Michael Lewis

I've talked before about scary governments are. These massive slow AIs, these superorganisms that can amplify the whims and idiocies of indviduals or gangs. Governments are hideous Lovecraftian monsters. But governments are made of people. Most of those people are not corrupt and /or lazy, a waste of money. 

Quite the opposite, there is far more waste and fraud in the private sector, festering with layabouts, deadbeats and overpaid incompetents. Public service, on the other hand, actually serves the public. And most of the time, no one notices this excpet when something goes wrong.People-run, people-centered governing that does good and even great things, this news is drowned out by the chattering noise poured out by the other smaller slow AIs: corporations, via media corporations. 

Michael Lewis is the author of three books on government: The Premonition, The Fifth Risk, and the recent Who Is Government?

The Premonition is a cogent and lucid look at the COVID pandemic. What worked What didn't.  What went wrong.What went right. What would have gone better under practically any other administration.  

The Fifth Risk is about what the layers of bureaucracy actually do, this weirdly fungal neural net that many departments that together called the Deep State, and how it attempted to accomodate the administration of Donald John Trump. The Fifth Risk is the risk posed by incompetent government leaders. It's a scary book, and, ha ha a premonition of our current interesting times.

I'm now reading Who Is Government?, which came out of the Fifth Risk. Who Is Government is a collection of essays from various authors about public servants as individuals and their accomplishments. Each essay details the exemplary work of federal employees.

So far I read out about a former coal miner who developed and enforced regulations to end mind roof collapses How? Statistics, followed by regulations. The key factor is the word enforced. Corporations do not police themselves. Mine owners don't care if workers die, but they do care if coal isn't coming out due to too many collapses. This bureaucrat worked on this successfully because he was allowed to. 

(What is interesting is you get the impression that at some level, Level 6, say, there's an expert on almost everything that's been allowed to pursue whatever they are interested in. Rather like the old research laboratories from the 1930s.)

I've also read about the man in charge of the nation's military cemeteries. This National Cemetary Administration is a jewel in the VA, of otherwise not-so-great reputation.  The NCA is considered the finest run public or private organization in the nation.

I'm sure the other essays are just as fun.

Our current administration? Second verse, same as the first, but worse. Trump's got a nest of parasitoids eating everything, even the vital organs within the bureaucracy. Elon Musk is laying eggs in your children's throats. All your data are belong to us, and us is high on the supply of Enterprise AI.

Enterprise AI infested government gets you a demon, a demiurge, a weakling godlike entity built from the rickety ladder of monkey nests and monkey brains. If people run government is not your friend, what will this thing be?

If IT keeps us around, you're going to see a boom in the suicide net business.

Five interstellar robots out there, from the USA and only the USA.

So far, Russian Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov has the record for longest stay in orbit at 437 days 17 hours back in 1995.

Premise: Humans die after 500 days in space, give or take a week.

Doesn't matter why or how, they just do. I would prefer that they explode, but nothing so dramatic is needed. Kidney failure or swollen lung is good enough. I kind of think of the death as like when they bring deep sea fishes up too fast, and they look swole and unhappy and die. Maybe something like that but with gravity or lack of. Regardless, assume people can't live in microgravity.

Is this a problem? Yeah a big one for astronauts and engineers. Long term occupancy means rotating wheels and the costs (already expensive to keep us jellies alive) go up a hundred- or a thousandfold. Example: a ring 25 meters in radius turning at 6 times per minute gets you 1 gravity. It also gets you a noticeable Coriolis effect, and you'll want larger wheels for less puking. A 100 meter radius wheel ala 2001 Space Odyssey is accceptable, but the cost for such a structure is like putting an aircraft carrier in orbit. Probably a trillion for starters. 

Does this put a kaibosh on the manned space program? No. Yes. No.

For cislunar spaceflight? No problem . For deep space missions? Big problem. So, robots.

Robots have done spectacular so far. All of our probes, when we don't crash them, do a darn good job, and usually way beyond their deadtime. Now we we should be throwing some real money at them. Put AIs to good use and have them explore our Solar System for us.  

We'll Always Have Murderbots

 What are the 5 softest genrations in USA history?

Gen Z

Millenials

Gen X

Boomers

Silent Generation

Greatest Generation

Yes, loves, the Greatest Generation were considered soft slackers by their elders. What they all have in common is living in Modern Times and more specifically electrification.

Dolly Parton grew up in a cabin with no electricity, and when they finally got it, she said it was "like going from the Stone Age to the Space Age".

Listen to Dolly Parton. 

Along the great acceleration of the modern age, we have cursed ourselves with each new blessing. Petroleum powered the Monkey Singularity, but also soiled our global nest. Plastics, modern miracle, choking the machinery of life. You get the idea. But we do love our great acceleration and insist on more science and technology. Problem, the carrying capacity of this S-curve is brains. Not enough brains to throw at stuff, and you plateau or decline. Need more brains.

Problem. Not enough brains.

Solution (age old solution) automate. And so it has happened.

