Hi. I have bad news. Then again, I have good news.
Spoiler: It’s the same news.
The bad news is: I’m sorry, no one is coming to rescue you. No one even knows what rescuing you would entail. Not in the long run.
We are largely on our own surrounded by people no smarter or more capable than us. It’s up to you. And me. And all our friends and relatives. We have to, somehow, rescue ourselves.
The good news is: No one can plan the future and make it work exactly as it should with amazing foresight, etc. Which means you’re still free. And likely to remain so, even if some set of idiots or other thinks they making nefarious plans that this time, no fooling, are totally going to work.
In not completely unrelated news, I finally started reading the first David Starr adventure (Well, I finished Laura’s book and need to read something at lunch. (My co-worker — coff. Husband — and I usually have dinner together (unless I’m upstairs hitting the clanker and forgot to eat) but have lunch separately. And I can’t eat by myself without a book.
Anyway hit the “Council of Science” and hit my had on the table, repeatedly. It’s such an … Asimov Thing to have in the book.
OTOH, it’s not just Asimov. It is very much an idea fossilized in early twentieth century science fiction. (Probably in later too. Most of them were thoroughly unmemorable. At least in the ones I like there usually isn’t some kind of “superior man” controlling everything.)
There’s this idea that somehow, somewhere there are — or sometimes should be — hidden masters of the universe controlling everything.
Should be? Oh, it never fails. Any post that mentions race or ethnicity or culture (here we go again) gets someone to come over into the comments, spin around in a bloody tizzy and shriek “IQ, IQ, IQ” apparently under the amiable assumption that this is an all powerful incantation that will make me apologize for everything and completely agree with him. (Um… wonder if it would work on the clanker. Calling it a clanker didn’t!)
Since usually these posts are in relation to immigration, the implication behind the meltdowns is that we should only import the highest IQs…. Look, dudes, I have nothing against Chinese and Jews, but I refuse to believe we only need them, forever. For one right now the Chinese are as likely as not to be contaminated with authoritarian ideology. For another the type of person erupting in Tourettes-like shouts of “IQ” usually completes their charming personality with a hatred for Jews.
I’m only half joking about the IQs. Yes, Asians and Jews tend to be highest, but it varies within the groups — of course! — but all the same, here’s the secret sauce: IQ measurement, if done properly, by unbiased testers and in the right way (I was certified as a proctor once upon a long time ago) is very good at predicting you’ll do well in college and certain types of professions, mostly those having to do with high abstraction.
The point I want to make — hear me out — is that those are not, nor will they ever be the only type of immigrants we need.
High IQ people are not generally better at life. In fact trust me on this, some of the very highest IQ people I know pre-GPS needed a map to tell him how to get back from the grocery store after using another map to drive to it. And this grocery store was up the road for blocks, turn left, two blocks and you’re there. (And no, not husband. Husband has an almost supernatural sense of direction.) Even I who have no sense of direction can figure that out.
And don’t get me started on very high IQ people and not picking up social clues. Or– well, other things.
Let’s say like having a Phd in one field doesn’t give you the ability to comment/know about all others, having a very high IQ doesn’t make you the sort of polivalent genius that bestrode these SF novels: capable of doing whatever the author needed him/her to do at the drop of a hat.
Very high IQ people can often perform miracles, it’s true, if the type of miracle you need is “You need to be at first year of college level as a chemistry major in two weeks, and I don’t care if you’re a 9th grader. Here’s a stack of books. Go.” (Totally random… yes, the idiot did pull it off.)
However it tends to be highly specialized. if you’d handed younger son the same book and given him the same instructions, he’d have ignored it for two weeks then told you it was impossible. He can however make things work that physically shouldn’t.
High IQ people are more… specialized. the IQ might test high all over, but what will even hold their attention tends to be a narrow band of stuff, and outside that they’re morons. Or next door to.
One of the things high IQ people are UNIFORMLY bad at, unless that is their particular area of obsession of course is predicting the behavior of other people, particularly masses of people over a long period of time.
They shouldn’t feel TOO badly about that, though, because no one is good at it. In fact humans en mass tend to be fairly unpredictable. I mean, I can make some predictions, sometimes, a year or two into the future, can make decent guesstimates about trends beyond that, but my batting average, while better than usual, is not 100%. (And BGE predicts a lot of stuff, after studying it, but we’re both baffled by some of it.)
So, this brings us to the other great myth of the twentieth century: The nefarious planners. Someone posted in comments that someone (presumably the WEF types) is now preparing Argentina as a place to get away in case New Zealand goes bad….
Guys, that’s bullshit. It’s not just bullshit, it’s bullshit on stilts. The WEF types might very well be SAYING that but that’s because they don’t want to admit that not only did Argentina tell them to go suck an egg, but that Argentina is doing very well indeed by ignoring them. So they’re doing the usual “I meant to do that.”
And it wasn’t New Zealand the WEF types were “preparing” as a place of refuge when the rest of the world went to crap. Not in the nineties it wasn’t. Even in the early oughts, everyone knew the place they were preparing was Australia.
This might have been true, even, in the sense that they thought they were doing it. There is a lot of bad idea bear type of things Australia implemented which comes directly from the Davoisie playbook: the type of ideas they are SURE will lead to paradise.
Which explains the trouble Australia is in. Bad, bad trouble.
Because the truth is, geniuses — and keep in mind WEF types aren’t. They just think they are though they might have very high IQ people working for them — are as prone to illusion and buying crazy theories wholesale as the rest of the humans. Maybe more, actually, because the idea of a great theory that explains everything, a grand, unified theory of everything, is catnip to geniuses. (That high abstraction thing.)
And when in the grip of a grand theory, very smart people will do the most unholy stupid crap. Like try to institute communism. Or think that it would be great with the “right” people in charge. Or–
In other words, those who are very intelligent (and sometimes really are) or maybe only gifted at something, or born to a position of wealth and great power are just as human and fallible as the rest of us.
So the good news is their ability to control you is very limited. They can sometimes brute force something incredibly counterproductive and stupid for a while, but they can’t make it stick, much less worldwide.
So while they conspire and a lot of conspiracy theories (mostly related to hiding information, or lying) are true, what I call “grand conspiracy theories” involving truly long time spans or the world as a whole, are mostly bunk.
The closest you come to one of those that works is our prospiracy to refuse to be ordered around. That one, over the long span of humanity, despite some truly disgusting times and places, has a track record of working.
So stop being afraid of the grand masterplan of the left. Mostly it consists of “We meant to do that!” like your cat, after falling off the bed while grooming himself.
Go on, be ungovernable, be free.
Sure, no one is coming to save you. But in the long run no one owns you either.
And we’re going to make any of them that try rue the day they were born.
The grand planners can’t predict and thwart what we’re going to do because to be fair, half the time we don’t know it ourselves!
Sursum corda. In the end we win, they lose. Because we are free. And no one is coming to rescue us. So we rescue ourselves.
According To Hoyt 
… Often from the trouble we got ourselves in all on our own selves. But that’s okay! We invent new trouble on the daily, so there’s all sorts of shenanigans we can get into, if we’re confident, prepared, and willing to do the work.
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The trouble with most of the would-be genius dictators is that they’re confident, prepared, and willing to order others to do the work.
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lt seemed like a good idea at the time….hold my beer…in our defense, we were left unsupervised.
Things often go sideways, but the stuff that works gets passed around to the neighbors and continues on. And since life in general is just barely controlled entropy, learning how to deal with things going sideways is good training. Bottom up republicanism is a much better long term strategy than top down authoritarian rulings.
