My favorite is the Amish Powerball. I just paid $8.00 for a dozen eggs.
Filed under: economy, Government, Humor | Tagged: Amish, Bird Flu, Inflation | 2 Comments »
Keep Drinking the Kool-Aid
Posted on 28/10/2024 by Grumpa Joe
Just as I suspected, the dream of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just that, a dream. The book I am reading, titled “Feeding the Machine,” exposes the millions of workers behind the technology that is supposedly going to change the world. Although AI will help many of us be more productive when we find an APP developed expressly for a specific application we can use it for. My personal experience with AI is limited at best, and I find it annoying. Most times, I use a Chat bot at a website like my bank, or a vendor like the phone or cable service. The first thing I find useless are bots that answer only very specific questions. Most Chat-bots are developed like that. If you are seeking answers to a complicated problem there is a 99.999% chance you will need to connect with a human to get near an answer. Our suppliers, however, make us go through the steps before they give us a number to call for help. Evidently, a large number of callers are happy with the canned answers they receive.
The workers being employed live in East Africa and work nine hours a day in almost slave-like conditions. They watch videos to highlight activities that may escape the sensors used by AI applications. An example cited involved a lady walking a bicycle across a street in the crosswalk and being struck by a self-driving car. The AI used in the car could not determine that a human walking directly in front of the car was a safety issue. The job of the reviewer is to highlight this anomaly on the video to bring it to the attention of the programmer who then modifies the the algorithm to prevent a collision. The work to do this is mindless and boring. Managers require that the worker perform a set number of observations per minute and the worker keystrokes are measured and reported. If the worker does not match the requirements of the job, he is penalized, often by firing.
While all these observations are going on, billions of dollars are spent making artificial intelligence more intelligent and faster. We endure the chatbots just so big companies can use fewer paid employees to do the job. They truly believe we, the consumers, are getting the absolute best service experience that can be provided. It doesn’t matter what we believe we are getting. If they are making more money, we lose, and they keep on convincing themselves that they are making us happy.
Someday, AI may threaten society and cause people to lose their jobs, but I will not be around to witness the debacle. In the meantime, the venture capitalists who continue to pour money into AI companies will keep feeding us the Kool-Aid to convince us of how wonderful life will be when it all begins to happen.
Filed under: economy, Education, Technology | Tagged: Algorithyms, Artificial Intelligence | 2 Comments »
I Pray I Am Wrong
Posted on 04/10/2024 by Grumpa Joe
So many pundits give us their reasons for why Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are ahead of each other. My personal feelings will be revealed later. This week, I watched the Vice Presidential debate and saw the polished young lawyer JD Vance overcome the moderators’ attempts to rattle him as Vance destroyed his opponent Walz with finesse and pure logic. The days following were loaded with excitement by the right-wingers who were anti-Kamala. The right wingers unanimously proclaimed that the totally unreal Kamala had lost points in the debate. Pundit after pundit proclaim her reluctance to engage with the public and her in ability to effect any argument that is not pre-written and pre-memorized. Her inability to engage spontaneously and extemporaneously will be her downfall.
I am skeptical about the whole spectacle. Even though she is a moron, that she has lost her debates, that she doesn’t engage with the press, and she speaks words that seem to be incoherently put together, she will win this election. There is only one way Donald Trump can win. He must win by a landslide so great that the clever democrats cannot sneak enough illegally garnered votes to overcome the numbers, and they cannot themselves deny that they lost.
Why do I feel this way? It is simple. Kamala Harris is a feminine copy of Obama. They have too many things like each other not to win. I watch interviews of the man on the street asking questions of people about Kamala, and their responses are senseless. They like her smile, they like the way she talks with her hands, they like the way she speaks. . . . Most of the respondents are young, very young. They see her as a needed change in leadership. They fail to recognize, however that she shows no signs of leadership what so ever.
The latest news bit I watched was Kamala addressing people affected by the hurricane. They watched their houses wash down a flooded river, their possessions gone with them, and their vehicles smashed and piled into trees and posts. They have nothing left: no clothes, no housing, no food, no water, no help from Uncle, and Kamala so powerfully proclaims that the Federal Government will give them each $750. “You heartless bitch” is all I could say to myself. If you had leadership skill the size of a mustard seed, you would have said “I will go to Congress and beg for money to help you rebuild.”
Even after this stupid disastrous $750 dollar slap in the face she will win. All I can say is that I pray I am wrong, because if she does win we will all regret it. All I will have left is to say “I told you so,” as I watch inflation rise, and my retirement fund shrinks daily because of the money the democrats will spend on stupid things.
Filed under: Biography, economy, politics | Tagged: Election, Inflation, Kamala | 3 Comments »
April Showers Bring????
Posted on 04/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe
I’m back from the walk I ended my last post with. I’m still cold, but at least dry. The embarassingly hilarious part of feeling cold was revealed when my Lovely, also complained. She is a cold human who comes from a cold country and enjoys living in the cold. I took her mild complaint as a sign that something was seriously wrong. I was right. I checked the thermostat and discovered that in my morning fog while adjusting the temperature upward, I had put the blasted thing into Aircon mode. Being an obedient artificially-intelligent device it responded accordingly. There was ice-cold air blasting from all of the vents. The expected 74 degrees was down to a chilly 69 and dropping fast.
