I was reading an article about the NPR debacle, when NPR defended itself by saying “look at all the skin colors in our staff.” And some of the “varied skin color” bearing individuals came out to defend it too because “there are people who look like me.”
It brought back to me again why I got so bent out of shape at idiot on twitter talking about how we need to have higher minimum wage, so as not to make our cities into slums, and so that young women can have children.
Even here in response to that we got all tied in knots over the “real” result of minimum wage or if it was a science of not (in large numbers, economics absolutely is a science, one that “laws” can only distort, not make to conform to politicians’ insanity.)
But the important thing is that the left is — as always — approaching things from the wrong end of the problem.
It’s not that the problem they’re identifying isn’t correct. More often than not there is a problem — though note the problem might be so small that it doesn’t register, or barely does, before they wade in to make it as horrible as possible — the real issue is that they look at the problem the wrong way, assume powers they — and often other corporeal beings — don’t have, and make everything worse by trying to fix the “problem” by forcing a solution that fixes nothing.
Take for instance the minimum wage problem: Yes, wages are ridiculously low, compared to cost of living. No argument there. And while theoretically minimum-wage paying jobs aren’t meant to be given to adults, in reality they mostly go to older adults these days, to supplement social security and other safety net payments. Why? Because laws protecting children from exploitation now make it functionally impossible to hire anyone under eighteen.
This not only has nothing to do with stopping the exploitation of children, it is in fact children and young adult abuse. It prevents young people from getting a functional education into what work means, and the relation between work and money. Look, it’s not like most of them are getting any kind of education in the schools they are forced to attend. And when you tell them all they can do till 18 is attend the make-work schools where boys are often treated as second class citizens and girls as neurotic basket cases who must be indulged at all costs, you are not preparing them for life. You are also not saving them from anything.
What you’re doing is releasing them to the world at 18, when they’ll be responsible for their own crimes, and capable of picking their own path, with about the functional maturity of a 12 year old 50 years ago.
They have never earned a dime through their own labor. Money comes as a hand out from benevolent older people. They aren’t sure where money comes from other than that way. They have been conditioned to comply with unreasonable and senseless demands of authorities they don’t fully understand, and to perform tasks that mean nothing. A lot of them — mostly young women and minorities. Sorry, but it’s a fact as schools try not to be accused of discrimination — have been used to having A for effort and being indulged in their maladies real or imaginary, including the “I had my feelings hurt.”
And now, with no job history, no experience of getting up when they don’t feel like it, to go work because that’s how you get paid, no idea of why anyone should be doing that in fact, we suddenly expect them to be functional adults.
We all remember the story Heinlein told to illustrate why mollycoddling young criminals then dropping the law on them was 18 is stupid, right: you bring a puppy home, never house break it, indulge its every whim, then when it is a full grown dog you take it out and shoot it.
Well, this is the equivalent. You bring a puppy home and tie it up and truss it and put it in a tube so it can’t move, while taking care of its every need. Then when it’s a full grown dog, and it can’t walk, you beat it because it’s not acting as a grown dog should.
However, the story falls short, because we don’t take that dog who has never had experience of walking, and make it get in debt. While at 18 we view these kids who never had a meaningful choice in their lives, and have the haziest ideas of what a “job” is, and who, to boot, have been lied to all their lives and told that they can be anything they want to (yes, it’s a lie. I could never have been an Olympic athlete, not matter how much I wanted it.) and tell them they have to go to college. Because all successful people go to college. How many even sign up for it, because school they know, but they don’t know anything else? And how many sign up after trying to find jobs and being unable to, because they have no job history and no idea how to apply? And then we encourage them to sign predatory laws from which the government doesn’t allow you to escape. And then when they finish, and are again unemployable, or employable at a very low level, the left screams we must forgive the loans, the right says “pay up deadbeats.” And the left wants to raise minimum wage so the kids can have kids.
Look, this is patently insane. Anyone looking at it objectively can see, no, it’s not the kids’ fault, but all this nonsense doesn’t help. Begin at the beginning: who in America thinks that kids are at risk of being put in sweatshops and worked night and day? So, why are we trying to protect say 16 year olds from getting a retail job, or assuming anyone who hires them to sweep the floor is going to chain them to a 19th century textile mill.
The laws relating to “child” labor need to be relaxed. And they need to be relaxed starting at about 12. Sure, fewer kids might go to college. But more might be literate and functional adults.
And for those clutching their pearls, a lot of us had jobs — part time, sometimes self imposed — starting at about that time. We are noticeably, not Dickensinian victims standing in line for our super, or twisted out of shape by our inhumane exploitation.
If people are too young to work, they’re much to young to be prisoners in public schools. Release them to the wild, where at least a few of them might learn that rocks to the skull hurt. (Note I don’t think the vast majority of 12 to18 are too young to work a couple of hours a day at least.)
But wait, there’s more. Other than the fact most 18 year olds have not been allowed to develop work habits and are therefore not worth whatever crazy minimum wage the government decided to mandate, there is something else holding wages down: lots and lots and lots of immigration, both illegal and targeted legal.
Targeted legal? Well, companies are allowed to import vast numbers of specialized personnel, from MDs to programmers, from pharmacists to engineers, whom they get on visas and therefore treat as indentured servants, including paying below-market wages and working insane hours. This makes it hard for in-country-trained people to be paid what they would normally be paid.
And since the avowed reason for this is that they can’t find people to do the work in the US and that’s patently false — they can’t find people to do the work at extremely cheap wages and while being totally controlled by the company, which is different — this is a scam, and should be stopped.
But at the bottom level, what is causing the low wages is that we opened the border, and got all sorts of unskilled labor into the country.
Our country is not early 20th century — as the left seems to think — and as I said before, we’re not going to open sweatshops (though I bet you there are some, and a lot more unsavory enterprises with all the minors and women brought over the border and effectively disappeared) that necessitate vast numbers of illiterate button-pushers or garment sewing people or any of that.
So what these people, desperate for any kind of work (though a lot of them are getting too many handouts to care these days) get is starting jobs that used to be done by young people: gardening, lawn mowing, entry construction work, basic retail. (I can’t be the only one who keeps running into cashiers who don’t speak English and get angry when you try to.)
They will take much lower wages, because they are living ten to an apartment. This in turn lowers everyone’s real wages.
And raising the official, mandated minimum wage does not solve any of these problems. It only exacerbates them. And gives more jobs to illegal workers, willing to work for less and under the table. Because the businesses can’t afford the crazy minimum wages and therefore will hire who they can, even if technically “illegal.”
Looking at the results and the desired results, and not what is driving the situation is the wrong end of the stick. It not only doesn’t fix the situation, it worsens everything.
It’s the same thing with “diversity” and the rest of the DIE (or IED if you prefer) panoply.
Is diversity useful? Not particularly, people have found, outside one, not really honest study. But it could be. Not diversity as the left identifies it but true diversity.
Suppose you’re opening a business that is supposed to serve everyone, but you’ll only hire people who have exactly the same life and work history as yourself (I don’t know, maybe they’re clones.) and therefore you all miss that, I don’t know, the pastries you’re selling have stuff small kids will choke on. Or that women will dislike because it will cover them in sugar. Or whatever. In that case having a woman who has raised children on the staff could help.
