#structured preemption

[mentalisttraceur-software]

execve(2): insecure by default

a rant that ended up flowing into "structured privileges"

Thinking about the execve(2) interface of UNIX, particularly with elevated privileges - especially in combination with the UNIX philosophy of little tools that do small jobs well.

This generalizes, actually - the same ideas of privilege segregation could apply within a process if languages and runtimes took advantage of modern kernels' support for it - at least in Linux, where processes and threads are basically the same kernel primitive, with just a few configuration differences.

Anyway, it bothers me that the default behavior is that if I start a root program, everything it executes is also root. In some sense, the ideal default for a program with a privileged effective UID and an unprivileged real ID is that the execve system call drops privileges - and if you want to keep privileges, that should be an explicit flag.

Even more ideally, this wouldn't be a flag that you, as the program with privileged effective UID or effective capability set or whatever, get to just set however you want - this should be some sort of object, like a file descriptor or a 128-bit random key or a pointer into read-only mapped memory, which is given to you by the caller who gave you elevated privileges. So your options are either "drop privileges" or "keep any privileges that your caller allowed you to keep" - notably absent from your options is an unconditional "keep privileges".

Of course, one problem here is that at some levels of abstraction, forking another process should be an implementation detail - when I call a program as root, I shouldn't have to know "this program wants to fork a child", let alone details like which child programs, how many, how deep the process tree goes, and so on.

So execve isn't exactly the right boundary here, at least not always. But here are a couple examples where the execve boundary is user-facing and explicit, and is the right boundary:

Suppose I want to run a privileged `find` program - because it needs to look inside directories that only root can read, and then I want to run some un-privileged command per file path - the most secure thing, especially if I don't have time to audit the command's source and build and binary for problems, is to prefix my exec arguments for find with something like sudo -iu "$USER" so that the child process of find drops privileges back down to my user before running the command.

For another example, suppose I want to run something like fzf on a list of paths, and then I want fzf to use `bat` to preview those files. bat could need read-only root privileges if some of those files are only root-readable, but there's no great way to give those privileges to just bat instead of fzf - at best, I run sudo once before running fzf, sudo caches my credentials, and then I set the preview argument of fzf to include a sudo call. But this isn't friendly to building larger programs: if the fzf call is inside some larger script, that script now has to either unconditionally include that sudo call, or include it or not based on either a flag that is passed in or if it already has special privileges.

Going back to how this generalizes, this same problem happens with libraries - instead of calling into another program, you call into some library, but either way, you probably don't have time to audit the whole thing, and it often doesn't need all the elevated privileges that you have - if I've got code to parse YAML inside my process, those instructions don't need any privileges besides access to the input bytes and enough memory to return the parsed result, and yet I have to go out of my way to isolate them and drop privileges if I want to be safe from some exploitable parser bug.

Ideally, code should have to go out of its way to explicitly take privileges that it either needs or can optionally use, as a kind of parameter. The whole system, from the ground up, would be built with APIs which have a bias towards dropping privileges and which require every privilege to be passed in from higher up in the call tree. Then the path of least resistance aligns with security: if you're writing code which doesn't need privileges, you don't go out of your way to take them from the caller - if you need privileges to do something, you have no choice but to reveal it in the API.

The only wrinkle here is that people should be able to write middleware which doesn't know or care about privileges, but is transparent to them. The simplest solution is to do what Go did with its context type - force middleware to take that parameter, and pass it through just in case the thing it calls needs it. This is... better than privilege use being invisible, but it's still pretty bad, especially when we generalize it to a granular "permissions" object, since middleware would need an arbitrarily permissive type: instead of knowing if we're calling something that requires privileges, we are back to calling something that might use any of the privileges we fed into it, and we can't know without inspecting the middleware.

In languages with templates, the permissions could be expressed as a template parameter, and then it's at least clear that the middleware takes whatever permissions its callee requires - and someone higher up in the call stack is defining the callee, so they have the responsibility and knowledge of those permissions. But this still isn't really enough, that's just a nice way to make the type system transparently propagate information about elevated privileges to the places where a developer is most served by knowing it.

But at runtime, we need a distinction between a usable privilege, and an unusable "sealed" privilege which is just being passed through code from a higher caller to a transitive callee which has what they need to unseal it.

This has been on my mind for a couple years now, at least. The overarching theme here is that ideally software has a reified representation of all interesting privileges, which ideally is both visible in the type system and actually enforced at runtime, and that code should be forced to be explicit whenever it uses or passes privileges to do anything.

(I call this "structured privileges", and it's yet another special case of the general/abstract idea that unifies structured programming, structured concurrency, my structured preemption idea, and so on. If we fully generalize the concept, the most appropriate term is something like "structured capabilities", because it comes to encompass the ability to do anything that we might want to explicitly manage in some parts of code. More on that soon, hopefully.)

[thatstormygeek]

St. Louis, Kansas City and other cities are easy political scapegoats for Missouri candidates like Eigel in large part because they are reliably Democratic enclaves in an otherwise deeply red state. Republicans running for a statewide position know they can win without city voters. Once in office, Republicans codify their distaste for cities into law by restricting what cities can and cannot do. They’ve largely succeeded at this by passing laws that block the very cities they call lawless from enacting the policies to address problems. City lawmakers can’t raise the minimum wage. They can’t require people to pass a background check before buying a firearm. They can’t pass a moratorium on evictions. Kansas City can’t control its own police department, or how much the city will fund it.

But Missouri law prevents any county, city or municipality from passing legislation regulating the sale, purchase, transfer, ownership, use, possession, transportation, licensing, permit and registration of firearms. At a recent Jackson County legislature meeting, legislator Jalen Anderson criticized that policy. “These preemption laws were put in place to make sure that our lives are made to be political, that our safety is political, that they have something to run on every two years,” Anderson told a room full of gun safety advocates and young people who testified about the importance of gun control. ... Kansas City has not had local control of its police department since the 1930s, a governance structure not seen in any other major U.S. city. The department is overseen by a Board of Police Commissioners, all of whom are appointed by the Missouri governor except for the Kansas City mayor. The amount of money that flows to the KCPD is set by Missouri lawmakers, though funding comes from Kansas City.

[enterprisewired]

Exxon Mobil Misses Analysts’ Estimates with 28% Drop in Q1 Profits

Source- rte.ie

Exxon Mobil Corp faced a setback in its first-quarter earnings, reporting a 28% year-on-year decline in profits. The shortfall was attributed to weaker refining margins and lower natural gas prices despite volume gains. The company’s first-quarter earnings stood at $8.22 billion, or $2.06 per share, compared to $11.43 billion in net profit during the same period last year. Analysts had anticipated higher figures, with profit per share falling 6% short of Wall Street estimates, as per LSEG estimates.

Factors Behind the Decline

Chief Financial Officer Kathryn Mikells highlighted that while the results marked the second-highest for a first quarter in the past decade, they fell short due to tax and inventory balance sheet adjustments. Mikells noted the impact of “pluses and minuses” associated with one-off items, which this time leaned towards the unfavorable. Weaker energy margins, resulting in a $2.6 billion reduction in operating profit compared to the previous year, were primarily responsible for the downturn. Global oil prices remained relatively stagnant, while natural gas prices witnessed a significant decline, with U.S. gas futures trading 20% lower compared to the previous year.

Positive Boosts and Cost-saving Measures

Despite the challenges, Exxon Mobil experienced lower costs and higher volumes from its operations in Guyana, which partially offset the decline. The company’s capital spending in the last quarter marked a seven-quarter low, with streamlined operations contributing to an expansion of structural cost savings by $400 million. Exxon ended the quarter with $1.7 billion in additional cash, totaling $33.3 billion.

Pioneer Acquisition and Future Outlook

Exxon’s impending $60 billion acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources is expected to conclude in the coming weeks. The acquisition, conducted entirely through stocks, positions Exxon Mobil as the largest oil and gas producer in the leading U.S. shale field. This move is anticipated to double output in the shale field to over 1.3 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. The company projects that the combined entity will reach 2 million barrels per day by 2027, capitalizing on economies of scale and years of future production.

Hess Arbitration

However, Exxon Mobil faces challenges regarding its assets in Guyana, where it is embroiled in a dispute with Chevron and Hess. Exxon has asserted preemption rights over Hess’ Guyana assets amidst Chevron’s $53 billion offer for Hess. This dispute is under consideration by an international arbitration panel. Should the panel uphold Exxon’s preemption rights, the company, along with partner CNOOC Ltd, will explore available options.

