I think you just taught him a lesson. 🧠

That's the trouble with dribbles.

i understand and agree that he is unamerican in the sense of the "american ideal" but outside looking in, he is a completely typical product of american culture. he's reality TV, fame for fame's sake, wealthy without working, a hustler, the ideal jerry springer guest, the ideal wrestling guest, the son of racist nepotism, performative altruism (and then defrauds his own charities), he pathologically cannot accept being wrong/defers all fault to anyone else ("whatever, i do what i want"), he's weaponized ignorance, he's "hilariously" rapey, he's illiterate, a proud philistine, he's vapid pageantry, he's a christian who know nothing of religion/spirituality, he's 4chan, he's 8chan, he's tacky style with complete lack of substance, he's the personification of "fake it 'till you make it". these are all lessons i've seen repeated ad nauseam from american TV, films, music, podcasts, youtube stars, etc. to the point where they're past cliché that they're now entrenched americana.

i know that isn't the typical american but that is the most typical american america has sold to itself and the rest of the world.

Personally, I don't give up hope. If you know what the truth is then all you have to do is wait for them to burn themselves while playing with matches even though you told them 1,000 times about the consequences. Then when they learn the hard way, as most of us do, be there for them when they find you were truthful with them the whole time.

Your great work does not go unnoticed, newt. It's something that I could not do on my own and you have my support and admiration.

I too have gotten private messages from bob. I have even sent him power points once when he showed compassion. I let him know I don't hate him but I do like to use him for a funny reply once in a while.

Regardless of his intentions or beliefs I still give him the chance to burn his fingers. It's the flame that teaches the lesson.

If you need to 🤦 do it. Just don't stop doing what you are doing for all of us.

Love you, man

Subscribe to what you want, my birth lottery included trees and butterflies, I was raised in a forest in a glass house in a forest. (We had an atrium inside with a forest of trees growing through the roof, and the house was in the middle of a forest)

If I were born black, that person would be me, but I would be different. Besides, I was born a poor black child, sir. ;-)

If my starting line is 50 meters ahead of yours in a 100 yard dash through nothing but luck, that's pretty lucky for me.

I feel pretty successful having made little effort to get there, that's luck.

I don't feel shame because I'm not a normal American that thinks anything they want is something they deserve and need. Best lesson my dad ever taught me was know the difference between want and need and you'll be far happier in life. It's true.

I don't have too much, I have enough, but I still share with those who i feel don't. I've housed multiple friends for free, and even let one live in my yard for 7 years, which in retrospect was at least 5 years too many. My wife and I live comfortably on <$30000 a year. Most Americans can't live on that for one person. Newts do just fine, we take a vacation every year, pay our bills, and eat well.
Maybe that's why I'm so different. I was allowed to roam the wild woods and bayou alone at just over 3, to the point where the neighbors told my parents they were going to call the cops. This was in the middle of Houston, literally a wilderness of (or at least in) modern civilization. ;-)

I did go to school for 24 years (preschool -the ten year plan at Jr college) but never tried hard or practiced, to the point where my trig teacher insisted I was cheating because I didn't pay attention or do homework so she separated me for a big test, the class average dropped a full grade but not me, my neighbors were cheating off me. She left me alone after that. That might be preparations, but it wasn't hard work. It was boring busy work.

I did that, read encyclopedias and dictionaries. That was punishment at my school through 7th grade....but my grandmother read her set through twice for fun. My mother was called "the encyclopedia" in school, with good reason.

I definitely let opportunities pass often. Sometimes because I don't need them and others might, sometimes I'm just lazy and happy so see no need to expend effort, usually because I see opportunities as traps, the bait being some modest short term gain, the cage being large long term obligations. I'm always prepared for opportunities that are for me without preparation. I'm not Trumpian, I understand I have limitations, and don't tend to obligate myself beyond them.

Who said I waited. I've been lucky enough that I didn't have to wait for, nor do I expect luck. Through luck, forethought, and decent planning things have worked out well with minimal effort or sacrifice. I don't rely on luck to dig me out of holes, I tend to watch my step and not fall in them often. You might call that preparation, I call it paying attention. It's working so far.

I went in the late 80's. Nicest people I've ever met, with Iceland a very close second.
Both made me feel depressed about how Americans act. By comparison, we are a group of uncivil toddlers.

