Deja Vu All Over Again - part the eighth

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.

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.

Thought For The Day - 27 March 2025

Well... yet another, sorta kinda, slap at AI. But it doesn't get at the kernel of failure: AI, as currently implemented, isn't intelligence. Any more that winning at Jeopardy! is intelligence. Yeah, there's all that "Ken Jennings is sooooo smart!" bullshit. It's just prodigious memory (churned through a correlation exercise); some people have it, most people don't. Having prodigious memory doesn't make you smart, it might, in the end, make you kinda dumb. While the current count is 86 billion little grey cells, that's still not an infinite number and some will be dedicated to memory and others to, among other things, logic. It's logic processing that makes intelligence. That's how Einstein figured out special relativity just by sitting in a tram and watching a clock tower disappear in the distance. Can your AI do the same? Call me when it can.

This is where we, the people, are apparently failing AI. Because in addition to being humans with jobs and social lives and laundry to fold and art to make and kids to raise, we should also learn how to tiptoe around the limitations of large language models that may or may not return accurate information to us.

Where's the logic in all that? Nada, zip, nil. It's all a galaxy sized correlation matrix, and as we all know, 100% correlation belongs only to God.

And, for what it's worth, I've not been hit with a hallucination from the wiki. Ever.

Party Like It's 1829 - part the first

Well... what is it that Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) keeps blathering? Oh, yeah. Let's get rid of them damn illegals and the sub-GED crowd will have better wages and lifestyle. Yeah, that's the idea!

Well... not so much, at least in Florida. As you might expect from a fascist state (both versions of the word).

Florida has been working for years to crack down on employers that hire undocumented immigrants. But that presented a problem for businesses in the state that are desperate for workers to fill low-wage and often undesirable jobs.

Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state legislature have a potential solution: children.

Are you surprised? I sure as shit ain't.

The number of child labor violations in Florida has nearly tripled in recent years, according to US Department of Labor statistics.

And, I expect, such data will soon disappear thanks to the Office of Data Integrity. Can't have those Blue State Wokers bitching and moaning about our sovereign right to exploit our kids. Now, can we??

I Told You So - 24 March 2025

When Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) announced that he would Make America Great Again by imposing massive tariffs on foreign producers, these missives told you that what would happen is that American producers would use these new, elevated, prices of foreign product as carte blanche to raise domestic prices. Not only do Chinese companies (and not Beijing) not pay the tariff bill, but... Double whammy time. Well, it has come to pass

"What we're seeing so far happen is mills capitalize on the tariffs and uncertainty of tariffs, and they've been able to raise prices such that at US$900 a ton it's more than what would happen to price with an actual 25 per cent tariff implemented," Timna Tanners, an analyst at Wolfe Research, said during a telephone interview. "This isn't the desired outcome Trump has articulated." [my emphasis]

Well... of course not. He's a fucking moron, and well earned.

Pyrhhic Losers - part the third

Well... some times I manage to get it wrong. Not a robot, I suppose. The series of No Fucking Way essays speculated that Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) would go all out to protect the MAGAnauts from his ministrations. At all costs to the Blue States. It appears, not so much.

He's about to cut the nuts off FEMA!! Who wooda thunk it? Figures are hard to come by, "everybody knows" that regular, damaging weather disasters happen mostly in those southern Red States. Blue states get some snow now and again, but nothing like the hurricanes, tornados, hail storms, and (what used to be as rare as hen's teeth) winter freezes (hellooooo Texas). See ya!!

It was one of the worst years for disasters declarations in the last three decades (1995-2024), according to a new analysis from the International Institute for Environment and Development, or IIED, shared exclusively with CNN. Ninety major disaster declarations in a year is nearly double the annual average of 55 declarations, according to the London-based think tank.

Here's the 2024 tally from NOAA. Better go and look before the Batshit J. Moron orders it removed. And, yes, not much on the Blue coasts, and almost all in the Red South and Midwest.

On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order that outlines his desire to shift more responsibility for disaster response and recovery to the states.

