Future Transcript - part the first

Now that Bone Spur Samurai^© and Just Dumb Vance^© have been playing the poor victim of the Lefties, wrt attempts of Off Bone Spur Samurai^©, I've found a transcript of part of a rally speech from Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© to be given on 31 September, in Tulsa, OK.

Enjoy!

My fellow Americans and Red Neck Sooners, the time has come to stop the bullshit surrounding the two, so far, attempts on Bone Spur Samurai^©. To be clear, the perps were not, nor ever were, Libs from shithole Blue States. No, in point of fact, they were/are died in the Rock Ribbed Red MAGA wool whackoes. What we don't yet know about their motives. It's clear that a disaffected Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut would only drift so far away from Bone Spur Samurai^© to feel the need to off the bastard with some deep provocation.

It would appear that there's really only three possibilites:
-- Bone Spur Samurai^© has not gone unhinged enough that the perp has to take revenge
-- Bone Spur Samurai^© has sucked Vlad's dick so much in Ukraine ...
-- Bone Spur Samurai^© has caved to the Deep State and gone all soft in the middle (well, metaphorically of course; he's Jabba the Hut IRL) so ...

So, Bone Spur Samurai^© shut the hell up. Just be thankful that a real marksman from one of those shithole countries that you keep pissing on, doesn't see to it that you get your just desserts.

USA!! USA!!! USA!!!! Bomb Moscow back to the Stone Age! We know how to do that!!

[ahem]
really dumb
-- Jonah Goldberg/2024

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the forty ninth

Well, boy howdy!! My early morning sojurn to the grocers and the greasy spoon (the former for foods and the NYT, the latter for a bun, a cuppa joe, and the NYT crossword) takes my by an Exxon station. And, boy howdy!! Regular at cash is $2.99.9!!! Take that Alzheimer's Ronnie, II. Ya gonna give credit to Sleepy Joe and Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©?? I suppose not.

Scaredy Cat - part the first

Well, he could saute himself, although one might surmise that his recent unhinged bloaviating indicates self-immolation. Be that as it may, we have this.

Scared little Bone Spur Samurai^©. I guess not getting the clap in the 60s and 70s qualifies as combat duty.

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the twenty fourth

Today's NYT has a long piece on the dangers of over-automation. Rather than repeat most of it, just this

Opposition from unions is just one obstacle to automation. The installation of new machinery and software can cost many millions and even billions of dollars — investments that can take years to pay off. And some ports may not have an incentive to invest in new technology when shipping companies and their customers can't easily move to more efficient ports.

Sound familiar? Use the automation a little or use it a lot, the cost is nearly the same, because it's all sunk and can't be avoided. What happens to capital when there's no more labor to replace?

By The Numbers - part the seventieth

Sex, lies, and videotape.

Bone Spur Samurai^© a lot, Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© not so much. CNN

Trump ultimately delivered more than 30 false claims during the debate, CNN's preliminary count found, while Harris shared just one false claim, though she also added some claims that were misleading or lacking in key context.

I suppose we'll see updated figures in due time.

And, of course, Bone Spur Samurai^© went totally unhinged afterwards, since every time he loses something, anything, it's because he's been sabotaged. Those six bankruptcies had nothing to do with him, of course.

They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Such a whiner.

Codd's Revenge

Some years ago, this report ran in the NYT, relating the not so spectacular life of IBM Watson. I find it a cautionary tale for those who cleave to the notion that there's some 'post relational' data world. They ain't no such a thing.

This was predicted some time ago

This goldrush is being driven by the hauntingly accurate results AI has delivered in fields like image, audio and video recognition. Yet, at the end of the day, these algorithms are merely correlation machines, sifting through vast piles of numbers to record subtle correlations among inputs without any high order understanding that would allow them to divine causative relationships. In the end, we are building our AI revolution on a correlation house of cards.

