Donald Trump has announced his new initiative for governmental efficiency. This is a derivative idea pushed most famously by Elon Musk.
It has “Efficiency” right there in the name, but it has two co-chairs? Two? This is "efficiency"?
The two leaders are to be Vivek Ramaswamy ("failed presidential candidate") and Elon Musk ("purchaser of politicians"). I am gonna love seeing Vivek and Elon share leadership. Pass me the popcorn.
I reviewed the new (2025) Medicare Plan D drug plan options a month or so ago, when the information first came out, and I just re-reviewed them all. In 2024, I have a plan that is $3.30/month and the drugs I use are at no additional cost. For 2025, that same plan goes up to $36/month and the drugs now come at an added cost for an annualized total of $908. Yes, the plan goes from about $50/year to $900/year. Naturally, I looked at other plans.
I conclude that I am the product.
If the plan costs nothing and the drugs cost nothing, then my information is being collected to be bought and sold. Yeah, there is HIPAA "to protect me" but I am sure they have clever ways to, uh, comply while still selling information.
The nine plans available to me run between $0 and $2150 (annualized). At that top end, there is no deductible, but it is about $600 more expensive than the next most expensive - and the deductible is about $600. Strange, that.
I assume I will spend the rest of my life on this merry-go-round, chasing low-cost options each year, and getting "collected" by various insurance companies each time I switch.
Democrats are not well-served by a meltdown, a spiral of demoralization that zaps their energy to counter the Trump administration and bounce back in two and four years. Understanding what happened is important because it impacts the future.
He is right. The Competitive Hyperbole is the story of the hour/day/week hogging the headlines and the airwaves but it illuminates nothing. There was no "Trump mandate" and it was a close race, even with the House and Senate races assessed. Trump has a thin, thin margin. Democrats need to point out that There Is No Trump Mandate forcefully & repeatedly. The so-called analysis is just the same old players playing their same old talking points to their same old audiences. Bernie sees it as a failure to court the middle class because, of course he does. Others see it as a failure to boldly support Palestine because, of course they do. And so on. The fact is that Kamala is the second woman presidential candidate to lose and was only the second non-white candidate to run. We are talking about simple sexism and racism in the electorate. Exactly how we fix it - well, I have opinions, but the important thing is to abandon familiar, comfortable arguments and really understand what actually happened.
I do not know who will rise to lead the Democrats. Mr. Jeffries? Ms. AOC? I know it will not be Bernie or a Palestinian advocate, and it cannot be a "bipartisan" throwback. I do know that Democrats must absorb the pain, stop the blame, unify the aim, and get back into the fight.
The sorrow is that said citizen was able to manipulate the system to avoid responsibility and evade accountability while rising to the highest office in the land.
Yet, somehow, his machinations are not yet over. It is not a simple matter of remanding him to authorities to be held until sentencing; in fact, he roams free. The battle continues.
CNN reports Trump Guilty on All 34 Felony Counts
It started this morning when a well-known SM personality opined that YouTube had done her a disservice. To quote her question, "did the algorithm just fuck me over?" Seeing someone somewhere on the Internet making a mistake, I was compelled to query in response,
“Never assign to malice what mere incompetence can explain” - does that apply here?
The SM personality replied,
I didn't suggest malice. I just said it's weird.
Confused by this, I replied,
I apologize if I am being argumentative, but your wording is stronger: “but did the algorithm just fuck me over?” I do not think I am being thin-skinned or puritanical.
But back to my point, I suggest it is an inept programmer acting under deadlines rather than a focused attempt to fuck over or protect any individual. I have no data to support this beyond anecdotal experience.
The SM personality replied,
when comments are off, the algorithm stops recommending your video and therefore views go down. calm down, you're being weird
I was puzzled by this because I was not being weird or un-calm, I was quoting the SM personality. My confusion was magnified when someone else replied to me,
it sounds like you are being both thin-skinned and puritanical tbf
that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say and not imply malice
So, the word "fuck" is now an ordinary verb and polite conversational manners are passe. Thus, I have become a boomer. I did think of several clever responses but I decided that they would fall on deaf ears and so I just walked away from the stupidity.
