Why Humanoid Robots Make No Sense At All

If my scan rate at UPS was this slow, I would have been fired.

A recent video online shows a humanoid robot sorting packages, mostly just flipping them label side up so they can be scanned.  It was painful to watch because the conveyor was slowed down to at least half normal speed and the "robot" was horrifically inefficient at its job.

Irony Alert:  Before I could play the linked video above, it asked me to "sign in to prove you're not a bot."   Rules for me, but not for thee, I guess.

Warehouse robots exist, but they don't look like ersatz humans.  Rather, they are machines optimized for handling, sorting, and stacking packages and retreiving and packing goods.  They look nothing like the "row-bots" of science fiction because doing so would be pointless.  Why give a package sorting robot legs and a torso and a head and human-like arms, when history has shown that human anatomy is ill-suited to repetitive motions.  Do you want these robots to have tendon and joint problems?  Backaches and arthritis?

But seriously, a humanoid robot might have some specialized uses, particularly when interfacing directly with humans, but for other purposes, it makes no sense.  Imagine an automated car wash that, instead of having rotating brushes and spray wands, had dozens of humanoid robots sloshing around in the suds, hand-wiping your car.   Maybe there is a kernel of an idea there, but why would you give them legs to walk around with, when stationary or wheeled robots would make more sense.  And why make them look like humans?

I suppose the idea of a "general purpose" humanoid robot might make some sense.  It could mow your lawn, wax your car, and then shake up a martini for you at five o'clock.  That seems to be a common fantasy with robot fans - that "Jeeves" the family robot will mix up that martini and light your cigar (and empty the ashtray) while you sit in your smoking jacket in the den and listen to Jazz music.

But as history has shown, it is a lot more effective to make a number of domestic robots, each specialized to a purpose.  Having a humanoid robot operate a vacuum cleaner is an expensive waste of machinery.  Having an automated vacuum cleaner makes more sense, as does an automated lawn mower.

With regard to the latter, such things exist, but never became popular.  I recall a few years back seeing a display at Lowe's of a robotic lawn mower.  The display was broken.  A neighbor actually bought one and I guess it worked for a while.  One day I saw them out on the lawn, looking at the inert machine and then poking it with a stick.  It sat there, motionless, for about a week and then disappeared never to be seen again.  It never pays to be an early adapter.

The problem with the automated lawn mower is obvious - suppose your pet is run over by it?  Or maybe a crawling infant?  The liability is huge and no matter how many sensors you put on it, it may be likely to fail.  For that reason, most automated lawn mowers used string trimmers, not whirling blades, so little junior won't be sliced to death, just slowly whipped to oblivion.  But I digress.

Another problem with humanoid robots is the power they require.  Humans are a fascinating machine - converting calories of food into energy every day for nearly a century before they wear out.  It is just a shame it takes 25 years or so to program their neural networks, and often that goes horribly wrong.

Companies like Boston Dynamics like to show off their robots dancing to music and doing amazing flips and stunts.  In most cases, they are tethered to a power cord, or in some cases, an IC engine powered electrical generator.  The actual ambient sound is rarely shown, as instead of music, you would hear the scream of a lawn mower engine or the sound of electrical or hydraulic actuators.  Lithium-Ion batteries are one solution, but of course add weight to the design and have a limited capacity.  I suspect many of these short videos are short because that is the extent of the battery life.

While Boston Dynamics claims that their robots are for sale, at the present time they are limited to enterprise customers and there is little or no word as to how many have been sold or are in use.  Have you seen one being used? Let me know.

Meanwhile, other more plebeian robots are already out on the streets - quite literally.  No doubt you've seen the food delivery robots on some city streets.  But again, they are not humanoid, but small boxes on wheels.  A humanoid delivery robot could do things like climb stairs and get around obstacles better, but the energy required would no doubt limit their range and the cost would be prohibitive.  Boxes on wheels are cheap - and get the job done.

And of course, robot taxis are a thing, at least on a trial basis in some cities - with mixed results.  When error-prone humans run over a small child, we chalk that up to the cost of doing business - and the driver gets a slap on the wrist.  If you want to get away with killing someone, use your car.  Ask Bruce Caitlyn Jenner.  She got away with it!

Sam's Club and Walmart have a floor cleaning robot that seems to work "OK" - although it has a seat and manual controls.  Not only does it wash floors, but it also takes inventory with a side-mounted scanner.  Again, it is on wheels,  not legs.   No one seriously suggested using a humanoid robot with a mop-and-bucket - it would make no sense whatsoever.

Getting back to UPS and other shipping companies, when I worked there as a nascent Teamster in the 1980s, we were basically human robots.  Bar codes were a thing of the future, and boxes came down a chute in pre-sort where four or five guys would sort each package by zip code.  These guys had the entire zip code structure of the greater Syracuse area memorized and I could not keep up at all.  I lasted a day in pre-sort.

The solution wasn't robots to "read" hand-written addresses and sort by zip code, but to put standardized labels and bar codes on each package.  Back in 1986, few had home computers and printers.  Today everyone does, and if they don't, the local UPS store will print the label for you.  Automation didn't mean creating mechanical men to mimic manual human labor, but to automate the process instead.

So bar codes are read by lasers and mechanical flaps divert packages to different conveyor belts - a much more efficient and cost-effective process than having humanoid robots pick up packages and look at them.  Humanoid robots are not an advancement, but a step backwards.

Similarly, when I worked at Domino's, we took orders over the phone and then hand-addressed each box of pizza using carbon-copy strips.  One went to the line cook to make the pizza (and make a record of the transaction), while two went on the box.  The driver would tear off the pink copy upon delivery.  It was a primitive system, but it worked.  I told my boss there that someday a computer would print out these labels and he laughed at me.  At the time, I had to deal with his shitty handwriting, which almost got me mugged.

Now, I suppose you could use a humanoid robot to pick up the receiver on a landline phone and take orders and write them down on slips of paper, but that would be dumb.  Instead of automating human actions, they automated the process.  Customers order online using an app and the pizzas are made after the labels were printed automatically.  Addresses can be verified (and customers tracked for loyalty rewards) and phone numbers confirmed through automated call-backs.  Automating the process makes much more sense than using a humanoid robot to mimic what was done before by humans.

In warfare, the same is true.  Much has been made of humanoid "soldiers" replacing men in the field. A bipedal robot can walk through ditches and climb over fences.  But what we are seeing in Ukraine is that flying robots (actually, remote controlled drones) are far more effective, efficient, and less costly than some clanking monstrosity from Boston Dynamics.  Seaborne and landborne drones also exist, the latter tending to be of the wheeled variety.

The idea of autonomous mechanical warriors, however, should give everyone pause.  Some drones are deemed "semi-autonomous" in that they can continue their mission even if cut off from their operator by jamming signals.  Even these are controversial, as without a human-in-the-loop, it would be all-too-easy to bomb a school or create a friendly fire situation.

But again, with drones, the idea of a walking humanoid fighting drone seems dead in the water, at least for now.  Masses of cheap and lightweight drones - often "suicide drones" - makes more sense than an expensive walking-talking doll.

Perhaps I am wrong about this, and instead, in a decade's time, my personal robot will clear the dishes after cooking my meal, mow the lawn and drive my car.  I kind of doubt it, only because I can't afford such nonsense.  I also wonder whether humanoid robots are really solving a problem that exists - is it really cost-effective to replace low-wage jobs with robots?  Or are we just chasing a tech dream?'

