One year ago today: June 9, 2018, less prone to thievery.
Five years ago today: June 9, 2014, survivorship bias.
Nine years ago today: June 9, 2010, $1000 is hardly poverty.
Random years ago today: June 9, 2007, a two-dollar gig.
We got rained out. That’s the first time the doggies have balked at hopping out of the car. They both kind of sat there, ears down and looking at me, like, pal, it ain’t gonna happen. There had been a clearing in the western sky so we drove to the lake and wound up waiting in the car for a break that never came, but I did read the local paper, the Tennessean. How original can you get. What’s this, a couple from Texas died in Fiji from a “mysterious disease”. What’s the bets they had been eating modified food? Hey, I’m just askin’.
Here is another picture of the caddy field test. My public should know, in a quest for pexcellence, this testing is an on-going procedure. As long as there is considerable input from the bar babe contingent at these honky-tonks, who knows where this development process could lead. Why, there’s the ever-present note book, the kind where the stylus is an actual pencil. You know, where real work gets done. Work is a relative term, you have rich relatives, you don’t know what work is. The same happens when you get lucky while you are young enough to enjoy life. Take that Apple dude Bezos dishing out advice on how to succeed. Where do these billionaires get off giving lectures like that?
He says passion is the key. Like anybody trapped ina cube farm or a mining camp doesn’t passionate want out. It is strange that in a country that heralds small business startups so greatly, that it is one of the most difficult things to accomplish and the education system gives no help. You see, this is not England where you keep your shop and your shop keeps you. In America, that shop must not just operate, the climate is where it must keep expanding, branching out, franchising, and so on. Or some corporation will either swallow it or crush it.
As for Bezos being a “genius”. Not in my books. People of intelligence don’t spend $80 million on condos in New York city and then council people how to begin a business. By that stage they’ve lost all concept of what startups are like, but if Bezos wants to put in a year passionately building my hotdog business, I’d pay attention. Other than that, the only thing I’d get passionate about in business is the $80 million.
Mississippi mansion.
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Here’s a nice video for you, taking the doggies to the lake last month. The string here is notice the method of carrying the wee doggie into the water. Yes, the pets have life jackets, I don’t want to hear a word from the back row out there. Anyway, pay attention how the doggie is lifted up and ask yourself if that reminds you of anything. Ha! (It’s a fake, there was actually no connection between this video and the six-pack caddy, which was separately conceived a fortnight later. But have a laff.)
What you are seeing are extremely clever emulations of human behavior. While these systems use both traditional and novel feedback sensors, they do not possess anything like the “self-awareness” required to approach real A.I. One of the approaches I would watch is machine learning. I know, it’s a new vocabulary and these words are strictly the creation of early university courses called Computer Science. I’ve taken several such courses, so forgive if I slip in unfamiliar words. It is machine learning which, in my opinion, poses the biggest threat and the greatest promise.
For once, the term is descriptive. You want a machine to perform a task that right how is done by humans. The scientific goal is to have the machine do the job better, but in reality it only has to do the job cheaper. Thusforth, the programming does not have to solve problems or make human-like decisions. Instead, it examines the output and uses that to hone or acquire greater skill at a single task and is not concerned with the correctness of any given solution. Take your ten best workers and have the machine memorize their actions. Amalgamate these and have the computer go over the data to pick out those operations that maximize performance. Then fire the ten workers.
In other tech news, the outfit that publishes Make Magazine, the last real “science” publication for the US market, has pulled the pin. I was unaware they were a different outfit than Maker Faire itself. They let their 22 workers go and locked the door. Too bad, it was one of the last magazines I bought retail and I was, for the first time in years, to subscribe. And is anybody else but me wondering why this DTC, or direct-to-customer, mode of business is considered new. Cutting out the middleman is traditional American practice. The middlemen that remain do so only because of distorted market shares, outdated laws, and contrived distribution pressures. Maybe there’s more to it, which I’ll watch for. But to me, direct to customer means I hand her the hotdog.
ADDENDUM
While watching a documentary on the latest Harrier jet developments, I stumbled on an Argentine classroom video that was teaching schoolchildren that the Falklands was part of their country. That the British had invaded the islands. It’s indoctrination, but no worse I supposed than what is force fed in our American schools. It’s plain the Argentine’s have forgotten the ass-kicking they got back in ’82. The British got their nose bent as well. Most of their sailors thought the Falklands were somewhere off the coast of Scotland.
It’s laughable how the US media portrays Argentina as a steady and reliable ally. The average American could care less, considering the place just another banana republic. Argentina was the only Latin American country that didn’t declare war on Germany, which essentially meant they refused to borrow money from the US banking cartel for that purpose. The US banks have never forgotten this.
What makes the third world such a joke sometimes? In the classroom video, the teacher was saying the Falklands belonged to Argentina because the island were on its continental shelf. Yet, like so many claims, nobody in Argentina was even faintly aware of what a continental shelf was until the English showed up and told them. It’s as ridiculous as saying Iceland belongs to Baffin Island because they are connected underwater. Such wars are proof soldiers don’t die for their countries, they die for their politicians.
This article on the Falklands war from the Argentine perspective got me looking at a few more sources. The British, well, they’ve had no wars for so long their ranks are full of people who had no intention of fighting anybody. Generations have passed since anyone pulled a trigger, and for many the Falklands seemed to shock them. Once again, I’m against allowing married men in combat situations, it’s not like we have a shortage of single men whose lot in life is following orders of some kind, so it might as well be the military. Make the forces more appealing to couch potatoes, and you’ll meet your quotas. Plus most of them are already self-trained League of Legend killers, level 99. Or at least think they are.
The follow-on documentaries were boring interviews with survivors. Okay, guys, people get killed and wounded, that is part of the job of soldiering. Get over it. You got the mothers crying for the cameras. Well, Argentina, that’s what happens when you start wars for silly reasons. The Brits may have lost an empire, but they’ve got a military geared to mowing down savages that works just in South America as it did in Africa and Asia. As for sending the cruiser Belgrano into action, well, apparently when it comes to big ships and modern warfare, down in Rio nobody told the big brass about Pearl Harbor. Or, the possibility has been suggested they didn’t want to listen. Nor have they had much luck with their submarines, which have a nasty habit of disappearing while on exercises.
As for the Brits, well, they learned a few lessons. One is that when the French develop an anti-ship missile, they don’t have the Swiss navy in mind as targets. And when Paris offers to sell you a copy of the missile, buy it, don’t debate it. Your House of Lords will still be demanding each other’s resignations when the warheads explode. Most interesting was the shock on the Argentine soldier’s faces when they liberated what they thought were Argentine people being oppressed under British rule. They were stunned and couldn’t even read the road signs and rumor has it half the POWs didn't want to return to Argentina.
And how about this latest youTube kick about “offensive” postings. Is there anything that a wimp or a liberal won’t find offensive except his own narrow point of view? So I took a look at something declared offensive. It was an ordinary documentary on the German 88 millimeter cannon. It quoted that an experienced crew could dismount and fire the gun in 20 seconds. It further stated many of the German field commanders were brilliant operational leaders. These are raw statistics, but youTube has placed a warning message, disabled comments and likes, and removed suggested links. You can view this same video by searching “German 88mm AT Gun World War II”. It is a sad state of affairs when a pressure group can have ordinary history labeled as offensive.
