Sean Werkema's Blog

Today I was shared an article in the Guardian about how the climate is likely about to shift due to changes in the AMOC. And I can see the two camps reading that article already:

• Liberal view: OMG the Earth is nearing a catastrophic tipping point! We have to stop everything humanity is doing before this becomes the disaster that turns the entire world into Mad Max!
• Conservative view: Pssh, this is just another ploy by crazy pinko commies who hate fossil fuels and big industry to try to shut down the economy! Don’t you hippies know how many jobs are at stake!?

And I’m standing on the sideline, looking at both parties, saying “geez.”

So let’s get a couple things straight here about where I stand on climate change:

• Is climate change happening? Prolly.
• Did humanity cause it this time? Prolly.

But — that’s about where it stops.

The liberal jumps straight from those two facts to “and therefore we must stop everything!” The conservative disavows those are even facts. You got your choice between Chicken Little insisting the sky is falling, and Mrs. Ostrich with her head in the sand.

We probably shouldn’t be birds.

I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. Great Lakes territory. Lakes bigger than a lot of seas. If you’re on a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, you can’t see land in any direction. Drive or sail for a few hours… and you still can’t see land in any direction. These lakes are bigger than a lot of countries.

They’re also 12,000 years old, give or take. That might seem like a long time, but in geology, that’s a blink of an eye. Civilization, maybe just a few thousand years. Human culture, about 100,000 years. Human beings ourselves have been around maybe 300,000 years. The dinosaurs? 76 million years ago, plus. Life on this planet? Billions of years.

These lakes are bigger than the biggest big — and they’ve been around since approximately yesterday.

One day, about 12,000 years ago, the first Native Americans were likely expanding across North America past a big honking glacier, and they noticed that huh, there’s a lake at the edge there. That glacier pulled back, uncovering New York and Boston from a mile of ice, leaving a great big hole in the middle of the continent, and filling it with water in the process.

The biggest lakes in the world have been around for so little time that humans were around to watch it happen.

Earth just said, “Hey, y’know what, we’re gonna do warm now for a few epochs, say g’bye to the glaciers, everybody good with that? Cool, bruh, don’t actually care what you think, we’re doing it anyway.” Massive climate change. Not one iota of human activity required. We were passive bystanders on the Tuesday the glaciers started to melt, and we couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

How long has the AMOC been circulating? Turns out it’s about the same amount of time.

Even if we didn’t cause climate change this time around, there’s nothing stopping Earth from doing it herself whenever she feels like it. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. The only constant on this little ball of dirt is change. Seems like this time around we’re going hot: 100,000 years from now, if humanity hasn’t blown itself up by then, our descendants will probably get to watch the pendulum swing back to ice again.

Change — including climate change — is normal. It happens. The writing’s been on the wall for all of human history: Now isn’t permanent. You adapt, or you die.

Funny thing, though, is that human beings are the most adaptive species this planet has ever produced.

We live in places hot and cold. We’ve been to the tops of mountains, the bottoms of seas, to both poles, and around the equator. People live just as readily in the frozen tundras as they do in the heat of the jungle. Some guy is floating around the Earth in a space station right now, and we’ve even walked on the moon. We’re astonishingly good at finding ways to survive terrible environments, maybe even better at it than tardigrades. If the oceans suddenly turned into hydrofluoric acid, we’d just be like, “Better not go swimming without your steel armor on, Timmy.”

So what’s that really mean? The climate’s probably shifting, sure enough. Maybe we did it this time. Also the Netherlands lives just fine already with most of the country below sea level. We figured out how to live with an uncooperative environment before. We’ll do it again.

That’s not to say it won’t affect things. We’re also damn good at fighting, and people will migrate away from unlivable places, so there’ll be wars, and arguments over land, and winners and losers. But to say that “climate change wrecks everything” is a bridge too far: We’ll adapt. We always have. If we survived the last ice age, we can probably handle the next hot age. You know what happens when sea levels rise 10 meters? They build a dam around New York City to keep the water out, and people go right back to complaining about the rats.