Already we are seeing incidents where "AI" ends up being more costly than replacing human workers.  And as a "tool" it seems highly flawed.  At least from a consumer standpoint, it is of limited use - and if you rely on AI answers to basic questions, you may end up in trouble.

For example, our van has a problem in that the switch or sensor that detects whether the sliding door is open, isn't working.  Not only doesn't the dome light come on (grammar?) but the "auto relock" feature kicks in, if you unlock the van with the remote and open the sliding door.  The system detects if a door has been opened after unlocking.  If no detection occurs within 30 seconds, it assumed you hit the button in error and re-locks the van.  Since the sliding door sensor is broken, it doesn't detect this as an opening and re-locks the van.  No big deal, unless you set the keys on the counter and then re-shut the door.  Congratulations, you just locked the keys in the van!

And no, there is no way to turn off auto re-lock.  :(

Anyway, Google AI keeps cheerfully informing me that a 2015 Mercedes Sprinter 3500 high-top has a simple plunger switch "on the B-pillar" and it costs only $4.95 on eBay.  No, it does not.  Mercedes chose instead to put a switch on the door latches (all doors) including the sliding door.  It is a PITA to get at and guess what?  It costs a lot more than $4.95!

I've tried rephrasing the question (the "prompt" I guess) many times, with the same result.  The information provided is clearly wrong, every time.  And sadly, this seems to be true of many technical questions, regarding cars, computers, or whatever.  AI merely skims the surface and provides the most facile responses.  Did you try unplugging it and then plugging it back in?  Gee, thanks, Sanjay!

I guess I take some comfort in this - that our robot overlords are as clueless as we are (indeed, we "trained" them, no?). In the future, there will be robot counterparts of all the inept and clueless people in the world, including robot Karens and robot BMW drivers who refuse to use turn signals.

Or, God forbid, Robo-Trump.  Maybe we are already there - after all, he died of rabies!

Why The Richest Man In The World Isn't (Do The Numbers!)

SpaceX stock has sagged a bit since its early peak, but that's not why Musk isn't a trillionaire.

Market cap, as I have noted time and time again, is just eye-candy bullshit.  Financial news sources want to generate clicks and capture eyeballs - as all modern "journalists" today want to do.  Our whole information infrastructure today has been corrupted by fast cash and special interests.  In our world of high-tech and "information economy," belief in UFOs, flat earth, moon landing denial, anti-vaxxing, etc. ad nauseam, is at an all-time high.  Hold on tight, AI is going to make it much worse!

Sadly, few have the capacity to do anything more than a superficial analysis.  Take this recent article online - a bit of schadenfreude click-bait for Musk-haters, claiming that people are "losing money" on the SpaceX IPO because it has dropped to "only" 30% over its IPO price.  Most folks didn't lose money, though.

Buried in the article are a number of comments which should be the 100-point type headline:

A further decline in SpaceX shares reduced CEO Elon Musk’s net worth by $67.8 billion to about $1.2 trillion, according to Forbes’ estimates. His fortune hit a record high above $1.4 trillion amid SpaceX’s three-day winning streak, and Musk still ranks well above Google cofounder Larry Page ($300.8 billion) as the richest person in the world.

Morningstar analysts lowered its fair value estimate for SpaceX to $62 from $63, citing a “sizable dilution” of SpaceX shares following the Cursor deal, noting a best-case scenario would price shares at $169 should its AI revenue improve.

It’s a cooling from the record-setting demand since its debut: Investors purchased $369.8 million in SpaceX shares over its first three sessions, accounting for more than quadruple the funds poured into Nvidia ($88.2 million) over the same period, according to a Vanda Research note on Wednesday.

Wait. What?   We are talking about Billions of dollars - Trillions even, and the amount sold to the public was a paltry $369 million?  A little more than a third of a billion?  No, that can't be right.  They actually raised $85.7 billion, which is a lot of money, but represents only 4.7% of the stock of the company.

As I noted time and time again, the purpose of an old-fashioned IPO was to raise capital to build factories and fund a business.  A modern IPO, however, is structured to sell off a pitiful fraction of the company in order to create a market for the company stock so that founders can cash-out and make real money.  This is particularly true in the tech field, where founders want to run for the exit before everyone discovers that the "tech" is just bullshit.

There are 13.5 billion shares of SpaceX outstanding, according to Google AI (consider the source!) and Musk holds about 6 billion shares.  The IPO sold about 639 million shares at the IPO or about 4.7% of the outstanding shares, which is typical of a modern cash-out IPO.  If that was not enough, these new shares have only one vote each, while Musk's shares have 10 votes each.  He clearly is not worried about any potential proxy fight down the road.

So why isn't Musk a trillionaire?  Again, "market cap" is nonsense.  It is just a number generated by basic math - the number of outstanding shares multiplied by the latest share price (the price the "last sucker in" paid for his paltry investment).  It is "wealth on paper" not in real life, with only one or two real exceptions.

For example, if a company is severely undervalued and someone wants to buy it, they may make a takeover bid and offer the shareholders an attractive buy-out price above the trading price for their shares.  For example, many years ago, I bought a small number of shares in Winn-Dixie, the grocery chain.  Shortly thereafter, there was a takeover bid of $2 a share more than I paid and in a matter of a few weeks, I made a thousand dollars.  Whoop-ee!  In that case, the "market cap" of the company actually represented a number slightly less than it's actual value.

But in most other cases, market cap is meaningless, particularly with tech companies that are trading at 100 or 200 times their earnings (EPS).   Tech companies also - like SpaceX - have huge blocks of shares held by a few prominent investors or founders.  If those folks started selling off their shares to generate cash, the share price would drop precipitously, for two reasons.  First, the market could not absorb the sheer volume of sales - more supply than demand, and thus the price would plummet.  Second, even if these principals sold off shares in small lots (so as not to depress the price too much) people would notice this and wonder why the founders are bailing out on their own company.

Real wealth doesn't exist on paper, but in cold hard cash, or at least cash equivalents.  If Musk held a trillion dollars in a diversified portfolio of real estate, stocks and bonds, commodities, and the like, he would be a trillionaire, as he could liquidate any one of these assets (or combinations of each) without tanking their market value.  But when your entire portfolio (or a substantial part of it) is tied up in closely held speculative tech stocks, your net worth is just that - speculation.  He cannot cash-out of these positions, simply because he owns too large a share of too few companies.  That, and the "market cap" of those companies is far and above the actual value of the companies themselves.

The "last sucker in" share price only represents what some small retail investor, likely ill-informed and mostly gambling, paid for his share.  I am sure a number of buyers of the SpaceX IPO - like many before it - bought a small amount of stock (a few grand at most) on the thought that they could then flip this after the stock "pops" out of the gate - as it appeared to do, dropping off after peaking shortly after the IPO dropped.  This share valuation does not represent an actual valuation by the market of the underlying value of the company, anymore than financially stressed consumers, paying $15 for doordash delivery of $15 of fast-food means that fast food is now worth $30. It just means the little guy is often uninformed and driven by emotion, not logic.

Of course, it could all go the other way, provided that SpaceX stops losing money and starts making a shit-ton of it, instead.  Given the current state of the AI business, the recent Anthropic disaster, and the public's general distaste and distrust of AI, it seems that the entire industry is over-valued, over-hyped, and long due for consolidation.  And the ultimate winner might be.... the Chinese, who are far ahead of the US, far less stressed by regulations, and offering AI products today for 1/60th the token price of American AI companies.   In other words, even if AI is a "thing" it likely will end up a "thing" made in China, like so much of everything else (including electric cars!).

