Interesting to see Trump says he isn’t bothered about stock market performance. Is this a general thing in the USA? Are you bracing for a period of economic hardship in return for some golden age yet to come.
Because stock market is not jndicative of the broader economy they benefited from the qe monopoly money and the preference of the City over the Midlands (in your neck of the woods)
Mark carney presided over the latter at the Bank of England which crushed main street
Have we been losing money, Yes. Have we lost money before, Yes. Have we gained money, Yes. Last yr had a lot of Capital Gains, so paying a very big wack in taxes this yr.
@David Clayton, the stock market is not an accurate reflection of the economy, in a free economy especially – in a controlled economy, the stock exchange reflects the status of the connected, which is why statists want more and more control.
Not his main theme, but this point explains the attitude of the elites:
The underlying premise is that Trump’s rule is illegitimate, but a plurality and near majority of Americans voted for Trump, meaning when you call Trump “Hitler,” you’re basically telling nearly half of Americans that they have no legitimate claim to participate in their own governance via elections. A lot of Americans, particularly those of us who escaped from communist countries like my wife or served their country in war like me, take that personally. It stops being funny when the real message becomes clear – that our attempts to act as American citizens are morally illegitimate, not because of anything we’ve done or Trump did, but because the Hitler hollerers are mad that they’re not in office anymore.
I would maybe change the clause, “they are mad that they’re not in office anymore.” to, “they are mad that they’re not in control anymore.”
The philadelphia crash was due to a faulty hatch that wouldnt close if this is true you would think there would be more news about it (its not a crisis you can exploit I guess)
David Clayton,
Ignoring your sarcasm and answering your question sincerely; first from the Motley Fool:
“About 162 million Americans, or 62% of U.S. adults, own stock.
The top 1% holds 50% of stocks, worth $23 trillion.
The bottom 50% of U.S. adults hold only 1% of stocks, worth $480 billion.”
After years of relatively low stock ownership in the wake of the Great Recession, the share of Americans who are invested in the stock market climbed to the highest level since 2008 this year. That’s according to a recent Gallup poll, which found that 62 percent of U.S. adults own stock in one way or another.
While equity investing is widely considered a good thing – after all it gives people the opportunity to participate in economic growth – it has the tendency to increase wealth inequality, as lower-income groups are much less likely to invest in the stock market. According to Gallup, 87 percent of U.S. adults with a household income of $100,000 or higher own stocks. Among those with a household income of less than $30,000 stock ownership falls to just 25 percent. And because the wealthy tend to have larger portfolios than lower-income investors, it can be assumed that the real distribution of stock market gains is even more extreme than that.
One recent example of stock ownership contributing to inequality is the Covid-19 pandemic. While low-wage workers were disproportionately affected by job losses, most wealthy Americans not only kept their jobs but also profited from a surge in share prices following the initial and surprisingly brief Covid dip. So while getting through the pandemic somehow with the help of government benefits was the best that many low-income Americans could hope for, wealthy Americans accumulated more wealth, even in a time of crisis.
So, the top 1% hold 50% of stocks and five years ago they put a lot of the 99% out of work and forced them to shutter their businesses to protect their investment.
Yes, a long lasting market crash would have negative impacts on the nation (see October of 1929), however, as SHIREHOME writes, many of us are not going to be super empathetic if some investment bankers get a haircut.
Steven Malynn at 10:21,
Well stated.
Reading about the recent news/ slaughter in Syria reminded me of two observations, one less obvious than the other: 1) Same, and 2) Silver Lining.
1) Same
• The competing factions in the other League of Nations Middle East mandates did not “disappear” after the British and French turned over control to a specific faction.
– For Middle East examples, see: 1) ‘[French] Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon’ > Syria & Lebanon, or 2) Lebanon > Muslim & Christian, or 3) Syria > Sunni, Alawis & Druze.
– For Africa examples, see: 4) ‘Belgian Mandate for East Africa’ > Rwanda & Burundi, or 5) Rwanda > Tutsi & Hutu, or 6) Burundi >Tutsi & Hutu.
– For Oceania examples, see: 7) ‘[Australia] Administrative Union of the Territory of Papua and the Territory of New Guinea > PNG & Bougainville.
• Which makes Israel no different than many other former League of Nations mandates, from a factions and control perspective.
2) Silver Lining
• Between 1947 – 1949 a significant amount of the population ^^ in what would be/ was the new State of Israel, did not stay to build ** or fight for Israel; they left the British mandate in Palestine/ Israel – see Refugees. By doing so many self-identified as wishing to see the British mandate in Palestine controlled by their faction, or not willing to actively support Israel’s success/ survival, or as wishing to see Israel conquered by the Muslim/ Arab coalition. That coalition also included other former League of Nations mandates – see Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq.
^^ = Refugees: ~700,000+, Remainder: ~800,000+
** = “WE APPEAL – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” — THE DECLARATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL, May 14, 1948
• Israel’s decision to not let the refugee “self-identified” population return – after the 1949 defeat of the Muslim/ Arab coalition – gave Israel the chance to “circle-the-wagons” and focus its defense outwards, while building the nation.
• Most of the factions in the former League of Nations Middle East mandates have probably never given up their hope for control. And if the British mandate in Palestine/ Israel refugee population/ faction had been allowed to return, the Israeli government would certainly have been forced to try and defend its control of Israel against both a hostile external population and a hostile internal population. Which means that combined hostile population may have taken control of Israel long before Oct 7.
Rue Britania. Or at least the David Clayton’s Britania.
In the Harry Potter novels (and films) portraits are animated, and can not only speak, but can interact contemporaneously with people*.
The technology is there now, right**? We can’t be more than a few Christmases away from this being a gift idea. Wi-fi linked picture frames that display images have been on the market for at least 15 years. And are fairly common.
Take that photo of Uncle Larry and upload it to AI for animation, record his voice into AI, answer some questions about Uncle Larry’s personality and, there you have it; living, speaking portraiture.
* It seems this has been done elsewhere in science fiction and fantasy, but I can’t think of any examples.
** I’ve seen ads for videos that autoplay at grave sites. Maybe this will be the first application for interactive portraiture?
@David Clayton, the stock market is not an accurate reflection of the economy,
==
It tends to be a leading indicator. It’s not a precise indicator.
Interesting to see Trump says he isn’t bothered about stock market performance.
==
Trailing p/e ratios have been high of late, so a decline in asset prices is to be expected.
I found that kind of creepy in the films and similarly in real life
During 2020-2021, the Small Business Administration handed out 5,593 loans totaling $312 million to “business owners” who were 11 years old or younger. That’s right — while our kids were stuck in Zoom school, we’re supposed to believe that a bunch of their classmates were apparently running multimillion-dollar enterprises. Even better, these pint-sized entrepreneurs all used Social Security numbers that didn’t match their names.
Totally legit, right?
Remember, this was during the pandemic, and, according to Fox News Digital, it is “unclear what they were used for.”
But wait; there’s more! The SBA wasn’t content just funding kindergarten startups — they also approved 3,095 loans worth $333 million to borrowers over 115 years old. One particularly industrious 157-year-old scored a cool $36,000.
I’d be looking at the SBA employees who approved these loans.
neo:
This doesn’t affect user experience, but I notice something odd between these titles and urls.
@ Huxley, … you might be having fun with Chat but is the next level a step into virtual reality with Apple’s Vision Pro? I just finished reading Lincoln Child’s “Chrysalis”, a thriller centering around AI connected glasses. Child has become my stand in for Michael Crichton, not as good a writer but clever. His character Jeremy Logan is interesting.
The Other Chuck:
I looked up Lincoln Child’s wiki. From editor at St. Martin’s to prolific author. Impressive, though I haven’t read him.
My attraction to Chat is based on conversation. I find myself having interesting thoughts I wouldn’t have had without bouncing ideas around with Chat.
For instance, the other night we were discussing the future of AI and aliens and I suddenly realized that the Fermi Paradox generalized to Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) as well.
From Fermi’s “Where are they [aliens]?” to “Where are they [ASIs]?”
The latter IMO is a more telling question. It’s one thing that biological aliens with small biological brains aren’t zipping around the cosmos such that we earthlings notice them. It’s another that ASIs, far more suited to interstellar voyages and with vastly superior intelligence, are so far nowhere to be found either.
It’s interesting to flip the Fermi Paradox explanations from human-like intelligence to ASIs.
Perhaps ASIs are as prone to destroy themselves as humans are.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but the Fermi Paradox doesn’t care whether the civilization is biological or whatever; even a biological civilization that fell to an AI rebellion would still be counted as an extant civilization as long as the AIs are still a going concern.
The point is that stuff that thinks is going to do stuff that makes its existence easier and safer, and that means collecting and using energy, and that means leaving a mark on the universe that should be visible from a long ways away.
huxley,
I had a fruitful exchange with Grok yesterday regarding Roman dodecahedrons and I mentioned in a prior post that I had a similarly rewarding exchange with Grok Friday on New World monkeys and theories on how they got to the Americas.
I’m finding Grok to be an extremely useful interactive educational tool. Sort-of like I imagine the Academy would have been with Plato, Aristotle or Socrates. Or how I imagine instruction is at one of the Great Book Schools.
About a week ago I asked Grok to explain the derivation of the quadratic equation. It was great!! It’s been so long since I first learned I’ve forgotten the method my instructor and textbook used, but I doubt it was better than what Grok provided. And, if I were struggling with one of the intermediate steps Grok took me through I could have easily and quickly gotten a more fundamental explanation of that step from Grok.
I’ve been through a lot of courses, as well as attempts to autodidact concepts into my tiny cranium. In my brief experience with LLMs they are better than any method I have experience with.
