Essays
What Is The Purpose Law?
Police in the United States have a blank check to kill because people in power have convinced citizens that if an officer feels threatened there is no consequences for their actions. Feelings cannot be proven or disproven so the result is immunity. The combination of fast, mass hiring of officers to fill law enforcement positions with a likely low threshold of evaluation on the hiring, is a threat to all citizens in the United States.
A government for the people must treat the use of lethal force against citizens with the utmost care. Any person given a gun, bullets, a badge, and the blank check to kill citizens must be throughly vetted.
Why should it be acceptable that disobedience of an officer’s orders be grounds for killing?
Further, why if you are telling a person in a car to move, does one stand in front of that car to “block it?”
Is shoot first ask questions later by officers justice? Or is this really a show of force to create a state of fear? And if the answers are yes, then how is the United States different from any of the “socialist” or “communist” or “dictatorships” of any other country in our past or current times? Isn’t shoot first ask questions later how the military works? While ICE may be organizationally apart from the military, I think their actions are of the military and should be treated accordingly.
You may think you are creating order through enforcement of law, but that is not justice and it is certainly not freedom. What we have right now in the United States is a standing army on U.S. soil killing citizens.
Who Can Be Accountable?
I think most people trying to interpret Trumps actions in Venezuela are making a mistake of doing so through a lens of what is thought to be normal, or how or why things were done in the past.
The same formula seems to be repeated: “Trump claims the reason why he did this is because X but here is an instance of Y that is completely opposite of X.” The implication is, Trump’s claim cannot be true because it’s inconsistent. I think the real problem is paying any attention to any claim made by Trump.
Everything that Trump does appears to be in the moment, his actions are mostly emotional and whoever has access to him last greatly influences what he does. In my opinion the real root problem is that Trump believes he can do whatever he wants and doesn’t need to convince anyone, neither Congress, the Supreme Court, nor citizens, that what he is doing is good or right or just. Sure, he very much wants us all to like him, but in the end nothing matters, the only thing that matters to Trump is what is in his head at any given moment.
I think we need to spend much less time on Trump and much more time on his enablers. Why is all this happening? It’s happening because the Supreme Court ruled Trump is above the law and made him king and the majority in Congress is only there for the LOLs and not there do their job, and a wealthy class of people willing to pay and participate in tearing it all down for the sake of keeping what they imagine to be their wonderful life.
The response to every action Trump takes should be a push to remove any enabler and make them accountable. All this has to start with us not reacting to anything Trump does from what we think to be normal. Making claims that what he did is illegal does not matter because there is no accountability of him. Pointing out Trump’s hypocrisy does not matter. Nothing you can do or say about Trump matters. What does matter is how we view and consider those people who enable him now and work to replace them.
For Most, Christianity Is A Religion
The problem of Christianity is that like an onion, there are many layers of understanding about it. What started as an adjective associating the way people lived to who they followed became an institution, a religion, a church, and a set of beliefs some equate to being faith.
The Christianity known to perhaps 90% of the world is a religion and the institution founded by the Roman emperor Constantine. A hallmark of religions and institutions is that one can be kicked out of them.
If you have spent any time studying what Jesus taught, does it make sense to you that he would create something from which you could be kicked out from?
Religion is a necessity for and a product of man’s ego, in fact it may be one of the most dangerous things ever created by man. It is often used by Powers and Principalities to control people and to gain wealth.
I think the most enlightened part of the founding of the United States was the recognition through experience by the founders of just how religion is used by people in power, and attempted to wall off the threat of religion in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The first amendment does not just exist to protect religions from the government but also, and I think most importantly, to protect us from the government using religion to take away liberty.
The Clicks Communicator
I noticed some entries in my RSS feeds this morning making reference to the Blackberry, and I suspect they were in reference to the Clicks Communicator, a new Android-based phone to launch later this year. This is from the company that has been selling a physical keyboard case for the iPhone. The Clicks Communicator has a built-in physical keyboard, hence the reference to Blackberry.
The device software is built on Android 16 with a customized launcher that is optimized for communications. What it looks to me like is the Android notification shade made front and center to the device. It has hardware buttons to initiate voice to text input, if one prefers and has an LED around the primary button that will flash different colors one configures for different notifications. The color LED reminds me of the roller ball of the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1.
The negatives start with the price, while one can reserve one now for a $399 total price by paying $199 to reserve it, the Communicator will retail for $499, which I think is too much for a device being promoted as a second phone. The intro video compares the Communicator to a Kindle as it compares to the iPad, but Kindles cost much less than $499.