Exxon’s first-quarter results reflect a mixed performance influenced by industry dynamics and strategic maneuvers. The impending acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources signifies a significant step towards solidifying its position in the energy sector, albeit amid ongoing legal disputes that may shape its future trajectory.

Curious to learn more? Explore our articles on Enterprise Wired

[militaryleak]

Unified Concept for Air Power in the Nordic Region During Exercise Nordic Response

For the first time, the Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden – together with other Allies – cooperated on a combined concept for Air Power command and control in the region during exercise Nordic Response 2024 (NR24). For exercise NR24, the combined Nordic Air Operations Centre has been established at Camp Bodin at Bodø Air Base. It normally controls Nordic air operations in peacetime from a mountain facility at Reitan, Norway. The air operations centre serves as the air component headquarters for participating air forces during the exercise. From here, approximately 300 officers and specialists are planning, controlling and assessing air operations across the assigned operations area. The Royal Norwegian Air Force point out that this is a test of concept for this year's winter exercise, and not a preemption of either the location or command element within the NATO command structure.

For the first time, the Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden – together with other Allies – cooperated on a combined concept for Air Power command and control in the region during exercise Nordic Response 2024 (NR24). For exercise NR24, the combined Nordic Air Operations Centre has been established at Camp Bodin at Bodø Air Base. It normally controls Nordic air operations in peacetime from a…

[mullandfrasertokyo]

Mulland Fraser Tokyo Japan on China and BIS plans to uncrown the US Bone

The United States Bone( USD) is the most extensively used reserve currency in the world moment. still, a changing global fiscal geography, driven by the rise of indispensable currencies, new borders in fiscal technology, and a shifting trend towards fiscalde-centralization and multiple currency access incross-border trading pose a challenge to the current ascendance of the US Bone and for all its stakeholders.

The United States ’ rise as a global superpower happed after its rapid-fire industrialization, as colorful nations were still floundering with the despoilments of World War II. Mulland Fraser Japan The proliferation of manufacturing manufactories and exportation of automotive vehicles erected a robust frugality, and the establishment of the United Nations and its corollary fiscal bodies similar as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund paved the way for the US Dollar’s success as the dominant reserve currency.

After World War II, utmost countries reckoned on and traded with the United States, which further��cemented its status as the world’s profitable superpower.Mulland Fraser Tokyo Japan But according to data from the Lowy Institute, although 80 of the world traded with the US in 2001, it fell sprucely to a bare 30 in 2018, and was deprived by China, which is now the main trade mate of 128 out of 190 countries.

China’s Global preemption of Top diligence

China’s rise as the new profitable superpower can be attributed by its preemption of the top three diligence that are crucial for erecting profitable structure the manufacturing assiduity, the automotive assiduity, and the labor request.

[signalprioritypreemption]

Emergency Vehicle Preemption

The EMTRAC structure interfaces with starting response vehicles to request signal seizure through facilitated crossing places. The EMTRAC development's general correspondence range enables first-response working conditions to change each blend approach so Emergency Vehicle Preemption can be alluded to when the need ought to emerge.

To know more about this visit: https://www.emtracsystems.com/emergency-vehicle-preemption-EVP.html

Get in Touch:

location: Manufactured By STC, Inc. 1201 W. Randolph St, McLeansboro, IL 62859

phone: Richard D’Alessandro: (214) 607–0100

Fax: (214) 607–0105

Email: info@emtracsystems.com

Web: https://www.emtracsystems.com/

[xygled]

Special-shaped Screen Brings More Hope to the LED Display Industry

LED special-shaped screen, also known as concept screen, belongs to one kind of LED display screen. LED special-shaped screen is a specially shaped display screen based on the conventional screen. Its product feature is to get used to the overall structure and environment of the building. The size and size of the LED special-shaped screen can be customized according to specific requirements. In addition, the special-shaped screen is more deterrent to watch under the special structure. LED special-shaped screens are generally classified by shape. Today, let's take a look at several typical LED special-shaped screens:  

1. LED magic cube screen

The LED magic cube screen is a square composed of six faces. The minimum gap between faces is perfect! Using the advanced box planning technology and combining with the field environment of the practical device, a new led display screen with the concept of preemption has been created. The most attractive thing about this screen is the common shape, which breaks away from the sense of the traditional plane display screen, and gives people a new visual three-dimensional sense. The atrium location suitable for installation in bars, hotels or commercial real estate can give the audience a new visual experience.

2. LED bar DJ table

In the past two years, LED bar DJ has become the standard configuration of some cutting-edge bars and nightclubs. LEDDJ can play the most brilliant role with DJ, making music and vision perfect. Through the deployment of customized videos, DJ stations and LED large screens are integrated, which can be broadcast independently, combined with large screens, and superimposed to make the stage more layered.

3. LED roller shutter screen

The common and novel structural planning can complete the arbitrary changes of the screen's top and bottom, left and right sides, and satisfy the needs of various irregular actual surfaces; The LED roller shutter screen body can be changed up and down along the arbitrary curved surface, and can be rolled up 360 degrees; The left and right sides of the screen can be folded by 90 degrees; It is placed on the top (and can be adjusted according to site practice), and the layout of up and down wiring makes the whole screen look orderly; The screen body is all made of open-mold plastic shell, which not only ensures high precision, but also completes the ultra-thin and ultra-light screen body; Vacuum polymer nanotechnology is used for glue filling to reach the field waterproof grade; The screen is simple and convenient, and is mainly suitable for rental places.

4 LED spherical screen

The LED spherical screen is planned as an all-aluminum structure, with very solid structure and strong serviceability; Together, it can be planned to be mobile, convenient to carry, and can also choose hoisting and seat mounting; 360 ° omni-view point, omni-directional video broadcast, any point of view can feel the outstanding visual effect, no plane perspective problem; It can be planned and produced according to customer requirements. The minimum diameter is 1 meter, which can be used inside and outside the room; A spherical surface is completely completed by numerical control. The precise module size ensures the consistency of all circular curvature of the LED spherical screen, and makes the spherical shape appear regular and perfect.

Read the full article

[yatescountyhistorycenter]

Gristmill (still) still standing in Bellona

By Jonathan Monfiletto

The headline for this article is a play of sorts on the headline of an April 20, 1966 newspaper article: “Grist Mill Still Standing,” about the gristmill in Bellona built nearly 200 years ago on the south side of Kashong Creek. That article is interesting in light of an item that appeared six months later, in October 1966, stating the owner of the garage across the road planned to sell the mill for its materials and have it torn down to make way for a parking lot for his business.

Another article from 1966, headlined “5-Story Grist Mill Must Go, Owner Says,” caught my attention. One day from my post in the research room, I was looking into something totally different when I came across this article about the desired removal of the mill in Bellona. “Hmm, OK, that’s nice,” went my initial reaction, as I kept searching for information on the topic at hand.

As I continued sifting through the Bellona subject file, though, a lightbulb came on in my head. “Hey, wait a second,” I thought to myself about the newspaper article. “I recognize that gristmill in that picture. I think I drive by it every day.”

I ride the length of Preemption Road from Routes 5&20 to Route 54 and back on my way to and from work, travelling through the hamlet of Bellona. On the way home that afternoon, I made a point to look to my right as I drove through Bellona – sure enough, there was the gristmill from the picture. It hadn’t been torn down after all and is in fact still standing. I wanted to find out what happened and why.

I searched again through the Bellona subject file and learned Jacob Carpenter, the owner of the garage, sold the mill to John Fontana in 1972. Fontana and John Prendergast, who bought the mill and the adjacent general store along with Fontana, planned to restore the mill and the store. A $5,000 interest-free loan from the Geneva Historical Society – now called Historic Geneva – supported their efforts.

A series of newspaper articles from the late 1970s to the early 1980s details Fontana and Prendergast’s efforts – both physically and financially – to restore the mill and store. However, the research trail goes cold after a November 14, 1982 newspaper article in which Fontana acknowledged losing sight of the objective but vowed the mill would come to life again one day.

So I’m wondering what has happened with the mill, which is clearly still standing, in the 40 years since the last record we have of it at the History Center and who is in charge of the property now. Another mystery, at least to me, is what happened to the general store, which is clearly not still standing but still had one tenant in 1972.