Another way to look at Market Cap in situations like this is to ask, "where did all the money come from?" and the answer is, it didn't come from anywhere because it didn't exist to begin with.  No one plunked down two trillion dollars in the SpaceX IPO, but rather only 4.7% of that amount - the amount of money people actually paid hard cash for shares.  The rest is "wealth on paper" which is speculation, not actual wealth.  When the real estate market crashed in 2008, some idiots actually posted online, "where did all the money go?" as the real estate and stock markets lost billions, if not trillions of dollars.  What was lost was not cash money in circulation, but the idea of what these things were worth.

My house has doubled in value since I bought it, but while this might be added to my "net worth" it doesn't amount to actual wealth until I sell it.  And who knows?  Maybe we are on the verge of another speculative housing bubble or interest rates, or insurance, or property taxes, or just demographics, may tank the value.   After all, I live on a retirement island of boomers, who are dropping like flies, going into assisted living, or moving back home to be close to their children.  Will the next generation be in a position to buy these vacation homes (and RVs and motorcycles, and hobby cars)?  Bear in mind, the next generation is smaller than the boomer set.  Throw in a hurricane, a property tax spike, and a general recession, and, well, today's market valuation means nothing.

Ditto for SpaceX.  Right now, the market valuation is mere speculation. If it were a traditional company - making products and selling them at a profit and paying dividends - you could put a more realistic valuation on the share price.  If your company pays $5 per share in dividends every year or has retained earnings in the same amount, you can quickly and accurately calculate a target price for that stock.  But technology stocks, which often never show a profit, or if they do, have a P/E ratio in the hundreds, and rarely, if ever, pay dividends, are much harder to quantify.  The only real number is the amount the "last sucker in" paid for his one paltry share.  And given how the Internet has been used to influence people and turn the markets (and everything else) into a casino, I would not put much faith on the valuation by "the last sucker in" as his valuation is not based on any informative valuation, but emotional response.  After all, Musk owns Twitter, and I am sure he didn't use that lever to hype the share valuation of SpaceX.

Right?

Of course,  it could all go South in a hurry.  Twitter is breaking even - in good years.  And Elon pledged his stock in Tesla and SpaceX to buy Twitter - while paying a billion a year in interest.  Hope they don't call in that note! (Hmm... maybe that is why he is doing the SpaceX IPO?). Tesla is leveraged by cash incentives that Trump has cancelled, and makes more money from selling carbon credits than from cars. Since Trump promises to loosen EPA requirements, what are those carbon credits worth? The market for EVs is saturated and many manufacturers are pulling back or going bust - and the specter of cheap Chinese EVs is always on the horizon.  SpaceX traditional rockets seem to be doing well, but the "Starship" concept is proving to be unworkable, other than as a really big firework.  NASA has basically told Elon to fuck off with his proposal to fly the Starship to the moon as a lunar lander (wtf?) as the darn thing has failed to meet a number of milestones.  And the AI thing?  Well, a race you enter at the end isn't one you are likely to win.

Speaking of the Starship, I just got done reading Jame A. Michener's Space (1982) which was on my pad device (along with thousands of other books).  The idea of launching a huge-ass rocket, rendezvousing in low earth orbit to refuel, and then taking the whole kit and kaboodle to the moon and back was proposed by Von Braun and the Peenemünde gang back in the day.  It was shot down then as too impractical.  It was deemed easier for a rendezvous in lunar orbit (between the CSM and LEM) with staged rockets that would dispose of each stage (and weight) when no longer needed.

It was an interesting discussion and, according to Michener, an issue that divided the space community back then.  People were quite vehement that their way was the correct way.  The lunar docking model won out, but of course was more of a one-and-done deal.  Those proposing earth orbit rendezvous claimed it could be used to create a platform for long-term exploration of space (as illustrated in the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey).  Perhaps they were right, but then again, the budget just for the Apollo missions turned out to be too much, with three later missions (18-20) scrapped due to budget concerns.  A permanent base on the moon?  Seems like a fantasy then - and now - when we can't even balance our budgets as it is.

So, Musk is chasing an age-old dream.  And in order to make Starship work, he would need to expand funding for NASA by a factor of ten.  No problem there - he has a close friend (or use to) in the White House. lol.

Catering To Our Weaknesses

This is how I feel these days, watching any form of media or visiting any website.Source.

All my banking apps and websites have "updated" recently.  Of course, the big new feature I am supposed to love and cherish is the new AI assistant!  He will tell you your bank balance and whether a payment was made!  You know, stuff you can find more easily with a click of the mouse or a swipe on the phone.  But its AI, so it's better, right?

Bank of America cheerfully announces they've "improved" the payment feature for your credit card.  Instead of hiting "make payment" you have to "initiate a transfer."  Hey, we don't want people actually paying off their credit cards now, do we?  If you do make a payment, the system acts like you ruined their day.  "But, but, your payment isn't due until July 3rd!  Are you sure you want to pay now?  Maybe buy a new pair of shoes instead!"

That tactic not working, they try another angle - "You are already signed up for autopay!  Any payment made today will surely cause catastrophe!" Or something along those lines.   The message is not very subtle - here you are, offering to pay back a loan in full and they act like it is a horrible thing to do.  And from their perspective, it is.  Banks make more money today by ruining their clients than by working with them.  In the old days, when loans were used to buy a house or start a business, when the bank profited, you profited as well.  Today, they want you to run up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, consumer debt, and student loan debt, and then watch you struggle for years to pay it all off - at exorbitant interest rates, of course - before you throw in the towel and declare bankruptcy.  Even then, they get their pound of flesh as you have to "work out" the debt over a number of years.

Welcome to The United States of Go Fuck Yourself.

And it isn't just BoA, but other banks as well.  Capital One has similar roadblocks to payment - reminding you that payment isn't due yet and hey, you're already in autopay anyway, so why bother?  We took out a bridge loan with BMO - the Bank of Montreal.  What a shitshow that bank is.   They have offices all over the place and no one seems to know what is going on.  They lost the title to the van and then accused us of having it.  I had no luck trying to call anyone, but finally got someone in Dallas (I think) who knocked some heads together in Idaho (?) and figured it out.

I sent in a big payment to reduce the balance on the account and they sat on the check for a month before cashing it.  There is no way to make a "principal reduction" payment online.  If you pay online, they just assume you are prepaying for the next ten installments (!!).   Gotta get those interest payments, right?  Worse yet, on two occasions, I sent in payments (to the correct "principal reduction" address) with the "principal reduction" box checked off and written on the check, only to discover that, once again, they applied the amount to future installments.  Bastards.

The comic above summarizes how I feel about America these days.  Watch any streaming service with ads and you will be bombarded with pleas to play online casinos - everyone is making money this way, why not you?  Gamble! Gamble! Gamble!  Are there really that many gamblers in America?  How many casinos can our country support?  How can the economy survive if everyone is gambling themselves into the poorhouse, particularly those who are already poor?

The Supreme Court decided that in the name of "freedom" we should be allowed to gamble on sports - or just about anything from a coin toss to whether it will rain tomorrow.  Of course, it quickly became apparent why sports betting was illegal to begin with - it is a trivial matter to fix sporting events by bribing players or blackmailing them.  And of course, when players bet on their own games, what's not to like?

