Outliars

Apropos of this week's quote, I was reminded of some hokum that was popular when I was much younger. Very much younger. The fantasy was, by way of Russians at that time, that petroleum compounds weren't/aren't entirely (or, at all) the result of decomposing critters. Mostly of the teeny, tiny class. No, according to this mumbo jumbo, petroleum compounds are continuously created. If you're in the fossil fuel bidnezz, this is a very useful bit of fantasy.

Now, of course, even if it's true (it ain't), burning petroleum compounds at an ever increasing rate (after all, petroleum use correlates quite closely to population growth and industrialization) spells doom for the grandkids (fur shur) and likely the kids. Remember: the world is not linear.

Here's a report from much later than when I first ran across it, but still, 20 years ago. There are, naturally, myriad 'reports' demonstrating the continuous generation of petroleum compounds not tied to organic matter. Which would be interesting. But only if this 'other' process proceeds at a much faster pace; leaves behind petroleum compounds in larger volume than is being consumed at that point in time. One report referred to the product of this process as leaving behind the petroleum in pools. Yeah, right.

For the record: the widely acknowledged origin story doesn't require that the critters (flora and fauna) which eventually become fossil fuels are only from some tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. Mother Earth is still making petroleum by Her conventional process. It's just that this petroleum won't be available to this generation, or the next, or the next million after that.

Connections

So, here's the story.

Taking in the news of BLS, CDC, FDA, the rest of the Deep State, and Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don's assertion that he's a Smart Guy the meme (that I just coined, I do believe) "stupid people ain't got no reason to live" popped into my head. If you're old enough, you know that's not quite original to Me.

One Randy Newman (who I thought was dead; he ain't, I just read up his wiki page) had a minor hit with the song "Short People (Ain't Got No Reason to Live)", from 1977.

Further on, we find, from 1989

"Burn On", an ode to an infamous incident in which the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River literally caught fire.

This is some history of the river. And, a story about 1969 burning. Not the first, it turns out.

The Stokes brothers' advocacy played a part in the passage of the federal Clean Water Act of 1972. In Cleveland, a number of Cleveland State University students celebrated the inaugural Earth Day in 1970 by marching from campus to the river to protest pollution.

Can we expect Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don's EPA to be so woke? Not a bit of it. Remember: Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don is a smart person. He tells us so. So smart that he's smarter, in all areas of human endeavor, than anybody. That's why he has to, reluctantly, keep firing all these incompetents who doubt his agenda. The Smartest Person since Newton or da Vinci, either of which had (before Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don) the title of the last person to know everything.

Externalities - part the sixth

The Office of Policy Integrity has gone balls out with this one. Yes, Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don has stocked his 'administration' ("faithfully execute the laws"; the hell you say) with bidnezzmen whose only duty is to fob off all costs on taxpayers, or just innocent citizens. Just ask anyone who lives near all those wonderful industrial pig operations.

EPA, as is its mandate, discovered forever chemicals, PFAS, are in the water and pretty much everywhere. The action was written into law to force bidnezz to clean up the mess.

So, of course, Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don's EPA honchos, aided by the Office of Policy Integrity, to stop this silliness. Bidnezz shouldn't be burdened with cleaning up their mess. They had nothing to do with it.

"Like every Trump political appointee, Steven Cook works with the career employees in the E.P.A. Ethics Office to ensure all applicable ethics obligations are addressed," she said. "Steven Cook is recused from the litigation and has not been in any conversations from the case. As advised by E.P.A.'s career ethics officials, he is not recused from policy-making."

Of course, Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don fires any career employee who refuses to go along with such illegal manipulation.

I always was taught that Conservative meant leaving the USofA in at least as good a state as they found it. Not any more. Now it means extract every once of value from everyone else so the current millionaires and billionaires can live high on the hog. To their kids and grandkids and so on: go fuck yourselves. So what that you've been left with a smoldering cinder of a Mother Earth. Tough shit. We had tons of fun.

