Today is different. It is challenging to put into words what is different. I know what has changed, but finding the words is difficult.
More than 36 years ago, I was sitting in an operating room as a doctor was cutting my wife’s belly open. I was in scrubs, looking and feeling out of place.
I had informed the doctor ahead of time that if there was a choice to be made between saving my wife or my child that my wife would take priority.
My child was six months early. She is now a successful mid to upper manager in a large corporation.
My second set of children came before my oldest graduated from middle school.
Today, my youngest children, twins, start classes at University.
The house seems quiet. Their spoor is being quietly removed from the public areas, reviling my mess/spoor.
I have been informed that there will be cleaning done. That I will be moving my “stuff” out of common areas and into my areas.
I’m both sad for the silence in the house. I’m also at a loss. This is the first day in over 36 years when my children were not a major part of any decision I made.
People get very upset when they go to visit Amazon, Netflix, or just their favorite gun blog and the site is down.
This happens when a site is not configured with high availability in mind.
The gist is that we do not want to have a single point of failure, anywhere in the system.
To take a simple example, you have purchased a full network connection to your local office. This means that there is no shared IP address. You have a full /24 (255) IP addresses to work with.
This means that there is a wire that comes into your office from your provider. This attaches to a router. The router attaches to a switch. Servers connect to the server room switch which connects to the office switch.
All good.
You are running a Windows Server on bare metal with a 3 TB drive.
Now we start to analyze failure points. What if that cable is cut?
This happened to a military installation in the 90s. They had two cables coming to the site. There was one from the south gate and another from the north gate. If one cable was cut, all the traffic could be carried by the other cable.
This was great, except that somebody wasn’t thinking when they ran the last 50 feet into the building. They ran both cables through the same conduit. And when there was some street work a year or so later, the conduit was cut, severing both cables.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceivebe a system admin
I’ve been deep into a learning curve for the last couple of months, broken by required trips to see dad before he passes.
The issue at hand is that I need to reduce our infrastructure costs. They are out of hand.
My original thought, a couple of years ago, was to move to K8S. With K8S, I would be able to deploy sites and supporting architecture with ease. One control file to rule them all.
This mostly works. I have a Helm deployment for each of the standard types of sites I deploy. Which works well for me.
The problem is how people build containers.
My old method of building out a system was to create a configuration file for an HTTP/HTTPS server that then served individual websites. I would put this on a stable OS. We would then do a major OS upgrade every four years on an OS that had a 6-year support tail for LTS releases. (Long-Term Support)
This doesn’t work for the new class of developers and software deployments.
Containers are the current answer to all our infrastructure ills.
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” In the Ninth Circuit, if a panel upholds a party’s Second Amendment rights, it follows automatically that the case will be taken en banc. This case bends to that law. I continue to dissent from this court’s Groundhog Day approach to the Second Amendment.
Following the Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Rahimi, the federal government acquiesced in certiorari in a handful of cases pending before the Court and presenting the same question addressed in this case. The Supreme Court should have granted one or more of those cases, and this case illustrates why. After New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, perhaps no single Second Amendment issue has divided the lower courts more than the constitutionality of the 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(1) felon-disarmament rule’s application to certain nonviolent felons. The Third Circuit—and for a time, this circuit—concluded that there was no analogous tradition of disarmament for at least some defendants. Range v. Att’y Gen.; United States v. Duarte. The Eighth Circuit concluded otherwise, United States v. Jackson, while the Tenth and Eleventh Circuits upheld the continued constitutionality of Section 922(g)(1) under pre-Bruen precedent without reaching the historical question, Vincent v. Garland; United States v. Dubois
One of the hard things to accept is that so many inferior courts think that when a case is vacated and remanded, it isn’t for good reason.
The courts speak in polite ways. You don’t call out a judge for being an idiot. No matter how often they open their mouth to remove all doubt.
In Bianchi, the Supreme Court granted cert, vacated the Fourth Circuit’s judgement, and remanded it back to the Fourth Circuit for a do-over.
If my boss comes to me and tells me that I got it wrong, here is the documentation, read the documentation and do it over, right. I’m going to read that documentation.
If that documentation suggests that I’m right, I know that is the zebra in the herd of horses. Why? Because my boss told me to do it over.
If I read his documentation, use it to reason to the same method/result, I’m making a mistake.
Unfortunately, our court system doesn’t allow an easy method for an inferior court to say, “I’m too stupid to understand what you said, what does this line mean?”
One of the cases that was before the Supreme Court before Rahimi was U.S.A. v Jackson. It was not granted cert until after Rahimi was decided. At that point, the case was granted cert, the Eighth Circuit’s opinion was vacated, and the case was remanded back to the inferior court with instructions to “do it over, follow the documentation in Rahimi”
This case involves California’s one gun per month infringement.
On Dec 18, 2020, nearly 4 years ago, Michelle Nguyen and others filed a complaint against Xavier Becerra, the Attorney General of California asking for injunctive and declaratory relief.
Because this happened before the Bruen opinion issued, it is couched in terms of Heller and levels of scrutiny. Remember, arguing that interest-balancing was wrong was a losing argument at that time.
They claimed that their rights were being infringed because “arms” is plural and limiting the purchase of guns to just one per month is singular. Thus making the law unconstitutional, on its face.
This case was a series of motions and counter motions. Both parties trying to limit what the other party could present as “evidence”. On Dec 6, 2023, three years after the case was filed, a motion hearing was held. This is the place where the parties argue why their motions are better before the judge.
On March 28, 2024, the court issued its judgement. This brings this case to completion at the district level.