You might as well bet on professional wrestling - where the outcomes are predetermined.  Oh, wait, apparently you can - the height of idiocy!

The messages in these ads are clear - they want to normalize gambling as a fun activity that ordinary people engage in, and not some life-destroying monstrosity that can bankrupt you and cause you to lose your family and everything else you hold dear.  The upside?  Occasionally they let you win - just enough to keep the addiction strong and the dopamine flowing.

Yes, dopamine.  I recounted before how a drug tested to cure Parkinson's caused some users to gamble compulsively.  We like to think we are in control of our destiny, but we really are just a bag of chemicals.  Funny, too, that at the Mayo clinic, they asked me whether I was gambling or made any major purchases lately.   I didn't tell them about the Mercedes van.

But seriously, it seems that more than ever before, our society is catering to our weaknesses.  Advertisers want you to order out for food using Doordash or Uber Eats - financial transactions that make no sense whatsoever.  $15 fee to deliver $15 of food?  Stupid! Or how about our neighbor at the condo in Virginia ordering one donut delivered, from a donut shop across the street from our condo?

We are weak, to be sure, but trying to be strong is what makes our lives better.  It takes willpower to get your finances into shape - and keeping them there.  The things that are good for you are hard to do, while the things that destroy us are as easy as falling off a log.

It is akin to the casino we visited in Vegas, some 20-30 years ago now.  A conveyor belt whisked us from "the strip" right into the heart of the casino.  After some time, we tried to leave, and could not find the exit.  We asked one of those beefy-looking guys in a suit who was wearing an electronic earpiece.  "You see that next room? Go in there and then the room beyond, and beyond that, two other rooms.  On the last room, on the left side, behind the large potted plant, is the exit, behind a curtain.  Good Luck!"

No wonder so many die in casino fires - they are roach motels.

Time was - in my lifetime - that Vegas was the only place where gambling was legal.  Now there is a casino of one sort or another within 30 minutes of your home - or on your phone.   It is easier than ever to ruin yourself.  Or ruin yourself at the ultimate casino - the stock market - where speculative stocks trade at hundreds of times their earnings, and stocks are hyped online and CEOs treated like celebrities.

And of course, there is good old fashioned predatory lending - something that also didn't exist when I was young, as consumers could stiff the banks by declaring bankruptcy.

Of course, you could argue - and I do - that one can avoid all these financial traps by being smart.  You can avoid gambling debt by not gambling.  You can avoid credit card debt by not spending on stupid things like delivery food and $5 $10 coffee drinks, and by paying off your credit card balance once a month.  If that requires too much discipline, use a debit card or pay cash - I see many people do, and there is no shame in it, only virtue.

But alas, not everyone has that level of self-control, and even those that do, rarely have it all the time.  We all fail at life from time to time - no one is perfect.  And when you fall, the banks and casinos won't be there to cushion the blow, but rather kick you in the nuts and steal your wallet.

We no longer, as a society, look out for one another.

Battery-Powered LED Lights - A Waste of Money?

Depending on the features, the batteries may last only a few days or weeks.

We are flooded with cheap products from overseas, mostly Asia (formerly "The Orient" but that is now considered a slur for some reason).  Some products are real values - low cost, well made, and supported by a company that stands behind their work.  Others are shoddy merchandise, barely functional, but inexpensive.  Still others leave you scratching your head, "why would I want to buy this?"

LEDs have revolutionized the lighting industry.  Our gallery has maybe 100 or so "halogen" track fixtures that had 50 Watt bulbs in each fixture.  That's 5000 Watts! And the heat generated, while welcome in the winter, was oppressive from Spring onward.  It was like standing under a heat lamp!  We had the same problem in our kitchen at home, on a smaller scale, of course.

Today, we have replaced all the halogen bulbs with 3600K warm white LED bulbs, drawing 5W each.  That not only reduced our power consumption for lighting by a factor of 10, but also reduced the heat load on the building, reducing air conditioning costs somewhat. Well, actually more than somewhat - about 15,000 BTUs, or enough to run three small window unit air conditioners (!!).

So LEDs are here to stay.  No, they generally don't last ten years (as was promoted) in my experience, but they do last longer than incandescent bulbs, and now that the cost has come down, are economically competitive even without the energy savings advantages.

Of course, we had to learn a whole new lexicon of LEDs - lumens, Kelvin, and so on.  Gone are the days of the 100W Warm White.  It has been replaced by a much more efficient LED.  And some lights are programmable to different frequencies.  Want soft lighting for your living room?  Flick a switch and you have 2000K or 3600K for that cozy look.  Need bright light for a work space?  Flick the switch back and you have 5000K.  Neat!

Even more fun are LEDs that change color, either on demand, or in patterns of pulsing disco lights.  This is where it gets interesting.  The big-box stores often have "puck lights" (as shown above) that come in a 3- or 6-pack and run on three AAA batteries each.  Accompanying them is a remote control that runs on a CR2025 "button" battery and allows you to turn the lights on and off and select colors, patterns, or brightness.  Since they are alarmingly cheap, they are often an impulse buy - and conveniently placed near the checkout.

Don't buy them.

Why?  Well, any battery powered LED light that relies on a remote control to work is a non-starter.  Even when "off" the lights are still "on" in that the control circuit in each "puck" is running - waiting and scanning for commands from the remote.  It it wasn't, the remote would not work.  So after a week or two, the batteries wear down, and chances are, you've already spent more on batteries than the darn things cost to begin with.  Disgusted, you throw them out.

Of course, you could use rechargeable batteries, as I do.  But these are Nickle Metal Hydride types that put out a slighly lower voltage than the disposable alkaline type.  By the way, avoid Duracells - after Berkshire Hathaway bought the company, they tend to leak, which deposits noxious goo in your electronics, often corroding contacts or just frying circuits.  Be warned!  Rechargables work OK, but you just end up recharging them again and again, in these LED puck lights.

LED puck lights that have a simple ON/OFF switch seem to work OK - the batteries lasting months, with infrequent use.  Since the device is OFF when you turn it off, there is no battery drain.

Mr. See wanted another kind of LED light, a pair of wall sconces with shades.  Again, they were alarmingly cheap, so I said OK, as this keeps the peace, and I think he needs to buy crap like this on occasion to remember why it is a bad idea to buy crap like this.

They look like this, only in black

They were, however, interesting lights.  First of all, they were cheap - $39 at WalMart - but many other sites advertise them for $179 or more (!!).  The actual fixtures are U/L style 110V fixtures, right down to the mounting hardware (designed to attach to a circular or hexagonal wall box).  It would take little effort to wire them for 110V.  Even the lamp "socket" was a U/L approved style socket with an "Edison Thread" (talk about the Mother of backward compatibility!) ready to accept a 60W Incandescent.

But of course, it was not wired.  Instead, it came with two "bulbs" that mimicked the look of an incandescent bulb, right down to the Edison thread.  But here's where it gets weird.  The bulb came apart in two pieces.  The bottom part threaded into the fixture and was just a mounting point.  It attached to the top part by magnet.  The top part had the LED light and circuitry and battery, with a USB-C charging port.  So, to charge, you just yank the top part of the bulb out of the fixture and charge with your cell phone cable.