While other people will certainly know more about the mill and the store than I do right now, I’ll keep looking into this and seeing what I can find out because it is a history mystery of sorts to me. What I am certain of is the first almost 200 years of mills in Bellona because that history is well documented in the History Center’s files.

The first mill in Bellona was built by Caleb Benton, the namesake for the town in which the hamlet lies, and was located on the north side of Kashong Creek. The spot was chosen because of the water power provided by the creek and its falls and the logging facilities nearby. James and Otis Barden operated the sawmill, and Benton built a 30x40-foot barn near the mill a year later. Around 1800, a frame gristmill went up on the south side of the creek, and in 1828 a stone structure replaced it. The stones used to build it came from the creek, and the cement was made by burning limestone in a limekiln.

An eight-foot-high dam across Kashong Creek supplied power by raising the water level 12 feet above the top of the falls. A sluiceway dropped water on an undershot wheel.

In November 1854, fire destroyed sections of the interior of the mill. George Barden and his son Ashley – descendants of James and Otis – took ownership of the mill and restored it into a combined gristmill and sawmill. They leased the mill to relatives Thomas and James Barden, who provided lumber to Geneva by transporting lumber down Kashong Creek into Seneca Lake.

Another fire swept through the mill in 1863, destroying the roof and interior, and left it idle for the next two decades. At that point, George Barden sold the mill to Nathan Maxwell for $5,000 in gold – because Barden would not accept a check – and Maxwell rebuilt the mill with a shingle roof and plaster interior walls. Maxwell also converted the mill operation from millstones for grinding to then-new rollers to speed up the process.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the mill modernized – John Alexander replaced the wheel with a turbine in 1889, and Jefferson Davenport rebuilt the dam to raise the water level. The Bill family, the last operators of the mill from 1925 to 1959, adapted the mill for steam power and later for gas power.

During its lifetime, the mill produced animal feed as well as flour and grain and at one point included a cider mill with a press and other fixtures and machinery for cutting pipes and tools. Several sources indicate the stone gristmill in Bellona is the last of its kind remaining in New York State and possibly the United States.

[onancientpaths]

Today we celebrate the Three Holy Hierarchs,  three late 4th century eastern bishops who were enormously influential on the development of Christian theology: St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great, and St. Gregory the Theologian.

Among other influences on me, thinking through their understandings of property and our duties to the poor was a major part of one of the three or so strands of thought that led me towards socialism (or at least anti-capitalism).  Here's an example statement from each:

"Let us imitate God’s law of creation. He makes the rain fall on the righteous and the wicked and makes his sun rise upon all human beings without distinction. He gives to all the creatures living on earth vast spaces, springs, rivers, forests…and his gifts ought not to be appropriated by the mighty nor by governments…Hold fast then to that primitive equality, forget subsequent divisions. Attend not to the law of the strong but to the law of the Creator. Help nature to the best of your ability, honour the freedom of creation, protect your species from dishonour, come to its aid in sickness, rescue it from poverty…You who are Christ’s servants, his brethren and fellow-heirs, while it is still not too late, [in the poor] help Christ, feed Christ, clothe Christ, welcome Christ, honour Christ…" - St Gregory the Theologian

"The possessions of the Emperor, the city, the squares, and the streets, belong to all men, and we all use them in an equal degree. Look at the economy that God has arranged. He has created some things that are for everyone, including the air, sun, water, earth, heaven, sea, light, and stars, and He has divided them equally among all men, as if they were brothers. This, if nothing else, should shame the human race. The Emperor has made other things common to all, including the baths, cities, squares, and streets. There is not the slightest disagreement over this common property but everything is accomplished peacefully. If someone tries to take something and claim it as his own personal possession, then quarrels arise. It is as if the very forces of natures were complaining, and as if at that time when God was gathering them from everywhere they were trying with all their might to separate among themselves, to isolate themselves from each other, and to distinguish their own individual property by coldly saying that ‘this is yours but that is mine’. If this were true, quarrels and bitterness would arise, but where there is nothing of this sort neither quarrels nor disagreements occur. In this way we see that for us as well a common and not an individual ownership of things has been ordained, and that this is according to nature itself. Is not the reason that no one ever goes to court about the ownership of a public square the fact that this square belongs to all?" - St. John Chrysostom

"In just a little while, his life will be snatched away, and what is [the rich person] thinking? 'I will pull down my barns and build larger ones.' Well done, I would say for my part.  The treasuries of injustice well deserve to be torn down.  With your own hands, raze these misbegotten structures.  Destroy the granaries from which no one has ever gone away satisfied.  Demolish every storehouse of greed, pull down the roofs, tear away the walls, expose the moldering grain to the sunlight, lead forth from prison the fettered wealth, vanquish the gloomy vaults of Mammon....'But whom do I treat unjustly,' you say, 'by keeping what is my own?'  Tell me, what is your own?  What did you bring into this life? From where did you receive it?  It is as if someone where to take the first seat in the theater, then bar everyone else from attending, so that one person alone enjoys what is offered for the benefit of all in common - this is what the rich do.  They seize common goods before others have the opportunity, then claim them as their own by right of preemption." - St Basil the Great

[diffractor]

So, there’s several different aspects of punishment that the criminal system is trying to do, none of them well. I’ll try considering how to best optimize them individually, and then mentally expose them to other considerations to arrive at something not totally evil (something still feels a bit off about my results, this is a first draft). Only reblog if you’re going to do a dry effortpost about crucial considerations left out and a better way to do things taking those considerations into account.

