Recent Comments

1. 2 months ago on Bill Bramhall

   This appears to be a RawStory summary

   https://www.rawstory.Com/trump-putin-2667171823/

   of a very good Financial Times article

   https: //www .ft.Com /content/18c5296a-f0d5-47d5-aacd-af5210d638fc

   (paywalled, but archived here)

   https://archive.Is/zcgaj

   By Gideon Rachman

   https://en.m.wikipedia.Org/wiki/Gideon_Rachman

   an author whose work (including several good books) is well worth reading..

   As to the excerpt, we should all be cognizant of the implications of unelected shadow dictator having this kind of brazen influence on our Congress.. To say nothing of the prospect of an indicted felon barred from running for office usurping power on the ignorance of a dwindling minority intent on destroying democracy before demographics overtakes their gerrymandering and manipulation.

2. 3 months ago on ViewsAmerica

   Poofing four misty pes hasbeen excremely impotent two myre putation ;)

3. 4 months ago on John Deering

   Yeah, this is fine..

   The education that let the West take advantage of post WWII dominance is squandered in political squabbling and offloaded to profit taking entities selling empty buzzword degrees while Western market capital is now mostly financial services and a half dozen tech giants who are run by a vanishingly small cadre of math and compsci PhDs who mostly contract out everything not requiring hard science graduate education anyway, leading to a behavioral science fantasy playground for those rewiring the infrastructure underlying society from credit scores to news broadcasts into an AI enabled surveillance capitalist phantasmic virtual cave / media bubble most never leave home without..

   AI is already driving a wedge between non automated (thus far) physical jobs devoid of advancement opportunities and the now rapidly attenuating office work that is seeing much of its entry level succumb to rapidly evolving computational linguistics in fields from law to chemistry, adding newly downgraded, disgruntled under and unemployed to democratic systems already on a knife edge as these forces run like a quick profit buzz saw through former social norms..

   KC Green got it right a decade ago.. We’re just in comic dog denial :

   https://gunshowcomic.Com/648

4. 7 months ago on Brian McFadden

   I think the cartoon is portraying Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

   He has done some interesting things previous to that including tech philanthropy and a run as president of Y Combinator, which hosts the Hacker News site, where I now post much more often than here..

5. 8 months ago on Jen Sorensen

   It’s a reference to the character John Belushi played in Animal House.. Set in at the fictitious Faber College but satire focused squarely on the Midwest and Southern unis I referred to in my first post in this thread..

   The DVD edition has a 45 minute mockumentary showing where the characters ended up a quarter century on with the Belushi character (Blutarsky) as POTUS..

   This was itself created almost two decades before the travesty of the Trump administration and, like the even crappier movie Idiocracy, demonstrates the fall of American culture below even the worst movie parody uncannily well.

6. 8 months ago on Jen Sorensen

   I sometimes wear a Bluto Blutarsky “COLLEGE” sweatshirt with a Jack Daniels pin on it to those campuses but nobody seems to get the reference..

7. 8 months ago on Jen Sorensen

   The conditioning necessary to watch grunt cameras (and, coming soon to your 4k 86 inch screen : branded baseball burp cameras) starts early ; in America, it is perfected in college:

   Having worked for several current and former SEC conference universities, I still cannot see the point (although I have seen the private data on the revenue and understand it well from the unis’ bottom line) of getting all worked up about team x because you are attending the same school (as players who get a full ride including : private meal halls, dorms, tutors, limo busses on and off campus, multimillion dollar gym and sport medicine facilities, etc..) who they will probably never even take a class with much less see in a normal student dorm or meal hall.. Quite a racket.

   These uni’s make literally hundreds of millions of dollars per year on the games, merchandise – and most importantly the fundraising from alums and VIP schmoozing in fully catered ‘press boxes’ high above the screaming slobbering hoi polloi paying for bleacher benchs below.. It is amazing to see even now as a consultant : honestly the students at these unis really haven’t changed from the materialism that took over as these colleges accepted the inevitable in the early 80s and parlayed their degree mills into highly branded vocational training drive thrus..