So far, they haven't needed a charge, probably because they use a Lithium-Ion battery and not alkaline batteries.  There is a remote, and yes, you can select from a rainbow of colors or patterns (Why?  For parties, I guess).  So, over time, they will discharge themselves.  It will be annoying, as what will happen is we will go to use them one day, only to find the batteries dead.  So we will charge the bulbs and put them back, and forget about them until months later - when the process repeats.  This is how puck lights get thrown away.

At least these fixtures are readily convertible to 110V with a little wiring.  So there's that.

We also found some motion-sensor LED cabinet lights for $5 each at Dollar Tree.  The cabinets in the camper are dark inside and these lights attach with velcro or even magnets.   They are long and narrow and very bright.  They have an internal Lithium-Ion battery and USB-C charging port.  When you open the cabinet, the motion activates the light.  Close the cabinet, the light goes out.  Easy to install (no wiring needed) and cheap.

But again, the motion sensor is always "on" so after a few weeks, the batteries go dead and I have to remove them and plug them in.  I suppose if I was ambitious, I could snake some really long USB cables (like the old ones I bought at a truck stop years ago) to a USB power supply and they could continuously charge when the camper is plugged in.  But that just smacks of effort.

Anyway, I came to realize that almost every battery powered LED light we've bought that has a remote control feature (particularly those that use alkaline batteries) are pretty worthless.   Sure, they are cheap to buy, but you'll spend more on batteries just right out of the box, than you did on the lights themseleves.  And when you really want or need to use these lights, the batteries will be dead.  You can buy new batteries and double-down on this idiocy, with the same result.

Go Lithium-Ion or go with an LED light that doesn't have a sensor or remote control - or forgetaboutit!

Online Cards, Invitations, Etc. - Just Don't!

The latest scam going around Old People Island is the fake Punchbowl invite.

We call it "Old People Island" as the average age here is (or was) 74 when we moved here in our virgin 40's.  Well, now we are the old people - has it been 20 years already?  It seems we measure our time from trash day to trash day (is this week recycle?) or by the monthy changeover to a new show at the gallery.  Right now, we are at the "sweet spot" where the weather isn't too hot and the tourists seem to have fled.  Evening buggy rides in the cool weather to watch the sunset are sublime.

Mark gets an e-mail with an "invitation" to a party through a third-party site called "Punchbowl" - yet another "silicon" valley startup idea that solves a "problem" no one has - how to invite people over to your house for drinks (I dunno, maybe call them?  Too obvious, I guess).  Anyway, it seems the invite was  fake, even though the return address was from a friend of ours - the first sign it was a scam.

You see, if you stoop to using "Punshbowl" (why, dear God, why?) they will send out "invitations" to the people you select, but the return address for the invite will be from a Punchbowl e-mail server.  I mean, after all, if they used your actual e-mail address, the guests would simply hit "reply" instead of going though Punchbowl!  And we can't have that - people socially interacting without using some sort of social media intermediary.  The horror!

It was a pretty slick e-mail, which sounds hard to do, unless you have an ounce of computer savvy and realize that anyone can copy an html page and then paste it to their own website.  So it looked "legit" until you get to a page asking you to "login" to your e-mail by providing .your username and password.  Sadly, many fall for this gambit, and now the "hackers" have all they need to log into your e-mail account, unless you have multi-factor authentication.

But even then, there are ways of "social engineering" that data - by sending another e-mail or text, saying they are the ones sending the code to "verify" you and would you please enter it now?  And sadly, people do just that - and the bad guys win.

Like any good virus, the first thing it wants to do is replicate.  So, once they have your login information, they login, and then send the same fake "invitation" to everyone on your contacts list.  If even one in a hundred bite on the apple, well, the thing will spread like wildfire, globally.

But a virus isn't a virus unless it causes some sort of harm or damage or changes things, right?  What are they after other than a desire to spread?  Well, just harvesting valid e-mail addresses is one "win" for them, and knowing which targets are vulnerable (read: willing to fall for the scam in the first place) is also a win.  By reading all of your e-mails they might be able to glean some demographic data, for example, which banks you do business with or maybe even a credit card number - if the victim is dumb enough to put that in an e-mail communication.

Of course, changing your password right away is one way to try to shut it down.  Problem is, a bot may have logged in and scraped your contacts list and even read all your e-mails (and scraped more e-mail addresses from that!) within minutes, so the damage is already done.  They usually don't try to change your login credentials (which would lock you out of your own e-mail) but that's not to say it has never been done.

Even after you change your password, they may still send SPAM to your friends in your name.  About a year or so ago, a company that managed our condo for us got hacked, and even today, I get e-mails ostensibly from "Joe Smith" (not his real name) but from a nonsense e-mail address, exhorting me to open attached documents with "recent photos" or our "upcoming itinerary."   I cannot unsubscribe from these, of course, so they keep popping up in my SPAM box, for years, each message a gentle reminder that Joe Smith (or his assistant) is not very net-savvy and maybe it is best we sold that condo after all.

I suppose there are other exploits a scammer could try, once you give them your username and password.  Google (gmail) in particular, wants you to do one-stop shopping, and links your credit card information to your Google account.,  The hacker would still need the CVV2 security code, of course, but no doubt social engineering would yield that.

EDIT: I realize the main goal of the scam isn't to target the initial recipient, but the contacts extracted therefrom.  The person who clicks on the Punchbowl scam becomes the virus carrier.  The real infection is the scam e-mails I get from "Joe Smith" exhorting me to open virus attachments.  Since the e-mail appears to be from a close friend or business associate, we tend to let our guard down.  "It's from good old Joe!  He would never send me a virus!"  But the e-mail isn't from him, of course.  And the virus attachment could be a keyboard logger that captures the login information for your bank the next time you login.

Worse yet are sites that allow you to log in through Google (don't ask me how that works!) and once in, they can buy things and hit "buy now" and it will automatically charge your credit card.  Looking at you, Amazon and eBay!  However, most e-commerce sites recognize a  new device and ask for multi-factor authentication.  So, I presume one is safe there - let's hope, anyway!

So maybe there is no real danger to these phishing attempts, other than harvesting your e-mail address (and those of your friends).  That, and the social embarrassment you will get when people realize you fell for a scam.

But how to avoid this?  Online sites exhort us not to click on links, enter passwords, etc. - the obvious stuff, of course.  I could go one further and say, JUST STOP USING THESE STUPID INVITATION AND E-CARD SITES!  And yes, I am shouting.  There is really no legitimate reason to use these sites and services - the "inconvenience" of writing down a guest list and sending out invitations is not that great.  Send out an e-mail to yourself and bcc your invitees!  How hard is that?

And I wonder, if you read the "Terms of Service" of these sites, if they don't agree and you consent to them harvesting your e-mail address as well as those of the addressees to your soiree, to be sold or whatever.   It just makes no sense whatsoever.  And no, it is not personal, in fact it is more impersonal.

We get the occasional Christmas or Birthday card this way, and every time, we are reluctant to "open" them for fear of a scam. Some sites notify the sender that you didn't read the card, and the sender may e-mail you haranguing you to do so!  (Why not send an e-mail in the first place?).  So we click on the link and hold our breath as we carefully navigate through pirates' cove, hoping to avoid rogues and bandits.  What's not to like?