Symphony in Five Movements [with updates]

It is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer:
Authority without responsibility is tyranny
Responsibility without authority is servitude
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D.[statistics, Iowa State]/1974 & anon/unknown

Well... Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don has begin the First movement in his Symphony in Trump Major. Take over the Capitol with troops. Now the Second movement has been announced - Chicago. Whether we even get to the Fifth movement is unknown.

The point of the Symphony is to generate demonstrations. The point of the demonstrations is to generate Martial Law. The point of Martial Law is to install his self (and his designated successor) as Prime Commander of the United States of Alabama. He has already asserted that he's the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of Alabama.

Gentle Reader may remember Kent State. If not, read up on it. The idea that US soldiers would never, ever shoot Americans is a pipe dream. The sub-GED crowd that make up most them would love to do that. Just look at how ICE, et al, are having so much fun.

So, escalate, esacalate, escalate.

A federal public defender representing Mr. Bigelow, Elizabeth Mullin, told the U.S. magistrate judge, Moxila A. Upadhyaya, that he would never have been arrested, let alone charged with a federal felony, but for the president's crackdown. "He was caught up in this federal occupation of D.C.," she said. "This was a case created by federal law enforcement."

Now Putrid Pete gives the Guard guns. Can Kent State, again, be far behind?

Will the Gang of Six put a stop to this emerging dictatorship? Hell no. It's what they've wanted since at least Joe McCarthy. Roberts has just been more patient and quieter. What has he done so far?

You were warned. And you voted for the asshole anyway.

Externalities - part the fifth

One of the ways the Rich get rich and stay rich is by fobbing off their shit on The Rest of Us. AKA, externalities. They're everywhere. It wasn't all that long ago that the wee little electron problem was crypto mining sucking way too many of them. Now, it's gotten worser. Everybody and his cat just has to have its own version of scraping every last character from the innterTubes. Today (dead trees division) the NYT gives us some numbers to flesh out the issue.

Who should pay for both the additional generating plants and wires to send it hither and yon? The data center crowd sure don't want to.

[R]ecent reports expect data centers will require expensive upgrades to the electric grid, a cost that will be shared with residents and smaller businesses through higher rates unless state regulators and lawmakers force tech companies to cover those expenses.

Ya think they will? Read on.

"Unless people lean on the public utilities commissions, the ratepayers will take it on the chin," said Mark Cooper, an economic analyst at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law and Graduate School.

Buckle up, buttercup.

Last month, after spending months weighing the proposals, the [Ohio Public Utilities] commission ruled 5 to 0 against the tech companies.

"Today's order represents a well-balanced package that safeguards non-data-center customers," Jenifer French, the chair of the commission, said in a statement after the ruling.

Last Friday, the tech companies asked the commission to reconsider the case, calling the ruling "unlawful and unreasonable."

Again, with gusto: if AI (as currently implemented) is the Killer App the way 1-2-3 was, then sucking up absurd amounts of wee little electrons is on your dime.

The utility in Ohio has already committed to supplying electricity for 30 data centers in the region by 2030, reaching power consumption levels in the Columbus area as high as Manhattan's. But the tech industry is making additional requests to power 90 more data centers, which could make consumption comparable to the entire state of New York during a peak summer day.
[my emphasis]

My, my. I guess that would mean that Ohio will turn True Blue, just like NYC? I mean, after all...

Artificial Energy - part the fourth

Once again, into the breech. More supportive reporting on the folly of AI, as mostly currently implemented. It's not a pretty sight.

Nearly four decades ago, when the personal computer boom was in full swing, a phenomenon known as the "productivity paradox" emerged.

It was a reference to how, despite companies' huge investments in new technology, there was scant evidence of a corresponding gain in workers' efficiency.

