George Ure

That thing over to the right is a robot…a quadruped…and one of the fastest in the world.

And of high interest to the military.

Reason?  Because when you take off a couple of hundred pounds of packs, the robot, which has an onboard engine to power it, makes a dandy mobile weapons platform or battlefield surveillance drone.

And that gets me back to a childhood where I read every scrap of science fiction I could get my hands on, because deep down inside, robots are (and were) a major fascination.

Let’s cut to the chase, though, because the precision of our collective thinking will define future choices in terms of policy. 

I have, on several occasions been less than 100% precise in my language use about robots and often lump them into the same bit-bucket as robotics and the evolution of the “replacement for your bag of skin filled with bones that presently passes for human bodies. 

Good news and bad here:  The human body comes with a whole range of sensual pleasures such as food, sex, sound for the sake of art, eyes to behold majestic scenery, and so forth.

The Kurzweilian future envisions a world where the line between humans changes up a bit.  A robotic arm here, an artificial leg there, a nano-tube artificial lung, and first thing you know, the major parts have been replaced and we begin to become something else.

Reader Keith called me out, on a further level of distinction, and I’d like to share this with you because it is very good insight into a whole range of problems describing the evolving world of possibilities and how we use language amongst ourselves to talk about it.

Specifically, he’s worried about precision when it comes to discussion about robots becoming “aware.”

“George,

   Not to “pick nits,” but isn’t “self-awareness” actually better characterized as “other-awareness”? 

Humans (and smarter animals…you should meet my parrot) are completely self-absorbed until they realize that there are entities “out there” which are separate from themselves; but can be manipulated into serving the greater good of the newly aware “self” intelligence. 

For instance, a healthy human child becomes aware of “the other” (usually Mom and those big soft serve feeding devices) at a very young age.  The child quickly learns that the “other” can be manipulated into action to serve the self by screaming it’s foul little head off until this mysterious other arrives with pacification devices.  Animals however take longer to develop this sense of self. 

For instance, we’ve all (we country folk) seen a rooster “attack” its own image in a reflective surface.  The bird has no sense that the reflection is “itself.” 

However, IMHO, animals who are raised by humans develop this sense of self at a relatively early age (quicker than they do in the wild).  You can accuse me of anthropomorphizing, however a parrot chick that is raised by hand understands “me” and “mine” very clearly. 

They may think their people are birds; but they, like the infant, know that if you make enough noise, you will get that other to bring you objects of pacification.  Mango is nesting so the “need” is balls of newspaper for her to shred for her nest box.  She asks for them: “Mango want paper.” It’s not grammatically correct; but it is as clear as a bell.

I’ve blithered enough…I’m trying to be aware of the needs of the other…so I’ll hush.”

Hardly a blither!  Indeed, if anything, it gets us to the problem which algometicians (new word, use it often and PayPal me a dime each time, please.;  It’s the people who create algorithms for programmers…) and their acuity of thought.

On the one hand, we know that first robots will learn the basis of looking ahead x-number of moves.  Then, with some work, they will develop weighted future-potential matrices and will be programmed to make choices based on a programmable set of “values.”  From there, they will self-optimize, and presumably the onboard values will include high-standing for “others”.

As with any marketing analysis, we can see how the “new niches” will lay out, using this type of model.  We can see not only where we are, where we might be going, but with a new Star Trek movie ion the works, it also gives us some keen insights into the Prime Directive.

Our guest level (and PhD level prof, by the way) who points out the importance of otherness as a key metric is exactly right.

A couple of reads on point are worth reviewing:  “Chappie and the Future of Moral Machines” is one of them.  The other is a note in Forbes about how “Clearpath Robotics Raises $11.1 Million To Build Ethical Industrial Robots.”

We run into all kinds of problems looking at the borderlines:  A “thing” becomes a “machine” becomes a “robot” becomes a “human?”

That’s a stretch, but we need to begin looking at definitions carefully, since we are building and deploying all of them right now.  A thing might be a load of iron ore, a machine might be an ingot of iron, a machine might be that iron changed into a production line part, a robot welding up product under computer control, and the human might be the banker behind the scenes, making sure to take enough “skim” so that no one else gets to make or keep as much money as he/she/they do.

Sounds like a pretty quirky thing to be talking about, but another articles out in the past week about a robotic arm that can reproduce itself is also very disconcerting to me and folks like reader Ken:

computer arm that replicates itself.. this is scary.. what is even scarier is the new software in the cloud seri Or Watson that answers questions.. I have an acquaintance  that is a retired scientist and worked on robotics.. anyway in his retirement he is attempting to write his legacy in the form of a computer program that can be self recognizing and learning from what it encounters..For me that is a scary thing to have a computer that has access to the cloud..

