurate description since they function very much like the muffler of a car. They are primarily used for safety and comfort, since it is much nicer to not go deaf from your hobbies, and ear muffs can be uncomfortable and ineffective, along with other downsides. “Those sound like great inventions” you’re probably thinking. They are. Too bad they are damn near illegal here.

    Pictured: Shit you can’t have.

    You see, about 80 years ago, a bunch of politicians decided to take their first really big shit on the second amendment, and boy did they deliver. It’s called the National Firearms Act. You may have heard me talk about it once or twice, and I promise I will mention it again in the future because you will never love a woman (or man, if that’s your bag) as much as I hate that piece of legislation. The NFA put a de facto ban on a whole bunch of fun, useful, and constitutionally protected items, including silencers. The silencer regulation was particularly painful because it affects all silencers, for all guns, for all reasons. There is absolutely no way you can own or possess one without going through the NFA. There’s no decibel threshold for what constitutes a silencer, either. If it reduces the sound signature of a firearm in any noticeable way, it is considered a silencer. You literally cannot legally make your gun quieter. I don’t think it’s difficult to grasp how infuriatingly asinine it is to prohibit an item that is dangerously loud from being made safer to use. What really puts the corn kernels in this shit sandwich is that, by itself, a silencer is completely harmless. They’re regulating ownership of an overpriced piece of sewer pipe. In terms of lethality, it’s somewhere above a metal spatula and below a large flashlight.

    Could you keep it down? I'm trying to shoot here!
    If only the chainsaw was a little louder, we could have had a chance.

    The thinking (and I use that word as loosely as possible) behind it is that criminals use silencers to muffle their murderous gunshots during crimes, thereby delaying or avoiding police intervention. Sounds reasonable, right? Except that it’s 100% horseshit. A silencer doesn’t actually silence anything, it simply reduces the sound of the gunshot down to hearing safe levels, and even with a silencer many guns still do require hearing protection. A silenced gun is still about as loud as a chainsaw or an ambulance siren. I don’t hear any morons in congress talking about making those louder for safety. Imagine if a law was introduced severely restricting mufflers on passenger vehicles in order to reduce collisions. It would be laughed right out of Congress, but change ‘cars’ to ‘guns’ and suddenly it’s common sense regulation!

    To put this in perspective, a number of countries with significantly more restrictive firearm laws not only allow but encourage ownership and usage of silencers on firearms. Places like Norway, New Zealand, and Poland have essentially no restrictions at all on silencers, and even the gun hating utopia of the UK is relatively lax in their silencer ownership laws. When you’re doing worse than the UK at something gun related, you know you’ve got problems.

    See this guy? FUCK THIS GUY! FUCK HIM RIGHT IN THE EAR!

    There is, however, some hope on the horizon. a few years ago some politicians got together and introduced the Hearing Protection Act, a name which puts a big trollish grin on my face every time I read it. The HPA would take silencers out of the purview of the NFA and treat them like a gun, requiring only a 4473 and a background check to purchase. It had fairly broad support in Congress, but never went anywhere because chocolate Jesus would have vetoed it on the spot. That all changed when Big Donny Sixgun came to town, though. With orange being the new black, the HPA has a real shot at getting passed. That shot got a little bit louder (or is it quieter?) recently when some clever fellow in Congress (oxymoron, I know) decided to roll all of the major provisions of the HPA into an otherwise boring little piece of paper called the ‘Sportsmen Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act’ or SHARE Act. I wonder how much they pay people to come up with names for these bills. Is that where greeting card writers go after they’re promoted? Anywho, the bill was scheduled for a hearing on Wednesday, but some fucking dicknose bernie bro douche canoe had to go and put bullet holes in a couple of politicians that morning, and the hearing has been canceled until further notice. So, if that was your ultimate goal, you fuckstick, then mission accomplished. I am going to break my foot off in your ass when I see you in hell.

  • Tuesday Afternoon Links

    Brett is having his wallet molested by a mechanic, so you get links from me today. And none of them are NSFW except maybe this one and that one.

    “Secret” space plane Boeing X-37B

    Spaceplanes, motherfuckers.

    Tunnel at plutonium uranium extraction plant collapses in Hanford (TW:Autoplay video): The AP reports no workers were in the tunnel at the time of collapse. Workers at the site have now been evacuated. Workers farther away were told to remain indoors. Destry Henderson, deputy news manager for the Hanford Joint Information Center, told NBC News. “There are no reports of injuries, no reports of a radiological release.” Gojira hardest hit. (h/t Playa  Manhattan)

    Good Korea elects a new president after forcing their last one into early retirement for being an utter putz. NYT has a great primer on the election and current geopolitical situation in the region. DAEHANMINGUK (대한민국), bitches.