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I have always wondered, what brought you here? Why did you come? Serious. Portugal like Spain seems a backward place. I’ve seen a friends pictures of steam trains and trolleys there back in the sixties and seventies. Good stuff we were interested in. So what brought you here? I was surprised by the SciFi literature in Portuguese that it even existed. Some words on such, your background, mighy prove interesting reading.
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I thought this actually has been well explained.
But, caveats, I may have been reading here for almost fifteen years, and I forget or do not know what has not been reiterated very recently. Also, I may read between her lines better as a result.
So modern academics saying that ‘alien does not mean inferior’, and pushing the claim too far, has discredited a bit the idea that alien does not mean inferior. Backward is a ‘yes and no’ question. The European nations, a lot of them have very long established universities that work in those languages, and functionally the countries are about as bad as each other, in different ways.
A lot of our historical sources are from England, and do not care for the continent. A lot of our recent scientific immigrants, culturally speaking, were Germany and eastwards. This is a sampling problem. France, Spain, and Italy are not without their modern academic merits, in real technology fields. A problem is corruption, the cultural inheritance of Rome. (Roman politics was about influence, and deeply engrains what we might think of as corruption.) Corruption makes people poorer, which limits adoption/updating of technologies.
Anyway, Sarah’s family was unusual by Portuguese standards. Even by North of Portugal standards. Trying for concise, enough intelligent and educated people in her family to be nurturing in that way. Older brother had a science fiction book habit. She was a preemie, so ill enough as a child to fall hard into books. And lots of tourists from England, so easy access to a lot of second and third hand books in English.
The series on science fiction read when very young? Explicitly has mentioned that one publisher was translating into Portuguese.
Her youth was when Portugal was having a lot of communist revolutions and mass murders.
She was also a highschool exchange student to the US.
(Also, her university education was in languages, and could have taken her into diplomacy.)
She is in the US because of meeting Dan, which was on the highschool exchange trip.
Sci fi is a less cut and dried ‘just so’ explanation.
Writing? Natural bent, and no other occupation or vocation getting in the way.
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Yes. Portugal is as backward as England, but not as authoritarian.
There are no steam trains. There are trolleys, but then it’s a touristic country.
What even? I suppose next you’re going to ask if I knew what flush toilets were?
My childhood was relatively primitive, say like that Appalachia in the 60s, but though I lived near a large city it wasn’t in the favored part of the country.
As for what brought me here, I’ve never made any secret of it, and I’m sure others can enlighten you.
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The rest of the world is a hellhole, especially for an American which the stork dropped in the wrong country.
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She’s told the story repeatedly, in various forms.
She’s an American.
The Founding Creed sings to her soul.
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Yes. Some things simply transcend mere, ah, accidents of birth.
Thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand,
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation…
There’s a reason these lines, from the last stanza/verse of “The Star Spangled Banner” that so many people never hear, stir our hearts.
There’s a reason they appear on Caitlin Walsh’s latest July 4th celebratory picture:
https://x.com/caitliniwalsh/status/1941147742669242624
(Of course, it is possible this is a case of “if you know, you know.”)
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So you insult her original home country, but then also ask why she left? Interesting strategy.
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Someone did the meme!
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“Let’s say like having a Phd in one field doesn’t give you the ability to comment/know about all others, having a very high IQ doesn’t make you the sort of polivalent genius that bestrode these SF novels: capable of doing whatever the author needed him/her to do at the drop of a hat.”
Yes. The basic thing is, maybe potential is a little broader, but the verifiable skill runs through experience, and is very narrow. Suppose we have have PhD A in Economics, and PhD B whose degrees are only in Electrical Engineering. How effective are they at teaching mechanical engineering, or at doing purely mechanical engineering research? Well, will be less obvious without the background to attempt practicing those fields, but there is no reason to expect A or B to be particularly competent at mechanical engineering. Skill at one academic field does not translate automatically to every other field, and some fields are pretty distant from other fields. Engineering to engineering requires a bit of a map of the disciplines of engineering to guess about, and one can build a crude map by look at undergraduate degree plans within disciplines and in a few related academic fields. But that sort of map has issues, and it does not tell you about what graduates with job experience can branch into, or specialize in.
Anyway, we can also specify that the IQ level for A and B is second quartile from the top for According to Hoyt regulars, and it would not change that result. Top quartile for here might be unchanged or outright worse.
Fundamentally, one gits gud at mechanical engineering by doing mechanical engineering. One learns to teach mechanical engineering well by teaching the courses a lot, and preferably by doing that after having had those same courses and gotten some TAing experience under someone who had taught a course well for twenty years. One learns the academic theory by studying the academic theroy. One gets the necessary on the job skills by working in a very specific application within the disciplien, on the job, for some number of years.
I’m sorry, but I have met some very bright PhDs and doctoral students. Raw intelligence alone does not mean that one can just pull a stack of books from the university library, adn then execute on a mechanical engineering recipe and it works the first time, after you are fresh from learning the theory for the first time. Some engineering recipes are robust, and are much easier to reproduce. Some of very fragile, and you have to ‘just know’ that you need to be standing on your head while you do step seven, and the whole of step seven is left to reader intuition in ten out of twelve books. (With maybe a hundred books on that course, which have omitted step seven in the pattern that has been well established for seventy years.) The specific example is made up, but it does represent real situations in the engineering literature and where recipes are concerned.
“One of the things high IQ people are UNIFORMLY bad at, unless that is their particular area of obsession of course is predicting the behavior of other people, particularly masses of people over a long period of time.”
Hahahaha.
I’m laughing in how terrible I am at this, and at how understanding some of the why and how of me being terrible is actually one of my specialisms.
One possible interpretation is that my issue is that I am low IQ, and that if I were higher IQ I would be better at it. My preferred interpretation is that the first interpretation is either evidence that someone does not know me well, or that they may have some wrong intutions about IQ. (Maybe I am low IQ. I am of the opinion that having higher IQ would not make me more effective, and would not make me happier. Former is a skill problem that I can work on. Latter is a choice and habit problem.)
“Maybe more, actually, because the idea of a great theory that explains everything, a grand, unified theory of everything, is catnip to geniuses. (That high abstraction thing.)” “And when in the grip of a grand theory, very smart people will do the most unholy stupid crap. “
Yes.
Absolutely.
Tertiary school is not a good influence on everyone, adn some secondary teachers are very poor at preparing tertiary school expectations.
So a lot of secondary school teachers and journalists have not themselves done tertiary level research, in say, fluid mechanics. So they do not understand how much fluid mechanics really sucks as an academic field. The expectation they pass on a lot of the time is that fluid mechanics problems are fully calculable, in deterministic ways, and the computer gets most problems correct the first time, without expert skill by the user. This becomes an unfun learning experience in tertiary school fluid mechanics, and not everyone who has been near a fluids textbook realizes fully how annoying a subject it is to get correct.
In the history of engineering fluid mechanics, there are rare grades of mathematical genius that were really able to intuit a lot of things simply from having the model straight in their head. Some of those did not at all learn anything in a normal way, and had a very difficult time teaching anyone else. When it comes to the recipes of engineering applications, intuiting from mathematical beauty is often a fairly distinct thing from making a recipe work reliably in practice.