Does this make me antisocial?
Yesterday was the Washington Presidential Primary for Republicans and Democrats. Washington does not require a voter to be registered in a particular party, but the voter does need to declare a preference or an affiliation for the election. Once declared, a particular voter cannot vote for candidates from the other parties. I did not see an Independent or an Other option, however there were protest votes. On the Democratic side, there was a campaign underway for people to vote Uncommitted, and on the Republican side, there is a continuing effort for Nikki Haley even though she has formally withdrawn from the primary contest. The results were that 85.6% of Democratic primary votes went to Biden while 7.5% of ballots went to uncommitted delegates, leaving 6.9% in some other category. On the Republican side, Trump picked up 74% of votes, Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race but was still on the ballot, is pulling 22%, and the remainder were scattered for Ron DeSantis (also dropped) and some miscellaneous categories. Some of Haley's 22% represents cross-over Democrats doing protest votes, but we cannot determine how many.
The uncommitted-as-protest group will claim victory based on the 7.5%, however the significance of the Uncommitted vote is unclear. The 7.5% participation is a small number of the whole and no one knows what it would have been without the protest vote. Therefore the other side (who?) can also declare victory. In the end, the uncommitted-as-protest campaign was much sound and fury signifying nothing.
As in the last decade, the vote was primarily by mail with scattered drop boxes usually located near libraries, post offices, and the like. I have not heard any reports of irregularities.
As of "Super Tuesday", Trump and Biden have clinched the required number of delegates to secure their nominations. For all intents and purposes, the Presidential campaign season has begun.
When last I wrote about WFH, I was upset at the radio, but I have now returned to being continuously upset about what someone said on the Internet. I am a creature of habit. As to subject matter, I was complaining about Work From Home, WFH, also known as Working Remotely. I had spoken about "hard metrics" and was about to discuss "soft metrics". Allow me to reestablish the rant, uh, conversation.
In the classic goal-setting process of management-by-objectives (MBO), the emphasis is on specific and measurable goals (part of the larger "S.M.A.R.T." framework for goal setting). A classic goal is "deliver a report to the customer by the end of the quarter". This is much more useful than "be a good employee" or "do good work" and it has the welcome attribute that there is little argument because the report gets delivered on-time or it does not. What can one argue with?
Well, one can argue with this because of the soft metrics. I can deliver a "report", even a long report, that is on-time but full of garbage. The word "report", even qualified with some number of pages, is a soft metric, and so we see that metrics can be misleading and metrics can be gamed.
WFH or remote work has virtually the same problems as SMART. It is overly fixed on things that can be measured and these things are often a narrow part of the job. If the job is full of rote processes, then WFH can be perfect. A customer service agent (first-line) can answer calls and reset passwords or refund orders with little supervision needed. The rare problems can be handled with voice recordings of the customer transactions and depend on the customers to escalate situations to higher levels of support. But not all jobs are rote and simple metrics are usualy inadequate. Engineering, software, business and accounting positions require at least spreadsheet or database work, and art positions require lots of computer interactivity, thus many positions now include some sort of computer programming. All of these (engineering, software, business, accounting, art) require some degree of originality and inventiveness, perhaps within bounds but still require novelty. The behavior we want to encourage is more than just words and formulas on a page, requiring human judgement beyond simplistic metrics.
But that human judgement often requires exposure and observation. Management can often tell a difference in actions when practiced at the office that is not visible when working from home. I management cannot see the individuals as they practice their expertise, it rapidly becomes hard to evaluate the level of expertise.
And that is why WFH only works for rather rote role and starts to fail as one moves through a career.
Note: I got stalled and distracted by this note. It took multiple tries to edit it down to something readable and focused. Therefore, there are multiple dates on the title line.
