Im reading “The Man of My Life” by Manuel Vazquez Montalban and there is a passing reference to Catharism. I need to read the Wiki in more detail, but I’m surprised I never heard of this before.

Catharism

A good post from Statistia on Crime Clearance Rates (which seems to be another word for “convictions”). I was mostly interested in murder, which seems to be about half. However, my understanding is murder is usually a crime of passion between people who know each other. So 50% seems pretty small.

Some searching gives numbers on the single digits of convictions for “random” murders in the US. Which brings me to my real subject of interest: the apprehension of Luigi Mangione for the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

I continue to be very skeptical that kids behind the counter of a McDonalds in Altoona, PA identified the killer from somewhat poor surveillance images. My best guess is our modern Surveillance State quickly kicked into gear and all of the mechanisms put into place for our long running War on Terror quickly tracked their target. The McDonalds kids were explicitly or otherwise given the information. Or maybe that wasn’t even necessary. I haven’t seen any interviews of these young heroes. Normally I would expect to see them on every TV screen and eventually, perhaps on Dancing With The Stars. But nada.

Of course I do expect our extensive (and expensive) Surveillance State should do it’s job. I’m just not clear exactly what that job is at this point. I heard one commentator call the killing a terroristic act. Maybe. But I do know this. If I were shot in similar circumstances I would not expect similar treatment. Is the Surveillance State just here to protect the wealthy and their property? Some say that is the purpose of all police. Not a bad thing, but if it’s the only thing, it may be less a tool for justice and more a tool of repression.

I found myself re-reading an old book review of Thomas Pynchon Inherent Vice. Maybe Doc Sportello was on to something after all (Drugs to Do, Cases to Solve)

Crime clearance rate in cities in the United States in 2020

A few months back I did a clean start for my new Raspberry Pi 5. Clean new everything, including Ubuntu Linux and all software. This included email. I installed the new Thunderbird mail client and even moved my decades of email (in local files) over. Things were frustratingly slow at first. After much reading and tweeking of various settings, things finally settled down and my mailer did everything I could have expected.

Fast forward to last week. My wife’s Windows 10 machine is ending support for the default mail client. I recommended Thunderbird. All went well at first. In fact it found old emails going back to the 1990s in another folder. Nice. But things quickly slowed down. Really slow. I googled around and it seems to be a common problem, similar to what I experienced on Linux. But solutions offered on line were all over the map. And results reported were uneven (worked for some, not for others) I tried a few but none worked for me.

Then my wife email client on here phone (not Google but from a 3rd party) also slowed to a crawl. No explanation for this one. Fought for a few hours and late last night came to the conclusion Google was to blame. A quick search turned up the page below. I guess the 30,000 emails in my inbox and the 16,000 in my wife’s led to a slow start as Gmail IMAP synced all that data. Too bad there are tons of “fixes” out there for a problem that mostly goes away by itself. Though cleaning out our inboxes has helped out quite a bit.

Gmail bandwidth limits

I have a good friend, a European who has been in the US for decades, who has always said “America runs on resentment”. I was never exactly sure what he meant, but I find it funny that Paul Krugman picks this idea up in his final New York Times article. I have always been a fan of Krugman. I didn’t always agree with him and he wasn’t always right, but he was always honest, perhaps to a fault.

My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment

Nobody I know is going back.

After buying an EV, less than 1% of drivers go back to gas-powered cars

Last week we got a letter telling us we had to validate our home address for tax purposes. We have been living here since the 1990s and have never lived any place else and own no other properties. Easy peasy.

Except I forgot I was living in techno-dystopia called Austin, Texas.

We have the standard Homestead Exemption for taxes, as we should since this, uh, is where we live. The system involved taking a photo of your Drivers license and uploading it to a web site. We were rejected. Why? The drives license spells our street name (correctly) as “MCNEIL” while the tax office spells it “MC NEIL” (with a space). So no match.

After many calls and emails we are told it will take several weeks to resolve this issue. Which puts us past the deadline for verifying our home address. There are also dozens of similar “McNeil” addresses out there and I’m gonna assume lots of other near misses like it. I feel like I’m living in Brazil.

From IEEE Spectrum.

The Unlikely Inventor of the Automatic Rice Cooker

Some good charts from Our World In Data.

17 key charts to understand the COVID-19 pandemic

While I’m fond of the line from the old song, “things in this life change very slowly if they ever change at all” it isn’t really true. Many things, maybe most things, don’t change much at all. But some things change very quickly and in ways hard to even understand. I worked in tech and rode the big wave of semiconductor change for pretty much my entire career. But I even have a hard time with the numbers, because the scale isn’t something humans usually have to deal with. I’ve seen it explained lots of ways, but Azeem Azhar in his post Why AI, solar & batteries will keep getting cheaper spells it out in plan numbers. It’s pretty amazing. And it’s still happening, but only in a few places. Here is what happened to computing power in my lifetime.

From $190 billion for one gigaflop of compute power in 1961 to just 1.25 cents in 2023