Engineering is many heuristics or rules of thumb. For example, the factors of safety in structural engineering thinking. Part of the recipe, its context, is tribal knowledge about various factors (really delicate to C, but D does not matter so much), that may not be carried by an easily transmitted or easily recorded mathematical model. The mathematical models in engineering seem to only very rarely contain the full recipe. Few of the recipes can be fully developed by a really smart guy working directly from the model. However, almost all of the coursework gives a lot of coverage to derivations and simplifying assumptions.
The courses and textbooks make sense in context, but it is extremely possible to wildly misinterpret them. Physics and maths in engineering is about thinking about your work in more than one way, and about being able to check your results by doing it in ways that are not identical. Ideally, your professors are not trying to convince you that they have smart guy magic, and that you need to have the magic right. Ideally, what they are trying to teach you is that you will probably need to practice your scales, under an experienced pianist if you are learning piano, under a cellist if you are learning cello, etc. A rotating pump is metaphorically like a Saxophone, you want to find a Saxophone teacher, or a least someone who teaches Brass (or is a saxophone a woodwind?)
Mathematical models of the real world are wrong in some way, sometimes some very specific and specialized ways. Some of them are useful in some specific specialized ways.
Part of the catnip is daydreaming that one’s current grasp of a mathematical model is easily applied to every application that something can be valid for.
At one point, I learned seperation of variables as a mathematical tool for solving PDEs. Several disciplines of engineering are built on PDEs, so obviously I was suddenly a polymath, skilled in all engineering problems, right? LOL. Nope.
I think the wave solutions to the electromagnetics PDEs might have seperation of variables built in, but even after studying EM and the wave solutions, electromagnetics applications can be really far away.
Engineering is widgets.
There’s a step from widgets to biology, and a step from widgets to behavior. These steps are doozies. Here I ‘leave them as exercises for the reader’. Which is a stock phrase in academic theory. It can be literal and honest. It can also be “I am lazy” or “here there be dragons” or “I do not want to embarass myself with the demonstration that I do not know or understand things”.
When one has a hammer, everything looks like it needs to be nailed together. This is a problem of ego for all theory obsessives with a little tertiary schooling.
High IQ tertiary educated folks are often enough having a self hypnosis problem of having spent a lot of time training themselves to ignore the places where they can be verified as not good at stuff, and of getting the emotional significance for their lives in the idea that they really can be good at everything. Also emotional significance in the consensus of their circles being the correct way to order the whole of society.
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Mom! Bob’s making sense again! :)
Agreed on the engineering bits. What a lot of people forget (including those who should know better) is that Murphy always has a vote in the matter. More pedantically, the textbooks might not include all the factors in a given instance.
Minor case in point: I did a dog kennel some 20+ years ago to protect small dogs from birds bigger than them (eagle territory; seeing a juvenile Bald perched on the temporary kennel Was A Clue). I covered it with 2″ x 2″ fencing mesh, and it did well until last winter. At which point, damp snow bridged the mesh, and a couple of additional feet of snow joined it. Collapse of the kennel roof. Oops. My excuse; I’m a retired Electrical Engineer; I don’t do snow loads*. This was a record for the area; 48″ of snow in the course of a week. My SWAG is “normal” years, we’ll get 24″ all winter. Caveat: Intermountain West; “normal” is undefined.
Major case in point: The high school in Medford (west of the Cascades; usually 10 degrees warmer than Flyover Falls, maybe 15 degrees warmer than us) built a brand new gym/classroom structure. They got 12 inches of wet snow. The gym roof collapsed, 20 minutes after they got everybody out. My guess is that a normal snowfall (Rogue Valley has a semblance of normal weather, so no scare quotes) for them is 2″, with maybe 6-12″ for the entire winter. Somebody forgot about Murphy in the design, and TPTB bought off on it. IMHO, somebody probably should have expected that, but…
(*) I do look at rafter tables. The three outbuildings I’ve designed and built all did well. I didn’t bother for the kennel. Kennel 2.0 will have no mesh.
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Intermountain West: ‘normal’ is undefined. This. This is God’s Own Truth. Absolutely can confirm. I am often annoyed and inconvenienced by the weather, but not shocked. I know to stay out of thunderstorms, and after this many years, that’s the only way the weather has left to shock me.
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Wrote too long, moderation gulag.
TL;Didn’t see: Murphy has a vote, and the textbooks might not include extraneous factors. Those tend to bite, hard.
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And a Saxaphone is a woodwind.
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Being an ‘Odd’ is know a saxophone is a woodwind.
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Naw. Being in a band class. Only through middle school (sophomore year back then). Wasn’t that good at either clarinet (4th – 7th) or oboe (last 2 years). Although I was 2nd chair for oboe, 2nd out of 2 😃
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And being an Odd, I will provide The Explanation, whether you needed one or not. :)
Although saxophones are made of brass, the reason they are not a brass instrument lies in the method of producing the sound. Woodwinds use vibrating reeds or pass the airstream over a hole to create the vibrating air column, and then use the opening or closing of holes in the instrument’s body to change the pitch. So saxophones are woodwinds.
Brass instruments are of course made of brass (the reason for the name), but the most salient difference is that they produce the vibrating air column by means of a cupped mouthpiece and the vibration of the musician’s lips, and it is the length of the instrument that changes the pitch.
(Final note: In woodwinds and brass, the velocity of the airflow and the tension placed on the mouthpiece, either by squeezing the reed with your lips or by squeezing your lips together, also have a very noticeable effect on the pitch. You can fine-tune the pitch and even switch octaves simply by changing your input to the instrument.)
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Pretty sure the reed is the defining feature. Otherwise a flute would be a woodwind.
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A flute is a woodwind. The technique to play them is to blow an edgetone at the mouthpiece, which in this example is like a solidly fixed reed. (Reed instruments use edgetone waveforms as well, but the vibration of the reed adds to the sound. That’s why a flute sounds “cleaner” than a clarinet, though the fingering is very similar.)
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The Reader offers this as a question. What is a flute?
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Well, according to Jethro Tull, “the oldest heavy metal instrument.”
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Now I am imagining Roman horns playing “Smoke on the Water”
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BTW, Bagpipe Metal is a thing.
(grin)
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Off-Kilter. And any band with an album called “Celtic Armadillo” is a Texan must listen. 😏
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=off+kilter+band
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And per Wikipedia, two of the loudest acoustic instruments in the world are the bagpipes (Scotland) and the Lambeg drum (N. Ireland), probably because there is something in Celtic cultures that makes ruckus-raising as natural to them as a barn-raising is among the Amish…
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Sir? Why did you do that to my brain this morning?
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Yes.
A major thrust of engineering (first defining a problem, then decomposing into sub problems that can at times be solved seperately) directly creates a shortcoming in some of the tools.
A tool focused on a reduced order model in isolation can break in funny ways if the reality is not actually isolated.
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I don’t know if you’re a high IQ, but I can guarantee that you’re not sub-average IQ. I’ve dealt with a number of such types in my life (oddly enough, the Downs folk are *less* likely to register that way in my memories, because they may be slower but they usually aren’t plain dumb) and one common tendency is inability to carry coherency through a conversation. A comment like that, with the thread of the topic carrying from paragraph to paragraph, would be beyond them.
TRUST me on this.
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Your last paragraph is extremely insightful, and explains why so many academics get locked into the idea that the Good Men* (themselves) should be in charge. Because they take the true statement “I have spent serious years in training in this discipline, and I am therefore one of the top 0.1% experts in the world in this discipline” and extrapolate it incorrectly to “I am one of the top 0.1% experts in the world in all disciplines”. Which is why so many academics fall for the lies of Marxism and other systems that profess to put the Right People (them, they think) in charge.
