Coyote Blog

In preparation for a return to active blogging I have torn down this server to the root and reinstalled everything clean.  I am hoping the errors and problems encountered for a while will go away now.  I think it was some sort of conflict between the ssl code and multiple security plugins, all of which I have simplified.  We will see.

After a lot of complicated debugging, of course it was something simple -- the certificate failed to renew automatically.  Hopefully all is working correctly now

Update:  Of course then I screwed something else up.  Some sort of problem with php vs. mysql versions.  Anyway, fixed now, hopefully

I am completing what is for me a large and complicated acquisition/merger that we have been working on all through 2020.  I fiddle around with Twitter once in a while but have not had time for long-form blogging.  But I will be back, I just need a few more weeks away.

After a few false starts, and prodding from several readers, I finally got this creaky 16-year-old blog (yes, started in October of 2004) onto SSL and HTTPS.  Hopefully you will not get security and safety warnings any more and will see that comforting little lock symbol by the URL.

There was one advantage to waiting so long -- the process is now ridiculously easy.  Cpanel will provide free auto-SSL certificates for all the domains on my server, but I went ahead a splurged for a paid key and that can be done entirely automatically now too.  Then, I installed a little WordPress plugin called "really simple ssl" which was in fact just that -- installed the plugin, pressed a button, and all the work was done.   It detected my certificate and did all the setup and without doing another thing, we were good to go.  It doesn't seem to have blown anything up like comments, but email me or DM me on Twitter if you see a problem.

1.  The Brave browser is terrific and an essentially seamless transition from Chrome.  I depend too much on Lastpass and needed a browser it would work with, and it works just fine in Brave.  I am sure Brave is more vulnerable than they let on but it is an almost no-brainer upgrade from Chrome.
2. DuckDuckGo is okay but well short of Google for search.  I don't find the search results are as good and related Google functionality like Google Finance (e.g. when you search a stock price) and I quickly missed Google places and maps.  I am continuing to try to make it work but I keep a Google tab open and find myself going back to it frequently.
3. I have been using Express VPN.  I am not knowledgeable enough about how these things work to say if it is better than other VPN services but it seems to work fine for me.  Really almost invisible except that websites that depend on your browser or computer being recognized (e.g. some banks) will put you through verification hoops every single time you log in.
4. Stuck with Gmail.  Our company uses Google Apps to host email and some other services for our company and switching costs are high.  Particularly since I have a grandfathered free account for up to 100 users, which saves a ton of money.

In no particular order, and sure to grow as I ponder it more:

1. Tribal rather than thinking responses to any argument
2. Using the wackiest person that can be found as representative of an entire group
3. Judging the individual by the group to which they belong ("racism" and "sexism" used to be examples of this but apparently these words are defined very differently in practice today)
4. Bad headlining (can include social media summaries) that obscures complicated situations with definitive black and white judgments.  When was the last time you clicked through from a social media headline to the underlying article and ever found it to actually say what the headline claimed?
5. Using tortured logic (or even no logic at all) to claim the worst possible interpretation of a person's arguments
6. Attacking a speaker's hypothesized motives, rather than their actual arguments
7. Using ad hominem attacks rather than rational responses to arguments  (the prior #6 is really a subset of this, but the claimed ability magically be able to read opponent's minds is so prevalent that I wanted to break them apart).
8. Post-modern "fake but accurate" facts. "It does not matter if fact X is wrong because it fits in so well with narrative Y we have created."  e.g. "this story about AOC turns out not to be true but it pretty accurately illustrates how uninformed she is."
9. Stretching definitions of words to try to tar lesser crimes with the opprobrium meant for greater crimes (modern examples include "sexual assault" and "racism."
10. Only learning about the arguments of person X from people opposed to person X (a sure path to failing the ideological Turing test).  Examples:  Relying on Rush Limbaugh as one's only source for knowing what Hillary Clinton's political positions are.  Never reading climate skeptics directly but only learning about what they supposedly say from those opposed to climate skeptics.
11. Failure to be skeptical about any story or argument that support's one's own position or "side."  (I know I struggle with this in my personal reading."

