About The Bots - part the first

Well, about time I had an essay on the rampaging chatbots. Don't you think? I promise this isn't generated by one of them. Ha.

Today's report in the NYT is the lengthiest I've seen. Which doesn't mean a whole lot, since I've not been interested all that much. The angst and consternation over what these AI programs produce appears to be happening almost in lockstep, one version with the others. In other words: they're all fucked up in the same way. What might that same way be?

Well, you already know the answer (if you're a regular reader, anyway). The general claim is that these bots are driven by neural nets, which are made out to be really, really complicated thingees.

A commonly used cost is the mean-squared error, which tries to minimize the average squared error between the network's output and the desired output.

If the clowns pushing this three-card Monte on the public were honest, AI (as of today) is just standard inferential stats - minimizing squared differences, albeit with the sheen of 'complexity' to distinguish it from your Stat 101 class exercises. They ain't be no diff; it's all the same. And, of course, that's all there will ever be for AI, because correlation exercises, no matter how complex they are presented as being can't do anything else.

Which is why they can never be reliable.

It is just generating text using patterns that it found on the internet. In many cases, it mixes and matches patterns in surprising and disturbing ways.

We already know, don't we, that the RRW are far more prolific on the innterTubes than the Woke Crowd, so the likelihood that a bot will find itself using RRW memes and such tends to the RRW mindset (if one is allowed that anthropomorphism); that's just what correlation hunting gets you. Remember, all these AI machines are just calculating correlations; i.e. minimizing squared differences. A lot of them very fast, but not, qualitatively, any different from your multiple regression or ANOVA class. The bots, alas, don't publish the p-values of what they generate. One can only hope.

As one of the interviewees put it

This is terra incognita. Humans have never experienced this before.
-- Terry Sejnowski [from my dead trees edition of today]

Call For Gov. DeMented© - part the first

Two interrelated bits of reporting.

First, this NYT piece on the issue of the RRW of Israel driving away the best and the brightest already. Barely a couple of months.

While the judicial changes will affect all Israeli businesses, the tech sector's reaction is of greatest concern because it provides so much of the economy's horsepower.

Some 54 percent of Israel's exports are high-tech products and services, according to the Israel Innovation Authority, a support arm of the government. Israelis have created more than 90 so-called unicorns &mdash€privately held companies valued at more than $1 billion &mdash including Wix.com, which offers cloud-based web services; the gaming company Moon Active; and the financial services company eToro.

And so on.

Which brings us to Second: Gov. DeMented^©'s dictatorial Redneck takeover of Fla. Will the Redneck morons be enough to keep Fla.'s economy going? Only The Shadow knows, but me? I'll bet against Gov. DeMented^©.

The bill would put all hiring decisions in the hands of each universities' board of trustees, a body selected entirely by the governor and his appointees, with input from the school's president. A board of trustee member could also call for the review of any faculty member's tenure.

Of course, college instructors don't have the flexibility to pull up stakes overnight the way big bucks bidnezzmen do, but if you make your state hostile to anyone with a working brain, the future won't be pleasant. Well, the Redneck morons will be happy. Until Uncle Sugar cuts off the welfare. hehehe.

By The Numbers - part the thirty first

What with the likes of Scott and Lee leading the charge against Damn Gummint, and income taxes in particular (the kind the RRW hate to the core), it's useful to recall how it came to be. Most significantly, it required a Constitutional Amendment, the 16th.

When the federal income tax was implemented to help finance World War I in 1913, for example, the marginal tax rate was 1% on income of $0 to $20,000, 2% on income of $20,000 to $50,000, 3% on income of $50,000 to $75,000, 4% on income of $75,000 to $100,000, 5% on income of $100,000 to $250,000, 6% on income of $250,000 to $500,000, and 7% on income of $500,000 and up.

Now, that's heaviest on the riches, as is easy to see. Also, those dollar figures are closer to today's notion of gross income than today's notion of net income.

