Rubenerd

TreeHugger has published a haunting image series from 1940s Pittsburgh, in the US state of Pennsylvania. They're well worth a view, even if they're presented as a slideshow. Slide six included this intresting observation:

"The idea of increased costs for a necessity like heat during Pittsburgh's cold winters was surprisingly well-received. People were willing to pay for clean air, and the improved efficiency of clean-burning furnaces actually made the net cost of heat about the same as before."

This is very much like today. If really given the choice, people will pay for a healthier environment, and in the end, they'll often find that if you take into account externalities, costs are actually lower.

The problem, especially for libertarians and some conservatives, is recognising these externalities.

Australia went through this recenty with Tony Abbott repealing our carbon price. When it was in effect, pollution levels dropped sharply (despite the embarrassingly wrong predictions of the Murdoch press). Without having to factor the cost of their carbon dioxide output, pollution levels have unsurprisingly increased.

As former PM Paul Keating put it:

Look, only prices and markets shift these big things.

I mean, this is - the price allocates capital in the market. Only a price on carbon will start allocating capital to the right places, where we should be investing in the new Australian economy.

The same applies to individuals.

So I attached a crane to your crane so you can lift while you lift. Via @AlanJLee.

The lovely, imitable Shaun King of the Your Mac Life podcast needs our help. He has "advanced periodontal disease", and is looking at five figures for surgery.

Money is tight for me right now too, but I threw in $5. Please help if you can.

This tweet from @EXERClSES went mildly viral (is that a thing?) recently. Like all good tweets in 2015, it consisted of a link to an image containing text. For your convenience, I have transcribed them below:

1. Think Less, Feel More
2. Frown Less, Smile More
3. Talk Less, Listen more [sic]
4. Judge Less, Accept More
5. Watch Less, Do More
6. Complain Less, Appreciate More
7. Fear Less, Love More

At the risk of violating my own happiness with points 1 and 6, I'd be remiss not commenting.

Despite my progressive hippiness, I never bought the idea that thought and feelings are tanjential. I'd argue the ultimate path to empathy is thought.

Watch less, do more also seems dangerous. Certainly actions speak louder than words, and your envy would be more productivly chanelled into self–improvement. As Sun Tsu said though, "know thy enemy". Observation is a critical skill (as point 3 notes).

As for fear less, love more; I think trust would be a better antonym. Which brings me to my ultimate point: never trust anyone who tells you to stop thinking.

I really need to abstain from late night posts.

Every website and their dog are now using Outbrain, Taboola and such to link to other articles. Their slick marketing material have you believe they're providing valuable resources (34 celebs you won't believe!), but we all know they don't.

NoScript blocks their JavaScript from loading, so problem solved. If you're not a whitelisting pedant like me, you can also use the Fanboy Annoyance list in your ad–blocker of choice. Even if you don't like ad–blockers on principle, you could just use them for this blocking task.

Unfortunately, in the discusson about why we dislike these servies, the reason for their existance was lost. Namely, that online publishers are struggling to get income. Until this is resolved, we can only expect (regrettably) self-defeating junk like this to get worse.

A recurring, and worrying, theme in Australian newspapers has been the pricing out of people from the "Australian Dream". For the first time, young Australians face living standards that were lower than their parents.

We have it amazingly good here, but we sure pay for it. By some estimates, Australia is now the most expensive country in the world to live in. Sydney also leads the country in housing undersupply.

I left a comment on the latest article on the subject on the Sydney Morning Herald:

Rent is also putting pressure on living standards. I pay most of my income in rent, as do most people I know in their 20s. With that gone each month, exorbitant public transport costs, and a decent chunk into savings and super (we try to be fiscally responsible), there's scant extra to spend on other things. To say nothing of HECS, food prices, etc.

Without getting political, what we need is 1) serious public transport investment 2) broadband infrastructure that would allow people to work remotely rather than in CBDs 3) a greater housing supply for more rentals, and/or affordable buying so we're paying our own mortgage instead. Maybe a few nets to catch pigs flying too, while we're at it.

I'm Australian but grew up in Singapore, which until recently I thought had a ridiculous property market. An apartment there now looks like its within closer reach. Aiyo!

Point 2) was entirely the fault of our current conservative government, but as far as I'm concerned our centre-left Labor party have lacked the courage to tackle this as well.

Someone linked to an article about the #SydneyStorm on Twitter, which turned out to be from The Australian. For your delight, have these other articles linked to from the front page, with my comments in brackets.

Rains embarrass doomsdayers
Chris Kenny – As city dams fill climate doomsdayers should be reminded of their predictions [of extreme weather?] and held to account.

Baird should abolish the ICAC
Simon Breheny ICAC [Independent Commission Against Corruption] is adept at taking down [our side's] politicians over a bottle of wine, but incompetent at uncovering cases of serious corruption.