In other words, the lie of Marxism is “ye shall be as gods”. There is, truly, nothing new under the sun.
* Yes, exactly: those Good Men.
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After a life long career as an industrial scientist I have found that “smart” people usually have one of three things: memory, intelligence and wisdom. Most smart people really just have amazing memories. THey can regirgitate something they read 20 years ago and sound like experts on everything. In fact, most of them are dolts – articulate and smart sounding dolts, but still dolts. Then there are people who really are intelligent, most of whom have terrible memories (not sure why). They appear to be absent minded and bumbling in everyday life but in reality are hugely intelligent. The third component is wisdom, and it is maybe the most important. Solomon prayed for wisdom – showing he really was wise. Anyone who buys into communism in its many forms lacks wisdom. I know lots of people with just good memories, fewer with intelligence and memory and only one or two that have all three..
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One part of creating new things is the ability to associate things in unexpected ways.
The second edge of that sword is, if you ask me to categorize a bananna, it could end up in Yellow, Fruit, Lunch, kid’s favorite snack, things I shouldn’t eat, Still Life, hazards of monoculture, gags, landmines, racism adjacent, and bread.
Sometimes that produces useful results. More often, it sends me down a rabbit hole of how on earth one contaminates shrimp with radioactive cesium, by accident or even intent, and how the US orange crop appears to have been murdered and speculation of what level of biological warfare is sufficient to require MAD levels of retaliation. Though, that may actually be one of the contexts in which a complete trade embargo is sufficient?
Yeah…
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*cough* if creating and modifying a virus to target humans wasn’t enough…
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The USA could completely destroy the world economy by replacing the $100 bill, limiting exchanges to approved people and firms.
How so?
90% of our currency circulates overseas, fueling the global underground economy. Other currencies are used, to lesser extent, but the C-note is the lynchpin of the off-books stuff. And in many cases, the local nation’s “official” economy is a basket case, and only survives because folks can go around it with real money. Anyplace where the street vendor gives you significantly better exchange rate than the government is vulnerable.
Thus, if we recall the greenback Franklin and replace it with a red-white-blue Reagan, and limit exchanges in time and who, the rest of the world will lose its collective mind, then its ability to eat. It is an extinction level event. It is also why we never de-circulated the older 1980s-1990s $100s. Slowly they get eliminated, and often counterfeits get swapped, in order not to implode half the world economy
And Trump knows this. He could cause a global catastrophe just by joking about replacing Franklin with Harriet Tubman on a high-tech note to stop counterfeiters. And he -knows- it.
The Mandarins of China have their assets in offshore currencies. So do most of the nasty folk regimes. Hussein had -warehouses- of US cash.
Not kidding about “extinction level event”. We survive because we have a real economy, and have recent history of near self sufficiency to rebuild. Those who do not? Game over.
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Pretty sure the rest of the world would go on using the old Benjamins, with each other anyway. Especially in the, shall we say, informal economy. They wouldn’t care that the US Govt won’t accept them, because they don’t do business with the US Govt.
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The value of any currency depends on whether the person you want to do business with will accept it. If the informal economy decided the bill still had its old value, well, then it would. If they decided that the ability to exchange it with the US gov’t in official capacity is important, then some of the people officially allowed to exchange the old bill for the new would find pressure put on them to take these old bills and exchange them. Perhaps that pressure would be of the coercive type, but in many cases it would be of the financial type, offering 1% of the value of the exchange. At which point the old dollar would become valued at 99% of the new dollar in the informal economy, meaning it would have very very little effect.
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Which leads directly to the “crypto evades taxes” fallacy: sooner or later, the entities will need to deal in the approved currency, even if only to pay taxes.
“Good morning, Mr Capone, I’m from the IRS.”
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Anyone currently accepting c-notes knows they are accepted and thus “redeemable”. With near certainty. (possibly counterfeit, but still highly useful)
Once the USA says “Notes of type X are now worthless”, the near certainty pops like a bubble. You dont -know- the next schmuck will still accept them, or he wont know if he can pass them along anymore.
Doubt kills currency.
The -minute- the announcement of impending ‘void’ hits the mainstream, folks are going to start dumping risky for non-risky. Nature of money: use bad, hold good. If the held becomes risky, use it.
Always.
Sure, we get hit with a flood of last minute counterfeiting and redemption. Not a no-impact strategy. Its just that we come out much better than anywhere else.
Nuclear option.
We have enough farmland, so we don’t starve.
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But in your earlier post you said that there would be a limited number of companies allowed to exchange the old bills for new. Which means the old currency isn’t dead, it’s just restricted in flow.
You did mention “limit[ing] exchanges in time”, but I’m unclear on what you meant. If you meant “for the next 2 years you can exchange old for new, after that tough beans, the old is void” then yes, that would have the effect you mention, but I’d question: 1) whether that’s legal at all as it would constitute reneging on the legal-tender promise printed on each bill (and also enshrined in law, as I vaguely recall), and 2) whether the cost would be worth it, as the new bills would also be considered doubtful by just about everyone (because if you break a promise once, you’ll break a promise again, the only question is how long it will take you). So the U.S. economy would suddenly be isolated from the world. Trump is putting in a lot of work to have the opposite effect, making U.S. goods easier to sell around the world. People can differ in opinion as to how successful he can be, but nearly everyone agrees that the U.S. being able to trade with the rest of the world is an advantage to the U.S. economy (as long as the trade is within spitting distance of actually fair, of course). So cutting the U.S. off from the world economy would be a heavy cost; in my opinion, heavier than the benefit the U.S. could conceivably gain from such an action.
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“1) whether that’s legal at all as it would constitute reneging on the legal-tender promise printed on each bill (and also enshrined in law, as I vaguely recall),”
Robin, that one has actually been tested over 20-30 years ago, when apartment complexes and similar businesses stopped accepting rent payments in cash. Thieves both inside and outside the business knew the days of the month people were most likely to have paid, so apartment managers were getting robbed or embezzling on those days. Your government may have to take it but your business doesn’t.
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I did know that already, but the hypothetical that 11B-Mailclerk was talking about was specifically the government refusing the old C-notes, not private businesses. (They would, naturally, follow suit, but that’s not relevant to the question at hand).
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Try redeeming old gold or silver certificate notes. Fce value in paper only.
Its a Federal Reserve note. Congress didnt issue it. Arguably, they are all void and worthless becasue not Constitutional.
“Can” is not “Should”.
Note that we can and have repudiated large chunks of debt whenever we have a formal war. We sieze national assets in our banking system under far less dire circumstances.
Again, as a very wise Drill Sergeant taught me, “Can” is not “Should”.
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Of course, in a world where a) the government gives businesses licenses to exist and b) the panopticon we live in, where privacy vanishes without a trace, how “private” is any business, truly?
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In Somali, both the old government’s money and badly forged copies are used as money. They are worth about the cost of forging them.
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Yep, universal currency.
After laughing at the Bond thing about gold sovereigns sewed into clothing (“obvious”), someone who got his entire extended family out from under the noses of the mullahs while being on a death-on-sight list for his job under the Shah said “dollars work everywhere, and nobody you bribe who is found holding them will be immediately shot, except maybe in North Korea.”
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Okay, Harryvoyager, as one who, until the early 30s, had a very good memory (verging on eidetic in some cases), I can see your point. However, very little in the modern world is ab initio creation; almost everything builds on what has gone before. Even the creative arts like painting, writing, and music composition and performance build upon previous examples. An expansive memory often gives a person more from which to synthesize new things. Doesn’t mean you WILL synthesize better but it certainly does give advantages in doing so.