Curiously, a Civil War income tax was allowed to stand, for a while.

The Civil War taxes were not immediately repealed at the end of the war but continued in force until 1872, when the Grant administration sponsored the repeal of most of the "emergency" taxes.

and, who would pay how much?

The Civil War income tax was the first tax paid on individual incomes by residents of the United States. It was a "progressive" tax in that it initially levied a tax of 3 percent on annual incomes over $600 but less than $10,000 and a tax of 5 percent on any income over $10,000.

There were challanges:

The tax on whiskey remained in force. Between 1868 and 1881 the U.S. Supreme Court responded to challenges regarding the validity of the Civil War taxes on dividends, real estate, inheritances, and income tax by upholding the constitutionality of those taxes.

But wait, there's more

But the Supreme Court surprised the nation, reversing its earlier decision and declaring the law unconstitutional in 1895. This ruling, declaring that an income tax is a direct tax and therefore unconstitutional, led to the ratification of the sixteenth amendment in 1913.

So, that's how we got here. And it's very much worth noting that, from the beginning, these income taxes were what the RRW of today would condemn as Woke and Progressive. But, of course, that's a part of turning the calendar back to the 19th century they don't want to talk about.

Thought For The Day - 13 February 2023

See, if we had a real President with real Balls, you know like The Orange Trickster, we'd already have a barrage balloon fence from Angels 40 to the edge of space all around the lower 48. Alaska and the Woke Islands don't matter.

Sometimes, especially around London, several balloons were used to lift a length of "barrage net": a steel cable was strung between the balloons and more cables hung from it. These nets could be raised to an altitude comparable to the operational ceiling (15,000 ft / 4,500 m) of the bombers of that time period. By 1918 the barrage balloon defences around London stretched for 50 miles (80 km), and captured German pilots expressed great fear of them.

By The Numbers - part the thirtieth

Today's NYT Covid page shows the daily average deaths at 442.6. That works out to 156,000 per year. And no one seems concerned. Recall when Batshit J. Moron called Covid just a bad flu. And others called it just a cold?? 156,000 is in the neighborhood of three times the average season's flu deaths. And no one seems concerned. And, it's likely to get worse: hospitalizations spiked their highest a month ago since the Covid-ο one a year ago.

May be those other high-altitude flyers are ETs bringing us new goodies like a cure for cancer, as they did at Roswell; you know teflon, H-bombs, Tang.

I Told You So - 11 February 2023

Early versions of these missives made mention of the, mostly unacknowledged, Achilles Heel of American Bidnezz chasing cheap hands in the Far East: the unit cost of transport of the widgets will eventually dominate the BoM. Well, it has come to pass.

It was January 2022, and Mr. Chan's company, Man Wah Furniture Manufacturing, was confronting grave challenges in moving sofas from its factories in China to customers in the United States. Shipping prices were skyrocketing. Washington and Beijing were locked in a fierce trade war.

Neither pressure is going to be relieved any time soon.

The interest of Chinese manufacturers in Mexico is part of a broader trend known as nearshoring. International companies are moving production closer to customers to limit their vulnerability to shipping problems and geopolitical tensions.

Gee. I guess there's been some (slew?) B-school reports goading the C-suites into it. Let's go see... (note, many of the B-school reports aren't freely available on the innterTubes, so wish me luck). This is the earliest one that comes up in the search, from 2017. Ha ha, I told you so a lot earlier. And it ain't free, but you can see a precis for no Bongo Bucks.

If we turn to the olde reliable wiki, we find this. The page doesn't date the 'beginning' of nearshoring, but does have the audacity to open the section with:

According to the 1913 New York Times article "Near Source of Supplies the Best Policy", the main focus was then on "cost of production."

This is fun. Let's go find a cite that puts nearshoring into recent perspective... this is from 2014 and, while it is an overview rather than a history, seems a good place to start.

