COBOL

The business computing language since the 1950s.  A large percentage of banks and the US government still use COBOL, because massive batch processing, money, reliability, and most important, easy to learn. COBOL was written for C students. Robust, fogiving, a Soviet tank of  a language, you could write hideous code and the computer would still work. 

There's other reasons for using inefficient and antiquated technology. Software, unlike hardware, gets better over time as bugs are stamped out. Utilizing a new system means starting all over. Why do that? Do what Nature does and build kluge upon kluge. 

I myself wrote programs in COBOL, and I got two insights working in IT.

1) Clever is the enemy of Smart. Even Stupid has a problem with Clever. Clever solutions are contingent and often accidental, not replicable. Smart solutions, once they work, work until they don't. Stupid solutions resolve quickly one way or the other. Clever can be Stupid posing as Smart.

2) The world is always making a better idiot. There is no such thing as idiot proof. See 1).

Working at one company I noticed they didn't have a lot of common modules programs could call, like an app, and get a result. You know, basic stuff like day of the week, number of days between dates, code that was needlessly replicated. These were installed as what were called black boxes and used. One day, the day of the week subroutine went kablooey. It was quickly determined that a newbie was curious about the black box, looked at the code, decided it didn't look right, and changed it.  

3) KISS Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Back in corporate days I once reviewed a COBOL program for Accounting a bright lad had wrote. I went through the code and complimented him on the elegance and brilliant little subrouines he had written in this concert of a program. 

"We can't use it". "What?" "Can't use it." "You just said it was a beautiful program" "Yes, and this program has to be maintained in the future by people not quite so bright as you and I. Sorry. Turn it into a brute force double sort match". By this time I had realized that all these smart programmers were C students who thought they wre getting straight As.

Do I care? Nah. I may look like a slacker, but I work until I have enough money to not work. I not work, until I run out of money and have to work again. If this were the 19th century, you would say I won and lost fortunes. But I have enough slack saved up to tranport me clear to Venus.

Year of the Wood Snake

I'm thinking how many AI ads there are going to be during this year's Superbowl. It reminds me of the 2022 crypto commercials and the crypto crash, or one of the many crypto crashes and booms, and I thought "Great, we are done with this bullshit". There is no end in the Age of Bullshit. Crypto's back, the AI bubble only partly deflated and we have an entire year ahead of us. I turned to divination. 

I cast a hexagram using the I Ching the binary divinator, to see how we will do. Is it wrong for a Northern barbarian to use the I Ching?  Wy am I not casting runes? Well, I'm not a witch. I can't see the future. So I use the ancient Chinese computer to winnow out an interpretation.

Question: Will We The People make it through the Year of the Wood Snake?

(Meaning, how badly will our democratic institutions be eroded? How much more power will the .01% accrue? There will be an artillery battle of lawsuits soaring over our heads, but is there any way for lawsuits to overcome the deep pockets of the Filthy Rich? We couldn't keep the Republic. Can we win it back, or at least fight a continuous rearguard action?

I cast the hexagram and I got one changing line, number 2 in hexagram 64, Unfulfillment. 

Hexagram 64

The changing line 2 (second from the bottom, yang to yin) produces hexagram 35, Advance. Sounds promising.

Before I go into context, I read the changing line's text:

He lifted the front tip of his sash. Good omen.

(Taking small precautions can protect against large mistakes).

I take this too read this is going to be a shit year, but if you prep now, you'll make it through. What do I mean by prep? Not just real life preparations, but the psychic equivalent of checking your tire pressure and oil levels and have a kit in the trunk before going on this road trip.

The Context? It's fun to read. Hexagram 64 .

Sign of the Sacrifice

A little fox, crossing at the shallow

Got its tail wet

There is nothing to be gained.

Hexagram 35.

Marquis Kang presents a herd of horses

The spoils of three victories in a day.

The judgement is there is no advantage to pushing ahead from weakness; therefore rendering unto Caesar is the auspicious course for now.

I can remember the flatulent triumphalism of 2017, Trump 1.0 dullards swaggering around, until it was realized that all that neo-Nazi shit was uncool, and we muddled along until the plague came. Oh sure there were massive protests and pussy hats galore, but it was the incompetence and laziness of Trump's phone-in golf presidency that made things seem normal.