Another big miss in my opinion is not providing a removable battery nor Magsafe support, although I imagine this might be something that could be provided via special “cover.” The device includes the things smartphones lost over the years like the physical buttons, storage card slots, and 3.5mm audio adapter, so why not go all the way and provide removable batteries?
The Clicks Communicator is going to be a niche device, it’s not going to take over the smartphone leaders. I got to think that $499 starting price will have to come down to the $300 to $400 range to justify the purchase as an “accessory” to an every day carry smartphone. The question then is, will enough sell for the device to last long enough for the price to come down? The answer depends on whether there is truly a demand for this type of device.
At The Start Of 2026
Mother Nature set the scene today by providing freshly fallen snow, sunshine, and frigid temperatures, which I take as a sign for a fresh start. Today is not only the start of a new year, but for me it is the start of the fifth chapter of my life, now as a retiree. My most specific plan for now is to savor more of life, to take it in fully and continue to learn and grow.
I have long followed people who seem to be able to spend most of their time on whatever they find to be most fulfilling in the moment and dreamed of that for myself. My intentions for this year are to read more, to write more, to listen to more music, to spend more time with people I love, and to be grateful for every minute.
Year in books for 2025
Here are the books I finished reading in 2025. I fell short of my goal to read 20 books this year, and I am committed to meeting and exceeding that goal in 2026.
Testing Android Desktop Mode
I enabled the Android Desktop Mode on the Pixel 10 then connected the phone to my BenQ Monitor via the USB-C port, selected the Desktop Experience as the option in the notification that appeared on the phone and behold this desktop. To complete the picture I paired the Logitech MX Keys keyboard and mouse to the phone using Bluetooth so that I can fully use the desktop experience. I am typing this right now in Google Keep and then I will copy and paste this into the micro.blog app to post to my blog.
All of the Android apps installed on the phone are available for use in desktop mode. Google apps like Gmail and Keep are working in tablet landscape mode with dual panes. Tabs that I had open in Chrome are retained in the desktop mode.
It looks like apps start in a default sized window.. When I start the Calculator the app window size is way too large. I can resize the window to something more reasonable but when I shutdown the app and restart it starts back at the larger size. When I run Radarscope the resolution of the radar is too low and doesn’t change even when the window is made smaller. Obviously, these are instances where the apps are not developed for a large display.
YouTube video playback is good but the audio playback is on the phone speakers and not the monitor. I think the USB-C connection should be able to support audio.
The final test was to enable the Linux Terminal mode which then on the first run downloaded the virtual machine which takes up a little over 600 Mb. The font size is too small for me to read but I found instructions at the following web page to increase it and the font family to make it easier to read. The main benefit to me for having this Linux terminal would be to SSH into a Linux server running on my home network, and for that task this worked perfectly.
Beginnings And Endings
As I wind down my 36 year career in information technology I feel that I am in a nostalgic loop, which is probably inevitable particularly when I am closing down my career 37 years to the dates when it started. I find myself thinking all the way back to high school and reasons why I decided to go to Michigan Technological University (MTU) for a degree in Computer Science.
In the early 80s computer science was just becoming a thing, in fact Computer Science was a part of the Mathematics department at MTU and not the separate college that it is today. If when I was starting college I was asked what it was that I was studying to become I would have answered “a programmer.” Of course, over the course of my five years at MTU I learned Computer Science was more than programming, but that was still its core competency.
I think nearly everyone who I may have told I was going to be a programmer would have had an appreciation for my career choice because while they may not have understood exactly what that meant they likely knew that computers were the “hot thing” and programming was done on computers.
The irony is, of my 36 year career programming turned out to be the least of what I did, what programming I did was done during the first three years and then fate moved me on to more broader topics like the SEI Capability Maturity Model and technology architecture. Turns out my learning to program a computer was merely a foot in the door.
It's Not AI That I Fear
It’s people. I think there are similarities in how people make claims about guns in the United States and the claims about AI.
More often than not whenever you encounter a person who opposes any form of restrictions on access to or use of guns they tend to make the claim that “guns don’t kill people,” which is obviously true. Guns are inanimate objects, they don’t just on their own fire and kill. The real problem are the people who have access to guns and what they do with them. In reality, all gun regulation laws apply to people, what they can access, how qualified to use them, etc.
