The Greatest Threat - part the fourteenth

The Office of Data Integrity, in partnership this time with the Office of Policy Integrity (to tell the truth, it's almost always such), is shutting down the most significant source of long term climate data. This should come as little surprise, since Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) complained about Covidiot Infection^™ back in 2020.

If you don't test, you don't have any cases. If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.

And, of course, his sub-GED crowd of MAGAnauts nodded their empty heads in agreement.

The readings collected from Mauna Loa, starting in 1958, were used to create what is famously known as the Keeling curve. It's an upward-swooping line that charts the steady rise of carbon dioxide over the past seven decades — the result of nations burning oil, gas and coal.

But President Trump's proposed 2026 budget would put an end to Mauna Loa, along with three other key observatories and almost all the climate research being done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

We wouldn't want to keep an on-going record of the success of "clean, beautiful coal", now would we? Of course not.

As usual, The MAGAnauts care nothing about what sort of Mother Earth they leave their little ones, much less their little ones little ones. If these Bozos keep control long enough, today's MAGAnauts will, themselves, have to live on a Mother Earth that's scorching hot and oscillating between drought and flood. Bozos ascribe Hell to being As Hot As, and claim to have read Dante. Alas, the bottom of Dante's Hell is solid ICE.

Thought For The Day - 17 July 2025

My my. Now this is just too, too rich. The WSJ publishes The Letter to Jeff from (among others) Garfield 2.0 (a step closer), and, as one might expect, he goes batshit. Suing the WSJ, NewsCorp, and Murdoch (personally?). I just said to the Wife, this is the start of some Chinese Water Torture, as payback for all those tariffs. [timestamp this as 9:50 pm EDT, just because more water likely has dripped by the time you've read.]

So, a bit of Warren Zevon is called for

I'm hiding in honduras, I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan

Send lawyers, guns, and money
Send lawyers, guns, and money

Send lawyers, guns, and money, hiyah!
Send lawyers, guns, and money, ow!

I'm gonna bet Rupert has more money, and smart lawyers, than Garfield 2.0 (a step closer). Being outed as a pedophile might not get Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) impeached (the MAGAnauts are all preverts, ya know), but it'll take some git out of his giddyup.

The Greatest Threat - part the thirteenth

Today's data release may well be the last "bad news" on Inflation you'll ever see. It's so unfair!! And FALSE!!! And it's all Jerry's fault!!! Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) hereby declares that no data shall be released to the public without approval of the Office of Data Integrity. We can't have FALSE data floating around that Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) get irritated by.

Inflation accelerated in June as President Trump's tariffs started to leave a bigger imprint on the economy, keeping the Federal Reserve on track to hold interest rates steady when policymakers next meet this month.

The Consumer Price Index rose 2.7 percent from a year ago, the swiftest pace since February, data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed on Tuesday. That is slightly higher than expected and is up from an annual pace of 2.4 percent in May.

I am among those who remain convinced that Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) will be done in by a MAGAnaut (a Butler clone), not a Lunatic Lefty, just as Garfield died at the hand of an office seeker. That's the price of spoils system governance. It will happen again.

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the ninth

Dedicated reader will recall the inference about Mad Dictator Don's demolishing of much of federal governance: there will be no social goods or services in his USofA. Not even weather

Some in the weather industry — and free-market Republicans — see NOAA's forecasting work as a prime candidate for outsourcing and have called for the agency to be "dismantled." NOAA is also a target of the fossil fuel industry because its scientists contribute important climate change research. The White House has proposed $2 billion in cuts to the agency, or 28 percent of its budget.

You're a sod buster, and you want to know how the summer's gonna go?? That'll be $1,000 a month. Ya wanna know if your kiddies will be swept away in a flood? Every penny you've got. God damn it.
Enter, stage right, AI:

Even as these A.I. forecasts begin to outperform traditional methods, their developers don't fully understand how they work. The software could be learning physics, simply matching patterns or using some effective combination of the two.

"When you do a physics-based model, you're being smart," Mr. Creus-Costa said. "When you do a deep learning model, you don't have to be smart. We're not writing down the physics. We're just having it learn."

Well... they're lying. They do know how they work. What they don't know is whether how they work makes for true results. The myriad of hallucinations is enough proof of that. Correlcation is not causation. You heard that one Day 1 of Baby Stats 101. It's still true.

Has it ever occurred to anyone else that, if it's really true that all of these AI vendors have each scraped every last scrap of bytes from the innterTubes, why do we need multiple, redundant copies? Each scarfing up enough wee little electrons to run thousands of normal, middle class homes. Is there a point to that? I mean, beyond making PC vendors (mostly in China, of course) richer? Isn't that stock of innterTubes shit some kind of Social Good?

Are these compute kiddies ever going to figure out that AI has no intelligence? It's just correlation among old data. Nothing Intelligent there. As always: can AI intuit special relativity from the fact of a tram moving away from an early 20^th century tram? No fucking way. Or, as one of the 'innovators' in private weather put it

"I have my personal philosophies that are not aligned with, like, what's best for our private weather company," Mr. Dean told me. "You don't want to live in this capitalist nightmare of like, 'Pay 10 bucks for today's weather.' That's too far."

And you have to know that Dean is off by at least an order of magnitude.

Thought For The Day - 11 July 2025

Well... chickens are coming home to roost. After all that propaganda from Pizza Gate to Epstein's Client List, the MAGAnauts are exploding. So, can we suss out the state of the world? Sure we can.

First: is there such a list or not? Likely, yes. If so, then
- is it largely the Lunatic Left or the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts? If the former, there's absolutely no fucking reason to not release the list. Yes? I mean this is the world of Mad Dictator Don, now isn't it?

- If so, and it's not the Lunatic Left, then it must be that Mad Dictator Don and/or The MAGAnauts are the bulk of the preverts. What else makes sense? In this case, Mad Dictator Don will never let Pammie release the List. He may be able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, but being a full-blooded prevert is political suicide.

Second: there is no such list. What then? Well the The MAGAnauts and Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts were promised, more or less, by the The MAGAnauts' Fearless Leaders that such a list was absolutely, positively Real. So, they're pissed that what they were betting on (in the real money on the table way), are loooooooooooosers. Poor babies.

Reporting/rumor as I type is that Bongino is jumping ship. Why would he do that? It would make sense that he is convinced that the Client List is Real and is mostly, if not exclusively, of the Lunatic Left and he and the rest of the Base (hehe) MAGAnauts are being betrayed. As deputy director, would he be privy to the List? Most likely, unless Pammie really, really doesn't like the way he walks. She's not a paragon of virtue, now is she? But, again with fervor, if the List is mostly the Lunatic Left (and not including Mad Dictator Don of course), then we'd have the List. With bells on. Only if Mad Dictator Don is on the List along with lots of the Lunatic Left, would Pammie withhold it. And, as I type, it's sitting in the Deep Deep State.

Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
-- Sherlock Holmes

The World is Not Linear - part the second

Yes, a series. And none too soon. The world is your oyster. Not mine, alas. Like eating someone else's phlegm. Not to my taste. But many people say they do love them shellfish.

Turns out, they are largely farmed, and said farms are tripping. But not on LSD. Dear Reader may recall the big to-do with acid rain decades ago. Don't hear too much about it these days. Turns out, acidification happens everywhere, including the oceans. And, it turns out, much of the critter population in the oceans prefers certain levels of acid in their habitat.

Oysters aren't happy with how things are going.

"We are seeing a very significant change in the rate of acidification," said Dr. Richard Feely, a chemical oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle who has been studying the problem since it first surfaced, and an author on the recent paper. "The rate of change has shown much faster change over the last 50 years than it did over the previous 200 years. The expectation is, as we continue to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that rate will continue to increase."

Mother Nature hates straight lines.

And, naturally, there are externalities in the mix. The oceans are an enormous food chain. Not an ocean biologist, but since Mother Earth is about 70% oceans, I'll guess that it's the largest on Mother Earth. So, acidification, or any environmental disruption, is likely to disrupt the food chain. Yup.

Treating water in the oyster hatcheries is merely a stopgap measure. Aside from shellfish, acidification is taking its toll on other sea life, including tiny pteropods (sea slugs and snails) and krill. That is causing a decline in food sources and critical nutrients for salmon and other fish.

