Politcial Economy Musings, 21-Dec-2019

Originally posted on Facebook

So far, the Congress party has not clearly stated that it is against NRC. But things may change as an interesting Monday is ahead, when the Jharkhand results will be declared.

WhatsApp played a big role in the Nigerian election. Not all of it was bad

Supporters of Nigeria’s All Progressives Congress presidential candidate, President Muhammadu Buhari, at a rally earlier this year. EPA-EFE/Stringer

Nic Cheeseman, University of Birmingham

There is growing concern about the potential for the message and media sharing platform WhatsApp to undermine democracy in a number of countries across the world including Brazil and India.

Are Robots Coming for Our Jobs? Careful, It's a Trick Question

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez

The robots are coming, and they’ll probably take your job when they get here.

Oh wait—have you heard that recently? As recently as, say, yesterday? In the news, or from a coworker, or in a sinister dystopian movie, maybe?

Sounding the alarm about job losses to automation has become commonplace—in fact, it’s more of a nonstop siren these days. Multiple Democratic presidential candidates are featuring their plans to combat Big Tech and solve technological unemployment as talking points of their campaigns. Dread of a robot-dominated future is mounting.

How ad hominem arguments can demolish appeals to authority

-- Moti Mizrahi

‘In logic, inconsistency is the cardinal sin, and consistency the first of the virtues.’
Patrick Shaw, Logic and Its Limits (1981)

In 2018, the US Surgeon General declared e-cigarette use among young people an epidemic in the United States. As a result, parents were encouraged to talk with their children about smoking. One of the Surgeon General’s tips for parents is to ‘set a positive example by being tobacco-free’. But what if parents are smokers, too? What if children respond to their parents’ plea to refrain from smoking by saying: ‘You use tobacco, so why shouldn’t I?’

This retort is an example of ad hominem argumentation.

Programming on Windows

During the last four years, until the early part of 2018, I worked on a MacBook. Sometime in the second quarter of last year, I shifted to a Windows 10 laptop. The transition has been quite smooth and delightful.

There were two Rails applications that I had to write and maintain. The first application, let's call it webapp-1, was coded by me in 2016 using Ruby 2.3.1 p112 and Rails 4.2.6. The second application, hereafter referred to as webapp-2, is a new application that I had to write from scratch, so I chose the latest versions: Ruby 2.5.3, Rails 5.2.1.

For both these applications, the database was MySQL, and I decided to install the latest version, i.e., 8 running on Windows. The MySQL installer tools make the installation and configuration very easy and I could bring up MySQL quickly.

I started setting up the Rails environment for webapp-2 first. The installation program for windows that I downloaded was rubyinstaller-devkit-2.5.3-1-x64.exe. I ran it, selected MSYS2 and MINGW development toolchain option and the installation went through smoothly. I installed rails gem with the following command
> gem install rails --version 5.2.1

But then, when I started the rails server, I ran into a library issue. In the browser, I accessed localhost:3000 and I got a nasty looking error:
Authentication plugin 'caching_sha2_password' cannot be loaded: The specified module could not be found.