There do seem to be some odd relationships among various mental capacities for example I and similar engineer types ability to read people vary from poor to practically nonexistant (I live at the far end of that range). Is that because there is some inherent physical or genetic relationship in those processes, or do those of us with high Memory/IQ lean so heavily on those capabilities that we do not develop the emotional processing? Or is it a combination of both, combined with developmental factors? Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the experiments needed to sort that out fall deeply into those kinds of experiments we do not perform on humans (particularly children who can not give informed consent).
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And how much of the inability to read people comes from watching Mean Girl games and thinking “that’s stupid; I’m not going to waste my time on that”?
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Part of it is the gap between what people do, and why, and what they will say they do.
I got very, very lucky, because my mom is from a family that knew they needed to do a more in depth explanation, not just the polite fiction one where we’d fill in the gaps well enough when we got older.
If a major portion of the population is Dolores Umbridge from the kids’ POV, they’re going to have serious issues making a functioning model of the world.
Part of the joy of the Hank the Cowdog series is that the main character is an unreliable narrator, and it’s broadly sketched enough to be obvious to even an emotional-iq-of-potato six year old.
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With you on the thought that very little in this world is “original”; we all stand on the shoulders of those before us. I will say that my experience is the least creative and most unimaginative people I worked with were the ones with good memories! The problem is most of what you memorized in your life is wrong, or at best a limited case. I hold over 80 patents and most of the people in North America use products that go through one of my processes. Every single patent was rejected as wrong by the “knowledgeable” and highly educated people in my company (Engineers were about the worst). The people who memorized Dr. Bimboo’s theory in Alien Engineering 201 really never understood either the theory or its limitations. One time I worked with one of the top 5 experts in the world in a particular field. After rejecting my discovery and then, reluctantly, accepting it he told me “you problem is you are too ignorant to know that your idea was rubbish”! And he was correct – I had no idea what I was doing and blindly stumbled on something new. No one had ever tried something so “stupid” because the experts knew it wouldn’t work… I’d rather be lucky than have a perfect memory!
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and how the US orange crop appears to have been murdered
If you’re talking about this year’s crop, it was due to that cold-snap-with-multiple-inches-of-snow right during blossom time.
… or have I completely lost track of time and that was last year’s crop?
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I’d have to check, but I’ve been hearing that the orange crops have been being progressively decimated by an Asian citrus blight that’s slowly been rendering the entire production space unusable.
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“Citrus Chancre” in Florida. The 2004 Hurricane season spread it everywhere, largely ending any serious eradication by cull efforts. .
Federal reg defining “orange juice” is changing to allow slightly lower sugar. The oranges today have a bit less than the 1960s when the law was passed, so Florida growers sometimes have to blend with foreign fruit to meet it.
You can dive down a very deep rabbit hole chasing Florida orange varieties, pests, and genetics over time.
Imported fruits eventually import nasties. Bugs, blights, etc. And of course the maniacs that introduced Pythons to south Florida….
Just as exotic mosquitos hitchhike in scrap tires. These are often used as elcheapo fenders on small vessels. And bilgewater often contains nasty things like intrusive fish and mussels.
So active malice isn’t really needed for the kind of slow developing blights we see. Just the usual indifferent idiots.
A bio attack signature is a sudden -widespread- outbreak. Dozens or hundreds of initial events. Likely target would be the major strains of wheat and corn, not oranges. If one port city reports a sudden outbreak of YP, its nature knocking. If a dozen ports on each coast, and a bunch of inland cities, all show the same YP outbreak within a day or two, its an attack.
And that would be insane. Because we would “turn the keys” in very short order. And just one of our SSBN has enough canned sunshine to extinguish the major cities of any country on earth. An d folks know it. Small insane nations run the risk of becoming literal glass parking lots.
Not to mention “what goes around comes around” and “nature is a B(HONK!)”.
Nature is a homicidal maniac, who intends to cull us at the first opportunity. Thus the ongoing “guess what, now…”
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If that was the the only case, yes, accident would be more likely. However, we recently had a couple Chinese bio scientists caught smuggling head blight into the US Midwest and their behavior during covid rather strike one as more of a pattern than an accident.
And I’m not sure a massive coo resonated strike is the best way to do that. That makes it obvious. Where as slowly spreading it where one can with plausible deniability could avoid provoking a direct response.
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My brother in paranoia,
The universities and med schools have effed up, and made it very difficult to handle such concerns in a way that resolves disputes.
So there is a hypothesis that the PRC has the judgement and discipline to wage a biological war, in a limited way, just under the detection threshold.
I submit that if this hypothesis was untrue, we would still have rumors and also suggestive evidence.
I’m not saying anything definitive. I do not have the sense or information to do so.
I am saying that how we process models has an effect on our psychology. The choices for this are maybe a bit of an art.
I dunno.
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And always has been. The issue now is that a) there are substantial numbers of lunatics that see that as a feature, and b) the tech to do it has gotten down to “Mad Scientist lab in a 1 BR apartment” level.
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Back in college I look at class in, “Florida Fruit and Vegetable Pests.” It was amazing just how many things latch onto orange trees. They need lots of tender, loving care. And fungicides. And pesticides.
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Sigh. Grandma’s backyard. We ignored the orange tree, pretty much, save for summer when it tried to bury us in ripe oranges. As the youngest member of the family, from age 8 or so I valiantly tried to eat the entire harvest to save the rest of the family. I often failed and had to sell half of it. it had the curious side effect that I never sought out, and actually didn’t particularly like oranges until last year when I found myself craving them.
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You’re likely referring to Citrus Greening Disease, which is spread in most places by an insect called the Asian Citrus Psyllid. It originated in Asia, but was subsequently confirmed in Florida in 2005. It has since also appeared in California, and finally in Texas.
The disease has also appeared in Africa, where it’s spread by a native African psyllid, instead of the tiny Asian insect which is spreading it here in the US.
Research is ongoing for a usable treatment. There have been some trials, but nothing definite yet.
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CC was teh thing when I lived in Florida. The Stte could sieze and destroy any Citris tree within X distance of a known infection, no notice, no warrant, no compensation. Folks. got irate when the wild citris in their yeards got abruptly cut down. It worked, sort of, to slow the spread.
Then Mama nature said “Hold my Screwdriver” and threw four cat3+ storms across the infected zones. Now it is essentially endemic everywhere.
Its the tropics. “Pestilent Hellhole” is the default state.
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That was this year’s. Snow, snow everywhere….
There is also the citrus blight, which does not help.
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This rings true. It’s quite possible to parrot back things one has read, without understanding them or ever thinking about them much.
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I freely admit that I have rationalized myself into most of the major mistakes in my life.
IQ is overrated.
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yeah. I know that song.
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One major problem that I have with Asimov’s “Second Foundation” is that it reminded me of the so-called “Elders Of Zion”.
IE The secret organization attempts to control the World.
Of course, the Second Foundation was “doing it for the Good of the Galaxy” and Asimov allowed the First Foundation to think that they defeated the Second Foundation.
Mind you, in the later Foundation novels Asimov made the Second Foundation into the “Bad Guys” but the people that replayed the Second Foundation as the “Good Guys” weren’t IMO that much better.
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My vision of a Council of Science is less Isaac Azimov, and more Ayn Rand.