In the same way, if you’re a media or entertainment corporation, trying to report the news fairly, you should not hire only people who agree with you. Mostly because if you were suckerpunched by the election in 2016 and are continually stunned as to why Obama and Biden aren’t beloved leaders, you obviously don’t understand most of the country. And saying you understand everyone but the “fringe” only makes us wonder if you know where the fringe is. Kind of like if you think NPR only went nuts in 2016, you make us want to tell you to pull your head out or a smelly and dark place, because the problem was already far advanced. Which is why you slid insensibly into totalitarian behavior.
What I’m trying to say here is that the left looks around and wants to have people of many colors and body types, so they FEEL inclusive and accepting. But skin color doesn’t make editorial decisions. Brains do. And human brains are all white-pink and squishy. Also, please, no, I don’t want to see them.
And when you’re hiring people who know they’re being hired for their skin color, you naturally select people who think skin color is the most important thing for diversity of thought. Which means you select for racists leftists, and for people who likely all think along the same patterns.
This obviously is not going to give you any “diversity” advantages. Whether your job is book publishing or political reporting, it’s just going to crash make your audience appeal more “selective.”
One of the articles I came across yesterday was with subscription services for video content being baffled that their subscriber number are falling. Well, part of it is that they are chasing the wrong end of the stick. And when people don’t like what they produce, then then obsess on race even more, because it must mean the public is racist. When in point of fact it’s the story lines and characters that suck, and race has nothing to do with it.
It’s all chasing the wrong end of the stick.
Are fewer women having children? Raise minimum wage. But what the heck does that have to do with anything? Having children is not merely an economic decision, and people throughout history had children when far poorer than our poorest.
The right end of the stick would involve figuring out why people are marrying late or not at all — and without feminist blinders, please. Perhaps figure out that part of the reason is this artificial division and hatred we’ve put between the sexes — and also if regulations and government hokum have made child raising too onerous. (Answer: yes. They’d already done it in my day. Mostly by trying to save children from horrible situations that 99% of the population would never inflict on them.)
The right side of the stick is to figure out why things aren’t working, not to assume we know the cause and trying to make a quick fix.
Of course, that would require the left to realize that laws and regulations aren’t magical. They don’t do what you want them to, and nothing else, ever. That things have second, third and fourth order consequences.
And sometimes the solution is to take the chainsaw to previous rules, regulations and laws which not only didn’t do what they were supposed to but worsened everything.
And sometimes the solution is to follow the law, like, by having a border.
Neither of which will happen until we hit bottom on our addiction to government, and then it changes.
We’re not at bottom yet. But it looks mighty close.
Be not afraid, brace for impact, and don’t be distracted with short term solutions.
Chainsaw, baby, chainsaw.
According To Hoyt 
So long as there is one unemployed American, corporations have no business bringing in foreigners.
———————————
“Why do you allow such puny, useless, evil creatures to rule over you? Why do you listen to their lies? It makes no sense.”
“Why do you allow such puny, useless, evil creatures to rule over you? Why do you listen to their lies? It makes no sense.”
Might be because I’m not ready to be the person who goes out an exterminates them.
‘when NPR defended itself by saying “look at all the skin colors in our staff.”’
Back when the GameStop stock bubble was first starting (shortly after Biden took office; it’s been a while), a reporter asked Jen Psaki what the Biden administration was going to do in response to the bubble, and the problems that the shorting hedge fund managers were having.
Psaki’s response was to point out that the administration had appointed the first femZle treasury secretary
How is it ‘diversity’ when every single one of them is a clueless incompetent? I thought ‘Circle Back’ Psaki was the world’s worst press secretary — until they replaced her with Mop Head. I shudder to contemplate where they’d find one even worse than that.
Harvard? Yale? Disney’s PR department?
Disney’s ‘picking producers for Star Wars movies’ department. 😛
Speaking of The House of Mouse, their Florida operation maintains an IT department of some 300 folks, or did some years back. All of a sudden about half of those computer professionals got their notice that their jobs had been abolished, made redundant. Only choice was take retirement if eligible or a severance package and move on. I heard from a friend that what you got upon leaving depended on whether you simply left or stayed on long enough to train somewhere around 150 new folks hired on H1b visas for totally different jobs that somehow had requirements and responsibilities coincidentally similar to the jobs just abolished.
Funny that.
That’s been an issue in IT for over 20 years. One of the few who’s said anything about it being a problem is Sen Cruz.
Keeping the jobs in country by bringing in H1Bs is just as bad as watching the jobs go out of country.
But the thing to remember is why they do that.
Because the tax revenue stays in the country. So the politicians still get fat and happy.
Company has been sold, again, from the Canadian private entity to one in Montana. My last employer company, the private entity was threatening to send programming work to somewhere overseas (per insider). Don’t think it happened. Would have been bad in so many ways. I suspect the clients had something to say about that proposal. Clients are 100% government. When tracking down problems, or creating new, programmers work with real data, snapshot frozen in time, but non-the-less, real actual data, not made up mickey mouse data. Most the time would not matter. Talking costs (it is a “cost accounting” system) and time card data. At worse crew and employee codes, but not SS data, most the time. Then some of the new stuff that “wasn’t getting done fast enough” was new payroll module, instead of feeding, or receiving data from a payroll system.
Them: Fix the thing!
Us: Why did the thing break and how?
Them: Doesn’t matter, FIX IT!
Us: We might break it worse.
Them: Stick this on it and it will fix the thing!!
Us: Facepaw and sigh, then braces for impact.
forever wrong solutions to mostly imaginary problems
Long before 2016 I was listening to NPR and the two women were talking about the “Promise Keepers” that had just had a big rally in Washington DC.
Now my father had attended that rally and described it to me as a “revival meeting”.
Now the woman who had been at the rally was “really shocked” at how Non-Political it was.
Now the Promise Keepers were never IMO political because they were more interested in Married Men putting their Wives and Families first in their lives.
But these NPR women, being Liberal, couldn’t imagine that a large organization reaching plenty of people NOT BEING POLITICAL.
Oh, the NPR women finally decided that since Promise Keepers were “Conservative Christian Men” that their “real agenda” was to “keep women from working outside the home” which in their silly minds meant PK were “Political”.
So yes, NPR was very politically Liberal/Left back then because if they weren’t somebody more conservative in a religious sense would have corrected those women. ☹
The Right has dangerous extremists, the Left has activists.
The left has commies who need one-way helicopter rides.
Viva la libertad, carajo! shove
Viva la libertad, carajo!shove
Viva la libertad, carajo!shove
(It’s got a nice rhythm, don’t you think?)
Viva la libertad, carajo! is the most beautiful phrase ever!
“carajo”? was told that means “shit”. As in “no moleste carajo” ” dont mess with my shit”
Maybe, but I doubt it. In Portuguese Caralho is dick.