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The market’s jump yesterday was very good news, indeed.  With the Dow popping up 228-points there are a couple of ways to read the Dow. 

One way – and this is the one I’m inclined toward – is this is a massive “Buy the rumor” event.

If you watch the market long enough, you can get a sense of it:  Sometimes, when “planned news” like the Fed announcement tomorrow afternoon is due, you’ll see a big run-up ahead of time.  This is oftentimes followed by a major decline after the news comes out.

That’d be about the least surprising result.

There is, however, reason to expect the markets to keep going up; not the least of which is our Trading Model which has been a poster child for this particular blend of crack and Starbucks that seems to be powering the market upward.

Same kind of thing as was going on in 1928-1929  until things broke.

Sit back and you can see why stocks are something of the “only game in town” at the moment:  Housing prices are going up about like the general rate of inflation as measured by the CPI.  With that stuck at less than 2 percent, it’s not too enticing to run out and buy a home.

To be sure, there are still hot markets.  Our San Francisco real estate broker/watcher was reporting brisk growth in sales and prices there.  But just last night, Sacramento Channel 13 was running a story about how Drought is forcing new restrictions on water use at hotels and restaurants.  And west of Suisun, (locals call it “sih-SOON”) there isn’t much better to report. The whole state is still stuck in drought and it looks to Ures truly like the Dust Bowl replay for the Greater Depression will be centered in the California agricultural heartland.

Not that it stops there:  Two more counties up in Oregon are looking at drought restrictions, now, too.

Somewhere, along in here, you’re going to be glad you didn’t build that marina to retire to up at late Shasta. 

For those who missed Ure’s Complete Economic History, Volume IV, you’ll see the explanation of what’s at work in California right now, despite all the protestations from naysayers who insist it will be pouring buckets any old minute, now.  Volume IV consists of single page, reproduced upper right:  Humans got along for millions of years without the web or software, but few can go more than 120-days without food.

Without calories, your body will lose 0.5% of its weight, just supporting itself.  (Marvels of writing up my diet book…).  Which means, even from being technically obese, I can tell you with fair precision that I would be down to 93w pounds by September 18th on the current diet plan.

That said, I could turn off all my computer gear, and leave it off for a couple of years, and let’s toss in the television while we’re at it.  Come back in 5-10 years, but keep shoving calories into the old pie-hole, and I will be as rotund as ever, and perhaps a bit brighter, too.

And that’s the problem of California in a nutshell.

Just like an overweight person (obese) a little belt tightening is a good thing – helps slow the drain on natural resources.  But carried too far (to September with no rain, for instance) and the state will be taking on all the aspect of anorexia.

Not that it’s the only economic fly in the ointment.  The people in Europe have figured out that printing up money is an easy fix to deflation, so they too are now in the Global Competitive Devaluation scramble.  Overnight, the Germany DAX blew through the 12-grand mark (or is that marks, lol). 

So it’s with this kind of pressure on that the Fed will gavel-in this morning and tomorrow afternoon will tell us what we already know:  We’re screwed.  But that’s just my sense of it, and remember:  I’m  a crazy man in the East Texas Outback who just doesn’t much give a rip one way, or the other, having designed (close as I can figure it) a “crash-free life.”

Few people understand this imperative well, let alone do something about it.  So even though the market is up, we’re reminded that markets are subject to gravity, too. 

Oh, and weather forecasts.

Housing:  Blame Weather?

A serious bummer is out from the Census folks this morning:  Housing is on its ear:

The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development jointly announced the following new residential
construction statistics for February 2015:
BUILDING PERMITS
Privately-owned housing units authorized by building permits in February were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,092,000. This is
3.0 percent (±1.7%) above the revised January rate of 1,060,000 and is 7.7 percent (±2.0%) above the February 2014 estimate of
1,014,000.
Single-family authorizations in February were at a rate of 620,000; this is 6.2 percent (±0.9%) below the revised January figure of
661,000. Authorizations of units in buildings with five units or more were at a rate of 445,000 in February.
HOUSING STARTS
Privately-owned housing starts in February were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 897,000. This is 17.0 percent (±9.5%) below the
revised January estimate of 1,081,000 and is 3.3 percent (±12.5%)* below the February 2014 rate of 928,000.
Single-family housing starts in February were at a rate of 593,000; this is 14.9 percent (±10.0%) below the revised January figure of
697,000. The February rate for units in buildings with five units or more was 297,000.
HOUSING COMPLETIONS
Privately-owned housing completions in February were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 850,000. This is 13.8 percent (±9.0%)
below the revised January estimate of 986,000 and is 1.8 percent (±11.7%)* below the February 2014 rate of 866,000.
Single-family housing completions in February were at a rate of 595,000; this is 12.1 percent (±10.0%) below the revised January rate of
677,000. The February rate for units in buildings with five units or more was 236,000.