This time out, still a lot of protests and pussy hats, but not so well covered by the media. Not when you've got a skipping dipshit Seig Heiling all over the place. Now Trump & Co can and will do real damage to things. There is the worry of privatisation of government functions (home to so much corruption and waste) but the bigger worry is the chopping down of the federal rainforest. What I mean by that is the federal government is a treasure house, strike that, an Aladdin's cave of precious data and metadata on practically everything. The AI boys sure want a piece of that, as do all the filthy rich, who can't swait to sift it through their filthy hands. I fear it will be eaten up completely. 

It's bad enough to deal with kaiju nation-states, the corporate kaiju have nothing but greed and utility, and they would reduce the world to a zero if they could.

Other things. Any other thing.

It seems as you get older, time moves faster. This is different than time moving slower, which apparently is an actual thing: https://futurism.com/neoscope/humans-access-bullet-time  I have experienced this time dilation during extreme events. One of my favorite recollections is driving east on I-80, contrete bollards set up for only one lane. A truck cab in front of suddenly veered left and hit the bollards. The cab back jumped as it pivoted on its front bumper. If I braked, it collapse on me. If I accelerate, I make it past. That experience was about 30 seconds subjectively and perhaps 2 seconds, real time. I shot past and watched the truck wedge itself diagonally in my rear view mirror, all of I-80 heading east stuck behind it. What a triumphal memory!

But old coot fast time, well it's bad, in that summer shoots by in about two weeks. It's good when the grey dismal stretch of January/February is also reduced to about two weeks. I attribute this time compression to a decrepit and rapidly decomposing brain. Time actually is shorter for me year by year, since, at nearly 68, a year is 1/68th om life. When I five it was 1/5th. 

I do have a memory, my earliest memory of being on the warm concrete patio in our backyard, as a propeller plane went overhead. And it took about three hundred years for that plane to go over. Bright spring day. Periwinkle sky.

Hopefully, it will make the next four years go faster, but that's a copout. Enduring life is no way to go through with life. If things suck, learn to thrive in sucky times. I see no other logical alternative. Why despair when malice is so much more fun?

I am talking about Trump2.0 It will be weirder shit than the first time. Most importantly with Trump having his Howard Beale moment where, with just a whiz of an assassin's bullet, thinks that he is chosen by God. I am convinced this is his mindset. He has always seen himself as the one who should be in charge, but with sanctimony its just the worst. This is worrisome, but I am reminded Trump voters are only 23% of the populace, the Annoying Minority. Unfortunately our system of government leans toward the tyrrany of the minority.

Point being Republican or Democrat the policy is to maintain the status quo of the USA: cheap food, electricity, convencience, modern times. Trump wants to stay with the petrosauruses, Biden wanted to move us to Green (not so green) Energy. Either way we still killl the planet to our best ability (which geohistorically is weak sauce in terms of mass extinctions), and in turn only kill ourselves off. In which case, hey, problem solved.

I much more worried that the logjam on innovation breaks and we get something world changing. Let's try one. Commercial fusion energy under Trump's term and a Golden Age of America actually occurs. Might as well get the Crown out as we have new royalty. (I can't wait to see what Don Jr.s' inbred progeny look like in the 22nd century). Success is the worst thing that can happen, not because of Trump, but because we will just use the gadget to fuck things up more. Because we are punks.

I've heard this meme about how empires only last 250 years and the USA is 246 years old. Meaning what? We couldn't keep the Republic? (Technically we are Republic2.0, 158 years old). Meaning we are an aged doddering Empire? Well, one golden spike for American Empire that is obvious is December 7 1941. So the Empire 84 years old?  How about 1992 the collapse of the Soviet Union and USA the only global superpower standing? The USA is not old. It is a pimply face teenager, a juvenile delinquent.

What better representative than Trump? Who is a punk. And the great adolescents is they either get their asses kicked or realize they are not the asskicker in the room they thought they were. So maybe that is the good we get out of Trump.