From the Daily Dot:

A lawyer for Facebook argued in court Wednesday that the social media site’s users “have no expectation of privacy.”

According to Law360, Facebook attorney Orin Snyder made the comment while defending the company against a class-action lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

“There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy,” Snyder said.

In an attempt to have the lawsuit thrown out, Snyder further claimed that Facebook was nothing more than a “digital town square” where users voluntarily give up their private information.

“You have to closely guard something to have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Snyder added.

Zuckerberg really is one of the most dangerous people on the planet.  He has taken well-founded criticism against his company, its failings, and its past misrepresentations and somehow morphed that into a campaign to gain totalitarian government regulation of online speech.  Incredible.

Apparently, despite the fact that I spend a high monthly fee to HBO to be able to stream all their content, I cannot get the content I paid for when in France.  I have an account with Express VPN and it has always served me well.  I was able to log in via this VPN and was able to stream the most recent Game of Thrones episode.  I could have probably waited until I got home but the Internet seems to be filled with like 6 million spoilers.

BTW, unlike much of the most vocal Internet, I was totally fine with how the major character deaths were handled in the last episode.  I thought they were symbolically consistent with how those characters got to where they are.

At home I almost always surf through a proxy server, even though that means I have to endure endless identity confirmation tests from websites as they don't recognize my IP.

RL has been nutty of late, but I have a backlog of things I want to write about and will be back next week (barring any fresh disasters).

As a thank you to readers, get my novel and short stories on Amazon for free, at least in the kindle version.  Click on the image to go to the relevant Amazon page.

After engaging with my issues briefly within a couple of hours of my support request, Disqus has for 3 business days ignored all further communication from me to multiple email addresses.  Unfortunately, they do not seem to have any kind of support ticket tracking system.

As a reminder, 6 years of comments on thousands of posts, likely tens of thousands of comments have disappeared.  I do have a paid account so supposedly I am owed support.  I know a number of you expressed your frustration to me that years of your contributions have been lost and I will do everything I can to restore them.  I have the main corporate number at Disqus and will try that door if I still don't have any sort of response by tomorrow.

I sent in a support request to Disqus reporting that Disqus comments exist for posts from the last 2 months but have disappeared for posts from 2012 up to a couple of months ago -- tens of thousands of comments missing.  And the comment box is not even showing up on the posts.  I sent a link to an example post both with and without comments and they responded:

We'd be happy to take a closer look into this, kindly forward us both of the following:
-text of a missing comment;
-link to the page on which the comment should be.

Obviously this is not responsive.  I can't send the text of a comment I don't have.  Thinking that maybe by support request had not gone through completely I resent the request:

I am not communicating well. There is not a particular comment missing. I had between 5 and 100 comments on every single post from 2012 through February 2019 at coyoteblog.com, all with Disqus, and they are all gone. Even the comment links are gone

Here is a recent one that still has comments: https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2019/03/an-incredible-crony-mess-in-maryland.html

Here is a random one from the past that had over 100 comments and they are all gone: https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2018/11/i-have-totally-lost-the-thread-here-based-on-what-we-know-now-someone-please-make-the-case-for-me-on-trump-russia-election-collusion.html

this same is true for literally thousands of posts that until recently had disqus comments but now have no comments at all

By the way, between these two posts and all others, they use the same template, code, add-ins, everything.

They answered:

If you give us an example comment, we would have a better idea of what is causing the broader issue across your site.