The aspects: 1: Retribution: Someone hurt you, so you want them to suffer. 2: Deterrence: Preemptively prevent people from doing [thing] by guaranteeing that bad things happen to them if they do [thing]. 3: Prevention: If someone does [thing], you do something so they don’t do [thing] again. 4: Reparation: If someone does [thing], you take resources from them to pay back for the damage caused. 5: Preemption: Do stuff that makes [thing] less likely to occur in the first place, like after-school programs or something. For maximizing retribution: Well, that’s just called torture. For maximizing deterrence... well, certainty of punishment plays a bigger role than magnitude of punishment, so some 100% certain moderately bad thing is visited upon you when you commit a crime. For maximizing prevention... idk, a magic rock that when you touch it, it instantly wipes any desire to commit crimes. Or a teleporter to extradimensional australia where someone walks in and they don’t come out. For reparation... fines seem pretty sensible. And for preemption, that’s just structuring society in ??? way s.t. there’s no incentive to commit crimes in the first place. Now, a lot of the earlier-mentioned stuff is pretty evil when taken to extremes, so let’s try throwing a moral parliament at this. Retribution: Ok, this one gets a whole lot of shit as not a morally valid motive, and I think there’s a lot of people who, if given a magic criminality-wiping rock, would have “touch the rock” as their only legal consequence. I don’t know about that, desire for retribution is pretty clearly a terminal value. If a man shot someone’s dog, and then they touched the magic rock and were remorseful and would never do something like that again... then, according to my personal sense of which worlds are better, it’d be clearly better if they also got kicked in the nuts by the dog owner, even though that doesn’t affect anything going forward. With that said, however, there’s still all the other moral considerations about. Disproportionate retribution like Hell or Azkaban or spending a decade or two in prison gets a very strong veto from the rest of the moral system, and it isn’t even that satisfying to the retribution value. If someone burns down my house, I don’t want them to spend several years in a dreary place with their life on hold, either no or bad company, a high risk of rape, and then find it impossible to come back into society, that’s just depressing, excessive, and not even that satisfying as punishment. Retribution-Value says it’d be much more awesome to just beat the shit out of them with a stick, or sting them with a bullet ant. I also think that, if given a choice between the latter options and prison, I’d take getting beat up in a heartbeat. There’s a tremendous amount of risk with the legal system having retribution as a purpose, because there’s no incentive for mercy there. The prisoners cannot vote, and the people voting for what to do with criminals are not going to go in the direction of “more mercy”, signalling is going to take it to really bad extremes. Also (Retribution-Value says), hurting someone yourself is way better than having someone do it for you, and (Mercy-Value says), there’s a possible check in the latter case that isn’t present in the former case, namely, the person doing the punishing feeling bad. There is, however, still a slippery slope of being permitted to come up with increasingly nasty retributions to do to people. So, the best option for retribution seems something like “if you were greatly wronged, you get a chance to personally beat up the person, someone’s nearby to ensure you don’t do permanent harm”. For stuff like imposing a bullet ant sting, that’d take a great deal more care because past a certain point, increased intensity of pain doesn’t make someone look like they’re suffering more, so you’d need incredibly strong restrictions on not adding additional painful options (example of failure mode: “yo we found this one species of centipede that hurts like 3x as bad as a bullet ant, let’s add that to the allowable retribution list”), or a rule like “you’ve gotta personally go through a quarter of what they’re going through, choose your retribution accordingly” to give more of an incentive towards not being too cruel for really vengeful people. I don’t trust any civilization to be able to stick to those rules, so I guess “you get to personally beat up the criminal, but not cause permanent damage” is about as good as you’d get. Retribution-Value says this is awesome, and other values don’t object too hard. 2: Deterrence. Magnitude of punishment isn’t as important for deterrence as certainty of being caught, so I guess just ramp up the number of police, and do the Singapore thing of caning. I’d definitely take that over prison and it seems like a pretty effective deterrent. Or maybe “eat this ghost pepper”. Having devastating punishments that are infrequently applied is just the exact wrong way to go about this. 3: Prevention. I don’t really know what works for this one, having not done a literature review. I will, however, observe that putting someone in a place stuffed with repeat criminals and then tanking their ability to get honest work once they get out is a uniquely awful way of preventing future crimes. An aspect of this is incapacitation, where a repeat offender has to be kept in prison because otherwise they’d totally do [thing] again. If you need to incapacitate someone, prison seems like an uneccessarily cruel way to do it, just design, like, a big apartment, throw in an unlimited supply of video games and weed, and drop the solitary confinement part. Or, if you really really need to make sure someone stops interacting with others, period, just cryopreserve them. Thinking about it a bit more, these two feel unsatisfactory, there’s probably better options. Also, I’d be quite worried about using crime-stop magic rock for this one, because we have instances of moral progress (legalization of weed, gay rights) which relied on people breaking the law, so sufficiently advanced deterrence or prevention may shut down lawbreaking for bad laws. I’d take a bullet ant over the magic rock if the magic rock enforced compliance to the laws of the US, because there’s a lot of really dumb laws. 4: Reparation. Idk, fines? Community service seems like a way of doing reparation, but I’m a bit leery of it because it saps time instead of money. 5: Preemption. Again, I don’t really know what’d be effective here, and there’s the aforementioned issues with sufficiently advanced deterrence/prevention/preemption taking away the recovery mechanism for bad laws. And there’s one last thing that hasn’t really been discussed but also feels like a terminal value. The desire for the person to realize how bad the thing they did was. I think one of the original motives for prison back in the 1700′s-1800′s was that the time of solitary reflection would prompt a realization on the part of the prisoner that what they did was wrong (source: half-remembered Focault book), and... it doesn’t really seem like that works. The ideal would be something like the ending of the Eragon series (major spoilers ahead!) So, there’s an evil king who’s been making the land pretty terrible for a while, the hero confronts him, is just about to lose, and then in the last moment manages to fire off a  wordless empathy spell born from the desire for the king to just... understand that what he’s been doing is wrong. And so, he mentally experiences all the consequences of what has happened to all the people of the land since becoming king. Needless to say, full awareness of all the consequences of one’s actions minus scope insensitivity is a pretty severe thing to think about, and the king shortly thereafter commits suicide. Minus the suicide part and the full removal of scope insensitivity part (because wouldn’t that be as bad as all the stuff that has happened up to now?), that just feels deeply right. That there be something to bring awareness of the full ramifications of everything you’ve done and realize that it was wrong. We’re probably not getting that, but it feels like an unusually pure form of justice. So, summary: current penal system sucks, more police, less prison, more minor corporal punishment (for deterrence/punishment), more fines (for reparation), ??? (whatever works) for addressing the cause of crime/somehow ensuring that people don’t do their crime again, if you need incapacitation then you don’t need to be cruel about it, just go for something Lotus-eater-like. You don’t want to be too effective at shutting down crime, because some crime is good when the laws are dumb. Retribution is a terminal value, fite me on this, but it’s best done on a personal level without lasting harm instead of being put in the hands of an impersonal organization with no incentives for mercy. Finally, full awareness of what one has done is something that’d be awesome if it existed.

[queernuck]

Fucked: Death, Disease, COVID-19, Sexuality, Performance, and Psychopolitics in Early 2020

When a crowd can make AR-15s, masks and gloves look uncool, there is something seriously wrong with their priorities. The petit-bourgeoisie nature of protests to “reopen” states and the neoliberal direction, as well as the way in which neoliberal opposition directs a flow of crisis, anxiety, and repetition thereof into state control and the power thereof, creates a model whereby two wings of the same party join in a kind of neoliberal unity in order to protect the articulation of hegemony at a time when it is most in danger, when the commodities it most openly fetishizes are at risk of falling out of use, when the two form coalitions such that various apparatuses of recapture can function as usual even in a highly unusual time.

And what better apparatuses than those of intimacy, sexuality, the means by which vulnerabilities are made most clear and a point at which numerous striations upon the socius are imparted, cross, become part of assemblages of the body in forming the many linkages of binary-machines that make up the series of desiring-machines most active in a time of quarantine. In this time schools, asylums, hospitals, factories and prisons seem to be sharing far more than ever, are converging on and repeating one another in frightening fashions as conceptual spaces of play become ones of work, languages of wartime production become the vocabularies of virologists, and the tally of American lives is measured against terrorist attacks and failed wars of conquest that define exactly who can be considered “American” at this time.

It is rather clear that those who attend these reopening protests are at the least not terribly concerned with their own safety, at least from COVID-19: there is a belief that a personal exemption can be had from the virus, in a fashion which specifically targets individualism, notions of routine and fetishization of lifestyles as consumerist acts of branding, identification with brands and experiences thereof which have become the basis for psychopolitical engagement with Neoliberal modalities of exchange. By stripping off the surgical mask, there is another mask (in the sense of Jung) being placed on, one of an exceptional specimen who is undaunted by a kind of agenda which wishes to blow the Coronavirus out of proportion, to deny that the thousands of deaths are happening, to attribute those same thousands to a bioengineering project on behalf of the Chinese state, and moreover to claim that just as America is artificially inflating the number of deaths, China is deflating them by an even greater magnitude. The attitude, the brazenness with which these acts are carried out, requires a kind of specific ideological positioning wherein one’s safety is in fact not actually meaningfully threatened by the prospect of reopening en masse.

The language of social distancing and self-quarantine, when weaponized in the survivalist vocabulary, has become sort of an excuse to throw a Flugaloo bash in hopes that an oncoming Boogaloo is rising: “Boogaloo” is a term that has gone through a series of ironic internet references to pick up iconography of igloos (the Big Igloo), tropical shirts (referring to the Big Luau) and now the “Flugaloo” with cheeky Lysol cans attached in place of vertical grips on paramilitary-style rifles. Self-quarantining and social distancing, as practiced in this case, is a kind of performative creation of quarantine as begrudging, the result of a liberal overstep, but a time to work on various projects, or to goof off, a time for telecommuting but also not doing all that much business at all, is a kind of extension of the petit-bourgeoise lifestyle that many aspire too and that most would have to be to maintain a serious hobby of survivalism and small arms collecting, given the price tag on some of the more useful rifles out there. The lifestyle is documented on instagram or reddit for consumption of others, as a psychopolitical display which aims for a kind of living-out in the exact sort of display that the protests at capitol buildings are aiming for. They assert a kind of right over individual bodies by a means which entirely negates any actual critique such an assemblage could raise: Butler’s description of protests which specifically flaunt rules by following them more earnestly than a traditional protest is entirely lost, in that here assembly is taken as a more absolute directive to break guidelines in order to assert a truth about oneself, one’s identity, to cultivate one’s own immunity through presence in the body wielding an invisible hand to pry markets back open. The admonishment of some that these protests represent working-class anxieties is mostly misleading in that not only are these reactionary protests (and thus, lacking in class consciousness, refusing any potential even among those who may be working class within) but additionally by positing oneself as a consumer, as part of a consuming or leisure class which is suffering as a result not of the virus, but the antivirus, bodies repulsed by the antibodies of closures and distancing. One can “bug out” or hunker down with as many weapons as one wishes, but only after engaging in the conspicuous displays of consumption that ensure the current “late-stage” acts of capitalist identification are met, the correct Veteran-Owned companies are supported, the right businesses buycotted and so on.

