lousyd

In bash, if you put:

ls /Users/*/.ssh/id_rsa 2>&1 > rsa-keys.log

...you're redirecting stderr to the stdout's destination while stdout is still sending output to the screen. So any permission errors encountered will go to the screen, not to rsa-keys.log.

From the bash manpage:

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Note that the order of redirections is significant. For example, the command

   ls > dirlist 2>&1

directs both standard output and standard error to the file dirlist, while the command

   ls 2>&1 > dirlist

directs only the standard output to file dirlist, because the standard error was duplicated from the standard output before the standard output was redirected to dirlist.

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Commands given to the shell are evaluated and processed in a specific order and fashion, and this is one quirk of that that many people are unaware of.

Druze people are an ethnic religion, like Judaism. The Druze faith is Abrahamic and monotheistic, dating back about 1000 years. It was initially an offshoot of an offshoot of Islam, but its members are not Muslims. They believe in many prophets, and in reincarnation leading to being united with the Cosmic Mind. They have influences from Christianity. You can't convert, you can only be born into it. There's about a million Druze people in the Middle East, including in Israel. They apparently do well in Israeli society. They are educated. They serve in the military.

Druze in Syria are not doing well, though. They are under attack right now, where things are just generally kind of shit. The Syrian government is trying to hold things together, but Syrian government forces are killing people and attacking religious minorities, including the Druze. The Druze, for their part, refuse to give up their weapons and want to maintain territory for themselves.

tw: politics

Today I learned that, since April, the Supreme Court of the United States has sided with Trump in all 15 rulings it has issued on the President’s emergency requests. Of those 15 rulings, the court has only written 3 majority opinions. 7 have come with no explanation at all.

I don't have to convince anyone here of what's going on in America, obvs. I just wanted to share because this fact surprised me. I didn't realize that they weren't even justifying their decisions, which normally they do.

The Algoma Buffalo, a 635 foot long lake freighter, about to pass under the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, Minnesota. People gather at the water's edge almost every time a freighter comes in, and clap and wave. These ships have typically been sailing for several days by the time they hit Duluth.

The Algoma Buffalo, a 635 foot long lake freighter, about to pass under the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, Minnesota. People gather at the water's edge almost every time a freighter comes in, and clap and wave. These ships have typically been sailing for several days by the time they hit Duluth.

Found here.

"The area, which has about 5,000 residents and a growing waiting list, is completely self-sufficient. Residents can build houses however they like, and must collaborate with others to figure out things such as street names, waste management, roads, and even schools. But the local government has included one extremely unusual requirement: about half of each plot must be devoted to urban agriculture."

But also: The price of eggs! Oh my!

At the end of WW2 most of the world's major economies were in shambles, with a lot of international debt outstanding. Political leaders wanted to do something to handle that in order to head off what had happened after WW1, when international debts were defaulted on and countries started manipulating their markets to gain advantages over each other. The economic mess after WW1 had contributed to the making of WW2; being able to avoid any kind of a repeat was a priority.

So in 1944 economists and policymakers from 44 different nations, including every Allied nation, got together in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to work out some kind of agreement about how the world economy would work after the war ended.

The agreement they came to was that all the nations would establish fixed exchange rates with each other, and all nations had to agree to maintain convertibility of their currency to U.S. dollars. U.S. dollars, in turn, would always be convertible to gold at a certain rate. The agreement also established the International Monetary Fund and (what became) the World Bank to maintain this system and to provide a means of cooperation between the countries.

The representative from the U.K. (Keynes) wanted the system to be based on a made-up currency, but the U.S. threw its weight around and made it the dollar.

The system worked because of the economic dominance of the United States. You could count on the dollar. But it also meant that the United States had to be putting money out into the world, so that other nations had dollars with which to trade. The United States had to maintain a "balance of payments" deficit with the world. One way to do that would be to buy a lot of stuff from other countries and thus make dollars flow out, but we didn't want to do that because we had a strong economy; we produced stuff here and didn't need to buy it elsewhere. So the U.S. decided to just start donating money to other nations. Here you go Europe: a blank check to help you rebuild from the war. Here you go Asia: money to help feed your poor. And so on. We were fine with that because that money bought influence. The U.S. gained some say over how other nations did things.

This all started to break down when our position drew us into Vietnam. We were financially supporting South Vietnam when the North Vietnamese started fighting it, and so we got involved. First under JFK, then LBJ, then Nixon. We ended up spending over $130 billion in Vietnam ($1 trillion in today's money). Add to that LBJ's Great Society, which increased domestic spending. This all added to America's debt, which began to impact the strength of the dollar and our ability to give money away to the rest of the world.

Here we are, printing money... but remember that we've agreed that dollars would always be convertible to gold at a certain fixed rate. The amount of dollars in existence was going up but the amount of gold was not. Or not as fast, anyway, and so it became harder and harder to keep that gold promise. France, having always been skeptical of America's dominance of the system, literally sent a warship to New York to retrieve its gold in August of 1971. They got it, but they were the last to do so. Nixon realized that the end was nigh for Bretton Woods and declared an end to the gold standard a few days later.

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When Nixon ended the gold standard in 1971 the dollar quickly devalued and it started a period of high inflation. OPEC embargoed the US starting in late 1973, in retaliation for American support of Israel. The embargo and reduced output from OPEC caused recessions in other parts of the world, leading to tension between the US and some of its allies, who faulted the US for provoking the embargo.

Enter: the "petrodollar".

Once the embargo ended the United States and Saudi Arabia, OPEC's biggest member, worked out a deal. The deal was that OPEC would export oil only in dollars, keeping our buck on top post-Bretton Woods, and in return the United States would provide weapons and military assistance to the Saudis.

It kept us on top. You have to have dollars if you want to buy oil, to this day, and you have to get dollars from the US, ultimately. In 2000 Saddam Hussein decided to start selling Iraqi oil in euros. By 2003 5% of the world's oil was produced by Iraq and was being sold in euros. Which... was right about the time a WMD mirage appeared somewhere in the Iraqi desert and the United States started shooting bullets its way. Maybe there was a connection.

The petrodollar is still the system today, though America's influence in the world seems to be changing, maybe even waning.

I'd like to become a tree.