Edit: my favorite story that exemplifies this was from a hot spring we visited with a dozen concrete pools on a hillside, one emptying into the next. Two groups of kids were playfully throwing pebbles at each other from one pool to the next when one, about 12, stood up and in the most calm voice and proper enunciated English said "Excuse me, but I would appreciate it if you would stop throwing stones.", and they all stopped. We just couldn't imagine that working with American kids, they would all target the complainer. It was quite a lesson on how civilized they are, and how far behind American manners have fallen.

No, I've got documented proof that you wrote, and I quote, "FUCK YOU".

A signal that you have accepted their anger as your own. Now you prepare to give it back to them in War Games.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." - War Games

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" - Isaac Asimov

The winner of a fight does not make him the best man.


The round goes to bobby.

Edit: BTW, If we have to "teach those dumb rednecks a lesson again." then I guess we didn't get to the heart of the problem the first time.

@BSR no i said i was done arguing with them because they don't argue in good faith.

If they want a civil war, i guess we'll have to teach those dumb rednecks a lesson again.

You can do what you want. I only asked because I wasn't sure I made myself clear. It's ok.

OH Wait! I see what's going here. You're about to give me an English lesson.

Some people don't want to be helped back up, they actually deny they ever fell....while laying face down in the dirt.
I'll help anyone up that wants up.
I've learned my lesson about lifting those who don't, they bite.
That doesn't mean i should spit on them when they're down, no matter how tempting it might be.

Nice of you to say, but Trumpublicans are immune to facts.

I've thought for years my discussions with Bobby aren't for him, they're to contradict his nonsense so other people don't get conned by liars. He's a total lost cause, proven when he said only stupid people tell the truth under oath if the truth might hurt them, defending Trump lying in his depositions. Anyone who supports perjury is lost.

Yes, sometimes kids who like fire need to be burned , badly, to gain respect for fire...I did. Sometimes even that doesn't teach them (my brother didn't stop making pipe bombs just because he almost blew himself up, for instance). The problem is, they usually burn down a house or two before getting burned enough themselves, maybe burning a few people to death for lack of a lesson. I say, if you see a kid playing with matches a second time, light their ass on fire in a dirt field, give them all the fire they'll ever want and then some. If they survive, they'll almost certainly quit lighting fires.

Bob is lighting fires at home with his other firebugs. None of them are concerned, none of them wants the fire out.

Congratulations! Your video, An Important Lesson, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 84 Badge!

Your video, An Important Lesson, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

The worst DevOps mistake I ever made:

Assignment: On ~1,000 -physical- RHEL systems, change the default run level from command line to GUI (don't ask).

Solution: Hey, all our config files are controlled by Puppet, so this'll be easy!

(If you don't know what Puppet does, it enforces file configurations, so if you change a single file on the Puppetmaster, that change is pushed out to all servers running Puppet)

Ok, all I need to do it edit a single file, change a single number in said file and issue a single command: reboot. Easy-fuckin'-peasy.

The file I need to change is /etc/inittab -- this file tells a Linux system which "run level" it should initiate upon booting up. runlevel 3 is command line and runlevel 5 is a GUI like Gnome or some other tragic perversion of the whole reason you run Linux in the first place. All I had to do was change from runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. And reboot.

So simple; so stupidly simple.

So stupidly simple at 3:00am. When I hadn't slept all night. On a production network. When I'm working from home away from the office. On a Saturday when no one is in said office.

I make my change and save it, then push it to the version control system. Puppet picks it up and pushes the change to ~1,000 physical computers.

Done and done!

Remember I mentioned that I had to change a single file AND execute a single command: reboot?

Here's where things go tragically wrong.

My changes worked PERFECTLY. Everything did exactly what I told it to: Puppet changed the file, and rebooted the servers.

Only they keep rebooting. They keep rebooting over and over and over and over. I can't access any server on the network. Worse, while I'm trying to figure out WTF I did wrong, the 30 minute time-out I'd set on our alerting system, Nagios, expires.

Did I mention that I pushed this change to ~1,000 servers? ~1,000 servers that won't stop rebooting and aren't reporting into Nagios, thus being marked as down?

At 3:31am, on Saturday morning, the pages to ALL the on-call engineers began. One page per engineer per machine. About one every two seconds. And I'm getting paged, too -- except some of the pages are Nagios and some are utterly irate engineers who want to know exactly WTF is going on and I can't tell which is which because I'm getting text-spammed like crazy.