Oh Murdoch press, you so precious.

Frank Nora had an all-too prescient point on the latest episode of The Overnightscape:

It's called The Void. Of course, you have guns and you're shooting things.

I don't know, maybe I'm out of touch with the world, but I'm tired of all the violence in all these [rides, video games]. Why can't we have an attraction without anyone getting shot, or stabbed? Holy fuck, enough of this stuff. It's ridiculous.

Do people love it that much that we need to have it in everything?

All the good games. Even this VR stuff... oh, you have a gun, you're a warrior. Okay, okay. Why can't we just be nice?

Ditto for movies as well. My late mum made the point that hospital dramas are for those without medical issues in their lives. Maybe violent movies and games are for those who aren't in violent places. Another point she made was how perverse it was that we consider natural naked bodies as offensive, but if people are wounded in unnatural ways, that's fine. It's disgusting.

In the process of clearing our junk for another house move, I've consolidated most of my ancient PC hardware into my first computer. I built this Pentium MMX tower during primary school in 1998, and delightfully it still works.

In a bout of nostalgia, it seemed fitting to retrofit this machine with the same OSs it originally ran. In the process, I discovered a feature of Windows 95 I never knew existed, which allowed both DOS/Windows 3.1 and 95 to share the same DOS partition.

Background

Dual booting DOS is complicated. MS-DOS (and PC DOS) require installation in a drive's first primary partition. If you're dual booting DOS and a flavour of Windows NT, this isn't an issue. With Windows 95 however, its DOS underpinnings require it. Manually installing DOS and setting active partitions is possible, but its messy and buggy with certain old applications.

Initially, I figured I'd install Windows 95 first, boot into MS-DOS mode and install Windows 3.1. Unfortunately, 3.1 complained it couldn't verify the DOS version, and SETVER didn't work. Short of patching DOS with a third party tool, that was a dead end.

The solution was to install DOS and Windows 3.1 first, then "upgrade" to 95. This presented a new problem though; AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS loaded drivers optimised for DOS and 3.1 are either redundant or cause problems for 95.

One could write a CHOICE.COM menu in AUTOEXEC.BAT, which would only load 16bit DOS drivers if you chose DOS/Windows 3.1, but turns out the retail edition of Windows 95 Upgrade has a menu like that already.

Steps

Broadly speaking, these are the steps:

1. FDISK the target drive with a primary DOS partition, without large drive support. Set the partition active, reboot, format C: as per normal.

2. Install DOS to C: using a custom directory, such as C:\DOS6. I'm fairly sure Windows 95 will overwrite what's in here otherwise.

3. Install Windows 3.1 in a custom directory, such as C:\WIN31.

4. From Windows 3.1, start the Windows 95 Upgrade installer. Set a custom target directory, such as C:\WIN95. Don't attempt this with an OEM or full release, or it will complain an OS already exists. This is what we want!

5. Reboot into Windows 95, and unset read-only on msdos.sys, either from Windows Explorer, or an MS-DOS Prompt:

C:\> attrib +r +s +h msdos.sys

6. Open the file, and change/add the following lines:

BootDelay=2
BootGUI=0
Logo=0
BootMenu=1
BootMenuDefault=1
BootMenuDelay=30

7. Reboot, and you'll see the following boot menu. Choose “Normal” for Windows 95, or “Previous version of MS-DOS” to boot into DOS and launch Windows 3.1.

Microsoft Windows 9x Startup Menu
=================================
   1. Normal
   2. Logger (/BOOTLOG.TXT)
   3. Safe mode
   4. Step-by-step confirmation
   5. Command prompt only
   6. Safe mode command prompt only
   7. Previous version of MS-DOS

How it works

It's actually pretty clever. Windows 95 Upgrade maintains two sets of boot files:

System	AUTOEXEC.BAT	CONFIG.SYS
DOS	AUTOEXEC.DOS	CONFIG.DOS
Windows 95	AUTOEXEC.A40	CONFIG.A40

When you choose your target system, boot files specific to it are renamed with their origianl extensions. For example, booting Windows 95 renames AUTOEXEC.A40 to AUTOEXEC.BAT.

Thus, both DOS and Windows 95 maintain their own boot options, and you can configure both sets regardless of which you've booted from. Very neat.

In the context of a wider US marine deployment to Darwin, Ruby Jones and Xavier La Canna from ABC News reported this interesting observation I hadn't thought of:

Under the deal struck between former prime minister Julia Gillard and US president Barack Obama, the number of US Marines rotating through Darwin each year will gradually increase to become 2,500 troops by 2017.

Mr O'Connor said while Australians may be in favour of the deal while Mr Obama is the US president, the agreement is a long-term deal and it may lose public support in Australia if a Republican president wins office.

For people outside Australia, Darwin is our most northern city. Within a hour or so flight, you're in Asia.