So a colloquial interpretation would be “Long live liberty, dickhead!” [shove]
I agree with Sarah. Carajo in Spanish literally means [whatever is the worst possible English word for] penis. It has the emotional punch that the F-word used to. So the best translation of that phrase would be “[May] Freedom [live], f*cker!” (shove)
Up With Liberty, Fucker. 😉
Yeah, “Up with [who/whatever]!” does better justice to ¡Viva! than “May it live.”
But, given the context, let’s pick Beautiful(?) over Faithful:
¡Viva la libertad, carajo! means “Let Freedom Ring, F*cker!”
Oh, that works.
More like half-way helicopter rides.
spot on Nathan
We should paint parking lots white, and photograph the patterns they make as a new art form.
The problem is if it gets to be too popular.
I was … well, really a bit surprised and disappointed with NPR in the days of the Tea Party. I was the media rep, for my sins and because the local Tea Party leader knew me from my mil-blogging days and said “Hey, you’ve been in public relations – you wanna handle that aspect for our group?” and I said of course, because he was a fellow military vet and a solid citizen … and I would have thought that the Great Brains at NPR would have looked up the phone numbers for various Tea Partiers and given us a ring, and asked us what we were all about … but no. They apparently thumbed through their Golden Rolodex and called the usual political science experts that they usually relied on for insight and sound-bites for a chin-pulling exercise.
I think that NPR concluded that the Tea Party was all about being mad about socialism and because the president was a man of sort-of-color.
NPR … missing the whole point of everything since the turn of the millennium, if not before.
NPR hasn’t been interested in bi-partisan stories for a long time. I remember back when the ACA rules were finally published, and the Catholic Church got upset about the requirements to fund abortion insurance for its employees. The White House offered a compromise in name only that just changed a couple of terms to make it so that the employers weren’t required to buy abortion insurance, but the insurers were required to include it in all of their policies (I think that was what they did; it’s been a while).
The Vatican, understandably, still wasn’t happy even after the “change”.
So NPR had a roundtable to discuss this change and the Catholic Church. IIRC, not quite half of them thought that the Church had a point in objecting to the law as originally written. Not one of them agreed with the Church’s continued opposition after the “compromise”.
My thought at the time was, “Seriously? You couldn’t be bothered to find *ONE* person who agrees with the Catholic Church on this?”
Actually, it could be “worse”.
There have been plenty of cases where the Press (not just NPR) have had “discussions” of various issues and they chose a kook-ball to present the “opposition” point-of-view.
IE: They can’t show a reasonable person on the “other side of the issue”.
Well, yes. After all, that’s what they were doing under the Fairness Doctrine, when they were required to have “opposing viewpoints”. That’s one of the reasons why the Republicans got rid of it when Reagan took office.
Or go Overton and have the “Opposition” be a Repub like Sue Collins or the like.
RINOs, a Dems best friend.
until they run for Prez, then they’re Hitler and Lucifer incarnate
THIS.
Even Romney got called Hitler once or twice. But I still wonder if the only reason why he ran was to be a sock puppet to beat, and what his payoff was for it.
You’re not alone.
He was to be the GOPe’s proof to the base that it was that low-bred Palin’s drag on the ticket that caused the loss, is what I thought.
Nowadays, “both sides” sounds like Trotskyites versus Maoists. Sometimes they may include a Stalinist for variety’s sake.
“Their diversity is strangely uniform…” is what I usually say about progs when they preach about diversity. (Oh and their inclusiveness is exclusive. Their equality… well, I’m not very creative so I just say it… isn’t.)
Their Equality is caste in a special mold.
I was looking at an ad. 5 young men in a band, all with identical little goatees but different colored shirts.
Me: “Look at them, in their uniquness!”
Dad: “Well, you know what a eunuch is.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about wisdom, what it is and how to get it. So far my findings come down to “this too shall pass” and “whatever you try to make other people do is probably wrong.”
I’ve been busy anyway.things are heating up in financial economic land. There’s a nice juicy scandal in insurance and China continues to circle the drain. Don’t be surprised if there’s a large devaluation in the yuan and another Asian currency crisis. August is traditional with the associated market crash in October. Wouldn’t it be bonny were Obama driven out by the same thing that got him in?
Insurance scandal?
Dang it, now I have something to hang my latest sense of impending dread upon.
(And it has been a good day, too. I thought I’d lost the last pocketknife my dad gave me, and I found it today).
It’s a doozy. Global Life, previously Torchmark. It’s got fraud, drugs, sex — consensual and otherwise — ponzi schemes, false selling, Lamborghinis, weight lifting, and Patek Phillipe. every guy involved has ‘roid face. a real boiler room deal. The damned fools called themselves the wolves of Wall Street.
In fairness, the basic story broke last year, some clown named Arias, but a short seller got hold of more extensive and far reaching stuff that implicates executive management so you had a good, old fashioned bear raid today with share prices dropping by half. $5billion poof, gone. Buffet had dumped his holding last year when the Arias news broke, he has no patience with chicanery.
Normally I find this sort of thing immensely entertaining when it’s just money. this one seems to be much darker than that.
It’s worse than an insurance scandal. It’s 2008 all over again. They have kicked the can down the road twice to avoid the correction, bailed out a few banks last year, and inflation is killing everything. Just wait till the CRE chickens come to roost.
Wrong end, hell, they’ve got ahold of the wrong stick.
But you can’t tell ’em that.
Sure you can (for kinetic values of “tell”). Just take it, reverse it, and demonstrate with a few swings how it actually works. 😈
See it a lot. Then they are surprised that, until full retirement age (used to be age 70) it can affect their SS payments.
And
Granted most senors working part time at the minimum wage jobs being discussed the odds of actually making $22,230 (let alone $56k+) for entire year is limited. Even at CA new $20/hour minimum. But still could apply.
Source: https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/whileworking.html
Is that only W-2 earnings, or does it include interest, dividends, rental income, capital gains and so on?
Last year they told me it was ‘early retirement’ if I applied before 66 years + 8 months. Is it ‘full retirement’ then, or did they stick something else in between?
Full retirement is now 67. Except for those of us between. https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/agereduction.html
Yes. What pays out SS now.
Also, do not know how all this applies to what gets paid out of your pay check to SS or employer’s matching.
For those of us beyond retirement age ($SPOUSE and I were able to collect SS at 62. Insert “Get off my lawn” here.) there’s still the bit where earnings above $XXX cause Social Security benefits to be taxable.
That seriously burned us one year when one long term investment was threatening to go pear shaped, so ’twas cashed out and rolled into another. There was a capital gains bump, low enough not to trigger cap-gains taxes, but enough to do a number of the taxable portion of SS.
There’s also the bit that “tax-free” interest might not show up as income on the first part of the 1040 forms, but they sure as hell do on the SS taxable worksheet. I blew that one year, by misunderstanding something; it was in the 1040 instructions, but way down in a paragraph. Perhaps the only reason to own a MacWin machine, to run TurboTax. I still don’t, but read with more paranoia now.
I build a spreadsheet for the fed and state tax returns. Getting the various worksheets right is a challenge. Makes one wonder if the people who write the damned instructions ever fill out a form using them.
Which is why TurboTax and H&R Block exist.
