Yesterday, I had an exchange of wits with an Artificial Intelligence bot. The internet connection of my computer was lost, and I didn’t have a clue as to how to fix it. I didn’t even have a phone number to call. Usually, I go to a company’s website for information or a friendly phone number. With the Internet out, I couldn’t get help. All day long, I pondered how I would live without the connection. The funny thing was, I still got TV and streaming services. In desperation, I looked through my ancient card files, hoping to find a number. I did. I called and got an AI bot. The bot was useless because it was programmed to answer only precise questions, like, “Do you wish to add services?” I began shouting into the phone with my question, using different words each time. I hoped it would recognize a word and connect me to a real, live human being. After many tries, the Bot asked if I would like to speak to an agent, “YES,” I replied. After a few moments on hold, I listened to several phone clicks and finally a voice. The agent was the same damned bot as before. I answered more stupid canned questions, and finally, the bot asked, “Do you want to speak to an agent?” This time, a real live person came on, and we made some progress.
After checking the status of my area for outages, she checked the lines in the house. Everything was in order. “Try resetting your modem, and I will call back in ten minutes.” I did as asked and she actually called me back. “Any change?” She asked.
“No,” was my answer. “Try turning off your device (computer) for thirty seconds and then turn it back on.” I did what was asked. The computer came back online, but the internet was not working. As I reached for the computer, to rip it out of the wall, the internet began responding. “Thank you Lord.”
I was so glad to have the thing working again that I forgot how angry the experience made me. Then, I began thinking about how to make this problem-solving more productive. First of all, I am an actual live human, and I started the whole fiasco by speaking to a numb-nuts non-human bot. I realized we don’t speak the same language. What I need is a bot to talk to the bot for me. I’ll spend the whole day looking for a bot that knows and understands AI and can intervene on my behalf anytime a provider insists on making me communicate that way. I will give the AI bots one thing: they speak English, but, more importantly, they speak without an accent, and they speak slowly enough to be understood.
It is time for me to go to the AI bot store to find my new assistant.
The big story yesterday was from New York State. It seems a car with two people slammed through a border barrier at one hundred miles per hour in a hurry to get to a concert in Canada. Thankfully, they slammed into another barrier, and the car exploded. It is unknown whether it exploded like a bomb or ignited like a gas tank fireball. What bothers me about this story is that officials can tell us that the couple was headed for a concert in Canada but can’t tell why they suddenly decided to be in such a hurry.
I want to believe the couple was involved in a freak accident, with the car being the problem. I also want to think that the couple supported Hamas and showed it with the spectacular launch of a modern computer-controlled car of high reliability. The terror attack is the most probable explanation but the least supported.
It was Thanksgiving morning, and the streets of New York City were lined with thousands of people watching the annual Macy’s parade ushering Santa Claus into town. Why not pull off a terror stunt to panic people into doing stupid things? I can believe that the Government would want to suppress anything terror-related in an attempt to keep the citizens from panicking. Although this incident happened hundreds of miles from the city, it was close enough to warrant concern. At the same time, a group of Hamas sympathizers glued themselves to the street to disrupt the parade and to garner attention. If I were in charge, I would have left them all glued to the street until the glue wore off. This might have made them wonder if the New York City cops would have directed traffic around them as they did with the parade. It is my opinion that leaving the glued protesters sitting there watching taxis and busses bearing down in the hopes they would avoid driving over them might have convinced them to change their minds about sympathizing with a hate group. It is too bad the NYC Police chose to do their job to protect them.
Meanwhile, In the Mideast, Israel is doing a fabulous job of swatting the annoying flies that have been proclaiming death to Israel and all Jews. If Israel is smart, they will only stop long enough to get some hostages out alive but short enough to keep Hamas from regrouping underground into a different set of tunnels. I believe Israel is finally pissed off enough to make some history and will eradicate Hamas and any of their supporters worldwide. Remember when ISIS was the scourge of the Earth? They were moving across the territory rapidly spreading their shit for brains’ ideas about how we must live. It wasn’t until Trump declared that the USA would not stop eliminating ISIS until they were eradicated. All of a sudden, we stopped hearing from ISIS. Israel must do the same with Hamas, Hezbollah, and all Jew-hating groups.