Now that’s not to say that I’m toeing the line of the fossil fuel companies, because there are plenty of real issues with all this, and those are the ones we should actually be talking about:

• Sooner or later, the oil and gas will run out. More drilling does not equal more oil. Someday your big gas truck will stop trucking, so you’d be wise to start thinking about what happens when the gas is gone.
• A wind farm in your backyard means you can point both middle fingers at the repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and Iran and Russia and tell them to go pound sand. You want to truly be America First? Install a solar panel, and then stop giving your money to the Middle East.
• Climate change means migration, so we’d all better stop pretending you can build a wall, because people are going to find ways to get over and under and around it. We’re all gonna need to figure out how to be nice to each other when we’re sharing the beach in sunny warm Alaska.

That’s what we should all be talking about. The sky is not falling. But also, don’t ignore that things are happening. We have some responsibilities. The climate is changing — just like it does every Tuesday, and Mother Earth is gonna probably throw us a few more Great Lake-sized curveballs before human history is done. But also, we can adapt: It’s one of the few things humanity is actually good at.

I’ve thought about this considerably lately, and there’s a trend by the current US administration to portray everything they’re doing as “good.” It’s “good” to deport people, it’s “good” to defund universities, it’s “good” to attack other countries. There’s always a justification given. So who’s to say who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy? But there’s a way to answer it, and it works correctly, every time.

In any given conflict, there’s nearly always one leader that can say a single word and end the conflict. If Hitler said “leave” to his troops, that would’ve ended WWII right then and there. When King George said “leave” to the British troops, that ended the Revolutionary War. When Nixon said “leave” to American troops, that ended Vietnam. If Hans Gruber had said “leave” to his men in the Nakamura Building, that’s the end of the movie right there. If Saddam Hussein had said “leave” to his troops in Kuwait, then Bush Sr. would never have needed to send coalition forces in. If Putin says “leave” to Russian troops, that’ll end the war in Ukraine. In every case, you can answer who the aggressor is and who the victim is by simply asking, “If one side said ‘leave’ to their people, does the fighting stop?” If one leader can say “leave” and the fighting ends, their team is the aggressor. Their team is the villain. There’s no “but what about” or “but they’re doing” or “but reasons!!!” — if you can say “leave” and all the violence stops, then congratulations, you’re the bad guy. This rule is simple, common sense, trivial to understand, and applies universally.¹

Which brings us to Minnesota.

• If Governor Tim Walz says “Please, for the love of God, leave the ICE agents alone” to the protestors — the protestors will keep protesting, and the conflict will continue.
• If President Donald Trump says “I order you to leave Minnesota” to the ICE agents, the ICE agents will leave — and then the protestors will go home too.

Congratulations, Donald. You’re the villain here. You’re the aggressor. Your team is the aggressor. You, and Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller can all tell yourselves and Fox News whatever you want, but by the very simple objective measurement of “You could say ‘leave’ but you don’t,” you’re in the same bucket with every other villain in history.

And this is a simple, objective way to look at a conflict. You can’t spin it. (They’ll try, to be sure.) If you could stop the violence and you choose to keep going, you’re the bad guy. It’s not about Federal Law, or ancient birthright, or “but their family killed my family!” If you could say “leave” but you don’t, you’re the villain, as simple as that.

You’re the villain, Donald. You will be to the end of time in every history book. I hope you’re okay with that. I sure wouldn’t be. And remember that the sooner or later, the Devil always reclaims his own.

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I’m not going to deeply opine on Renee Good or Jonathan Ross. I remain deeply, deeply troubled by what happened. God help them both. Even if Ross is never charged with the deserved crime of second-degree homicide, even if Trump’s people stonewall and block any investigation, thou shalt not kill is pretty clear, and someday Ross, just like the rest of us, will have to answer to a far higher authority than the American justice system. I hope for him that when he arrives at the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter says, “So how do you think you did down there?” Ross can answer, “I made a terrible, terrible mistake, but I spent the rest of my life atoning for it; please tell Renee I’m sorry, and please forgive me.” Any answer less than that isn’t likely to be enough to save him, if he can be saved at all.