Some state officials and even Republican lawmakers have raised concerns about Trump's plans to slash FEMA, expressing worry that it will weaken responses to future disasters.

All those Red State MAGAnauts were just dupes and pawns in Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor)'s effort to be the next Orban/Erdogan.

Have a nice day.

Erasing History

Ah, some news. One of the first thing that a dictators does is to erase any history which contradicts his authority. Been done before. Here's an update on Mad Dictator Don's effort to remove DEI from every nook and cranny (or, crook and nanny) in HIS gummint.

"Of all the things they could be doing, the places they're putting their focuses on first are really things that just don't matter ... This was literally a waste of our time," a defense official said. "This does absolutely nothing to make us stronger, more lethal, better prepared."

On a related note, we get this report which, I suspect, relates to the one just above

"We will not tolerate politically motivated efforts by the Deep State to undercut President Trump's agenda by leaking false information onto the pages of their allies at the New York Times," Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement on Friday. "The Alien Enemies Proclamation is supported by fact, law, and common sense, which we will establish in court and then expel the TDA terrorists from this country,"

I'll bet you a tall lemonade that the stupidity of the DEI purge will be 'classified' as a national security breach, and all those involved will be poly-ed.

Dictators can't be too careful in protecting their hindmost. In due time, only Mad Dictator Don dick suckers will be left in the Damn Gummint. Just like it was in Mad Andy Jackson's day. If you're up there God, strike this asshole down.

You Go Don

You knew something like this would happen. Those nice Canadians (or Canadiens from the east) just gave the finger to a Downeaster:

The owner of the Point of View Inn tells CNN's Randi Kaye he's had so many cancellations that his business may not survive.

And more to come. Lots more.

The Greatest Threat - part the tenth

An interesting piece on CNN website, about where Trump-phobic geezers might escape to. The piece does a high-level primer on each of five countries. Some obvious, others likely not so.

Of course, Mexico is on the list, last, as one might expect. Given all the news we get about drugs and gangs and so on.

Mexico ranks among the least peaceful countries in Latin America. According to government statistics, there were 31,062 homicides in 2023, about 24 per 100,000 residents (in the US, that figure was about six per 100,000 people in 2023, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data).

So, the Office of Data Integrity is caught between a rock and a hard place: which way should they slew the number? If they push it down, the MAGAnauts will be disgusted that our own FBI can't find the Real Danger to Our Precious Bodily Fluids from criminal migrants, Okies, Arkies, and Darkies ravaging the Homeland. If they push it up, the MAGAnauts will be disgusted that our own FBI can't find the Real Danger...

What's the American Goebbels to do?

Minority Report - part the seventh

There continues the argument as to whether shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw have a 'mandate' or 'landslide win' to justify destroying Federal governance. On the face of the bare fact, they don't. Batshit J. Moron won less than 50% of the popular vote, so he is, by definition, a Minority Ruler. He's crowned himself King, of course.

But, how common is the Minority President in our history? Common? Rare? Somewhere in between? The wiki has the answer, but I'll save you the effort. Let's skip Washington, who ran unopposed and likely would have gotten 100% anyway.

Less than 51%          Less than 50%
Madison/2
                       J. Q. Adams
Van Buren
                       Polk
                       Taylor
Pierce
                       Buchanan
                       Lincoln
                       Hayes
                       Garfield
                       Cleveland/1
                       Harrison
                       Cleveland/2
                       Wilson/1&2
                       Truman
                       JFK
                       Nixon/1
Carter
Reagan/1
                       Clinton/1&2
                       Dubya/1
Dubya/2
                       Trump/1&2

That's a lot of Minority Rule for a democracy.

Buyer's Remorse - part the second

Oh my!!! Roberts is getting all hot and bothered that shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw are claiming impeachment against the judges that have been slapping them down for flouting the law and Constitution!! Doesn't Roberts know that Garfield 2.0 has proclaimed himself King? Says so right here

"CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan and all of New York, is SAVED," he wrote, adding, "LONG LIVE THE KING."