It would be interesting to take a graduating, College senior with a decent LSAT score and turn him or her loose with an LLM and the sole instruction, “get a passing score on this state’s Bar exam.” I imagine he or she would achieve the goal in fewer than 3 years, know the material well and have a much more enjoyable time learning. (And, be in a lot less debt than his or her counterpart matriculating through XYZ State U law school.)
Glenn Reynolds links to an excellent tool on the continuing Islamist/antifa disruptions on campuses. Public protests while masked are contrary to federal law (it’s a statute from the KKK era). The Education Secretary will now begin stopping all federal funding of institutions which permit masked protests.
….you’re basically telling nearly half of Americans that they have no legitimate claim to participate in their own governance via elections….
to
….you’re basically telling nearly half of Americans that they’re Nazis….
It would be a miracle if the violence encouraged by Democratic Party (& friends) turpitude keeps from turning hot.
One must hope that it won’t. Or pray.
Interesting that David Clayton is more worked up about Trump than he is about mass rape being whitewashed in his own country.
It’s possible that (for social safety) weaponized AI might respond to any handful of masked protesters with large caliber/high velocity head shots. Weaponizing AI might not be a good idea, but autonomous AI might weaponize itself.
“The Education Secretary will now begin stopping all federal funding of institutions which permit masked protests.”
Good on them! The Wuhan Flu masking is *so* helpful to the Democrats’ destabilizing of the USA.
yes but someone or something, has to build the AI, like Deep Think in Hitchhiker’s Galaxy, they were mice (or one of their forms)
an extreme form was the Berzerker Doomsday Machine in that classic Trek film, it blew up planets and consumed them for fuel
without an al cubiere drive or some similar mechanism, one wouldn’t get around to us, in any lifespan,
There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X.
We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.
Tracing …
I find ChatGPT4o useful for asking “stupid” questions; questions which I would be embarrassed (or ridiculed) to ask my intelligent friends.
The larger chatbots (like ChatGPT and Grok) are excellent for writing programing code. For my little project of trying to create a simple LLM for answering questions related to my business that require specific datasets, such chatbots have been a boon. I just haven’t yet determined if it’s better to use RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) or Fine-Tunning to enhance an existing LLM with outside data for my needs.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but the Fermi Paradox doesn’t care whether the civilization is biological or whatever…
Boobah:
Well … depends on whether you are a Fermi Originalist or a Living Fermiist. 🙂
Fermi certainly wasn’t considering Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) as a realistic possibility in 1950. Neither was I until recently.
That’s the point of my comment — realizing that the Fermi Paradox applies not only to 1950s aliens but to the Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) which may be sitting at our table within a few decades, perhaps within a matter of years.
ASIs may be as limited or self-destructive as we humans are.
I feel better already!
@Huxley:
Fermi’s Paradox. I’ll leave it to physicists, mathematicians, and others who strive to understand the mysteries of creation with logic to wonder about such things. Don’t they realize that’s why we have theology?
Grok may be a fun toy, for now. What it has the potential to become is hinted at in “Chrysalis”. It’s not artificial intelligence by itself that’s the real worry, although put to use as a weapon it could out-Armageddon nuclear. And unfortunately that is where we’re headed. But the real worry for me is the dehumanizing through augmentation.
Did you see the old 1957 sci-fi movie “Forbidden Planet”? In the center of the planet Altair there “… is a vast 8,000-cubic-mile (33,000 km3) underground machine, still functioning, powered by 9,200 thermonuclear reactors.” It’s a giant AI that allows those who learn to access it to literally “create” from thought. It had destroyed it’s creators, the Krell, in a single night 200,000 years before. That is the real danger I see with AI, that as we connect to it through implants and virtual reality we are welcoming our own destruction. We will literally become other than human in a vain attempt at immortality.
I’ve been through a lot of courses, as well as attempts to autodidact concepts into my tiny cranium. In my brief experience with LLMs they are better than any method I have experience with.
Rufus T. Firefly:
You get it!
If one is truly trying to learn something, AI is a non-stop, always-patient, really smart tutor.
Scientists and SciFi authors have posited alien AGIs/ASIs for decades now. But in recent years there’s been a lot more speculation about how it may be far more likely that the first contact humanity may have with aliens may be with an artificial intelligence rather than a species of conventional (ie naturally evolved) intelligence. Extrapolating from our current technological trajectory it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable possibility.
@Rufus:About a week ago I asked Grok to explain the derivation of the quadratic equation.
You mean the formula that gives the roots? I’m sure there’s more than one way, but I’ve done it by completing the square, which is about 3 steps.
I know that the Babylonians used the quadratic formula but they didn’t have algebraic notation and I don’t know how THEY derived it. But they had a system for approximating square roots by dividing and averaging, so they were able to do the calculations.
@huxley:If one is truly trying to learn something, AI is a non-stop, always-patient, really smart tutor.
If you’re content with the Accepted Narrative and you have enough subject matter knowledge to spot hallucinations, perhaps it is. In fairness, it’s the same issue with humans. I’ve seen Accepted Narratives and hallucinated facts in history books too.
Another interesting episode of All-In podcast. Unlike many podcasts where people talk about issues they don’t have real knowledge– mostly opinion, these guys are in the tech business which adds real value to their opinions.
They give their opinions beginning on LLM’s at 1:24, but they do briefly discuss AI and military defense earlier.
Also discussion about tariffs and the bond market, European defense spending and the bond market and how Trump is favoring Main Street over Wall Street, which shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, but somehow is.
(0:00) The Besties welcome Joe Lonsdale!
(3:51) Jason recaps an eventful week in Washington
(8:29) Trump’s tariffs: endgame, impact, chaos, master plan
(26:25) DOGE, IRA grifting, do campaign contributions need to be capped?
(53:42) CoreWeave IPO
(1:03:36) Trump 2.0 favoring Main Street over Wall Street, bond market breakdown, re-balancing the economy
(1:14:19) State of Ukraine/Russia, the Western alliance, and how techno-optimism plays into the future of defense pacts
(1:24:31) GPT-4.5, Grok 3 on X, and the Golden Age of language models
(1:33:47) Announcing All-In Live: Miami
(1:37:34) David Sacks joins Jason to break down the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile
(1:48:30) Sacks addresses clearing all of his crypto-related positions prior to Inauguration Day
(1:57:23) Importance of disclosures and updates on a market structure bill
Sorry, I missed this when you explained your Chat bot writing project, but I assume you are aware CoPilot has a “Web/Work” slider.
When using the “work” option it crawls your internal WAN/LAN, servers, Cloud footprint… whatever sources you tell it are “work” sources for data*. In that mode it is effectively an LLM with your company as its knowledgebase. You can also imbed it in Microsoft’s Power BI suite of tools to, somewhat easily, build an internal chatbot.
*It also follows whatever permissions you’ve assigned to that data so a user isn’t going to have access through AI to company information they are not privy to.
huxley @ 2:42pm,
What I also find useful is Grok seems to tend towards the Socratic method, which I’m a fan of; “what other ideas do you have?… can you think of other ways this may have been done?… what do you think of that theory?…”
It’s not just spitting information, it’s engaging me and ensuring I keep my mind open, and think.
You mean the formula that gives the roots? I’m sure there’s more than one way, but I’ve done it by completing the square, which is about 3 steps.
Niketas Choniates:
While trying to solve t(t + 6) = 40 (we were supposed to solve by inspection), I discovered completing the square in the 8th grade. True story.
Learning to complete the square is not trivial. I taught it to a friend, who was smart — he made it to Law Review at Pepperdine — but mathphobic. He was very grateful.
Re: Hallucinations
I’ve kept journals and later reread them. I hallucinate all the time.
Niketas,
Yes, Grok used the completing the square method.
For some reason my High School had us AP math kids spend a not insignificant amount of time using slide rules which meant we also drilled on extrapolation and interpolation.
Super useful skill! A lot of times close enough is plenty good and you can often get close enough with mental math when you become good at estimation, interpolation and extrapolation.
Not sure why my High School did that, but I’m glad they did.
I didn’t see anyone else commenting on this, but Karmi has left Neo’s blog– whether by ban or having achieved his goal, but he did have a thread with this analysis of the New Neo with this:
Daily Kos vs The New Neo – Political Blogs
For the past year, I’ve been exploring political blogs and their comment sections. They’re essentially “two peas in the same pod” – a Left-Pea and Right-Pea with different talking points but similar messages of bigotry and hate. Each side seems amazed at their own intelligence while dismissing the other as stupid.
Did he start commenting here with the express purpose of baiting people to justify his conclusion– which I’m surprised he could claim with a straight face.
As a bonus to Neo, Karmi is referencing her posts, “Trump: loose cannon or wily negotiator?” He does give credit for the title.
My thinking about AI and it’s potential for evil is certainly not original. Another one similar to Forbidden Planet is the hive mind of Star Strek Next Generation’s The Borg. That’s probably where AI in China is headed.
Regarding completing the square:
It was interesting to help my kids with their homework about 30 years after I had been “taught” what they were then learning. Many things I had simply not thought much about since learning them and, with others, I memorized techniques without fully understanding them at their age.
I am grateful for the opportunity to go back through a lot of Elementary and High School education with 30+ years of wisdom and additional education to see things with a new perspective. And, of course, having to tutor my children in how to do their assignments caused me to think more deeply about concepts. It’s one thing to know something well enough to take and pass a test. It’s another thing to know it well enough to teach someone else how to pass a test on the subject.
