This is a bicycle trap, Florida style. The bicycle paths of this area are designed by the sick-minded. I’ve described how they often go several blocks from nowhere to nowhere. Then disappear without any ramp to get off the roadway or onto a sidewalk. Sometimes they end in grass, which is impossible to pedal through. This bike path squeezes to nothing, see the paint stripes, and ends in this axle-breaking hole around 8 inches deep. I saw it in time. The broken pieces in the hole tell a different story for others.
Children of the Harvest. That’s the name of a documentary on children working farm labor jobs. Agriculture has no minimum age. The video did go on about how childhood should be a time for playing, how the children belonged in summer school instead of sweating in the fields. The theme was that back-breaking farm labor robs them of their childhood and places them at a tremendous disadvantage in all aspects of later life. The pity is focused on Mexicans. Apparently the sympathy of WVTJ-TV does not extend to white children who lived through the same hell.There is now a national organization who watch child labor, but once again, the mercy does not apply to farm families, rather only families whose children work for farms other than their own. That was a fine line my parents were careful never to cross. Don’t you love such national groups? Such swell, fine, nice guys who figure it isn’t illegal child labor as long as your own parents are the azzholes.
The budget is something political that directly affects me. There are so many slackers on the government payroll that no constraints will ever be ratified. One of the first cuts will be to social security. Old dying people, while an expanding sector, are no organized voting bloc. The budget forces have backed themselves into a corner. By putting off measures for years and paying the bills with borrowed cash, they have wrecked their own credit. Now it has come back to bite them and time for me to sit back and watch them stew in their own juice. Me pity the middle class? Not bloody likely.
The parts for the first autonomous machine are being collected. Note, I avoided saying robot. The frame is to be wood, with one motor and plastic gears. It is what materials we have on hand. The design is monorail, the control is by pre-written code. Allow me to introduce the lofty “Chapter Four”. (No website, but it is from Laboratoire d’Analye et d’Architecture des Systemes Centre National del la Recherche Scientifique.) Read it if you’d like to know where I am with studies at this point. It is a treatise on a theoretical car-like robot.
I couldn’t help watching TV. Combine intense study and stormy weather, even I have to kick back. There was a projection on Florida construction. The population here is due to explode by 2030 so they are glorifying construction. Guys, construction is mostly labor and where it isn’t, you have to be a machine operator, not a foreman. Some outfit called Career Watch says we need 250,000 workers now but avoids stating that those jobs don’t pay.
I suppose $12 an hour right now might look good to anyone who has seen the $7.25 jobs of the past five years. Be warned that a bare-bones existence in Florida is $20 per hour. With the enormous pool of unskilled illegal alien labor in the streets, you will never see that kind of money. A side effect of that cheap labor and minimal unionization means you could find yourself sweeping the floor alongside carpenters and electricians.
For distraction I played Talk City trivia. It’s an old chat game based on Ridiculist, but not near as cerebral. A few top players who live there can rack up points in the thousands. I’ll often go there to dominate the board for a half hour just to show them who’s boss. Today one question was what animal is born male and turns female when it matures? I passed on it. How could anything both mature and become female?
It was also check the real estate market time. Nothing interesting. Prices falling. I got as good a deal as I could right where I am. Do nothing until the results of the budget are known. Silver is over $40 per ounce, a good sign if you own 250 ounces. I also gave a listen to the top tune in ten countries (such as “Go Go Summer” in Japan, “Mr. Saxobrat” in Germany, and “Last Friday Night” in Canada). Post Generation X pseudo-music. A mixture of old rock, that single pre-programmed disco beat, and half-rap lyrics. Sounds like Florida guitarist original material. Does the phrase “bottomless pit” mean anything to you?
Another but fun robot meeting. We are headed for a difficult stage of coordinating construction and code, a realm we have no experience. The two hours tonight was demonstration enough that we require an entirely different approach to subjects we do not mutually understand. I can’t build the cart and M can’t program the code.
Does it travel to the point and stop (which requires braking) or sneak up on it depending on an inverse speed depending incestuously upon the last reading? If it overshoots the first reading, a situation that must be accounted for, why not let it do an ordinary binary iteration seven layers deep and say that is good enough? The only solution is to compromise and let M build it anyway that satisfies the forward-back motion any way that satisfies the programming criteria. It comes down to circular logic.
But at least it isn’t politics. I read a chapter about America’s prelude to the Korean War. My conclusion is the decision was made by a pack of two-bit jackasses and I shudder to think that the nation is today led by the fantastically less qualified. I read how reporters “deduced the situation was most serious indeed” because a career diplomat known for fancy dressing arrived without a jacket. What manner of ass-clown goings on is that? Defense policy is communicated by dress codes?
I read where people died while the politicians argued over the wording of the declaration. Our top leaders didn’t have the balls to tell North Korean to get the hell out now. Their brains were paralyzed until a 57-year-old secretary came up with the phrase “call upon”. We called upon the North Koreans to knock it off. We must be careful not to hurt their feelings. It’s that kind of shit, White House.
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