tingilinde

if mark twain was alive today

A friend and I were talking and challenged each other to write a piece on generative AI as if Mark Twain had written it.  After a few iterations and with apologies to Twain:

 

Generative AI? Well now, there's a contraption to beat all. It's a kind of mechanical parrot, trained by the entire world, yet swearing it came up with your grandmother’s recipe all on its own. It talks like a scholar, thinks like a gambler, and lies like a politician — but with the charming earnestness of a child who’s only just discovered the alphabet.

Man has always been mighty proud of his inventions —  slavery, the steamboat and the guillotine — and now he's gone and built himself a thinking box that writes poetry, paints pictures, and tells you what your future ought to look like. Only trouble is, it don’t know the past too well, nor does it care much for the truth unless you tip it handsomely. Least its owners tell you truth is for sale.

Still, I reckon it's no more dangerous than a loaded gun in the hands of a well-meaning fool — which is to say, exceedingly so. 

 

contrary to what the gop says..

There's very little fraud in Medicare.. it's just they don't like the idea of helping people. 

Who gets it:

 

ann telnaes on keeping brain-dead women alive

If they're pregnant - and even if the fetus is unviable. 

 

 

hammerstone

The name for a meteorite that hits a structure.

 

reindustrialization

Paul Krugman notes there's no viable path back to the manufacturing days of the 1950s.

snip

...

The inconvenient fact is that economy changes over time and so do the industries in which people work. A century and a half ago, despite the growth of manufacturing, America was still largely a nation of farmers. Today hardly any of us work on the land:

Oh, and many, possibly a majority of farm workers are foreign-born, and many of them undocumented.

Although some politicians still portray rural areas and small towns as the “real America,” you don’t hear a lot of nostalgia for the days when agriculture dominated American employment. (If you ask me, Queens, New York comes a lot closer to being who we are now.)

There is, however, a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s, when more than a quarter of U.S. workers were employed in manufacturing. Income inequality was much lower in that era, so much so that many blue-collar workers considered themselves middle-class. And there’s a widespread narrative that (a) attributes those good times for American workers to the availability of well-paid jobs in manufacturing (b) attributes the relative decline of American manufacturing to overseas outsourcing and trade deficits.

...

 

 

on tariffs

An illuminating discussion between Paul Krugman and Joe Politano

(I went with the transcript)

 

why are us navy ships so expensive?

A fascinating dive into the subject.

snip

...

This is a policy proposal written by Austin Vernon and myself for improving US naval shipbuilding.

...

 

 

 

how biden ensured trump's election

A damning new book based on insider knowledge.  Probably an important, but depressing read.

snip

...

In Christian theology, original sin begins with Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. But Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” chronicles a different fall from grace. The cover image is a black-and-white portrait of Joe Biden with a pair of hands clamped over his eyes. The biblical story is about the danger of innocent curiosity; the story in this new book is about the danger of willful ignorance.

“The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” Tapper and Thompson write. On the evening of June 27, 2024, Democratic voters watched the first presidential debate in amazement and horror: A red-faced Donald Trump let loose a barrage of audacious whoppers while Biden, slack-jawed and pale, struggled to string together intelligible rebuttals.

Trump’s debate performance was of a piece with his rallies, a jumble of nonsensical digressions and wild claims. But for many Americans, the extent of Biden’s frailty came as a shock. Most of the president’s appearances had, by then, become tightly controlled affairs. For at least a year and a half, Biden’s aides had been scrambling to accommodate an octogenarian president who was becoming increasingly exhausted and confused. According to “Original Sin,” which makes pointed use of the word “cover-up” in the subtitle, alarmed donors and pols who sought the lowdown on Biden’s cognitive state were kept in the dark. Others had daily evidence of Biden’s decline but didn’t want to believe it.

Tapper is an anchor for CNN (and also served as a moderator for the presidential debate); Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios. In an authors’ note, they explain that they interviewed approximately 200 people, including high-level insiders, “some of whom may never acknowledge speaking to us but all of whom know the truth within these pages.”

...

 

 

on summoning fairies

Lynn has a wide range of interests.. notes on the history of  summoning fairies 

Not terribly different from religion myths or the GOP version of history.

 

 

 

the gop is going to chop away at medicade

Here's what it does

a tip of the hat to Sukie