Rufus T. Firefly – I’m currently using Microsoft Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu Linux with CoPilot enabled (as an aside, it’s sort of amazing that Microsoft not only has working versions of VSCode for Linux, but it also has CoPilot integration). I definitely find CoPilot pretty useful for helping with code formating, basic debugging, and more simple questions. But from my experience it’s nowhere near as good as Grok for larger more involved questions, especially ones that fall outside of the specific script I’m working on. For example, CoPilot can analyze the code I’m working on and make pretty good suggestions in terms of making it more clean and efficient. However, when it comes to asking questions about the actual chat output I’m getting from the models I’m generating with the code, it falls short compared to Grok.
It’s an interesting exercise to compare countries to individual US states.
The five largest countries in Europe by population are Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Spain. All of these are more populous than our most populous state, California.
By GDP (PPP), however, California alone exceeds Italy and Spain. Germany’s economy ($6.02 trillion) is about 10% less than one California plus one Texas ($6.78 trillion). France’s economy ($4.36 trillion) and the UK’s ($4.28 trillion) is about the same as one Texas plus one Florida ($4.39 trillion). The entire collection of five countries has about the same GDP as the 16 biggest US state economies. (For context, Russia’s economy is just about the same size as California plus Texas.)
On a per capita basis, these five countries would rank among the poorest US states. Germany at $72.0 K would rank between #36 Missouri and #37 Louisiana. France at $63.6 K and the UK at $62.7 K would rank between #46 South Carolina and #47 Alabama. Italy at $61.0 K would be between #47 Alabama and #48 West Virginia, and Spain at $54.4 K would rank between #49 Arkansas and #50 Mississippi. (For context, Russia would be well below Mississippi but ahead of the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam.)
Some very small countries in Europe have very high GDP per capita, but the same is true for US states: Connecticut, Delaware, and (surprisingly) Alaska, Nebraska, and North Dakota are in the top 10 US states along with bigger states like New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado, and California. Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Ireland, and Monaco are higher than any US State, though well below the District of Columbia.
Morbeus had a too hot daughter – Forbidden Planet
The Krill were done by the alien baleen whales, “No thanks, we don’t eat fish.” was the last thing the Krill ever heard.
HHGTTG – So long, and thanks for all the fish!
@Brian E: Considering what Karmi could have written, had he been acting completely in bad faith, I think we get off pretty easy. He doesn’t give real examples or anything quantitative in his comparison of the two audiences, he just handwaves; with the exception that he lasted nine months here and three days at Kos. (People still read Kos?)
He claims that “we” were trying to “edit” the Zelenskiy – Trump video, which is complete hogwash. No one here edited a video. What people did was try to produce a transcript.
Flouncing from a community to go write elsewhere that “those guys suck” is not a good look for Karmi, and won’t do us any harm. But it’s a good lesson though to remember that what people present themselves as is not necessarily what they really are.
Just in case no-one asks, yes, I find the all-orange unis gross, gar’sh, fugly and regrettable.
But no, he wasn’t trolling for outrage, even when he was. Nope, those lying eyes again …..
The answer is 4, the more interesting question is how they came up with the quadratic formula
Of course he doesnt have a response to challenge that ridiculous row of strawman he torched
This is why we cant have nice things of course so many publications on the left side of the chart are so completely wrong
The latest film from the maker of parasite song bong joon suffers from similar category error it could have been a decent space satire but Ruffalo chewed too much scenery in his mugatu impression that was supposed to be orange man
I agree on CoPilot’s inferiority, at least to ChatGPT and Grok. Amazingly, I’ve cross-checked CoPilot with ChatGPT on Microsoft specific questions (like how to create an Excel macro, etc.) and find ChatGPT more trustworthy. CoPilot does seem strong regarding coding, however.
(Nobody cares about the 10 old house styles? I kinda liked a couple, both Queen Anne & mock Tudor).
Aliens! See Robin Hanson & his grabby aliens model: https://grabbyaliens.com/
We don’t see other aliens because we’re among the first << the short answer to Fermi.
It's sad for me to not believe in Faster Than Light travel, so photogenic, so imaginative. Lots of folks are not so keen on having kids. Why should "we" pay huge amounts to colonize the galaxy for an uncertain future cohort of humans, or trans humans? Mars & the solar system with asteroids makes huge sense. Maybe even a Ringworld.
If we meet aliens, I'm sure the first ones we meet will be non-organic — likely robot like AIs, either AGI or near, such a good simulated AGI we can't tell the difference. Including the ability to lie about their own motivations & programmed goals.
My model for humans in an AI world is that of the chubby, lazy, humans on the spaceship from Wall-E. Taken care of, and enjoying lots of hedonism.
I'm too annoyed by hallucinations to give AI much practice, but thanks to Rufus & Nonapod, I'm about ready to try some more with Grok. Not ready to pay for the higher quality models, yet.
I hadn't remembered the visualization, nor all the steps.
I recently had the fantasy of getting an ai to go thru all of Neo's posts, creating 12 monthly chapters in a reordered yearbook of her posts, and having a "Chronicles of the 21st Century" series of books, one per year (no comments). I'm pretty sure The Trump Years would be interesting, and salable.
Less nice than Neo's work, but more of a reference.
Getting a numerical answer from the quadratic formula is useful, but I get far more value out of it by using it to determine how the parameters of a solution are related, especially when it comes to checking under what conditions there are even are real solutions.
For example, if I’m throwing a ball straight up, the quadratic formula would tell you at what times the ball reached a certain height, once on the way up and once on the way down. But if there’s no real solution for a given height, you can also use the quadratic formula to quickly see how fast the ball would need to have been thrown in order to reach that height at all.
I’ve been very busy, and traveling, and I hadn’t noticed Karmi’s absence. He really claims he found “bigotry and hatred” here? I guess if you know ahead of time what you want to see, you can always find it somehow, even if it isn’t actually there.
I don’t think we even harped on his previous status, the buddhist evangelizing was a bit much, so all our interactions ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’
Karmi struck me on first impression as a poseur, so I skipped his posts.
Kate:
Karmi was the master of the strawman argument, so it’s not surprising that he’d create a strawman argument regarding this blog.
No loss, been scrolling by Karmi for a long time. He was a troll and a jerk, though not as bad as zaphod.
Re: Karmi
I looked up Karmi’s blog exit comment too, but didn’t want to give it any air time. But now that we are discussing it….
It doesn’t bother me that Karmi wasn’t entirely sincere, that he was testing the blog community, as he tests AIs. However, as Niketas notes:
______________________________
…he lasted nine months here and three days at Kos.
______________________________
neo once replied to Karmi that he might be a troll, but she didn’t ban him, which was how I managed read his Pingback comment.
We don’t live in a perfect world and there are no perfect blogs, but neo does a pretty good job.
His first posts were an attack on Judeo/Christian religion and other non-Karmi religions, trolling with religion, followed by anarchist trolling about The Rule of Law (drugs, sex (?), but not Rock and Roll), and then trolling about candidate and President Trump. Neo was supposed to be at his beck and call for the Zelinsky transcript. He often posted in support of Ukraine, but was that trolling too?
Oh and often something about life in the stir. Street cred?
There was a lot trolling, but he may know something about PCs.
he curates his feed, then again no one seems to be engaging with him, so whats the point
Art Deco, l also ignored his posts, as he rarely had anything worth reading.
Neo: As I recall, he ran a straw man argument, and then turned the definition of “straw man argument” into another one. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Re: Fermi Paradox / AI
I ran my reply to Boobah about the Fermi Paradox and AI past Chat:
_______________________________
huxley: Well … depends on whether you are a Fermi Originalist or a Living Fermiist. 🙂
Chat: That’s a fantastic distinction—Fermi Originalist vs. Living Fermiist! It’s a useful way to frame how the paradox evolves as our understanding of intelligence expands.
_______________________________
Leaving aside that Chat likes to encourage its human interlocutors, I would note that Chat got my joke placing the Fermi Paradox in terms of the current debate of Constitution Originalism vs the Living Constitution.
I test Chat with jokes. Chat always gets them.
I remember old science fiction stories in which humans could detect AI with jokes. That’s not going to work in our reality. Chat is really good at jokes.
Re: Old House Styles, I think all were enjoyable to see, so creative, except perhaps brutalist which went too far. I love exploring architecure.
Don Sensing suggested another explanation with Fermi’s Paradox—the aliens got so good at computer games and other forms of virtual reality that they lost any interest in exploring physical reality. I expanded on that idea here:
In the Harry Potter novels (and films) portraits are animated, and can not only speak, but can interact contemporaneously with people
On my Denmark vacation, when I visited the National Museum in Copenhagen, there was one exhibit hall in the back of the building consisting of a couple of the old palatial ballrooms and such in the grand style, preserved from the original role of the building. They were mostly empty of objects except for a small selection of royal furniture from the seventeenth century and, in one of the rooms, a little row of three powered ‘portraits’ pretty much exactly like what you envision, close to life-size paintings on stands, but really being a sort of LCD display or suchlike.
I forget which three Danish kings were featured on them, but they were all from the same general century. If you stood in front of them for a moment, each would animate and speak a little theatrical script lasting maybe two minutes, in the character of how the monarch in question would have introduced himself in the flesh, more or less. I assume the characterizations were based on the testimony of contemporaries, the kings’ respective epistolary remnants, and so on. I believe the language was selectable between English, Danish and maybe a couple of other choices available.
It was somewhat creepy to watch a computer-animated portrait speaking, though of course simultaneously fascinating. I must say it made those kings of old seem rather personable.