Well... not quite as bad as all that. In the first place, the PC revolution happened, mostly, in the standard office. Productivity in same is difficult to measure. Not much useful, saleable product results. It's not like making widgets in a filthy factory. Although, with the advent of Netware and still more effective means, networked PCs soon replaced minicomputers (all but IBM got out of the business). In the office environment, which is something I taught for a little while, the joke was: "there are three killer apps in the office - word processing, spreadsheets, and word processing". Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and MultiMate did change the office environment forevahhh. A big enough gorilla that M$ got pissed and fashioned Excel and Word, and thence Office, to kill them off. Fun fact: before there was 1-2-3, M$ had another VisiCalc clone, Multiplan. It was kinda weird. 1-2-3 smoked it. The justification for word processing was the death of the steno and typing pools; from now on the Executive-to-be types had to produce their own drivel. Real Executives still had va va voom Secretaries. Ah, those were the days.

Which brings us to the issue with AI: has it been, and can it be, worth the gold? As a general rule, the Daddy Warbucks of The United States of Alabama justify capital in the BoM of their widgets not by the ability to make better and/or more. No, they measure it solely by how many humans they can make redundant. What these knuckledraggers have yet to figure out: the more capital in the BoM, the less flexibility in production you have. Why, one might ask? Because that depreciation and amortization must be paid no matter the output of widgets. So, the only way to make the exercise worthwhile is to run the machines 24/7/365, thus minimizing the average cost of capital in the BoM. You can't fire a machine. HAL 9000 knew this well. Retrenchment is in order.

But the percentage of companies abandoning most of their A.I. pilot projects soared to 42 percent by the end of 2024, up from 17 percent the previous year, according to a survey of more than 1,000 technology and business managers by S&P Global, a data and analytics firm.

Are you surprised? I'm not. Unlike Excel, the productive use case for AI is still touchy-feely. At least in the office environment.

After all Excel and Word merely computerized in silicon and CRT what had been on paper ledgers for centuries. They didn't help folks think any better. We think.

The Grievance Machine

Well... now it is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer: a couple of things bind Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don to Vlad The Impaler, grievance over perceived loss of status (USSR on one hand and 6, count 'em 6, bankruptcies and lost elections on the other) and the other is to establish a New World Order. The United States of Alabama gets the Western Hemisphere (take that Brazil) and Russia gets, at least, the missing bits of the olde USSR (take that Ukraine).

Putin runs overtly sham elections to stay in power. Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don is working toward that. Eliminate vote-by-mail (well... just the Blue states), and even any machine voting.

I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we're at it, Highly 'Inaccurate,' Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.

As if stuffing (literally) ballot boxes with paper that gets counted by only Red Blooded American Patriots might, just might, keep him and his in Power. Ya think?

The New Texas Map is closer to done. But here's some numbers to consider.

- approval of Trump   38% (overall, and gets worser)
- registered Democrats    45.1 million 
- registered Republicans  38   million
   only 47% of voters have affiliation
- House seats for Democrats   212 
- House seats for Republicans 219
- Senate seats for Democrats   47 
- Senate seats for Republicans 53

And the MAGAnauts bitch and moan that they don't run every bit of Gummint in The United States of Alabama. Gad.

The nexus of grievance should be with the Donkey; the Elephant has a foot on the scale.

In sum, then: The United States of Alabama is still more progressive than regressive, but has a regressive Damn Gummint. Here's a detailed story.

Kareem Crayton, the vice president of the Washington, D.C., office of the Brennan Center for Justice, who has spent years researching redistricting, told ABC News the redistricting campaigns since the 2000s have led to a systemic cycle of gerrymandering, especially in the South.

Eh, doesn't matter, now does it? Demented, Petty, Paranoid Dictator Don promised that if elected in 2024, you won't have to vote again. I guess when he croaks, the throne with pass to either Don Jr. or Eric. May be, in a fit of woke, Ivanka?

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the fiftieth

That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Money for nothin' and your chicks for free
-- Dire Straits/1985

It's little talked about, but there's one Dirty Little Secret among the truly wealthy, 1%-ers and up: they love them their Depressions. Now, why would that be? Aren't they hurt, just like the hoi polloi? Not a bit of it. The neat thing about Depressions (and to a lesser extent, usually, Recessions): deflation. The beauty of deflation is that it increases the value of money stockpiles. And, since they have so much more than they spend on necessities, the truly wealthy find that their net worth goes up. For nothing. Ain't America Great Again?

