A Happy Ending

Just happened to be surfing the cab/sat guide, and caught the last few minutes of "Good-bye, My Lady". In sum - boy meets stray dog, boy bonds with dog, dog goes back to owner. I suspect that, for those who see the movie in its entirety, the ending is at least a 2-hanky tear drop. Which led me, as is so often the case, to read up the film on the wiki.

When not filming with then 13-year-old deWilde, the dog spent all her time with him, and an attachment developed between them. Unknown to theater-goers that saw boy and dog parted in the film was the fact that the written agreement supplying the animal stated that My Lady would become the personal property of Brandon deWilde upon completion of filming.

deWilde was the same age as the character, 13/14, and died in a car accident at 30. May be he and the dog stayed together? One suspects that the contract was written for deWilde's benefit, not so much the dog's.

Middle America

Time and again, the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts pratal that climate change is a hoax. Time and again a nano-second later, some bidnezz complains that bidnezz is failing because of some climate catastrophe. Some times, not often enough, the bidnezzmen call a spade a spade and name climate change as the source of their misery.

And so it is in today's reporting from the NYT. This time it's the Mississippi river. Turns out that river cruises aren't just on Europe's cornucopia of waterways. Turns out that the Big Muddy has been used not just for commodity barges, but also languid tourism cruising. Not that I would, of course. But times are tough. Turns out, times are tough at both ends: flooding and drought. Both make it impossible, at times, to use the river. So sad.

Just late last month, in St. Paul — the final port for the Trovatos' original itinerary — rising Mississippi River levels forced the closure of shoreline roads, bridges and parks. The river rose 20.17 feet above its banks before cresting, the seventh major flood in St. Paul since 2010, according to the National Water Prediction Service, and the eighth highest crest recorded.

And, for the record, the National Water Prediction Service is part of NOAA, that commie left wing cabal of liars. Just so ya know who to blame.

What's a cruise boat bidnezzman to do? Well, find some coattails paid for by the damn gummint, of course.

The boats themselves are changing, too, to designs that can slip beneath low bridges, motor upstream against strong currents and get to shore in shallower waters. "Our basic design parameter is that if the tow boats can go, we can go," said Mr. Robertson, the chief executive. "Because the Army Corps will move heaven and earth to allow the towing industry to keep moving."

I guess the centuries ago paddlewheelers are doomed. On the other hand, the European boats, showcased in those Viking teeVee adverts, would work. May haps not carry as many cruisers, and possibly too long for parts of the Big Muddy's navigation channel. But, hey, at least the boats can go.

What's the issue?

Even in its historic state, it could be powerfully unpredictable, with flows that oscillated by as much as 60 feet in the space of a season. T.S. Eliot called the river "a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable."

Low

Mississippi River water levels are plummeting to an all-time low this week at Memphis in the wake of a sweltering summer and ongoing drought — setting a record for the second consecutive year, new data shows.

High

The Bonnet Carré Spillway upstream of New Orleans, used during high water, was operated eight times between 1931 and 2007; it was operated seven times between 2008 and 2020.

Not an exact number, as Low, but instructive.

By The Numbers - part the fifty ninth

So, now that it appears the Kamala is the new Sleepy Joe, how has that worked out in the past? History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes (attr. to Twain).

Number who ran - 19 (from primary)
Number who ran as candidate - 11
Number who won - 6
-- the wiki

But, we can dig a bit deeper.

How many made the White House directly after their President? - it appears to be the 6, but I haven't found an explicit source. Close enough for gummint work.

So it appears to be better than 50/50 chance. I'll take it.

Thought For The Day - 22 July 2024

You pull any of that shit you did on Hillary with me, I'll shove a barge pole up your ass!! Are we clear wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024? -- Kamala Harris/every day

Thought For The Day - 21 July 2024

Hell No!!! We won't Joe!!!

Bleach

There's been some backlash, to over-use an over-used word, asserting that Sleepy Joe is lying about the Trump/bleach fiasco. Politico has a long, quoting piece on the fiasco.

Now, it is true that Trump didn't say "bleach" in his word salads... But... it is a true logical conclusion. If we go to the transcript, it is shown that one William Bryan (not a doctor or scientist near as I can find) does explicitly equate 'bleach' as 'disinfectant'.

We're also testing disinfectants readily available. We've tested bleach, we've tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids and I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes.

Case closed: wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 is a pure bred moron.

Oxymoron - part the first

Amidst all the cuming about AI from the illiterate and innumerate, we finally get some sense from a labour economist out of MIT. Of course, in the world of econ, where the mantra is "it's all micro, and nothing but micro", the very term 'labour economist' is heresy. Nevertheless, here's some analytical sense.

His major point is the elephant that's been sitting in the room from the beginning: if labour productivity rises, how much of that productivity increase accrues to workers? Or is it the case, as it has been since at least Eli Whitney, that more productivity leads to labour shedding? After all, that's the express point, now isn't it?

Sam Altman of the ChatGPT maker OpenAI sees A.I. wiping out poverty.

That is just about the stupidest, ahistorical statement that anyone can make. How, exactly, are the poor, uneducated, rednecks living in Appalachian shacks (or worse, your average urban ghetto) going to be transformed to 90210 (RIP, Shannen)? The answer, of course, is not.

Years ago I worked for a regional store-front computer training outfit, which had been a straightforward COBOL school in real brick and mortar facilities with real IBM Big Iron. But then the Damn Gummint dangled moolah to 're-train' welfare folks, mostly mothers, for word processing and Lotus 1-2-3 office jobs. Turned out that almost all of my mothers were there under court order; skip school and ya don't get your kid(s) back. Needless to say, they evinced little enthusiasm for improving their skills. Ultimately, the outfit was found out and shuttered. Little of the moolah went into the classroom, and most went into the owner's pocket. And, also, an MIT grad. He wore his class ring with distinction.

An earlier essay in these musing referenced The Musk Ox's assertion that AI and the like mustneeds develop in concert with a massive re-distribution of income and wealth in order for the machine to keep running. Naturally, The Musk Ox was gleefully dis-employing his own workers rather than moving forward with such re-distribution. But, as Eccles observed 70 years ago: the machine stops working when income and wealth get so lopsided that aggregate demand collapses.

One of Acemoglu's critics puts it this way

"A lot of the benefits of A.I. will come from getting rid of the least productive firms," argues Tyler Cowen, an economist who says the model behind Acemoglu's study is wrong.

Of course, Cowen (a raving Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut of the first water) may be correct, so far as it goes. But if significant numbers of American business is shuttered, how do the dis-employed continue to buy the cornucopia of burgeoning productivity? They don't, stupid. Which is a feature, not a bug. The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts seek to return to the thrilling days of yesteryear, when there were a few elite with all of the creature comforts and the serfs making do with subsistence. They just dress it up in fancy verbiage.

But, it remains the case (as of today) as others and I have asserted, AI as currently implemented is just a massive correlation matrix of internet shit. Some call it search on steroids. That, too. `