Florida has a problem as of late today. The climate attracts not just those seeking warm winters, but also the deadbeats too cheap-ass to heat a place up north. The time limit is, oh I’d say, two days before they start freezing their lazy asses off and blaming everyone except their own inept political choices. That was the case back in early 2003 when it last happened. They voted themselves welfare out of the public good, so why isn’t there any more free money like before? It promises to be a good deep freeze this time. Here’s a nice high-altitude photo of the front advancing over New York. I lifted this from Imgur. Florida, you are in for it.
One video I watched was about the Black Sea, because I can’t help thinking it was the strange circumstances over there that caused the onset of civilization. Much of the available study on the Black Sea concerns its biblical relevance, which interests me not. Only the evidence of the flood common to much ancient history, and I subscribe to the Black Sea theories that the Mediterranean breached the Bosporus.
NOON
Florida, in its infinite wisdom, has a new requirement that allows people to carry two pieces of ID. It is a driver’s license stamped valid in Florida only and applies to anyone with property (not necessarily just a vehicle) registered in the state. Furthermore, if you have a Florida ID card, it must be surrendered when you get a Florida driver’s license, that is, they are no longer separate items. Mark my words, no good will come of this. It is a move toward national ID, which nobody wants. (Again, it is not the national ID that is scary, but what the system will do with that ID once it is in place.) This is the first time I’ve heard of it made legal to carry two driver’s licenses. It is a can of worms.
How did I discover all this? Well, a perfect record has now been contaminated. Today, for the first time in my entire life, I got a traffic ticket. You know that driveway that goes over to Dixie that this entire trailer court uses instead of driving down Pine? I was ticketed for crossing private property to avoid traffic. I will defeat the ticket in court, but the blemish is that any ticket on file is as bad as a conviction thanks to the Internet. Well, I got away over forty years without a ticket and that would be some kind of record. That’s right folks, never even a speeding infraction. A couple of parking and towing items, but those were not police matters.
Today I met a newly-unionized member of the AT&T company. Naturally, the talk went instantly to pay rates. He was first hired by one of the contract-out spinoffs the phone company initiated in the 1980s to nullify expanded union hiring. These were “new and separate” companies that were created to be unbound by negotiated hiring practice. The man today was with the Internet business division and the absorption by the union meant his base pay went from $17 to $22 per hour. But that is still a laugh. When I left the company in 1995, I was making almost $29.23 per hour. Plus all the differentials.
You might say I got out in time, but I chose to go into accounting. That was an error, but not an evident one in 1994. It was still unknown that accounting would be one of the first occupations to be felled by robots. But, you may ask, why don't we ever see an office full of robots doing accounting. True. That’s because the “robot” in this case refers to software which tax laws were subtly changed to allow in place of real accountants. I took
Like many of the others in the class, I was one of the group who already had some accounting experience and had “gone back” to keep current. The savvy students noticed instantly that the course was NOT teaching accounting skills at all, it was teaching the use of the pre-programmed packages. To do this, you push that button and just you never mind how the transaction is calculated or recorded. It’s all about trust, they kept telling us. The people who created the code knew what they were doing, they said. And we all know how much I respect computer programmers.
NIGHT
Continuing from what I was just saying, the older scholars [in the class] balked, the younger ones, never having known any different, ate it up. Accounting software is not much more than ordinary spreadsheet technology with fancier interfacing. But it is designed to follow the tax law from the collector’s point of view, not accounting practice--to minimize the tax paid--and good accountants are specifically trained to interpret the law in favor of the client. Accounting software does not do that, which is plenty of reason to hate it right there.
One of the first items that tipped me off the entire profession was slated for automation was the inability to back out an erroneous transaction. One had to devise a clever reversing transaction to nullify an error, even a perfectly normal and innocent error. And leave an obvious paper trail of both acts—to draw attention during an audit. I custom design all my accounting software on good old spreadsheets where I control the input, formulas, and output, without regard to anything except minimizing the tax I have to pay. And that is what cost management accounting is all about.
That the human factor has largely been removed and the work is done by minimum wage clerks feeding an automated machine spells r-o-b-o-t. That is my context here. I don’t know if there is a new term for it, but robots and automation do not entail freeing workers from drudgery. I’ve never had a job that was anything but drudgery. Robots mean, like most high-tech advances, the concentration of wealth to those who can afford them. The same happened in the industrial revolution. Machines and factories cost money. Lots of it. And don’t think any current “skilled” occupation is immune. With nano-technology advances, even doctors are at risk of being replaced. A simple home-administered dose of nano-bots will seek and destroy anything in the body that isn’t supposed to be there.
This concentration of wealth is no illusion. As I pointed out with accounting, it is not so much that the robotic operations will “take over” existing jobs as about how far and quickly the system itself will devolve to such low standards that machine-quality output is accepted. Think Quickbooks. You can also forget about technological innovation. For all the kerfuffle about the Internet giants with their combined trillion-dollar wealth (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) between them employ less than 147,000 people. And you won’t hear those employees bragging about how much they make.
ADDENDUM
Back to our [surprisingly] popular research on crime labs. Like most who don’t know, my first assumption about these labs is that they test for poison. Turns out poison is so easy to detect it isn’t much used any more. But I did find out that strychnine comes from India, so there is after all something that was invented there. Plant poisons preceded chemical alkaloid poisons and are easiest to detect but most difficult to get a person to take because most of them taste or smell funny. They must be inhaled, swallowed, or injected. As far as arsenic, its most common application is in crime novels.
However, my question has never been the crime, but the tendency of lab technicians to work toward a known goal. I mean, how long would you have to work in a crime lab before you picked up on what was being looked for? Keeping a job then becomes stating “what results mean rather than what the facts are”.
That phrase I learned from a passage about the people who detected that because Napoleon was poisoned, it must have been the prison governor. Nappy himself knew he was being poisoned by arsenic. But there was never any proof it was the governor. Question everything. I’m learning quite a lot from my cursory reading of what goes on in crime labs. Imagine what I’d find if I ever like, actually visited one.
Learning? Yes. For example, one of the most common items present a many crime scenes is, I found out, broken glass. And there are 100,000 types of glass on file, so it is almost like a fingerprint. Glass comes from wristwatches, jars, fixtures, headlamps, windows, ornaments, and iPad screens, and is one of the primary clues detectives look for. Tiny chips in clothing, hair, even the rubber on boot heels is given a “density” test.
That’s where glass bits are dropped into a test tube of liquids of varying density. Identical glass will settle at a distinct level. I discovered this upon also reading that most lab tests are the wet chemistry type. The composition of a substance is determined by its reaction to liquids. Now it makes sense why the silver shop has a bottle of nitric acid. FYI, it dissolves silver, but not gold. I also found that buying most reactive chemicals these days involves showing identification.
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