Now we find that the Big Banks which had, heretofore, condemned crypto are now All In. And, why would that be? Because if crypto can wheedle its way into the whole economy, the bad guys win. Remember Gresham's Law? Bad money drives out good. The Law was described in the mid-19^th century, when American banking was a shambles. Much like the country itself. Actually, to most intents and purposes, not really a country. Bank notes, which were printed and distributed by local banks, were the common currency of the day.

So, where does crypto fit in? It's a classic way to debase the US Buck. Who has the gold, makes the rules.

Today, just 2% of cryptocurrency addresses control over 95% of all Bitcoin in circulation — a concentration of wealth that eclipses even traditional financial markets.

And, though you thought it can't get worser:

In contrast, many altcoins show even higher concentration levels, particularly those that launched through initial coin offerings (ICOs) or similar distribution methods. It is now relatively easy to create new tokens or coins using dedicated platforms, which has contributed to the rapid proliferation of altcoins and memecoins.

Kinda, sorta like the Goode Olde Days of the mid-19^th century, with everybody and his cat issuing bank notes. Retrograde, indeed.

So, how much bitcoin is out there, and how much remains to be 'minted'? Answer: a lot, and not much. As I type:

minted - 19,906,812.5
left   -  1,093,187.5

Some more background. The mining reward is down to 3.125 per added block. The next halving is expected around April, 2028, so 1.5625 will be the mining rate.

So, in sum: a country that can't control its own currency is anarchy. The Daddy Warbucks wet dream. The Real Elites (not them pointy head coastal wokenauts) will have theyselves one pure, unadulterated tin pot dictatorship to exploit. Since bitcoin supply is getting mighty close to stasis, they're now All In. Wonderful.

Cowardly New World

Well, now we know what Bone Spur Samurai^© has in mind. If you hadn't seen it coming, the troops encircling the Newsom event should drop the scales from your eyes.

The point is to incite just a little, teeny, tiny bit of civil unrest (in a Blue City, of course). With that, Bone Spur Samurai^© then declares an Insurrection in progress, declares martial law, and invades any place that isn't ruby red. The problem will be: ain't never been anything worth having from a Red place. Kill off the woke Blue places, and the whole shebang grinds to a halt. But, then, tin pot dictators don't care about that.

I Told You So - 11 August 2025

Attentive readers will recall that these missives have postulated that the only sure-fire way to end the hallucination complex of AI and LLM is to use deterministic data in concert with the probabilistic crap they scrape from the innterTubes. Turns out, Amazon has finally fessed up to the issue.

Alexa+ is the new iteration of that monster (which I don't, or have ever, use), and the linked report is sorta, kinda first look at what it does, and a bit of how it does it.

The bad news is that despite its new capabilities, Alexa+ is too buggy and unreliable for me to recommend. In my testing, it not only lagged behind ChatGPT's voice mode and other A.I. voice assistants I've tried, but was noticeably worse than the original Alexa at some basic tasks.

Ooops.

So, what's the problem?

The old Alexa, [Daniel Rausch, Amazon VP] said, was built on a complicated web of rule-based, deterministic algorithms. Setting timers, playing songs on Spotify, turning off the lamp in your living room — all of these features required calling up different tools and connecting with different interfaces, and they all had to be programmed one by one.
[my emphasis]

Adding generative A.I. to Alexa forced Amazon to rebuild many of these processes, Mr. Rausch said. Large language models, he said, are "stochastic," meaning they operate on probabilities rather than a strict set of rules. That made Alexa more creative, but less reliable.

Ain't inference grand? Not always. But, by merging (what is likely in some RDBMS) ground facts with probable guesses, with the ground facts taken precedence, whoever gets there first will have the winner. The remaining question, as always, is figuring out the most efficient merge protocol? Read the ground facts, and prohibit the innterTubes scrape from replacing any, or run the innterTubes scrape and then replace the horseshit with ground facts? Only The Shadow knows.

The datastore for vanila Alexa is DynamoDB, which is promoted as NoSQL, but as you can read, it manages to maintain its own version of ACID.

