29 January 2023

Thought For The Day - 29 January 2023

The five Memphis officers involved in the beating — who are also Black — were fired and charged with murder and kidnapping in Nichols' death. The unit they were part of was disbanded, and state lawmakers representing the Memphis area began planning police reform bills.
-- CNN

Interesting. So... why has there not been such 'swift action' when the perps/cops are White?? Just askin.

23 January 2023

Do AI Bots Dream Of Electric Trucks?

Well, a tad lifted from Philip K. Dick, but it's become a lamestream media Hot Story.

So, let's ponder the tale's trail, shall we?? The left wingnuts have been braying every day since the emergence of the industrial revolution, that said revolution would kill more jobs at each stage than the new jobs created and, in particular that the new jobs can't be available to old job workers; skill mismatch and all that. By and large, that's been true. The only reason total collapse of economies hasn't happened yet (or, may be, it has but the lamestream media has kept silent?) is that economies have relied on exponential population growth to keep demand for widgets in line with automation's ever increasing productivity. (Well, and hammering nails into sticks to make houses isn't rocket science.) Which increases in productivity accrue almost entirely to the wealthier classes; not insignificantly due to the fact that the RRW continue to live (and vote) as if it's still 1829 and fewer and fewer of them have the skill sets needed for the 'New Economic Order' (not to be confused with the New World Order Run By And For The Jews).

The sort of economy and society we used to know were the result of most of the people having most of the moolah (and thus buying power) most of the time to drive growth. And, for the record, only lasted from the end of WWII (when the Powers That Be still operated with a "We're all in this together" mantra) to the first OPEC oil crisis. As is 'intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer' (Dr. McElhone said that a lot) we've entered (perhaps for fucking ever) a period of monopoly capitalism, with the few having most of the moolah. That condition can't have a happy ending. Monopoly capital will collapse if it can't sell all of that burgeoning output, and who will buy? The Tyranny of Average Cost guarantees it. There's less and less labour to cut from the BoM of said widgets and suck into the bidnezz coffers. Eventually, the BoM consists of just paying for the capital and keeping the machines running. They'll have machines that do that part, too; cut the last humans from the process. Some pretty much already do. One might wonder how many unskilled, semi-skilled, and high-skilled humans this capitalist has managed to make redundant?

Does anyone really believe that replacing 100 assembly line workers with a robot designed, engineered, and built by 10 other people is a win-win? Moreover, those assembly line uneducated Rednecks could never, ever qualify for one of New Tech's better jobs. "Wanted: 1,000 uneducated Rednecks to design AI control programs for ditch digging machine." Ya think? That simple fact has been true since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as well, and is exemplified by the RRW's desire (I'm talkin' to you Gov. Ron DeMented) to turn the clock back to 1829. "Ya'll don't need no book larnin' to walk behind a plow mule or make babies. Just shut up and read your Bible. And, never ever have a kind word to say about or to a Darkie. They's beneath ya'll and always will be. Gov. Ron DeMented will see to it." Just keep in mind what LBJ said; still true today.

But, if that's where we go, who'll have the moolah to buy up all that automated output? Hmmm?? Certainly not all them thar no book larnin' Florida Rednecks. The slave-wage exporter's dilemma: it can't survive without a (or, more realistically, many) high-wage importer(s); that's the only way the arithmetic can work. But if you can convince the uneducated Rednecks that, though they're getting screwed by the monopoly capitalists, the Darkies are getting screwed worse, the uneducated Rednecks will continue to support the power structure.

It is just a tad odd that Henry Ford, anti-Semite and White Supremacist and other not so wonderful qualities, was also infamous amongst his peers for paying his low-skilled assembly workers enough that they could buy a Model T. Legend has it that they did. He wasn't being kind; he just knew who buttered his toast.

This tying of economic growth, and thus jobs (may be we'll get more?), to growing population is of a piece with the slash-and-burn agriculture of Brazil as an exemplar and the mindfuck of folks like Musk who dream of colonizing Mars as an exemplar of Real Progress. No water. No air. No soil. No nuthin. Even if would could build chemical rockets with enough oomph just to get there, how about getting back? We can just about make it to the moon and back with, if we're lucky, six humans aboard (not all will touch the moon, of course).

