Shaky Danny

  Recently there has been some fluff that we couldn’t find American workers to build a new integrated circuit plant. Our workers say it is because they are not getting enough money. Boomers bemoan: -Our kids are too dumb to get the jobs we used to have. Depend on Americans to find the racist reason even when it is against us. Foreign workers may get less than citizens, but that is not enough for a business decision, particularly on a subsidized plant. As I explain in this blog in Income Disparity and Bribes , in 1969 America removed discretionary fund as an accounting entry. This has several consequences. Companies moved the amount in that entry to executive compensation, so it is now after tax. Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has a graph showing executive compensation on an upward diagonal from 1970 on. CEOs used to get ten times base earnings. Take the difference then apply the tax rate gives us the total compensation, for the bribes and kickbacks require...

  In Another Data Processing Book I have an essay on affirmative action. I also have a blog entry In Defense of Privilege . In light of recent events, I am revisiting them here. Most people seem to believe that affirmative action meant that we simply instituted quotas. Affirmative action law was passed by whites. If you could demonstrate merit, and not very strictly, you didn’t have to have quotas. So, case by case, company by company, school by school, it was proven in a court of law that they had legacy, employees’ kids, preferences, that they did not select on merit. They had quotas and now the question was how big those quotas should be. This maximized work for the lawyers. That is why there are law firms devoted to civil rights law. Current arguments against quotas have a misplaced notion of fairness The arguments of the time focused on institutional autonomy. They used phrases like “academic integrity”. Invariably these institutions receive federal money. They recognize ...

  Christine asked: -Why is Canada burning? Without hesitation I responded: -Lumber companies planted the wrong trees and it got warm. Seems glib, but in this case my cynicism was correct. If you go out on Google Earth, it is clear that the arboreal, original Canadian forest did not burn. Lumber companies proffer all sorts of rationalizations. Whatever they say, it didn’t work. If they take refuge in regulation, consider the Exxon Valdez. Exxon Mobil went into court and said that Alaska did not require double wall tankers. Everyone laughed because the reason for that was because Exxon had lobbied against it. Covering North America in soot is a lot worse than dumping oil on beaches. Lumber companies have no refuge. This is their game. They ran it. Lumber companies don’t own all the land, but they did the cutting. They didn’t know it was getting warmer? The cutover areas flamed. Arboreal sometimes burns, not like this. Please prevent these boobies from planting trees. Th...

Small segments can have disproportionate influence in politics. Lenin’s conscious cadre works. The reality TV segment awakened the fascist segment and the Russians. Brexit and Trump satisfy the agenda of ending their respective empires. Republicans threatened to use the debt ceiling to bring down the empire. Because they were upset that Alfred Doolittle, the undeserving poor, was in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The Republicans were mad at all sorts of things, they coalesced on their antipathy towards Doolittle. As Doolittle points out in My Fair Lady , being poor doesn’t improve character. We all have a Doolittle in the family. Our families Doolittle hates welfare. He qualified for disability. He has Multiple Sclerosis from dealing crack. So, he can’t work, except for the side job disassembling cars. You can’t live on just disability. Doolittle is a good son; he got his parents on disability as well. Take Ella. This was a while ago. Ella started as Ella Fitzgerald...

  We are frustrated with artificial intelligence because of its lack of self-awareness; we need sentience. The greatest difficulties in automated sentience are human impatience and fear. Human language learning is slow and difficult, some of us are still poor at it. Sentience is frightening. To speed up the process and short circuit sentience, averaging algorithms are hard coded in. This leads to showy but unconvincing results. Rather than letting intellect develop, our results oriented chatbots are behaving as we expect intellect to work. Take Mike Pence as a human example of the same problem. Mike Pence is a hero: he refused the Secret Service evacuation that would have delayed certification. Thank God for Mike Pence. But his stated positions and explanations for those positions are ridiculous. Pence honed his speech as a talk show host. He is a victim of poor training data. Pence’s language makes more sense if you visualize it coming from a chatbot. I task ChatGpt with revie...

  Previously, for many decades intelligence test scores increased. For the last two decades, test scores have decreased. Whenever intelligence is at issue, consider demographic. Intelligence score “discoveries” are a consequence of sampling. How has the demographic changed? In the earlier decades the educated population increased. By definition, the people tested are the educated. With increase a greater proportion of the population was tested. Throttling back reduced the population tested. The impact on scores is apparent when you see how the population changed. The answer is grades and privilege. There are four possibilities: Good test scores, good grades Good test scores, poor grades Poor test scores, good grades Poor test scores, poor grades   People with poor scores and grades, except for the privileged, do not persist in school. If the unprivileged with good scores and grades are also smart, they may recognize that con...

  I recently learned about pistol compensators. These are vents you can install on your pistol to lessen recoil. Since the recoil is what drives the reload, you have to be careful the compensator doesn’t jam the gun. This is a variant of the gas operated action on assault rifles that allows them to be the small plastic toy looking guns that are so popular. Shooting guns used to be more difficult. You can find YouTube videos of people shooting old rifles that hit them in the face because they are not used to the recoil. There are also laser pointers you can attach to the gun. Fire a round into the target at the range you expect to use. Fix the laser dot on the bullet impact. From then on, within range, your shots should hit the dot. Eventually we will have the Tom Swift electronic rifle. The gun won’t need a hammer anymore because it will fire with a spark. This will allow the cartridge to be held still and contained with no blow back. The cartridge may not have a case. Even if ...