Most promoters of AI go to great lengths to try and persuade us that there is nothing to fear about AI. My response when I hear this is that I don’t fear AI, I fear the people behind AI and I fear the people who will use AI. My fear is driven by the reality that greed drives everything in the United States, if not the world.
Giving greedy people access to AI is equivalent to giving a person who has nothing but contempt for others or does not have hope or can’t control their emotions and wants to go out in a blaze of glory access to guns.
The lengths to which I see people in power in the United States are going to try and convince me there is nothing to fear about AI does nothing more than increase my skepticism and fear. You have not earned my trust and you cannot earn my trust until you demonstrate the maturity of self restraint.
Cubs Took A Loss On Kyle Tucker Trade
Bleed Cubbie Blue has a survey asking Cubs fans whether the trade for Kyle Tucker last year as a success for the Cubs as GM Carter Hawkins claims. The writer of the post suggests that it was, and to do so he uses the results for each player involved in the trade.
I think the post misses one key point in the analysis, which is the value of the players at the time of the trade and take that in to account along with their actual performance. While the Cubs traded three players to the Astros for Tucker, the deal really came down to two players, Tucker and Cam Smith.
At the time of the trade Smith was the Cub’s top prospect in the farm system, which made him one of their most valuable young players. If Smith had stayed with the Cubs he likely does not make the major league roster whereas the Astros immediately put him on their roster. So I think the real comparison is another year of Smith developing for the Cubs versus Tucker’s performance for the Cubs this past season.
When a team trades away a top prospect they are giving away the potential future value of a player, usually in return for something needed now. Did the Cubs need another bat? Yes! Did that bat have to be Tucker in right field, particularly when you had a good hitting right fielder on your roster? Probably not.
In my opinion, when Tucker signs with a team other than the Cubs, the Cubs will have lost on the trade. Had the Cubs kept Smith they still had value in the bank for future years and they lose that future value no matter how you slice it. From a Cubs fan perspective, if you had told me we would only have Tucker for one year, which was very likely at the trade time, and the team did not advance to the NLCS I would have said that one year of making the playoffs was not worth losing Smith. From a Cubs ownership and management perspective, making the playoffs and the extra revenue that generated made the Tucker signing worth it.
E-ink Tablet Lock-in
In a YouTube video the developer of My Deep Guide, which is a robust PDF organizer template for e-ink devices, talked about the issue of e-ink device lock-in. The issue is that when you use a brand of device, say Remarkable or Boox, there is not a way to move your data from one device brand to another. The only file formats common to all device types are PDF and ePub but that does not provide for extraction of the information within those file types.
The problem is not just with moving from one vendor to another, but affects searching for one’s writing, which requires some form of indexing of the handwritten data such that a search can be run. I touch on this issue in my recent post in which I describe using Google NotebookLM to search for what I write on my Viwoods AIPaper Mini tablet.
As I understand it, what one writes on the Viwoods tablet is translated to vector graphics data that is stored in a file on the device. Viwoods, like Boox, uses a “.note” extension for these file names and those files even sync to my Google Drive. The problem is, there is no application provided by Viwoods to read those files and thus provide a way to search within the files.
The problem here is very similar to about 40 years ago when word processors like Microsoft Word and WordPerfect were developed and used proprietary file formats. Back then the only way to view and thus search within your writing was to open the files in their original application, you couldn’t read Word files in WordPerfect or vice versa. Years later this issue became moot as application vendors reverse engineered the file formats so that files could be moved between word processor brands. Many people vow to avoid any possible word processor vendor lock in by only storing their writing in plain text that may use markdown for formatting.
I think the ideal for tablets would be a standard data file format for handwritten notes that either the tablet providers used natively or at the very least provided for exporting. PDF exports are the equivalent to printing a document and saving that hardcopy as an archive/backup, it provides a bare minimum but quickly becomes unwieldy as the number of documents and pages within them increase. We really need fully searchable formats to allow us to retrieve information from our writing.
Use Google Drive And NotebookLM With Viwoods AIPaper Mini
I recently started using the Viwoods AIPaper Mini, which is an e-ink tablet with an 8-inch black and white display that is optimized for reading and writing. The reason I bought this device is that I wanted a smaller and more portable tablet for reading and writing than the Boox Note Air 3C I have been using.