My beloved is working tor Intuit this year. It’s interesting.
Do tell? Tattle tales welcome.
I hate the new subscription services for Quicken. But to go with the free open source version I’ll have to retrain hubby. Not sure if the free version actually does anything with investment accounts like Schwab, Fidelity, or Fisher, which is what hubby tracks.
TurboTax we use the Deluxe version that I pickup from Costco. We don’t have any non-IRA investment accounts to download tax information from, but son does. We get up to 5 federal free electronic filings. That is ours, son’s, and mom’s. State gets snail mailed.
When I stopped the Windows machines, I looked to see if I could run the Intuit programs under the Wine not-quite emulator for Linux. Seems to be nope. I’m not going to own a Win/Mac machine just for that. (Haven’t looked for compatibility lately, but didn’t expect any improvement, either.)
Most of the time, our income is predictable, but there have been some changes that threw me off. Blew the SS taxable income calculation one year, so the fed was off. Not enough for penalties, but annoying. Now, I’ve learned to read the motherfarging instructions two or three times before setting things up.
We get nailed with the taxable SS on feds too, every year. Not Oregon taxes however 😉(non Oregonians, and those Oregonians not on SS, Oregon taxes $0 SS regardless of how much income). Last year was particularly bad. Between what we had to pull from IRA’s to just keep up with Bidenomics 👎we also had to pay for a roof, and half a garage door (other half hits 2024). All in all, almost $50k, which put us over $100k (for sixth time in 45 years). We have $0 taxable interest (until interest rates go up, a lot), and little capital gains or dividends (everything is in IRA’s). This year because of more house maintenance, is going to be as bad. OTOH one car paid off.
Those seniors will not be getting that $20/hr in Cali that just dropped yesterday. They will be getting fired. Because the real minimum wage is zero.
I heard that a couple of pizza chains in Cali fired -all- their delivery drivers last week before the wage hike came in, and contracted with Uber and Lyft to do the deliveries instead. It is not difficult to read the tea-leaves and predict that pizza delivery will disappear as a thing before the end of 2024.
Fast food itself may very well disappear as a thing in California before the end of 2025. Are people really going to pay $25 for a happy meal? When they’re unemployed?
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Kipling seems to show up a *lot* here. I wonder why that is? (No, actually I don’t.) 😉
We are all inveterate Kiplers here.
Kipling was the George Carlin of his era, just not as funny.
Oh, I don’t know…..
”
Watch ‘im, with ‘is ‘air cut,Count us filin’ by –Won’t the Colonel praise ‘isPop — u — lar — i — ty!We ‘ave scores to settle –Scores for more than beer;She’s the girl to pay ’em –That is why we’re ‘ere!”
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/sergeants_weddin.html
now imagining a meme with NPF and Leatherface
Back during WW2, the army was concerned about ‘all the bullet holes’ in aircraft that returned to the feild on thier own. They wanted to ‘up-armor’ those areas. One engineer told them “NO! armor the areas that weren’t hit, because the planes that didn’t come back were hit in those areas, and crashed.”
The problem with our system is that Negative Feedback is misinterpretted, (or ignored!!!) and most (all?) of the left runs on positive feedback which ALWAYS starts a decline in function, leading to failure.
That’s remarkably obvious, but I don’t think that I would have caught it.
As much as I’d like to believe it was an engineer, it was a mathematician. https://worldwarwings.com/the-statistics-that-kept-countless-allied-fighter-planes-in-the-sky/
I stand corrected, and happily so. Memory may have slipped a tooth, but hasn’t blown the cams yet.
Back from our eclipse road trip to the hill country of Texas.
Hope you had a good view. We were very lucky/blessed in Indiana.
And according to Scientific American, the red dot I saw was a solar prominence. I’m impressed.
It was mostly cloudy but we did get a glimpse of totality and the solar corona so I’m happy. One of the NASA guys who was also at Garner State Park wanted one of my sister-in-law’s photos so that was cool.
We watched from Shelbyville, Indiana and had great look in viewing. I thought the red dot was Mercury, but a solar prominence might actually be cooler. Metaphorically speaking. And despite the alternator dying in the stop-and-go traffic on the way back, it was a lot of fun. I even got the vehicle back, fixed, before noon the next day.
My road-trip was to the back yard, we were in the eclipse path this year. ~:D
Cloudy, but we got a clear break for the eclipse. Super cool!
If they had a clue and could think, they wouldn’t be Communists. Some just pay lips service to Communism and are just lining their pockets with their thirty pieces of silver. Make no mistake, both are evil, and I hope you never have to deal with one of the slimy ignorant/uneducated diploma-ed bastards. May God have mercy on their souls, we should build walls around their cities to keep them in and let them feed upon each other.
“who in America thinks that kids are at risk of being put in sweatshops and worked night and day?”
[raises hand]
Except that the sweatshops are called “public schools” and in particular “good public schools.” They’re operating on the busywork theory of education: “Look at how much the children are doing! How could they possibly not be learning anything?” Then if you do show that the children aren’t learning, the answer is to double down and make them do even more busywork – longer school years, longer school hours, and more homework assigned to be done each night.
Yes. That. Of course. But that’s not what the left fears.
I doubt the left actually fears anything to do with the possibility of sweatshops; as with nearly everything their professed “fear” is nothing of the sort, merely a way to pile on more regulations, since such regulations increase their power and promote their agenda. Their concern for minors is essentially zero, as shown by the Epstein Island scandal, and many others. 😡
Having been a teacher, it is still astounding to me looking back at just how much the system is built around measuring and judging inputs rather than outputs.
As you mention, homework amount is often used as a measure of how good a school is. This is a good case study: since independent practice is an important part of learning, some “homework” is important/inevitable. And people think more of a good thing is always better so even more homework should be even better! They are missing diminishing returns and the costs of homework that you note.
Now being able to look back on the private schools I worked at vs. the public schools, what I note is that when I was working in the good private school we had a really good curriculum, and I was able to provide a very consistent experience for the students. After a couple of years of experience I was able to assign fairly focused homework sets that were trimmed of all the fat, such that even bad-at-math kids could get all the math problems done at school as long as they actually spent their time in class working on them.
But back in topic, a big part of why I was so effective with that was because I checked every single problem the students did, and had it back to them by their next class. (Yes, this was part of the reason why the problem sets got optimized). So amount of time spent was not what was measured, actual progress in recognizing and solving math problems was what was measured every single class.
The last public school I worked at was pretty much the opposite, ironic since they were going all in on buzzword soup that one would naively think would mean output measuring. The problems were several-fold. First, I had four times as many students at the public school as at the private school. Second, the curriculum was new (in contrast to the private school and their deliberate decision to stick with a now out of print curriculum) and so we had lots of extra work to do to figure out what exactly we were doing with it. Third, the math department head chose to implement the new curriculum in basically the most labor intensive way possible, and being new to the school I went along with it since I figured I was still learning how to deal with the huge classes. Fourth, the whole institution is built around being a prison, where the 90 percent of kids who want to learn are stuck with the 10 percent who really do not want to be there and make everyone else suffer. Which means that being a teacher in public schools, even good suburban ones like the one I was at, is more about your ability to exert control over teenagers and manipulate them into behaving by force of personality than it is about your actual knowledge of the subject.
