02 April 2025

Feets Don't Fail Me Now

It was, IIRC, Dr. McElhone who introduced me to the saying, "the good people vote with their feet." 'Good' is, of course, fungible. Some take a broad view, while others keep it to the very straight and narrow. As in minded, by the way.

Speaking of straight, here's a report on the bent among us.
"With everything going on in my previous country, I didn't have much choice," Kasatkina said about choosing to switch nationality, per Reuters. "For me, being openly gay, if I want to be myself, I have to make this step, and I did it."
Doesn't say why she chose Aussie rather than some European enclave. May haps she knows more about Vlad the Impaler's plans than the rest of us? I expect we'll see more Americans leaving the Red states for the relative 'freedom' of the Blues. And so far as killing all that funding from Blue to Red through DC, well we in the Blue will welcome the lifting of the burden. Will Red state administrations work to replace the lost moolah? HA.

01 April 2025

I Told You So - 1 April 2025

And not, alas, an April Fool's Joke. The real skinny.
In the week ending on March 8, the number of homes for sale in the Washington, D.C. area market grew by 56.2 percent compared to a year earlier, Realtor.com found.

It was the third consecutive week of rising inventory, after the number of homes for sale in the metropolitan area grew by 46.5 percent year-over-year in the week ending on February 22, and by an even higher 48.3 percent year-over-year in the week ending on March 1.
Next, we'll find out that those private equity monsters that have been buying up distressed houses all across this great land, will have lunch on worthless, out of work, bureaucrats.

No Fucking Way - part the sixth

Yet another shoe has dropped. How many shoes does a centipede have? And, just as last time, shitler is bailing out the Rednecks. Farmers first, of course.
A sponsor of the measure, Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican who owns an 850-acre farm in Washington State, said his colleagues had felt unable to act while the border remained chaotic. "That excuse no longer exists," Mr. Newhouse said. "I truly think this is the Congress that we can make it happen."
Who said they can't find folks? Oh, they can't find American folks who'll work for starvation wages like those Mexicans?

And, then, there's the direct bailout, just like 2018.
The early discussions offer a tacit acknowledgment that Mr. Trump's expansive tariffs could unleash financial devastation throughout the U.S. agricultural industry, a crucial voting base that the president similarly tried to safeguard during his 2018 trade war with China.
So, ya tink egg prices are bad now? Just you wait.
Such a rescue package ultimately proved expensive, with the government shelling out about $23 billion after China imposed high retaliatory duties on soybean, corn, wheat and other American imports beginning in 2018.
...
But the price tag this time could prove even higher, since Mr. Trump has threatened to target many countries, including American allies like Europe, Canada, Mexico and Japan. The potential scope of their collective retribution could inflict deeper, more lasting harm on American businesses.
Or, as shitler has said
"When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win," Trump tweeted Friday morning. "When we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore — we win big. It's easy!"
Once again, with feeling: "Hey shitler, show us just one wire transfer that pays the tariff from just one foreign gummint or company!" Whataya say man?

What only a few of the pundits have told the American People: when tariffs increase the price of a foreign good/service, domestic producers follow along. And, why not? Why leave money on the table? Anyway, who'll tell differnce between French Champagne and that Gallo ersatz version at about the same high price?

29 March 2025

No Fucking Way - part the fifth

It should come as no surprise that the venerable NYT reports on the process by which the MAGAnauts avoid the lash of the shitler and muskrat©dugugotw whip. But, I suppose, you knew that would happen. Right? We can't let the shithole states bear any burden from their stupidity, now can we?
Mr. Cole, the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee that controls federal spending, quickly swung into action to try to head off the cuts. He and his aides started dialing their staff contacts at DOGE, the White House and the federal agencies in charge of the facilities on the chopping block, which also included a field office for the Indian Health Service.
What!!! Shut down SSA and SPC facilities??? That's so unAmerican!!! Digest the report, it's corruption of the highest (or lowest, depending on your point of view) order.

