Monthly Archives: January 2024

In case you think there’s an economic case for electing Trump president, here’s former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (Clinton Administration) with a rebuttal. I haven’t verified his numbers, but what he has to say is congruent with many other analyses I’ve read.

It used to be that progress was measured by civilization’s control over the evils of Nature. This was not some weird perversion, mind you, but rather a measure of our understanding of the world around us. I recall reading in a school textbook, long ago – someone wake the dude in the corner up, eh? – that riders of the old steam trains would be proud that their clothes were stained with the soot generated by the coal powering their locomotives, because it it was emblematic of the control of civilization over the Nature that so often robbed us of fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, children, friends, through disease and the other vicissitudes of, well, being alive.

Beats me if it’s actually true, not being a historian, but it makes sense.

These days, I think, we’re in a dispute over the meaning of progress. Some cling to old definitions, such as how high we can build, or build farms, or build dams.

And then there are the new ways of measurement in which we try to comprehend entire natural systems and how to interact with them, not only for our immediate gratification, but how to also consider the needs of other members of our ecology, whether they be trees or wildlife – or rivers.

To the last comes the news that the dams on the Klamath River are not being built, are not being maintained, but are being dismantled. From NPR’s Erik Neumann:

The dam that was opened yesterday is the lowest on the river. It’s huge – 173 feet tall, made of earth and rock. And after a 16-foot-wide tunnel was opened at the base yesterday morning, a plume of chocolate-milk-brown water surged through, containing sediment that had accumulated over decades.

Link River Dam (1938).
Source: Wikipedia.

No doubt there will be immediate negative effects, and wildfires are mentioned in the above interview. These will be used by advocates of the old measurement systems to attempt to condemn this project, to spread gloom and despair among the affected, to build political power by those who have no wish to solve problems, but to hold power.

I hope they can be ignored. The fact of the matter is that the dams had many negative effects on salmon, and those entities who found them valuable, from killer whales to humans. This is far more important than having to move some folks to new communities and make them whole, something which we can easily do. But it does involve cooperation, hard work, and weighing alternatives — things foreign to demagogues.

This is all in order to shore up the environment which enables our survival.

Sometimes it just takes an article title to inspire some thought. There goes one now:

Popular AI Chatbots Found to Give Error-Ridden Legal Answers

This is from Bloomberg Law, and is, in fact, behind a paywall, so I have not read it. But just reading the title gave me a new way of thinking about Chat GPT-4:

These chatbots are actually thermometers, or, even better, an improved polygraph, if you will, measuring the accuracy of the Web on whatever topic you might like.

This does not take them out of the league of party tricks, an assertion I’ve made before. But I don’t see them as legitimate tools, because, as polygraphs, they indicate the patient is hardly trustworthy. Potential customers should be intellectually invested in honesty, in truth. That should go without saying, but, sadly, does not. Ask a tobacco company. And Error-ridden legal answers does not qualify as truth.

But it does qualify as a measuring stick.

A week or so back, Hunter Biden was subpoenaed by Rep Comer’s (R-SC) House Oversight to appear for a private hearing, a hearing from which the press and other news media is excluded.

Hunter declined, but offered to appear at a public meeting, one open to the media. He was perhaps undiplomatic in noting Comer’s inclination to misrepresent the findings of such meetings. Rep Comer (R-SC) declined this offer, which is to say he expressed outrage and made various claims of impeachment of the President over the matter, the heaps of evidence, and a few other trivialities.

Which leads to a joint meeting of the Oversight and Judiciary committees to begin the process of holding Biden in contempt of Congress a day or two ago in which … Hunter Biden showed up. Reactions reported by CNN/Politics:

On Wednesday morning, Hunter Biden entered the committee room, creating a tumultuous scene inside and outside the committee room as lawmakers debated what to do.

“You are the epitome of White privilege,” GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina told Hunter Biden from her committee seat. “Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls.”

It was quite a meeting according to CNN.

“I think it’s clear and obvious for everyone watching this hearing today that Hunter Biden is terrified of strong, conservative, Republican women because he can’t even face my words as I was about to speak to him,” [Rep MT] Greene [R-GA] said.

More likely, it was to keep from laughing. In fact, you know you’re in trouble when Rep Andy Biggs (R-AZ) is the reasonable guy in the room:

Reacting to all of the members interrupting each other, GOP Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona implored his colleagues “don’t act like a bunch of nimrods.”

But, seriously, as noted by others this is what happens when politicians trained to be publicity hounds are elected. They should be seen as object lessons on the attributes of who does not deserve to be elected. Far-right pundit Erick Erickson, in a paywall piece that he sent to unpaid subscribers like me, recognizes this was an entire room of preferably ex-Representatives:

I will not be surprised if, by this afternoon, Rep. Nancy Mace has out a fundraising appeal that she told Hunter Biden to his face that he has no balls. The GOP has a problem. This morning’s hearing about Biden turned into a clown show. I bet a lot of you loved it. But a lot of Democrats loved it too. Both sides get to rile up their base and fundraise. …

The Republicans, and to some extent the Democrats, believe that it’s now campaign time at all times, and worse yet that governing performance is not part of campaigning.