You just know this leaves government in a box:  How can housing collapse due to record cold and snow on the one hand, and a straight face be maintained about Global Warming?  A sane person would note that “Gosh, George, they’re calling in climate change, not warming anymore!”

Right – presactly: And your BS detector isn’t going off because????

I’m reminded of the guy who falls off a tall building.  On his way down, about the 25th floor, he says “You know, this ain’t so bad…”

And that’s how markets are taking this one so far:  The Dow futures are only down 35, and – many will rationalize – they really ought to give back a few cents of that 228-pointer Monday…

The pavement ought to be more in focus by tomorrow afternoon.  The surging dollar on the one hand, and is there a quiet “Weather War” on the other?

Israeli Elections

Big day for Benjamin Netanyahu today.  Since there are so many dual-citizens both in government and finance in the USA, I think a fair question to be asked is “How many of them get to vote?”  I’m not sure how voting in Israel works, that way; definitely a hole in Ure’s knowledge bank.

But that might have something to do with Netanyahu’s appearance in Congress…if dual citzs get to vote, that is.

Virulent Bid Flu?

Thousands of birds – snow geese – have fallen from the sky in Idaho.  So much for being good for the gander.

Revising St. Patrick’s Day: V.

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There’s a very good reason to start thinking about cosmological accidents.

My friend Chris McCleary has sounded the alarm about some new data that’s popping up in enough dreams at the National Dream Center to make it interesting.  It makes us suspect that some dangerous cosmology will be blowing up (or seriously malfunctioning) at CERN this summer or fall.

You need to go over to the National Dream Center site and read the posting here for background.

If you don’t know too much about CERN, it’s time now to begin absorbing just a bit.  As we get closer to July, I’ll pop in the occasional “self-education” pointer here and there, so that IF/WHEN news does begin to pop you’ll know something about it.

As to why this shows up in this column, please note that we have a long history of tracking use multiple technologies, such as predictive linguistics, as well as dream analysis and word/phrase frequency analysis to give us a better handle on “that which is coming.”  Often it’s wrong, but always thought-provoking.  I trust you’ve visited out www.nostracodeus.com website, as well as the National Dream Center/NDC?

So back to CERN (because this has huge potential to be bad:  Some bacgkround…

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), known as CERN (/?s?rn/; French pronunciation: ?[s??n]; derived from “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire”; see History) is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, the organization is based in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border,

( WikiMiniAtlas 46°14?3?N 6°3?19?E? / ?46.23417°N 6.05528°E? / 46.23417; 6.05528) and has 21 European member states. Israel is the first (and currently only) non-European country granted full membership.^[3])

The term CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2013 counted 2,513 staff members, and hosted some 12,313 fellows, associates, apprentices as well as visiting scientists and engineers^[4] representing 608 universities and research facilities and 113 nationalities.^{[citation needed]}

CERN’s main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research – as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN following international collaborations.

CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web. The main site at Meyrin has a large computer centre containing powerful data processing facilities, primarily for experimental-data analysis; because of the need to make these facilities available to researchers elsewhere, it has historically been a major wide area networking hub.

As to the claims about CERN being the birthplace of the Worldwide Web, that’s technically true: Tim Berners-Lee’s great insight into Hypertext Mark-Up Language (HTML) occurred there in 1989.

But, now that gets us onto the trail of this morning’s little mind-treats to ponder.

When I zoom-out to the maximum permitted by the feeble George-mind, I begin to see what almost looks like the classical battle of “good and evil” evolving around CERN.

You see – and this goes back to the original “here, have an apple” in the [purported] Garden of Eden – there are a couple of ways of looking at life.

One method would have been to sit back, not accept the apple from the tree of knowledge, just accept that which is bounded by physical laws, but not challenge those laws or understand how they work, let alone manipulate them for our specific purposes.