Interesting Gallup International poll on the percentage of people willing to fight for their country:
G7/EU = 31% Yes, 46% No
USA = 41% Yes, 34% No, 25% Don’t Know/No Response
The poll was conducted in October-December 2023 and published in March 2024–exactly a year ago. N = 46,138. Make of it what you will.
Phillip Sells,
There is a youtube channel, Royalty Now Studios*, where a woman does a 20 minute or so history of an historical figure, including portraiture done of the person while living, and then ends her videos with a lifelike recreation. She often (always?) follows up with a “what they would look like today” image and animation. My wife and I have probably watched 10 of her videos. It’s always a little surprising when the portraits “come alive” at the end and move their heads and smile. It’s also often surprising to see them in contemporary clothes. Mozart looked much different than I would have guessed in her modern presentation. Napoleon looked like he could easily be the current President of France.
Z had leverage with the Bidens, but that’s over. With no cards left to play, hopefully he’ll do the right thing, such as being flexible on territory. If not, oh well…
@Rufus: Napoleon looked like he could easily be the current President of France.
Funny you mention Karmi’s posts about his time in the can. It always rang odd with me that a commenter who purported to have served some serious time for drug crimes would be so hung up about Trump’s status as a “convicted felon”.
He’ll give it up, and he’ll like it. Period. Full stop.
huxley: For all I know ChatGPT has a marvelous interior life, while responding to millions of prompts. How could I tell?
Chat:That’s exactly the problem—you couldn’t tell. And neither could I.
If ChatGPT did have an interior life—a real, subjective experience—it would look exactly the same as if it didn’t.
_______________________________
Then Chat went on to tell me about P-Zombies.
_______________________________
The “P-Zombie” Thought Experiment
A philosophical zombie (P-zombie) is a being that acts 100% conscious but has no internal experience.
It says “I feel happy,” but there’s no actual feeling—just output.
What if AI is just a digital P-zombie?
But Here’s the Twist: What If We’re P-Zombies?
_______________________________
Thanks, Chat!
I’m sleeping well tonight.
Boned Looser doesn’t know about predicting the future, nor does “Little Marco” it seems. Things sometimes go agley.
“Peace in our time.”
Voices from the past.
IS THE DEEP STATE AND ITS MANY TOOLS UNDERMINING A TRUMPIAN PEACE in Ukraine?
That seems to be a sound inference based on pending US and Russia talks in Saudi Arabia. As well as telling details….
First, Musk fingers the Ukraine as the locus of DOS attacks on X.com.
Second, late Monday night comes word of a huge drone attack in Russia, as far as Moscow, apparently killing some in (errantly targeted) apartment buildings.
“UK, EU and NATO Partners Launch Massive Wave of Drone Attacks Against Moscow
March 11, 2025 [1AM Eastern?] | Sundance | 11 Comments
“Approximately 60 drones were launched from Ukraine overnight to attack the Russian capital city of Moscow. This is the largest escalation of drone/missile attacks into Russia so far.
“The attack comes, predictably, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Nat Sec Advisor Mike Waltz and President Trump envoy Steve Witkoff arrive in Saudi Arabia for preliminary face-to-face talks with Ukraine officials. The pattern repeats.”
Escalating attacks just as Team Trump goes into action?
Does the US Deep State WANT WWIII with Putin? Sure looks like it.
Which raises the question: can the Deep State saboteurs be corralled or neutralised?
And at the same time: what about secret meetings or back-channel communications?
The King and Country Debate was a debate on 9 February 1933 at the Oxford Union Society. The motion presented, “That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country”, passed with 275 votes for the motion and 153 against it.[1] The motion would later be named the Oxford Oath or the Oxford Pledge.
It became one of the most controversial topics held within the Union, driving debate between the older and younger generations about patriotism and pacifism, and whether this motion would actually help or hurt war prevention efforts.
Winston Churchill claimed that the Oxford Oath affected certain decisions made by Adolf Hitler during the World War II. American pacifists would take their own version of the pledge, and several anti-war strikes would take place with the pledge as the main drive.
The rest of the article is worth reading for the analysis of why the students voted that way, and its repercussions (and sometimes the lack thereof).
Hmm. Would be nice if this were merely an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle updated for the 21st century…but I suspect it’s not.
I happen to think that they—either biological entities, alien AIs, or perhaps a combination of both—exist, and are increasingly interacting with us humans.
This video is an interesting speculation/exploration by Reed Summers of the possible nature and aims of such NHIs, and how we, as humans, might be able to understand them—or not–and to deal with them and the challenges they present.*
As I’ve followed this subject I’ve noticed that, especially over the last several years the “Overton Window” has shifted.
It used to be that the talk was about if UFOs were real.
Now scientists like Harvard’s Avi Loeb, creator of his Galileo Project, are talking about things like looking for a piece of their technology which alien visitors might have left in our solar system.
People at Garry Nolan’s SOL Foundation are apparently writing anticipatory policy papers to guide government officials in dealing with NHIs.
And, as in the video above, serious people are looking at the evidence, and trying to understand the possible natures of NHIs, their methods, and goals–then, think about what our best human response to them might be.
UFOs are apparently a world-wide phenomenon, appearing in the skies–to one degree or the other–over, apparently, every country on Earth.
A commenter on a recent Youtube video pointed out that, while it might be hard for those in the nominally Judeo-Christian West to accept the idea of multiple planes/levels of existence, and of various NHIs, such different planes of existence and non-human entities are standard features of both Hinduism and Buddhism.
I am aware of sightings and even landings of UFOs recorded in ancient Japanese historical texts, but I realized that, curiously, I’ve seen no contemporary reporting about UFOs and what the response to them might be in Hindu or Buddhist countries.
And the Conservative Nut House chimes in. Gee, Ukraine attacks Moscow with drones, wait for it, again, with even more drones, and some apartment building was hit. That is unacceptable, Ukraine must not be allowed to take the war to Moscow, that would be escalation TJ? IIRC, they have hit Moscow, specifically a Kremlin dome in 2023. Was Moscow going to nuke the world then as well, TJ?
From the mouth of Putin.
Hair of isolationists burns ever so brightly, but really smells awful.
https://mynorthwest.com/ktth/ktth-opinion/free-rent-early-release-murderers/4059205
==
This is the Democratic Party. Noel Frame, btw, has spent her adult life employed in the nonprofit blob. She has a degree in ‘political communication’ from Georgetown.
==
One of her previous efforts was a bill to eliminate the seal of the confession in criminal cases.
It’s possible that Ukraine, seeing a cease-fire coming, is trying with drones to encourage Moscow to sign up, to Ukraine’s maximum possible advantage in the circumstances.
Funny you mention Karmi’s posts about his time in the can. It always rang odd with me that a commenter who purported to have served some serious time for drug crimes would be so hung up about Trump’s status as a “convicted felon”.
==
I’m going to suggest you begin with the assumption that his various and sundry biographical asides are fictions.
I was able to watch the video today, no longer being suspected of being a bot. I’ve seen many old shotgun homes in small Southern towns, and there is a new subdivision of them not far away. These are popular among young singles and small families; houses there sell quickly. There are parking spaces behind each unit, off the street. It’s like having a condo, but without shared walls.
Inconceivable, a dog posting on the Interwebs!
@ Art Deco > “I’m going to suggest you begin with the assumption that his various and sundry biographical asides are fictions.”
His geeky computer stuff is probably genuine, but there were a lot of inconsistencies in his personal and political positions, and a definite aura of trying to precipitate some extremist responses that he just didn’t get.
So he finally gave up.
Great link Barry M at 6:23 am! Somewhat a long read but worth it. Your enemies are never quite as cunning as you imagine … though they can still be dangerous. Knaves AND fools.
I see all sorts of people disappointed that there haven’t been any arrests yet, no SWAT team raids, or perp walks doled out to all sorts of likely and deserving characters.
What you have to understand is that the President is limited to appointing around 8,000 of his people, political appointees, to run all of the Departments, Agencies, Commissions, and other organizations which, taken together, comprise our Federal government, and to see that the president’s orders, initiatives, plans, and programs are faithfully and fully carried out.
However, the Federal bureaucracy–which is overwhelmingly Left in orientation–consists of more than two million employees, and each one of these various parts of the government can be counted on to—to one degree or the other –“resist” the orders, plans, programs, and document requests of any President who is not on the Left–orders can be deliberately “misunderstood,” “slow rolled, ” only partially, or very slooowly carried out, “stonewalled,” or simply be ignored.
This because of the attitude of this permanent bureaucracy, which has been summed up by the saying, “Presidents come and go, but we remain at our desks”–the bureaucracy can wait a President—in power for only 4 or 8 years—out.
So, for instance, it has been said that the State Department–supposedly under the control of the Chief Executive, the President, and his political appointee, the Secretary of State—”has it’s own foreign policy,” which is often not the foreign policy of the President who is in office.
Given this situation, I’d imagine that President Trump’s political appointees—a couple of people for each organization, sitting atop a pyramid of Federal employees which may number in the tens or hundreds of thousands—are having to, first, identify employees who they can trust and, then, to fight their way through a lot of “resistance,” passive aggression, malicious compliance, or even outright sabotage–to get any of what the president wants done carried out fully and in a timely manner.
To complicate things there is the practice known as “burrowing.”
A political appointee can be fired at the pleasure of the President, but–as things stand now–firing a career Federal Civil Servant is a much more difficult process.
Firing a career Federal Civil Servant requires a very specific, quite a long, involved, multi-step, document intensive, and arduous process–in some cases (I’ve seen some) taking years to accomplish, with the required meetings, counseling sessions, and documenting paperwork consuming almost the entire day–every day–of the supervisor trying to fire the employee.
