CapitalistImperialistPig

If you live in a major city and haven't seen an autonomous vehicle yet, you probably will soon, but if you want to buy one for personal use, it might be five or ten years. The NYT has a story on the state of play. The basic conclusion is that limited applications like buses and maybe taxis in central cities, farm tractors, and long haul trucking are pretty close, but all weather operation on all roads, not so much. Right now this technology is driving big chunks of both artificial intelligence and sensor technology. The side effects of these developments may be even more important than the transportation revolution they will bring.

I have both the Amazon and Google versions of the verbal assistant, and I had asked Alexa (the Amazon version) to set a timer for me. When it went off I mistakenly said "OK Google, stop", Alexa didn't turn off the alarm or say anything, but she did display "Try Alexa, stop." The digital servants are developing an attitude. I don't think that it's a good sign.

I expect the world will be watching what happens to US stocks tomorrow. My (totally worthless) guess is that we see the market gain back much of Monday's damage, but if carnage continues, that will be a pretty bad sign.

Eugene Robinson, writing in the Washington Post , quotes Yeats re our current catastrophe of a President: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” Robinson has seen that beast: The chaos all around us is what happens when the nation elects an incompetent, narcissistic, impulsive and amoral man as president. This Christmas, heaven help us all.

The NASDAQ and S&P are in Bear territory, and the Dow is very close. Trump is furious with the Fed, but he would do better to look in the mirror. His reckless incompetence is almost surely a major factor in the decline, but diagnosing stock futures is an art I had best leave to its own witch doctors. If I believed the Fed, I would probably be buying right now, but while I somewhat trust the Fed, my faith in Trump's demonstrated reckless stupidity and likely treason is unbounded from above. I'm also profoundly suspicious of a boom founded on massive government borrowing.

The subject is a favorite bugaboo of Ayn Randers and various other nutjobs of the right. The first fiat money we know about was the silver coinage introduced to replace the somewhat cumbersome barley money previously used in ancient Mesopotamia. That barley money, in turn, was the last true commodity money. Silver and gold, like paper money, are valuable mostly because people think they are, though they are decorative and have a few technological uses. Just sayin'.

I have been known to mock those* who think that selective breeding plus maybe a bit of CRISPR could produce humans with IQs of 1000. Whatever that means. Whatever does that mean? My only, or at least main, guide, is what I would wish to be able to do better, intellectually speaking. I'd like to have a better memory, an eidetic memory, that could recall everything I had learned. I'd like to be able to understand complicated arguments and equations at sight, and I'd like to see remote analogies and connections better and faster. Most of these seem to reduce to better memory and faster processing. Does that sound like anything that we've ever heard of? If you said computers, you might be right, but there are still some things people do that computers can't do (yet!). The most important is constructing sophisticated generalizations from what they know, and storing them as meta knowledge. I think that we humans usually do that by creating narratives - from Gene...