It’s going to be a rough time for Americans until they figure out that Mace, Greene, etc et al must be ejected before responsible governance will be possible.

This doesn’t sound good for the guy who wants to be Superman, invulnerable to everything:

Judge Florence Pan, a President Joe Biden nominee, posed some striking hypothetical questions to Sauer, to flesh out the bounds of his immunity argument. His legal theory claims former presidents are shielded from prosecution for official actions if there isn’t an impeachment and conviction by Congress first.

“Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival? That is an official act, an order to SEAL Team Six?” Pan asked. [CNN/Politics]

A question that clarifies the bankruptcy of Trump’s immunity assertions. Of course, some far-rightists and those who value money more than good sense will whine about Judge Pan being a Biden appointee, but that just marks them as fourth-raters. Pan’s question lays bare the issue at hand: is the President immune to common-sense constraints? Even Trump’s lawyer half-way conceded the point:

“He would have to be, and would speedily be impeached and convicted before the criminal prosecution,” Sauer said.

“I asked you a yes or no question,” Pan said.

“If he were impeached and convicted first,” Sauer replied, later insisting that the “political process” of impeachment “would have to occur” before any prosecution could be initiated.

But we are all equal before the law, and if we grant the President some deferrals in special cases, they do not include deferrals, much less exceptions, for what appears to be outright corruption.

It occurs to me that the district court might have declared that the question of immunity need only be decided if a finding of corruption or other law-breaking, as it would be otherwise moot, which is rather the reverse of Trump’s assertion concerning these prosecutions. By continuing the process of litigation, even if the former President is eventually given immunity, the voters will gain important, legitimate information concerning Trump’s guilt, or lack thereof, in these cases, and this is important for making voting decisions.

In the end, actions that benefit the President at the substantial expense and imperilment of the Union do not, in the least, deserve deferral nor immunity, and the suits dependent on the outcome of this litigation definitely fall into this category. Disregarding this facet puts the Country at peril.

Fantasizing about Carrie Fisher as a blonde, I guess.

Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (2016) continues the tale of Fin Shepherd, the terror of flying sharks everywhere, and his merry band of washed-up costars on what must be, for some, their final go-around, as names such as Hasselhoff and Busey, Tiegs and Chrisley and Guttenberg accompany Fin in his desperate play to keep the ravaging herd of flying sharks at bay. As backstory, Astro-X, a company and not the Godzilla co-stars, has manufactured and used its nuclear Astro-Pods to suppress the sharknados, but little did they know that the sharknados were growing stronger, and so the Astro-Pods are overwhelmed, embarrassing the CEO of Astro-X.

But who knew that sharknadoes can ALSO spawn? In a fit of rapid evolution, the sharknado that has been pursuing Fin all over the landscape now becomes a firenado, fueled by an oil field strike, and then a cownado, lavanado, and a hailnado, all accompanied by the endless supply of sharks. With more to come.

But the big surprise is the return of April, Fin’s dead wife. Or, from her point of view, the return of her entire dead family. Except her Dad, a famous Evil Doctor, who has done a bad thing.

And then it all comes together at Niagara Falls, where the end of this ‘nado has been achieved, but the next … is just beginning. And, in a fit of terminal sentimentality, everyone gets rescued. Except Fin’s son’s newlywed wife, who apparently really didn’t want to continue in all this silliness.

Folks investigating UBI (Universal Basic Income) screw it up:

If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?

That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized. [Los Angeles Times]

Never mind the absurdly small study size. The fact of the matter is that one of the crucial variables that affects human mentality, which is the essence of the measurement subject, is time. That the study was limited to a year was bad enough; that it was cut off after six months is the mark of the partisan, not the seasoned scientist.

These results are liable to join the graveyard of ghostly results, never to be reliably reproduced, because maybe after a year the typical study subject could easily decide to return to whatever habits put them in the state of homelessness in the first place, assuming it was not some bit of bad luck beyond their control. The longer study might detect this, consigning this study to the curiosity bin.

Such a study is vulnerable to so many insidiously unrecognized variables, such as researcher impact, and then to cut it off short! I like the idea of UBI, and I fear this cutoff does a disservice to the academics of UBI.

Remember the mythical hoop snake? Here’s a small one.

More here.

Well, maybe it’s justified, since crime does seem to cluster; that is, crime is intensely local. But if you happen to live across a big area, maybe it’s not justified, or so suggests Jeff Asher:

Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023, likely at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded. What’s more, every type of Uniform Crime Report Part I crime with the exception of auto theft is likely down a considerable amount this year relative to last year according to newly reported data through September from the FBI.

Americans tend to think that crime is rising, but the evidence we have right now points to sizable declines this year (even if there are always outliers). The quarterly data in particular suggests 2023 featured one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years.