For folks old enough to remember the program, this is like talking to Eliza.  So I wrote back

How can I give you an example when they are all gone?  Just to be clear, it is not a comment I made that disappeared.  I run the blog coyoteblog.com and it is all the comments of my readers that have disappeared.
Please, go to this link:  https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2019/01/update-on-tesla-from-the-conference-call-today.html.  Do you see comments?  There were over 100 comments on disqus on this post, now they do not show up at all.  Ditto every post over the last 6 years except for posts over the last 2 months.  Please, rather than sending me these automated replies that don't actually address the issue, compare the comments section of the two post links I sent you.  One has comments on disqus, the other has them all disappeared.

For some reason all comments from about 2012 when I started on Disqus to this February are missing.   There are not even comment links.  Sigh, I apologize for the loss to all those who took the time to participate in the conversation and I have ponied up for a paid Disqus membership to try to get some support and see if its fixable.

Henry Payne, a cartoonist featured on many of the libertarian sites I read and a writer for the Detroit News, was a classmate of mine at Princeton.  Every year he creates a new birthday card that my class sends out to all of us on our birthdays.  I kick myself for not saving them all, but I am not really a keepsake kind of guy.  Here is the one for this year:

For years our company was forced by our partners to use their reservation systems to take bookings for campgrounds we operate.  But several years ago we had the opportunity to run a number of campgrounds where we have the ability to choose the reservation system.  After a lot of false starts, we developed it ourselves, a decision we have been happy about.

I am not surprised people lose their passwords or forget them or enter them incorrectly.  But what amazes me and sometimes drives me to madness is the absolute CERTAINTY some have that they are entering their password correctly and therefore it MUST be our system that is somehow not functioning correctly.

I know I have not been blogging serious topics much of late.  In part this is due to just being busy -- holidays, end of year accounting closeouts for the business, and some geeky projects (a few raspberry pi things I will share soon).  In part this is due to the fact that whenever I engage with social media too long I become a worse person and back away again.   In part this is because my daughter said I needed to lighten up on my blog for a while.  And in part this is to my not wanting my obsessive fascination with the trainwreck that is Tesla to dominate my blogging (though there are a couple of updates coming).

As I close in on my 15th(!) year on this blog, this sort of ebb and flow happens from time to time.  I will be back in force soon.

WordPress 5 changed to an entirely new editor where construction of a post that historically just involved typing now involves pasting together a series of blocks that have to be added, for example, just to have quoted text.  Am I missing something?

This seems ludicrously more awkward than the original editor, which I immediately switched back to by downloading and activating a plugin for that purpose.  My guess is that this functionality is aimed at the large number of folks who use WordPress as a content management system for building websites and not for actual bloggers.  I am guessing that content management for website design is actually a much bigger market for WordPress than blogging, and so development is focusing more on that market.  Maybe someone needs to fork WordPress for a version track focused on traditional bloggers.

Update:  Apparently the WordPress 5 editor is the same as the Gutenberg editor that has been available as a plugin for a while.  A couple of observations.  First, few people every really liked Gutenberg.  It has a 2.5 star rating which is really low for any WordPress plugin with a lot of installs, particularly one WordPress decided to make standard.  And second, this just reinforces my sense that WordPress 5 is a sign that WordPress is leaving the blogging community behind and focusing on CMS.  I have used WordPress as a CMS for our company websites until we mostly switched to ProcessWire, which is an actual CMS from the ground up and not a modified blog engine.  Gutenberg made much more sense as a CMS tool than a blogging tool.

Having a variety of site issues.  I turned off some of my cache and security to try to diagnose why some folks are not seeing newer posts, and then immediately got a DOS attack that shut down the site.  Working on it but may be the weekend before entirely fixed.

I have resisted Instagram for years because a) they only really allow photo uploads from your phone (not your pc) and b) none of my good photos are on my phone.  It is just really difficult to take a photography platform seriously that only really supports the crappiest end of the camera spectrum (i.e. phones).

However, a couple of things have changed.  One, Instagram is now a powerful social media platform and useful to my business given that I am trying to get young people to go to outdoors locations that are photogenic.  And two, I have gotten comfortable with a couple of hacks to be able to use instagram from my pc (more in a second).