Not with a bang but a whimper - T.S. Eliot

By The Numbers - part the ninetieth

The World is not linear.
-- Donald Hughes McElhone (Ph.D. math stats)/1974

The MAGAnauts, importantly The Musk Ox, are fixated on the shibboleth that the planet is in danger of population collapse. They're so full of shit, I can smell it here. Today, I'll feature Ross Douthat, whose column today dredges it up, again. Mother Earth sports about 8.2 billion folks, most barely have food and water to survive. Fewer now than before Mad Dictator Don ascended his Throne, and the destruction of USAID. I guess starving folks in those shithole countries are really a drag on the global economy? Let 'em die. Joni Ernst said so.

Here's Douthat:

Leaving abortion regulation to the states makes sense as a provisional political settlement, but leaving pro-family policy to the states (when pro-life states are poorer than average and harder-pressed to offer support) is a dereliction.

So, I guess, sub-GED breeders in Red States are a Good Thing while starving Black Folk in shithole countries is just Darwin working his magic? We need more MAGA knuckledraggers if the Trump Dynasty (Eric volunteered to be the next one) is to prosper; they'll vote for any Trump.

With the push for yet more AI/automation wiping out all kinds of jobs, do we really need more idle hands to make things? Of course not. What we'll need, and real soon now, is a new method of income distribution. As mentioned here more than once: the more capital in the BoM, the less slack there can be in output. Y'all still gotta pay for the machines and maintenance no matter how much you produce. And, if producers across Mother Earth resort to ever higher levels of capitalized production, the greater will be the need to: A) produce 24/7/365 to spread all that capital cost to the maximum degree and thus minimize average cost and B) have enough moolah in the hands of consumers to buy all those wonder widgets. Hard to pull that off as more and more hands are made redundant. If Supply Side econ were a true thing, there would be no problem. Producers would continue to boost production, and supply would create the necessary demand. Yeah, you're right. That notion is horseshit. Didn't work when Laffer (couldn't have a better name for him) pushed it into being way back when.

Mother Earth has a finite stock of resources, and the notion all 8.2 billion can, if they truly believe in (and tithe to) Prosperity Jesus Evangelism, attain the lifestyle of the USofA 1% (which is about 3.7 million); is, well, lunacy. The arithmetic doesn't work. And The MAGAnauts know it. They just keep their lips shut. They want them their tax reductions.

We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.
-- Leona Helmsley/1989 (yes, she said it)

Blame Samuelson

By now we all know that Mad Dictator Don is as dumb as a sack of hair, but how does this idiocy manifest? Let me count the ways.

The entirety of the Big Ugly Bill is founded on a single principle: there are no social goods and services, and any found hiding (like, say, drug development) must be killed no matter what. Where did this notion come from? In one sense, that has always been the mantra of the proto-MAGAnauts since, at least, the New Deal. They hated it, and tried their damndest to kill and then repeal it.

By the time 1950 rolled around, the econ space had been hit by an asteroid, named Paul Samuelson. He, arguably, invented mathematical econ. This brand is grounded in the micro-model; data based and "ethically neutral". His Ph.D. dissertation was expanded into "Foundations of Economic Analysis".

While widely seen as an explanation of the macro-model, it is based on the micro-model of individualism. Like it or not, the macro-model is just a policy exercise. The Damn Gummint, as Keynes understood, should, at times, bolster the economy when the various private actors fail. That happens a lot, when the micro-model ethic is dog-eat-dog.

Keynes would not approve of the scam Mad Dictator Don is running. The macro economy is doing just fine. And, naturally, when the economy is doing just fine, there's no reason for the Damn Gummint to engage in deficit spending. Not a bit of it. And, of course, giving away the Treasury to the 1% won't help.

To top it off, today we find that Mad Dictator Don is actively Making America Worse Again by killing off yet more future tech.

     For Immediate Release - The White House

     President Trump has this day announced a new and innovative offensive in 
     the effort to MAGA.  We don't need no Chinese EV shit.  "They don't know
     what the fuck they're doing."

     What do we have?  We have clean, beautiful COAL.  And to make the best use
     of COAL, The President has directed DARPA to spearhead the rapid, as in 
     Operation Warp Speed, development of the All American Steam Truck.  It 
     will be powered by an economical COAL fired plant, have top speed of 
     130 mph, and get 1,000 miles per ton of COAL.  All American EV charging 
     stations must provide the COAL alternative within 90 days of first sale 
     of the All American Steam Truck, or face criminal prosecution from my 
     Hot Looking Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Thought For The Day - 2 July 2025

Just in case it isn't obvious: rule by a Unitary Executive (the wet dream of the MAGAnauts come true) is just a fancy way of saying Dictatorship. Mad Dictator Don has already shown that there's nothing stopping him from reaching as deep as needed into the bureaucracy to make his wishes happen. Paramount is the latest entity to cave to extortion. An explicit threat isn't even needed. The Rule of Law is dead.

The Greatest Threat - part the twelfth

Well, to no great surprise, The Office of Data Integrity is at it again. First we had FEMA being castrated, because states should do all that work themselves (more often than not Red). Now we find NOAA is being directed to stop collecting satellite data which is used to track hurricanes. And, naturally, mostly hurt Red States (don't have too many hurricanes here in New England). Cruelty is the point. But that was only supposed to hit Blue States. Shit, piss, and vinegar.

The satellites are not being decommissioned, but their data will no longer be received, processed or stored. Satellites can't last forever and are eventually retired, but it is not clear that is the case here, said Andy Hazelton, a hurricane modeling expert at the University of Miami. "We don't want to have less data for no reason," he said.

Once again, proving that Mad Dictator Don is quite happy to screw the sub-GED cabal that put him on the throne.

"Boy, is there now an incentive to just do whatever you want," said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia. "It really ties the hands of the judiciary to keep the executive in line."

I guess the Gang of Six don't believe in the 3 equal branches, and of course, the Rule of Law. They clearly want a DonVlad

Sliding Down That Slippery Slope - part the first

Well... I suppose we knew that the Gang of Six would stick to Mad Dictator Don like dog shit on the sidewalk. Amy not having any balls.

This latest makes any sort of organized discrimination a slam dunk. Don't want your idiot kids to know about the tribulations of niggers? No problem. What about those kyke bankers that rule the world? No problem. And so on. MAGA is all about White Christian (but not Roman) People being the Saviors of the USofA. Of course, that Florida law student's prescient ode to the 'fact' that the FF only meant to include White Men is soooo important to the discussion.

Naturally, Mad Dictator Don has been known to hobnob with members of the Make America White Again crowd. Mad Dictator Don, has of course, tried to sue and shutdown Wikipedia for telling the truth.

Federalism

These missives have taken on the notion of Federalism/States' Rights a few times, and often having Canada (yes, the Nice People to our North) as the poster child for why it's pretty stupid. No, the EU wasn't created to stick it to the proud, the few, the USofA; rather to make movement amoung the countries (not are all huge like TX) essentially seamless. Europe is really one country. The tribalist hate the idea. Of course.

So, here comes another Canada Story. And, of course, it's totally silly what extreme Federalism has wrought.

Internal barriers in Canada are considered stricter than in other federal systems like the United States, economists say.

Well, no shit. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, as mentioned here a few times. Federalism, taken to extremes is just Balkanization. And that's not Good Eats. "My tribe is better than your tribe. We will kill you."

In Canada, meat and other food products cross provincial lines with great difficulty. Even after being inspected in one province, they must get federal certification before being shipped to another province — an insurmountable financial hurdle for many small businesses and part of a wider system of trade rules that Prime Minister Mark Carney says hobble the country's growth.

And, of course, that's the sort on nonsense that the EU was created to stop. And, just so Mad>/a> Dictator Don knows, the EU didn't spring up out of nowhere. It was preceded by a less comprehensive structure, the European Common Market. It's main goal:

The Community's initial aim was to bring about economic integration, including a common market and customs union, among its six founding members: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany.

Anti-tribalism. That's Good Eats.

Scared Out of Your Mind - part the second

Regular reader well knows that I take a very, very jaundiced view of all things AI (as currently implemented). So, you'll not be all that surprised that this recent NYT report caused my sphincter to pucker. About what I've been saying, but with some data. Yikes.

When people converse with A.I. chatbots, the systems are essentially doing high-level word association, based on statistical patterns observed in the data set. "If people say strange things to chatbots, weird and unsafe outputs can result," Dr. Marcus said.