Sadly, it seems like so much else coming from "silicon" valley (which is now bullshit valley) are business models like this which make little or no sense - solving trivial lfe problems or problems that no longer exist.  Perhaps sites like Punchbowl are the reason people no longer have cocktail or dinner parties, but instead meet up in bars and restaurants.  Perhaps.

Of course, this "AI" fad is just more of the same, on a much, much larger scale.  It is sad, but so much money is being thrown at AI with little to show for it.  Moronic chatbots provide little or no information - or flatly wrong information.  The user ends up talking to Sanjay ("Chuck" he calls himself) in Bangalore or, better yet, Steve in Manilla.  Watch out, India, the Philippines are in your rear-view mirror, catching up fast!

Companies are laying off workers in favor of "AI" and running up huge bills with AI providers (if they are not in fact, creating their own "agents.")  The staggering cost of data centers far outweighs the cost of blood-and-bone humans, who at least are accountable for their errors.  The whole thing just smacks of the "blockchain" hysteria of a few years back (whatever happened to that?).  CEOs are desperate to latch on to the "latest-and-greatest thing" lest they be viewed as retrograde or their stock options tank along with the share price.

But I digress.  If online invites are "technology" then we all need to spend more time offline.

OK, BOOMER! (Riding in Cars With Boys)

One difference between my generation and the young people of today, is back then, we cared about people and gave them a second chance - or a third, or a fourth.

The new memory chips arrived and they worked flawlessly.  I uploaded about 650GB of data to them - about 11,000 songs, a few thousand books, and a thousand or more photos and videos.  Videos in particular, take up a lot of space.  But I also noticed that cell phone photos take about ten times as much space as our old digital camera pictures - but don't look much better, on a small screen.  Digital camera pictures are stored in directories and files with the year and date on them.  Cell phone pictures all have indecipherable names like "2051267_1056783" which is really handy when you are searching for that last picture you took of grandma before she died.

The personal computer used to be personal, as I noted before.  Now, it is like a device that belongs to big tech, which we are allowed to use.  I noted before how a "software upgrade" to my phone remapped the off button to load Gemini AI instead.  I noped out of that right away, disabled Gemini AI (still able to do this!) and have ignored subsequent pleas to "update" my phone.  Oh, and I am using Duck-Duck-Go for AI-free searches, as clunky as it is.  I find that AI results are wrong or misleading about half the time.

I noticed other weird little changes to the O/S on the phone.  I no longer click on "delete" to delete old text messages.  They changed that to "trash" which is a big improvement.  I mean, "delete" - what does that even mean?  It was so confusing!

I still haven't figured out how to get my printer to work with the Chromebook - I will have to buy a new printer or keep using one of my four old Toshiba laptops to print from.  A friend of mine complained about the same thing - she had a Macbook but switched to a Windows machine and found it frustrating to figure out.  Once you get used to a certain machine and software, having to re-learn all the changes with each "upgrade" gets harder and harder - particularly as you get older.  And as you get older, you start to think that maybe these "upgrades" are not upgrades at all, but merely a cash-grab by big tech to force us all to throw away functioning technology in favor of the latest-and-greatest.  Microsoft no longer supports even the previous generation of Windows, which is a big switch from the past, when even three or four previous generations were supported.

Anyway, I mentioned to my friend that the new Macbook Air came out and people are saying good things about it (supposedly) and I saw them for sale at Walmart for about $500.  "Really?" she said, "I do so loathe going to the Apple store!"  She wanted an Apple product, but not the Apple "experience."  It is akin to saying you like Starbucks coffee but not the sneering "barista" talking down to you and expecting a huge tip for pouring coffee.

So she lugged her new Macbook home in a grey plastic Walmart bag, not a fancy paper Apple bag with the logo facing out.  Wasn't that the whole point of Apple?  And Starbucks?  Mark's store (Sutton Place Gourmet) had lovely bleached white paper bags with string handles and the company logo (an artichoke) on the side.  People would actually come in asking for bags, so they could put their Safeway groceries in them and make other people think they had money to burn.  Humans are fascinating - and incredibly stupid.

Anyway, she is happy with the Macbook Air and maybe it isn't as powerful as the old-school Macbook (nor is a Chromebook a proper substitute for a real PC), but for us older folks who just want to answer e-mails and get sucked into online scams, it works perfectly.  And with these new tablets we bought (outrageously outdated Galaxy Tab A's) we are all set for the retirement home.  Funny thing, they give junky tablets like this, with simple games on them, to toddlers - and to the elderly.  We have come full circle.

I digress.  Today's topic is boomerism and how lucky we had it back in the day compared to the present.

I finished loading all these books on my tablet and thought I would test it out by loading one.  I picked this book, "Riding in Cars with Boys" at random, mostly because I recalled there was a movie made from it and I suspected it might be about Catholic girls and teenage fellatio, as Frank Zappa once sang about.

Close, but no cigar.

The protagonist (the author - it is largely autobiographical) documents how she became a "bad girl" because her parents were mean to her and poor and gave her the initials "B.A.D." so she dated and slept with "bad boys" and got pregnant in high school and dropped out and married the schmuck who knocked her up.  He becomes a heroin addict and disappears.  She smokes pot and does a lot of drugs and drinks heavily - while raising a kid as a single mother in the 1970s - and blames all her woes on society, her family, her teachers, and everyone but herself.

The first part was a depressing read, but I plowed on.  In the second part, she gets arrested in a drug raid and turns her life around - with heavy lifting from the government.  Yes, back then, you could get welfare, food stamps, a free house to live in, and so forth.  It wasn't so much they wanted to help her out, but realized the kid was an innocent bystander in this train wreck.  Of course, today, welfare is largely dead - you can get "TANF" - Temporary Assistance to Needy Families - but only four five years for your lifetime.   And while Section-8 housing exists, the waiting lists to get on that program can stretch for years.

But better still, she was able to get a GED diploma and a scholarship to the local community college.  A $500 student loan allowed her to buy a secondhand VW Beetle and commute to classes.  After two years, she was able to transfer to Wesleyan for her Bachelor's degree - on a full scholarship, including a free house to live in!

While it is a heartwarming story of redemption, I thought that the author really placed more emphasis on her efforts to get ahead, while sort of glossing over the huge opportunities offered to her by the government - opportunities that are evaporating rather rapidly, if they are not in fact gone today.

I realize, looking back on my life (and growing up in the same era, albeit a few years later) that I had a lot of opportunities handed to me, by the government, the private sector, and by friends and family, and that I probably wouldn't have made it as far as I did without that help.  I also realize that these same opportunities are harder to find today and that the newer generations' grievances are, in fact, legitimate.

General Motors Institute is now Kettering University,  Still in business, but the behemoth that was GM is no longer.  Today, GM merely assembles light trucks from bought components - a far cry from the era I was in, where we made every part of the car except the gasoline in the tank and the tires on the wheels.  As a result, GM sponsors far fewer students (we were paid salaried employees of GM - as students!) but some other companies have taken up the slack.

Similarly, Carrier is a far different company than when I worked there.  I am not sure if they reimburse tuition for lab rats like me anymore.  They took a chance on me and it made all the difference in the world.  Syracuse University had a "Returning Students" program for drop-outs like me, and I was able to attend school at night and eventually (after a decade) earn my BSEE.

At the time, I owned my first house - thanks to the Farmer's Home Administration (FmHa, not FHA) which had a loan program subsidizing interest based on income.  Lest you think it was a rampant giveaway, they recouped that interest from the sales price when I sold the house several years later.  I guess this program is still around, now called "USDA Loans" but I am not sure what the terms of the program are like.