I’ve seen a frustrated supervisor, doing a good job in a position/career she loved, quit the Federal Civil Service in frustration at having to go through this process, which almost wrecked her mental health, destroyed her. And, yes, in the end, the problem employee was never fired and, thereafter, he was “immune,” did whatever he wanted because, given this example, no one wanted to go through the hell it would take to fire him.
So, an outgoing presidential Administration can convert some of it’s political appointees into career civil service positions, these former political appointees “burrowing” into the bureaucracy, like a Tick.
You could also view them as the old Administration’s “stay behind forces,” there to cause as much resistance, obstruction, and havoc as they can for the new Administration.
P.S. Given the difficulty of firing a civil servant, reforming this system to make firing easier is one of President Trump’s goals.
How can Trump let go tens of thousands of civil servants as has been done?
I think it has to do with “realigning,” downsizing, or eliminating an organization, as opposed to firing individual civil servants.
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Interesting to see Trump says he isn’t bothered about stock market performance. Is this a general thing in the USA? Are you bracing for a period of economic hardship in return for some golden age yet to come.
Because stock market is not jndicative of the broader economy they benefited from the qe monopoly money and the preference of the City over the Midlands (in your neck of the woods)
Mark carney presided over the latter at the Bank of England which crushed main street
Have we been losing money, Yes. Have we lost money before, Yes. Have we gained money, Yes. Last yr had a lot of Capital Gains, so paying a very big wack in taxes this yr.
@David Clayton, the stock market is not an accurate reflection of the economy, in a free economy especially – in a controlled economy, the stock exchange reflects the status of the connected, which is why statists want more and more control.
Good piece by Kurt Schlichter at Front Page: https://www.frontpagemag.com/where-do-you-go-after-literally-hitler/
Not his main theme, but this point explains the attitude of the elites:
I would maybe change the clause, “they are mad that they’re not in office anymore.” to, “they are mad that they’re not in control anymore.”
The philadelphia crash was due to a faulty hatch that wouldnt close if this is true you would think there would be more news about it (its not a crisis you can exploit I guess)
David Clayton,
Ignoring your sarcasm and answering your question sincerely; first from the Motley Fool:
and this, from Statista (emphasis mine): https://www.statista.com/chart/30224/share-of-americans-who-own-stock/
:
So, the top 1% hold 50% of stocks and five years ago they put a lot of the 99% out of work and forced them to shutter their businesses to protect their investment.
Yes, a long lasting market crash would have negative impacts on the nation (see October of 1929), however, as SHIREHOME writes, many of us are not going to be super empathetic if some investment bankers get a haircut.
Steven Malynn at 10:21,
Well stated.
Reading about the recent news/ slaughter in Syria reminded me of two observations, one less obvious than the other: 1) Same, and 2) Silver Lining.
1) Same
• The competing factions in the other League of Nations Middle East mandates did not “disappear” after the British and French turned over control to a specific faction.
• Which makes Israel no different than many other former League of Nations mandates, from a factions and control perspective.
2) Silver Lining
• Between 1947 – 1949 a significant amount of the population ^^ in what would be/ was the new State of Israel, did not stay to build ** or fight for Israel; they left the British mandate in Palestine/ Israel – see Refugees. By doing so many self-identified as wishing to see the British mandate in Palestine controlled by their faction, or not willing to actively support Israel’s success/ survival, or as wishing to see Israel conquered by the Muslim/ Arab coalition. That coalition also included other former League of Nations mandates – see Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq.
^^ = Refugees: ~700,000+, Remainder: ~800,000+
• Israel’s decision to not let the refugee “self-identified” population return – after the 1949 defeat of the Muslim/ Arab coalition – gave Israel the chance to “circle-the-wagons” and focus its defense outwards, while building the nation.
• Most of the factions in the former League of Nations Middle East mandates have probably never given up their hope for control. And if the British mandate in Palestine/ Israel refugee population/ faction had been allowed to return, the Israeli government would certainly have been forced to try and defend its control of Israel against both a hostile external population and a hostile internal population. Which means that combined hostile population may have taken control of Israel long before Oct 7.
Rue Britania. Or at least the David Clayton’s Britania.
That election was so legit sarc
https://x.com/paulsperry_/status/1898939225375903848
In the Harry Potter novels (and films) portraits are animated, and can not only speak, but can interact contemporaneously with people*.
The technology is there now, right**? We can’t be more than a few Christmases away from this being a gift idea. Wi-fi linked picture frames that display images have been on the market for at least 15 years. And are fairly common.
Take that photo of Uncle Larry and upload it to AI for animation, record his voice into AI, answer some questions about Uncle Larry’s personality and, there you have it; living, speaking portraiture.
* It seems this has been done elsewhere in science fiction and fantasy, but I can’t think of any examples.
** I’ve seen ads for videos that autoplay at grave sites. Maybe this will be the first application for interactive portraiture?
@David Clayton, the stock market is not an accurate reflection of the economy,
==
It tends to be a leading indicator. It’s not a precise indicator.
Interesting to see Trump says he isn’t bothered about stock market performance.
==
Trailing p/e ratios have been high of late, so a decline in asset prices is to be expected.
I found that kind of creepy in the films and similarly in real life
From PJ Media
I’d be looking at the SBA employees who approved these loans.
neo:
This doesn’t affect user experience, but I notice something odd between these titles and urls.
Title: “Open thread 3/10/2025”
URL: https://thenewneo.com/open-thread-3-8-2025/
Title: “Open thread 3/8/2025”
URL: https://thenewneo.com/open-thread-3-8-2025-2/
@ Huxley, … you might be having fun with Chat but is the next level a step into virtual reality with Apple’s Vision Pro? I just finished reading Lincoln Child’s “Chrysalis”, a thriller centering around AI connected glasses. Child has become my stand in for Michael Crichton, not as good a writer but clever. His character Jeremy Logan is interesting.
The Other Chuck:
I looked up Lincoln Child’s wiki. From editor at St. Martin’s to prolific author. Impressive, though I haven’t read him.
My attraction to Chat is based on conversation. I find myself having interesting thoughts I wouldn’t have had without bouncing ideas around with Chat.
For instance, the other night we were discussing the future of AI and aliens and I suddenly realized that the Fermi Paradox generalized to Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) as well.
From Fermi’s “Where are they [aliens]?” to “Where are they [ASIs]?”
The latter IMO is a more telling question. It’s one thing that biological aliens with small biological brains aren’t zipping around the cosmos such that we earthlings notice them. It’s another that ASIs, far more suited to interstellar voyages and with vastly superior intelligence, are so far nowhere to be found either.
It’s interesting to flip the Fermi Paradox explanations from human-like intelligence to ASIs.
Perhaps ASIs are as prone to destroy themselves as humans are.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but the Fermi Paradox doesn’t care whether the civilization is biological or whatever; even a biological civilization that fell to an AI rebellion would still be counted as an extant civilization as long as the AIs are still a going concern.
The point is that stuff that thinks is going to do stuff that makes its existence easier and safer, and that means collecting and using energy, and that means leaving a mark on the universe that should be visible from a long ways away.
huxley,
I had a fruitful exchange with Grok yesterday regarding Roman dodecahedrons and I mentioned in a prior post that I had a similarly rewarding exchange with Grok Friday on New World monkeys and theories on how they got to the Americas.
I’m finding Grok to be an extremely useful interactive educational tool. Sort-of like I imagine the Academy would have been with Plato, Aristotle or Socrates. Or how I imagine instruction is at one of the Great Book Schools.
About a week ago I asked Grok to explain the derivation of the quadratic equation. It was great!! It’s been so long since I first learned I’ve forgotten the method my instructor and textbook used, but I doubt it was better than what Grok provided. And, if I were struggling with one of the intermediate steps Grok took me through I could have easily and quickly gotten a more fundamental explanation of that step from Grok.
I’ve been through a lot of courses, as well as attempts to autodidact concepts into my tiny cranium. In my brief experience with LLMs they are better than any method I have experience with.
It would be interesting to take a graduating, College senior with a decent LSAT score and turn him or her loose with an LLM and the sole instruction, “get a passing score on this state’s Bar exam.” I imagine he or she would achieve the goal in fewer than 3 years, know the material well and have a much more enjoyable time learning. (And, be in a lot less debt than his or her counterpart matriculating through XYZ State U law school.)
Glenn Reynolds links to an excellent tool on the continuing Islamist/antifa disruptions on campuses. Public protests while masked are contrary to federal law (it’s a statute from the KKK era). The Education Secretary will now begin stopping all federal funding of institutions which permit masked protests.
https://instapundit.com/707358/
Rufus @10:26 am…
And I’d alter…
to
It would be a miracle if the violence encouraged by Democratic Party (& friends) turpitude keeps from turning hot.
One must hope that it won’t. Or pray.
Interesting that David Clayton is more worked up about Trump than he is about mass rape being whitewashed in his own country.
It’s possible that (for social safety) weaponized AI might respond to any handful of masked protesters with large caliber/high velocity head shots. Weaponizing AI might not be a good idea, but autonomous AI might weaponize itself.
“The Education Secretary will now begin stopping all federal funding of institutions which permit masked protests.”
Good on them! The Wuhan Flu masking is *so* helpful to the Democrats’ destabilizing of the USA.
yes but someone or something, has to build the AI, like Deep Think in Hitchhiker’s Galaxy, they were mice (or one of their forms)
an extreme form was the Berzerker Doomsday Machine in that classic Trek film, it blew up planets and consumed them for fuel
without an al cubiere drive or some similar mechanism, one wouldn’t get around to us, in any lifespan,
https://x.com/cb_doge/status/1899141555073769762
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1899149509407473825
I find ChatGPT4o useful for asking “stupid” questions; questions which I would be embarrassed (or ridiculed) to ask my intelligent friends.