May be the coming mega-storm which will raze the midwest and south in the coming days will put a dent into the MAGAnauts heads? Nah. I don't think so either.
It's already been a busy year for tornadoes even though the peak of severe weather season is still a few weeks away. There have been about 300 tornado reports since 2025 began, compared to 164 by the end of March 2024.
Yeah, climate change is just a hoax ginned up by pointy head woke "scientists". Shitler knows he's the polymath to top all others, and will prove that climate change is a hoax. Same as RFK proves that vaccines cause autism. The Musk Ox will prove the earth is flat shortly thereafter. A flat earth makes EVs more practical.

27 March 2025

Thought For The Day - 27 March 2025

Well... yet another, sorta kinda, slap at AI. But it doesn't get at the kernel of failure: AI, as currently implemented, isn't intelligence. Any more that winning at Jeopardy! is intelligence. Yeah, there's all that "Ken Jennings is sooooo smart!" bullshit. It's just prodigious memory (churned through a correlation exercise); some people have it, most people don't. Having prodigious memory doesn't make you smart, it might, in the end, make you kinda dumb. While the current count is 86 billion little grey cells, that's still not an infinite number and some will be dedicated to memory and others to, among other things, logic. It's logic processing that makes intelligence. That's how Einstein figured out special relativity just by sitting in a tram and watching a clock tower disappear in the distance. Can your AI do the same? Call me when it can.
This is where we, the people, are apparently failing AI. Because in addition to being humans with jobs and social lives and laundry to fold and art to make and kids to raise, we should also learn how to tiptoe around the limitations of large language models that may or may not return accurate information to us.
Where's the logic in all that? Nada, zip, nil. It's all a galaxy sized correlation matrix, and as we all know, 100% correlation belongs only to God.

And, for what it's worth, I've not been hit with a hallucination from the wiki. Ever.

25 March 2025

Party Like It's 1829 - part the first

Well... what is it that Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) keeps blathering? Oh, yeah. Let's get rid of them damn illegals and the sub-GED crowd will have better wages and lifestyle. Yeah, that's the idea!

Well... not so much, at least in Florida. As you might expect from a fascist state (both versions of the word).
Florida has been working for years to crack down on employers that hire undocumented immigrants. But that presented a problem for businesses in the state that are desperate for workers to fill low-wage and often undesirable jobs.

Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state legislature have a potential solution: children.
Are you surprised? I sure as shit ain't.
The number of child labor violations in Florida has nearly tripled in recent years, according to US Department of Labor statistics.
And, I expect, such data will soon disappear thanks to the Office of Data Integrity. Can't have those Blue State Wokers bitching and moaning about our sovereign right to exploit our kids. Now, can we??

24 March 2025

Pyrrhic Losers - part the third

Well... some times I manage to get it wrong. Not a robot, I suppose. The series of No Fucking Way essays speculated that Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) would go all out to protect the MAGAnauts from his ministrations. At all costs to the Blue States. It appears, not so much.

He's about to cut the nuts off FEMA!! Who wooda thunk it? Figures are hard to come by, "everybody knows" that regular, damaging weather disasters happen mostly in those southern Red States. Blue states get some snow now and again, but nothing like the hurricanes, tornados, hail storms, and (what used to be as rare as hen's teeth) winter freezes (hellooooo Texas). See ya!!
It was one of the worst years for disasters declarations in the last three decades (1995-2024), according to a new analysis from the International Institute for Environment and Development, or IIED, shared exclusively with CNN. Ninety major disaster declarations in a year is nearly double the annual average of 55 declarations, according to the London-based think tank.
Here's the 2024 tally from NOAA. Better go and look before the Batshit J. Moron orders it removed. And, yes, not much on the Blue coasts, and almost all in the Red South and Midwest.
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order that outlines his desire to shift more responsibility for disaster response and recovery to the states.

Some state officials and even Republican lawmakers have raised concerns about Trump's plans to slash FEMA, expressing worry that it will weaken responses to future disasters.
All those Red State MAGAnauts were just dupes and pawns in Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor)'s effort to be the next Orban/Erdogan.

Have a nice day.