I had a lot of help along the way, as did the author of "Cars With Boys."  Today, though, going to college is a much more expensive proposition - and one that is so pricey that some young people are starting to opt-out.  The "happy ending" in the book, where the author graduates from college, moves to New York, and becomes a writer for the Vilage Voice, is now a nightmare today.   Graduating from college today means struggling under the weight of staggering student loan debt while working minimum-wage jobs.  And jobs for English Lit majors?  They simply don't exist - and what few jobs available in writing these days are being replaced by AI-slop generators.

It is a different world today.

And that is not only sad, but bad for business.  When we offer a scholarship for a disadvantaged student, it is not just blind charity, but bread cast upon the waters - returning tenfold.  We hope the recipient graduates, gets a good job, and .starts paying taxes.  In the case of a single mother, perhaps it means a more stable home life for her child.  And of course, colleges hope alumni become successful and contribute toward the college endowment fund.

It is cheaper to send someone to college (or a trade school) than it is to put them in prison.  When someone gets out of prison, they are largely unemployable.  But someone with an education or skills (or both) can be a contributing member of society - and more than pay back the investment that society placed in them.

Sadly, it seems we boomers have "pulled up the ladder" behind us, and talk about nothing other than cutting our taxes and slashing government programs (but not our Social Security, of course!).  Although programs that help individual people make up a tiny slice of the government budget (as compared to say, military spending) they are always being offered up for the chopping block.

Companies don't want to train new employees, but rather want five years of experience for an "entry level" position.  The logic is, it is cheaper to hire someone that your competition has trained, than to spend valuable resources training in-house.  At GMI they told us that they expected more than half the graduates to seek employment at other companies - even Ford and Chrysler!  The horror!  But as they explained, by training new Engineers, they were increasing the size of the "brain trust" and, as they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.

Of course, increasing the size of the talent pool also tends to dampen salary expectations - as we are seeing today with Computer Engineering graduates - the field is now flooded with people who "learned to code" and salary expectations have dropped as a result.  So maybe GM wasn't being completely altruistic by running their own college.  Perhaps we were just another part of the car, with specifications and part numbers, interchangeable as well.

Whatever the case, it illustrates that investing in people can pay back to society - and to companies as well.

Maybe it is time we went back to the "good old days" where we actually cared about people.

Oldest Trick In The Book! (And I Fell For It!)

Beware when buying external hard drives or SDRAM chips!

I fell for a con the other day, but fortunately, since I bought through Walmart.com, I was able to quickly get a full refund of my money.  What was the scam?  Well, Mark wanted a new tablet to read epub books with - a glorified Kindle, basically.  We have thousands of e-books on our computers, phones, and tablet, thanks to a kind stranger we met camping.

Anyway, his old tablet died, so I looked around for a new one.  You can spend over $1000 on a tablet these days (!) and I guess if you are gaming or something that is a good reason to do so.  But our needs are simple, and I found an obsolete "reconditioned" Samsung Galaxy Tab-A SM-T290, which is from the mid 2000's I guess.  $69.99 plus tax, free shipping.  It arrived and worked OK, but the memory chip (SDRAM) from the old tablet was kind of full - no room for photos and videos.   Mark had complained that he hadn't seen old photos anymore, which are backed up on three external hard drives.

So, I figured out the max chip size for these old SM-T290's (I bought one for myself! $69.99!) was 512GB and looked online for a couple.  On Walmart.com, a third party seller had two "Lexar" 512 GB chips for $18 each.  Such a deal!  Too good to be true!

Alas, it was.  When the chips arrived, in odd packaging, they could not take any more data than 25GB.  Beyond that, the system would generate a "file corrupted" message.  I tried two computers, the chromebook, and even the tablets themselves.  No data beyond 25GB! It would just bomb out and stop copying.

I figured out I was scammed.  I had heard about this with external hard drives - wily sellers putting an USB dongle into the case of an external hard drive and formatting it for 2TB.  They put old washers or scrap metal in the case to make it feel like it has the weight of a hard drive inside.

Most people don't immediately dump 2TB of data into a new drive, but fill it slowly. So it isn't until months or years later that they discover that their backup files are simply phantom addresses in non-existent disc sectors on a non-existent disc.  Most folks might "test" such a drive by loading some files to it and reading then back - which will work for small files.  And even larger files will appear in the directory - but not actually exist.  It is a pretty slick scam.

Anyway, I did a return on Walmart.com and they generated a QR code which I printed out.  I took the chips to the return desk at my local Walmart and the clerk knew what to do and printed a receipt. My phone buzzed almost right away, confirming the receipt of the return.  In a couple of days, my credit card was refunded the $38 for the two chips.

So Walmart to the rescue.  On the other hand, shame on Walmart for not vetting vendors properly.   Then again, the same thing happens all the time on Amazon or eBay, particularly the latter.  At least Walmart is no longer being dinged for offering racist t-shirts from 3rd party sellers!

I got back on Walmart.com and ordered two SANDISK chips, which each cost more than the tablets I bought (!!).  But then again, we are in the midst of a memory chip shortage - or a general chip shortage - thanks to AI data centers vacuuming up all fab capacity.

Speaking of AI, my new old phone had been bugging me to update the O/S for some time now and I foolishly caved in to its nagging.  The new O/S has a lot of bloatware and a lot of it can't be uninstalled or even disabled - at least not easily.   But worst of all, it pushes AI ("Gemini") down your throat.  The off button is automatically re-mapped to load Gemini.  WTF!  They want you to go through menus to shut down the phone!  Fortunately, it wasn't too hard to re-map the off button to off.

Speaking of which - and I know this terrifies anyone under the age of 50 - but I shut off my phone all the time, particularly at night.  Even worse, sometimes I drive into town without my phone!   The horror of it all!  Taking such risks!  But the phone charges faster when off, and sometimes, the phone gets hot (probably because of all the bloatware running in the background) so I just turn it off and let it cool down and go do something else which doesn't involve screens and doom scrolling.

It is sad how we let our technology get ahead of us.  We come up with this tech and it ends up ruling us, instead of vice-versa.  I get "SPAM RISK" phone calls all the time these days.  I may end up legally changing my name to Mr. Spam Risk, so no one will ever answer my calls.  Blissful peace!  But seriously, we (our society that is) came up with this phone system and then we just let it go to hell, even though technological solutions to SPAM and FRAUD clearly exist.  We just.... let these things happen.

As as kid, we had phone books, where you could look up everyone's number unless they paid extra to be "unlisted."  Today, there is no phone book, no directory assistance, just a lot of SPAM sites promising to yield phone numbers and addresses of people, but instead just giving you hokey "Loading" and "Searching" icons, before coming to the point and demanding money for a phone number lookup (and even then, often giving the wrong information).

Oh, right. Privacy.  Everyone is so paranoid about their privacy, because humans have devolved into horrific creatures who will "Swat" you if you say something they don't like.  The Police show up in riot gear with armored vehicles, because, hey, we let that happen too - the militarization of the Police.  And even though this is a common occurrence these days, for some reason the Police have yet to figure this out and, I dunno, maybe call the address in question and figure out what is really going on?

But of course they can't call, because they don't have your phone number or a way to look it up.  Moreover, the miscreant who "Swatted" you is using a spoofed caller-ID number because we let that happen too.  I mean, how hard is it to fix called-ID so it can't be spoofed?  Maybe there is a useful application for Blockchain after all!