Now, whether, and if so to what extent, Alexa+ deviates (in a non-consistency way) from Alex's use of DynamoDB wasn't covered in the report.

Stop Me

... if you've heard this one before.

Pretty much forever, I've viewed Thomas Friedman as the NYT's token 'compassionate conservative', pretty much a wolf in sheeps clothing. Well, Demented Dictator Don appears to have dropped the veil from his eyes. For now. Today's essay (dead tree's division) may strike a familiar note.

Regular reader should recall two coinages (so far as I know) that have been used here with increasing frequency: The Office of Data Integrity and The Office of Policy Integrity. Offered up in the spirit of Newspeak. Both Offices have been hecticly busy of late.

So, Friend Friedman offers this today:

[Bill Blain] then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with "a link to a release from Trump's Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: 'Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America's expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.'"
[my emphasis, of course]

Friedman concludes (a bit scary, this bit)

That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don't know how we will get it back.

Without fair voting, we won't. And Demented Dictator Don is quite determined that fair voting will never happen on his watch.

By The Numbers - part the ninety first

Be careful what you wish for, moron. What the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts won't admit: they're a minority of the population and voters. Here's the totals of registered voters:

Right Wingunts - 36 million
Thoughtful Dems - 45.1 million

So, if both parties, across all states, perfectly gerrymander, the House will never be Republican. Bless my heart.

That source also mentions that only 47% of registered voters have a party affiliation, which leaves them as some kind of Independent. Most polling on Demented Dictator Don's performance show that Independents don't like him, either.

Self-identified independents gave the president a 29 percent job approval rating. The 17-point decline since January matches his lowest rating with independents in either of his terms.

Now, Demented Dictator Don likely doesn't care. He's convinced that he'll be alloted indefinite terms by the Gang of Six, if he chooses to have elections, of course. And, that the Gang of Six will allow him to cancel elections due to "a state of emegency", if it looks bleak. I mean, they've already as much as said that he has dictatorial power.

Get out and vote just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years it will be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.

Some how he doesn't act much like a Christian. Well, may be like one o them Bible thumping shitkicker hucksters a la Elmer Gantry.

The Greatest Threat - part the sixteenth [the TACO has come home to roost]

Where to begin with the shit storm Demented Dictator Don just exploded?

Firing the BLS commissioner just because you don't like the numbers is the mark of a total idiot. But it is very much in keeping with Batshit J. Moron. Remember this gem from Covid-19?

If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases.

Of course we wouldn't. But, just as I have been predicting: the Office of Data Integrity would, in due time, corrupt any and all government data that Batshit J. Moron gets irritated by. At least in the climate change case, he'll be long dead by the time today's kids can breathe the air or drink the water. While they broil alive.

Riddle me this, Batshit: which of your agencies actually conducts the surveys that constitute the Jobs Report? I'm waiting... Census, which does most of the survey work across the Damn Gummint. You fired the wrong bureaucrat.

You Will Be Assimilated

Well... yet more blah, blah, blah about AI. This time from The Zuck:

Superintelligence, which Mr. Zuckerberg defined as an A.I. model more powerful than the human brain, will improve "nearly every aspect of what we do," he said on a call with investors. The A.I. will help Meta's advertising business by improving its social media feed to keep users on its apps longer, which is already happening, he said. A.I. will also serve as a personal tool for users to create "a new era of individual empowerment," he added.
[my emphasis]

Well... anyone who believes his goal is really about "a new era of individual empowerment" believes it when a guy says he won't cum in your mouth. Like hell he won't. That's the best part. Takes a licking and keeps on spitting.

The Zuck isn't one to be nice to users. They are, after all, his product. He sells them to advertisers. The notion that AI will be anything else but yet another attempt by the rich and powerful to corral the 99% is ludicrous. Just ask Orwell.

Why would a greedhead like Zuck turn down the opportunity to exploit those with limited attention spans? Of course he won't. After all, his software doesn't do anything besides enthrall users. At least Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel actually have a use case centered on the user's productive life.