This morning, I looked out my window and saw what I thought was rain coming in at a seventy-degree angle. It looked like rain, but it was snow, turning into sleet and eventually into rain as it slid in against the ground. April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, but we are still a long way from May. I don’t expect anything but daffodils to bloom.
I feel my body becoming weaker as my daily exercise consists of shuffling from one chair to another. Either I’m reading a book or pounding keys on my computer trying to finish my book. I came across an old note on my phone yesterday, made in October 2013. I started writing my book, Space Rod. There is nothing like taking a few breaks in the project. I think I may have overdone it a bit. I have promised myself that I won’t stop until it is complete.
I’m debating whether or not to waste another three dollars on a lottery ticket. The winning numbers will net one billion dollars. It is wishful thinking on my part, but the price increases due to inflation are draining my resources faster than I want them to. I don’t mind spending money, but prices on food, a somewhat essential necessity, are as high as ten times. I remember reading many years ago about inflation in Argentina rising to the point where a person needed a bushel basket of paper money to buy a loaf of bread. Somehow Argentina continues to exist, in spite of the pain it has imposed on its population.
The moral of that story is that, somehow, a body will continue to exist no matter how much prices rise.
It is time for me to change chairs.
Filed under: Aging, Biography, economy | Tagged: Fixed Income, Inflation, Shoot Biden | Leave a comment »
2500 New Towns
Posted on 13/03/2024 by Grumpa Joe
A day ago, I overheard a news item on TV: the USA has allowed 10 million people into the country during the three years Joe, what’s his name, has been in office. I was driving with the radio on when I heard that, and at the very moment I heard the number 10 million, I passed a new population sign for the Village of Frankfort, 20,000. When I first moved here there were only 4000 of us. My gosh, I thought, how many towns like Frankfort, have to be started in order to accommodate 4000 new people. The math is simple: ten million divided by four thousand. The answer is 2500. I thought about the immensity of creating 2500 new towns all with a population of 4000 people. Frankfort is over 150. years old and it took that many years to grow to 4000, and another thirty-three years to grow from 4000 to 20,000. No matter how I look at the math, setting up house for that many new residents is a huge chore. Take for instance the Biden approach of spreading the new folks around to the states, it still means starting a new city with 200,000 people in every one of the fifty states.
To make things more manageable what if I take it one step further and ask how many people would be added to every city, village, and town in the United States? There are 19,495 registered places within the country. If we do it right it will place 513 new residents in every one. Does your city have the resources to place 513 new people in housing? Does your city have enough business to give that many families work? About the only ones not complaining are the churches, they will happily take the job on. What if your town is one that has only 500 people. Your population will double overnight.
Until the time we can get this surge under control, we will see tent cities pop up in every state and city. Assuming that a tent city can safely house 100 people, it will take 100,000 tent cities to house them. What about feeding them? Or about disposing of human waste? At the beginning I was not very sympathetic to the Democrat mayors of all big cities like Chicago bitching about not having enough resources to handle the problem. It is a sign of failure on the part of democratic leadership I said. Now, I see where they are coming from. The problem, however does not directly lie with the leaders of cities and towns. They did not cause the problem. The cause is not following existing immigration laws, and the root cause of that is Joe what’s his name.
When Obama ran for his first term in 2007, I heard an interview with his Pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Wright was asked about Obama’s unadvertised policy to re-distribute the wealth. I remember Wright dodging the question with, “I don’t know about that, but a whole lot of poor people are gonna be helped,” or something like that. The problem Obama had was he was too chicken shit to do what had to be done to make that happen. He didn’t want to become a martyr like Martin Luther King. Along came “that’s a big fuckin deal,” Biden, who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, and he figures he’ll just start an uncontrollable disaster of people coming in that will flood the country and put the Cloward-Piven strategy into motion. The goal is to turn the country into a tyranny. The Tyrant in charge will lead the population by the nose to wherever he wants them. He will be supported in this effort by an army of bureaucrats who have been armed to the teeth to defend the government. I believe that Obama is still in charge, and now he is pulling BIden’s strings and controlling things. He’s smart enough to know that Biden will do the dirty work and Obama will reach his goal without becoming a martyr.
Disasters are welcomed by democratic leaders, as we learned from Rahm Imanuel when he used Winston Churchill’s phrase “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The current flood of people into the country is a crisis, and the Democrats are lining up to put the strangle hold on the rest of us so we can become their pocket pets. What will happen is that those of us who are being robbed of anything we might have will be placed into abject slavery, and this time it won’t all be black people from African countries.
What will you name the new town coming to your neighborhood?
Filed under: Biography, economy, family, Government, Sarcasm | Tagged: Crisis, Immigration, Population Explosion | Leave a comment »