Mr. No Foreign Wars gets our asses kicked. And we will deserve it.

 

Wild Chocolate

It is Friday the 10th of January in 2025. For me, born in 1957, 2001 will always be in the future. For me, age 67, I'm still 25 in my head. @ 25 I was a werewolf, a bronze bull. 

I know I am not any of those things, still and all, safer with me than anywhere else in the universe.

I like this book and you might want to read it.

Wild Chocolate By Rowan Jacobsen 

There was a USA chocolate rennaisance in the 2010s, and as usual I sleptwalked through it. I knew about the coffee rennaisance in the 70-80s, but this hunt for heirloom strains of cacao, the source of chocolate Inow know through this book.

Big Chocolate, with plantations mainly in Ghana and Ivory Coast, uses hardy breeds with bitter taste and no flavors. Original cacao is reknowned in Mexico but from the Amazon. If you have read the book 1491 by Charles C Mann you will know that up to 40 million people lived there, with roads and island cities and plantations. Teddy Roosevelt almost perished on an expedition to the Amazon. Like conquistadors before him, he nearly starved in a garden.

Original cacao is callled food of the gods for a reason. Not quite psychedelic but at the least taking the right direction. It's nice to see coarse USA tastes maturing and taking flavor, taking life seriously. Fine chocolate now is sourced directly from indigenous "farms" and is called bean to bar, and savored by locality, reputation, etc. "farms" in quotes because the trees are not a monoculture. It turns out cacao trees really like being at the floor of rain forest, so win/win for farmers and rain forest. 

I had considered a greenhouse of cacao trees up here in the Midwest. I mean, Canada and Iceland grow bananas, tomatoes, and coffee, why not cacao?  Easy to bring sunlight down to 40%, humidity up to 80% and temperatures ranging from (depending on what you want the fruit to do) 80-90F. It turns out the pollinators for cacao are these bitey little mites that leave horrid marks if you scratch them, and they need a rainforest in a greenhouse to survive. Pass on the greenhouse for now.

Florida Vacation

Five days in Cape Coral. Ate well, got some sun, got some color, got some exercise. Alternating nights drinking. Cape Coral has canals, from above it looks like the PacMan game, so walking was a maze. I tried to do the blood sugar walk after each meal, and was 3 out of 5 days doing it. Enough walking to get a tan. I was supposed to lose weight and instead I gained it like a fat fat fatty.

(My kidney doctor scolded me for gaining 7 lbs in three weeks. I was like; the holidays. He said, you are like a starship with only one damaged warp nacelle running. You can't afford any extra mass. You are too tubby of a rocketship. Lose those pounds. That got through my geek skull)

The weather was perfect, the area hideously overdeveloped, businesses cheek to jowl. Still nothing to the auto and diesel smokes tempered in frozen airs of the great Northern cities, Great Lakes Sector. Each inhale of gulf air was a sinus rinse. Wonderful. 

I enjoyed it. And that surprised me how unenjoyable my life has been lately. Not from depression or events, just a general fog of suck.

We went to the beach. The beach was foggy and people freaked. It is always foggy in the winter. The Gulf water was 65F, Lake Michigan in June? temp. Warm air, cold water = fog. The fog burned off. Most people stuck to the shore, but my grand niece from Kansas was determined to get in the ocean. We waded out in the sand shallows. Finally about 20 yards out, we got some big breaking waves. I turn around and almost every kid from the beach is behind me. 

Oh, I realize, I am an adult. I am the adult. The water is safe, with the adult present.

Better still, I'm Grandpa Weed, so we are going to have a fun time. I throw my great niece into the waves, then I have to throw everyone. The kids cavorted in the surf like seals. They played like otters.

Finally I say OK kids we are going in, followed by an Aww and I said Nope In You Go. We waded ashore. It was cool. I led a tribe for a liitle bit. And, you know, my motto:

Safer with me, than anywhere in the universe.

Algorithms

Most people look at the Egyptian pyramids and see massive stone monuments, ancient wonders of the world.

I see an algorithm. An algorithm run on the platform of a human machine. A human machine composed of people, each completing subroutines as tasks broken down into logical components. Some of the components involve teams, others specific individuals. 