So, now Roberts, slyly, takes a dig at Batshit J. Moron and his minions

"For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision," Roberts said in a statement released by the Supreme Court. "The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."

I guess Serf John forgets that he, as the head of the Gang of Six, was the one to put the tiara on his balding head? And he's all bent out of shape that Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) take umbrage at getting their fannies paddled? What might an intelligent human expect? Gad.

The proof will be in the pudding when, not if, the first skirmish makes it to the Supremes. What will the Gang of Six do then? Re-affirm his Dictatorship? If not, will they feel the uncertainty of coming violence demanded against them as have many others? Does Serf John actually have gonads? Or raisins?

Ex-Im Bank

It is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer.
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D.[statistics, Iowa State]/1975

So, what's obvious, this time? The title refers to the Export-Import Bank which is intended to facilitate trade. It could be, but not yet clear, that shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw intend to use it as yet another weapon of retribution. We'll see.

Of more direct interest is the obvious question with regard to Batshit J. Moron's trade retribution: do domestic companies raise prices on their product when a tariff is imposed on foreign (equivalent) product? It sounds like an obvious answer should be: shit yes!! Why give away free money?

So, lets go see if anyone in the pundit class has gone through the data. It's an age old question, so there ought be an answer by now.

American households will bear most of the burden of higher tariffs. This will mostly come through higher prices for imported goods and, crucially, higher prices for domestic goods that compete with imports.

There you have it. It is obvious.

Thought For The Day - 10 March 2025

Well... now might be a good time to go to cash. Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) welcome a recession, and better yet, a full blown depression. Why might that be?

Well... depression equals deflation, and deflation favors the well-to-do. Just look at the pet project of the well-to-do like shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw, crypto, which are all (should they get past each's fad stage; bitcoin for example) deflationary. Of course, not so long ago Batshit J. Moron, derided crypto as a scam. But The Musk Ox set him straight; enough to mint his own coin, of course. A modern Barnum, he hopes. At last count ~95% are in existence. One estimate has it that 2,140 will be the final year of release. If, of course, there's enough electricity around to support mining at such tiny reward, $0.00000001 . The common wisdom is that, at some point, the cost of mining will exceed the reward of bitcoin, and paying for new bitcoin will have to be paid for through transaction fee. That Rubicon will be crossed long before 2,140. You betcha. Ya think your Visa bill is ridiculous? Just wait for that to happen.

As Dr. McElhone says, "the world is not linear", which commonly means change is geometric/exponential, but that also describes asymptotic behavior. And bitcoin/crypto are surely that. We've got ~19 million of the critters in ~15 years, and ~125 years to get the remaining ~2 million. Should bitcoin specifically become the New Buck, watch economic growth go in the tank. We've had long periods of deflation, and not one was prosperous.

And, as the twice told tale says: major crypto held by very few hands.

As of March 2023, the top 1% of Bitcoin addresses hold over 90% of the total Bitcoin supply, according to Bitinfocharts.

I'd be willing to bet a carafe of lemonade that, two years on, that 90% has grown. May be 95%? Yeah, crypto is all about freedom from the elites!!!

A Test of Will

So, we've been hearing the bleating from the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts about how the EU is taking the poor ole USofA to the cleaners by them not funding NATO 'enough'. May be. May be not. But it is true that the USofA has been shipping materiel to Europe to a faretheewell, at least since the invasion of Ukraine.

Well... here's the test. Will shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw 'support' Ukraine by limiting the export of materiel to any EU nation? Ya know, France or Germany buys and transship to Kyiv? It's obvious to even the most casual observer that Bone Spur Samurai^© means to carve up the greater West with Vlad The Impaler: he takes Europe, Bone Spur Samurai^© takes the Americas (I guess including the Gulf?).

Won't that be a fun world to live in?

Those Damn Externalities

At one time, for a long time, all econ types recognized and studied the force of externalities on an economy. By and large, except those in the pocket of monied interests, argued for charging those who generate externalities (nearly all negative, of course). Among the more famous is the stench of pig farms in the Carolinas. So far as I can find, the pig machines continue unabated.

