Nine Circles of Shell

Accent Colors on non-iMac Macs

Just posting this so I can remember how to do it for new Macs. This is a link to a blog post explaining how to change the accent color on MacOS to use the special accent colors only available to the nice colorful iMacs. So now you can use those on your drab, homely Mac Mini or whatever.

Instructions below if the link dies.

First, enable the hardware-based accent colours.

defaults write -g NSColorSimulateHardwareAccent -bool YES

Second, choose a color. Use integers 3-8 to specify color.

defaults write -g NSColorSimulatedHardwareEnclosureNumber -int 3

Finally, restart your computer.

Colors are as follows...

• 3 Yellow
• 4 Green
• 5 Blue
• 6 Pink
• 7 Purple
• 8 Orange

Amazon's Unethical Dark Patterns

I know it's been knocked out of the news cycle now by the Oceangate sub and Wagner's mutiny bluff-charge, but recently Amazon was sued by the FTC for using dark patterns to trick people into signing up for Amazon Prime and making it overly difficult to cancel that subscription. When I read this I double checked my account and realized that I was, indeed, a non-consenting Prime member. How?

I didn't see much coverage of what the actual dark pattern is, so here is how I think they got me. Do not click the free overnight shipping option if you aren't already a Prime member, or you don't intend to sign up for Prime. By clicking that, you apparently consent to signing up for Prime and to being billed monthly for it. At time of writing, it is Prime month/week/whatever so they actually WILL give you free overnight shipping if you aren't a Prime member. When I saw the free overnight option, my exact thoughts were "Oh it must be some kind of promotion and then they'll remove this option eventually when the promotion is done". It didn't occur to me that it was actually me signing up for Prime.

Part of the coverage has been around Amazon's "labyrinthine" cancellation process. I found the easiest way to cancel was to just google "cancel prime" rather than navigate from within Amazon.

So here's what to take away.

1. Don't click the free overnight shipping options if you aren't already a Prime member, it isn't Prime month/week/epoch or you don't intend to become a Prime member.
2. If you are tricked to sign up for Prime, it's easier to just google "cancel Prime" or something to that effect than it is to navigate to wherever you get to cancel from your Amazon home page.

Another note: it felt pretty cathartic to tell them that I hope the FTC destroys them in the cancellation survery.

Did America Really Print 80% of All Dollars Ever In 2020/2021?

You've probably heard at least one amateur deficit hawk in your life say something like "America has printed 80% of all dollars ever printed within the last two year!" as an explanation for the historic inflation rates of 2021 and 2022. While it's true that we have experienced extreme inflation in the last couple of years, it is not due to the US printing 80% of all dollars that have ever existed in the last two year, mainly because that has not happened.

The M1 and M2 Money Supplies

The 80% in the last two years number comes from watchers of the M1 money supply. The M1 money supply is a measure of dollars in circulation in the US, which prior to March 2020, included cash and checking accounts. Go ahead and take a look at the graph below of the M1 supply...

Looks pretty alarming right! You can clearly see the line basically go straight up in the beginning of 2020. Where did all that new money come from?

Well here is the thing: prior to March 2020, savings accounts were counted as M2 money, not M1. That changed as the Federal Reserve started counting savings accounts in the M1 money supply. If you go read their Q&A about it, they even acknowledge that "Recognizing savings deposits as a transaction account as of May 2020 will cause a series break in the M1 monetary aggregate." In other words, it will make the graph go straight up. The M1 supply jumped at the beginning of 2020 because of a definitional change of what would be counted as M1 money, not because we had the money printers go brrrrr. I mean we did, but not that much. The inflation we've experience, like basically all major inflation jumps in my lifetime, is largely due to high demand and low supply across markets. Oil, semi-conductors, building material... basically every commodity.

Deficit Hawks Are Bad for this Country

It's not just important to talk about this to be a know-it-all at parties, or to own relatives in debates or whatever. It's important because this cultural fear of printing to much money and causing hyper-inflation serves the right-wing and big corporations. If you can convince someone that it would take 14 to 15 trillion dollars printed in just one year to fund Medicare for all, that doing so would cause hyper-inflation, and that the Federal Reserve would be eager to do it, then you can pretty easily convince them not to support Medicare for all, despite all of that being untrue or highly misrepresentative.