A warning about computer security for medical computing systems was recently raised by a neighbor named Steve Moeller. He wrote:
Here is an article from the Seattle Times talking about the threat from cybercriminals to the national and local healthcare system: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/why-health-care-has-become-a-top-target-for-cybercriminals/#Echobox=1708874045
From the article:
When a cyberattack hit Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center late last year and exposed the personal data of nearly a million patients, many were caught off guard, stunned a breach could infiltrate such a large and highly resourced health care organization.
This is a problem and it is more widespread than most people realize.
The Internet was designed with open access in mind, so it is proving hard to make it secure. This means that *anything* attached to the Internet has some degree of exposure that depends on how much thought and effort the "owner" has put into security. The answer to "how much effort" is often little to none. This means that everything from your medical records to your banking records are at risk. Further, your power grid, your road systems, and even your personal cars are all at risk. The old phone system is relatively secure (ok, I remember 2600 and phone phreaks) but the new wireless systems are far more exposed. Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Xitter, and Snapchat are all exposed, and even giants in the field like Google and Microsoft are exposed.
My point? You should be checking with each and every supplier you use to ask them what their security policies are. In the main, you will find that the corporate security policies protect the corporation but you? You are left dangling. We need legislation that places the burden back on the corporations.
Of course, some people could try to delay in the hopes that plate tectonics will come to the rescue as the New Pangea reassembles itself.
To the surprise of absolutely no living person, Ron Desantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have dropped out of the primary process to be the Republican nominee for President in 2024. We also got news that Chris Christie had dropped out recently. As to Desantis, NBC blamed "Muddled messages, hiring too many staffers and even a puzzle." There are probably similar defenses of Ramaswamy as a candidate. Both of these argument threads miss their respective points.
Ramaswamy was a tech-bro who drank his own coolaid. He got lucky in business, parlayed that into a little bit of political success, and started inhaling his own gaslighting. Like Desantis, he presented himself as a Trump without the baggage. What Ramaswamy calls baggage, we would call a history of recorded and reported statements, policies, and actions. But I digress... Ramaswamy was another sideshow and no one wanted his also-ran tickets, either. On leaving, he has endorsed Trump.
Chris Christie is more of a question mark. He clearly sees Trump for what he is and is willing to state it, but Christie is too little, too late. But even if he were the right amount and on-time, he is running on a negative-Trump platform rather than a content-filled platform of his own. No one knows what Christie stands for outside "not MAGA".
For all intents and purposes, this leaves Nikki Haley. She is but a pale imitation of Trump (pun intended), and the only real question is whether Haley will pull out before Trump falls over from bad health.
But we can be a bit relieved because we are now free of the Ron-Vivek virus.
P.S. Yes, Trump continues to bounce among his various legal cases. I think there are four, perhaps a fifth that I lost track of, and still 91 felony counts hanging over him. He has been recently making more and more verbal mistakes in the press. Confusing Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi is the most recent one, but they are coming in a steady flow. Trump is still the unchallenged favorite to get the Republican nomination.
Inflation has been a key concern of many in the USA for the last year, perhaps longer. FOX News [sic], in particular, has been banging on President Biden and his "failure" to control inflation, rating it one of the key problems that Biden "must solve". However, now a more complete truth is coming out, backed by actual data and studies rather than gaslighting (from FOX).
The report, compiled by the progressive Groundwork Collaborative think tank, found corporate profits accounted for about 53% of inflation during last year’s second and third quarters. Profits drove just 11% of price growth in the 40 years prior to the pandemic, according to the report.
Note that second sentence - profits are driving almost 5x the amount of price growth that has been historic.
As a shareholder, I am delighted, but as a consumer, hang 'em all! And the next time you consider the "benefits" of trickle-down economics, remember this, and ask yourself if the explanations of trickle-down economics are complete or if they are masking a deeper strategy better described as trickle-up.
The success of new companies of the world is highly dependent on diligently and daily applying innovation to their products and processes. Bookstores were simple repositories of books until Amazon unleashed technology on the selling and shipping of books and more. Cars were glorified wristwatches until hybrids and then full electric vehicles (EVs) caused a reinvention of the automobile. Even companies like Intel were glass manufacturers until ARM, Apple, Nvidia, and AMD showed that fabless semiconductor companies could be a thing. You can debate specific examples, but the clear trend of business from 1924 to 2024 shows that those failing to apply technology have been left as footnotes; at best, they are quaint companies turning out homespun crafts.
