Tootfinder

Logistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.

#Dentist -related question, if given the choice with "amalgam" fillings or "white" fillings which one is better? 🦷
I would ask a dentist but since they get more money for using the white filling they don't seem completely unbiased..

"Ideally, that's what you've got in an acting career is an equal number of dramas and comedies and an equal number of small films and big films."
—Jason Bateman
#acting #coaching #inspiration

Primer to get you started with Optimization and Mathematical Programming in R #rstats

CRAN Task View: Optimization and Mathematical Programming
This CRAN Task View contains a list of packages that offer facilities for solving optimization problems. Although every regression model in statistics solves an optimization problem, they are not part of this view. If you are looking for regression methods, the following views will also contain useful starting points: MachineLearning, Econometrics, Robust Packages are categorized according to the following sections. See also the “Related Links” and “Other Resources” sections at the end.

"… I gradually switched from OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks to PC-BSD. Then TrueOS, then FreeBSD-CURRENT. In the midst of all that, something with FreeBSD in September 2012 … probably toying with 9.0 on a PowerPC iMac with failing graphics hardware. Not because I was a glutton for punishment (like, the horror of a command-line loader, and the certainty that hardware was failing) – because there was nothing good to be done with the Mac, and I was curious about non-Apple alternatives to Microsoft…

1.5 weeks into a 3 week holiday* and I can feel now just how much I needed it.
And how little I want to go back to work in August.
Let's hope the second half of the holiday fixes that.
#AcademicChatter
*yes I know, I am incredibly fortunate to get to take 3 weeks of summer holiday off, but the feeling of utter burnout is also real.

“We are a nation of laws.
You can't just make up things whole piece,”
said Senator Bill Cassidy,
following his primary loss.
“People are concerned about making ends meet, not about putting a slush fund together without a legal precedent.”
It’s not clear yet what approach Cassidy will take in his final months in office,
but he’s got plenty of opportunities to make his voice heard,
including on the effort to limit U.S. hostilities against Iran wi…

Bill Cassidy Is Done Holding Back What He Thinks
The Louisiana Republican is already speaking out against the president's “weaponization” fund and money for a White House ballroom.

I did a test in Romania, #meshtastic vs #meshcore and here is the quick summary:
Over 250 Meshtastic nodes found, compared to 70 Meshcore nodes.
BUT
Meshtastic was basically dead, no one talked, or answered anything. I only got one message with the following - "test&…

good grief i thought bournegol was bad but there are still new depths to plumb
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh/mode.h

Giants' Cam Skattebo won't alter approach after injury: I'm going to get back to 'running people over' https://www.nfl.com/news/giants-cam-skattebo-won-t-alter-approach-after-injury-i-m-going-to-get-bac…