I feel like I lost track of what I was replying to at some point in there. Oh well, it is still good to get some of that out instead of keeping it all bottled up.
Cue the old joke about ‘diversity’: A black leftist, a female leftist, a hispanic leftist, a homosexual leftist, a disabled leftist…
Or the other old joke about a diverse staff or faculty: “A sheep-like herd of independent thinkers.”
Life of Brian: “You are all individuals!” Crowd in unison: “We are all individuals!”
I’m really curious how we’re supposed to know what color someone’s skin is on National Public RADIO.
They’ll tell you.
Back in the Dark Ages of the Internet, before the year 2000, I encountered One Of Those People posting on a bulletin board. No usericons, no photos, just green text on a dark background.
He absolutely insisted that people treating his trolling as a bad thing were doing so out of RACISM. Despite that the BB system was all text, all the time.
A lot of times you can tell, just by the way they speak. It takes a lot of work to drop the accents of your childhood to sound colorless.
I find the biggest problem with those who scream for, or legislate, minimum wage laws have absolutely zero knowledge of economics, or reality. They think mandating a handout stands completely isolated from anything else. They never understand that networks are interconnected and changing one thing causes the entire network to shift. Nor do they understand that after the shift, their change is usually negated.
And yet they’re full of dire (if ignorantly overstated) warnings about ecology and how nature is full of interconnections, so that messing with the environment can produce horrible effects. It’s just the economic environment that they’re sanguine about polluting, clear-cutting, and paving over.
Funny how ‘selective’ they are about that, isn’t it?
The Left, for the most part, has never been particularly deep thinkers. Or perhaps wide is a better term-there’s a strain of autism in how they think, believing that because they know (or think they know) one thing, they know a whole lot of other things.
It’s why a lot of them do very, very well in the arts. Because they think they know everything…but really only know one thing.
I have read some good stuff recently about right-brain vs. left-brain thinking, which fortuitously lines up with the political divisions.
The basic thrust is that the right brain observes reality as it is, while the left brain creates a model and puts things into it. Both processes are important for a healthy mind as them bouncing off each other allows us to comprehend reality with mental models that match what is actually going on around us.
As you mention, a strong left brain can create art very well–the internal vision is imposed out onto reality even if such a thing never existed. But then we can see if the right brain is abandoned, the art will wither like modern Hollywood since a vision too disconnected from reality will be unable to connect with other people.
Having not much to say about the article, I’ll talk about the AI art. First, I appreciate the AI art you put at the top of the articles; it’s often gorgeous. This time is no exception… but as usual, the AI doesn’t actually understand what it’s mimicking. Look at the boy’s grip on the wooden pole. His right hand is holding it pretty close to correctly, but his left hand isn’t holding the pole at all; it’s just resting a fist on top of the pole. Any martial arts instructor would yell at him for using such a stupid grip, because even an amateur with zero training would know to open that left hand and wrap it around the pole.
Yes the grip is weird, looks to me like the right wrist is twisted oddly too.
At least the image clearly looks like a boy. Not nearly dirty enough, though, for any young male anywhere near the woods, especially in the midst of tree-and-stick endeavors.
Agreed on the right wrist, which is why I said “pretty close” to correctly. I’m not trained enough in FEMA or stick fighting (or baseball, even) to know if cocking the wrist like that would produce any advantage, but I didn’t think so.
You’re also right about not being nearly dirty enough, which I didn’t think about. I have two young boys. I should have thought about it. 🙂
Come to think about it, AI-generated faces are pretty much always pretty. Sometimes the male faces are ruggedly handsome rather than pretty (more on that later), but I’ve rarely seen an ugly face in AI-generated art. By which I mean, a well-drawn face that is supposed to look ugly. (I’m sure the AIs generate plenty of faces that are ugly by accident, though people rarely post those so I don’t see them because I don’t have a reason to pay for an art generator subscription).
For example, look at https://civitai.com/ and scroll through the models section, subsection character. (Don’t do it at work or where other people can see your screen, though, because while MOST of the images you’ll see are safe for work, some will be decidedly NOT so). Lots and lots of human faces and bodies, 98% of them female, 85% of them anime-inspired, and not an ugly one in the lot. (Except for “well, that’s not to my taste” — let’s just say that some people like certain body types. Again, don’t browse this at work. The character models shown all have clothes on, but it’s pretty obvious what some of them are designed for.) Oh, and speaking of clothing, the “clothing” subsection of the models has some pretty stunning stuff, too. Also NEARLY all safe for work.
Point is, AI art is trained to produce attractive-looking human figures, not deliberately-ugly ones.
AI is trained using vast quantities of stuff found online. And there are a *lot* of galleries that focus exclusively on attractive members of one or the other sex.
That’s likely influencing what the AI draws.
Gah. I meant HEMA, not FEMA.
In my defense, if this were for a cover say, I would play with it long enough to fix the bits. But for blog illustration I don’t want to take the time.
No worries whatsoever. I don’t expect you to spend hours on a cover image for free ice cream.
I think it’s more useful as a metaphor. AI art is like someone who is mimicking real life but doesn’t quite understand it.
I’m not being “clever” here, but– that is exactly why so many Hollywood writer types are worried it will take their jobs.
The biggest weakness in entertainment right now is exactly that– folks mimic the form without understanding the function.
The traditional example of this is knife throwing in movies.
Throwing knives is not easy. But it got used to show “wow, this person is really exceptional,” and now it’s “I took fifteen minutes and now the main character girl can throw knives more reliably than most people can shoot!”
There were two scenes in “Romancing The Stone” that I just loved.
The female main character was a romance writer and the first scene was of her character throwing a knife that takes down a bad guy.
Later in the movie, the female main character attempts to take down a bad guy by throwing a knife. He easily gets out of the way of the thrown knife. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I saw a live throw-knives-at-blindfolded-woman act (at a rodeo, of all places). It was remarkably disappointing for exactly that reason.
What is the point of putting a blindfold on the target? Now, if the knife thrower was blindfolded, that would make a difference.
So the target won’t flinch when thrown at.
“..not easy” is an understatement. I’m not sure whether a knife or a handgun is more difficult to become expert at, but it takes about 5,000 rounds to become a relatively competent pistol shot on stationary targets from a stationary position at up to 25 yards; far more if either or both are moving, and as the range increases. I suspect doing the same with a knife is similar, but limited to 10-15 yards, and that’s for a knife you’re familiar with, properly balanced for throwing. Movie writers seem blissfully unaware of any of this, and usually ascribe magical powers to both knives and handguns.
Funny thing:
Axe throwing, or rather. hatchet throwing?
THAT is pretty easy.
My brother and I– and I am “has trouble dribbling a basket ball” level skilled– became pretty good at it, so a good fifteen feet away, we could sink the hatchet for kindling into the side of a tree.