The AIPaper Mini, like most e-ink tablets, is designed to provide the ability to write notes by hand in a manner that feels like writing on paper. The handwritten input is usually stored as vector graphics data in a format known to the software on the tablet. Unfortunately there isn’t a standard file format for this data and Viwoods does not provide a way to read those files, which have a .note extension, via a desktop or web application. Fortunately, Viwoods does generate PDFs of notes that reproduces the handwriting as seen on the device display, so exporting or syncing of the generated PDF files is primary means for archiving and retrieving information captured using the device.
Even The Wealthy Are Not On An Island
I am not going to lie, I am happy to be at the end of my career rather than at the beginning. I have no doubt that in the context of a greed driven United States that the wealthy/power class see AI as removing their greatest cost, which is the people they employ. The ends is ever more wealth no matter the means. How might this actually look like? Well I think Daniel Miessler’s description of AI Maturity is as good as any.
The biggest problem I see ahead of us in the United States is that because any thing that looks like “central planning” is deemed anathema, no serious consideration, let alone action, will be taken on the impact to us as a whole. In a society that expects every able person to have a job so that they can take care of themselves, what happens where there are no jobs to be had?
Further, I think the wealthy class should be thinking about this because for where that wealth actually comes from. All of their wealth accumulation is derived from us spending money on products and services they sell. What happens when there are no jobs for people to earn money to therefore spend money that makes them rich?
On Joy
I think the best advice I can give anyone is to learn the difference between happiness and joy. Most may think this is not good advice because they think happiness and joy are the same, but they are not.
Happiness is an emotion, joy is a state of being. Happiness relies on externalities, what makes us happy are those things outside of our self that trigger the emotion that we call happiness. Because happiness relies on things other than ourselves, our happiness and unhappiness is outside of our control.
How is it then that some people who are in situations most would consider unhappy such as poverty, starvation, or war, seem happy? It might be that what it is needed for them to be happy is much different than yourself, or what you think you see as happiness is really joy. People in joy choose to see the world differently, to practice gratitude (another choice) for what they have and for who they are, than to be unhappy for want.
Joy is a state of being.
Joy is what comes to mind when I read this blog post by Joan Westenberg that asks this question:
Imagine your 80-year-old self looking back at the day you’re having right now. What would they give to inhabit your body again, to have your knees that don’t ache, your schedule that seems so overwhelmingly full, your problems that feel so urgent?
Joan goes on the write:
We have pretty good data on what actually happens to people’s subjective wellbeing as they age. The U-shaped curve of happiness is one of the most robust findings in social science: people report being happiest in their twenties, hit a low point somewhere in their forties or fifties, and then happiness increases again in later life. The interpretation of this finding is contested - are older people actually happier or just better at regulating their emotions? Do they compare themselves to worse alternatives or have they genuinely figured something out?
And continues:
Does this mean the thought experiment is useless? Not quite. Its value is in what it reveals about your current priorities. When you imagine an elderly version of yourself looking back, you’re running a sort of values clarification exercise. You’re asking which parts of your current life would seem precious from a distance, which anxieties would seem trivial, which opportunities would seem worth taking.
I commend the entire post for your reading. I also recommend The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu.
Copying Blog Posts To Day One
Manton has added cross posting of what I write here to a Day One Journal. I also learned via his post about this feature that there is a way to export blog posts to a Journal using the Day One CLI, which I did. Unfortunately, it looks like the export function doesn’t handle post titles. I am hoping that by getting my posts in to Day One I can find a way to get a nice hard copy version for archival.
Really Solving Problems Means Knowing Root Causes
I was born in 1966 and thus part of Generation X. The primary norm that I was taught to be in good standing within the U.S. social order can be summed up in the phrase, “get a job!” It is that phrase, and all of the expectations around it, that I think is at the root of our problems in the United States today.
The obvious reason why society wants one to “get a job” is so that others in society do not have to provide for me. We not only glorify the self made man, we demand it! Another, unspoken reason why society demands I “get a job” is that having a job provides me the money to buy things that make others in society wealthy. Nearly all of the wealth in the United States is because someone else has spent, and thus given them, money. (Think about the real reason why Trump gave us those stimulus checks at the beginning of the COVID Pandemic.)
And of course, this also means that those who have a job are superior over those who do not have a job.
Today the United States government is “shut down” because no Democrat Senators will vote yes on the Continuing Resolution law that approves the money needed to keep the government running. Democrats are voting no on the CR because they want the government subsidies that lower the cost of health care people buy via the Affordable Care Act extended. The subsidies are expiring at the end of the year and if not extended the resulting monthly health care premiums people will have to pay in 2026 can be double what they paid this year.