It's an axiom of any trained economist, Right/Left/Keynes/Smith/whatever, that demand for goods and services is infinite, even at the individual level. It's just that, until Ehrlich revealed the truth about resources, it seemed that global population growth (even with the feeding frenzy of the 'civilized' West) could support the approach. (The 'Green Revolution' came from millions of pounds of chemical fertilizers, not smarter farming.) But with the resources, land and water (clean ones, of course), needed for basic existence in ever shorter supply, it makes exactly zero sense to encourage an economic system dependent on per capita growth in those goods and services. The housing sector is a prime example, and not just here in the USofA but fur shur China. The housing sector is some combination of Pyramid and Ponzi; it doesn't look good.

We need the Damn Gummint to be smart enough to herd cats. That is to say, tilt the playing field such that your average greed obsessed bidnezzman will do what promotes long term survival of most of us, at least, not just the 1%. No, I can't offer the One True Answer in this missive. The dark side of that: the idiots and charlatans very nearly turned Covid-19 into a massive disaster. Xi's egoistic bungling may well yet; China's manufacturing has been far more dependent on hands than machines than much of Western manufacturing. That appears to be changing.

The simple fact is, making physical widgets is rapidly approaching a no humans need apply condition. When it hits, and it will by God, it will likely be too late to figure out an income distribution regime to keep the whole mess humming along as if nothing bad had happened. Good luck.

We know that lower level animal populations have grown themselves to extinction. Humans are no different, thanks to the likes of Gov. Ron DeMented.

The mention of Brazilian slash-and-burn is just a particularly egregious example of, at the least, Western 'Civilation's' answer to trouble: just get outa Dodge and find somewhere else to reduce to cinders. Rather than use the ever diminishing resource endowment of Mother Earth to solve the problems we face, burn up (and that's literal) ever more of said resources in pointless treks to places that are not habitable by humans, without said humans bringing all necessary resources with them and other humans sending replenishment for fucking ever. Now that's a grand plan.

We know, with a more than fair amount of certainty, that Earth 2.0 doesn't exist as far as we can see in any direction. And certainly not reachable with chemical rockets and within the remaining life-span of an adult human. And, likely, even with near-light-speed ships. Assuming, of course, that there's another Einstein in our midst to show us how to build one. For myself, I'd settle for Mr. Fusion engines available at WalMart for $100.

Humans tackle the problems they find fun and profitable to solve, not the problems that really matter beyond the immediate term and to species survival. Mostly. WWII being a significant exception; I can't think of another exception since. We don't yet know how the West will ultimately deal with Putin and his American buffoons. Or climate change. Or rampant autocracy everywhere on the planet.

A tad too harsh? Just keep up with the crap coming out of the mouths of RRW.

20 January 2023

Thought For The Day - 20 January 2023

So, we have news!! A Make America Great Again voting machine company has double counted votes with no help from Hugo Chávez, or any other Communist Venezuelan.

11 January 2023

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the twentieth

Here we go again. Today's NYT tells the tale of Intel and the future of 'other' processor architecture. To see how life used to be, go back and re-read "The Soul of a New Machine". The principle lesson from doing so is the realization that, at that time and previously, a hardware engineer could conceive and build a bespoke computer and sell it to make money. The various descrete components were all listed in the catalogs of myriad semiconductor producers; one need only map out the circuit from one's brain to paper, find the necessary components, buy a handful of each, and build a prototype. The single-chip computer (of at least 32 bits, anyway) in commodity quantity, didn't yet exist. While I can't find any specifics about the individual components of the machine (memory says the book talks about that in detail, but that's the best my memory can do and I can't find my copy), here you can see that this ain't today's cpu on a chip!

Not so much these days. TSMC has come to dominate chip production just because of the Tyranny. The world of economics has recognized the notion of the natural monopoly from its beginning; such products existed for millennia before the field of economics was invented. With the unhindered march of capitalized production, the number of descrete low cost production units (whether owned by a monopolist or a few oligopolists) continues to shrink (all the while the unit grows more complex).