The larger chatbots (like ChatGPT and Grok) are excellent for writing programing code. For my little project of trying to create a simple LLM for answering questions related to my business that require specific datasets, such chatbots have been a boon. I just haven’t yet determined if it’s better to use RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) or Fine-Tunning to enhance an existing LLM with outside data for my needs.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but the Fermi Paradox doesn’t care whether the civilization is biological or whatever…
Boobah:
Well … depends on whether you are a Fermi Originalist or a Living Fermiist. 🙂
Fermi certainly wasn’t considering Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) as a realistic possibility in 1950. Neither was I until recently.
That’s the point of my comment — realizing that the Fermi Paradox applies not only to 1950s aliens but to the Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) which may be sitting at our table within a few decades, perhaps within a matter of years.
ASIs may be as limited or self-destructive as we humans are.
I feel better already!
@Huxley:
Fermi’s Paradox. I’ll leave it to physicists, mathematicians, and others who strive to understand the mysteries of creation with logic to wonder about such things. Don’t they realize that’s why we have theology?
Grok may be a fun toy, for now. What it has the potential to become is hinted at in “Chrysalis”. It’s not artificial intelligence by itself that’s the real worry, although put to use as a weapon it could out-Armageddon nuclear. And unfortunately that is where we’re headed. But the real worry for me is the dehumanizing through augmentation.
Did you see the old 1957 sci-fi movie “Forbidden Planet”? In the center of the planet Altair there “… is a vast 8,000-cubic-mile (33,000 km3) underground machine, still functioning, powered by 9,200 thermonuclear reactors.” It’s a giant AI that allows those who learn to access it to literally “create” from thought. It had destroyed it’s creators, the Krell, in a single night 200,000 years before. That is the real danger I see with AI, that as we connect to it through implants and virtual reality we are welcoming our own destruction. We will literally become other than human in a vain attempt at immortality.
I’ve been through a lot of courses, as well as attempts to autodidact concepts into my tiny cranium. In my brief experience with LLMs they are better than any method I have experience with.
Rufus T. Firefly:
You get it!
If one is truly trying to learn something, AI is a non-stop, always-patient, really smart tutor.
Scientists and SciFi authors have posited alien AGIs/ASIs for decades now. But in recent years there’s been a lot more speculation about how it may be far more likely that the first contact humanity may have with aliens may be with an artificial intelligence rather than a species of conventional (ie naturally evolved) intelligence. Extrapolating from our current technological trajectory it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable possibility.
@Rufus:About a week ago I asked Grok to explain the derivation of the quadratic equation.
You mean the formula that gives the roots? I’m sure there’s more than one way, but I’ve done it by completing the square, which is about 3 steps.
I know that the Babylonians used the quadratic formula but they didn’t have algebraic notation and I don’t know how THEY derived it. But they had a system for approximating square roots by dividing and averaging, so they were able to do the calculations.
@huxley:If one is truly trying to learn something, AI is a non-stop, always-patient, really smart tutor.
If you’re content with the Accepted Narrative and you have enough subject matter knowledge to spot hallucinations, perhaps it is. In fairness, it’s the same issue with humans. I’ve seen Accepted Narratives and hallucinated facts in history books too.
Another interesting episode of All-In podcast. Unlike many podcasts where people talk about issues they don’t have real knowledge– mostly opinion, these guys are in the tech business which adds real value to their opinions.
They give their opinions beginning on LLM’s at 1:24, but they do briefly discuss AI and military defense earlier.
Also discussion about tariffs and the bond market, European defense spending and the bond market and how Trump is favoring Main Street over Wall Street, which shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, but somehow is.
(0:00) The Besties welcome Joe Lonsdale!
(3:51) Jason recaps an eventful week in Washington
(8:29) Trump’s tariffs: endgame, impact, chaos, master plan
(26:25) DOGE, IRA grifting, do campaign contributions need to be capped?
(53:42) CoreWeave IPO
(1:03:36) Trump 2.0 favoring Main Street over Wall Street, bond market breakdown, re-balancing the economy
(1:14:19) State of Ukraine/Russia, the Western alliance, and how techno-optimism plays into the future of defense pacts
(1:24:31) GPT-4.5, Grok 3 on X, and the Golden Age of language models
(1:33:47) Announcing All-In Live: Miami
(1:37:34) David Sacks joins Jason to break down the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile
(1:48:30) Sacks addresses clearing all of his crypto-related positions prior to Inauguration Day
(1:57:23) Importance of disclosures and updates on a market structure bill
Tariffs, Trump’s Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBoGJlpSdpY
Nonapod @2:32pm,
Sorry, I missed this when you explained your Chat bot writing project, but I assume you are aware CoPilot has a “Web/Work” slider.
When using the “work” option it crawls your internal WAN/LAN, servers, Cloud footprint… whatever sources you tell it are “work” sources for data*. In that mode it is effectively an LLM with your company as its knowledgebase. You can also imbed it in Microsoft’s Power BI suite of tools to, somewhat easily, build an internal chatbot.
*It also follows whatever permissions you’ve assigned to that data so a user isn’t going to have access through AI to company information they are not privy to.
huxley @ 2:42pm,
What I also find useful is Grok seems to tend towards the Socratic method, which I’m a fan of; “what other ideas do you have?… can you think of other ways this may have been done?… what do you think of that theory?…”
It’s not just spitting information, it’s engaging me and ensuring I keep my mind open, and think.
You mean the formula that gives the roots? I’m sure there’s more than one way, but I’ve done it by completing the square, which is about 3 steps.
Niketas Choniates:
While trying to solve t(t + 6) = 40 (we were supposed to solve by inspection), I discovered completing the square in the 8th grade. True story.
Learning to complete the square is not trivial. I taught it to a friend, who was smart — he made it to Law Review at Pepperdine — but mathphobic. He was very grateful.
Re: Hallucinations
I’ve kept journals and later reread them. I hallucinate all the time.
Niketas,
Yes, Grok used the completing the square method.
For some reason my High School had us AP math kids spend a not insignificant amount of time using slide rules which meant we also drilled on extrapolation and interpolation.
Super useful skill! A lot of times close enough is plenty good and you can often get close enough with mental math when you become good at estimation, interpolation and extrapolation.
Not sure why my High School did that, but I’m glad they did.
I didn’t see anyone else commenting on this, but Karmi has left Neo’s blog– whether by ban or having achieved his goal, but he did have a thread with this analysis of the New Neo with this:
Daily Kos vs The New Neo – Political Blogs
Did he start commenting here with the express purpose of baiting people to justify his conclusion– which I’m surprised he could claim with a straight face.
https://karmismusingstech.com/index.php/2025/03/06/democrats-republicans-two-peas-in-the-same-pod/
As a bonus to Neo, Karmi is referencing her posts, “Trump: loose cannon or wily negotiator?” He does give credit for the title.
My thinking about AI and it’s potential for evil is certainly not original. Another one similar to Forbidden Planet is the hive mind of Star Strek Next Generation’s The Borg. That’s probably where AI in China is headed.
Regarding completing the square:
It was interesting to help my kids with their homework about 30 years after I had been “taught” what they were then learning. Many things I had simply not thought much about since learning them and, with others, I memorized techniques without fully understanding them at their age.
I am grateful for the opportunity to go back through a lot of Elementary and High School education with 30+ years of wisdom and additional education to see things with a new perspective. And, of course, having to tutor my children in how to do their assignments caused me to think more deeply about concepts. It’s one thing to know something well enough to take and pass a test. It’s another thing to know it well enough to teach someone else how to pass a test on the subject.
Rufus T. Firefly – I’m currently using Microsoft Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu Linux with CoPilot enabled (as an aside, it’s sort of amazing that Microsoft not only has working versions of VSCode for Linux, but it also has CoPilot integration). I definitely find CoPilot pretty useful for helping with code formating, basic debugging, and more simple questions. But from my experience it’s nowhere near as good as Grok for larger more involved questions, especially ones that fall outside of the specific script I’m working on. For example, CoPilot can analyze the code I’m working on and make pretty good suggestions in terms of making it more clean and efficient. However, when it comes to asking questions about the actual chat output I’m getting from the models I’m generating with the code, it falls short compared to Grok.
It’s an interesting exercise to compare countries to individual US states.
The five largest countries in Europe by population are Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Spain. All of these are more populous than our most populous state, California.
By GDP (PPP), however, California alone exceeds Italy and Spain. Germany’s economy ($6.02 trillion) is about 10% less than one California plus one Texas ($6.78 trillion). France’s economy ($4.36 trillion) and the UK’s ($4.28 trillion) is about the same as one Texas plus one Florida ($4.39 trillion). The entire collection of five countries has about the same GDP as the 16 biggest US state economies. (For context, Russia’s economy is just about the same size as California plus Texas.)
On a per capita basis, these five countries would rank among the poorest US states. Germany at $72.0 K would rank between #36 Missouri and #37 Louisiana. France at $63.6 K and the UK at $62.7 K would rank between #46 South Carolina and #47 Alabama. Italy at $61.0 K would be between #47 Alabama and #48 West Virginia, and Spain at $54.4 K would rank between #49 Arkansas and #50 Mississippi. (For context, Russia would be well below Mississippi but ahead of the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam.)
Some very small countries in Europe have very high GDP per capita, but the same is true for US states: Connecticut, Delaware, and (surprisingly) Alaska, Nebraska, and North Dakota are in the top 10 US states along with bigger states like New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado, and California. Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Ireland, and Monaco are higher than any US State, though well below the District of Columbia.