Well... here's another one, possibly worser

A South Carolina woman faces charges after igniting yard debris that burned out of control and allegedly sparked a wildfire that has scorched more than 2,000 acres near Myrtle Beach, the state's forestry officials said.

This is beyond stupid. My guess: a MAGAnaut asserting her liberties.

And, not surprisingly, at least one of the LA fires was caused by utility pole failure.

Routinely, Big Bidnezz pleads to be let go of responsibility, since taking care of these externalities will raise their costs, and most likely, the price to consumers. Well... there's not a thing wrong with that. Even if you're a Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnut economist: your obligation is just that, not your neighbors. For those of us who love bacon, we should be paying to ameliorate the stink. Mammy Yokum has spoken.

The Musk Ox - the other stable genius

Well... here's a report which makes The Musk Ox look the charlatan that he really is, Batshit J. Moron fellow traveler. You've no doubt heard, insistently, that The Musk Ox is a once in a millennium genius and that he's built the most powerful rocket in the history of mankind. And that this rocket will take humans back to the moon, and thence to mars. How could he not be a true genius?

Well... that report contains the fatal flaw in this wonderful new rocket. And, by the way, it's by no means the first to try liquid methane as fuel. Didn't work out before. Now, we humans got to the moon boosted by the Saturn V rocket, at the time the most powerful, and such. And, also just by the way, all this yapping about returning booster shells to earth for reuse isn't anything new, either. We did the same for SRBs on the space shuttle. Plopped them in the Atlantic and ferried them back; cheaper to do, I expect. And, as to that landing of the spent booster feet first, not so new either, but is said to burn 700 tons of fuel. Makes for a cool photo-op, but not much else. The Musk Ox wasn't even born yet when we landed on the moon. The LEM's landing was accomplished with compute equivalent to almost nothing of today: 2K Ram and 36K of ROM. I'll guess that a current digital watch (not smartwatch) has more oomph. Landed feet first on the moon and came back. So there.

Most critically, it needs to show that it can move liquid oxygen and methane propellants from one Starship to another. That procedure is key to allowing a Starship to accumulate enough fuel to go to the moon or Mars.

Say, whaaaaaaaat!!! This most powerful rocket ever made doesn't have enough ooomph to get just to the moon like Saturn V did more than 50 years ago? What the fuck? And we're supposed to think this piece of expensive shit will get to mars? Yeah, right.

Turns out, and this being the first report I've seen (as you likely guessed by now), Starship needs trips to the gas station to get anywhere of consequence.

Mr. Musk has asserted that propellant transfer is a straightforward exercise. But pumping that much liquid that quickly while floating in orbit has never been attempted, and no one knows yet how many Starship launches — perhaps as many as 20 — will be needed for a single moon mission.

So, instead of a single competent rocket, which doesn't waste its fuel on its landing feat, we need 20 (may be more) additional launches to get the gas tanks filled, just to get to the moon? This is cost effective, how?

Mr. Dumbacher even proposed that NASA switch to a smaller, simpler lander to improve the chances that NASA can win the 21st-century moon race with China. As SpaceX is supposed to conduct a demonstration of its Starship lander without any astronauts aboard before Artemis III, a successful astronaut landing on the moon using Starship could require as many as 40 launches.

He did not regard the chances of that many successful launches as high. "I need to get that number of launches dramatically reduced," Mr. Dumbacher said during the hearing. "I need to go simple."

Expect him to be attacked by The Musk Ox and his merry band of Fascists, any day now. Telling us that Emporer Elon is naked? Can't have that.

What was it Barnum (denizen of my current state of CT) may have said (somebody did and P.T. is close enough): "There's a sucker born every minute."

The Musk Ox sure has found one in Batshit J. Moron. Gotta get rid of all them dumb Damn Gummint workers; we rich folk just ain't rich enough.

The World is Not Linear

Perhaps a series? If need be, I suppose. But here's a new report on the extent of global warming. I know. I know. Global warning is just a hoax from the woke wonks of the Ivory Tower. They probably are shorting fossil fuels and food commodities. I would if I believed in global warming.