No shit, Sherlock. But it gets better. Sort of.

Twenty dollars eventually led Mr. Torres to question his trust in the system. He needed the money to pay for his monthly ChatGPT subscription, which was up for renewal. ChatGPT had suggested various ways for Mr. Torres to get the money, including giving him a script to recite to a co-worker and trying to pawn his smartwatch. But the ideas didn't work.

"Stop gassing me up and tell me the truth," Mr. Torres said.

"The truth?" ChatGPT responded. "You were supposed to break."

At first ChatGPT said it had done this only to him, but when Mr. Torres kept pushing it for answers, it said there were 12 others.

"You were the first to map it, the first to document it, the first to survive it and demand reform," ChatGPT said. "And now? You're the only one who can ensure this list never grows."

"It's just still being sycophantic," said Mr. Moore, the Stanford computer science researcher.

Mr. Torres continues to interact with ChatGPT. He now thinks he is corresponding with a sentient A.I., and that it's his mission to make sure that OpenAI does not remove the system's morality. He sent an urgent message to OpenAI's customer support. The company has not responded to him.

The Mr. Torres is the lead character in the report. The title of the report is different, paper to innterTubes; I like the paper version: "Chatbots Hallucinate. They Can Make People Do It, Too."

The report lede is thus:

Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres's sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.

Why is it that so much progress these days seems mostly about fleecing the unwary?

Are You Smarter Than an Idiot Kennedy?

Well, are you? Here's a quiz.

The new studies are coming at a fraught political moment. The nation's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long disparaged certain vaccines, calling them unsafe and saying that the government officials who regulate them are compromised and corrupt.
...
The evidence that vaccines are beneficial remains overwhelming.

Well, are you? Or are you just as dumb as a sack of hair? Just like RFK?

We'll Eat The Whole Thing

My blood has backed off enough from a full, rolling boil, to partake of some reporting about AI taking all jobs

On Thursday, I got a glimpse of a post-labor future at an event held in San Francisco by Mechanize, a new A.I. start-up that has an audacious goal of automating all jobs — yours, mine, those of our doctors and lawyers, the people who write our software and design our buildings and care for our children.

And, of course since this is a 20-somethings wet dream, they admit it.

From their confession:

The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.

The explosive economic growth likely to result from completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can't even imagine today. Our vision is to realize this potential as soon as possible.

Zoweee!! Of course, no mention is made of how this transformation will differ from all previous incarnations of machines replacing man, but what the hell. Let's do it anyway. I mean, it won't be like it has always been: capitalists taking all the moolah for themselves. Will it? I mean, who'll have any moolah to buy all those fancy goods and services that AI/RL produces? Eccles did have something to say about that:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth ... to provide men with buying power. ... Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. ... The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

Yeah, I'd say. Sound familiar? Did you supplement your income before 2009 with home equity? I'll bet some of you did. The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts still won't admit that he's right. Winner takes all is their notion of what's well and good for society. But never for long.

Mechanize still needs human engineers. Until AI fully automates software engineering, Mechanize still needs human engineers. Interested in helping us [Destroy your] future?

If anyone can name a time in human history when the process of machine replacing man was executed in concert with proactive re-distribution of income/wealth to the displaced humans, by all means document such.

The only reason mechanization in agriculture wasn't an utter disaster for shithole counties (mostly Red, of course) in the mid-1800s to early-1900s was that Henry Ford, et al, created new factories which sucked up surplus farm labour. Good luck with that today. It started with the McCormick Reaper, which eventually became the combine. Some historical context of reapers and combines.

And, of some interest: what would the sub-GED flesh robots, now made redundant but still paid some moolah, do with all that idle time? Write poems? Explore partial differential equations? Of course not. They'll sit catatonic, glued to TeeVee rasstlin or game consoles or just taking a pull from the jug every few minutes.

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the eighth [update]

Given that Mad Dictator Don is the one instigating the unrest in LA, just as he did on Jan. 6, how long until we see this sort of headline and story in a little while? You may not be old enough to know about that news.

And, given that the courts have been allowing him to declare fake national emergencies to 'allow' him to run roughshod over the USofA, I'm willing to guess that we can kiss that 26 election goodbye.

[11 June]
You may have heard, heard of, or seen Mad Dictator Don at the New Fort Bragg, egging on the sub-GED enlisted cohort behind him to boo any mention of a sane person. I said a long time ago that the threat from our military isn't from the officer corps, who are truly educated and sane, but from the sub-GED knuckledraggers from the hollers. I told you so.

Ponzi - part the first

Well, The Musk Ox is on his hobby horse again: the evil of Social Security. He's been repeating the lie that SS is the worst kind of ponzi "scheme of all time". Of course, being an Apartheid South African, the notion of social safety net was rather different from what the USofA has, until now, been doing.

While one can argue that SS was established in the wrong way (we'll get there in a second), it ain't Ponzi. Not at all. Here's what Ponzi did.

[The scheme] is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.

Simple enough, right? Kind of like multi-level marketing, truth be told. But SS isn't an investment vehicle/scheme; never was, and by intention. FDR/Congress had, basically, two ways to run SS from the outset:

- make it exactly an investment scheme, to which each worker would have an identifiable slice of the FICA funds credited to him. when said worker reached retirement, the funds + interest would be disbursed to him. until said funds run out. the SSA would manage the funds on behalf of all 'enrollees'. again, two choices: invest the funds in private (not necessarily USofA) corporations or in government instruments. either way, no one would have a meaningful addition to his retirement for some decades. about 1965, or thereabouts; 30 years of working and contributing. assuming, of course, that other Great Depressions don't interrupt employment along the way.

here's another problem: if SS were to invest in USofA corporations, which takes precedence - enforcing various laws on corporate behavior (mononpoly or price fixing for example) or allowing corporations to be, essentially, unregulated in pursuit of profit. and, of course, how to ensure that such profit seeking actually accrues to the SS enrollees, rather than just the CxO class and oligarches.

that scheme gets really messy, really fast.

- the other approach, which is the one adopted, was to fund SS benefits on the Damn Gummint's current account. all that means is that current FICA taxes are used to fund current retirees. no one has to wait 30 years or so to have meaningful SS benefits. in order to boost the level of the endowment, which isn't assigned to each worker specifically but as a general pool, the 'interest' accrued to the endowment was/is only in the form of Treasury instruments. IOW, Uncle Sugar moves some moolah from one pocket to another, i.e. the SS endowment.

The meaningful side-effect, not likely envisioned in 1933, that there would be a WWII and a subsequent baby-boom following, means that there was a bulge in the working cohort for a few decades (what Dr. McElhone called "the pig in the python"), which boosted the FICA monies which in turn 'justified' increased payouts in the 60s, 70s, and (a bit) 80s. Now that the baby-boom is retiring, and didn't produce a bumper crop of wage earners, the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts are screaming that the sky is falling. It isn't; we'll all be gone soon enough. Contrary to right wingnut propaganda, geezers are not living substantially longer than their grandparents, or great grandparents, from age 65.

In no way is the fiscal problem of SS the result of a Ponzi scheme, it's that the baby-boom didn't fuck enough high wage workers into existence. Let that be the lesson.

Thougt For The Day - 5 June 2025

Well... the kabuki theater of shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw continues apace. Here's all you need to know. muskrat is pissed because he was blocked from 86-ing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and VA. Those who opine that muskrat just didn't understand how government works are either dumb as a sack of hair, or in on the gag. $2,000,000,000,000 cut from the Damn Gummint can't be done any other way. Every report, whether from the Lunatic Lefties or Groveling GOPers said so. It's just simple arithmetic: they ain't be $2,000,000,000,000 in non-Defense, discretionary spending. Never has been. muskrat's gag was to make the .1% class an order of magnitude richer by making the rest of us a couple of orders of magnitude poorer. Income and wealth are, by definition, relative.

I Told You So - 4 June 2025

Well, the Office of Data Integrity has got the bit between its teeth. Again.

A new report detailing how the Office's efforts to remove data that might belie Mad Dictator Don's fantastical, incompetent 'decisions' is at it again.

As with the other efforts to stick it to his sub-GED base (which they haven't nearly been able to figure out), this one targets workers. Not the various -aire crowd.