I’ll concede that compared to knife throwing it’s quite a bit easier; I’ve done some of both, and was able to get the sharp end (edge?) into the target much more readily with the hatchet. Another advantage: Even if it hits haft-forward it’ll get his attention in a way a knife hilt usually won’t. Especially if it hits the throat or face. Not that I’d ever consider throwing at anything other than a target, of course… 🙂
I like the sharpened entrenching shovel.
Sharpened entrenching tools work very well as melee weapons, especially the folding kind, which can have the blade locked at 90 degrees. From what I understand they were quite popular in the trenches in WWI. 😈
But I can’t see trying to throw them very effectively.
That seems a little excessive?
OTOH I scared the crap out of the people around me the first time I was taught to shoot a pistol, so perhaps I am not the best judge.
“…scared the crap out of the people around me…” 😃
Admittedly the meaning of “relatively competent” is subjective; to me, it means something like “able to hit the target every time (slow fire), and to hold a group no larger than about twice the inherent accuracy of the weapon, with no more than 1 or 2 flyers”. For any decent handgun, that would mean a group (10 shots preferable, 5 OK) of somewhere around 4″ at 25 yards, most good handguns being capable of 2″ groups at that range. All fired without a rest, of course 😉.
And before you ask, no, I don’t consider myself relatively competent in that respect, since I don’t have the time or money to stay in practice; shooting is a perishable skill; most competition shooters fire 500 or more rounds per week. My level is more like “5 rounds in an 8″ group at 7 yards, rapid fire, every time”; fine for defensive purposes, but far from good enough to compete.
No defense needed. The points noted are about what AI produces, obviously with the dev team’s idea that the image is “correct”.
Robin’s note about faces is one such: Clearly the symmetry and such rules for attractive faces is something the dev teams worked on a lot, since bad faces will make most viewers react badly. And hands appear to have gotten better, but hand-wrist positioning within the bounds of anatomy are obviously still an “area for improvement”.
Historic European Martial Arts? That’s a lot of fun, but can be painful beating each other black and blue, even through all the armor and padding.
Precisely. I’ve taken exactly one class, a beginner-level class on swordfighting that was offered at a local community college back when I was living in Illinois. (Forget how I found out about it, but I probably saw a poster). They gave us two-handed wooden swords (I think they callled them “bastard swords”, so maybe they were hand-and-a-half) and taught us the basic stances. I remember the instructors mentioning old European training manuals, so they probably had a HEMA background, even if the historical stuff wasn’t emphasized in the beginner-level class.
Apart from that, I haven’t been able to pursue HEMA stuff very much living over here in Asia. So I have no knowledge of the fine points of grip, and couldn’t tell a student “Hey, slide your hand an eighth-inch that way, you’ll improve your grip balance” to save my life. But I do know that a hand not wrapped around the hilt is a hand not involved in gripping the sword. 🙂
I get thrown off a little because the stick that’s behind his back at the top looks like it should be the same as the one down nearer his waist, but there’s one hell of an implied S shape if it’s a single stick.
Re illegals jobs, aside from the traditional agricultural work, I recall the big harumph during the CCP virus about illegals employed all over the turning-cattle-into-steaks industry who, imagine the NERVE, came into work when they were sick in order to keep their job, since the entire point of their employment was that they were themselves easily replacing the last guys who were chopping up cattle.
The reporters on the story working in their pajamas discovered that, oddly, you can’t chop up a 700lb Angus into tasty steaks via remote work-from-home.
The end result was the meat packing industry had long already had The Wuhanenza roll through the workers and their families, with typical non-fatal effects, well before they came to the notice of the public health professional panickers.
But it’s their job to save children from abuse! Whether they need saving or not. If they don’t find enough child abuse to keep them all busy, some of them might get sacked. Inconceivable!
I tried asking a $20/hour minimum wage advocate what the proper minimum wage should be. Why not $100/hour, so we could all have big houses with 2 Teslas in the garage. Instead of thinking about it, she indignantly insisted that she would never drive a Tesla (apparently because Musk is now a perpe-traitor of evil bad-think).
It’s like arguing with Jehovah’s Witnesses. When you confront them with evidence from the bible that clearly contradicts their beliefs, they simply change the subject. When you try math (they believe there will only be 144,000 folks saved at the second coming, and I pointed out that they already had more adherents than that, so recruiting me diluted their chances to be saved), they pretend not to have heard you.
I honestly don’t know what to say to these people except, “Bless your heart.”
I asked that question about the 144,000 once. They had 144,000 before their founder died. She said that 144,000 will get into heaven, and “The meek will inherit the earth.”
“In 6 x 2 foot plots”, channeling Lazurus Long.
“I honestly don’t know what to say to these people except, “Bless your heart.””
I prefer “get off my lawn.” I can’t generate enough goodness in my heart to bless them, and there’s no use lying.
For Leftists I add short, four-letter modifiers usually starting with “f”. Also hand gestures and a menacing expression. They’re trying to destroy my country and family after all, no sense holding back.
You know, I can’t remember ever seeing a pretty enough Jehovah’s witness to even entice me into joining them. But I’m shallow that way.
Back in ancient times when I first got out of college I had NPR on while in traffic because their corporate voice is so low key and calm. But the words eventually got to be too much, always one side, their “balance” was balanced toppled over leftward, and eventually I gave up and went all classical for my drive accompaniment. But throughout my years in cubical land cube-dwellers always expounded on how balanced the coverage was on NPR, even when Radio Moscow English Service and old school Pravda was still right there for comparison.
My response was to change the subject to the weather. This is a key trick for surviving once awakened while working among the cubes – be knowledgeably boring on a non-threatening topic.
But NPR has always been such. I always could not figure out why NPR, regularly begging for money directly from listeners, was so deserving of tax funding. Still can’t.
Well, partly because one of their products is snobbery. By paying them, you prove your sophistication and need for a superior product designed for superior people.
THIS.
I had a long road trip in ’05 when my stepfather died. The truck was basic as hell, AM/FM radio (no cruise control either; made I-80 lots of no fun), and the only radio in the Back of Beyond was NPR or [shudder] Radio America. Got the Cartalk guys for one segment, then Rachel Madcow attempting something she thought approached humor. Some sketch about the Minute Men at the border conflating with Burning Man. Took a lot of brain bleach to forget the details.
I turned off the radio and started to sing. “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” was much more rewarding.
The next road trip (9 years later), I had a car with an mp3-aware CD system in it. Much better, and I could search out the weather reports when necessary. Shorter but much more frequent (200 mile round trip) excursions since then have been in a car with USB stick support, so if I don’t like what’s on, I have a few hundred others to choose.
I haven’t listened to radio in easily 20 years. 2001 I got a 10 CD player rack in my truck, put it on shuffle and swapped the CDs pretty often. After that it was MP3s, even better.
These days I (finally, dragged kicking and screaming) use Spotify. I use my old phone as a music player and listen to my stored “favorites” on the road, no internet connection needed.
Because radio is -toxic- now, and has been since at least 1998, IMHO.
Incidentally, I finally found out why. Here’s an amazing video that tells you all about what happened to music and radio in the 1990s. We didn’t imagine it, they really did get worse. Rick Beato, “How corruption and greed led to the downfall of rock music.”