PoliticalCompassMemes is Gaslighting You

The users of the PoliticalCompassMemes subreddit are pretty insistant that the sub isn't just a place for right-wingers to attack strawmen of left positions constructed by other right-wingers in bad faith. You wouldn't be crazy to point out that the posts from the sub that make it to the front page of Reddit are usually making fun of SJWs. You also wouldn't be crazy to point out that in the comments of such posts, users flaired as "lib-left" or "auth-left" are often seen making comments like "as a leftist, SJWs are the worst" or something along those lines. We can't really see into the hearts of these commenters. Maybe they truly do see themselves as leftists...

I lied. We can see into their dumb little hearts. Go on over to subredditstats.com and check out the overlapping subreddits that PCM users are subscribed to.

The overlap search generates a list of subreddits that users of the sub in question also post on. It assigns a score based on how likely any given participant of a subreddit is to comment on another. As an example, we search for subreddit A. It gives us a list of 3 other subreddits: B, C and D with scores 1.00, 2.00 and 0.5 respectively. Scoring 1.00 means users of sub A are no more or less likely to also use sub B than average redditor. A score of 2.00 means that users of sub A are twice as likely to also use sub C. Finally, with a score of 0.5, users of sub A are half as likely to participate in sub D.

One thing to keep in mind is these stats only include users who comment or post in PCM, and in other subreddits. These stats do not include lurkers who don't post on PCM, but are subscribed to it. It is impossible to see what subs a redditor is subscribed to unless you can log in as them. The end result is, these stats aren't telling the full picture because we can't see what subs lurkers on PCM are also subscribed to. We can't actually make a statement like 60% of people subscribed to PCM are also subscribed to furry_irl using this data. What you can say, though, is that someone who posts on PCM is twice as likely to also post in furry_irl than an average redditor.

So as of time of writing, PCM users are most likely to also post on these ten subreddits...

1. politicalcompass (30.01). A subreddit where people share results of taking various political compass quizes. I took a few of them and they seem about as legitimate as a Hogwarts house quiz.
2. polcompball (20.75). Poland Ball comics are cutsie representations of national stereotypes acting out international affairs in humorous ways. If you're thinking to yourself, "how on Earth could international relations be good fodder for comedy", I have no answer for you. Anyway, polcampball is the same concept but for political ideology. The ones that I have seen are generally funnier than their nation-based counterparts, but they still generally betray the ignorance of their authors.
3. theleftcantmeme (17.10). A place for rightwingers to aggregate what they perceive as bad takes by liberals and leftists.
4. shitstatistssay (15.14). A place for libertarians to aggregate bad takes by people who support states in any capacity.
5. libertarianmeme (14.87).
6. averageredditor (14.81). A place for redditors to aggregate bad takes by the average redditor. It just so happens that the average redditor is a liberal SJW according to this sub, and also the users of this sub really parrot a lot of right-wing talking points.
7. enoughcommiespam (14.71). Redditors complain about communist takes in the big subs.
8. anarcho_capitalism (13.58).
9. tnomod (12.51). A community dedicated to The New Order mod for the video game Hearts of Iron IV. According to tnomod's sidebar, the mod's setting is an alternate reality Earth where the Axis defeated the Allies in WWII and the Cold War was between Germany and Japan. I don't know anything about this game, but any game that lets you LARP as a Nazi winning the war seems sketch to me.
10. shitpoliticssays (10.71). A place for right wingers to aggregate perceived bad takes by liberals and leftists on the main politics sub.

So if I can take away one thing from that list, it's that participants on PCM are way more likely to also hang out on subreddits dedicated to aggregating perceived bad takes by liberals and leftists. Like more than 10 times likely to do so than the average redditor. Let me repeat that, users of PCM are over 10 times more likely to hang out on subreddits whose sole purpose is to shit on anyone left of center. No, you're not crazy for thinking PCM is full of right-wing trolls.

For a chuckle, let's look at the otherside of the coin. What subreddits are PCM users least likely to post in? This list is excluding the porn subreddits, which dominate the bottom ranked subs for PCM. Quick sidebar on that, the reason porn subs are at the bottom is not because PCM participants are less likely to look at porn than the average redditor (I'd wager the opposite), it's that they are web savvy enough to know not to be horny on main.