Last year was the hottest year in recorded history, breaking a record set just the year before. It was also the first calendar year to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a critical climate threshold.

And, of course, the punchline

Scientists have been struggling to fully explain the extraordinary heat of the past few years. While it has been driven predominantly by burning fossil fuels and the natural climate pattern El Niño, these factors alone don't entirely explain the unusually rapid temperature rise.

Isn't it sufficient to admit that most natural processes are non-linear? How else do we get income inequality, with a few gazillionaires, and billions living on acorn bread?

Grifters Will Grift - part the first

As Dr. McElhone was fond of saying, "It is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer". Which to say that this series should have begun in January, 2017. My bad, but better late than never. Or, more correctly, if only the Blue Cities had gotten off their collective asses, we wouldn't be in this mess. And this series would never have been.

It's clear, and has been since we all found out that Project 2025 existed, that Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) wish to return the USofA to the thrilling days of yestercentury, and suck moolah out of the Damn Gummint, which is to say the 99% who actually pay taxes.

We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.
-- Leona Helmsley/1989 (or earlier)

Over the years, even when I toiled at OPM (yes, that one), it was clear informally and analytically that being a federal worker bee wasn't necessarily lucrative. Certainly not in the DC Metro. The high priced spread worked on K Street and such. We had salary surveys done each year, and it was clear. But, of course, the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts always said we lied. Ah well.

Turns out the CBO occasionally looks, too. And they find pretty much the same thing.

What is ironic, from some perspective, is that the sub-GED crowd does better being a fed than the educated cabal of woke wonks. Go figure. Might be that Big Bidnezz really, really wants smart folks?

The federal worker has always been the favored whipping boy for the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts and Big Bidnezz and such. Especially the regulator agencies. Big Bidnezz employees are always smarter and more capable and can leap tall hierarchies in a single bound. The thing is, the federal worker bees (to be distinguished from Capital Hill flunkies) only want solid data to decide whether Big Bidnezz is living up to the statutory/regulatory requirements. Congress mandated them, and the President (supposed to) is to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Well, until now, of course. We could return to the time when FDA never existed, right? Or just to the time when drug companies only had to show that their pills didn't kill patients? What could possibly go wrong? Would the USofA be better off if The Musk Ox and his Tesla were never scrutinized? Run over a few people? Just ignore that. Get rid of NTSB because Boeing knows better? I guess we really don't need a CDC, since all those decisions are up to parents/adults/clergy and such. And so on. What could possibly go wrong? We all know that measles outbreaks happen every so often, don't we? And that bleach and ivermectin and hyrdo cure Covid?

I Told You So - 8 March 2025

Well... this is one of those "take a victory lap" reveals. Many's the time, during the MAGAnaut assault, that these missives have said that the DOGEmorons are messing with compute tech they have no idea about. It might as well be in Zulu. It's the wonder of COBOL. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with COBOL, esp. for an organization like Social Security Administration. It's the sort of application that COBOL was designed for.

While I was a worker bee at CSC (where I took the job because I was told "we're going to be doing heavyweight database development"), the job, it turned out was putting a pretty face on ancient (70s vintage) COBOL code. This process is widely known as 'putting lipstick on a pig'. I suspect the phrase originated in computer. Let's go see... Well, one source says it was baseball. Which is chronologically before the GUI problem. Close enough.

So, now we have the DOGE intent on breaking SS. Of course they are. Dropping multiple wrenches into the computers which run SS is a plausible deniable method of destroying SS. Which is the point, of course.

"This system needs a lot of maintenance, and the concern is that if they're not careful with their firing — and they're obviously not — these people who are experts in COBOL tend to be retirement age," said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group.