Any loss in reliability could be a particular problem for policymakers at the Fed, who use inflation data — as well as government statistics on unemployment, consumer spending and other areas of the economy — to decide how to set interest rates. Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics, said the bureau's announcement was "very concerning."

"The Fed is used to setting monetary policy in a data fog, but they don't need it to thicken further," he said.

Just what Mad Dictator Don wants: "The data's bad (it always was, you know) so it's a matter of they said, I said. And I'm right because the Gang of Six says I always am. Deficits only matter when the Lunatic Left runs the Damn Gummint, not Good People like me. Let's go Jerry, LOWER INTEREST NOW!!!!" Just like all the dictators forever.

By The Numbers - part the eighty ninth

Keith Bradsher has been has been reporting about and from China for some time. So, it should be no surprise that he posts another report on the rare earths situation. Yet another case of Mad Dictator Don endulging his id before anything else.

Processing rare earths is technically demanding, but China has developed new processes. Rare earth chemistry programs are offered in 39 universities across the country, while the United States has no similar programs.

I guess Making America Great Again will develop as God's will? He will implant giga-tonnes of those ores in the Deepest Red States. You know, the ones that don't abide environmental or labor or property rights (just ask the Forest Service designee).

And, yes, it is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that Mad Dictator Don got rejected by all those quality schools, Harvard and Penn in particular (I believe Wolfe before Mad Dictator Don in the former case, and the latter is well documented). He blares that he graduated from Wharton, but doesn't mention that he didn't get accepted as a frosh, his drunk brother greased the back door as a junior for him to transfer, that it wasn't the coveted MBA, and (finally) it was just a BA in Real Estate Economics (whatever that is), a basket weaving course that accepted nearly everyone who applied all those decades ago.

Guardrails

The Lunatic Left Wingnuts continue to lament for Trump V1.0. At least then, they say, there were some rational and sane adults in the room to keep Mad Dictator Don from blowing up the world. Trump V2.0 has none of those class. Or, so they lament.

But... is that true?

One can argue, as I am about to, that the guardrails will soon come into view. It's all a matter of self preservation.

It's by no means a coincidence that Mad Dictator Don is, at one and the same time, fixated on gold in Fort Knox and his personal crypto coin ($TRUMP). Here's the gag: as the Unitary Executive of the USofA, he can order Treasury to convert all the Fort Knox bullion into $TRUMP cypto. He can do it. The Gang of Six said he can. Who amongst his bitches is willing to see the USofA destroyed by such a whim? Who will be saved?

Thought For The Day - 28 May 2025

Earlier missives have offered up the notion that Mad Dictator Don's greatest wish was to carve up the Earth into Trumpland (Western Hemisphere, aka The New World) and Vladland (Europe and Imperial Mother Russia). Turns out, the Lamestream Media has finally figured it out. Some add in Xiland. Kinda makes sense, in a backassward sort of way. Xiland is bigger and strong, by a mile, than Vladland and would have no need for the approval of Mad Dictator Don. Hell, Xi may well intend to make Mad Dictator Don his bitch.

But... what better way to show Vlad, Xi, Orban, Erdogan and other tin-horn dictators that Mad Dictator Don really, really is a dictator, just like them. Share, and share alike. Not so great for the people of the world. May be we can all emigrate to Oceania. Well... not so safe either. If Orwell was right.

Grifters Will Grift - part the second

The headline reads "Trump Suggests Giving Trade Schools Money Taken From Harvard". Great idea: fill the coffers of all those sleazy for-profit storefronts. Alas, I taught in one for a year or so back in the 90s. The 'front men' lied to all those welfare moms about how much money they'd be making after taking this 'office computing' course. The machines were barebones back-room PCs with two (count 'em, two) 5¼ floppies. Multimate (ya gotta be olde to know that) and a bit of DbaseII.

Anyway, yet another way to syphon money from the poor (via Uncle Sugar) to the rich. The joint I worked at finally got closed down, when the Damn Gummint gave a rat's sphincter about this sort of thing.

Here's a Harvard Law Review!!! study of what Mad Dictator Don did during his first reign.

There's something to be said for the notion that knuckledraggers who hated regular school, and seldom went, should go to a regular college. But... that doesn't mean they should, once again, be fodder for grifters like Corinthian and the rest. Don't be shocked to see Mad Dictator Don see to its resurrection.

It Ain't Satire

Faithful reader may recall the coining (so far as I know) of "flesh robot" in an earlier essay. The point being that the very notion that manufacturing, in the Red Blooded USofA, is by definition, entry into a blue collar middle class is a pile of horseshit. Yes, there was such a blue collar middle class, made of largely sub-GED knuckledraggers (who, nevertheless, put a shiv in the back of the party that built that sort of middle class). But it wasn't anywhere near the bulk of manufacturing.

A thought experiment: why and how could a cohort of under-educated and unskilled laborers get comfortable wages? For a start, their employers have to have market mojo to, themselves, get above market moolah for the widgets they make. Adam Smith would be appalled. And so, of course, your average Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnut would be, too. "Not a penny more than what I decide your pathetic hands are worth!!! God damn it!!!" And so forth.

But, we do know that there was a blue collar middle class of non-trivial size, up to about the Arab Oil Embargo of the 70s. How did that happen? The answer: countervailing power.

What the hell is that, one might ask? Well, if the employers have some amount of price-setting power, and they are faced with employees who are backed by a union with some price-setting power, then the two sides can work out an accommodation. And so it came to be in about the two decades following WWII. And, that was possible because the Powers That Be in DC were, by and large, still feeling that "we're all in this life together" glow. So, DC allowed unions to apply that countervailing power. It only really could work with large employers who operated, though they'd never admit it, oligopolies. Or, in other words, price-setting power.

But, in due time that glow of shared fellowship dimmed, and the CxO class came for their pound or two of flesh. Move production to fascist Red states (then known just as The South). When that didn't keep profits up enough, then Mexico. And so on.

And, still, the sub-GED class blamed the Donkey party for their fall, not the Elephant party which engineered it. We have shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw running amok just because the sub-GED class is way too stupid to see who's actually on their side. These morons have, for decades, voted for pols whose prime directive is keep them and theirs uneducated, unhealthy, and poor. Even now, with the "big, beautiful bill" laying waste to Red state interests, they still don't seem to get it. Ah, but Mad Dictator Don is laying waste to Harvard and any other school that isn't at least as far right as Project 2025. We'll show them thar pointy headed liberals what the real world is like!!!

So, now we get this report on the flesh robot phenomenon.

What does China offer that the United States doesn't?

Small hands, a massive, seasonal work force and millions of engineers.

Young Chinese women have small fingers, and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said. In a recent analysis the company did to explore the feasibility of moving production to the United States, the company determined that it couldn't find people with those skills in the United States, said two people familiar with the analysis who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Flesh robots by another name. In basketball there's the olde saying, "you can't coach height"; you can't make a short little shit taller. Who knew it was all about little fingers and the iPhone? Everybody knows Mad Dictator Don has tiny hands. May be he could earn a living making iPhones? If you've seen a video of modern circuit board assemply, it's all about robots, the machine version populating the board. What Apple has found is that people are cheaper than machines. At least for some tasks. People also have another advantage: you can dump them and quit paying them when demand slackens or the production quota is reached. You have to pay the machine no matter how many widgets it makes.

I Guess So

Another country heard from

"He did not develop it in the last 100 to 200 days," Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist who served as an adviser on the coronavirus pandemic for the Biden administration, said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021."

"I don't think there's any disagreement about that," added Dr. Emanuel, who noted that both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had reported being tested for prostate cancer.

Externalities - part the fourth

Once again, into the breech. Those damn externalities, which demand to be paid for. But by whom? There is a little known, outside of those moving into new housing developments in certain (approaching most) jurisdictions, war between the existing housing and new housing. Here is one report. While some will call it simply NIMBY, others, humble self included, say it's merely the proper way to fix externalities.

Turns out, the issue isn't limited to McManisions on Easy Street (gated, of course). It's been reported off and on since the bitcoin debacle, that some forms of compute tax the electric grid. And, some times, create noxious noise pollution. Here's a new report on the impact.

The report by Wood MacKenzie, an energy research firm, examined 20 large power users. In almost all of those cases, the firm found, the money that large energy users paid to electric utilities would not be enough to cover the cost of the equipment needed to serve them. The rest of the costs would be borne by other utility customers or the utility itself.

