Wednesday Wariness

Good morning from my Hunker-Bunker overlooking the Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains from the hillside of West Seattle. It seems that it is going to be one of those ‘bleh’ days where it will be mostly cloudy with a high of 74° F and the humidity at around 81%. I can tell, because my shiny, waxed bald head will produce rivulets of sweat when I exert myself.

It’s a great day to sit here in my air conditioned Hunker-Bunker study where the humidity is around 40% making the 65° F room temperature feel comfortable.

I’ve got some more coding to do and I am not really looking forward to it. For the past few days the ChatGPT has been unhelpful, at best, and almost deliberately making errors — stupid, repetitive errors and then lecturing me on why I shouldn’t provide code examples like that. Like it is MY fault.

I am also starting to wonder if there is more than one AI ‘entity’ within the ChatGPT model. I’ve noticed that I get a different ‘personality’ every day. Sometimes its response is helpful, responsive and mostly correct, and other times it’s truculent, and acts like it’s really going out of its way to provide an answer, and most of the time it is incorrect.

But you don’t care about any of that, do you? You are here for the stupidity of the day, and I am here to provide it to you, free of charge.

Just remember: you get exactly what you are paying for, so don’t complain if you don’t like what I’m tossing out here. It’s just like the shit you’d find in the “FREE” section of Craigslist: a few gems and a whole lotta crap.

I also want to remind you that I don’t take any of this crap seriously any more. If it makes me laugh, I’m posting it. I also keep telling you: if you think you can do better, by all means, step forward and start producing your own material here. I will gladly step away…

A one and a two and a…

You know you are on Broadway when…

… you see naked women nonchalantly riding rental scooters naked down the bike lane. This isn’t the first or only one, this has been going on around Capitol Hill all summer.

Larry Tesler, inventor of the cut, copy and paste commands, dies at 74.

Larry Tesler, inventor of the cut, copy and paste commands, dies at 74.

Ponder this for a moment: Without Larry Tesler, this blog, and all the others like it, would never have existed. This entire post is a literal tribute to the man.

Then there is what to do about Grandma:

This would be waaay too creepy for me:

These are the headlines that caught my eye this morning:

U.S. Said to Consider a Breakup of Google to Address Search Monopoly

Google seems to be a strange place to start if we were all that concerned about ‘monopolies’ in this country. Not when you consider who owns what in this country.

• Three companies control about 80% of mobile telecoms.
• Three have 95% of credit cards.
• Four have 70% of airline flights within the U.S.
• Google handles 60% of search. The list goes on.

In agriculture:

• Four companies control 66% of U.S. hogs slaughtered in 2015, 85% of the steer, and half the chickens (according to the Department of Agriculture)
• Four companies control 85% of U.S. corn seed sales, up from 60% in 2000, and 75% of soy bean seed, a jump from about half.
• Here in Seattle, we will have … Kroger, with their upcoming AI individual pricing based on who you are.

So the idea that going after Google was a priority rings a bit hollow.

It’s that time of the silly season

Donald Trump Says He Will Go to Venezuela if He Loses Election

This would be the third time he’s said that he would leave the country if he lost the election. He’s said similar things during the past two election cycles, and he’s still here. This is the first time he’s been specific about where he would go to.

Really? Venezuela? Of all the places he could choose to go live out his life like a king, he’s decided on Venezuela?

He could buy his own island and live out the rest of his life like the king he’d like to be. Biden could buy the one next to him and they could have little ‘wars’ as both their brains turn into calcified rock.

Have both these campaigns lost their fucking minds?

FBI probing alleged Iran hack attempts targeting Trump, Biden camps

As much of a time travel sucker I am, the first thing that came to my mind was:

“We did it! We’ve gone back into time!”

Haven’t we learned anything in the past eight-something years and all the gnashing of teeth and the rending of garments over Hillary’s emails and hacked DNC emails and wiki-something-or-another?

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” Trump said in a July 27, 2016 news conference.

Ring any bells? Both these campaigns should be treating their email as if their life were on the line. Because their lives are on the line in the sense that hacked emails have the potential to uproot your plans for your life and well-being. If not worse.