And to Becca Good and to your and Renee’s children, I would like to add that I’m deeply, deeply sorry for your loss. My heart goes out to you all. I have kids of my own, not that different in age from yours. Your children should never have had to grow up without Renee. You should never have had to grow old without her. From what little I’ve seen of her, she seemed like a genuine ray of sunshine, the sort of person anyone would have been lucky to know. I hope you someday get some kind of justice and closure, and that one day, goodness and righteousness will prevail, and that someday, somehow, something good can grow out of this evil soil.

God help you. And God help us all.

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1. The American Civil War, 1860-1864, initially seems like an exception to the “leave” rule: After all, Lincoln could’ve said “leave” to the Union troops, and that would’ve ended the war, wouldn’t it have? Except that violence includes the totality of violence — pulling out the Union troops still wouldn’t have ended the continuing systematic murder and torture of millions of African slaves. Sadly, this shows why the Civil War was such a mess: Lincoln saying “leave” to his troops, or Lee saying “leave” to his troops, or even Jefferson Davis saying “leave them alone” to the slaveholders would not have stopped the violence and hate, which had diffused throughout Southern society to nearly everyone to the point where the only ones sufficiently empowered to say “leave them alone” were the individual slaveholders — too diffuse for any one leader to end the conflict with a word. ↩︎

Everything is getting worse.

You’ve probably noticed that by now. Websites are chock-full of ads, whether you’re balancing your checkbook, reading the news, or just, God forbid, even trying to buy the thing they’re asking you to buy. Windows 11 is slower and clunkier than Windows 10 and wants to force you to buy a new computer. Capital groups use barely-legal tricks to take over beloved companies like Toys ‘R Us and drain them of every penny. We went from in-flight movies and hot meals to “just be lucky the plane didn’t crash this time.” Insurance companies are so bad that their CEOs are getting shot. Donald Trump, adjudicated rapist and close friend of child molester Jeffrey Epstein, is now an American tinpot dictator, supported by a crazed terrorist organization that calls themselves MAGA, and is leeching the life out of what once was the Last Best Hope. And social media is so toxic that X introducing “Mecha-Hitler” barely even makes the news anymore.

Everything but everything is steadily spiraling down the toilet, as enshittification sucks the entire Western World to the bottommost depths of hell itself. The rich get richer, and everybody else is getting screwed, and then the Wall Street types freak out when anybody dares to asks why things suck so bad. Ermagerd, “class warfare!” It’s almost as if people don’t like getting screwed.

Anyway, today’s entry in the “everything is getting worse” category is Hewlett Packard HP. I bought a new printer from them in late 2021, a snazzy M255dw color laser, and it worked darn well. But, of course, we’re no longer allowed to just have nice things. You can’t just buy a nice product and be done with it. Everything’s a service, even if it isn’t. You’re expected to pay through the nose, every day. For protection.

Which is why today my printer decided that the brand-new toner cartridge I’d bought for it just a few months ago was not to be allowed, as it was “Not HP.” Never mind that that’s just marketing bullshit, and there’s absolutely no technical reason why the printer can’t just send the “spin” and “dispense” signals to the cartridge, just like the HP printer I owned for nearly thirty years before this one did. That one was built like a tank, and it Just Worked for decades, like an actual well-made product should. Nope, I might’ve spent my hard-earned money on this new printer, but in HP’s eyes, printing is a service, and I’m “borrowing” the right to use my own printer, which means that if I don’t do exactly what they want, when they want, I don’t get to print.