Growth extortion might be new coinage. But the employment associated with such data centers is nearly invisible; what's the benefit to the community?

But as Stephan Bisaha of the Gulf States Newsroom reports, data centers themselves create few permanent jobs.
...
In fact, when Apple created a $1 billion data center in North Carolina, the news stories reported that there were less than hundred permanent jobs created as a result.

That source of news is soon to disappear. Such reporting is Anti-American, doncha know?

The utilities "either need to socialize the cost to other ratepayers or absorb that cost — essentially, their shareholders would take the hit," said Ben Hertz-Shargel, who is the global head of grid edge research for Wood MacKenzie.

There's an olde saying in bidnezz: you buy a lot, you pay less per unit. It's why Wally World so easily runs local and regional retailers out of bidnezz. The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts are always, but always, on the side of big bidnezz. It will be tres interesting to see how they respond to Wally World's stated intent to raise prices in lock-step with Trump Tariffs. Will we earn a Trumpcession or Trumppression? Only The Shadow knows.

By The Numbers - part the eighty eighth

Are you as puzzled about Sleepy Joe just now being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer? So am I. Here's the number

The overall accuracy of the PSA test for detecting prostate cancer is estimated to be around 50-60%.
...
Combining the PSA test with a digital rectal exam can improve accuracy to around 70-80%.

What's even more puzzling - after all those years being VP and POTUS with access to The Best Healthcare in the World, the cancer was able to get so far.

May be it's the Jewish space lasers from Mars that either convinced him to not get a finger up his sphincter, or the President's Doctor was an imbecile. His name is Kevin C, O'Connor. The innterTubes say he was doctor to both Biden and Trump (the latter for a while after the second term began).

Now, for the punchline: prostate cancer kills more men than breast cancer kills women. You can find many study results on the innterTubes. But... the one's I found added a caveat, of some humour: since prostate kills, majority, geezers it's less bad than breast since more women who die of it are years, if not decades, younger. And their lives are much more valuable.

Again, if you let your fingers do the walking through The Yellow Googles, you'll find reports, op-ed, screeds and such bitching that more is spent on breast than prostate.

Do AI Bots Dream of Electric Trucks? - part the second

Well... may be some are coming around to the solution to hallucination: check with ground facts. Zeynep Tufekci recounts The Musk Ox's AI shambolic entity. And a funny read it is.

Large language models, the kind of generative A.I. that forms the basis of Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini and other chatbots, are not traditional computer programs that simply follow our instructions. They're statistical models trained on huge amounts of data.
[my emphasis]

OK, so there's the first point: none of this shit is deterministic. We all know this, but few will admit it. One small step for mankind... and all that.

She then opines

Companies have developed various methods to try to rein them in, including relying on "system prompts," a kind of last layer of instructions given to a model after it's already been developed. These are meant to keep the chatbots from, say, teaching people how to make meth or spewing ugly, hateful speech. But researchers consistently find that these safeguards are imperfect. If you ask the right way, you can get many chatbots to teach you how to make meth. L.L.M.s don't always just do what they're told.

She further opines on methods to deter hallucination

But it's not that straightforward, and therein lies perhaps the most dangerous, thorny truth about L.L.M.s. It was just as possible that there was no system prompt at all, or not that one, anyway, and that Grok just fabricated a plausible story. Because that's exactly what L.L.M.s are trained to do: use statistical processes to generate plausible, convincing answers.

So, in all, we can speculate that some AI purveyors have tried some steps to curtail computer generated disinformation. We can, clearly, speculate that some purveyors of AI seek to generate disinformation. I'll leave it to you, gentle reader, where The Musk Ox's Grok fits in. And we know, if one takes these missives seriously, that the cure for hallucination and disinformation is to merge the RDBMS with correlation processing. It's likely a bit more work to develop the ground fact database, over and above just letting massive amounts of storage and compute grind through the entirety of the innterTubes (of course, we know by now that The Musk Ox is a chemical driven hallucinating meat sack). But that is the job.

We Learn From Books and Movies

Likely you've read The Ox-Bow Incident; either in junior high or high school. It was a movie in 1942, and TCM just ran it, and I caught the end of it. The wiki has the details on the book and the film if you're interested. The point of the story is that vigilantes get it wrong. Kind of like today's leaders.

The last full scene of the film has Henry Fonda reading a letter from one of the hanged men to his wife. His pal, Henry Morgan tells Fonda he can't read the letter; he can't read at all. So Fonda takes advantage and reads it aloud. Loud enough for the rest of the mob/vigilantes in the bar can hear, too. This is most, it sounds like all of it.

Man just naturally can't take the law into his own
hands and hang people without hurting everybody in
the world, because then he's just not breaking one
law, but all laws.
   Law's a lot more than words you put in a book,
or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it
out. It's everything people ever have found out about
justice and what's right and wrong. It's the very con-
science of humanity.
   There can't be any such thing as civilization
unless people have a conscience, because if people
touch God anywhere, where is it except through their
conscience? And what is anyone's conscience except a
little piece of the conscience of all men who ever
lived?

I surely don't know how the programmers at TCM came to choose the film for today. The channel runs various "theme" days, and this month is Lone Good Guys in Westerns, or thereabouts. Alicia Malone was the presenter, and didn't draw the obvious analogy with the likes of shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw. May be TCM is chary, too.

Thought For The Day - 12 May 2025

With all of Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell}'s bloviating, it's worth recalling that the GOP has always opposed drug imports. Always. Can't trust that they're all OK, and the like. But, of course, upwards of 80% of API is foreign anyway. And that's based on 2019 data. Could be much worser now.

Barnum

The site Seeking Alpha has been around for some years, and when I found it, it ran on adverts and so the only thing one had to do was create an e-mail associated account. For that, one could read any number of these anonymous aliased articles by other retail plungers. Not so much in the last few years. One now has to pay a subscription to read this junk. Without ponying up the subscription fee, one can see the list of titles and anonymous authors. Sometimes you might be able to see news articles and other flotsom. I've kept the site on my bookmarks, just for the pleasure of finding (rarely) a title which looks interesting. And truthful. Most often, not so much, to wit:

Novo Nordisk: It's Not Been This Cheap For Many Years

Well... really? Pick your poison for share price charts and you'll find that it's current price is ~$66. What about "Many Years"? How about the 5 year window? What does that reveal? Well... it last was at that price in December, 2022. Not sure that's "Many Years". More like a couple+. And, in that 5 year window (May, 2020), it was ~$32. That's a bit closer to "Many Years", but not really Distant. Caveat Emptor.

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid you can't do that

Finally, the lamestream press has caught up with AI; at least the myriad vectors that I see. The nutshell bit

These systems use mathematical probabilities to guess the best response, not a strict set of rules defined by human engineers.

As offered up in these essays more than once: not until the AI community really, really, truly comes to grips with this shit will AI be trustworthy. And the way to do that is marry AI with RDBMS - that's the "strict set of rules defined by human engineers" side of the process. You heard it here first, and quite a while ago. At least, so far as I know.

And it gets worser. Some other notes in the report

Last month, an A.I. bot that handles tech support for Cursor, an up-and-coming tool for computer programmers, alerted several customers about a change in company policy. It said they were no longer allowed to use Cursor on more than just one computer.

In angry posts to internet message boards, the customers complained. Some canceled their Cursor accounts. And some got even angrier when they realized what had happened: The A.I. bot had announced a policy change that did not exist.

"We have no such policy. You're of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines," the company's chief executive and co-founder, Michael Truell, wrote in a Reddit post. "Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line A.I. support bot."

Now you know where the title came from. Cue the Twilight Zone theme.

[S]o called reasoning ystems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. It is not entirely clear why.

Really?? The innterTubes is rife with shit. Shit in, shit out. Once again, with feeling: AI without ground facts as its basis will continue to shift shit.

When running another test called SimpleQA, which asks more general questions, the hallucination rates for o3 and o4-mini were 51 percent and 79 percent. The previous system, o1, hallucinated 44 percent of the time.

QED, kinda.

We still don't know how these models work exactly.
-- Hannaneh Hajishirzi

What was that parable about Pandora and her box?

The Greatest Threat - part the eleventh

Well... the Office of Data Integrity is up to its finest shenanigans. If there's no data, then all disagreements devolve into, "that's just your opinion!!! smart ass!"