Israel must successfully execute their goal to stop Hamas, and after that, they must brainwash all Palestinians into believing they love Jews and want to live peacefully together. Then, they must keep doing it for generations to make a lasting peace. At the same time, the USA must STOP giving the Palestinians money. They are poor money managers. They see money only as a vehicle to eradicate Israel. They must learn to fend for themselves and not allow themselves to be enslaved by the Muslims.
It would probably be an easier job to eradicate all Palestinians than it would be to make them believe something new. And now, I am sounding like Hitler.
Another idea is to convert all Palestinians to become Jews. Good luck with that.
There is definitely a trend I see happening in my life. A few weeks ago, I went to my doctor for a regular yearly checkup. Everything is okay, except your thyroid is a little off. We’ll wait a few months and recheck it before I decide what to do next. “Have you made an appointment with your Ophthalmologist for an eye exam?” The answer was “no.” I chose not to push my luck and made the appointment. It has been five years since my last dilated eye exam took place.
This morning, I went to see the Ophthalmologist. “Your eyes are good, except I see a buildup of protien behind the lens transplant in your right eye. This can cause blurred vision, but we can laser it out. “Can you do this in the office?”
‘Yes, but not here or by me. It has to be done by the doctor who does cataract removal at our other office. I’ll set up your next appointment there.”
“The free eye screening I had done by the Lions reported that I have the beginnings of macular degeneration.”
“Hold on; you sound like my wife, asking questions before I’ve had a chance to do the exam.”
By this time, my pupils were as big as the eyeball, and things were blurry. He instructed me to put my chin on the gadget he used to peer into my inner eye. The gadget shined two flood lights directly onto my retina. All I saw after that was a green cloud of light between me and him. “Yes,” he said, “there are signs of macular degeneration present, and since I’m not an expert on retinal issues, I recommend you see a specialist to take a closer look at your retina.” I couldn’t argue with him because there is one thing I have learned by working with the folks who attend OASIS meetings: out of twenty attendees with vision loss, only eight will be there for the same eye-related condition. The human eye is a complex collection system transmitting data through the optic nerve to the brain, where you see it as a picture.
Now, I have two new appointments with doctors I never needed before, and my plan to head south for the winter is becoming complicated. In my mind’s eye, I see a table full of dominoes all standing on end, and I have just tipped the first one over. I see the dominoes falling one against the other and never stopping until when? Until the end, of course, is this all legitimate healthcare or an organized effort to extract as much money from the system under the guise of healthcare? And what is the end, the last domino, the end of me, the end of money, what?
All I know is that I have been taking Lovely to a retina specialist for the past year, almost every two weeks, so she can get a shot in the eye to stop her macular degeneration from getting worse. When she comes home, she is incapacitated for twenty-four hours as she recuperates. This is not a cure. It is a preventative measure to help save what is left of her eyesight.
As my favorite actor William Bendix, often said on his radio program called The Life Of Reilly, “What a revoltin’ development this is.”
The push to electrify the world is based on the premise that we are causing global warming by burning fossil fuels, which produce carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide in the air makes the air get hotter than what is normal. This warming is then causing the polar ice caps to melt and the oceans to rise. A lot of ice is stored around the planet in glaciers, ice mountains in Antarctica, and just plain ice in and around the north and south poles. One day soon, I will attempt to calculate the volume of ice that has to melt and determine how much the oceans rise to cover seventy percent of Earth. That is a lot of water. My logic urges me to believe there must be some warehouse full of ice that we don’t know about.
Anyway, I’ll get to my point. I believe that we should change our way of thinking a little bit. A scientist would say we should shift the paradigm. Let us assume that global warming is taking place. For the moment, forget about the BS that you are causing the warming by driving to the grocery store. Assume, instead, that in addition to your hot drive to get groceries, the Earth is in one of its normal warming cycles when the sun is flaring extra heavy, the Earth’s orbit is just a fraction smaller, bringing the planet an inch or two closer to the sun. At the same time, our planet begins spewing lava from its core in places like Yellowstone Park, the ring of fire encircling the Pacific Ocean, our fiftieth state, Hawaii, and all the other volcanoes scattered about the planet in places too numerous to enumerate. All of them spewing molten lava at temperatures between 1300 to 2400 degrees Fahrenheit. Compare that to our hot cars emitting carbon dioxide at a measly 400 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists have yet to measure any atmospheric temperature of more than 0.000001 degrees, which is well within the measurement error. In other words, they have yet to see a measurable change. I point out that volcanoes have a much larger effect on global warming than cars.