The pyramid constuction itself is not the objective function, or not the primary one. The objective function is the creation and maintenance of the human machine itself, that in turn can make pyramids or whatever else you want. How the pyramid is built within this larger system can range from a lean mean harsh system of slavery to an almost playful state of volunteerism.

This large system is obviously a network. The component of the network can be people or ants or microbes or even photons. 

There is no complexity of scale, but there is complexity of components, and so complexity of connections in total. Our cellular machinery is far more complex than the most amibtious projects of the human animal, and not just through sheer numbers. When neural nets were first being played with on paper with pencil, it was quickly recognized that the sophistication of the net involved not only number of layers, but also the nodes. The simpler the nodes were in deciding to fire like a neuron, the faster the processsing speed of the net, but the cruder the results. Even more important was recognizing new connections and dropping unused ones based upon decisions of the nodes. Many of these new connections on paper were called back propagation, connections to earlier layers, into the "past". It becomes an all purpose tool, iterating itself.

Is this going to be about AI? Thankfully, no.

When I was 12, I read a book called The World of Star Trek, by David Gerrold, who wrote the "Trouble with Tribbles" episode. One of the chapters involved  world building, and Gerrold used the example of what world could create the starship Enterprise, by substitutiing what the modern world needs to do to make a 747? 

There are the materials and skills required to build the plane, but also the expanding network that supplied those materials and skills, until before you know it, everybody and everything in the world is involved. How do you cost that out? (The answer is when the signal of cost is swamped by all the other costs, thats' your cost, which is typcially about 18 months back).

This opened my pre-pubescent mind to the world of supply chains 50 years before I heard the phrase.

Supply chains? Supply webs! Once you start sourcing out what it takes to build, not just the airplane, but everything you need to build the airplane, all the way down to feeding little bitty babies, you realize its a gestalt. A whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It blew my tiny little mind. Material conduits as algrorithms involved in a big bang of creation called the 20th century, modern times, the monkey singularity. All from the network of funny little ape-shaped bugs.

I should have stuck with pursuing logistics, but I didn't, and here I am now, in a shitbox apartment typing on a 30-year-old computer piggybacked onto my smart phone hot spot. All of which, a mere 50 years ago, would have made little 12-year-old Johnny squeal with delight at how cool the future is. What was the point I was writing about? I forgot.

Algorithms. Is that how CEOs see people? Does Elon Musk coldly eye you for your capability, and capacity for punishment? As components, cogs within a machine, bees in a super organism? I think the psychopaths do, and as I can turn off most of my humanity when I need to, I get where they're coming from.

But we do recognize collective good and collective effort and collective care all as vastly superior to an optimal objective function.

Xenophilia

Considering the amount of guns in the USA, and the number of companies ruining lives for money, you'd think a lot more CEOs would be murdered. Common aversion to violence, not to mention the more mature motive of not getting caught, prevents a lot of these murders. Lack of knowledge and forward consequential thinking also hamper a lot of attempts.

It's not like these business types don't deserve it. After the killing of the CEO, social media exploded with horror stories of denied health care, and also inside stories as to the callous behavior of employees. Not to mention all the fraud and cheating. Kid Murder is right, they are parasites, middle men doing nothing but adding a percentage, which can oftentimes be obscene 11,000+% percentages.

A war of all against all, which is neoliberalism. The shareholder is the only real individual which the free market magically transposes into a corporate wave/particle. And since Citizens United, given all the privileges of personhood without the responsibilities. Well, Mangione has supplied a radical solution for Citizens United, a FAFO personal responsibility of one final conclusion. If you are part of a superorganism, you are complicit, and open to fiduciary and legal consequences. 

People will object that the murdered CEO was murdered! Forget solving any underlying problems. True, but look at the response and tell me mice can't scare elephants.

Also, I finished the bronze, pics included of Xenophilia, the piece title but also the name a series of bronzes I did back 10 years ago? Exploring the relationship between people and aliens/robots/AI. 

Not pets, but not tame. So a relationship "distinctly ambiguous and rather disturbing".