In recognition of this innovation force, companies set up internal procedures to generate patents. IBM is probably the cannonical example. IBM has long had an internal process that collected IP ideas, evaluated them through a committee process, and awarded IP "points" to inventors on patent filings that could be turned into cash and prizes. (No kidding - my prize for one set of points was luggage.) Little mafias and cliques grew up within IBM to keep churning out patents. If your idea had the right co-inventors, you got points. Even ideas that did not deserve filing were "published" and the authors got IP points as a result. Perverted results aside, the system worked well, and IBM was the largest patent producer in the world for decades. The innovations of IBM were world-class as demonstrated in their products, and IBM ruled the computer world. Somewhere along the line of history, IBM reduced their emphasis on IP and technological excellence and pushed financial engineering. While other companies continued to grow, IBM sold off parts of the company and shrank. As I write this, the market capitalization of IBM is about $150 billion, while Apple and Microsoft are each (each!) $2.9 trillion.
In the last few days, IBM has announced that they are terminating the old program (that would issue cash and prizes) for a new program that issues BluePoints. It is unclear what one can do with BluePoints, but cash awards for accumulating points seems to be elimiated. Combined with other changes over the years, it is not clear that IBM has figured out how to exit their death spiral. Cold days ahead for innovation at IBM. Sad.
Trials and court cases seem to be the mark of our times. Today is the start of Sam Bankman-Fried's trial for the FTX debacle and yesterday was the start of the penalties phase of Donald J. Trump's trial for real estate fraud in New York. Defendants along with Donald are Don, Jr., and Eric. No one has explained how Ivanka (or Jared) escaped, but they do not seem to be on the indictments.
I have long enjoyed a podcast called All the President's Lawyers with Ken White and Josh Barro. That podcast ended about a year ago and morphed into Serious Trouble, in part because Trump's legal problems had metastasized far beyond Trump himself.
During these trying times (no apologies), the USA has depended on a trustworthy judicial system. I refer here specifically to courts and judges. Unfortunately, Trump and the Republicans have spent years - decades - installing incompetent, biased, and corrupt judges throughout the federal judicial system, enough of these such that the judicial system is losing its trustworthyness. If you have any doubts, look at Thomas and Alito on the US Supreme Court; if doubts remain, look at the rest of the recent appointments such as Kavanaugh and note that Roberts is no shining example of anything, himself.
My point is that democracy needs to be strengthened against attacks by political, financial, and judicial hacks.
SCOTUS, the Supreme Court Of The United States, has faced some recent tests. No, I am not referring to the infamous confirmation shows for the last 2-3 justices, but rather to the recent relevations about Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito.
Clarence Thomas had rambunctious hearings when he was nominated. Anita Hill came forward with shocking allegations that would have derailed any other nominee, but Clarence Thomas cruised on to confirmation. I do not remember Sam Alito's confirmation hearings, but I suspect he was better coached and trained such that the hearings went more smoothly. The most recent three, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Brett M. Kavanaugh, were a sorry bunch, both through their own antics and with contributions from Senator Mitch McConnell as supported by the Republican members of the Senate. These are old news.
In the last month or so, journalists have uncovered allegations (being formal here - just allegations) that Thomas has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of "gifts" from a Republican billionaire named (ironicaly) Crow. Crow took Thomas and his wife on all-expenses-paid junkets around the world and bought the birthplace home of Thomas - and gave Thomas' mother free rent to live there. Is this bad? Yes, but Thomas failed to report these gifts even though he is required by law to report such gifts. More recently, he was given a window to restate and refile his attestation paperwork, and he has blown through the deadline.
While Thomas is redoing his paperwork, journalists have uncovered similar allegations (being formal here - just allegations) that Alito has accepted thousands and thousands of dollars of gifts, including an infamous salmon fishing trip to Alaska, none of which he reported as required. Alito claims some wordplay that exempts him from reporting requirements, claiming an trip in a private jet is some sort of infrastructure? It is hard to explain his position because it is stupid.