Republicans who oppose the ACA generally do so because they do not want to help pay for healthcare for those people who do not “get a job.” Of course, they assume that anyone who has a job can pay for their own healthcare, which itself is not necessarily true. Many people who get healthcare via the ACA do have jobs. (As do many people who get food stamps.)
So, “get a job” dogma is at the root of our current government shutdown. I would also say that dogma is also the kindle for the wildfire set by Trump and his supporters.
The thinking that those who do not have a job are just lazy, that anyone who has a job has enough to money to live on, and that healthcare (and thus the right to live) is only a privilege for those who have a job is the root cause of the problems of our times. How can this be for a so called Christian nation? We might say Christ is King in the United States, forgetting how Jesus answered Pilate when he asked whether Jesus was king of the Jews. And if Christ is King then shouldn’t we be following his commandments?
If you think the problems we have are bad now, consider what is going to happen when “get a job” clashes with the elimination of jobs by Artificial Intelligence. Further consider that many of the jobs AI is going to eliminate are the very white collar jobs that so many are told are needed for them to be wealthy.
Jesus does have the answer, but many in the United States do not like it.
Translating Handwriting To Text
Betting On Dependencies
Earlier this week a chunk of the Internet went offline, which should be a surprise for those who know the history of the Internet.
During the COVID pandemic just a few years ago prices of nearly everything in the United States increased because most products that we depend upon are manufactured in countries outside the U.S. and the shipping of those products was disrupted.
Both of these events exposed how fragile normal functions have become, and they should be lessons learned about the risks of depending upon an external entity. I think those who have long been warning us about these risks have been drowned out by the strong emphasis on open source and Internet application development that demands the use of external libraries. The culture says that one should not re-create the wheel and instead use the code already written by others as building blocks for your own application, thereby speeding up development in a race to toward making money.
The 21st Century is being built on blind faith of dependencies, with seemingly little thought on their risks, which is why all of the AI hype I see sets off nothing but alarm bells in my head. I see companies betting their future of the AI developed by a handful of other companies. I see the U.S. stock market driven up by the inflated value of those handful of companies even though most of those companies have not made any money.
What happens when capitalists stop throwing money at these companies when they realize there is no return? We saw this in the dot.com boom, as fast as those companies ran up they went out of business. So, if you are CEO of a company and you are “all in” on AI as the future for the products or services your company produces, realize you are “all in” on a handful of companies that might be gone tomorrow and ask yourself to which direction you are leading your company towards.
Physical and Metaphorical Demolition of America
While I thought that civil war could happen again in the United States, I never thought I would live to experience democracy die. I find the pictures of portions of the White House being demolished on the whim of a single person to be breathtaking. Unimaginable only a few years ago, now seemingly barely a blip on the news.
For years it became generally accepted to bitch about the U.S. government’s failures and inefficiencies. Government is too slow, they say, not knowing that was the very point. Dictatorships are more efficient but at the price of being enslaved to the whims of the dictator. Dictators being human are as prone to horrific acts in response to greed and anger as the human who decides to burst in to an elementary school and kill everyone inside. Worse still is the fact that the U.S. dictator has access to weapons of mass destruction far worse than AR-15s.
Freedom For Whom
I am reading Thomas Zimmer’s essay about Russell Vought that I think correctly states what is happening in the United States. The MAGA project is the destruction of the United States that they view as already been destroyed. In their view this is the third American Revolution, the second American Revolution started with the New Deal and culminated in Obama’s election. I think in order to fight against this I think more attention needs to be put on the question of what comes after the U.S. government is entirely destroyed.
Rooted in this question is the reality that these people only place value in freedom for themselves, freedom is not for their opponents. Democracy, including the U.S. Republican one, allows the possibility of one’s opponents gaining power and therefore impeding upon their freedom. Consequently, Democracy is flawed and the only way to assure their freedom is a dictator. The form of what is in place may have the appearance all one thinks of about the United States, a Congress, President, Supreme Court, but for that structure to remain there must be guarantee the opposition can never gain power.
Consider the current government shutdown, doesn’t it feel different to you? The difference is that the current Republicans behind the shutdown do not fear the voters, they don’t fear not being re-elected, because they believe so long as the fall in line with the MAGA project they will continue to have a share of power.
Of course, anyone who understands what is going on ought to be sober enough to know that when everything relies on human feelings rather than laws sooner or later you can, and likely will, become the opposition to that person. Marjorie Taylor Green might being finding this out right now.