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In the original books, the Second Foundation was supposed to stay completely dormant unless something completely off the tracks popped up, The Mule being the obvious example. Seldon knew that divergences from his planned history would arise, and permitted that. But he also recognized that something completely out of left field could show up that would not be an organic part of history playing out naturally, and the Second Foundation was meant to deal with those sorts of threats. It wasn’t supposed to otherwise meddle in events.
The interesting thing is that in his later Foundation books it appears that the Second Foundation attempted to recede back into watchful inaction after their “defeat”. But what triggers their participation in the plot of the fourth Foundation novel is the realization that there have been *zero* divergences from Seldon’s forecasts since the Mule was defeated. That means that someone other than themselves is forcing adherence to the plan. That group is revealed at the end of the fourth novel.
And, ironically, it turns out even that group is being manipulated by the ultimate manipulator – a very ancient R. Daneel Olivaw.
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Never really cared for the Foundation Books. Always thought the idea of a managed planned future a fool’s errand. A planned society is by nature stagnant and doomed to extinction. Creativity comes from innovation and chaos, something that are anathema to planned societies and those directing them, no matter how many “Foundations” one sets up to backstop the planning.
I found myself rooting for The Mule to wreck the whole thing.
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Huh?
It’s not a planned society as we would use the term. It’s more akin to someone positioning a boulder at the top of a very tall hill, giving it a push, and predicting that the boulder will end up reasonably close to directly below where it started. The little bumps and mini-ridges that it encounters on the way down will move it in one direction or the other. But ideally they all roughly balance out, and the boulder ends reasonably close to where you had hoped.
The boulder is the First Foundation, Seldon is the guy who positions it at the top of the hill. Seldon’s interference in the First Foundation beyond that is non-existent. He purposefully doesn’t leave any instructions to the First Foundation, as he expects the predicted Crises to play out with the leadership of the Foundation overcoming the Crises due to basic human nature (for example, one crises is due to a general of the Remnant Empire attacking the Foundation; but the sitting Emperor eventually becomes concerned about possibly disloyalty by a successful general, and recalls him, leading to the end of the war). I don’t recall any indications that the society in the Foundation isn’t a free one, aside from having a state religion during the middle of the first book (which is abandoned before the end of the book).
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In the movies (and some books) we are constantly bombarded with the “magical” characters (I don’t mean actually “magic”) … characters who “magically” have abilities to do things that their age or experience has never prepared them for …
Rey in Star Wars who manages to beat a fully trained Jedi in swordplay … or the “average joe” who happens to be the ex-special forces solider suddenly frinds himself in a hostage situation … its as if the pressure of the situation will suddenly endow someone with the experiance/skills and abilities needed to handle said situation … (NOT !!!)
We can never assume or wait for others to deal with the problems in life … we must figure things out on our own and thats always messy and full of failure … but as long as the failure is not the ultimate fail (death) we have to pick ourselves up and try again … grit and no quit is the one thing that can win the day … not every day but hopefully eventually …
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Sarah,
I sent you an e-mail I received from Dave Chesson, the developer of Atticus. He said there is a way to add blank pages to the front of your manuscript. Hope it helps.
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A few of us warned our hostess about the awefulness of the David Starr “books”. So bad they make Perry Rhodan or the latest Hugo winning dreck seem like masterpieces. Even as a kid that could read anything Z grade or above, I couldn’t finish those wastes of pulp.
In retrospect, the quality of Asimov’s writing, plotting and storytelling doesn’t meet the median of the later genre writers. He was just one the first in the field that could also fill reams of paper faster than most.
———-
Letting the experts and the elite planners decide that fate of the world has been a losing bet since Wilson. Probably even before humans. Rumors that the dinosaurs were wiped out by Mother Nature is probaly false. Chances are their version of WEF and ilk screwed them over.
———-
As for “smart” and “successful” people being better at deciding the fate of others, there’s always the temptation of people with success or power or leverage to play “EXPERT at EVERYTHING” or “god”. Gates, Soros, Larry Fink, the WEF/Davos crew down to the idiots in the local school board or HOA.
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IMHO, PR is superior to DS. I think the original German writers knew they were producing the textual equivalent of comic books, and at least did that well enough.
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I think the post-WWII popularity of ideas like “psychohistory” in SF (also shows up in Van Vogt, Heinlein, and of course Hubbard took it on the road) is wishful thinking on the part of readers and writers. The world had just gone through three decades of hell fueled by what people attributed to “irrational” mass movements. The idea that all this could be graphed, charted, predicted, and _controlled_ appealed to a lot of people, not just the Marxists (though they liked it a lot more). The fact that dictators got elected also fueled some distrust of mere democracy, just as it did at the Congress of Vienna back in 1820. We’re seeing that now from the Lefties, too.
In fact, it seems to me that conditions are ripe for a revival of the trope.
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There was a flip side, too, happening at the same time. The postwar era saw a boom in fantasy, not just in our little ghetto but in mainstream fiction and film. A lot of it was quasi-nostalgic appeal to a simpler, more human-scale world. CS Lewis in particular got pretty harsh about the “scientism” of postwar Britain in _That Hideous Strength_. That whole stream of thought led to the weird recurring idea that fascism/totalitarianism was somehow all about “efficiency.” (See Original Star Trek for examples.) Mussolini and Hitler would have stared uncomprehendingly, or even gotten furious, if you accused them of caring too much about “efficiency.” (Adolph considered himself an artist, after all.)
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The problem with blaming “irrational” mass movements is they were either funded by or reactions to the issues caused by the planners/elite. Like today’s “grassroots protests”.
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There is also an idea (I became aware of it via Robert F. Laird, but I imagine it has been broached by various people, and is connected to Jung’s thought) that, if God and His consciousness are omnipresent, there may be many levels of control, but not necessarily the sort of heavy-handed top-down stuff we get from our “elites”–more like nudges.
For example, how did bees evolve stingers, the ability to make perfectly hexagonal combs, and other such stuff that such tiny-brained creatures have no business having? Well, perhaps their evolution was guided by a “bee collective unconscious” that realized these would be cool things to have. If so, then humans may also have a collective unconscious guiding their own development, and resulting in occasional miracles (e.g., the Declaration of Independence, or Dunkirk).
I think it’s a fascinating idea. Though of course it does not absolve us of the responsibility to act–God helps those who help themselves.
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Bees don’t make hexagonal combs. They make circular cells, and being wax, they bend. They’re produced in those offset rows, and the hexagonal shape is just how they stabilize.
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Which confirms the statement, not refutes it. (grin)
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Ooh, next time I have the opportunity to look closely at a honeycomb I’ll pay attention to the deformed-hexagon cells and see if “they were originally circular and deformed into a stable configuration, which was basically a hexagon” is plausible.
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They have some variability, bees do some weird things. One would expect ten identical frames to be identical. Not necessarily.
Its a math/number/nature thing. certain designs just work, because the numbers line up. Fibonacci series, etc.
A bunch of round holes, staggered rows, invite straight lines in a hex grid. It is space and material efficient.
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MQ (Motivation Quotient) trumps IQ every time.
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c4c
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There are some education practitioners who have been trying to remind subject matter experts that their subject and the IQ necessary to succeed in that subject is not the only skillset that makes the world go ’round. As one would imagine, they have struggled to gain much traction outside of the DEI nonsense.
