Melllvar

Let us, like Him, hold up one shoe and let the other be upon our foot, for this is His sign, that all who follow Him shall do likewise.

“Not do anything useful” would be more accurate than “do nothing”. But that’s just my tl;dr.

[…] the resolution also contains many unbalanced, inaccurate, and unwise provisions the United States cannot support. This resolution does not articulate meaningful solutions for preventing hunger and malnutrition or avoiding their devastating consequences.

The United States is concerned that the concept of “food sovereignty” could justify protectionism or other restrictive import or export policies […]

We also do not accept any reading of this resolution or related documents that would suggest that States have particular extraterritorial obligations arising from any concept of a “right to food,” which we do not recognize and has no definition in international law.

https://usun.usmission.gov/explanation-of-vote-of-the-third-committee-adoption-of-the-right-to-food-resolution/

tl;dr:

1. The USA doesn’t think the resolution actually does anything useful, even if it supports the intention
2. The USA, the largest exporter of food, is concerned how the resolution might impact food exports
3. The USA doesn’t recognize the imposition of legal obligations to act outside of its own territory

But the resolution passed anyway, which is why world hunger has disappeared.

Tom Hanks in “Big”?

https://youtu.be/RsDj2fzEGdM?t=65

Here’s a rainbow that is close enough for the trees across the street to appear behind it.

Reminds me of the old trick on HTML forms where you use CSS to make one of the form fields invisible to humans and reject any submission that filled in that field.

first initial middle initial and last name

I do this when it’s a work-related document. Anything personal I write out my first name fully. So good luck forging my signature on possibly the wrong kind of document, people who want to forge my signature but only have one example to work from!

Don’t give up a stronger position for a weaker one in hopes of avoiding a conflict. You’ve only undermined yourself when the conflict happens anyway.

I’m an apartment building superintendent. I once confronted a late night trespasser: a junkie looking for a place to shoot up or snort or whatever his thing was. I demanded that he leave, but realized that I was physically blocking the only exit. He was cornered. So I moved out of the way and suddenly I was the one who was cornered. It all worked out in the end, but for a minute there I was facing a large, angry, paranoid junkie with a knife and no way to escape.

I don’t know what would have happened if I didn’t move to give him an exit, but I know that in doing so I gave up my own exit, and that was dumb.

I’ve had customers like this. Usually they just write their name in block letters. There’s no rule that says a signature has to be written in cursive so it still works.

E099: PROGRAMMER IS OVERLY POLITE

Obligatory:

My Yahoo email address is 27 years old.

I sold gmail invitations on ebay.

Realistically, that would get annoying pretty fast and I’d soon learn to hate any song I chose. So I’d pick 4′33″, which is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

But otherwise I’d pick “One Bad Tank”, from the video game Left4Dead2. It’s the song that plays when the boss enemy enters a particular map.

My mom’s early 90’s minivan. I think it was a Voyager.

“Privacy” in the modern sense is less about protecting you from personal embarrassment or financial loss, and more about protecting society from the dangers of mass data collection.

Historical examples of mass datasets that were misused:

• The Nazis used demographic records (birth, death, marriage records, etc.) to identify Jews and other undesirables in conquered countries.
• Japanese Americans were identified for internment in part through illegal use of census information.
• The Rwanda genocide was facilitated by tribal information being printed on drivers licenses.

In none of these examples were the data collected for the evil purposes it was eventually used for. In some cases, the evil purposes were completely forbidden by the rules governing the data, but they were used anyway.

Information is a form of knowledge. Knowledge is power. And power in the wrong hands is dangerous.

When in doubt, shut up.