This is the most high-larious quote from the Times piece:
Sapphire Rapids began in 2015, with discussions among a small group of Intel engineers. The product was the company's first attempt at a new approach in chip design. Companies now routinely pack tens of billions of tiny transistors on each piece of silicon, but competitors like Advanced Micro Devices and others had started making processors from multiple chips bundled together in plastic packages.
New? Not hardly. Granted the kiddies of today likely have no direct experience with anything that isn't today's X86 chips, but the notion of multi-chip cpu isn't ancient history. The IBM RS/6000 began life as a multi-chip implementation, which is what I chose for my employer about 1990 to run two Progress applications. It was a few years later that the first single-chip RS/6000 came to be. And from there to the PowerPC, and when Steve said, "no mas" oblivion. The reduction of general purpose cpu to just two architecures (X86 and z) would take some time. Now they're in a horse race with a, titular, RISC machine called ARM.
At the time of its introduction in 1996, the P2SC was the largest processor with the highest transistor count in the industry and was a leader in floating point operations.
So, Intel (and others, of course) are reversing course and going with multi-chip implementations. Not that these are built with commodity ICs, by any means. It's as much a matter of yield as density increases. Even if they can build a chip at 5nm, with X billions of transistors per, how many good ones can be gotten from a wafer? Only the Shadow knows.

Will Intel, unlike IBM and myriad others like Data General before, be able to out-duel TSMC in production mojo?? Hard to tell. Once again, the issue comes down to the Tyranny. TSMC still has the biggest piece of the cpu pie. And thus, lowest average cost. Or so we think. Will Intel really become a successful commodity producer? Ask the Shadow.

06 January 2023

Weighty Matters [update]

This past Sunday, "60 Minutes" ran a segment on a drug, Wegovy which is used for weight loss in obese people. It seems to be in short supply, high priced, and mostly not covered by insurance.

What's funny about all this is that the chemical, semaglutide, is also sold as both Ozempic (a self-injectable) and Rybelsus (daily pill) to treat type-2 diabetics. The latter two are incessantly in adverts on the teeVee, and if you watch closely at the end of these adverts you'll see the disclaimers. They can run to multiple screen shots. Among other things, they list the 'typical' amount of weight loss by dosage. And they explicitly say that neither is to be used as a weight loss therapeutic. Say what??

According to my doctor, the latter two (he didn't say whether he prescribes Wegovy) act as appetite suppressants, not as some kind of biochemical intervention in the process of diabetes; just stops the mouth stuffing. A pretty primitive approach to the problem. Which led me to ask whether the company mixes in some other compound to act as the suppressant. He said no, that was the basic mechanism of the drug.

Which leads back to the "60 Minutes" segment. Much of it was devoted to talking heads, doctors and patients for the most part, asserting that obesity was a genetic problem, not a shoveling too much stuff into the mouth problem. Say what??? As the group assembled, they argued that Wegovy should be widely available to the Just Too Fat and fully covered by insurance; after all, being Just Too Fat wasn't the result of overeating!! It's Bad Genes!! Now, the three drugs have differing amounts of semaglutide, with Wegovy way more; which I suppose is to be expected. I didn't hear any of the group assembled assert that there's some gene that causes overeating. It might be argued that: if your four grandparents systematically overfed your parents on a diet of fried chicken and cakes, then they will likely treat you the same way. Is that a genetic pre-disposition? Or are you just a member of a long line of fat familys?

Imagine my surprise when no one, not the reporter or any of medical talking heads, noted the contradiction: Wegovy simply reduces food intake. Works for Type-2 and for Just Too Fat. Honesty in science! Dontcha love it? Semaglutide doesn't address some genetic anomaly, just shuts your food trap whether Type-2 or Just Too Fat. Note that forcing more insulin out of a cranky pancreas is, may be, not the best thing to do to a cranky pancreas.

For Type-2s, it may be a safer alternative, in that some earlier compounds which worked biochemically (addressing 'insulin resistance', for example), had some nasty (if not common) side effects. Actos is one I recall seeing in the news some years back.