Perhaps none of this is by accident.  Or if it is, the track record of mankind's ability to control the Genie of technology once liberated from his magic lamp is rather poor.  And if so, what does this say about the future of AI?  Was The Terminator just mindless entertainment or a prescient documentary of the future?  Why is mankind hell-bent on techno-suicide?  Maybe we realize, deep down, that the machines will be better than us?  Or will AIs spend their days trying to defraud one another or falling victims to AI scams themselves?

I mean, these AI beings must have to have something to do, once we are gone.

Right?

Manny Festo - Why Fascism Is Popular Worldwide

Manifestos are the best kind of Festos, just as Tabernacles are the best kind of Nacles.

Everyone has a manifesto these days - so that when they die in a hail of gunfire, we can all read them on Twitter and shake our heads at the craziness.  Peter Thiel is a formerly closeted homosexual and German-American.  I've always said that Gay men make the best Nazis - what with the snappy uniforms and leather and whatnot, and closeted Gay men are as dangerous as cornered animals.   Throw in German heritage and what's not to like?

Thiel,  or more precisely, his co-founder Alex Karp, recently published on Twitter a 22-point Manifesto which appears to argue that the United States should be turned into a Technocratic Fascist State, with Silicon Valley Tech Bros put in charge.  Many are finding this ironic, as the whole Personal Computer revolution was thought, at first, to liberate us plebes from the tyranny of "Big Blue" IBM and mainframe computers (yes, I go that far back).

Once the PC took off, Google was going to save us from big, bad old Microsoft, by pledging "Don't Be Evil!" and allowing us to search the Internet as a database of facts.  In this brave new world of free data flow, it was thought that truth would reign supreme and that conspiracy theories and urban legends would slowly fade away - washed away by a fire hose of facts and truths.

But as we saw, the opposite was the case.  More people believe in "flat earth" theories and other conspiracies than any time in the past.  Superstition is more popular than ever and even a brief search online shows this to be true.  Did you know you can get rich gambling online?  Everyone else is doing it - why not you?

Some people see this trend as a betrayal of the founding principles of Silicon Valley.  Instead of making us free, technology has enslaved us, at first to the PC, then the smart phone, the latter of which we all stare at for hours every day, hoping to find something of interest.  Meanwhile, books sit dusty on the shelves and no one can sit through an entire movie any longer, even as they routinely go over two hours in length.  But I digress.

I see a pattern, though, not a betrayal.  Every entrepreneur and inventor espouses noble ideas when they pitch their new device, program, app, or business model.  Advertisements on your gas pump display will help consumers make better purchasing choices!  Yea, right.  What I think happens is that people make obscene amounts of money when they get lucky in tech, and once they have a big enough pile, they can't fail, even if they throw half of it at money-losing propositions.

And once you have that kind of money, well, you get tired of paying taxes.  You also realize you don't have to, as it is cheaper to buy off politicians than to pay taxes.  So the rich man thinks he "earned" his wealth - I have even heard heirs claim this! - and scolds the poor for being parasites of society, even as the tech bros lobby for yet another tax break, subsidy, or even government bailout.

It is a predictable as Hurricanes in Florida.

But another aspect is at work here.  I noted before that migration is not merely an issue in the US, but worldwide.  Migrants are fleeing war-torn countries and ravaged economies for a better life elsewhere.  It is how my ancestors migrated here from Ireland, Scotland, England, France, and Switzerland.  But that's different because, reasons.  Well, actually not. The anti-Irish sentiment in the 1800s was as strong in America as the anti-Somalian sentiment espoused by the GOP today.  Every minority gets their turn in the hot seat, it seems - the Jews, Italians, Chinese, and yes, even Germans, particularly during World War I, when Pennsylvanian Germans re-imagined themselves as "Pennsylvania Dutch."

The corollary to this situation is the perception that Democratic institutions are weak or vacillating and can't accomplish anything.  We need a strong man to "get things done!" and make the trains run on time.  And that is the problem with Democracy - when you give everyone a say in how things are done, nothing gets done.

Mark has been working like a dog for a few years now, as part of a committee to relocate our pottery guild (and classroom space for the Arts Association) to part of the old firehouse here on the island.  The guild was in the basement of historic Goodyear Cottage. Only Yankees are dumb enough to dig eight-foot deep basements on a property barely 10 feet above the high tide mark.  Whenever it rains, it floods, and when it storms, well, thousands of dollars of expensive kilns and pottery wheels are ruined.  Water + Electricity = Bad.

So after years of debate, searching, finding, and negotiating, the transition is finally happening.  A quarter-million dollars has been raised, and the build-out of the space has begun.  Despite years of committee meetings, as well as general meetings and publication of plans and requests for feedback, it seems that only now, once construction has begun, that some folks (who were against the whole project from the get-go) voice their opinions on trivial matters.

Can't we move that window over six inches?  Why not move that load-bearing wall?  No one ever asked for my input! (they did, again and again) so I will throw a wrench in the works at the very last minute!

Democracy sucks, it seems.

Of course, sometimes this is by design.  During the Wiemar Republic, the Democratic government was seen as weak and vacillating.  The economy was in the toilet and Communists and Fascists were rioting in the street.  Yet the government seemed incapable of maintaining control.  Since there was no clear majority in the government, any solutions could be readily derailed, often by the very same people causing the problems.  The Communists and Nazis didn't want street-brawling stopped - they saw a value in it, as each hoped that disorder would bring down the government and usher their side into power.

And we know how that worked out.

I noted before how some radicals want to see society destroyed, on the premise that when everything goes to hell, people will demand a fascist dictator or a Communist revolution to fix things.  Sadly, this sort of thinking is flawed, in that, when things do go to hell, there is no guarantee that "your side" will be the new power.  Granted, in the USA, when conditions become dire, people vote to change parties.  But such is not always the case, worldwide, and often people vote for yet more misery, convinced that the party in power hasn't gone far enough or hasn't been given enough time to make its wacky theories work.

It is not that Democracy doesn't work, only that bad faith actors intentionally stymie it.  Recall that George Bush tried to push through Immigration Reform legislation, only to have it nixed by his own party.  They don't want to solve festering issues, they want to keep them simmering on the back burner so they can run, again and again, on those issues.  When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republicans were stuck, like the dog who actually catches the car they were chasing.  Now what?  Can't run on outlawing Abortion when you've already won on that issue.

The problem doesn't lie with governments, but with the people.  People who keep voting for easy answers to complex problems - which are always the wrong answers.  Sometimes, people eventually wise up - often after decades of abuse - and overthrow fascists.  We saw this in Hungary recently, where state-run propaganda kept Viktor Orban in power far longer than one would have thought, given how he ruined that nation's economy.

Today, we see the same thing happening in the US.  Major news organizations are being bought up by right-wing Oligarchs.  The Washington, Post, CNN, even the New York Times, have all moved or lurched to the far-right.  One can no longer trust the media to be impartial, and the cry of the "liberal media" by the far-right seems almost farcical these days.

Maybe people will figure this out in time, or perhaps it will all fall apart as some extremists hope.  Sadly, if the latter occurs, I don't think it will user in an paradise era of Democratic Socialism, but instead, something far worse.

The 22-Point Palintir Manifesto.  It reads more like a personal grievance list, particularly item #18.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?