Dumbasses

So, I live in a small Red town, Reddest in my state by a wide margin, where the water has been mostly well and septic forever. A few years ago, since these houses are on a plot which nearly abuts a bit larger Red town, which larger town has a municipal water system (largely on the basis of water rights in the small Red town in which I live, of course), our often dry well was replaced by piped water from said larger town. Said larger town goes back, in terms of incorporation to 1853, and much if not most, of the water pipes do to. And, said larger town has had, by my count, a half dozen water main breaks in the the last few years. And, until now, fixing said breaks leaves us without water for a couple of days. Until now.

What happened was that there was a break on a street which is about the lowest in the town, running next to the main river in the area, which is your typical hillside New England town. There was a break on this street some years ago, and we were out of water for a couple of days. Irritating, but not critical.

So, while watching my local Lamestream teeVee news last night, I find that this break had happened and that all was under control and no one in the towns had, or would, lose water. Ok.

Got up this morning, and no H₂O. Off I went to the local grocery and grabbed some bottled water. We still had some bottles left over from the previous fiasco. I should have gone to the innterTubes first. Turns out that while fixing the 'minor' break first reported, the main-main water pipe, a 36 inch monster, which drives the distribution to said larger town and parts of some of the abutting towns blew out. Which includes our plantation.

Turns out that the 36 incher is close by, but upstream of, the original failure.

Now, explain to me, Mr. Natural, how fixing the smaller main (12 inch from the reports), could cause the failure of the 36 incher? My guess: come chucklehead civil servant water department drone slammed shut the outlet value on the 36 incher so the 12 incher could be worked on. According to His Honoer the Mayor, those pipes are all 100⁺ years old. So, of course, the resulting pressure spike on the 100⁺ year old 36 incher gave up the ghost. We're likely to be without water for a week.

Brazil is famous for its slash and burn form of agriculture. Some, especially among the Lunatic Left, blame some of climate change on such conduct. Turns out, the USofA does similarly. The New Territories, mostly Red States, have somewhat younger infrastructure than the Olde Towns, and want the Olde Towns to be shutdown. Come live in the Sunshine States. What? You say the Colorado is drying up? We'll just get water from the Great Lakes. All those Olde Towns don't need it.

Thought For The Day - 28 November 2025

Now that Donald J. "peace in our time" Chamberlain has promised to stop immigration from "Third World Countries", he has the opportunity to act here in concert.

Oops. Turns out the guy was granted asylum by Trumpsters.

If the chucklehead really wants to promote "domestic tranquillity", which is to say, stop folks from shooting each other for bad cultural reasons, may be he should stop AR-15 toting Rednecks from Red Counties migrating to any Blue Cities? That would be a good Social Good.

The Longer View - part the first

The weekly quote will be along, some time. But here's the closing remarks

So what is to be done? In the new issue of In Formation, a very irregular tech-critical tech magazine with the slogan "Every day, computers are making people easier to use," Ms. Borsook proposes a Silicon Valley Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

She imagines testimony from a long list of tech journalists turned investors as well as reporters turned celebrants. Also: confessions from the men who came up with the labels "sharing economy," "disruptive innovation" and "thought leader." The proceedings would, at the least, clear the air and provide greater understanding.

Her editor asked, "Is this humor or is this serious?" Ms. Borsook's answer: "I don't know."

Concentration of power and money has always lead to dictatorship. Alas, it won't be any different this time. The Founding Fathers had a great idea. But what they constructed depends on moral leaders, not grifters out to bend the Damn Gummint to their own wallets.

Cui Bono - part the fourth

Once again, time to ask that age old question when something out of bandwidth occurs. Who benefits? Today, it's Donald J. "peace in our time" Chamberlain. Now he has the excuse he's been pining for to impose martial law on all those Blue Cites, even the ones in otherwise Red States. Not that he needs to do that, but it increases his ego. And on from martial law to suspending voting. Is it going too far to insinuate that it's an inside job? Why wouldn't Donald J. "peace in our time" Chamberlain do it? Dictators have used the scam many times in history. The Reichstag?

Mammy Yokum has spoken.

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the sixth

Regular readers note that the Bold sub-head changes from time to time. One of my favorites (lasted, I think, longer than some) went something like this (I don't save them, alas)

Vlad, I'll take the Western Hemisphere, and you take Europe. Deal?

Sure does look like what they're doing. If I had kids and grandkids, I might give a shit. How about those of you who do?

Scared Out of Your Mind - part the third

The lede to this recent Derek Lowe post was going to be added to the trove of Thoughts. But it deserves some discussion, if only because he's 'repeating' much of what I've offered about AI. It sure is Artificial, but it ain't Intelligent.

As regular readers well know, I get very frustrated when people use the verb "to reason" in describing the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Sometimes that's just verbal shorthand, but both in print and in person I keep running into examples of people who really, truly, believe that these things are going through a reasoning process. They are not. None of them.

Damn straight. As he says later on, AI as currently implemented is just processing a gazillion cell correlation matrix. It does take some code to do the 'next word' walk through, but that's been a solved problem for many decades. What's also annoying: the coder cabal has managed to take the credit for this execrable scam, while the true credit belongs to Nvidia and AML, IOW, AI is a figment of hardware density. We could have had AI as currently implemented with the ENIAC back in the '40s, just would have taken a bit longer to generate.

[T]he accuracy of the answers across all 68 questions dropped notably in every single LLM system when presented with a "None of the above" option. DeepSeek-R1 was the most resilient, but still degraded. The underlying problem is clear: no reasoning is going on, despite some of these systems being billed as having reasoning ability. Instead, this is all pattern matching, which presents the illusion of thought and the illusion of competence.

This is the same phenomenon which leads so many to say Ken Jennings is So Smart because he won so many games on Jeopardy!. No, just large and fast memory. Just like today's AI machines.

LLMs are text generators, working on probabilities of what their next word choice should be based on what has been seem in their training sets, then dispensing answer-shaped nuggets in smooth, confident, grammatical form. This is not reasoning and it is not understanding - at its best, it is an illusion that can pass for them. And that's what it is at its worst, too.

Ken Jennings in silicon.

Polly Want a Cracker?

Anyone who thinks that Pami et al will release The Whole Epstein files is at least two steps beyond Pollyanna. Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don is a thug. That he would decline the opportunity to have at an underage piece of tail is absurd.

Remember:

Later, referring to Arianne Zucker (whom they were waiting to meet), Trump says:

I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.

He'd say to NO to Jeff??? Are you nuts? After all:

He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.

Flyers.
If it looks like, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck; it's a duck.
Birds of a feather flock together.

Me? I still think it's the case that Vlad has the pee tape. Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don is a thug. Of course, he'd do such a thing.

And, of course, lest we forget his Miss Teen USA adventures

"He just came strolling right in," Dixon said. "There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Others girls were naked. Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half-naked changing into our bikinis."

Say no to Jeff? Not a bit of it.