You’d think, being highly technically adept, I’d have noticed that hidden twenty-seven miles down in a screen you need multiple special skills to access, there’s a tiny checkbox that says “Allow HP to remotely fuck with your printer.” But nope. I hadn’t noticed that. There’s a good reason for all the many, many, many, many well-deserved class-action lawsuits against HP.

Related: I would like to invite HP’s current leadership to fuck all the way off. Bill and David would be ashamed of your money-grubbing. Hope you all enjoy it now, because you can’t take it with you.

The sad part is that the hardware’s really pretty good. It’s fast and efficient. But the company behind it went from “highly respectable and trustworthy” in the ’90s to “makes the cable company seem great” in twenty years flat, and they deserve every last jot and tittle of the negative press they regularly get. Including this blog posting.

The even sadder part is why I was printing in the first place: I was printing out the owner’s manual for my new refrigerator, which now is only provided online. Because, y’know, why spend $0.25 of paper and ink on a thousand-dollar fridge when the consumer can do that themselves?

So the cycle of enshittification continues. One has to wonder if we can, as a species, pull out of this. Maybe we’re just collectively doomed to put up with the worst, greediest, cruelest impulses of our worst, greediest, cruelest people. Right now, the Magic 8 ball is looking pretty fuzzy on that, with all signs pointing to “maybe” at best.

In the meanwhile, I have a printer that doesn’t print, so like a good little consumer, I’m going to shut up and buy another toner cartridge.

But not from HP.

They just don’t make enough popcorn for times like this.

The continuing news this week that Trump’s highest honchos texted war plans to a journalist continues to amaze. I laughed my lungs out for an hour when I first read it. This leads us to today’s short essay:

This is the reason MAGA will lose: It is dumb.

Dumb. Stupid. Pathetically, irredeemably stupid beyond all measure. A bag of moldy doorknobs will outscore these dipshits in trying to solve the maze on the back of a McDonald’s box.

The MAGA supporters insist that their orange god-king is playing four-dimensional chess, but the unmistakable truth is that Team MAGA brings a bag of marbles to a game of checkers, and they’re not so much “winning” as flipping over the board angrily and then kicking sand on anyone who says they didn’t win.

This should give the rest of us heart: For every victory the Trumpists may claim, for every institution they wreck, for every lie they scream, for every barrier they smash, there will be a massive stumble, a head to the door frame, an “Oops I accidentally texted the nuclear codes to cousin Larry Joe and he left them in the bathroom of a Piggly-Wiggly.”

That’s not to say these idiots can’t cause damage: A chimpanzee with a flamethrower can still wreck things. But if you take away their toys, the best they can do is kick and scratch and scream about how unfair it is. Trump’s minions have been irrevocably revealed for what they really are: Chimpanzees with flamethrowers. Monkeys with chainsaws. Apes with badges. It would be lovely if we could all just call animal control and put an end to this.

But either way, we now know beyond any doubt that they’ll eventually lose. And not because someone else will win — but simply because when you’re the Three Stooges incarnate, sooner or later, you’re bound to drop a piano on your head.

I had wondered at the start of the Trump administration which of the two Trumps we’d get. We’ve pretty clearly gotten two in the past:

• Lazy Trump. This one likes the adulation of being President, but he doesn’t really do anything beyond that. During his first term, this Trump spent more time golfing than any President in history, and he often didn’t start work until 10 AM.
• Vindictive Trump. This one likes to punch. He’s a schoolyard bully, and he might back down whenever somebody stronger shows up, but mostly he likes to walk around hurting people who are smaller or weaker than he is. We didn’t see as much of this Trump during his first term, but we saw plenty of it on the campaign trail.

A couple weeks in, there’s little doubt that Trump 2.0 is the Vindictive model. From slash-and-burn tactics to ridiculous and ineffective tariffs to blaming the deaths of his fellow Americans on DEI policies, this Trump is clearly the angry, hateful one, not the lazy one.

That’s a shame. We could probably all live with the lazy one — we did it for four years already — but the angry one presents a conundrum. A screaming toddler with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower, and the Republican Party is far too cowardly to take his toys away this time.