Both Alito and Thomas offer explanations that the law is complex. If true, then they are not qualified for their current positions and honorable people would resign. If we assume that they are smart enough on the law to hold their jobs as the ultimate arbiters of the law in the US, that SCOTUS gig, then they are disengenuous and honorable people would resign, again. It is quite clear that honor, impartiality, and the appearance of impartiality mean more about theatrics than actual compliance to Alito and Thomas. Even if the allegations of corruption are merely appearances and not actual corruption, these two men have failed.
Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., has a choice: he can redeem SCOTUS, impose ethics standards, and evict Alito and Thomas based on severe ethical lapses, or the Chief Justice can continue to oversee and overlook corruption on SCOTUS. It strikes me that this is not a difficult choice, but the fact that Roberts continues to dither suggests that he is willing to tolerate severe ethical failures, making him a co-conspirator of the failings.
God Save SCOTUS,
According to press reports, Musk and Zuck have agreed to a fight. Yep, you read that right - the headline reads
Mark Zuckerberg Says He's Down to Fight Elon Musk in a Cage Match
reference - https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-twitter-meta-cage-match-fight-1850563649
It is hard for me to believe that these two guys could get more stupid. They are trolling at Trumpian levels of stupidity. I hope they do not hurt each other, but I hope they learn serious lessons. Let me correct that: I hope the viewers of this debacle learn serious lessons. Musk and Zuck are beyond learning.
#birdbrains
Applying AI technology to analyze banks and prevent blow-outs would be a useful application of Silicon Valley technology. I wonder why the wizards of Silicon Valley overlooked this self-protective opportunity.
Some population of the "green" community has been demanding an increase in nuclear energy production in the United States. While this may make some sort of sense in the short term, it shows a grotesque failure to understand how actions and consequences relate. Let us get some terminology straight at the start of the conversation.
There is a common misunderstanding that people know how to build and maintain "nuclear power plants". If we look at these facilities in the short term, the name "nuclear power plant" makes sense, but if we consider the long term, a better name becomes obvious. The plants will operate and produce electrical power for 20-40 years, the short term. Once exhausted, they leave behind nuclear waste that will last tens, hundreds, and thousands of years. In this longer term, it is clear that their primary end-product is nuclear waste, therefore the facilities are more accurately called "nuclear waste production plants" and they have a brief surplus power in their early years.
By and large, we have no idea how to deal with the legacy of nuclear waste production plants. Coal-fired and gas-fired plants can be cleaned up, solar plants and wind farms can be recycled, and even dams can be safely breached. There is a problem with coal mines and gas drilling sites, but we have general technology to deal with most of that residual. But we have no technology or process that can handle nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste comes in multiple types, and some will argue that we can process 90-95% of the nuclear waste from the nuclear waste production plants. This is insufficient in the extreme. We build large processing plants to remove threats from water so that it can be used near humans, but we have no technology for nuclear waste products. The 5-10% remaining nuclear waste that cannot be processed can only be waited out while it remains toxic - waiting for thousands of years. And even the faint technologies that we do have that can partially process this nuclear waste have proven to be very expensive. So expensive that we have to ship the waste to the processing plant instead of processing the waste on-site. No one wants to allow the unprocessed waste to travel nearby, so moving the waste to the processing plant is not possible.
As a result, nuclear waste production plants leave pools full of "spent" waste material sitting nearby, waste that will take thousands of years to become safe to handle.
If it is not obvious by now, nuclear waste production plants do not generate enough surplus energy to justify their construction or operation. They are so costly and risky that they cannot get private insurance to cover their construction and operation.
We may develop nuclear fusion in the future. Until then, we must continue to develop avoidance and convervation technologies, and we can only build using renewable energy production technologies.
Edit: https://medium.com/predict/nuclear-power-is-the-future-heres-why-1901f8fa68e0
Florida governor Ron DeSantis is an idiot. Large chunks of the Florida legislature are, too, if they support this legislation.
