No, You Didn’t Pay for the Roads!

 General  No Responses »
Sep 202021
 

In the UK there is something known as “vehicle excise duty” which the owners of some motorised vehicles have to pay. Before 1937, this was paid into a road fund used exclusively to pay for the creation of the road network. But from that date, roads are funded out of general taxation and local council taxes.

Which means that everyone (or just about everyone) is paying for the roads and that is no bad thing – we all benefit to some extent (although the pollution is a bit of a drag).

Filthy Roaring Beasts Rushing Along The Scar

The interesting thing is that because local roads are locally funded (to an extent), there is a good chance that a pedestrian is paying more for the roads within a city than the car driver – the driver is more likely to be a visitor to the city and thus pays considerably less. So by the argument that whoever pays should have priority, it should be the pedestrian who does!

Doing Your Own Research Isn’t a Sin

 General  No Responses »
Sep 182021
 

There are a fair number of memes out there at the moment throwing rocks at people who “do their own research” (meaning reading a few articles online).

The point they are trying to make is not unreasonable – casual reading up on a subject doesn’t trump the results of professional researchers results.

On the other hand, reading the right sources is research; not as valuable as academic research with all that extra “stuff”, but research nevertheless. The OED definition includes :-

To engage in research upon (a subject); to investigate or study closely.

Doesn’t say a whole lot about publishing papers in a peer-reviewed journal, the scientific method, or all that other tedious stuff that separates the professional academic researcher from the amateur.

There is of course a whole other post on how to do research properly in terms of background reading :-

  1. Wikipedia may be a good start but it’s just that – a start.
  2. You need to assess the trustworthiness of a source; if nobody trusts the source you’re reading it probably means the source can’t be trusted.
  3. You’re looking for accepted wisdom; you need to do a lot more work to start looking at the kooky stuff.
Unnatural Nature

Medical Insurance and Paying For Others Healthcare

 Politics  No Responses »
Aug 302021
 

One of the most amusing (if you have a sick sense of humour) things about the debate between fans of the current US system (devotees of privatised health care) and those proposing a more rational and efficient system, is the whole “I don’t want to pay towards the care of another”.

Once you get past the level of selfishness approaching a sociopath, and think deeply about how insurance – any insurance – works, you realise something. People with private health care insurance are already paying for the health care of others because that is how insurance works.

The insurance company sets monthly premiums at a level they calculate will leave them with profit after all the healthcare costs and overheads are taken care of. Most of the people paying those insurance premiums are unlikely to ever use up those premiums on their own health care; those premiums are going towards the healthcare costs of those who do exceed the total value of all the premiums they’ve paid. And of course to fill the pockets of the insurance companies.

So the next time someone objects to “socialist” healthcare by saying that they don’t want to pay for the healthcare of others’, just point out that they already are.

Posts in a Foggy River

Ivermectin As A Cure For Covid? Don’t Be Daft, But…

 General  No Responses »
Aug 282021
 

There’s a bunch of idiots currently poisoning themselves by taking Ivermectin as a cure or preventative for Covid-19. Which is doubly-dumb because not only is there no real evidence that ivermectin will do anything to deal with Covid-19, but these idiots are all too frequently getting their dose from horse-worming medication because the stocks of ivermectin for people has all run out.

Yes you read that right ivermectin is an approved medication for people when the dosage is appropriate. But it is not approved for treating Covid-19; it is intended to treat parasites.

And nobody with any sense would suggest ivermectin paste intended for use on horses :-

  1. The dose of ivermectin for a 700Kg horse is way higher than for a person who typically weighs under 100Kg. And yes the weight makes a difference – LD50 is the measure of how poisonous a drug is, which is specified per kilogram of the subject’s weight.
  2. An oral preparation of a drug for a horse may well contain ingredients not suitable for people.

So taking ivermectin without checking the ingredients and adjusting the dosage is really dumb especially when taking it for something it hasn’t been shown to be effective for.