It's not widely discussed, but IBM built DB2 on top of mainframe VSAM way back when. Codd was driven to define the RM in the face of IBM's then major database product IMS, which was/is the hierarchical database. It was defined as a way around the network database. If one wished to, one could have built DB2-lite into any COBOL application, since key-indexed files were/are a part of VSAM, and even earlier machines. Codd, essentailly did that. And Watson and AI and what-have-you continues to do that; xml nonsense being an exception, being just a poor man's IMS. For those with faulty memories, Watson (Jeopardy! version) emerged in 2011. That makes it a decade old, a lifetime or two in IT land.

So, what happened?

The company's top management, current and former IBM insiders noted, was dominated until recently by executives with backgrounds in services and sales rather than technology product experts.

"until recently" is gilding the lily just a tad, implying that the probable was specific to Watson. It's not. IBM from Watson, Sr. on down was/is a sales effort; the science and engineering bits are tolerated as begrudged expense. Remember, the IBM/PC which did jerk IT around for some decades, was built almost wholly from bought-in parts; the Suits thought so little of it.

The Watson they built was a room-size supercomputer with thousands of processors running millions of lines of code. Its storage disks were filled with digitized reference works, Wikipedia entries and electronic books. Computing intelligence is a brute force affair, and the hulking machine required 85,000 watts of power. The human brain, by contrast, runs on the equivalent of 20 watts. [my emphasis]

What Watson is: a relational database on super-duper steroids. Or, at least, it ought to be. Imagine if IBM designed the thing to sequencially search all of that text? Of course not. Indexes up the wazhoo. The only real question: is Watson a structural relational database or a correlation engine? Not everyone acknowledges that these are two distinct ways of looking for 'intelligence'. The relational database is grounded in relations, of course. But relations, in Codd's term, is not the PK/FK 'relation' at all but rather the connection of attributes to the defining identity of the entity. IOW, the standalone table. Again, indexed files existed in VSAM very early on. Nearly everyone considers the PK/FK 'relation' the raison d'etre of the RDBMS, in contrast to the hierarchical file systems which preceded. Both systems are grounded in 'relations' specified by the Designer.

Or is a Watson a correlation machine, continually calculating R among gallions of data points?

The former is structural, dictated by the Designer, while the latter is explorational, hidden in the data.

In the end, so far, Watson would be the Health Guru to smarten doctors. Not so much:

Now IBM is paring back Watson Health and reviewing the future of the business. One option being explored, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to sell off Watson Health.

This essay sat in the queue since 2021. Not much has changed, except to increase the AI hype. And to create the WatsonX brand as some vehicle to re-coup all that moolah. They'll end up throwing good money after bad. It will still end badly.

Nuthin

Once again, with vigour: yet another report 'proving' that real estate, particularly residential, is a non-producing 'asset'. A house ain't anything like an ASML litho machine. And even that real asset can only turn a profit for the owners if it can run 24/7 and can shift all that output.

The company's newest lithography tool weighs a staggering 165 tons and will cost up to $380 million, roughly double the price of its previous low-NA EUV lithography machines.

The capital/labour ratio for such automation has to be sky high. Let's see if we can find some numbers. Well, not specific to ASML, but to high-NA EUVL machines in general

Perhaps surprisingly, operating labor costs are expected to be relatively stable. Leading-edge fabs are extensively automated because that approach is less likely to introduce contaminants or defects in the production process than with human intervention. As a result, staff size and responsibilities — mostly in engineering, technical, and operations functions — won't need to change substantially.

So, at the least, labour cost isn't going to rise with The New Machine (with or without a Soul).

Therefore, we see another case of the Tyranny of Fixed/Average Cost.

China's problem today, is just a worst case scenario of any pyramid scheme: it only works if the Next Buyer has more available cash than the current owner. Housing, as a non-producing asset, can only be profitable to the mortgage holder if incomes of those in the buyers class (a bit different for each profitable price point) continue to rise. Inflation, according to the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts, is always bad; unless and until they go to sell a house! Then it's God's Gift of Capital Gains.