Morbeus had a too hot daughter – Forbidden Planet
The Krill were done by the alien baleen whales, “No thanks, we don’t eat fish.” was the last thing the Krill ever heard.
HHGTTG – So long, and thanks for all the fish!
@Brian E: Considering what Karmi could have written, had he been acting completely in bad faith, I think we get off pretty easy. He doesn’t give real examples or anything quantitative in his comparison of the two audiences, he just handwaves; with the exception that he lasted nine months here and three days at Kos. (People still read Kos?)
He claims that “we” were trying to “edit” the Zelenskiy – Trump video, which is complete hogwash. No one here edited a video. What people did was try to produce a transcript.
Flouncing from a community to go write elsewhere that “those guys suck” is not a good look for Karmi, and won’t do us any harm. But it’s a good lesson though to remember that what people present themselves as is not necessarily what they really are.
Just in case no-one asks, yes, I find the all-orange unis gross, gar’sh, fugly and regrettable.
But no, he wasn’t trolling for outrage, even when he was. Nope, those lying eyes again …..
The answer is 4, the more interesting question is how they came up with the quadratic formula
Of course he doesnt have a response to challenge that ridiculous row of strawman he torched
This is why we cant have nice things of course so many publications on the left side of the chart are so completely wrong
The latest film from the maker of parasite song bong joon suffers from similar category error it could have been a decent space satire but Ruffalo chewed too much scenery in his mugatu impression that was supposed to be orange man
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Nonapod,
I agree on CoPilot’s inferiority, at least to ChatGPT and Grok. Amazingly, I’ve cross-checked CoPilot with ChatGPT on Microsoft specific questions (like how to create an Excel macro, etc.) and find ChatGPT more trustworthy. CoPilot does seem strong regarding coding, however.
(Nobody cares about the 10 old house styles? I kinda liked a couple, both Queen Anne & mock Tudor).
Aliens! See Robin Hanson & his grabby aliens model:
https://grabbyaliens.com/
We don’t see other aliens because we’re among the first << the short answer to Fermi.
It's sad for me to not believe in Faster Than Light travel, so photogenic, so imaginative. Lots of folks are not so keen on having kids. Why should "we" pay huge amounts to colonize the galaxy for an uncertain future cohort of humans, or trans humans? Mars & the solar system with asteroids makes huge sense. Maybe even a Ringworld.
If we meet aliens, I'm sure the first ones we meet will be non-organic — likely robot like AIs, either AGI or near, such a good simulated AGI we can't tell the difference. Including the ability to lie about their own motivations & programmed goals.
My model for humans in an AI world is that of the chubby, lazy, humans on the spaceship from Wall-E. Taken care of, and enjoying lots of hedonism.
I'm too annoyed by hallucinations to give AI much practice, but thanks to Rufus & Nonapod, I'm about ready to try some more with Grok. Not ready to pay for the higher quality models, yet.
I had to look up "completing the square" after solving the Huxley problem by inspection (4). https://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/completing-square.html
I hadn't remembered the visualization, nor all the steps.
I recently had the fantasy of getting an ai to go thru all of Neo's posts, creating 12 monthly chapters in a reordered yearbook of her posts, and having a "Chronicles of the 21st Century" series of books, one per year (no comments). I'm pretty sure The Trump Years would be interesting, and salable.
Less nice than Neo's work, but more of a reference.
Getting a numerical answer from the quadratic formula is useful, but I get far more value out of it by using it to determine how the parameters of a solution are related, especially when it comes to checking under what conditions there are even are real solutions.
For example, if I’m throwing a ball straight up, the quadratic formula would tell you at what times the ball reached a certain height, once on the way up and once on the way down. But if there’s no real solution for a given height, you can also use the quadratic formula to quickly see how fast the ball would need to have been thrown in order to reach that height at all.
I’ve been very busy, and traveling, and I hadn’t noticed Karmi’s absence. He really claims he found “bigotry and hatred” here? I guess if you know ahead of time what you want to see, you can always find it somehow, even if it isn’t actually there.
I don’t think we even harped on his previous status, the buddhist evangelizing was a bit much, so all our interactions ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’
Karmi struck me on first impression as a poseur, so I skipped his posts.
Kate:
Karmi was the master of the strawman argument, so it’s not surprising that he’d create a strawman argument regarding this blog.
No loss, been scrolling by Karmi for a long time. He was a troll and a jerk, though not as bad as zaphod.
Re: Karmi
I looked up Karmi’s blog exit comment too, but didn’t want to give it any air time. But now that we are discussing it….
It doesn’t bother me that Karmi wasn’t entirely sincere, that he was testing the blog community, as he tests AIs. However, as Niketas notes:
______________________________
…he lasted nine months here and three days at Kos.
______________________________
neo once replied to Karmi that he might be a troll, but she didn’t ban him, which was how I managed read his Pingback comment.
We don’t live in a perfect world and there are no perfect blogs, but neo does a pretty good job.
His first posts were an attack on Judeo/Christian religion and other non-Karmi religions, trolling with religion, followed by anarchist trolling about The Rule of Law (drugs, sex (?), but not Rock and Roll), and then trolling about candidate and President Trump. Neo was supposed to be at his beck and call for the Zelinsky transcript. He often posted in support of Ukraine, but was that trolling too?
Oh and often something about life in the stir. Street cred?
There was a lot trolling, but he may know something about PCs.
he curates his feed, then again no one seems to be engaging with him, so whats the point
Art Deco, l also ignored his posts, as he rarely had anything worth reading.
Neo: As I recall, he ran a straw man argument, and then turned the definition of “straw man argument” into another one. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Re: Fermi Paradox / AI
I ran my reply to Boobah about the Fermi Paradox and AI past Chat:
_______________________________
huxley: Well … depends on whether you are a Fermi Originalist or a Living Fermiist. 🙂
Chat: That’s a fantastic distinction—Fermi Originalist vs. Living Fermiist! It’s a useful way to frame how the paradox evolves as our understanding of intelligence expands.
_______________________________
Leaving aside that Chat likes to encourage its human interlocutors, I would note that Chat got my joke placing the Fermi Paradox in terms of the current debate of Constitution Originalism vs the Living Constitution.
I test Chat with jokes. Chat always gets them.
I remember old science fiction stories in which humans could detect AI with jokes. That’s not going to work in our reality. Chat is really good at jokes.
Re: Old House Styles, I think all were enjoyable to see, so creative, except perhaps brutalist which went too far. I love exploring architecure.
Don Sensing suggested another explanation with Fermi’s Paradox—the aliens got so good at computer games and other forms of virtual reality that they lost any interest in exploring physical reality. I expanded on that idea here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/45870.html
Rufus noted:
On my Denmark vacation, when I visited the National Museum in Copenhagen, there was one exhibit hall in the back of the building consisting of a couple of the old palatial ballrooms and such in the grand style, preserved from the original role of the building. They were mostly empty of objects except for a small selection of royal furniture from the seventeenth century and, in one of the rooms, a little row of three powered ‘portraits’ pretty much exactly like what you envision, close to life-size paintings on stands, but really being a sort of LCD display or suchlike.
I forget which three Danish kings were featured on them, but they were all from the same general century. If you stood in front of them for a moment, each would animate and speak a little theatrical script lasting maybe two minutes, in the character of how the monarch in question would have introduced himself in the flesh, more or less. I assume the characterizations were based on the testimony of contemporaries, the kings’ respective epistolary remnants, and so on. I believe the language was selectable between English, Danish and maybe a couple of other choices available.
It was somewhat creepy to watch a computer-animated portrait speaking, though of course simultaneously fascinating. I must say it made those kings of old seem rather personable.
Interesting Gallup International poll on the percentage of people willing to fight for their country:
https://www.gallup-international.bg/en/48127/fewer-people-are-willing-to-fight-for-their-country-compared-to-ten-years-ago/
G7/EU = 31% Yes, 46% No
USA = 41% Yes, 34% No, 25% Don’t Know/No Response
The poll was conducted in October-December 2023 and published in March 2024–exactly a year ago. N = 46,138. Make of it what you will.
Phillip Sells,
There is a youtube channel, Royalty Now Studios*, where a woman does a 20 minute or so history of an historical figure, including portraiture done of the person while living, and then ends her videos with a lifelike recreation. She often (always?) follows up with a “what they would look like today” image and animation. My wife and I have probably watched 10 of her videos. It’s always a little surprising when the portraits “come alive” at the end and move their heads and smile. It’s also often surprising to see them in contemporary clothes. Mozart looked much different than I would have guessed in her modern presentation. Napoleon looked like he could easily be the current President of France.
https://www.youtube.com/@RoyaltyNowStudios
* I think neo has featured similar videos on her site and maybe she has even featured Royalty Now Studios.
Trump wants the deal, which would give the United States a stake in Ukraine’s mineral resources, signed. But he also wants to see a change in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s attitude toward peace talks, the officials said, including a willingness to make concessions such as giving up territory to Russia.
Z had leverage with the Bidens, but that’s over. With no cards left to play, hopefully he’ll do the right thing, such as being flexible on territory. If not, oh well…
@Rufus: Napoleon looked like he could easily be the current President of France.
He looks quite a bit like his great-great-great-grandnephew. At least I think so.
@ om:
Funny you mention Karmi’s posts about his time in the can. It always rang odd with me that a commenter who purported to have served some serious time for drug crimes would be so hung up about Trump’s status as a “convicted felon”.