And cowardice, mind you, is the correct term. I will happily call the current members of the Republican Party cowards to their faces: You sacrificed your spines and your consciences to a mook from Queens? Just so you could hate an inner-city single Black mother who just wanted a chance for her kids, and a brown man who just wanted not to starve, and two guys who were just kissing on a park bench? For shame, all of you. I don’t care if you got shot at overseas in uniform: Dishonor is dishonor, and that squelches whatever honor you might otherwise claim. I hope you have a really good answer when you’re standing someday in front of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates and he asks you whether you think you’ve earned your way in.

But I digress. There’s still the outstanding question of how to deal with the overgrown child that the American populace unwisely elevated to the Presidency, ideally before he does something so stupid and destructive that we can’t eventually fix it. Last time, he didn’t know how to drive the car; this time, he knows the controls just well enough to drive it into a tree at 100 MPH. If the Republicans hadn’t become utterly ineffectual parents, they’d take away the keys, or at least chauffeur him around again for the next four years. But that’s no longer viable: You can’t really hope a bad parent will become a good one, even with court-mandated parenting classes.

And the Democrats? They’re not worth mentioning. You might as well put your hope in tantric yoga and magical crystals.

Which means that there’s not really much left to pin hope on for the next few years. The courts might restrain him a little bit, but it’s unlikely. Realistically, Vindictive Trump is going to pick his victims, and he’s going to hurt his victims, and nobody’s going to do anything about it. One parent will look the other way, and the other will say “tsk, tsk,” and that’s as far as it’ll go. It’s a somber assessment, but it’s a sober one.

Someday — and as Liz Cheney so rightly noted, there will be a someday when Trump is gone — the history books will write their story of him. I can’t imagine it’ll be a good one. The people who joined the Confederacy, the ones who joined the Nazi party or the Communist party, the ones who followed John Birch and Joe McCarthy and George Wallace — they’re all denigrated by history, and rightly so, for the ignorance and hate which led them to those choices. There’s little doubt that Trumpism and its founder will join that ignominious group once the Baby Boomer generation has breathed its last, and those of us following after will describe them the same way every generation does when faced with the truth that so many of their forebears were, in fact, objectively pretty terrible people: “It was a different time.”

In the interim, we have to do our best to persevere: Ignore the toddler when he burns the foliage, try to offer shiny baubles to distract him away from anything important, and do our best to continually spray water in the fervent hope that when he’s gone at last, the house still stands.

…assuming, of course, that it’s not so divided that it still can.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to say here in the wake of Trump’s reelection. I think it was among the stupidest things human beings have ever done in history, and that it’ll pay negative dividends for decades, but what do I know? I’m just some guy.

So what I’ve concluded I’ll say is simple: America: You broke it, so you bought it.

You don’t get to claim that whatever comes next isn’t what you voted for, good or bad. Price of gas and eggs goes down? Dow Jones goes up? Jobs come back to small towns? You can totally claim those results. Trump starts internment camps, collapses the economy, declares war on France? You bought the crazy bad results too. You don’t get to blame the Democrats this time: Republicans are now 100% in charge in Washington, DC, so if you voted red, you own all of it. Credit where credit is due on the successes, but you’d better man up and accept any failures you get too.

Lest there be any doubt, here’s what you all voted on. (And I included for rent both a red state and a purple state, just so you can see I’m not cheating.)

Let’s review these after a year or two of Trump running the show, shall we? I’m sure the prices will definitely go down when they’re managed by such a fabulously successful businessman. I’d love to see them go down — and I’ll freely credit Trump if they do — but I’m not betting on it.

As for me, I’m likely going to be sitting back with a bowl of popcorn occasionally shaking my head — assuming, that is, that there’ll still be farms in America to grow that corn, and not nuclear blast holes filled with Nazi stormtroopers.