I taught biology in a private urban school for a short time and had students with many interesting talents that were being nurtured. One was a ballerina with promising talent as a dancer and less so in biology. Her parents were extremely concerned that she didn’t earn an A in my class. When I expressed that she was doing well by earning a B grade, and that I did not think they should curtail her dance commitments to gain time to study biology because her talents and career path most likely lay in the arts, they were scandalized! That was back in the 90s. I wish I could conclude this with a statement about how she became a principal dancer in a famous ballet company, but there was no Internet back then to keep tabs on students like we can now. I don’t even remember her name to do a search. (Sorry if I’ve hurt anyone’s feelings by admitting that most teachers don’t remember students’ names.) The point is, we need dancers as well as lab technicians (not all biology majors go on to become principal researchers with their own labs any more than ballerinas all become principal dancers). STEM teachers would better serve their students if they would acknowledge this truth.
We’ve pushed people for too long into valuing STEM achievements while abandoning our appreciation of those talented in the arts (and in that I include the “simple” folk arts of cooking and tinkering and gardening and all of the other skills in which our grandparents’ generation had abundant talent). No wonder our modern artistic products cannot compare to those that were made long ago and some people are so incapable that they cannot work out how to change the battery in their smoke detectors!
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Or the quad PHD who couldn’t figure out the hole punch. At least with the stapler he got the paper in the correct side!
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I know two young ladies that both quit one course before getting a STEM degree to become a vet tech and a barista respectively. A waste of their time, their parents money, and a possible seats/money for other students. But both are happy now….
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I know a lady from back in my college days. 140+ IQ three majors, etc.
She became bored to tears with cutting edge PhD level laser physics. Switched to entry level medical stuff because gave a warm human fuzzy that laser mumblesomething never would. Happier.
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I disagree a bit on what has happened in tertiary schools around STEM.
STEM is definitely over weighted in a lot of ways.
I think that what happened is that STEM is the residue of what happens when the other academic fields are almost destroyed.
You can sample from other academic fields, and for decades the communists have been incorporating theory that is garbage and evil, and destroys a lot of the good in studying that field.
There’s also the damage at the secondary level, and the need for remedial work in tertiary programs.
Engineering has a bunch of older graduates who have ideas of ‘fit’ shaped by private industry, who can pay close attention to their program at their alma mater. Between that, ABET, and that some engineering faculty view the PEs as colleagues, there has been a limit to cutting standards, and faculty have instead often put in the remedial work.
The kids are not necessarily coming out of the STEM programs sane, or competent.
Over production, cutting corners, and taking in folks who are less interested. These have for decades decreased the employment utility of a lot of degree programs, and people have maybe given more of a try to engineering programs, etc, instead. Well, the employment utility of engineering is not so strong either.
Yes, the market basket of job suggestions passed to the youngsters absolutely need to be a lot wider.
But, when society over focuses on tertiary school, the over production is going to hurt jobs worst that could be satisficed by a more broadly tolerable degree programs. The programs that are only really a bit fun for a narrow range of weirdos are going to have less over production, and lose less value. And, before some sort of inflection point develops, the other degree programs lose more of their value, and people start following magical thinking to chase STEM, because they still think that engineering has strong medicine power.
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Speaking of valuing STEM achievements, I’m seeing the STEAM acronym more and more often, with A standing for Art. People have valued STEM so highly that they want to shove Art into the category as well — but one of these things is not like the others. What distinguishes STEM from other disciplines is that there is objective, factual reality, which doesn’t care what you think or believe, and you have to conform to it lest your bridge fall down.
But Art is different. Objective reality does get a say — a sculptor does have to deal with gravity, a painter has to use the pigments available to him (though there are more of those, and more affordable, than there used to be) — but ultimately Art is a subjective discipline, aiming at producing Beauty that speaks about Truth but the Truth it’s speaking of can be one that isn’t measured with numbers (courage in the face of adversity, and so on).
So the people who are trying to shove Art into the STEM acronym and make it STEAM are trying to push it into a category it doesn’t belong to, because they are overvaluing STEM and undervaluing Art for what it is. It is not something that has to deal with objective reality; it is something that speaks about what it means to be human, and what it should mean.
(A note: all of this is talking about what Art should be, the ideal that artists should be striving for. I am well aware that there are plenty of people making deliberately bad art, lowercase a. I am not talking about them when I praise Art.)
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I’m not certain of how much over 100 my own IQ is … but I’m pretty certain it’s up here, based on two things: next youngest brother and I were tested in the great panic after Sputnik (and all the schools were frantically searching for intelligence in their students) and we both tested out as gifted. On the pre-wokified AFQT that I took in the early 1970s, I maxed out the General knowledge portion. (Supposedly, that would qualify me for MENSA but never been interested enough to pursue.)
For all that, I don’t think I have any IQ-related autistic tendencies, although as a kid, I would get these mad interests in something and would then devour anything I could read about the subject (historical periods, medieval saints, clan tartans, WWII aircraft, quilt patterns, wagon trains in the American west, etc) and often been able to focus intensely on something, in spite of uproar all around.
And I’m very much not oblivious to human interaction around me. I was always pretty good at being able to ‘read’ the people I worked with, or who worked for me, after about five or six months of association. I wished sometimes that I could do this almost instantly, as sometimes it would have saved a lot of trouble – but I needed weeks and months. I could “see” things about people – insights which apparently boggled some fellow NCOs when I pointed them out. Sometimes, indeed, people were uncomfortable with how easily I could analyze them, and demand that I stop doing so!’
This has come in very handy, as a writer, though, in creating and writing characters, though.
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I got out of the Navy because I like working with systems/equipment more than people, making me not a good fit for the E-5 mafia or leadership.
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(Um… wonder if it would work on the clanker. Calling it a clanker didn’t!)
I once had a PC that was not playing nice (trying to format an MFM drive to tell you how long ago this was)
I pointed over at a toaster oven in the kitchen and said “You want to be doing that tomorrow morning? Because I can arrange that!”
Next format attempt ran smoothly and the PC started behaving.
So, have you tried threats?
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My first experience with a serial port mouse in was like that.
After spending all afternoon trying to get it to work with DOS, I threatened it, then went to the movies. When I came back, it worked flawlessly.
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As it happens, I had to threaten a roommate. -Then- my PC stopped malfunctioning.
(grin)
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When my husband was a computer tech, other techs would specifically call him over to threaten computers into compliance. Because it worked when *he* did it.
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For 12 years I’d get calls from clients: “Having trouble with XYZ.”
Me: “Okay. Let me link in. Walk me through it.”
Them: “This is what what I do … Wait! It is working!”
Me: “Well mom is on the phone …” (Only explanation I could think of that’s PC. Only one of the programmers, but still …)
Occasionally would get from them “See!!!!”
Me: “Why is this wrong?”
Them: “Because …” (explanation)
Me: (After research) “It is correct because …. Do you want me to take it to the boss?” Usually no, because they got an education on how the math worked. OTOH the “yes” responses were why I had a job, so that was okay too.
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I had that t-shirt. CPUs feared me.
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RandyGC, I had a salesman’s computer that would crash frequently, but not when I was there to observe.
In a moment of frustration, I taped a picture of myself to the inside of the computer case. The computer then functioned flawlessly until decommissioned six years later.
My personal theory, the computer was lonely. It could be, the paper blocked the morontrons; the fundamental particle that carries the Duh force.
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Number two son has been trapped in the H1B visa hell so big corporate is basically dead to him. It’s hard, but he’s coming around to having to make it on his own, which is probably best in the long run but it’s hard, very hard.