And those servers? They just keep right on rebooting.

At that point, I felt the kind of existential dread that only people who work in IT know -- the kind of dread that arises a picosecond after you've hit ENTER and realized you've type 'rm -rf /' or some-such -- because I knew at that very second exactly what I'd done wrong.

I'd typo'd "5" and made it "6" in the runlevel. And pushed it to ~1,000 -physical- servers. And then rebooted them ALL.

"So," you're asking, "Whyfor is runlevel 6 a big deal?"

Because of this:

runlevel 3: command line.
runlevel 5: GUI
runlevel 6: REBOOT THE FUCKING COMPUTER.

What I'd done was told every production server on our network to reboot as soon as it rebooted, which leads to another reboot, which leads to another reboot, lather rinse repeat.

At 3:45am on Saturday morning, I knew that every person in IT would have to drive into the office, visit every production server with a bootable USB key, change the BIOS to boot off the key, boot the server into Single User Mode, change the damned file by hand, then reboot the server. This takes about 10 minutes per server -- times ~1,000.

I learned a number of valuable lessons that day:

1. DOUBLE CHECK YOUR FUCKING WORK.
2. See lesson #1
addendum: filing for unemployment insurance in Washington state is amazingly easy.

And that was the very last time I ever worked on physical hardware. To this day, if it's not in the cloud, I ain't fucking touching it.

Here endth the lesson.

Newt, you've already lost.

You didn't lose with Trump in 2016, but with California's Prop 13 in 1978.

The goal of the Neocon movement was to decimate American public education because they knew that an educated population would never vote for the kind of shit they were selling, and because teachers (being educated and all) were a powerful Democratic voting block. Defunding public education was a win/win for them.

It worked beautifully.

The teacher's unions were starved. Public schooling imploded. We went from the most educated populace in the world to the point where 50% of the population can't find their own country on a map.

Then the real screw-job started with the wealth transfer. Unions were busted, jobs were moved overseas. The safety net that kept millions from abject poverty was dissolved ("welfare queens", "food-stamp cheats"). The Middle Class began to evaporate with about 10% climbing up the ladder and the rest being dumped into the street.

For people like me -- people with high-end skills and a college degree -- that shit worked out great. But people who aren't as lucky? Kinda sucks being them. So they got madder and madder. Luckily, there were dark-skinned people that this rage could be directed at. That good ol' American racism? That shit pays dividends if you play it the right way.

Now you have an increasing number of poorly educated people living in poverty with grievances. Hey, guess what -- we have a new tool to focus all that anger and it's called FOX News! They can show you whose dastardly plan it was to keep your poor, white self down on the farm while those FUCKING LIBERALS live it up in the cities!

Lather, rinse, repeat.

See Newt, people like Bob aren't an anomaly, they're the intended end result of a very well-conceived long-term plan by extraordinarily smart people who understood Chomsky, Orwell and Lasker better than you ever will. Bob is now the norm and you are the exception.

Go ahead and vote in Biden or Warren or even Sanders: it doesn't fucking matter because you can't vote out entrenched stupid. No matter who is sitting at 1600 Penn Ave, Bob is sitting in front of his computer, seething and being stupid. He's not going anywhere. He's not going to see things differently and he's damned well not going to get any smarter.

There's a shit-ton of Bobs in this country and their numbers are growing daily. What're you going to do with them? Put 'em in a camp somewhere? Shoot 'em? You cannot have Bobs and the America you want. That leaves you with exactly two choices: you pick up your gun and shoot them, or you pick up your passport and leave. It's one or the other. You might not like the taste of this shit sandwich, but you're going to eat it whether you like it or not.

Also, you think Bob's a little kooky? Go visit 4chan's /pol/, visit whatever 8chan became, visit the comments section of Zero Hedge, read the comments on FOX's YouTube videos: those motherfuckers make Bob look like a goddamn bastion of rationality. Those people, the ones who're yelling at their screens and pounding out febrile screeds? They're armed. They hate you. They want to kill you. The only reason they haven't is because they haven't reached critical mass yet. Give them a couple of years of post-Covid economic collapse and they'll get there.

I'll never forget the most important lesson a Holocaust Survivor taught me: "The smart Jews left first".

Good luck; see you in Lyon.