Of course, even from home the act of identification through the willing acceptance of a certain state of things and a retirement to various internet services is another psychopolitical recourse for many. In trying to find humor within the notion of social distancing and self-quarantine, the subject of nonmonogamous relationships has become a particularly fertile ground. Reductress and The Hard Times, two of the leading satire sites that have picked up slack after The Onion’s ownership group neutered some of its best content, have discussed sex and sexuality in relation to COVID-19 in a fashion that is hip, relatable, most of all distanced from any meaningful commitment to statements on exactly what one should do or be within systems present in neoliberal logics of life and commitment, especially regarding the topics of polyamory and open relationships. Discussions of nonmonogamy seem to predominantly tend toward offering a reactionary structure of preemption: by being “above it all” with a kind of ironic detachment, nonmonogamous relationships can be dismissed out of hand as worthless or less worthwhile, in a fashion that retains a certain woker-than-thou aesthetic while also failing to meaningfully situate itself in relation to notions of monogamy and life within it. At once there are both assumptions about nonmonogamy and polyamory: it is a singular slightly-above-average and certainly-above-her-station woman who is entertaining multiple affable but ultimately disposable men, while also being a man who is effectively cheating on a number of women all at once, with both deserving different sorts of contempt, either the woman with her “simps” or the kind of softly wrapped cheating and manipulation that the man gets his partners to pretend to accept. Even in queering this structure, recognizing that there are far more relationships than these two structures can describe, than these two Oedipal fantasies, there is a basic assumption that one body must fit at the nexus of this, that the polycule requires a center and is not simply a relationship of affinities, part of an assemblage of various other relationships that could just as easily be friendships, kinship, social ties with or without sexual implications that are not codified as such.

That there is frequently a display of such relationships on apps such as tumblr, facebook (wherein the parties’ partners engage in displays of affection that are almost as much about confusing those who are not clued in and reassuring themselves of a certain status as they are about making the partner feel loved) and Discord, along with the means by which psychopolitical acts of refusing to name certain potentially-rhizomal developments of friendship and trust in fact serves as an excuse to force an arboreal notion of dominance on them, making it so that the placehood of a relationship is profoundly realized during the decision to quarantine with a particular partner. Nonmonogamous structures of relationship in relation to contemporary questions on sexual identity, the ways by which sexual relationships are formed and realized, and the many ways in which a proliferation of identities converges on a sort of infinite signification, a kind of Dessert of the “Real” wherein one spoils oneself with the sweet possibilities of a Virtual life, is coming to the fore at this very moment. The beauty of relationships outside of a single structure, either a requirement of monogamous narratives (perhaps queered by the introduction of some sort of academic reasoning to them) or polyamorous ones (with the insistence that there is an inherent radicality to this that ignores how partners may wish to interact with one another, may get-along-or-not, may in fact be hiding their own feelings on such a relationship for various reasons) makes it such that the psychopolitical aspect of new relationships and their potential is continually in flux, on display, must always be presented in order to be analyzed by those whose relationship to the relationship is a foundational aspect of the relationship itself, a kind of audience (imagined or not) for which one performs.

More generally, discussions of relationships in quarantine are common, and most are pointing out what should be obvious: any situation wherein an abused partner is forced to spend more time with their abuser will be fraught, will be difficult, will have at the very least some psychological toll if it does not unfold into outright violence, how the threat of abuse functions in relation to abusive actions, how abusive actions play with certain thresholds in order to retain the structure that enables them (that is, refraining from physical violence specifically such that this points to an absence of abuse rather than a genuine calculation on the part of the abuser) and moreover how domesticity in the middle of a crisis such as this can exacerbate and trigger certain dynamics which were not as clear formerly, how loss of work or loss of a social circle greatly increases one’s susceptibility to violence, how a pressure to show that one is not only quarantining, but quarantining well, doing sufficient effort to come out of this “better” extends even to those who have already been submitting to an act in order to hide being abused so that there is always more more more to hide. 

So then, what kinds of assemblages are possible over distance? What performative structures result from this? The way in which nonmonogamous structures are enabled and enhanced by the digital interfaces with which a larger Virtual is created includes a new update to cruising: that of Grindr, a vast improvement over chancing dying on 9/11 cruising in the WTC bathrooms, one must admit (even if dying for a well-sucked dick is a romantic prospect). Grindr did long before and to a far greater extent what apps such as Tinder have attempted to do, in that their Virtual is a kind of hyperreal sexual signaling, is in many ways a part of a cultural shift, is a kind of discrete indiscretion that has been interrupted by the ban on casual travel enacted by COVID-19. The granting of an app access to one’s most private sexual desires is a new transformation in potential acts of control one which goes far beyond mere newspaper classified ads: the danger of Grindr as a lure for homophobic attacks is well-documented, with the fear of various dangers laid upon the spectre of homosexuality far more easily raised and discussed by a largely heterosexual class of analysts and spectators. Even within communities, objections to the ease with which Grindr enables practices such as chemsex and the related acts of dealing shows a desire for some kind of respectability: there is a limit on what can be enacted, and it is far better to make the sexual statement on freedom than to adopt a more genuinely radical philosophy around what one may do with one’s body in expressing sexual identity, how the chemical alteration of the body must stay within acceptable limits, the skin must remain intact, the phallus the only phallus and the act of fucking the only penetration, fists and hands allowed but needles only for play, never injection. Again, subjecting oneself to a certain sort of mask (the one that the Grindr logo cheekily evokes) allows then for a new sort of expression, for flows of desire that are not otherwise possible and moreover which are newly made possible by the kinds of knowing connections Grindr fosters: the creation of more intricately-planned public scenes, staging of a sexual fantasy more readily, the commodification of sex. 

As to who makes money off of these commodities, one perhaps might point to the rise and dominance of OnlyFans: as a means of sexual expression, as a means of sustaining oneself while in quarantine, as a kind of entry into sex work or as a means of transitioning to a different platform through which to perform such work, it has been a dominant part of the discursive structuring of COVID-19 and quarantine when it comes to sexuality. Sauce Walka, a rapper known just as much for his lean and jewelry as his rapping, started a companion OnlyFans to the two women he is currently dating, who both have OnlyFans of their own. Beyoncé namechecked the site in a verse on her remix of “Savage” with Megan Thee Stallion, whose song was already a cultural force in its own right. The way in which a kind of public discursive function is served by the question of what exactly is implied, mediated by this website and its functions is specifically that of a larger discussion about what sex work entails, its acceptability, its structure and just how much striations within sex work apply in relation to class and identity just as with any analysis of the sort. Again, all at once it is a kind of psychopolitical exercise for the performer (that is, submitting oneself to a specific kind of willing surveillance) and one for the audience (whereby one may reference it in order to support or malign those on the platform, to signal various identities and acts of identification, so on). The means by which it has become a discursive tool in addition to the website makes it so that the hyperreal version, a kind of Virtual idea of what it entails on top of the Digial interface, the second-order simulacra of what fantasies about the site insist it must be, makes for a far more interesting and impactful statement than actually going through and looking for any individual consensus on who uses the site how, just as Craigslist before it had no one common class character.

A commonality between the many lines of critique is some belief that quarantine may not be permanent, for one reason or another, and it is this vital difference which drives the differance between the notion of staying quarantined and reentry into “business” as usual. What the more Democratic solution seems to understand is that, even at home, the psychopolitical necessity of consumption has taken a toll to the point where brands can advertise that they will indeed, merely continue selling their products and consumers will support them. Companies will offer a charitable side dish to their main meal of a product, and it will be eagerly consumed. These new forms of consumption are a kind of test for ideologically-pitched battles over exactly what kinds of risks are entailed in preserving the socius. Spontaneous gatherings are too prone to turn into riots, to insurrectionary forms, to develop into battles within a People’s War: it is better to create a notion of prison that relies on a complete separation from any meaningful experience of prison, a specifically white consciousness of imprisonment separate from its presence in living with antiblackness that transposes itself onto the form of quarantine. Similarly, the means through which the school, the hospital, the asylum are all located within the home, are reliant on the psychopolitical acquiescence of an audience, and moreover a lack of questioning of exactly how effective this hastily-compiled pedagogy can be (thus preventing sponaneously radical pedagogical efforts) or how effective telemedicine is as a practice (making it such that doctors can arbitrate their power more effectively, psychologists and psychiatrists can focus more on specific mannerisms to add to the next DSM once this less expensive and more profitable means of seeing patients becomes more dominant) makes it rather easy to make accessibility inaccessible, shows just how frustratingly arbitrary many barriers have been and how even more frustratingly present many are now when making themselves known along settler-colonial lines, in communities that are marked by antiblackness (and high COVID comorbidities) as well as in vulnerable communities like sex workers, people who use drugs, disabled people who need support groups or extra medical care (and providers of such care), the many immunocompromised and those who love them. The means by which this crisis has striated the socius so dramatically is not going to be forgotten soon, and undoing it except through a full-scale dismantling of capitalist structures of exchange and marketing is perhaps not even a goal worth discussing, let alone an attainable one.