So if you are into Instagram, you can follow me now.  My business instagram for our campgrounds and parks is @camprrm.   My personal instagram mainly to be filled with travel photography is @coyoteblog.   Actually the other reason I have come around on Instagram is that I wanted to follow my daughter Amelia who is a student artist, and instagram is THE way to advertise one's portfolio.  She is at @meliameyer (see what she did there, millenials are much more clever with integrating symbols into an extended alphabet).

The two hacks I use are:  1)  Convert the instagram account to a business account and then use the free version of hootsuite to post to it.  Even works with scheduled posts.  This works well for one account but is hard to make work for two.  2) Open and log into instagram via chrome.  Right click on the white space of the web page somewhere and choose inspect.  I think there is also a keyboard shortcut to do this, maybe cntl-shift-i.  Once the inspect window pops up, click on the little icon in the upper left that looks like a cell phone.  Poof, your browser is in cell phone sim mode and instagram should suddenly give you the + button (refresh page if it doesn't) that will allow you to post pictures right from your computer hard drive.

We had a problem with the website that folks going to www.coyoteblog.com were getting the correct content but folks going to coyoteblog.com without the www were getting dated and/or unformatted content.  This seemed super odd to me.  I checked all my DNS records, particularly the A and CNAME and they looked fine.  I searched for the issue but no one's issues matched mine precisely.  I suspected that it was an issue with caching but turning off the cache did not fix it.

In the end the fix was simple.  In WordPress Settings - General I had set the domain name as https://coyoteblog.com.  It had been that way forever.  Somehow, something on the server or in wordpress or most likely in one of my plugins changed so that calls to coyoteblog.com confused it.  The simple fix was to change the setting for the wordpress site to https://coyoteblog.com.  Now everything seems to resolve normally. I hope.

I really like the Soul of Enterprise podcast, and was thrilled that they had me on for a full hour last week.  You can listen to the whole thing here.  We covered a lot of ground, from private management of public recreation to climate to health care and even to Elon Musk a bit.  Fair warning though, I am not sure that this sort of interview is really my best milieu, which is why I write most of the time.  These guys get some amazing guests and also cover some interesting topics.  I really liked the bit they did on the subscription model a week or so ago.

A couple of readers pointed out a major flaw in this article about solar and saved me a world of headaches.  Thanks!  I may still do the solar installation in our still near-zirp regime but if I do so I will be more informed.  If ever you think I am making a mistake or making a fool of myself, please let me know.

I post things like this NOT because I have any fashion or shopping sense but because I happen once in a while to stumble on something I really like.  I personally hate shopping and just want someone to tell me "buy this one, it is the best", sort of like going to Toms Hardware and finding which graphics card is currently the best value. 

When I am working out, I wear Drifit type wicking fabrics, but for other casual times around the house I want a soft t-shirt for lounging around.  Until recently my choice was a Kit and Ace T-shirt that I think had some cashmere in it (maybe this one?).   I can't be sure because there is absolutely no size or sku information in the shirt.  By the way, a note to clothing companies:  I buy clothing in physical stores, but I often want to re-buy the same sku onlie either as replacements or for additional colors and that is impossible if you don' somehow print size and sku information in the item.  Also, and I am told by the women in my family that this is a typically male rant, I am constantly exhausted to find that the item I loved and want to buy again over and over does not exist and has morphed into some other style or sku.  I am happy to keep re-buying the same shorts and shirts and running shoes forever if someone will sell them to me.

Anyway, my new favorite T-shirt and the current leader in my closet for softness is the Cloudknit tee from Outdoor Voices.  Outdoor Voices is a small company in startup mode and can be a little spotty on its inventory availability.  I found it on a vacation weekend in Aspen where they had a pop-up store we happened to walk into.  I love this shirt and bought a pile of them to sleep in (I don't really prefer to sleep in a lot of clothing but my wife is at that special age when she needs to keep the bedroom somewhere around freezing).  The Cloudknit hoodie is also amazing for lounging about the house.  Their "Doing Things" fabric is more for workouts and it is fine but not as spectacularly soft as their cloudknit fabric.