   Professional sports are the only hope for recruitees in these mega marketing golden cages (unless the unis are forced to actually pay for their services as the professionals they already obviously are) – and credulous, poorly educated ‘alumni’ are the perfection of the professional sports market training who proudly graduate from beer swilling on bleachers to beer swilling in Barcaloungers and lap up the branding.. Of course mindlessly rah raaahing for American mass market team sports has proven to be great conditioning for red hat rah raaahing too..

   I honestly don’t care anymore, so long as they continue to pay for remote IT consulting ;)

8. 8 months ago on Views of the World

   Of course you are correct. I don’t mean to discount the role of environmental factors (all necessarily speculative as is well documented in the research sources) but rather to point out that human activities (arson, to apply our values to it), in addition to expanding the binary overhunting vs environmental discussion, must have had profound impacts on the formation of human culture, selecting those who employed such tactics over those who might have been living by hunter gatherer practices in balance with the environment.

   While humans were only one likely factor in the the large mammalian decline documented in the Science paper, the analysis of carbon, does point to fires well beyond anything observed in the previous 20ka, and while their cause probably cannot be known, the likelihood of human origin seems very high..

   I do recognize how speculative my comment is, but it seems to me that the contemporaneous reductions in megafauna at so many other sites worldwide where humans were present argues for careful consideration of the possibility of humans using similar (and other) tactics to take advantage of the local situation..

   From our modern perspective it is abhorrent to even think of humans setting fire to a tinder dry overgrown forest (as was likely from the pollen data in the Science paper), but that could have been every beneficial to certain tribes of humans who were predisposed to see it in that way..

   This would provide a windfall of meat, a reduction in predators, and a denial of terrain suitable for rival hunter gatherers..

   There is plenty of discussion about the necessity for agrarians to become territorial, but I wonder (speculatively) if the territorial behavior was presaged by something altogether darker that conferred selective benefits on the tribes of humans who saw the way to their territory (and, ultimately, our nations) in using arson to burn out the competition..

   Would explain a lot of human history.

9. 8 months ago on Views of the World

   The research paper linked in the Conversation piece is worth reading:

   https://www.science. org/doi/10.1126/science.abo3594

   Specifically the part of the conclusion including:

   “Small populations of humans can have disproportionate impacts on landscapes through the use of fire (48); significant increases in regional fire activity after the arrival of humans have also been noted in Australia (49), New Zealand (50), Panama (51), and many other regions worldwide (52). Today, changing fire regimes resulting from climate change and human activities are again driving some ecosystems toward tipping points”

   thru

   “The conditions that led to the end-Pleistocene state shift in Southern California are recurring today across the western United States and in numerous other ecosystems worldwide. Understanding the interplay of climatic and anthropogenic forcings in driving the La Brea extinction event may be helpful in mitigating future biodiversity loss in the face of similar pressures.”

   A growing number research projects at several sites worldwide now show that we have to reinterpret the archaeology around the advent of agriculture and I can’t help feeling that the period of time between the end of the Ice Age and the rise of agriculture (and fall of hunter gatherers) is likely linked to behavior of “Small populations of humans (who) can have disproportionate impacts” through destruction of the environment that must have had deep and lasting impact on the nature of our agrarian societies’ (self selected) development.. in addition to the impacts on climates, flora, fauna – and less rapacious human societies – of the world from the paleolithic onwards.

   Sadly we can see reverberations of this right up to similar, if more duplicitous, behaviors and predictable, inevitably more damaging outcomes in our near future..

   The more we change, the more we stay the same – as long as we refuse to grow as a species anyway.

10. 8 months ago on Doonesbury

    It looks like a good university consortium project – from what I can see on their website.. the software itself is behind a screening requirement.

    I’ve worked with several national university consortia centered around member only ‘open’ source (for the rather specialized needs of university back offices) and, while it is way better than the proprietary software it replaces, and I understand the desire to limit the projects to the intended users, my experience is that actual open source projects always end up with superior codebases..

    (but at least the dev conferences are nicer without all the hoi polli mucking about ;)