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.