TL/DR, Clinton and the DemocRats did it with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. But watch the video, you’ll learn a lot about why you can’t find decent music anymore.
We use Spotify too. Free version. We also have all our CD’s ripped to MP3 on a thumb drive. We do listen to country radio, if available, when driving, background noise. We’ve use Satellite, but only when free (first 3 years after buying car, occasionally get a few months free because of maintenance by the dealership). But given where we travel, Satellite is often cuts out (canyons between burns and Ontario), thus we aren’t paying for it. Then we switch to MP3 (if satellite is cutting out, cell service and Spotify is not working either).
theres another side too,
when i was a kid i worked, stuff adults did, and was ok at most of it, from an early age it was obvious to most normal people that i had talent, all i wanted to do was take auto mechanics at the local community college, but that got squelched, was told in no uncertain terms you will go to college elsewhere, never mind that i was an awful student, and wasnt remotely interested in all the basic requirements of a 4 year college, long story short, it didnt work, been in the trades for 30+ years thank you.
I was college track, but the HS guidance counselor was horrified that I wanted to take Drafting and [searches for fainting counch] Metal Shop sophomore year. Took a certain amount of arm twisting, and my father might have had to chime in (it was back in the mid 1960s, so memory is a touch faded), but I got my way.
Somehow, the thought that a college-bound student might want to be able to draw a diagram and read a blueprint never occurred to the idiot, and that understanding manufacturing processes is a bit easier if you have some knowledge of the process is actually useful. Maroon.
(Got along well with the greasers in metal shop. I knew the dirty jokes and wasn’t scared of cutting oil, so I fit in. Still can’t weld worth a damn, but the JC welding classes are at hours I’d rather not have to deal with at my age. I hate driving at night.)
My middle school had a GREAT set of shop classes. I took them all: Drafting, woodworking, metal working, etc… It was great fun and I learned a lot, even though I never planned on doing any of that as a career.
No one expects everyone who takes Trigonometry to become a mathematician. Why expect everyone who takes a metal working class to become a sheet-metal worker?
I imagine that is long gone. The school is still in the same building. I suppose I could check next time I go back to Oshkosh (WI, not NE).
Economics is not a science. Controlling variables, reproducibility? Nope.
You know what else is not a science? History.
Once upon a time, they both were disciplines. Then they got the Marxist rot & skinsuited.
Codex’s corollary to Iowa Hawk’s SJW Laws: Once the skinned and beloved institution is visibly rotting, they’ll try to convince you it was ever thus.
Don’t let the rotters get away with their crime.
Also the linked article was hilarious in it’s lack of self-awareness. Though in fairness to poor Uri wossname, I spent a lot of time trying to do the same thing. In fairness to me I succeded for a while. Until I didn’t.
He is oblivious to how deep the rot goes. It is to his credit he actually has the honesty to realize it’s gone too far.
It usually takes one’s own ox being gored to look around and perceive the widespread failure of a congenial environment. As you point out, that he can do it at all is unusual in that setting: So kudos to him.
very carefully hides the whitepink squishy thing that he was about to show off
“Put that thing back where it came from, or so help me…!”
Poster: “Eat your brains! There are starving zombies in Washington D.C.”
fixing the fuel leak with a blow torch is always the leftoid method.
Shooting the mosquito with a laser cannon? On an airless moon.
But what if the mosquito is on the hide of a spherical cow standing on a frictionless surface?
Yeah, the whole thing is equal parts weird and sad. I don’t know how to fix it at my level either.
It’s all planned. Cloward-Piven. The antichrist/Marxist utopia model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy
But, to follow that is foolish! And read Romans 1:18-32, especially verse 22, if you don’t mind me playing the same song.
I grew up in California before, during, and after, it was ruined. I’ve read Jeremy Rifkin and Milton Friedman and understand the differences.
The left wants all of us to be slaves like the people in TMIAHM. Or the peoples in China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc. And when we’re gone, no one else will have a chance to escape.
Plan/Do/Check/Act. Be there “firstest with the mostest”. Have a ready defense for what we believe. Find a way through church/organization to mentor kids the right way. What we call capitalism is human nature—we all like to own things.
While we breath there is hope.
Isaiah 3 keeps coming to mind. Like Isaiah 3: 4-5:And I will give children to be their princes, and babes [maybe better, in the Septuagint, “empaiktai”=”[childish] mockers” or “deceivers”] shall rule over them. 5 And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable.
And Isaiah 3:12 As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.
Previews of Coming Attractions.
Very nice find! And sadly, sppokily accurate.
Thanks, but what with my black-pillable nature, I’d prefer “reassuringly accurate”. He knew how it ends before He ever let it begin. Whoever coined the word Apocaloptimist gave us a great gift.
Ecclesiastes 10:16-17 fits too: Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning! (A king in his second childhood is no better.) 17 Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness!
We might have to stretch that “son of nobles” part a little to cover Donald Trump, but he is a teetotaler, and the land sure was more blessed when he was kinging it.
And I wonder if Elon got a twinge and ditched “Twitter” and that bird logo from reading Ecclesiastes 10:20 Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
WP “helped” a LOT with the formatting here… [bites nails]
Definite chainsaw time. Off-topic: there are polls up here indicating the strongest conservative majority in more or less ever is an election away. I will be glad to be rid of the Pretty Pony, but it would be awesome to have a PM Milei…
Chainsaws for the win.
Liberals almost always seek solutions to symptoms and almost never the root problem … money doesn’t cure poverty … never has … lack of money is a symptom of being poor not the root cause … the root casues are almost always a combination of 1) lack of skills 2) lack of jobs 3) and in some cases lack of motivation to get a better job (which usually means acquiring new skills)
a big problem is that the “skills” needed in the workplace are almost never aquired thru schooling … many of them are aquired “on the job” and the higher the minimum wage the less chance an inexperienced worker will get a shot at a job, and skills, and a chance for more skills and a better job …
The left technogarchy is frantically working on AI to eliminate the need for anyone to work for them, other than a few useful idiots. They will make it impossible for programmers to earn a living wage, as well as make it impossible for their ideal world to exist any longer. Minimum wage is irrelevant. No need for employees, means no need for wages. Yes, I know, miracles can’t keep the computers running, the internet humming, and keep people ignorant. The latter, many of them seem fully capable of doing without AI.
Starlink would be a savior, however if anyone thinks that the 3 letter agencies will allow the prols to have any kind of samizdat surface better think again.
L. Neil’s Covenant of Unanimous Consent would be a way out to a minimalist, maybe government, but it’s a long, slow, very slow, slog to get people to even think of all organizations being constructed of relationships between each two individuals within them. It is a fact, but a very uncomfortable one for most people.
Majorly disagree. Just like the art AI produces, programming done by AI, won’t be good enough. Even tech systems that create code used by people who do not know how to structure programs are never quite right. It takes someone who knows not only how, and why, things work. Great shortcut. Guarantied if non-programmers attempt it, they will come short.
Or why I had a career for 35 years. I even was involved with a tool (mentioned before) that marketing tried to bill “for non-programmers”. Reality check, it was for non-C-programmers. Even then some of the problems they triggered were spectacular.