1. BONUS femalefashionadvice (0.06). Okay so I included 11 on this list just to get this one in there. It speaks volumes to to who the users of PCM are not.
2. puppy101 (0.06). Apparently PCM users don't adopt puppies very often. Or maybe they do but they're so good at raising puppies they don't feel the need to post questions or tips? I'm going with the former, but who knows!
3. winnipeg (0.06). The entire city of Winnipeg saw PCM and collectively were like "nah".
4. knitting (0.05). Not very crafty, PCM, are we?
5. shibarmy (0.05). This looks like a fan sub for an anime? I have no idea.
6. retrogaming (0.05). Was honestly surprised by this one because I would figure a male dominated subreddit would also be into gaming. I guess you can't play modded strategy games that let you LARP being a Nazi on an SNES though.
7. marriage (0.05). I'm dying.
8. houseplants (0.03). Who needs home decor when you're BASED.
9. teenmomogandteenmom2 (0.03). Who has time to watch this when you're watching Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. By the way, PCM participants are 4.32 times more likely to post in the Jordan Peterson sub.
10. thebachelor (0.03).
11. bravorealhousewives (0.02).

It's pretty clear to me based on the lowest ranked subreddits, and some sexist generalizing on my part, that the users of PCM are largely dudes. If you look at some of the mainstream male oriented subs like askmen (0.97), malefashionadvice (0.33), and malelivingspace (0.39), there isn't very much overlap there either. Some of the more rightwing male subreddits like mensrights (2.55) seem well travelled though.

So in conclusion, if you've ever felt off put by PCM and their claims of political neutrality but couldn't quite put your finger on why, you were right to feel that way. They are right-wing, and the stats betray their insistance to the contrary.

Utah Policy is Insane

I subscribed to Utah Policy, an email newsletter focused on Utah politics, hopeful that it would at least feign centrism. I am disappointed, but not terribly surprised, to report that Utah Policy's opinion section can largely be written as right-wing propoganda. Exhibit A: redistricting.

In a piece titled Opinion: Why Republicans feel justified in rejecting maps proposed by Redistricting Commission, LaVarr Webb looks at justifications for why Utah Republicans will feel okay ignoring the independent redistricting commission created by a 2018 ballot initiative. The whole thing reads less like an explanatory piece of why they will feel fine ignoring the recommendations and more as a justification for doing so. He also makes some really stupid points so let us go over those.

Webb's first point is basically that because the ballot initiative did not win by a large enough margin, we should all feel fine ignoring it.

Because they feel a majority of their own constituents didn’t want the commission created in the first place. It’s been mostly forgotten that voters in 2018 approved creation of the commission by a tiny margin of 6,944 votes statewide, out of more than one million votes cast. Prop 4, creating the commission, won 50.34 percent to 49.66 percent.

To his point that the initiative won by a slim margin statewide... what is the point? Ballot initiatives are STATEWIDE. We do not vote for delegates who then come to the capitol and vote on the initiative. This is how direct democracy works, unless they intend to introduce the filibuster for ballot initiatives (don't give them any ideas), a win by less than 1% is still a win.

Webb goes on to highlight the concept of communities of interest, calling into question the need to even draw new districts in Utah. If it were true that we do not need to redraw the districts because communities of interest are already represented, then any recommendation from the Redistricting Committee would be a non-starter. Makes sense. So what is the big argument for not redrawing Utah's districts?

Utahns, including suburbanites and urbanites, love Utah’s public lands and feel a kinship to rural Utah. So rural Utah is part of their community of interest.

There you have it. Because everyone loves our public lands, we should make sure that each district has a stake in it. That is the reason why we need to split the most liberal sectors of our state three ways. No need to worry about the fact that giving urban Utahns "a stake" in public lands means diluting their votes. If we are defining communities of interest as anyone who likes being outdoors in Utah, then why not just cut the whole state into four evenly sized squares? The answer to that very dumb question is because Republicans know this conception of "communities of interest" is BS and are just using it as a cover to gerrymander.

So there you have it. Republicans don't actually like democracy. Horrifying. Happy Halloween!