Diabetes is a weird condition. Is it caused by too much mouth stuffing? Genetics? It does seem to run in families, just as some forms of Alzheimer's. Is it the result of some environmental assault? Some in the science community linked the fall of the Roman Empire to water distribution through lead pipes; over many generations, they all got stupid. Given that science, today, tells us that a bit of lead paint will derail a child's mental development, it seems cavalier to dismiss a daily dose of lead as mostly harmless. Is there some element in pollution that triggers Type-2? Only The Shadow knows; or some ground-digging -ologists a thousand years from now.

Better living through chemistry.

[update]
A STAT report (no paywall as I type) on do-it-yourself Wegovy, et al 'solution'

05 January 2023

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the forty seventh

Well, at least one Fed official is reading these missives. :) May be not. But one has told the truth about how this bout of inflation came about.
But the price pop was driven by a combination of high demand and supply constrained by outside shocks —€mainly the pandemic and the war in Ukraine — rather than by wages and shifting expectations traditionally thought to drive lasting inflation. It is easy to think of the burst in terms of ride-share surge pricing, Mr. Kashkari said: Prices jumped, profits increased, and wages picked up, but there just wasn't enough supply to bring the market into balance.
[my emphasis]

03 January 2023

133

From the last episode in these essays:

"Draft The Donald!!" will be heard far and wide.

Well, Jeffries out voted Kevin three times:
First: Jeffries - 212 Kevin - 203
Second: Jeffries - 212 Kevin - 203
Third: Jeffres - 212 Kevin - 202

According to history's report, only twice has the Speaker vote gone beyond a perfunctory single ballot. And, of course, we can blame it all on Taxachusetts. 1923 went ten ballots to re-install the current speaker, and the longest ballot count was 1856 when it took 133 ballots to do the same thing.
Sectional conflict over slavery and a rising anti-immigrant mood in the nation contributed to a poisoned and deteriorating political climate.
I guess racism is the nature of The American Way.

There doesn't appear to be anyway out of the quagmire. The RRW is absolutely determined to return us now to the thrilling days of Yesteryear: party like it's 1829.

01 January 2023

The Case for The Donald

As I type here on New Year's Day, Kevin and the RRW have yet to kiss and make up. What to do? What to do?

I am among those who've heard that the Constitution makes no requirement that the Speaker of the House be a member of the House. How weird is that? Well, not so weird according to some of what I've read here on the innterTubes. Some assert that the Speaker is not just another partisan hack, but a non-partisan arbiter of the conduct of House business. I can find no report that any Speaker has been anything but a Partisan Hack.

But, s/he doesn't have to be.

The perfect, for some definition of perfection, candidate is wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024. Ok, you're freaking out. Hear me out.

First, appointing Trump Speaker keeps him occupied. He may, for some definition of may, learn what governing is all about. Not highly likely, but still.

Second, it is yet another argument against prosecuting the bastard for both the Insurrection and Classified Thievery. He is gonna need some protection against the Kryponite, you know; well, if Garland discovers a pair where they've not been. The first argument is that he's running as a Presidential candidate, and is thus prohibited from being charged.

Third, Kevin is a member of the RRW, just tries to fake it as a Wise Legislator. Putting Batshit J. Moron as Speaker frees Kevin up to go whole hog with the RRW. And, not insignificantly, cements exPresident Mumford as Hitler of the American White Supremacy Party. By this point, all that mumbo jumbo about being on the side of Joe Six Pack only works for the dumbest of the dumb.

Fourth, the RRW wouldn't dare invoke the 'one member Move to Vacate' that Greene/Boebert/et al are so dear to have at hand (to flog Kevin daily), so the AWSP will, at the least, project some semblance of stability. Until they get totally wiped out in 2024. Assuming The Orange Trickster doesn't keel dead over with a heart attack first. All those cheap hamburgers have to catch up with him at some point.

Fifth (and finally), reporting on his histrionics every day will keep to a minimum the revelations that he's neither as rich as he claims, nor as astute a bidnezzman as he also claims. He lives off of Uncle Sugar's good graces. And sales of many properties he got from Daddy. Such a loser. "Please, please; don't look behind that curtain!!"

[update]
Since this typing exercise we get this reporting (7:45 PM EST):
However, later in the call, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz — one of the five "hard no" votes for McCarthy — said they would not back McCarthy, despite all the concessions.
"Draft The Donald!!" will be heard far and wide.