The "game changers" are volatile, escalating oil prices and an imbalance of supply and demand for freight transport services. These realities have led to high transportation costs — high enough to cause companies to make transport-driven shifts in their supply chain strategies.

Finally, the last vegetable for the stew (well... today at least). From the beginning of offshore manufacturing (as different from IT/call center/etc.), I considered it dunderheaded when combined, by the C-suite MBAs, with JIT. The latter was invented/developed in Japan, Toyota in the main. Deming, my other hero (before or after Codd, depending on the phase of the moon) had a hand in the effort, too.

We're all turning Japanese.

By The Numbers - part the twenty ninth

Yet more nonsense about Medicare. Just as most, mostly from the Left side of politics, tell voters that 'you paid into Social Security and Medicare so you earned them', those mostly from the Right side of politics say that one or the other or both are on the brink of insolvency and have to be cut. They're both lying. Go figure.

The cold, hard, actuarial truth is that we don't need Scott's plan to force a debate over Medicare funding, because within five years, the trust fund that funds Medicare hospital coverage (Medicare Part A) will have a zero balance.

Guess what? It's all bullshit, and here's why: the so-called "trust funds" are fiction. They don't, in the very meaning of the term, exist. Note, in particular, this line

Interest earned on the trust fund investments

What, pray tell, are those 'investments'?

The trust is not an actual fund, but rather an accounting mechanism for the government securities that underlie the program.

In plain words: the Medicare 'trust fund' is said to 'earn' interest on the Damn Gummint's 'securities', aka Damn Gummint Bonds. What happens is that Uncle Sam moves moolah from one pocket to another, pretending that Social Security or Medicare or ... has 'earned' $X billion in some time period.

But, wait, you might cry!!! That's stupid!! It's just an accounting trick!!! Well, sort of or may be or may be not. Consider the alternative, where the Damn Gummint buys up stocks and bonds of public companies from Wall Street. For the moment, ignore the volatility of returns (and that a goodly number of Big Bidnezz don't pay dividends to shareholders in the first place). It would be a neat trick to plan Medicare or Social Security payments when you've, essentially, no idea what you're fund flow will be.

"Well Mom, you can't have that hip surgery Doc Smith says you need because Medicare says that the Portfolio went in the shitter last year."

And, of course, for the Big Bindnezz that doesn't pay dividends, and thus not pay income to Medicare, the 'trust fund' would have to sell off some part of its shares in some part of its Portfolio each year to maintain the cash flow.

It's one thing for the 1%-ers to do that, quite another for the Damn Gummint. The selloff in the XYZ Corporation that results would have a profound domino effect. And, of course, multiply that in spades during recession years when the 'trust funds' receive little or no dividend income from those Big Bidnezz that do pay dividends. You can see where this is going. It's called positive feedback, and in most cases, postive feedback isn't a positive experience.

In order to maximize it's returns, the Damn Gummint would have every incentive to look the other way when 'their' companies go batshit criminal in pursuit of the almighty Buck. Enforcement of securities laws would disappear. The laws themselves would likely be rescinded, especially if the RRW runs the Damn Gummint. I haven't done the arithmetic for this essay, but I'd wager that the Big Programs: SS, Medicare, Medicaid, VA, and such, would 'own' a non-trivial proportion of American Big Bidnezz; would make CalPERS look like a gnat (it's worth reading up, in that CalPERS is teeny compared to what the Federal 'trust funds' would be). Talk about a conflict of interest. Not to mention the whiplash in the C-suites of those Big Bidnezz: a Left administration for four years of Do Good investing followed by four years of Right administration giving orders to partner with the Right Wing Dictatorships du jour. Or thereabouts. Won't that be fun?

So, you can have free-market 'trust funds' (not that there's been any sort of free-market in these United States) that run the country (or vice versa?), or a Damn Gummint that keeps Big Bidnezz on some kind of leash; short or long depending on whether it's the Left or Right in charge. You can't have both.