Home Depot issues a warning about the economy

In case there was someone out there wondering for a sign of when the Fed was going to start lowering interest rates, this would be one of those signs.

This ‘warning’ isn’t a bad thing. It’s a sign that we’ve reached the threshold that the Fed was looking for when it first started raising rates to combat inflation. The purpose of raising rates was to try and slow down spending in order for labor and supply to catch up following the global economic shutdown during the pandemic. Because the US economy is such a behemoth the Fed can’t just wave a magic wand and make inflation go away. Control the flow of the money is how they do it. Slow down the flow a bit, the demand drops and supplies grow, causing prices to drop. Do it too fast, and you lose labor, causing ripples in the matrix. It’s a bit of a fiddle and a lot of over-caution, but I’m sure you’ve heard the term “soft landing” when talking about not finding ourselves in a recession.

Well, this is that point where the rubber is about to hit the tarmac. I suspect that the Fed will start lowering interest rates by a quarter percent in a couple of weeks. They might even go a half percent, but I think that’s pushing it. They don’t want to repeat the same mistakes they made back in the late 1970s.

We, The People…

“Squad” Rep. IIhan Omar wins primary against repeat challenger

I know that this just bends some of you the wrong way, but I have to point out that in a representative democracy, the person the people choose to represent them usually reflects the wishes and desires of the majority of the people who voted in that district.

People on the Left can be upset by some of the Congresscritters on the Right. But they also have to realize that those congresscritters they dislike have the approval of the majority of the people in the district. This also include those people who didn’t bother to vote. By not voting, they automatically approve of the person who won. But once in a while you get some anomalies, and they are quickly flushed out in the next election, if not sooner. This is how the system is supposed to work.

So Omar still retains the approval of the people who put her there. I don’t know why there is all this fuss over this one woman. Her’s is but ONE voice in the House of 435. It reflects the wishes and desires of the people she is representing, and she would be derelict in her duty if she delivered any other message.

If I had a visceral hatred for say, MTG, I wouldn’t want to hang out in her district any more than they would like to hang out around here if they were basing their visceral hatred on congresscritters like my congresscritter, Pramila Jayapal.

I am hoping that most people don’t make their life’s daily decisions by what their political leanings are.

“What would Joe Biden want me to do?”

“What would Donald Trump want me to do?”

Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? Well, there are some people…

The rambling point I want to make is don’t be pissed off over the congresscritters you consider “Idiots”. They have the approval of the majority of people they represent in their district. In other words, get rid of them and there are many more behind them.

Who thought this was a good idea?

I mean, talk about a forced error…

I am sure there are many more comparisons, but seriously, if you are running for president, do you need to be continually reminded of the personal connection — whatever it was – to a person like Epstein?

TOf all the Gulfstreams in the world available for lease on a moment’s notice, who thought it would be a great idea to lease Jeffery Doohickey’s plane? Were they taking advantage of a discount?

Would you feel comfortable flying around in the plane that ferried underaged girls to an island for some of the world’s billionaires to “enjoy”?

Her campaign was quick in response:

I don’t know why he says stupid shit like this, knowing for a guy who used to pass out campaign donations to just about anyone who tickled his fancy on a particular day, that there would come a time when he would be up against a politician whose campaign staff always keeps meticulous records.

They posted the image of the check twenty minutes later. That’s a troll.

The part of history you are supposed to Forget

Following the end of the Second World War, and the uncovering of the horrors of the Holocaust, there was a lot of debate going on about finding a homeland for the Jewish refugees of the war.

Where you would automatically think that “Israel” would be the logical spot, “Israel” did not exist, and the territory wasn’t even close to the top for consideration since it was still considered to be part of the British Empire and they were reluctant to part with it.

But what looks like a lot of “spitballing”, imagine what things would be like if one of these other alternatives had been settled on:

Alternative timelines would have versions of this, right?

You will have to forgive me, I am in the middle of actually READING Stephen King’s 11.22.63. The series was nothing. You NEED to read the book.

That’s it for today.