The rest of it IDK. But I suspect they are over reaching.
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Function A calling function B calling function C calling function D calling function A, is not recursive programming. There will be a stack overflow. The more functions between A and D the faster stack overflow happens. Guarantied. Stack overflow is never good.
The real problem will be testing AI. Getting an AI to test an AI is circular logic at it’s finest.
That’s what Dan says too, Dep!
That is a weird way to say hypercharge the productivity of competent programmers while showing up the Javascript Studies Degree crowd for the frauds they are.
Wait a minute…..
YOU MORON
They don’t get a choice. It exists. Now. YOU ARE USING IT WHILE DENYING IT COULD EVER EXIST.
I just had a reply to you disappear into WP’s abyss. It had to do with making the (obviously extant) internet unusable for samizdat via the for-the-children excuse of requiring your proof-of-age (thus, your ID) even to view, much less post. “Chilling Effect”, doncha know. But clearly that’s not the only way to make things unusable!
So the mere possibility that somewhere, someone will come up with a solution that you don’t like– one which is nothing but giving some slight teeth to existing laws — means that there is no chance of a samizdat.
Unless you’re talking about the actually checking for id to purchase a thing which it is illegal for children to access version of the set-your-hair-on-fire brigade.
…. either way, I was thinking that Ian was being uncharitable in his description.
I no longer think that.
Worrying about for-the-children stuff being used as a power grab to neuter the internet is actually the first decent point he’s made.
Mostly because it’s been tried every hour on the hour for nearly 30 years. And that is being generous and only counting from the first big one which hit the mainstream.
There’s a vast difference between worrying, and pretending like that worry means it’s already in place.
Especially when the recent format is “same rule as has been in place since the 90s, but they have to remove the account when contacted by a parent” and “can’t buy stuff online they can’t buy in person.”
Part of why I don’t give much credence to this panic stuff?
They never want to FIX the stuff by hard work, it’s either “burn it all down” or “hey, this might get in my way, NOW it’s a problem, and also hopeless.”
The “must be 13 to get an account” type rules could very easily be improved.
The ffirst law of economics is that resources are finite while desires aren’t. AI isn’t going to render people unemployable, it will free them up to create new wealth.
Blacksmiths put flint knappers out of business, don’tcha know.
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“We didn’t leave the Stone Age because we ran out of rocks.” — Dr. John Christy
I’m not sure if you are speaking purely of their intentions, and not addressing their actual ability, or if this is your strong background in pure mathematics blinding you in some way.
There are most certainly a lot of people very confident in AI.
I’m not sure many of them have quite the right background to test the internal assumptions, rather than taking them on blind faith.
There’s basically a narrower but stronger disproof of strong AI hypothesis, and a broader weaker one.
The stronger one attacks the singularity, which supposes that there will be breakaway synergies to AI, that must quickly outpace human oversight. One of the key steps is AI chip design, so that working and advanced chip designs are produced with minimal human intervention, or even despite human intervention. The domains of the argument are electrical engineering knowledge of IC fab, IC fab industry gossip, engineering research in neural nets, and maybe some of the stuff involving electromagnetics simulation research. (There’s a rabbit trail through challenges in AI deisgn of quantum computing chips that probably is not relevant.) The summary is that if you have a plausible path to making it happen soon, you could make a lot of money if real, and a little money if by fraud.
But, if the opposing argument is not formulated in so strong a way, it may still be disproveable, but in a less persuasive way. If neural nets are more complicated digital filters, than some other truisms of digital filters may hold. The issue is that engineering is tricky, and one element that may be hard to automate is the human judgement of what would be good or bad in a design. Work has been done for a while to the end of letting the human set that up for a specific problem, then automating the solving of the rest. Maybe results are debateable.
Some of the AI enthusiasts are not even technologists.
Technologists may also fail to grasp that technology is one thing, and changing human behavior can be another.
It is possible to be financially successful as a technologist without being very good and it, and without understanding the qualities of technologies distinct from what one has worked on.
Try working with PCB autorouting programs. It seems such a simple task, doesn’t it? Connect all the appropriate pins of various components with traces, maintain specified clearances between traces, pads and other features.
Cleaning up after the autorouter can take longer than doing the job yourself. The A.I. finds stupid solutions that would never occur to a human. Traces that wander all over the board instead of taking a reasonably direct path from U23 to Q18.
I remember one particular memory board. 32 identical RAM chips on each side, some buffer chips and a lot of bypass caps. Address pins of all the chips connected to the address drivers; data pins to the data buffers; clock, RAS and CAS from drivers to RAMs with equal-length traces to prevent skew. Simple, right?
The first run was a disaster. A plate of spaghetti. Throw it out, refine the rules and try again. Spaghetti. I wound up having to route all the clock, RAS and CAS signals myself and lock them down so the stupid A.I. wouldn’t monkey with them. When it finally delivered a semi-reasonable layout, spend hours more cleaning it up.
Rather than an infinite number of monkeys, A.I. is one really fast monkey with eight hands. Still produces 99% gibberish. A really advanced A.I. only produces 98% gibberish.
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G’Kar: “Weep for the future, Na’Toth. Weep for us all.”
As has been known for decades. Computers will simply make mistakes faster.
A.I. excels at finding new and innovative ways to be stupid.
Isn’t that Darwinian Evolution in action? 99-point-whole-buncha-nines-percent “mistakes” until some lucky bug gets dealt a winning hand?
You haven’t lived until you see what an autorouter can do to a complex RF or microwave design. At one point, the Reader had the pleasure of going into the office for the sector VP of engineering and telling him the autorouting software he had mandated everyone use was a piece of crap and the microwave design group was reverting to the previous tool (which was basically an Etch a Sketch for a skilled draftsman). The Reader’s career survived that only because at the time he worked for the VP of Manufacturing who was pissed that the new designs were hitting the factory broken.
When I was a kid back in the 1970s, my brother and I both had paper routes, and so did a lot of our friends. I was startled to find that this was no longer a Thing; papers were delivered (insofar as they still were) by adults.
I think a lot of this changed in the wake of the disappearance of Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin, here in Iowa. People freaked out and thought that slavering pedophiles were lurking behind every tree and bush, waiting to jump out and drag sweet, innocent paper boys away to fates worse than waking up wearing a wedding ring in bed with Yoko Ono.
A lot of the over-coddling of children we get now comes from the endless hysteria about 99%-imaginary pedophiles. Pedophiles are like witches in the old days, or Trotskyists in Stalin’s USSR—convenient hate objects that everybody can agree on.
Another part that killed paper delivery (other than not local) was not having the paper deliverer actually collect the monthly fee. Our paper person never got a Christmas bonus. But they got a decent tip every month (worked out to $120/year). That stopped when we quit taking the paper. Now the occasional free paper goes immediately into the recycling bin, plastic bag and all. I cannot tolerate the stench of the ink and cheap paper out gas. Finally got whoever delivers the weekly ad bundle to stop that too.
Just remember that the four principles of The Party’s ideology are:
Ignorance is Strength
Freedom is Slavery
War is Peace
Conformity is Diversity