But not that that would happen, would it?

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Loosely related, I’ve ditched Twitter (X) for good. I was sorta poking at it again for the last year occasionally, but I’m done with visiting wretched hives of scum and villainy, and I couldn’t be happier having said goodbye to it. And no, I haven’t signed up anywhere else: You might enjoy sadomasochism, but it’s definitely not for me.

“We have to rewrite it!”

I’ve done a lot of interviews recently, and a common theme among them — and among prior interviews over the years too — is companies who want to go from an existing “legacy” system to their shiny “new” system: They’ve concluded that the existing “legacy” system isn’t meeting their needs, and that a “new” system is necessary.

I call these “version 2.0” projects, because quite a lot of them involve taking an “original” system that’s been keeping the company alive since its inception, and making a replacement for it. I’ve been on several teams doing “version 2.0” projects over the years, and I’ve even started a couple of those projects, and there’s one truth that has been consistently valid among every single one of those exercises:

Don’t do it.

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The recent hullabaloo over Roald Dahl’s works being edited censored has me utterly incensed. Sure, Roald Dahl was kind of a terrible person, and he wrote several things I too find offensive. But that gives no-one other than Roald Dahl himself the right to censor his writing. He wrote what he wrote, and if you don’t like it, read something else. There are plenty of sanitized, safe, bland, milquetoast books out there if you don’t like having your sensitivities offended.

But it occurred to me that the reason that Puffin Books can get away with this censorship is that they (and Netflix) own the copyright, and by law copyright terms are ridiculously long. It’ll be four decades yet before anyone else can re-publish the stories the way Dahl wrote them.

I don’t want to be a part of this.

But I’m a creator: I make things, I write things, I draw things, I code things, I build things. I’m constantly contributing to a system I never signed up for. In my life a ton of work has been fixed in a tangible medium by me, to use the legal copyright terminology. Per copyright law, I hold the rights to a mountain of content, and because I keep creating, the mountain keeps getting bigger. These very words will join that pile, and if I die just after writing this sentence, my heirs or estate would hold the copyright in it for another 70 years — these words would enter the public domain in February 2093, which is utterly insane.

So I’m making an addendum right here to my last will and testament, and as soon as I’m done typing it, I’m going to print a copy and sign it to give it the force of law. And this addendum is simply this:

My works — all of them — will enter into the
public domain exactly one year after my death.

Not 70 years. One year. Every story, every essay, every picture, every pixel, every line of code, every last byte, everything I’ve made that could possibly be copyrightable and in which I hold the copyright will be up for grabs to the world one year later.

Does the world want it? Probably not, but you all get it anyway. Once I’m gone, my family gets a year to prepare for its release, and then it belongs to everybody, the whole kit and kaboodle. Anyone can have whatever debates you want over what I might have intended for some picture or some character or some design or whatever, but everybody is free to put their own spin on them all after the one-year mark. Once I’m gone, I don’t have a say in it anymore.

Presumably, I still have a lot of years left in me, and I can state my intentions and control my works for a few more decades. But whenever I’m gone, there’s one year on my copyrights left, and that’s it.

The copyright system is pretty broken, but with this, I believe I’m helping in my own small way to help right the ship. Maybe Congress will have some sense someday and shorten copyright terms to match, but until they take care of it, this declaration will have to do.

Beginner and intermediate programmers often think that programming is math. After all, a lot of computer science is math, and computers run on math, and core concepts of the field like Turing Machines and lambda calculus are really pure hard math. You can’t get started in this field without knowing some math.

But programming — or software engineering if you prefer — really isn’t math. Programming, as Donald Knuth rightly noted all the way back in the 1970s, is really literature. We tell the computer stories about how to do things: We write plays, and the computer acts out the play for us. Some of the words that we use in those plays are based on math, but most programming is really a form of storytelling. Code is sometimes compared to poetry, but I think it has the most in common with prose — which is arguably why systems like ChatGPT are so good at it.

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