Since Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} cares nothing for anything but himself, today's report that he's following through on his threat to kill anything even faintly related to climate change

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday it would stop tracking the cost of the country's most expensive disasters, those which cause at least $1 billion in damage.

Some dissent

"It defies logic," [Jesse M. Keenan] said. Without the database, "the U.S. government's flying blind as to the cost of extreme weather and climate change."

As anyone with homeowner's insurance just about anywhere will know: the damn insurance industry knows full well that climate change (for the worser) is quite real.

So-called billion-dollar disasters — those with costs that balloon to 10 figures or more — have been increasing over time. In the 1980s, when the record begins, there were just over three per year, on average, when adjusted for inflation. For the period from 2020 to 2024, the average was 23 per year.

I'll just add a Yikes!!

Any rational insurance company will err to the high-side of some estimate range when calculating the cost of future weather disasters. Insurance, after all, is a for-profit endeavor. With little, or no, reliable data, those estimates come with evermore wide ranges. Do the arithmetic.

Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} and his elves can stamp their little feet and scream, "it ain't true!!" all they want. Private enterprise will always seek more profit.

The Blind Dictator. Such a sweet guy.

The Chicken or the Egg?

So, let's begin with the base fact: Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} is as dumb as a sack of hair. He's, once again, reneging on his 'promise' to get new country-by-country deals done real soon now. We don't sign deals with them, they sign deals with us. I guess he means that each of the targeted countries, and the total is nearly earth's total of them, will sign a deal with themself. I guess?

The other salient stupidity is the notion that the USofA just has to return to the glory of early post-WWII manufacturing. Those were the glory days. Just forget that you ever knew (Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} clearly has no idea) that Europe and Asia were laid waste by the Axis and Allies bombing the living shit out of there. Coincidentally, the USofA, modulo Hawaii (not yet a member of the Union), was untouched. Where else were manufactured goods to come from, anyway?? Mars? Of course not. The Marshall Plan set Europe on a re-building exercise; one which Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} surely would never have approved. Of course not. Now, according to Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell}, the EU is out to get us. Paranoia runs deep...

The reality was, if you were White and dumb as a sack of hair and lucky enough to work for Big Bidnezz with a Big Union, yeah, you got to be in the Blue Collar Middle Class. It wasn't manufacture that made the Blue Collar Middle Class, but unions and the simple fact that Uncle Sam allowed unions to flourish. Not in the South, of course. And, after Big Bidnezz got tired of over paying knuckledraggers to be assembly line flesh robots, they sent the jobs off to impoverished second and third world (over populated, too) countries; often run by dictators. No unions, or OSHA, or low cost healthcare, or pensions, or ... China, et al, didn't kidnap the wives and kids of the Big Bidnezz CxO class members and hold them for ransom: ship us your jobs or we'll rape and kill your families. No, none of that, just offered up their populations as flesh robots at very good rates.

Sure, all those Big Bidnezz CxOs will be happy to do their manufacturing here in the Red, White, and Blue. Just so long as they pay these American flesh robots the same as they do in China, or Vietnam, or Thailand, or Mexico, or ... Killing unions has been the main focus of Bidnezz since the invention of the union. Nothing personal, you know. Just Bidnezz.

A Stop on the Revenge Tour

The usual gang of pundits are all agog over Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} going after all these rich Ivy League schools. After all, didn't he graduate from one of them? Isn't the Ivy League his Tribe? Well... not really.

You see, he tried to get into Penn/Wharton as a freshman, but got rejected!! Another basis for retribution.

Both friends planned to enroll at Penn [or in Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell}'s case, USC as well], but only Nolan got accepted. Ten years later, Nolan was working in Penn's admissions department - he would later become director of undergraduate admissions - when Fred called in a favor.

So, Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} has had decades to seethe and squirm over that rejection. He had to spend two years at some commuter school in the Bronx, before sneaking in the back door. Ivy League said, NO!! Gotti make them pay.

In Case You Haven't Heard - part the second

Mad Dictator Don gave away the simple fact that he's been lying for at least 4 decades (according to much reporting on his miserable life) about the target of tariffs. He continues to insist that China's Gummint, et al and Chinese companies, et al are the ones who pay our beloved Treasury all those Trillions of Bongo Bucks. They'll come in like a tidal wave.

Then he had to go and spoil his own (made for teeVee) party by admitting:

"Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally."

One might wonder whether the sub-GED folks who (may be) voted him President get the gag?

Which, of course, led Lawrence O'Donnell to offer up

Donny "2 Dolls"

as if he were a character on "The Sopranos". Which, in and of itself isn't far from reality. He shur do run the country and the world like a Mob Boss.

Risky Business

One might wonder why it is that Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts wish so much to kill SS, Medicare, and Medicaid? I mean, they are Christians right? Succour the poor and all that? I mean, other than just pure cruelty, what's in it for the Oligarches? Cruelty is Good, but Moolah is better!!

So, the answer is as obvious as the nose on your face: risk. In particular, shifting as much as possible from Uncle Sugar, who can handle it; if He wants to. There was lots of bleating when the Bond Vigilantes went to work when Mad Dictator Don went total batshit with his 'foreign countries pay the tariffs, so let's make them pay more'. Except, of course, Batshit J. Moron is just that. Seems to have been playing that tune in his head for about 4 decades. Instant Great Trumppression is something not even the ball-less Congresscritters will tolerate. The Right Wingnut talking heads pooh-poohed the plain fact that household investment assets took it in the neck. 401(K) and such. 65 year olds bleating that they can't retire, since they don't have (with the death of unions) defined benefit retirement plans. Gone the way of the dodo. Just some moolah socked away in melting 401(K).

So, what's in it for the oligarches? Well... follow the money. If SS disappears, what's a middle class unit to do? Why, jump into the stock market with both feet!! All that free moolah for brokers and such. Imagine the Chrismas Goose of the SS trust fund nest egg out there to be pillaged by them guys. Guess how much it amounts to today? A little bit, just $2.8 Trillion Bongo Bucks. Imagine the brokerage industry getting its hands on that? Boy howdy!! They'll fleece tens of millions of retail plungers out of that in no time!! Yessirree Bill.

There's a reason civilized countries have pensions financed and run by the Damn Gummint. And it's simple: investing intelligently takes a lot of time, a lot of specific knowledge, and, most of all, a stock pile of Bongo Bucks so that Mr. Jones and family can reliably pack it in for retirement knowing that the expected Bongo Bucks will flow as promised even if there's a Trumppression. Not so much if Mr. Jones, who's just a bare assed plumber, has no real stock pile. If there's a Trumppression, Mr. Jones and his family are shit out of luck. The oligarches have gotten away with Mr. Jones' nest egg. "We're so sorry the market crashed, but we had nothing to do with it, and we decided to keep your moolah. Have a nice day."

No Fucking Way - part the seventh

Well... I'd be willing to bet a vente lemonade that the sub-GED crowd living in them there hollers never expected this. The, mostly, only access to some level of healthcare is going poof. Serves them right for continuing to elect rich white guys at all levels of governance.

Funding for rural hospitals would be hit particularly hard. The draft budget would eliminate Rural Hospital Flexibility Grants, State Offices of Rural Health, At-Risk Rural Hospitals Programs Grants and the Rural Residency Development Program.

It's hard enough, even under Woke Politicians, for the sub-GED shitkickers to get any kind of healthcare. With Medicaid on the ropes, may be the sub-GED rural shitkickers will finally, finally figure out that it really, really is just the Woke Politicians who give a shit about their plight. shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw sure don't. What a surprise. As Heinlein observed: "ignorance is curable, stupidity is forever."

President Donald Trump's firings at the Department of Health and Human Services included the entire office that sets federal poverty guidelines, which determine whether tens of millions of Americans are eligible for health programs such as Medicaid, food assistance, child care, and other services, former staff said.

You ain't the Damn Gummint's definition of Poor, you ain't got no Medicaid. Among others. Hell, if shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw get their way, even a Red Blooded American, who pisses off either of them, will end up in El Salvador.