As a reminder, my one other shirt recommendation was for Hawaiian shirts from Tori Richard.  Great concept -- Hawaiian shirt patterns printed on fabrics that actually feel like quality fabrics.  I also like the orange label products because it is a more attractive fit -- most Hawaiian shirts are not very tailored.   If you want to try something different, try their crinkle fabric which I really like but is not loved by everyone.  I just throw them in the washing machine and hang them slightly damp until they dry and they are great.  I used to do the same thing for my Tommy Bahama shirts but if you hang them to dry they become really stiff for some reason.  Tommy Bahama shirts can be quite nice, especially as they age, but you have to tumble them dry to keep them soft, not sure why.  Fortunately neither shirt needs to be ironed (any shirt that requires ironing in my closet -- except for a few dress shirts and my beloved Robert Graham shirts -- immediately goes to Goodwill).

Kevin Drum claims to want to really understand the Trump voter.  I will let you read it to see what you think, but here was my comment:

I am all for promoting understanding between our two great national tribes. But you ruin your attempt by whipping out a statement like this: "There are plenty of people who are simply beyond reach for liberals. They’re either racist or sexist or they love guns or maybe they’re just plain mean" Seriously? Back to the old "if you don't agree with me you must be racist?"

Further, you execute the classic tribal maneuver of choosing to take on one of the opposition's silliest niches, rather than their best. This is the equivalent of a Conservative making blanket statements about liberals and environmentalists based on a few of silly folks caught on video signing a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide.

This does pretty much zero to promote understanding, and in fact is smug arrogance and virtue signalling masquerading as an attempt at understanding.

I think the high minimum wages in California are misguided and actually hurt the poor and unskilled, and I have written about why I think so. But you know what? I can sure as hell publish a one or two paragraph defense of minimum wages that you would never know was written by anyone but a hardcore progressive or Bernie Bro. As another example, I am pro-choice but I have really engaged with anti-abortion folks enough in social settings to infer that they really, truly think that abortion is killing human beings. We pro-choicers like to make ourselves feel better by saying that the anti-abortion folks are anti-women or religious fascists or something, because it is much easier to hate those folks. But it is much harder to hate someone who really, honestly thinks a baby is dying, even if we think they are misguided.

A lot of hate in this country would disappear if people really tried to understand their opponents in terms other than crude smears, like they are racist or sexist or fascist or snowflakes or whatever. So much so that if I were a professor, I think that every day in a class discussion at the halfway mark I would make everyone reverse positions and try to credibly argue the opposite side of the question. When I run my once a year high school economics class, I do exactly this. And I did that for years in high school debate. For a whole year, despite being an ardent free trader, in every other debate I had to argue in favor of protectionism. I think it was good for my soul.

I post this because there seems to always be a 50/50 chance that I will get banned after every comment on Mother Jones.  I never use profanity, and always try to be reasonable, but I am on my 3rd or 4th ID at Mother Jones because they keep banning me.  I still will always treasure the first time they banned me -- the comment that got me banned is below.  I am pretty sure they thought I was promoting the National Rifle Association in my comment, when in fact I was referring to the National Industrial Recovery Act and the NRA blue eagle of the New Deal.

The authors portray this (at least in the quoted material) as an anti-trust issue, but I suspect a bigger problem is the cronyist certificate of need process. In many locations, new hospitals, or hospital expansions (even things as small as buying a new cat scanner) require government permission in the form of a certificate of need. As one may imagine, entrenched incumbents are pretty good at managing this process to make sure they get no new competition. This, by the way, is a product of classic progressive thinking, which in its economic ignorance saw competition as duplicative and wasteful. We are lucky the Supreme Court shot down FDR's NRA or we would have this sort of mess in every industry.