    When all you have is hunger all news looks like a food pun

    Good Gravy: Trump is Poutine his Chips on the Table to Cover the Kurds

    Sessions to review Obama-era policies on drug-crime sentencing “If new charging instructions are implemented, it would mark the first significant move by the Trump administration to bring back the drug war’s toughest practices — methods that had fallen out of favor in recent years as critics pointed to damaging effects of mass incarceration.” (h/t OMWC)

  • Socialized Sports: A Microcosm of a Diseased Ideology

    There are a thousand examples that could be used to show the rot caused by the invidious tenets of socialism in our sports these days. The most illustrative, in my opinion, is that of IndyCar. For the first 75 years of the Indianapolis 500, the race and the supporting series were based on a free-market-style “run what you brung” model, resulting in a rich and storied tradition. Stories of turbine cars, diesels, close finishes, and 1000 HP rocketships on wheels echo through from the past. Before NASCAR, the various iterations of Indycar (CART, USAC, AAA, etc.) were king in the United States. Until the late 90s, IndyCar was a half-step behind Formula 1 for international popularity.

    Today, IndyCar is circling the drain. They had a race in Phoenix last weekend with 7,000 attendees and a few hundred thousand, at most, watching on TV. Why such a precipitous drop from rivaling F1 to now being on the brink of failure? Beyond the basic ineptitude and competitive failures that doom any venture, the problem can be summed up in one word: socialism.

    In the early 90s, CART (as IndyCar was called at the time) was king. Names like Unser, Andretti, and Foyt were touring North America, racing custom built race cars in front of packed stands. The Indy 500 would have 350k+ on hand for the annual culmination of a monthslong celebration of speed. Most years, certain qualifying days would have well over 100k people on hand. In 1994, the fastest qualifying speed was a hair over 228 MPH. Today, almost 25 years later, the cars do the same speed, the crowds are down and the hallowed Month of May has become a week and a half.

    Then, in response to escalating costs and a perceived shift away from the small-town American dirt track racers to foreign racers in the F1 minor leagues, the owners of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway started the IRL, which based its operating model on a top-down financing of the racing efforts of smaller teams. There are a bunch of other factors in the decadal decline of IndyCar, including a split into two series, series-wide emphasis on safety over speed, and the rise of NASCAR, but the biggest factor was the susceptibility to the allure of socialism.

    In the attempt to contain costs and attract smaller teams, the IRL and, later, IndyCar continued with two core principles that will sound familiar to all of you who are versed in the language of the socialist. First, IndyCar established a phonebook’s worth of technical regulations meant to curtail engineering costs. This resulted in the last 10+ years being run with a single allowable chassis each year. They have allowed limited competition in the engine, suspension, and aerodynamics, but the days of building your own mousetrap are over. Second, IndyCar established what’s called the “Leader’s Circle,” which is an alternative to the traditional purse system. Instead of the winner getting a zillion dollars and last place going home with a pittance, anybody who runs a certain percentage of the annual schedule is paid a salary for each full-time race car run, and winners are given a nominal sum as a prize.

    As can be easily predicted by those of us familiar with the stories of Soviet Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, IndyCar has been suffering from poor racing, fewer teams, fewer race cars, and an utter collapse of the fanbase. Besides a single day per year burning off 75 years of tradition, American Open-Wheel Racing is on life support. Of course, these are “bad economic times” and “motorsports is on a decline” and “we can’t afford competition.” The excuses have been flying since 1996 when they first headed down this path. Every half-hearted, feeble attempt to introduce a market influence is quickly undone. The toe in the water is withdrawn as soon as they realize it’s wet.

    The path to success is simple and quite obvious. Undoing 25 years of stupid will hurt, but, as Venezuela is figuring out right now, the pain is inevitable. IndyCar will wither into nothing unless it reintroduces the competitive spirit of the free market into the sport. The excuses of the boot-lickers in the sport are all based on some nugget of truth, but IndyCar isn’t failing because motorsports are unpopular or because the economy is bad. IndyCar is failing because socialism is more than just painful to live under, it’s also painful to watch.

    It’s sad to see such a great tradition go down in flame, but these days even our sports act as a cautionary tale against socialism and all its variants.