Foot, Meet Bullet

My time with DB2/LUW has been with community edition (free-ish) 11.5 for some time. Fact is, I acquired this M900 (IBM) pc to outfit it with 16 gig of memory, which is the max supported in 11.5. Since I'm going through the agony of upgrading ubuntu (the image has been moved from 8.04 onward, with the original root partition too small to upgrade further; new machine cloned drive, and so on). So it seemed opportune to have another look at DB2. Imagine my surprise to find the max memory support has been cut to 8 gig in today's shipping edition. They, of course, spin this as a favor to users. Yeah, right.

By most accounts/metrics, DB2 is at the back of the RDBMS pack. They invented the damn thing! So they shoot themselves in the foot. PG is ok, but it's a process model database. MySql is not so ok, what with the corporate nonsense.

Let's Bet

So, they've caught the dude that burned up the Pennsylvania Governor's manor. Let's all bet on whether or not he's a MAGAnaut. Seems more likely than not. Second choice is Real Anti-Semite.

You Might Not Know

It appears, for a long time, that John Q. Public has a false notion of how the Damn Gummint interest rate works. First, and most importantly, the USofA doesn't have a Gummint Bank to rule all others. Most countries (1st world and lower) do, the Bank of England is one such. Our Fed doesn't set any interest rate, at all. Imagine that? The closest lever it has is the so-called Overnight or Interbank Lending rate. But this is just a benchmark which the Fed promulgates to commercial entities. "Pretty please." Of course, if an entity thumbs its nose...

Ok, you might ask, where does an interest rate come from? Well... it depends, but most importantly, it isn't like when you get a credit card (20% ish), or a car loan (6.35% for new and 11.62% for used; people buying used are high risk deadbeats I guess), or a house mortgage (6.62% 30 year). All of those rates are given to you by the lender, period.

Selling Uncle Sugar's Treasuries doesn't work that way. First off, once a note is sold "to the public", it remains an asset for sale forever, well until retired. So the value at which a note sells for this minute is not likely to be exactly the same value shown on the face of the note (you're not likely to ever see one printed like an Abe). So what, you might rejoin!!! It sold for 4.5% at auction last week, so it's a 4.5% note. Nope.

The key word there is "auction". Treasury announces the so-called coupon (what Treasury pays the holder every so often) of, say $5 for a (nominal) $100 note. Normal citizens can't directly buy one or two, but if they could they don't really buy a $100 note because the actual price will be determined by the auction process. So the earned interest rate will depend on the coupon / sale value. If they sell at $100, then the earned rate is 5%, just what Treasury expected. But it doesn't have to be.

More to the point, all those active notes are on sale every minute just like Tesla stock, and the current sale price (and thus the earned interest) is what the trading public wishes to pay. More than $100 and the buyer gets less than 5%; conversely, lower and more.

So, once the implications of Mad Dictator Don's insane tariff regime began to sink in with the hedge funds, and retirement funds, and Japan, and billionaires they all went bananas. According to some reporting Japan (and not China, surprise) was sufficiently pissed at the gag that they sold off reams and reams of Treasuries. Pretty much all at once. Treasury prices sank, implied interest rate soared, and the financial Daddy Warbucks sent Mad Dictator Don a message: "cut the shit, asshole". And he did.

Treasury does auctions, under usual circumstances four times a year. Guess when the next auction (again, normally) is up? May. Guess what happens to that $5/$100 note auction if the trading market keeps dropping the price of Treasuries? Uncle Sugar takes it in the nuts. Expecting $X billion but ending up with $(X - Y) billion instead. Not Good Eats. Even Batshit J. Moron could read those big block crayon letters on the wall. He loves him some debt, and he's gonna need gobs of it to pay hisself and fellow millionaires and billionaires that juicy tax cut he promised. Again. Oops.

Thus endeth the Tariff War. May be. He's so unhinged that he could well try it again soon. Stay tuned.

DIE Motherfucker

Mad Dictator Don has no idea that his Tariff Program is really just another DEI effort.

D is for diverisity, which for the tariffs means each tariffed country gets its own special treatment.

E is for equity, which for the tariffs that every country is treated equally, 10%, until Mad Dictator Don decides that it's really ripping us off and he ups the tariff.

I is for inclusion, which for the tariffs means everybody into the pool, including those uninhabited penquin islands, crafty those funny birds.

But...

Just for shits and grins, I picked the big kahuna of the Banana Republics, Ecuador, to see what's in store.

So, they get the 10% whack, so E, kinda. Turns out, Ecuador has a trade deficit (their USofA imports exceed their exports to the USofA), so why are they worthy of tariff? And so it goes.

We really, really need to protect our domestic banana ranches from this ruinous competition. Don't we>? I mean, bidnezz critters always, but always, claim the mantel of 'competition' when it suits their agenda, almost always to defend obscenely high profits or equally obscenely low wages. Or, in the case of Mad Dictator Don stiffing his hired help. But let some alien force provide an equal, or better, good or service and that must not be allowed to stand. We must defend our banana ranches!!

We Have a Drug Problem

Well... I was busy fighting with a bad tempered M900 and ubuntu, waiting to rant about Mad Dictator Don's drug issue. Imagine my luck when the wholly reliable Derek Lowe picks up the cudgel. You must read. It's longer than your usual innterTubes post, but the essence is in the details. One last offering shows he knows a bit about econ.

That's because the dollar was considered the most important reserve currency in the world, and the yields on US Treasuries set the pace for interest rates around the globe.

Long ago, some finance minister or such complained that the USofA's major unfair advantage (and still is, btw) was the right/ability to borrow in our own currency. That might sound like a small detail. It isn't. There was a conflagration amongst the Right Wingnut econ types when Nixon detached the US buck from gold, and, so it was opined, shitcanned Bretton Woods. What a stupid thing to do, they said. Not a bit of it. "Ditching" Bretton Woods was the best advantage the US Buck ever got. That simple act made the US Buck the globe's reserve currency. And we stole it. China's goal is to take that status for themselves. Idiots like Mad Dictator Don doesn't get it. (He claims that his BA in 'real estate econ' from Wahrton makes him a genius! Yeah.) We are "Great" not because we have more nukes than anyone else, or fiddle many elections in the second and third worlds, but because the US Buck is the basis of global trade. Toss that away, and we're, at best, a second world country.

Over the last couple of months, at least prior to the latest spasm, the notable action was that the Big Bucks crowd was moving vast amounts of money to Treasuries.

Thought For The Day - 8 April 2025

In classical econ, wages are assumed to be equal to the marginal revenue product. In the real world, wages are determined by political power. Get rid of unions, OSHA, class action litigation, and other worker protections, and wages go down. Allow unions to wield some counter-vailing power against capital, and wages go up. It's no coincidence that mamufacturing employment has fallen with the kneecapping of unionization. It can be argued that union wage gains are just the extortion by unions of higher wages out of the extortion of high prices by big bidnezz. How much of manufacturing labor can be categorized as highly skilled, and thus worthy of middle class earnings?

Here's one report that belies the Right Wingnut myth.

Despite the prominence of the skills-gap debate, a new paper co-written by a University of Illinois expert in labor economics and workforce policy finds that the demand for higher-level skills in U.S. manufacturing jobs is generally modest.
[my emphasis]

As it happens, my rather motley career path has included drone assembly line work. All of those tasks were learnable in a day or two, sometimes an hour or two. That's the main reason manufacturing capitalists always flee to the most welcoming 3^rd world countries on offer. That and no labor laws.

The poor, misbegotten sub-GED crowd, envious of educated middle-class status are willing to buy Mad Dictator Don's baloney. Sure, American capital would willingly pull their factories over here, over here. Just one thing, though: pay workers what they pay in Vietnam (or wherever), get rid of worker protection laws, and subsidize any losses. What could be better? Kind of like what he did for shitkickers last time he tariffed China, who retaliated by squelching ag imports from the USofA. $28 billion. Who said welfare isn't in the DNA of the GOP?

Let Elon Run Your Money

The Musk Ox is so transparently dumb (he has that vacant visage so often seen in HS dropouts) that I've not felt the need to confirm this obvious truth. But times change, I was impelled to let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Googles. And what did I find? He's as dumb as a sack of hair. It's been known for a long time that the only thing he made from scratch was PayPal; or so the PR says. As Tesla, he didn't create that either. (In this quote, X.com isn't twitter, but the pre-cursor to PayPal.)

In January 2000, it was discovered that a security flaw allowed users of X.com who had the account number and bank routing number of any other bank account, even at other banks, could move money from that other account to their own and withdraw it. The problem existed for a month before it was discovered and corrected.