By The Numbers - part the twenty eighth

So, the Rabid Radical Right Wingnuts have trotted out some musings by Sleepy Joe, circa 1984, which say, more or less, that Social Security must needs be 'reformed'. So what? The Big So is that the field of play for retirement for private sector workers was materially different then than it is now.

Eighty-two percent of the employees in the survey were covered by private retirement pension plans, with the employer paying the entire cost.

70% of those covered had defined benefit plans, aka the pension was a function of earnings.

In 2020, life is rather different

Sixty-seven percent of private industry workers had access to employer-provided retirement plans in March 2020. Fifty-two percent had access only to defined contribution retirement plans. An additional 12 percent had access to both defined benefit and defined contribution retirement plans, while 3 percent had access only to defined benefit retirement plans.

So, overall, SS makes up a significant portion of retirement moolah now than it did in 1984. Note, carefully, that last phrase - 3 percent get a defined benefit; aka similar to what a 1984 worker had.

And that 401(k)? That's categorized as a retirement plan; employers may kick in some moolah, but are not required to.

The employer is not responsible to contribute any specific amount to the employee; each agreement is situational according to the workplace.
-- the wiki

So, when Sleepy Joe talked about SS in 1984, SS was an addition for most workers. These days, not so much.

Something I Didn't Know

After The Limeliters (I was rather precocious as a tween, if the word had been coined then) came The Byrds, rather more age appropriate by that time. Alas, their early work didn't draw me, but "Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde" did. Some view it as their best album (battling with "Untitled" for the title) that didn't sell. Anyway, some reporting, of a sort, today reminded me of a bit of "King Apathy III" -

All the changes superficial
Apathy still a king
Liberal reactionaries
Never doing anything, for now

is dropped into the stream of conciousness lyrics. Of course, McGuinn (I suppose) was being sarcastic, to the extent that a 'reactionary' is, by definition, one who wishes to push society back to some earlier time, aka Right Wingnut. Let's see what a reference has to say...

In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which that person believes possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.
-- the wiki

About right, from my point of view. Following "Dobbs" the Supremes have been tossed into that bin, both as punishment and as praise. Today's report further discusses that condition, in the frame of the recent Circuit ruling that protective orders cannot stop the perp from getting a gun. As I've allowed a few times in the last few years, the Radical Right Wingnuts are determined to turn the 21st century USofA back into the 18th century version. Or, possibly, worse; it was Alito in "Dobbs" who justified that phony decision on some obscure 13th century jurist. Why the heads of the rest of the Supremes didn't explode when reading such nonsense is puzzling.

So, what I didn't know that is in today's reporting

Oh, and at the time the Constitution was written, it was legal to beat your wife. It was only in 1871 that two states made it illegal.

Wow! A whole two. Let's go see if we can find out which... the wiki says

In 1850, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to explicitly outlaw wife beating.

You're right - who wooda thunk it? The wiki doesn't list state by state, alas.

This source sets Alabama and Massachusetts (who wooda thunk, too?) as the 1871 adoptions in law.

Liberal reactionaries, my skinny ass.

I Told You So - 7 February 2023

Over the years, Dear Reader has been offered a rant regarding the myth from PhRMA that it costs $X billions of dollars to make a new drug. In the first place, most 'new' drugs are just variations on a theme of existing drugs, mostly as a subterfuge (yet, in the open) to extend patents, and ridiculous prices. A recent case being Covid mRNA vaccines, which Moderna and Pfizer intend (last I knew) to charge $130/ shot, while Uncle Bernie asserts has a manufacturing cost of $2.85.

Now comes an admission from a PhRMA executive that it really is all a lie. He doesn't say it quite that way, just tells the truth:

Some of that money goes to failures, some goes to basic research, some goes to clinical trials and some goes to drugs that actually work.
-- Dr. Daniel Skovronsky/Lilly

Somehow, I doubt he'll have his job much longer. Telling truth to Power rarely works out for the Truth Teller.