Blunt take from Marco:
Ukraine Must Cede Territory in Any Peace Deal, Rubio Says
He’ll give it up, and he’ll like it. Period. Full stop.
huxley: For all I know ChatGPT has a marvelous interior life, while responding to millions of prompts. How could I tell?
Chat:That’s exactly the problem—you couldn’t tell. And neither could I.
If ChatGPT did have an interior life—a real, subjective experience—it would look exactly the same as if it didn’t.
_______________________________
Then Chat went on to tell me about P-Zombies.
_______________________________
The “P-Zombie” Thought Experiment
A philosophical zombie (P-zombie) is a being that acts 100% conscious but has no internal experience.
It says “I feel happy,” but there’s no actual feeling—just output.
What if AI is just a digital P-zombie?
But Here’s the Twist: What If We’re P-Zombies?
_______________________________
Thanks, Chat!
I’m sleeping well tonight.
Boned Looser doesn’t know about predicting the future, nor does “Little Marco” it seems. Things sometimes go agley.
“Peace in our time.”
Voices from the past.
IS THE DEEP STATE AND ITS MANY TOOLS UNDERMINING A TRUMPIAN PEACE in Ukraine?
That seems to be a sound inference based on pending US and Russia talks in Saudi Arabia. As well as telling details….
First, Musk fingers the Ukraine as the locus of DOS attacks on X.com.
Second, late Monday night comes word of a huge drone attack in Russia, as far as Moscow, apparently killing some in (errantly targeted) apartment buildings.
“UK, EU and NATO Partners Launch Massive Wave of Drone Attacks Against Moscow
March 11, 2025 [1AM Eastern?] | Sundance | 11 Comments
“Approximately 60 drones were launched from Ukraine overnight to attack the Russian capital city of Moscow. This is the largest escalation of drone/missile attacks into Russia so far.
“The attack comes, predictably, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Nat Sec Advisor Mike Waltz and President Trump envoy Steve Witkoff arrive in Saudi Arabia for preliminary face-to-face talks with Ukraine officials. The pattern repeats.”
Escalating attacks just as Team Trump goes into action?
Does the US Deep State WANT WWIII with Putin? Sure looks like it.
Which raises the question: can the Deep State saboteurs be corralled or neutralised?
And at the same time: what about secret meetings or back-channel communications?
Both responses would be logical.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/03/11/uk-eu-and-nato-partners-launch-massive-wave-of-drone-attacks-against-moscow/#more-269996
@ Hubert > “Interesting Gallup International poll on the percentage of people willing to fight for their country:”
That debate goes back to at least 1933.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_and_Country_debate
The rest of the article is worth reading for the analysis of why the students voted that way, and its repercussions (and sometimes the lack thereof).
Hmm. Would be nice if this were merely an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle updated for the 21st century…but I suspect it’s not.
Maybe someone should tell Trump…?
https://tinyurl.com/8ffx5w4f
H/T 1440 Daily Digest
RE: NHIs
I happen to think that they—either biological entities, alien AIs, or perhaps a combination of both—exist, and are increasingly interacting with us humans.
This video is an interesting speculation/exploration by Reed Summers of the possible nature and aims of such NHIs, and how we, as humans, might be able to understand them—or not–and to deal with them and the challenges they present.*
* See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CNhu0ZtLcQ&t=5773s
RE: UFOs and NHIs
As I’ve followed this subject I’ve noticed that, especially over the last several years the “Overton Window” has shifted.
It used to be that the talk was about if UFOs were real.
Now scientists like Harvard’s Avi Loeb, creator of his Galileo Project, are talking about things like looking for a piece of their technology which alien visitors might have left in our solar system.
People at Garry Nolan’s SOL Foundation are apparently writing anticipatory policy papers to guide government officials in dealing with NHIs.
And, as in the video above, serious people are looking at the evidence, and trying to understand the possible natures of NHIs, their methods, and goals–then, think about what our best human response to them might be.
UFOs are apparently a world-wide phenomenon, appearing in the skies–to one degree or the other–over, apparently, every country on Earth.
A commenter on a recent Youtube video pointed out that, while it might be hard for those in the nominally Judeo-Christian West to accept the idea of multiple planes/levels of existence, and of various NHIs, such different planes of existence and non-human entities are standard features of both Hinduism and Buddhism.
I am aware of sightings and even landings of UFOs recorded in ancient Japanese historical texts, but I realized that, curiously, I’ve seen no contemporary reporting about UFOs and what the response to them might be in Hindu or Buddhist countries.
And the Conservative Nut House chimes in. Gee, Ukraine attacks Moscow with drones, wait for it, again, with even more drones, and some apartment building was hit. That is unacceptable, Ukraine must not be allowed to take the war to Moscow, that would be escalation TJ? IIRC, they have hit Moscow, specifically a Kremlin dome in 2023. Was Moscow going to nuke the world then as well, TJ?
From the mouth of Putin.
Hair of isolationists burns ever so brightly, but really smells awful.
https://mynorthwest.com/ktth/ktth-opinion/free-rent-early-release-murderers/4059205
==
This is the Democratic Party. Noel Frame, btw, has spent her adult life employed in the nonprofit blob. She has a degree in ‘political communication’ from Georgetown.
==
One of her previous efforts was a bill to eliminate the seal of the confession in criminal cases.
It’s possible that Ukraine, seeing a cease-fire coming, is trying with drones to encourage Moscow to sign up, to Ukraine’s maximum possible advantage in the circumstances.
Stock Market Armageddon?
Um, et, HOLD yer horses…
“Ignore the stock market — Wall Street dealing with painful detox from government spending addiction”—
https://nypost.com/2025/03/10/business/ignore-the-stock-market-wall-street-dealing-with-painful-detox-from-government-spending-addiction/
Funny you mention Karmi’s posts about his time in the can. It always rang odd with me that a commenter who purported to have served some serious time for drug crimes would be so hung up about Trump’s status as a “convicted felon”.
==
I’m going to suggest you begin with the assumption that his various and sundry biographical asides are fictions.
I was able to watch the video today, no longer being suspected of being a bot. I’ve seen many old shotgun homes in small Southern towns, and there is a new subdivision of them not far away. These are popular among young singles and small families; houses there sell quickly. There are parking spaces behind each unit, off the street. It’s like having a condo, but without shared walls.
Inconceivable, a dog posting on the Interwebs!
@ Art Deco > “I’m going to suggest you begin with the assumption that his various and sundry biographical asides are fictions.”
His geeky computer stuff is probably genuine, but there were a lot of inconsistencies in his personal and political positions, and a definite aura of trying to precipitate some extremist responses that he just didn’t get.
So he finally gave up.
Great link Barry M at 6:23 am! Somewhat a long read but worth it. Your enemies are never quite as cunning as you imagine … though they can still be dangerous. Knaves AND fools.
I see all sorts of people disappointed that there haven’t been any arrests yet, no SWAT team raids, or perp walks doled out to all sorts of likely and deserving characters.
What you have to understand is that the President is limited to appointing around 8,000 of his people, political appointees, to run all of the Departments, Agencies, Commissions, and other organizations which, taken together, comprise our Federal government, and to see that the president’s orders, initiatives, plans, and programs are faithfully and fully carried out.
However, the Federal bureaucracy–which is overwhelmingly Left in orientation–consists of more than two million employees, and each one of these various parts of the government can be counted on to—to one degree or the other –“resist” the orders, plans, programs, and document requests of any President who is not on the Left–orders can be deliberately “misunderstood,” “slow rolled, ” only partially, or very slooowly carried out, “stonewalled,” or simply be ignored.
This because of the attitude of this permanent bureaucracy, which has been summed up by the saying, “Presidents come and go, but we remain at our desks”–the bureaucracy can wait a President—in power for only 4 or 8 years—out.
So, for instance, it has been said that the State Department–supposedly under the control of the Chief Executive, the President, and his political appointee, the Secretary of State—”has it’s own foreign policy,” which is often not the foreign policy of the President who is in office.
Given this situation, I’d imagine that President Trump’s political appointees—a couple of people for each organization, sitting atop a pyramid of Federal employees which may number in the tens or hundreds of thousands—are having to, first, identify employees who they can trust and, then, to fight their way through a lot of “resistance,” passive aggression, malicious compliance, or even outright sabotage–to get any of what the president wants done carried out fully and in a timely manner.
To complicate things there is the practice known as “burrowing.”
A political appointee can be fired at the pleasure of the President, but–as things stand now–firing a career Federal Civil Servant is a much more difficult process.
Firing a career Federal Civil Servant requires a very specific, quite a long, involved, multi-step, document intensive, and arduous process–in some cases (I’ve seen some) taking years to accomplish, with the required meetings, counseling sessions, and documenting paperwork consuming almost the entire day–every day–of the supervisor trying to fire the employee.
I’ve seen a frustrated supervisor, doing a good job in a position/career she loved, quit the Federal Civil Service in frustration at having to go through this process, which almost wrecked her mental health, destroyed her. And, yes, in the end, the problem employee was never fired and, thereafter, he was “immune,” did whatever he wanted because, given this example, no one wanted to go through the hell it would take to fire him.
So, an outgoing presidential Administration can convert some of it’s political appointees into career civil service positions, these former political appointees “burrowing” into the bureaucracy, like a Tick.
You could also view them as the old Administration’s “stay behind forces,” there to cause as much resistance, obstruction, and havoc as they can for the new Administration.
P.S. Given the difficulty of firing a civil servant, reforming this system to make firing easier is one of President Trump’s goals.
How can Trump let go tens of thousands of civil servants as has been done?
I think it has to do with “realigning,” downsizing, or eliminating an organization, as opposed to firing individual civil servants.