Okay, we will assume that global warming will melt the ice caps, and the water level will rise by 230 feet. Not all the land people live on will be affected by that much water rise. True, the amount of land above water will be reduced, but there will be sufficient land above water to provide a home for Earthlings. Some scientists predict it will take five thousand years of regular global warming to melt all the ice on Earth. I, for one, will not see that happen, nor will any of my kids. But for those worried about that happening, what are you doing about the problem? For one, you are making radical changes that don’t make sense to change the temperature by some immeasurable fraction of a degree to slow it down. If this is a regular warming cycle, we don’t have a Chinaman’s chance in hell to change things. The world has been covered in ice many times before and uncovered in periods long before the internal combustion engine was invented. It will take something more drastic than changing the world to electric cars to make a noticeable change.
A Mechanical Sea Wall in the NetherlandsA Sea Wall Separating the North Sea From and Inland Lake
Here are some things we could be doing:
1. Build sea walls in places where it is feasible. The country of Holland has had a sea wall retaining the North Sea for centuries. Learn from the city of Venice, which deals with tidal sea rises in their city seasonally.
2. Plan new cities into which major populations can move.
3. Build new roads into these new cities.
4. Innovate new boat cities that will survive, and thrive in the flooded areas.
5. Learn how to survive with dikes and sea walls from the Netherlands.
6. Build seawalls to keep the coastline from invading the shore.
7. Build desalinization plants that can bring fresh water to desert areas.
8. Learn to grow food in less space than we use now.
9. Provide housing with smaller footprints to house more people in the same space.
10. Finally, learn that electricity and water don’t mix.
Instead of trying to make a common sense practical plan, we are wasting money and effort on stupid plans to electrify our transportation system and to transport everyone (most likely the elite among us) to Mars to escape the rising water. We have 5000 years to make it happen so if you are really worried get it started today!
Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) with cubs in the Wapusk National Park, Churchill, Manitoba, Canada
The government will have to be involved in any plan this big, so I recommend we stop wasting our time trying to keep Donald Trump from becoming president. Instead, we should abolish Black Lives Matter, because all lives matter. Abandon “Defund the Police, because we need to recognize that our society needs to be secure from the crazies among us. Recognize that being “Woke” only means we treat people of all races equally. Write to your Congressman to ask AI to give us the solution. Put all uber-liberal communists to work building the wall. In fact, I think it might be wise to put all of Congress to work building the seawall around the Capital to protect Washington, D.C., from being overwhelmed by the Potomac River. (Most likely, this seawall will be the first built; God forbid our government should be exposed to a life-threatening situation).
Lastly, write to your Congressman to ask what he plans to do about the sea rising from global warming.
The world has truly gone crazy. I have a very hard time believing that so many companies are being duped by governments around the planet. Their commitment to company suicide is admirable but assinine. It surprised me when I heard car company after car company climbing onto the bandwagon of switching to electric cars. Have they gone mad?
Actually, when Henry Ford began making cars, he had no idea where the gasoline would come from. There were no gas stations around the country to supply fuel to the suckers who jumped at the chance to buy a motorized wagon. In the movie Field of Dreams, there is a famous line “Build it and they will come.” I guess the entire world now operates on that philosophy. It is not a bad directive, but I would like to believe that there has to be a tiny bit more behind investing billions of dollars in a technology that is still years away from fruition. I give Elon Musk credit for sticking his neck out to build electric cars, but I don’t give GM, Ford, Chrysler, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and the many other car company’s any credit for rushing into this scheme built on the phenomenon of global warming being caused by humans. Yes, global warming can happen but it is far beyond our capabilities to make it so.
My intention with this post is to add to this fray of commercial suicide. I am proposing two of my designs for electric cars free to the world for use by humanity. Both are just as viable as the cars Musk and others are producing. In fact, these designs may be more reliable and cheaper to build than those in current production.
Design number one.
Cheby V110Diverse Energy Powered Personal Transportation Appliance