And, about those mRNA vaccines:

During the summer of 1960, Brenner, Jacob, and Meselson conducted an experiment in Meselson's laboratory at Caltech which was the first to prove the existence of mRNA. That fall, Jacob and Monod coined the name "messenger RNA" and developed the first theoretical framework to explain its function.

IOW, it wasn't those smart, profit seeking, rent seeking, philanthropists in PhRMA that figured it out, it was Ivory Tower Academics. And it was turned into vaccines largely with your Taxpayer dollars doled out by NIH. Damn Socialists!!! Moderna and Pfizer deserve to steal the reward.

The Missing Question

Toward the end of Bill Whitaker's interview with Mark Pomerantz last night on "60 Minutes", there hung the question never asked. Whitaker asks/asserts that (some of?) the loans gained through fraudulent property values were paid off. Therefore, it could be argued, there was no crime. Pomerantz retorts that not getting away with the goal of a fraud is no defense.

What neither Whitaker nor Pomerantz delved into: was the ability to pay back the loans due to a (much?) lower interest rate gained by the inflated property values? Many have stated, IIRC even Mikey Cohen, that the reason for inflating property values was simply to gain more favorable terms on loans. And, conversely, to deflate the value of properties when dealing with The Tax Man to gain more favorable taxes.

There are, it would appear, two outcomes to the question:
- yes, the interest rate on the loans garnered with the fraudulent valuations was X points lower and Y dollars less to pay back
- no, the lenders knew that Trump is a lying grifter and charged him the going rate; that would require the lenders to testify at trial that they had independent assessments done

If the answer is no, then there is the possibility the lenders were/are aiding and abetting fraud. Only the lawyers know.

All of which leads to another question not asked, to wit: was the cash flow used to retire these loans garnered, if only in part, from further fraudulent loans? In other words, is TTO just an ongoing Ponzi scheme? Enquiring minds need to know.

By The Numbers - part the twenty seventh

So, Gov. DeMented is at it again, denying Covid mitigation (and burning books, too) sanity. One might wonder, mighten one, how much Operation Warp Speed moolah there was and where it went and what did we get for it? Recent reporting has it that Moderna (and Pfizer) intends to significantly boost the price of its vaccine.

proposed price - $130
known cost of production - $2.85
OWS to Moderna - $2.48 billion
OWS to Novavax - $1.74 billion
Pfizer opted for no 'direct' moolah, but accepted $2 billion PO
Sanofi/GSK - $2.1 billion PO
AstraZeneca - $1.2 billion PO
Merck - amount gotten, but not disclosed never finished project

total OWS deployed - $12.4 billion direct support and pre-approval purchase

how many vaccines - 3 (more or less universal) 1 (J&J, more or less restricted)

And Bancel tells us that all that Taxpayer Support is only worth a 'thank you very much', but I'll keep the reward. And you, gentle reader, might wonder why there are Progressives in the American system?

By The Numbers - part the twenty sixth

One has to wonder how stupid the Chinese are. After all, they're often referred to as the first intelligent civilization, long before fishbelly white Europeans. One might ascribe the 'balloon' to an attempt at asymetric warfare, but we know that the thing was visible from the ground with the naked eye. Did they think that no one would notice?

The reports are that the payload was the size of 3 buses. Let's assume that this refers to standard city buses.
-- The average city bus weighs between 25,000 and 40,000 pounds. so use 30,000
-- that gives a load of 90,000 lbs. or 45 tonnes

So, assume that the Chinese went the safe way and used helium as lift gas. How much would that require?
-- each cubic foot of helium could lift 0.069 pounds.

So, how much volume of helium do we need?
-- 1,304,347 cubic feet, and that doesn't include the weight of the balloon and any other stuff not seen, or we were told about (steering and such).
-- the latest version of the Goodyear Blimp (made by the same folks who brought you the Hindenberg, nation-wise): 297,527 cubic feet of helium

So, the Chinese balloon is almost 4 and ½ Goodyear Blimps. Stealth intelligence.