The court found for the plaintiffs. The good guys. The court issued an injunction against California Penal Code §§ 27535 and 27540(f) as violating the Second Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Knowing the state would appeal, Judge Hayes put a 30-day administrative stay on his ruling. This is perfectly normal.
The state filed their appeal the next day.
The Ninth Circuit administrative panel, continued its unbroken record in Second Amendment cases, issued a stay pending appeal.
Appellants have established a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits of this appeal and made a sufficient showing on the relative equities to justify a stay pending appeal.
This is pure spite. The Supreme Court has said, on multiple occasions, how the Winter’s factors are to be addressed. First, the merits of the case, second that irreparable harm, third the balance of equities, and finally that the injunction is in the public interest.
The order by the administrate panel did not address the merits of the case. This is an instant showing of a rogue court.
If the case is a civil rights case, and the party seeking the injunction is likely to win on the merits, the analysis is over. The denial of a civil right is “irreparable harm”. The balance of equities always tips to the party being irreparably harmed, the public has no interest in enforcing an unconstitutional law.
Thus, this admin panel did a crackerjack job of ignoring the law.
The administrative panel issued their stay on April 24, before the administrative stay expired.
The case is then calendared to be heard by a merits panel.
That took place on August 14th, 2024. It was a complete disaster for the state.
There are more than a few channels that have done reviews of the oral arguments.
So how bad were the arguments by the state? Their stay pending appeal was reversed.
The order (Dkt. 9) granting Defendants’ motion for a stay pending appeal (Dkt. 3) is REVERSED. Before: Owens, Bade, and Forrest, Circuit Judges.
It took the merits panel less than a day to issue the order reversing the stay pending appeal, in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
This is a good time to buy stock in heater vendors in hell, it has done froze over.
Americans know pasta. We eat tons of it every day. Of course, most of that is pretty boring or down right nasty stuff that comes from a box.
I know that my childhood was replete with box after box of Kraft’s Mac and Cheese. Bring your water to a boil, dump in the box of elbows. Cook until “right”. Drain the water, add butter and milk. Then add the powdered cheese.
The American “Alfredo”. Yes, it is as cheap and nasty as it sounds. And American’s seem to love it.
As a cheese wanna-be snob, I order Parmigiano Reggiano DOP every few months. Much better than the powdered stuff in a can.
So why and article on Pasta? Because I like to make my pasta by hand. Well, I call it that, but it wasn’t really “by hand” per the definitions that the real snobs use.
There is this trope in story telling of the vagrant, hobo, bum, or cartoon character steeling a pie from a windowsill.
It is good story telling. But, in my opinion, we forget what is actually happening.
We can go to the supermarket and buy a decent, almost edible, pie for 5 dollars or so. We are going to put that price at 15 umms.
Let’s take a step back in time. It is the late 1800s in the rural outback. It is a 20-mile trek to town to get supplies. But you have your homestead, there is food in the larder, there is food in the pantry, and there is food in the root cellar.
While you are out working the fields, your wife is baking an apple pie for the family.
The basics going into that pie are flour, lard, water, apples, sugar, some cider, butter, salt, and spices.
She starts with pairing the apples. The apples are from last fall when she and the children spent a couple of days picking apples in the orchard, all three apple trees. Those apples were preserved and stored, they look ugly, but they will taste wonderful.
The cost of those apples is the cost of picking, cleaning, storing, and preparing them. Call it 45 umms.
The lard came from the pig they harvested last fall. There were many hours of tending the pig, feeding it, caring for it, then the slaughter, processing the pig, and rendering the lard. She’s only using a palm full of lard, so about 30 umms.
The flour came from the store. They grew their wheat. While the total labor that went into growing that wheat was in the 1000s of umms, again, she is only using a couple of cups worth of flour. 30 umms.
Sugar was purchased, the cost was 5 umms.
The spices were expensive, but because she is only using a small amount, 5 umms.
The pie is going to bake in the oven. That oven is heated with wood that was chopped from a tree they harvested. Total of 15 umms for the wood to heat the oven.
In total, excluding the preparing of the apples, she has 30 umms invested in this pie.
The total cost of that pie? 45 + 30 + 5 + 5 + 30 = 115 umms.
An umm is a Unit of Man Minutes. So that 115 is 2 hours of labor. At $20/hour, that is a $40 pie. When that vagrant steals a pie, they are stealing at least 2 hours of labor from that family.
This doesn’t even touch the cost of not having the pie for themselves. That might have been the last of their apples.
It could have been a meat pie instead of an apple pie. If it was a meat pie, it would represent meals for the family for a couple of days, at least.
As an aside, why did they put pies on the windowsills to cool?
Because it was hot in the kitchen!
You want the pie to cool, it isn’t going to do that as fast in the kitchen, plus, all that heat from the pie goes into making the kitchen that much hotter.
My wife is a teacher. She is a darn good teacher. She has a couple of masters, is working on another, besides having a bachelors. She is constantly doing continuing education classes.
For years, I would talk about The Teachers Union in a negative light. She took that as a personal attack because she is a teacher.
When I was just entering 1st grade, they had just started a new language curriculum. It was a five-year plan. The gist was to move students through the k-12 process cleanly and with a good foundation.
At the end of first grade, we moved to Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, most kindergarteners arrive knowing how to read. I didn’t know how to read as a 2nd grader.
Later we went through “new math”. It did not bring much to the table. It did make it extremely difficult for parents to assist their children.
The Education Industry had managed to drive a wedge between children and their parents. Parents were made to look stupid because they didn’t know the new math methods. Read More