[mentalisttraceur-software]

Okay, so, here's the resolution to the problem I got to in my last meandering ramble. To summarize where we left off at:

on the one hand, preemptive, implicit, unpredictable multitasking is awful for reasoning about code behavior any time there can be relevant side-effects, but

on the other hand, preemptive, implicit, unpredictable multitasking is fine and a significant benefit to writing code if no side-effects that could slip in matter.

Here's where I'm at now with this:

What we really need is a system which requires cooperative multitasking unless you have written code which is "pure" code. If something in the system running your code can prove or has been told that your code need not care about side-effects, then it is fine for the system to do preemptive multitasking anywhere in your logic. But, code rootwards in the call tree from your code must be able to control if preemptive multitasking happens in your code.

Because preemptive multitasking is an optimization, the dangerous kind which is liable to change behavior or introduce bugs unless properly constrained, and like most optimizations it cannot be done without some sort of dialog between the thing implementing the optimization and the people or code which is aware of the bigger picture of the specific use-case, situation, and relevant caveats.

The simplest version of this seems trivial to do.

What's left is to figure out how to best make it granular, because stop-the-world blocking of all preemptive multitasking is rarely necessary, and would probably cause problems if code regularly relied on it to prevent race conditions.

Okay, so, here's roughly the thought process, although by now I've re-ordered and re-written several chunks of this, because the original thought process was a meandering thinking-out-loud. And this still is that, but I've tried to make it at least a little coherent.

Clearly "not safe to preempt" has to be transitive, from the caller down. Even if some pure code by itself is fit to get preempted, and even if we had a system where that code actively indicated that it is compatible with preemptive multitasking or did some sort of yield-if-needed operation, if that pure code sits in a code path which cares about any side-effects that might happen when it is preempted or something else is scheduled concurrently, then it needs to be able to call into that pure code without that code being preemptible.

Caveat: for some code, timing and latency is a relevant side-effect. This is why mainstream preemptive multitasking operating systems are so terrible for trying to build real-time computing systems - you can't guarantee any upper time bounds if any number of other things can be preemptively scheduled in between all of your operations. So whatever method we use cannot even assume that code paths of entirely pure code without side-effects in the semantics of its language is safe to preempt.

Finally, part of why "coloring" functions with an `async` keyword is good is that when `async` is transitive rootwards on the call tree, we always know when something we call is forcing concurrency problems onto us. Of course, if you can perfectly contain the concurrency within your implementation then there might be a way to split your call stack into a call tree of coroutines which are concurrent with each other but isolated from all other concurrency, wait for all those to finish or get cancelled, and that's fine to not reveal to the caller. But if your use of concurrency can breach containment in any way, you shouldn't even have the ability to express your code in a way that hides that from your caller. So that is the wisdom of function "colors".

But if we have an explicit yield-if-needed operation, should it be colored async? If you're already convinced of how great `async` color which contaminates all callers recursively is, and if you've accepted the wisdom of structured concurrency that concurrency should not be allowed to breach containment or slip in under you without you knowing about it and consenting, you might be tempted to say that the answer is obviously yes. Every instance of yield-if-needed is an opportunity for side-effects, after all.

So here's the key realization: yield-if-needed isn't saying "I use concurrency here (you are using concurrency by calling me)", it's saying "I yield to concurrency (you can use concurrency while calling me)".

So they are actually really different things, that we need to handle differently. Code which uses concurrency in a way that breaches containment is non-optionally forcing you to use concurrency, and it needs to be seen and managed as a place where something else can be scheduled underneath you. But code which merely yields to concurrency without using it is just optionally concurrent.

And so we could have a system where we can tell the scheduler "hey, I'm going to execute some optionally concurrent code now, but concurrency in this case is not safe for my logic, so don't schedule anything else in the meantime (and I accept that the only choice this might leave you with is to give me a cancellation signal or just kill me if it takes too long in total)".

Also, if yield-if-needed is an async-colored operation, then libraries doing pure logic can't just call it without tainting themselves as impure, as async-colored, and compilers or other tooling might need to do smarter and more extensive code transforms to automatically put it in for you if you don't care and just want the computer to do it for you. Because async-coloring in many languages changes the implementation of a function to return something that at a minimum holds the state which must be saved between pausing the now-interruptible function and resuming it.

So if we decide that yield-if-needed is not an async-colored operation, then

only code that introduces concurrency is async-colored, rather than any code which is not harmed by yielding to concurrency, and

yield-if-needed becomes something that actually could be slapped literally between any two operations in pure non-async code.

So finally we get to the breakthrough: we upgrade the yield-if-needed operation to yield-if-needed-and-safe.

The scheduler brings the "needed". The caller brings the "safe".

Of course, the scheduler has final say, so if you try to disallow yielding for too long you get some sort of cancellation signal, and if you don't obey your process gets killed. In fact I think there doesn't even need to be an explicit cancellation signal in the simplest version of this: when code sees that the "do I need to yield?" value is no longer zero, it could consult another "is it safe to yield?" value. If that says no, it quickly bails out and goes back to the caller with a "scheduler said to yield before I could finish" error. Or maybe there is also a good argument in some cases for the code to yield in that situation, and then only upon being resumed go back to the caller with the "scheduler said to yield before I could finish" error. Either way, getting that error from something you called functions as the cancellation signal.

I really like this. I think this elegantly solves the problem:

if you have logic which really doesn't care about being preempted, you can just write code without thinking about it, and it's trivial for your tooling or the system to automatically inject preemptive multitasking,

if you are calling into pure logic you don't need to worry about whether or not it has an yield-if-needed operations, because they're yield-if-needed-and-safe operations, and your code gets to say whether or not it is safe,

yield-if-needed-and-safe no longer needs to be async-colored, because it can only introduce concurrency which the system has proven would be irrelevant if you followed its rules, or which you have told the system is irrelevant - it can no longer force concurrency onto your caller,

we can implement this in a backwards-compatible way which allows incremental migration: add the yield-if-needed-and-safe operation, and let code opt-into this mode where it can say "don't interrupt me until I say it is okay" but it will get killed if it doesn't yield for too long,

in fact we maybe no longer need the yield-if-needed-and-safe operation, because the system can do the same check that yield-if-needed-and-safe would do, and if it knows you don't want to be preempted, it can just not schedule the next preemption until the latest possible moment,

although the yield-if-needed-and-safe might still turn out to be useful, either as an optimization, or because there is a need for it which I'm not yet seeing.

And the cool thing here is that we could generalize this! We could have systems that let you take any arbitrary sequence of operations, and the entire sequence will either succeed without interruption or race conditions, or fail somewhere along the way because there wasn't enough time in the time slot you had from the scheduler. You still have to do the hard work of figuring out how to deal with any inconsistent state from partial completions, but you no longer have to worry about all the problems that can only happen if something else gets to operate on the same state at the same time.

We could even probably figure out how to do this across processes. So even shell scripts could say "hey please don't schedule something between these commands that I'm about to run". And if the shell script or its child processes take too long, the whole process tree starting from that shell script gets whacked. And it seems like it would be fairly trivial to pass information between the operating system's scheduler and any event loop scheduler or lightweight thread scheduler in user-space, so most software developers would only need to make the request once in whatever language or framework they're using, and it could apply across all the relevant nested schedulers that are in play.

The other way this generalizes is that it would be nice and probably necessary to have the capability for branches of the call tree to isolate their concurrency from all other concurrency. To let code say "I am using concurrency as part of my implementation, and I am fine with yielding to other coroutines which I spawned as part of my logic, but I need to be safe against races with other logic".