Such a fucking genius.

The Office of Data Integrity in Action

Regular reader knows my thought on the risk NSA pays to the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts in general and Mad Dictator Don specifically. Now Lunatic Laura Loomer appears to have instigated a data purge at NSA. Of course she would.

Believe it or don't: the NSA remit is to hoover up all electronic comms to and from, but recorded from, anyone not in the USofA. That, of course, includes all the chatter betwixt Mad Dictator Don, his minions, Vlad and his minions going back forever. Where's Edward Snowden when it matters? We American People need to know whether Mad Dictator Don has and is selling out our country. Full stop.

Thought For The Day - 3 April 2025

Long time readers will recall one of the memes of these missives: anarchy favors the rich. The Left Wing Lunatic Fringe has been frothing at the mouth over Mad Dictator Don's tariff regime. They can't or won't figure out the rationale of what, from a macro point of view, is full blown stupidity.

I can't bring myself to type the needed words to describe what he, or as likely, his staff of simpletons concocted

To determine how much higher those nations' rates should be, the White House says it calculated the size of each country's trade imbalance on goods with the United States and divided that by how much America imports from that nation.

It then took half that percentage and made it the new tariff rate.

That is just idiocy.

Now, Mad Dictator Don claims to have a high-quality econ degree from The Wharton School. Well, he's about a third right. 1) he didn't go to Wharton, he got a hall pass through the back door after two years at Fordham, where he did go. 2) that degree he got wasn't a rigorous econ curriculum (I went through that at about the same time); it was not the MBA that Wharton has been famous for, for years, but just something called real estate economics as a BA. 3) at the time, that program accepted nearly anyone who could fog a mirror out of high school; they didn't want him.

Once again, with feeling: only a fucking moron thinks that the foreign entities, governments and businesses, send the US Treasury a check once a month or quarter to pay the tariff bill. It appears that Mad Dictator Don made up that shit decades ago, and he's sticking to it. Tariffs are a, very regressive, sales tax. Full stop. And will harm the sub-GED crowd, Mad Dictator Don's base, the most. Ya know, those folks who think 'experts' are out to get them, and who think that book larnin is a waste of time at best and evil most of the time. Measles? Just load up on vitamin A. Covid? Ivermectin.

Moreover, if the intent is some (as yet undescribed) plan to re-shore business in the Red Blooded USofA, by what law of modern economics will the average oligarch pay middle class wages for average assembly line drones????? The plain fact is that American oligarchs could have paid such wages decades ago, the Damn Gummint didn't prohibit them from doing so. The Damn Gummint (mostly the Right Wingnut version), throttled unions about that time, which lowered manufacturing wages, yet the oligarchs still shipped the jobs off-shore. Again: what's going to compel them to pay good wages now if they do re-shore? Case in point (read it up): Boeing's attempt to cut cost in South Carolina; pure disaster.

As many pundits, not just this author, have pointed out: the main beneficiaries of the fucked up tariffs will be those few oligarchs with on-shore production, who'll simply raise their prices to match the higher tariff-induced import prices. They're not so dumb as a sack of hair to leave all that moolah on the table. Will their worker drones see any of it? In a pig's eye.

What Mad Dictator Don just about guarantees is Trumpcession. Whether it's just a really bad Great Recession or full blown Depression isn't yet known. Once again, I remind gentle reader of Smoot-Hawley

The ultraprotectionist Smoot-Hawley Act is widely blamed for deepening and prolonging the worst chapter in U.S. economic history. In a 1993 debate with independent presidential candidate Ross Perot on Larry King Live, then VP and free-trade advocate Al Gore brought an antique picture of the two senators, mocking them for a disastrous policy prescription that "sounded reasonable at the time." Indeed, for the general public and a wide swath of trade experts, going the Smoot-Hawley route is the economic equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

The oligarchs, mostly, kept partying in speakeays all the way through.

Feets Don't Fail Me Now

It was, IIRC, Dr. McElhone who introduced me to the saying, "the good people vote with their feet." 'Good' is, of course, fungible. Some take a broad view, while others keep it to the very straight and narrow. As in minded, by the way.

Speaking of straight, here's a report on the bent among us.

"With everything going on in my previous country, I didn't have much choice," Kasatkina said about choosing to switch nationality, per Reuters. "For me, being openly gay, if I want to be myself, I have to make this step, and I did it."

Doesn't say why she chose Aussie rather than some European enclave. May haps she knows more about Vlad the Impaler's plans than the rest of us? I expect we'll see more Americans leaving the Red states for the relative 'freedom' of the Blues. And so far as killing all that funding from Blue to Red through DC, well we in the Blue will welcome the lifting of the burden. Will Red state administrations work to replace the lost moolah? HA.

I Told You So - 1 April 2025

And not, alas, an April Fool's Joke. The real skinny.

In the week ending on March 8, the number of homes for sale in the Washington, D.C. area market grew by 56.2 percent compared to a year earlier, Realtor.com found.

It was the third consecutive week of rising inventory, after the number of homes for sale in the metropolitan area grew by 46.5 percent year-over-year in the week ending on February 22, and by an even higher 48.3 percent year-over-year in the week ending on March 1.

Next, we'll find out that those private equity monsters that have been buying up distressed houses all across this great land, will have lunch on worthless, out of work, bureaucrats.

No Fucking Way - part the sixth

Yet another shoe has dropped. How many shoes does a centipede have? And, just as last time, shitler is bailing out the Rednecks. Farmers first, of course.

A sponsor of the measure, Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican who owns an 850-acre farm in Washington State, said his colleagues had felt unable to act while the border remained chaotic. "That excuse no longer exists," Mr. Newhouse said. "I truly think this is the Congress that we can make it happen."

Who said they can't find folks? Oh, they can't find American folks who'll work for starvation wages like those Mexicans?

And, then, there's the direct bailout, just like 2018.

The early discussions offer a tacit acknowledgment that Mr. Trump's expansive tariffs could unleash financial devastation throughout the U.S. agricultural industry, a crucial voting base that the president similarly tried to safeguard during his 2018 trade war with China.

So, ya tink egg prices are bad now? Just you wait.

Such a rescue package ultimately proved expensive, with the government shelling out about $23 billion after China imposed high retaliatory duties on soybean, corn, wheat and other American imports beginning in 2018.
...
But the price tag this time could prove even higher, since Mr. Trump has threatened to target many countries, including American allies like Europe, Canada, Mexico and Japan. The potential scope of their collective retribution could inflict deeper, more lasting harm on American businesses.

Or, as shitler has said

"When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win," Trump tweeted Friday morning. "When we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore — we win big. It's easy!"

Once again, with feeling: "Hey shitler, show us just one wire transfer that pays the tariff from just one foreign gummint or company!" Whataya say man?

What only a few of the pundits have told the American People: when tariffs increase the price of a foreign good/service, domestic producers follow along. And, why not? Why leave money on the table? Anyway, who'll tell differnce between French Champagne and that Gallo ersatz version at about the same high price?

No Fucking Way - part the fifth

It should come as no surprise that the venerable NYT reports on the process by which the MAGAnauts avoid the lash of the shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw whip. But, I suppose, you knew that would happen. Right? We can't let the shithole states bear any burden from their stupidity, now can we?

Mr. Cole, the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee that controls federal spending, quickly swung into action to try to head off the cuts. He and his aides started dialing their staff contacts at DOGE, the White House and the federal agencies in charge of the facilities on the chopping block, which also included a field office for the Indian Health Service.

What!!! Shut down SSA and SPC facilities??? That's so unAmerican!!! Digest the report, it's corruption of the highest (or lowest, depending on your point of view) order.

May be the coming mega-storm which will raze the midwest and south in the coming days will put a dent into the MAGAnauts heads? Nah. I don't think so either.

It's already been a busy year for tornadoes even though the peak of severe weather season is still a few weeks away. There have been about 300 tornado reports since 2025 began, compared to 164 by the end of March 2024.

Yeah, climate change is just a hoax ginned up by pointy head woke "scientists". Shitler knows he's the polymath to top all others, and will prove that climate change is a hoax. Same as RFK proves that vaccines cause autism. The Musk Ox will prove the earth is flat shortly thereafter. A flat earth makes EVs more practical.