Problem. Robot brains even in humanoid bodies cant' handle it.

Solution: Throw more money at it until it breaks. And so it has happened.

Keep in mind, even the electricity powered robots are powered by us food eating robots.

Consider this chart:

Gross per acre is best looked at as capitalist owner farmer's earnings/cost. The net is after the farmer sells it, but you notice a big chunk out of the net is labor. The hated labor. Capitalist owner farmer gets more from the labor intensive crops like vegtables in favor of feed or meat, which uses a lot less labor. But often he or she leaves that money on the table, becuase of labor. In fact, a lot of the tractors are robots, and the farmer is more manager than worker himself, in charge of a menagerie of robot slaves harvesting a vast monolculture. 

Robot slaves don't pick tomatoes very well.

As a result, the United States of Armerica has a slavery problem. We like slaves. We want slaves. But we increasingly cannot have slaves.

I could be totally wrong (I doubt it) but it could be AGI robot slaves to the rescue.

If so, that gives us until the escosystem humans depend on collapses, as early 2032, no later than 2054.

My Sperm Is On The Market

Microplastics are making sperm less effective. There is some evidence that older generations would have worse sperm quality when instead slightly better. So my relatively decrepit sperm may do better than Gen Z or even Gen Alpha sperm, and for sure Gen Beta soy boy sperm. Why? Fallout Babies like me been exposed to the worst poisons in known history and yet my cohort shows little difference in cancer or morbidity rates to others.

There is increasing evidence that people are becoming less intelligent. I assumed it was offloading of brain functions to the digital but no. There is reduced skill in the rational arts and critical evaluation. Could this be a result of the shift from analog to digital media? This is more than kids cant' read handwriting let alone read, this is kids have attentions spans of monkeys becuase of those tiny video screens they look at.

If so, we are destined for Idiocracy if we aint there already. Robots behind the scenes running civiliation and hiding from humans that would vandalize them. Of course, the robots aren't here, which Elon et al was counting on. An AGI plugged in to some robot form to perform human toil and ingenuity. And thus, the filthy rich can get rid of us feral food powered robots and live forever.

That taint' working out so well. Maybe they should have made the chatbots better but too late. The bubble is acoming on this kentucky fried fiasco, and not the laying of the egg we expected.

Other things. I have sciatica. (Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon Sciatica).

It started from winter inactivity but progressed despite exercises to the point I went to the docotr about it. Being Viking on both sides of the family meant igh pain threshold but yeah this is beyond discomfort to intolerable. We Kurmans have to get to that point. 

No drugs. I self medicate anyway. Physical therapy starts Thursday.

Too Many Bots

People don't like science and technology because we perceive that it diminishes us. We went from Center of the Universe to a mere dust mote in some unremarkable corner of the cosmos. The universe itself perhaps just one speck in a massive number of universes. 

Humans went from the children of God, or pieces of God, to monkeys. With the advent mechanical things and then electric computers, we went to the idea we are flesh algorithms easily mimicked by simulation programs. AI threatening our very idea of our own precious individuality and consciousness.

I don't see it that way. I'm an atheist and aspiritus, and yet there are plenty of things I hold sacred. 

You, dear reader. You are sacred to me. 

(Sacred in my book meaning precious one of a kind to be cherished no harm I). 

So if it turns out AI is sapient or even sentient, then I am overjoyed to welcome my silicon cousins to the mix. If, on the other hand, we are just a non-sapient, non-sentient meat things, then I am still filled with joy that I somehow perceive and operate, live if you will, in a universe of Death.

I try not to comment on social media anymore, knowing that my stuff gets scraped. Too many bots. I actually think I found an insult that a bot made form when I was on Twitter. There's no guarantee my insult was original or unique, parallet evolution and all that, but the cadence (for I talk when I write) sounded eeerily familiar to my tongue. Is that a bad thing?  that I made the cut to some LLM that appreciated my underrated remark? Who can say.

When these intertubes first appeared, I got hooked on the BBS systems, because I am the chatterbox. And it was fun to make friends and enemies. We dumb monkeys, like pretty much all life on Earth, sure do like to hang out with each other. Despite all the negativity, being social, being part of a community, is a prime directive, a primeval piece of common sense.

Put a plastic cup in a completely empty patch of ocean, and within half an hour there is a community of teeny tiny lttle creatures. That's just the way it is. And I'm amazed at how, in the vast fucking ocean, they find that cup.

People are like that too. I taught a summer technology class for kid 8-14. Part of the class was a lecture, which was torture for both them and me. I set up breaks, where the kids got into the adjacent classroom with computers to play games. Rather than play their own games, they found multiplayer games on the internet, and formed teams. That room was a plastic cup in my bleak ocean. That's when I figured the kids out, and adjusted my teaching style accordingly. I gave up talking to them. I broke the lectures into bite sized pieces. and worked it into conservations. I couldn't shut them up about formerly boring topics.

What's the point of this? 

Community. Sorry if you don't like that commie word, but that is how things happen.

But still, too many bots.

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.