(Incidentally, the most mature and thought-out structured concurrency implementation I know of (the Python library Trio) lets you shield a branch of the call tree from cancellation by code rootwards on the call tree. And what I'm describing here is shielding a branch of the call tree from concurrency with code which is rootwards on the call tree. I imagine Trio has cancellation shielding and not concurrency shielding because in most async code, you want other stuff scheduled while you wait on I/O, and you can get away with putting off handling cancellation until you're done with something that needs to finish to keep things consistent. Meanwhile, I'm currently more focused in robustness against race conditions and how to get the benefits of cooperative multitasking while still being robust against code which fails to yield for too long, all while making guarantees about completing within some upper bound of time - so desirability of concurrency is no longer taken for granted, and cancellation is more starkly revealed to be something that needs to be a non-optional final warning. Notably though, to the extent that cancellation shielding can be permitted, it seems a lot like a special case of concurrency shielding.)

So this is all cool, but so far this solution is fairly all-or-nothing. The simplest implementation I described is absolute - there is a "need to yield" boolean (which we might consider turning into a "yield deadline" monotonic clock value) and a "safe to yield" boolean. Of course, we can implement more granular concurrency scopes/shielding on top of that mechanism. The trouble is actually coming up with how to make it more granular than "yes I'm fine with stuff preempting me" or "no I'm not fine with stuff preempting me". What we really want is a way to specify which stuff we are fine being preempted by.

And maybe the answer is almost just locks - mutexes, or read-write locks, the usual. In a sense, locks are how you say "please do not schedule anything else which uses this specific thing at the same time". Of course this was very hard for me to see because a lot of systems do not have locks for most things or actions which you might want to avoid concurrency for, and what locks they do have are often advisory. But if

everything which touched or did a thing in a way where races might matter was required to get a lock for precisely that thing, and

all locks were automatically released if the holder did not release them on their own soon enough,

then holding locks basically functions as precise specification to the system and its scheduler of exactly what you care about not having scheduled during your code.

But... I can see other avenues besides locks which I'd like to really deeply think through here.

[signalprioritypreemption]

How Transit Signal Priority is useful for Medium and Small Cities?

The urban sector prioritizes Transit Signal Priority (TSP) as there is more moderate to high demand for transit service, and bus headways are less than 15 minutes. The urban sector system is executed to expedite buses' movement with high occupancy, thus supporting any negative consequences on other traffic and lowering the overall person-delay at intersections.

The experts have laid research to assess the impacts of transit priority deployments in the smaller cities. They evaluated the anticipated impacts and also field tests. Bus travel time is the most generally used means to evaluate the impact of transit priority.

Transit agencies in small-medium-sized cities have fewer users and work at less frequency (i.e., headway more significant than 30 minutes). During peak periods, traffic congestion causes missed intersections at crossings and can increase the transit commuter's time even for around one hour. Therefore, we use TSP in small-medium size areas to alleviate missed connections, enhance service, and attract more transit riders.

TSP can advance traffic conditions in the area where it is implemented for both transit and non-transit vehicles. The authorities plan and use such signal priority strategies and treatments safely and efficiently and conduct proper analyses using fundamental traffic engineering and transit management and operating principles.

Progression in traffic signal technologies and other factors have created a great deal of interest in providing particular traffic signal strategies and treatments for transit minibusses and other vehicles at signalized intersections in different cities.

The structure for implementing TSP strategies in this methodology may be explained as follows:

· Minimize obstructions during traffic signal coordination,

· Follow the minimum green and pedestrian timing requirements for all signal phases,

· Provide the most benefit to the transit vehicle,

· Use one detection zone and a timer or clearance interval for the transit vehicle, and

· Grant priority to the transit vehicle on a priority basis.

Summary and Recommendations:

With the improvement in traffic signal technology and other related factors, there has been an increase in the interest in TSP in small and medium-sized cities. Of course, we need to evaluate the impacts, benefits, and limitations of TSP strategies and apply the system effectively. It is always recommended to use signal priority strategies for transit minibusses in harmony with other preferential signal treatments such as traffic signal preemption strategies. With both TSP and preemption strategies in place for different vehicles, the people can expect better preserving of safety, facilitation of emergency response, enhancement of traffic flow, and improved overall mobility.

Get in Touch:

location: Manufactured By STC, Inc. 1201 W. Randolph St, McLeansboro, IL 62859

phone: Richard D’Alessandro: (214) 607-0100

Fax: (214) 607-0105

Email: info@emtracsystems.com

Web: https://www.emtracsystems.com/

[kapitaali]

American opposition to cell tower installation started long before 5G due to concerns about reduced property value, public safety risks, as well as health and environmental effects from radiation emissions.  For many years now American firefighter unions have also opposed the use of their stations for cell tower and antenna installation due to exposure risks.

American Academy of Pediatrics and other health experts have repeatedly warned that children are more vulnerable to adverse health effects from exposure.

Of course, where there has been opposition – there has been more of an effort to strategically camouflage telecommunications infrastructure.  This has only increased due to the controversial “Race to 5G” (see 1, 2).

Environmental Health Trust has recommended several documentaries and films about risks associated with cell towers and other sources of wireless radiation.  Recently, one produced in 2003 became available to watch for free online.

Bad Reception:  The Wireless Revolution in San Francisco

The Telecommunications Act of 1996, passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, preempted local governments in the U.S. from considering the environmental effects of wireless facilities if they met F.C.C. exposure guidelines.  These guidelines were designed to be protective solely of thermal (i.e., heating) effects of radiofrequency radiation, not all potential biological and health effects.

Armed with this federal preemption, the wireless industry in the late 1990s-early 2000s began the rollout of so-called 3G (i.e., digital voice and data) cellular phone technology and the infrastructure to run it.  Across the country, local communities were faced with the sudden appearance of cellular phone towers and antennas mounted to buildings and other structures, oftentimes in close proximity to where people lived, worked and played.

Bad Reception: The Wireless Revolution in San Francisco, which premiered in January 2003 at local venues in San Francisco, California and was subsequently broadcast nationwide on Free Speech TV, focuses on San Francisco as a case study of one of many of these communities where concerns were raised about the potential health and environmental consequences of this revolution in wireless communications.  Bad Reception tells the compelling story of residents from backgrounds as diverse as the city itself as they take on one of the most powerful corporate entities in the world.

Produced and Directed by Doug Loranger.  Co-Produced by Gordon Winiemko.  USA.  Running time:  55:23 minutes

[onancientpaths]

"In just a little while, his life will be snatched away, and what is [the rich person] thinking? 'I will pull down my barns and build larger ones.' Well done, I would say for my part. The treasuries of injustice well deserve to be torn down. With your own hands, raze these misbegotten structures. Destroy the granaries from which no one has ever gone away satisfied. Demolish every storehouse of greed, pull down the roofs, tear away the walls, expose the moldering grain to the sunlight, lead forth from prison the fettered wealth, vanquish the gloomy vaults of Mammon.

...

'But whom do I treat unjustly,' you say, 'by keeping what is my own?' Tell me, what is your own? What did you bring into this life? From where did you receive it? It is as if someone where to take the first seat in the theater, then bar everyone else from attending, so that one person alone enjoys what is offered for the benefit of all in common - this is what the rich do. They seize common goods before others have the opportunity, then claim them as their own by right of preemption." - St Basil the Great, celebrated today

[queernuck]

The Desiring of Desire

The fundamental problem with radical theorists who reject the potential of postmodernity as a site of radical inquiry, who reject trans women as subjects due to biological essentialism, is the incongruity with which their rejection resonates given the larger acceptance of certain postmodern precepts into their discourses on gendered bodies, the demarcation of sex as a flow of knowledges violently imposed upon the body, the sexuality of colonialism and the sexual politics of decolonization, and how these relate to the profoundly complex structures of desire that encompass specific becomings vital to radical feminist thought (becoming-lesbian perhaps the most central) leads one to a conclusion that radical feminism undoes itself in the same fashion as numerous other political and philosophical standpoints: attempting to disallow an infinite return, a new structure of signification out-of-or-beside itself of-itself, the kind of ironic mirroring necessary to contend with structures of late capitalist meaning-making. Desire and the structuring thereof, the process whereby one enters into becoming-desirable, that through which one’s desirability is marked and understood, is not simply held in the violent, patriarchal standards that radical feminists rightfully condemn. Desire is not only shaped by the pornographic, but by the antipornographic, by condemning porn as an aberration, unnatural, unhealthy. The inability of fetish to stand as genuine desire, rather than as always-already morally degenerate, involves a kind of uncritical gaze upon sexuality which upholds this concept of degeneracy in desire that is not terribly helpful beyond its most basic invocations, and even then only becomes of use due to its opening of wider demarcations of the fetish, the fetishized, the fetish-object, and the sexual interplay of these determinations. Lesbians being understood as sexual, as sexual in ways that are unacceptable, as desiring and loving and indeed fucking is important because it vitally affirms so much of what critiques drawn from radical feminist thought seek.

