Meals on Wheels

Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up this morning entitled “Republicans, As They Always Do, Want to Cut Meals on Wheels”.

I drove for Meals on Wheels1 very briefly back in ’92 or ’93.  It was their shortest route—maybe ten or twelve stops give or take.  I was filling in for somebody who was taking a vacation; and it was just one day a week for four weeks2.

From my miniscule experience, I can tell you that Meals on Wheels drivers work hard at it; and they might be the only people that the folks they serve see on any given day3.

Cutting funding for Meals on Wheels is about as disgusting as it gets.

1I heard about it through the First Unitarian Church in St. Louis which I was a member of at the time.

2I had arranged with my boss to take a long lunch break on the four days.

3That would be OK with me, but I’m a fairly extreme introvert.  I can’t even imagine how important that small bit of human interaction is for some of the old folks on the route.

Don’t Lose Hope, …

… otherwise the oligarchs win.

Lots of folks these days are giving up on the U.S. because of our current politics.  They see Trump and his minions attacking universities and the press, kidnapping and disappearing legal residents … you know the list; but they see these things as separate issues.  It seems to me that we have exactly one problem that takes a variety of forms:  the oligarcy trying, and so far succeeding, to divide us and to make us feel hopeless and just give up.

Don’t give up.  Stay aware of the crap that’s going on.  Get angry.  Even if you’re an old fart like me who can’t do much more than write angry blog posts, keep at it.  There are a few signs that things might turn around before long.

– Trump’s approval ratings are dropping, not among the MAGAts (racists are still cheering on his disappearing of people with darker complexions; he’s still the fundagelicals actual lord and savior), but among those who thought he’d lower egg prices.  There’s probably enough of them to swing an election as close as the recent ones.

– There will be some interesting cases before the Supreme Court some time this year.  It’s possible that at least two of the gang of six will be not entirely shameless.

– Democratic primaries will begin about a year from now, give or take; and they might be interesting.  For example, there’s talk of AOC going after Schumer.  That’ll be fun to watch if it happens.

– The midterms are coming up in about a year and a half, give or take; and I’m guessing that we won’t be having Russia-style elections that soon.  It’s possible that Democrats, more progressive candidates among them, will take control of one or both houses of Congress.

It probably won’t be the end of republican democracy until the 2028 general election, and only if nothing good happens before then.

We need to primary Democrats who are old rich guys and who are friends of the oligarcs, and do whatever we can to get them elected.  Let’s keep at it.

I’ve been pretty depressed lately, and not only because of Trump.  I haven’t written much of anything in quite a while, and I think the post above shows it.  Indeed, it seems rather disjointed to me, and not something that would make me think that I’d learned anything.  I need to break out of this funk.  Is this a start at least?  We’ll see…

Any Java Gurus Out There?

Over the new year holiday I wrote a rational number in Java just for lulz.  I was looking at it the other night and thought of a way to make the code for rounding to an integer more elegant using a java.util.EnumSet<RoundingMode>.

There’s a bit of code that’s computationally expensive that I don’t need to do unless the RoundingMode is one of HALF_UP, HALF_DOWN or HALF_EVEN; so I’m wondering whether EnumSet.contains() is quicker or slower when I have only three enumerators that I’m looking for.

Another important question:  do I really care, or am I just engaging in premature optimization? 😎

Here’s a screenshot of a bit of WinDiff output to show what I’m thinking of:
screen shot

Oh-Oh

For the next three weeks or so, the news is likely to be all about one dead guy who, as Kristjan Wager put it, “represented a bigoted organization, covering up for child molesters”.  I now add to my current depression the worry about what the Trump/Musk regime and its gaggle of grifters will get away with while nobody is paying attention.

With any luck, I’m overreacting.

Update:  I haven’t been following Francis because I don’t really care; but I guess he was one of the good guys after all.  Robert Reich posted a eulogy on his substack; so I defer to Reich’s better knowledge of Francis himself; but I keep the same opinion of the Roman Catholic Church and the same worry about what more important news might be missed.