You're not likely to be able to run SS on webservers running java, or even C++. The best hope is to keep the COBOL and leverage the relational power of z/OS DB2 (most likely what's available on the IBM Big Iron). Now, here's the real kick in the balls. While at CSC, when it tried, with shitty results, to both put webGUI lipstick on its pig COBOL by creating a java applet front end (the aforesaid lipstick), it also attempted to transition from the original VSAM files for the COBOL code to z/OS DB2. That was an even bigger clusterfuck: the clients got the worst of all worlds - the overhead of database transaction control coupled with the olde fashioned bespoke transaction monitoring in their COBOL and a bit of secret sauce from CICS. SS is likely in that situation, and likely for a couple of decades, if not more.

So, let's send some PHP kiddies over there to fix the problem. At least CSC had the sense to bring in a brigade of Indian Freshers to maintain the COBOL. Oh, and one client demurred from the 'upgrade' to GUI and DB2. They've been running just fine.

"Right now, they're driving these people that understand the IT architecture, understand how things are connected, understand how things work — and they're driving them out of the agency as quickly as they can, with absolutely zero transfer of knowledge," he said. "We looked at attrition as the fire breathing dragon at the gate that needed to be defended against. These guys think it's a fire upon which to douse kerosene and to give people incentives to leave."

And, of course, the reason it all got this way

The computer system is old enough that its monochromatic green screen upon loading says "welcome to the future" — an irony given the age of the technology.

"There had been talk about removing it, because it seems so ridiculous, but that would have cost money and required more staff that they didn't have," O'Malley said. "So they've never done that."

Neither java nor C++ is an easy replacement language for COBOL logic. They just aren't, which is why most of American Big Bidnezz still runs on COBOL. With webGUI lipstick. The further irony: back some years ago, xml stormed on to the scene, and the PHP and javacript kiddies decided that it would make for really new, modern, and cool database stores. Dumber than a sack of hair. xml as datastore is just a clear text implementation of the hierarchical 'database' IMS from IBM before DB2. At least VSAM fit nicely with COBOL.

And, yes, there are myriad COBOL to C/C++ converters/translators on the market. In general, the result is mixed, and not just a push-the-damn-button process.

The Greatest Threat - part the ninth

The Office of Data Integrity has the bit between its teeth and galloping along. This report lays out the threat explicitly. Not that I'm surprised, naturally. It's the playbook of the Dictator.

It should be no surprise to gentle reader that I predicted that Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) would brazenly set out to fudge the data to make Mad Dictator Don always look good.

Comments from a member of President Trump's cabinet over the weekend have renewed concerns that the new administration could seek to interfere with federal statistics — especially if they start to show that the economy is slipping into a recession.

Of course they will. That's the purpose of the Office of Data Integrity: to make the Dictator look good.

Federal statistical agencies have long operated with a degree of autonomy from the cabinet departments that they are nominally part of, following methodologies developed by technocrats inside and outside government. But experts in recent years have warned that independence rests more on norms than on statutory protections, and that the agencies could therefore be vulnerable to political interference.

Ah, "norms" raise their evil heads yet again. And, once again, we run headlong into the egregious failure of the Founding Fathers: that only moral folks would be elected, and would govern in the interests of all Americans without need for explicit statute restraining their corrupt natures should any emerge. As if. It's not well known (and not mentioned in the report) that almost all of the surveys are conducted by Census, no matter which department/agency name is on the resulting report. Lutnick controls Census.

Nancy Potok, who was appointed chief statistician for the United States by President Barack Obama and remained in the role for much of President Trump's first term, said Mr. Lutnick's comments were a sign that those fears could be becoming reality.

"It's very concerning," she said. "It puts the U.S. in the company of countries that are notorious for fudging the numbers to support failed economic policies."

Ah, the United States of Bananas? And, it gets better. For some definition of 'better'.

More recently, the Commerce Department moved to kill off several advisory committees that provided feedback and guidance to federal statistical agencies.
[FDA is doing similar]

"It's very disconcerting," said Mary Jo Mitchell, who was a member of a Census Bureau advisory committee. "These committees were important avenues for ensuring that the bureau was receiving input from experts and stakeholders who care about these issues."

Ah, but everybody knows that Mad Dictator Don knows more about anything than those stupid experts (he's told us often enough), especially math stats and survey design. Piece of cake for such a polymath as Mad Dictator Don.