Perhaps a good beginning is to write of becoming-lesbian, then. While I have witnessed numerous moments that can be described as becoming-lesbian, have been party to lesbian identity and activity, performatively found myself in a certain linkage of affinity with various lesbians, I have never become a lesbian, and I doubt I ever quite will, although the affinity with which I view lesbian histories and communities gives a certain aspirational element to the notion. Perhaps a change of registration to political lesbian would be in order, if I felt it to be a necessary step for my own development of becoming-woman. Immediately, this points me out as fetishizing lesbians by some accounts, despite claiming this  only a passing aspect of a larger gay (and indeed in the theoretical sense of the word, queer) affinity, an influence and commonality with lesbian communities that specifically relies on a difference of identity found in my own bisexual trans womanhood and the respective genealogies of these identities. The simple answer as to why I would simply admire lesbian identity is that lesbians have stood as part of my community for so long, have been its most prominent activists on assemblages of gender, race, and sexuality with class and class consciousness for as long as such critiques have been offered, and are among the most astute observers of the means by which these structural critiques have given way to a kind of unknowing post-structuralist Oedipal cycle, whereby the critique forms a kind of lesbian oroboros consuming and violently reacting toward itself, a kind of snake eating and regurgitating itself violently all at once, choking on its own tail. 

Lesbianism as a specific sort of singularity, as a particular becoming, as a process, is often simply seen as another sort of coming out. However, to examine it critically, it involves certain molecular structures that vary wildly when realized alongside one another, specifically homosexuality and womanhood, ones that take on certain structures for trans women. The presence of homophobia is undoubtable as it is part of reflecting the larger structure of homosexuality and a phallogocentric ontology of sexual conduct that lesbianism emerges. While one can trace back homosexuality with relative ease, lesbian history, herstory, is far harder to come by due to the ways in which, absent any phallus one can occasionally construct a vision of a lesbian phallus but largely is left with roommates and lifelong friends. As a result, lesbianism is absent specifically because there is not a phallus to be inserted into the record. The invention of the lesbian phallus, a sort of specific structure that approximates the role of the phallus in heterosexual desire and its apparent absence, the specific Lacanian lack of a phallus results in the kinds of approximations necessary for discussing lesbian relationships in relief of a heterosexual history. These attempts are further complicated by the emergent properties of transmisogynist thought as a specific convergence of the two, homophobia and misogyny, resulting in a kind of schizophrenic affinity denied by many supposed-radical critiques, best understood as a specific flow of both homophobic and misogynist fantasies, a kind of pooling of these violent libidinal flows into a singular sort of violence from which many drink freely, from which many willingly quench their thirst for some sort of understanding as to the incoherence of womanhood in a world marked by hyperexploitation and the hyperreal limits of Virtual contact, Virtual affinities. The two converge specifically due to the means by which they reinforce and flow through one another, across a rhizomal structure of signification: homosexuality is signified by a kind of femininity, even in its most masculine realizations, due to the phallogocentrism of heteronormative concepts of gay sexuality. Similarly, transmisogyny draws upon the homophobic specifically because, as a trans woman’s body is observed, she most readily is expressed as a certain sort of woman, one who satisfies a certain fetishized location within womanhood but can only be approached after a kind of violent refusal of the homosexual, the knowing nod that comes with a structure like medical marijuana. One may participate, and is in fact expected to, in a certain fashion that at once denies the truth of its intentionality and makes this denial explicit through violent acts of language, even violent sexual acts or acts of assault.

The fundamental influence of misogyny upon colonialism, upon the resultant Deleuzean structure of future and past under capitalist eternity, how signifiers of colonial power resonate with the same frequency as previous structures of encounter, is part of what makes radical feminism a worthwhile point of critical inquiry. The fundamental nature of misogyny as a structure in radical feminism, a sort of post-marxist development that posits not class struggle but a struggle against misogyny as the central force of historical development, leads to a certain sort of critique which itself can be serviced toward enhancing one’s understanding of class, as part of critiquing the means by which a fundamental determination of class structure lies outside the bounds of class in-itself, for-itself, as arbitrated by structures like gender. However, specific understandings of radical feminism, specifically trans-exclusionary ones, exclude trans women as fetishistic in themselves, as sublimating male desire into their womanhood. For TERFs, there is a fundamental, and perhaps intentional, misunderstanding of the structure of "desire" within the possible critique offered by discussing and forming a vaguely coherent politics of desirability specifically because it is based in a kind of ignorance regarding the subject of desire and the desiring-of-the-subject: there is a rabattement vital to desirability, that is, a desire-of-desire, a desire-to-be-desired. This results in a certain sort of account of the trans body which reclaims trans men as representing certain sorts of women (a kind of post-butch lesbian identity) while situating trans women as men with the same violent capacity but none of the projection of power, none of the same ability to manifest or direct flows of desire in the fashion a man may. Rightfully, a critique on or of desire, of acts associated with expressing desire, will eventually name these acts as largely sexual in a fashion that is roughly Oedipal; the approximation of certain structures of Oedipal affinity (taboos on incest, the killing of the father, the claiming of the mother) and how they relate to homosexuality (across boundaries of class, race, nation) in shorthand discourses of desire makes clear that the desire at hand in desirability politics is not desire as a certain flow that is fundamental to understanding any action, any intention, but rather an Oedipal flow and moreover a violent, Oedipalizing one, the kind of focusing of the subject that structures the pornographic gaze, that structures the sort of gaze that trans women most readily find themselves in. The commonality of this with lesbian experience, gay experience, the sort of pornographic becomings of first identities, the way in which it is out of a sort of sexual curiosity rather than a more innocent, apparently-genuine encounter that identity is first discovered (and thus sublimated into violent structures of encounter due to the violent aesthetics most common in pornogrpahy due to the hyperviolent environments of pornographic stimulation and repetition) that all of these find themselves, but it is perhaps in trans women that this process is most emphasized. Trans women are fetishized and overrepresented through fetish such that the only desire trans women may know is specifically that, as a sort of fetish, as part of a kind of ideation whereby they are not only primarily realized in the pornogrpahic, but entirley through it. Indeed, trans women want to be desired. Perhaps by men, but often by women, by other trans women, the kind of desire that resonates on a phenomenological level as recognition, rather than as an Other, an ontological possibility or an object of fetishized desire. Trans women want to be desired in a sense that is most directly related to other marginalized identities within communities of affinity: gay men and lesbians give us the vocabularies we describe ourselves with because we are, in some sense, embodying a certain Oedipal preemption of the homosexual prohibition. A man may engage with a trans woman as part of this, may desire a kind of homosexuality to the encounter as demonstrated by the phallogocentric tendencies of the transgender fantasy woman, the way in which a fantasized-about trans woman retains a certain sort of phallus. This phallus is vastly different from that possessed by many trans women, the trans lesbian phallus found in intercourse between trans women, the resignification of the phallus in the trans woman unchanged by the flows of hormone replacement therapy. Wishing for desirability is not privileging or celebrating these abuses, it is rather a statement on the profound abuses necessary to maintain flows of acceptable desire. Lesbians want desire, gay men want desire, this desire-of-desire is a kind of restructuring of vocabulary that recognizes certain sorts of violence for that which they are, that presents violent fetishization, Oedipal trauma repeated in the pedophilic, incestual, racialized, class-based, neurotic vocabularies that are implemented upon so many flows of desire, that form the basics of biopower, that form the ways in which subjects are acquainted with that which they may become, the molecularity of becoming as a series of processes. Coloniality and its contingent structures, the means by which coloniality manifests class and class develops out of it, capitalism as a development of feudalism that is not an ontic necessity but a kind of teleological development, a telos of capitalism due to the conflict of class, gender, race, the intertextual, schizophrenic, all-at-hand structure of history (or anti-history) itself shows the presence of transness as a sort of identity, as a structure of acquaintance with the body, and most importantly as a contemporary difference, a contemporary measure between sex and gender that develops out of violence and through violence, not as a reinforcement of it.

To blame trans women for a supposed structure of desire and pornographic acquaintance with a fetishized woman’s body, when trans women are themselves fetish-objects in so many senses, is either fundamentally reactionary or fundamentally dishonest.