Murder is down 12.7 percent in our YTD murder dashboard as of this writing (December 7th) with a decline in 73 percent of the more than 175 cities with available data. The sample suggests either the largest or one of the largest national declines in murder on record occurred this year (both in terms of percent and absolute decline). [Jeff-alytics]

I know six months ago car-jackings in the Twin Cities, often by teenagers, seemed to be surging, while here in January of 2024 I can’t recall seeing a report in quite a while. Still, “a report” qualifies as anecdotal evidence par excellence, but as much as it’s important to understand that your feelings do not qualify as expert opinion on any quantifiable phenomenon, it’s also important to understand that our irrational, keep you alive part of your brain runs on internalized empiricism, or intuition aka your feelings. Keeping that in mind, it’s good to stay connected to the community through news sources, but, unless those sources include summations with time-series graphs, if you’re feeling panicky about trends, seek out authoritative sources of said graphs.

And then think about them.

For instance, if the per capita graph says a rate is going down, ask yourself if the population covered by the graph is itself growing. If the answer is ‘yes’, then that might explain why there are more incidents being reported even as the per capita drops.

So when I see a report that says murders are dropping, I wonder if that applies to the Twin Cities, and how growing population is interacting with a saturated new station and a dropping rate. I’m too busy or too lazy to seek out the actual data, but at least I know I should do it.

From “AI firms will face copyright infringement lawsuits in 2024 (print: Creators fight back against AI),” Alex Wilkins, NewScientist (30 December 2023, paywall):

“People say a lot of crazy things in a class-action pleading. There’s no particular incentive to be judicious, to only run your best arguments, to only say things that you can actually back up with facts.”
— Matthew Sag at Emory University in Atlanta

Linguist Philip Seargeant has something to say concerning the diversity of languages:

The Babel myth, which casts a long shadow over how we think about the topic, is based around the idea that linguistic diversity and multilingualism are flaws in the human faculty for language – that they are a problem, and thus in need of a solution. In reality, they are fundamental features of the system, which give language its flexibility, and upon which whole cultures and identities are built.

It is this inbuilt urge for diversity that is the main reason why all the schemes for universal languages never quite fulfilled their inventors’ ambitions. As communities shift and grow, so do their linguistic habits. And while language is, of course, a means for communicating with others, it is also a means for differentiating yourself from others. So technologies that find ways to bypass or render invisible this diversity will have significant ramifications for human society. [“Is artificial intelligence about to free us from the curse of Babel?” NewScientist (30 December 2023, paywall)]

His suggestion that languages differ because we like to have something which differentiates us from “others” is a bit of balderdash with nothing suggesting proof.

Here’s an experiment, which should be possible using computer simulators: Spread a human population speaking a single, relatively immature language over a geographically diverse area, with a slow transmission speed, meaning no electronic communications such as radio, and limited and even hazardous travel. Give the agents an urge to survive, propagate, perhaps even prosper. Give the population a few hundred generations to develop.

The varied geography will, one should hypothesize, lead to the development of differing vocabularies, because language isn’t only about communication, but also about the lens through which we view the world as modulated by our common but distinct interests.

Look at me: An obsolete software engineer. Show me a randomly selected seed and I’ll say, “It grows a plant, doesn’t it?” Show it to a farmer and they may identify it down to the exact variant of barley into which it’ll develop. I won’t even remember the words used to describe it. They’ll glare at me if I make a joke about, say, wavelet data structures using their words.

I dare to say that his suggestion may be more reflective of the individualistic mindset of today than anything else.

But his assertion that Babel, so to speak, isn’t a curse remains interesting. It may simply be inevitable.

And this is your film critic du jour. Mind the cilia.

Dune (2021) is one of the slickest examples of space opera ever made. A space opera, for me, involves one or more fictional empires based on one or more fictional planets, possibly in other galaxies or a fictional universe. Much like the Roman Empire, space operas involve empires, often autocratic, full of ambitious characters, filled with swirling rip-currents of politics, leaders whose view of their position includes little of standard morality with an inclination towards power and wealth and influence, existential enemies who are outside looking in, and many other titanic elements, and, at least in the better ones, how the individual copes with the many reasons to act in the worst ways.

And in most of these there’s a MacGuffin, a thing that promises to change the game.

Can’t think of any offhand? Try Star Wars (1977) and its various sequels, prequels, all in pursuit of the Force, along with imitators, from the last generation; a couple of generations prior to that there was Flash Gordon, featuring Ming the Merciless, and whatever it was (I forget) that would neutralize the evil Ming.

Dune pits House Harkonnen against House Atreides. The former has the rights to the planet Dune, from which the MacGuffin psychotropic travel drug called spice, is extracted, amidst various local dangers. The emperor has decreed these rights now belong to House Atreides. But it’s all a plot to cripple or even destroy House Atreides, it turns out, and soon enough Harkonnen returns in force.

Despite the slaughter, two members of Atreides survive, the wife and son of the Lord of Atreides, and it’s their journey into the power of the locals, the Fremen, and the local wildlife, that occupies our attention.

That’s Part One.

Is it good? Oh, it’s not bad, but it seemed to drag on and on. The personal battleshields were under explained, while the battle scenes can drag a bit. It can be predictable, and good characters die, perhaps too easily. My Arts Editor told me not to pause it when she headed for the bathroom during said battle scenes.

But if you have a spare three hours, it’s not the worst possible way to occupy those hours.