And don’t take the advice of random strangers on the Internet; some of us aren’t qualified as pharmacists. Consult proper experts.

Setting Sail

Linux: Listing Disks and Controllers

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Aug 282021
 

Dealing with a potentially problematic SATA controller, I came across a little issue – which disks were connected to which controller? Not a problem most people would have to deal with but I do have rather a lot of disks. What I wanted was a tool that would list the controllers (lspci) with disks (block devices) shown per controller (lsblk).

I couldn’t find on, so I knocked up a quick and nasty shell script to do the job.

This isn’t a proper product and probably has many bugs (in particular it doesn’t like disks that are members of a volume group), but it works well enough for my use case :-

» ./print-block-tree 
01:00.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] X399 Series Chipset USB 3.1 xHCI Controller (rev 02)
  sr0:  PIONEER BD-RW_BDR-UD04 41443030303030303030303030303030 1024M
01:00.1 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] X399 Series Chipset SATA Controller (rev 02)
  sdi: 0x5000c50050ada74d ATA ST4000VN000-1H41 Z300H9GD 3.6T
  sdl: 0x500003992be00c53 ATA TOSHIBA_MG04ACA4 39DFK8S4FJKA 3.6T
  sdm: 0x500003992bf8077f ATA TOSHIBA_MG04ACA4 39CIK7DNFJKA 3.6T
  sdn: 0x500a075102fce9c7 ATA C300-CTFDDAC128M 00000000103402FCE9C7 119.2G
  sdo: 0x500003992bb80ede ATA TOSHIBA_MG04ACA4 39CAKCKDFJKA 3.6T
09:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9235 PCIe 2.0 x2 4-port SATA 6 Gb/s Controller (rev 11)
  sdp: 0x5002538f71100d76 ATA Samsung_SSD_870 S5STNG0R101271L 3.6T
  sdq: 0x50000399ec700c31 ATA TOSHIBA_MG04ACA4 30BXKC00FJKA 3.6T
41:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981/PM983
  nvme0n1:  96G
42:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: Broadcom / LSI SAS2308 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 (rev 05)
  sdb: 0x500080dc00b4e2e9 ATA TOSHIBA-TR200 28RB76F7K46S 223.6G
  sdc: 0x500080dc00b4e3f6 ATA TOSHIBA-TR200 28RB76MOK46S 223.6G
  sdd: 0x500080dc009263fa ATA TOSHIBA-TR200 976B607GK46S 223.6G
  sde: 0x500080dc00926416 ATA TOSHIBA-TR200 976B6088K46S 223.6G
  sdf: 0x50025388a09508a9 ATA Samsung_SSD_850 S1SMNSAG216528K 119.2G
  sdg: 0x50025385a01c8379 ATA Samsung_SSD_840 S1ANNSAF214088T 119.2G
  sdh: 0x500080dc009263f4 ATA TOSHIBA-TR200 976B607AK46S 223.6G
  sda: 0x50025388a09508b4 ATA Samsung_SSD_850 S1SMNSAG216534V 119.2G
44:00.3 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h (Models 00h-0fh) USB 3.0 Host Controller
  sdj:  Generic- USB3.0_CRW_-SD 201404081410 59.5G

The script itself :-

#!/bin/sh
#
# Attempt at printing a "tree" of block devices

controllers=$(ls /dev/disk/by-path | awk -F- '{printf "%s-%s\n", $1, $2}' | uniq)
for c in $controllers
do
  rhs=$(echo ${c} | awk -F- '{print $2}')
  lspci -s ${rhs}
  blockdevices=$(ls -l /dev/disk/by-path/${c}* | grep -v part | awk '{print $NF}' | awk -F/ '{print $NF}' | uniq)
  for b in $blockdevices
  do
    exp=$(lsblk -no WWN,VENDOR,MODEL,SERIAL,SIZE /dev/${b} | head -1 | tr -s " ")
    if [ -n "${exp}" ]
    then
      echo "  ${b}: ${exp}"
    fi
  done
done
The Rower
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