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apparently part of what caused #2 son to give up … He’s doing other stuff now. But you know, it would help if he talked to us, instead of trying to go it all alone….
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Off topic but possibly interesting…..
That screaming sound you hear is the entire Secret Service detail giving birth to porcupines, breech presentation….. 😏
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/08/21/cue-the-meltdowns-trump-is-going-in-patrol-in-dc-tonight-n2662158
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LOL
They escort him through DC quite often. Yawn. Putting him in one of several LEO marked MRAPS could only make them happier. The Beast is more than capable of defeating gangbanger level mischief.
Many places he has visited as president make DC look like a Barbie commercial.
The epic disruption to normal traffic is why he will likely get talked out of it.
(grin)
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Except that he wasn’t…. thus proving that with the Donald, unlikely is the way to bet.
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“Planners? Planners? We don’t need no sinking Planners” said the millions of barbarians the left has let in as they slowly burn down and bankrupt their leftist cities.
Which shows you exactly where the mental masturbation they call planning ends up, Foisted on it’s own Pickard.
Yes the pun was intentional Roddenberry should get his blame as well.
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I know too many high IQ people to trust them to run my life.
I mean no disrespect, however, you’d think that with that many extra IQ points, you would have enough IQ to spare a few for the more mundane tasks of life.
And probably they could, should they wish to do so. Or notice that it might be helpful.
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I am so tired of ‘Official Approved Science!!’ Like the universe gives a rat’s ass what a bunch of pompous credentialed bureaucrats ‘approve’.
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I had to check the from tag to make sure I hadn’t typed this, brother Imaginos.
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From welding, via Lois McMaster Bujold and “Falling Free” (approximately), on bad but “good enough” welds:
You can fool your buddy, you can fool your boss, sometimes you can fool the inspector or even yourself.
But you can never fool the metal.
(And it’s getting to where ‘consensus Science!’ can’t hardly fool anyone but its own perpetrators.)
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We are largely on our own surrounded by people no smarter or more capable than us. It’s up to you.
Well, crap. We’re hosed.
While evidence points toward the fact that I am indeed a fair bit smarter than the average bear, I am NOT smart enough and certainly not capable enough to rescue anybody else. Heck, I’ve maxed out my capabilities just in trying…mostly failing…to manage my own self.
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Wait. So what you are saying is…
We are the ones we have been waiting for?
(I’ll show myself out.)
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I much prefer Jimmy Buffett:
“We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us About”
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I sure wouldn’t mind a cheeseburger in paradise right now.
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Yeah. We’re the barbarians at the “civilized left’s” gates. May G-d have mercy on their souls.
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I’m just amused that Obama’s vapid rhetoric now has real meaning.
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I know. This has occurred to me too.
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Almost. I rather suspect we’re usually the barbarians already inside their gates, in a lot of ways.
It’s a little odd, being Barbarian Defenders of Civilization; but far stranger historical things have happened.
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Right? Right?
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But I don’t want to be the Adult. I’m tired of being the Adult.
/singing starts
I don’t want to
You can’t make me
I’m not going to do it
/end singing
Le Sigh. Ok whining song over, time to go continue the Adulting.
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Refuse to grow up.
Never die of old age.
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Common mental model failure mode: Assume everyone is pretty much like me, and my model of you is complete and accurate.
Among the smart set, however defined, this can lead to the Lake Woebegon School of Societal Design – everyone is above average and thus can (take your pick of):
-use whatever substances without risk of addiction
-be savvy enough to not get scammed, pay usurious interest rates, or gamble the rent
-endless retrainable lump of labor across industries, skill levels, and geography
You see this along left, right, center, and any other axis you can think of.
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I was told as a young lad that I had a “high” IQ and very vaguely remember some documents my folks had. Anyway, working my way through life I’ve figured out that I am just smart enough to know I’m not smart.
Oh, I did/do good with tests and stuff but was never able to do much with math or the ‘hard’ science stuff and found ways to harness what ever it is I’ve got and did ok in life. I even got a master’s degree (In Science! – Remember the old Dr. Science program?). A friend who did get a PhD always referred to it as piled higher and deeper. He actually got two sets of business cards done up where one had his titles, letters etc. on it and another one that was just his name/title along with the contact stuff. He would only use the ‘Phd’ cards when he figured somebody would think it really meant something… not often.
Being retired I still find myself running into real life at stores or dealing with services, companies or organizations. I’ve found the smaller family run stuff usually has their act together and it ain’t due to a bunch of degrees. The real hill to climb is often with the mid to big outfits who’ve got that goofy MBA in the chain of command and thus can’t do anything in a direct or simple way. Oh well, I have un-read books tucked away and other important “survival” gear so I’m ready for self-rescue – and… if I’m really lucky, I’ll get to be with some of you guys too!
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I would always visibly cringe when my boss introduced me as “Dr” at client meetings (PhD chemistry, mainly playing engineer). The only times I used the title was I placed a collect call to my mother (“Accept a collect call from Dr McCollor?”) to tell her I had passed my orals, and when I “fixed” a parking ticket for a visiting engineer (also a Dr). The conversation with the parking office had the title in every other sentence. They caved (it being a university). My greatest praise was related by a fellow engineer (working on a power plant project) asking an older, hard-bitten plant engineer (where I had previously headed three or four projects) if he knew me. “Yes. He really knows his shit”…
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A way to model it is patterns– or metaphors, or stories, they’re all reaches for the same kind of “you know, that thing,” a theory or system.
Being really good at one field can make you be able to pick up stuff really well in another, if you can find how they share a pattern.
This is also how you can get seriously spectacular failures-of-model.
And really smart folks are often fast enough that they’re already done before they can reality-check their theory in practice. And successful ones have gotten, as part of the pattern, “that didn’t do what I thought it would, someone else messed it up.” (Which also feeds into a human baseline norm!)
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Word.
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When “the ranking man” is a PFC…..
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I suppose better than a lieutenant, “Not all who wander are lost. Except the lieutenant. The lieutenant is lost as fck. The lieutenant has hypothermia.” UNLESS the Lieutenant’s last name is Heinlein.
(Do you realize my moral conflict? Real life dad was a Sargent and dmn proud of it, too.)
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I am very, very good at learning a lot about a subject in a hurry (unless it involves mental image rotation/manipulation, Organic Chem ARGH) and then being able to use that to make interesting connections to other subjects.
I am not good at the kind of obsessive stick-to-it-ness you need for a Ph.D.
AKA if you want me to dig into interesting odd facts about life in Joseon Korea/Mongol-invaded areas/weird bits of bio in any era, I can do it, worldbuild with it, and if pressed write a paper about it. I’m currently going to make use of a character who knows about tree burial customs in ancient Korea (yes, that happened in some areas – usually smallpox victims).
Getting these skills to be put to use in a normal job… has so far been failure. Meh.
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A corollary to the Gellman effect is that when a subject matter expert is asked a question outside his subject matter by a sufficiently high status media personality, the level of ignorant pontificating is directly proportional to the hubris coefficient of both individuals.
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And often inversely proportional to the actual knowledge of the “subject matter expert” outside of his field of, hm, expertise. Alas. (It can be painful to watch, even in a schadenfrede-lous mood.)
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I’d wager that one reason Huns and Hoydens seem a bit more pragmatic than a lot of overly-educated types is that so many of us have been out in the Real World™ and have applicable skills and experience (and bruises, scars, and missing eyebrows) from that as well as book learnin’.
And a lot of us also read all sorts of books that are not official textbooks for classes and the like.
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