The second method, which doesn’t need a bunch of superstitions built up around it, is the scientific method which is really little more than a take-it-apart-and-see-how-it-works project of enormous scale.

Considering 5,000 years ago, conveniences like indoor plumbing had yet to be invented in a meaningful (accompanied by Charmin) sort of way, the idea that you have a “magic box” which let’s you “plug-in” to an ocean of reality really makes it seem like the bite on the original apple was a good thing.

Until, that is, you start looking at the debris and leftovers from the process.

As you know, Elaine and I have been crisscrossing America by land and air for a good while now, and you’d be surprised at how crappy some of the country is.  And a good bit of it can be seen on aircraft sectional charts that have – gosh, must be over half of the land areas of Nevada – still marked as no-fly territory due to atomic tests and such.  Not to mention the down-winders who were exposed to high levels of radiation as children, especially in the Four Corners area of Arizona.

Then there are the massive dead zones in the ocean, brought about by the run-off of high-potency fertilizers and pesticides that slough-off the land and end up places like off the mouth of the Mississippi River, or the European version up in the ocean between Denmark and Sweden.

There’s a handy-dandy map off to the right, there –> which includes a link to oceanic dead zones that you can study at your own leisure.

And then there’s the problem of space-junk. m A Wikipedia note on that tells us:

As of 2009^[update] about 19,000 pieces of debris larger than 5 cm (2 in) are tracked,^[1] with 300,000 pieces larger than 1 cm estimated to exist below 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi).^[1] For comparison, the International Space Station orbits in the 300–400 kilometres (190–250 mi) range and the 2009 satellite collision and 2007 antisat test events occurred at from 800 to 900 kilometres (500 to 560 mi).^[

Thus, when I assert that “biting into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge” was an arguably bad move.

Humans seem to have schooled-up (to put it in marine biology terms for fish) on two center premises way back in the earliest of times.

Premise 1.  Do not eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.  When you are ready and sufficiently advanced as a species, some great Other will come along, and you’ll all get to go off into (the) Heavens and that will be that.  Simply follow the ground rules we’re leaving behind on how to live right path that we’ve left and everything will work out find.

A great source on this (and with some serious corrections to currently popular Biblical texts that support the “We were planted” may be found at Chris Tyreman’s www.thechronicleproject.org website.  And no, there weren’t just 10 Commandments. 

Premise 2.  Eat all the fruit you want, as fast as you can because by doing so, you might be able to keep up with the Grim Reaper who seems – almost unstoppably – to jump out after every bite.

Some examples:    Atomic energy.  Sounds great but poll the folks in Fukushima or most of Japan and you might find some variance.  Or, ask American Down-winders about it. 

Of course, modern high intensity agriculture is a miracle, but go back to the kill-the-oceans runoff and rethink what I’m telling you about a Grim Reaper in every bite.

Same thing in antibiotics:  Penicillin is a miracle drug.  But it has worn-out to some degree, and so has almost everything up through Cipro.  In fact, about the best anti-bacterial out there may still be silver which I encourage everyone to have and use since there’s a reason both Permise 1 and Premise 2 people agree it is a precious metal. 

But it’s too late to put back the genie on this whole antibiotic thing; it’s being made and dispensed in such numbers that it’s showing up in water supply samples.

As long as I have my pet “bitch list” out about Premise 2 thinking, have you read about the dangers of bisphenol-A which is used to coat thermal printer paper, like your receipts from the store?  This stuff is definitely not good for you.  And it gets absorbed through the skin.

Could go on all day about the Grim Reaper aspect of Premise 1 versus Premise 2 thinking, but the next logical stopping place would be a book-length treatment (after my novel, maybe), but to report on the marvels of modern computers would simply get me into the GR’s work on carpel tunnel syndrome and viruses from innocent drive-by’s on the net.

“So are you getting to a point?”

Oh, that.  Umm….yeah, sure, and here it comes:

We don’t KNOW as in mathematically provable science, but we suspect that the CERN quest for the God Particle may run into trouble.  Trouble with a capital “T” trouble.

Maybe the God Particle doesn’t want to be found.

Or, if it has been found, at least it doesn’t want to be isolated.  So as to where CERN is looking for consistent results of the Higgs-Boson?

On 14 March 2013 CERN confirmed that:

“CMS and ATLAS have compared a number of options for the spin-parity of this particle, and these all prefer no spin and positive parity [two fundamental criteria of a Higgs boson consistent with the Standard Model].

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Now that I have your attention, we’ll freeze-frame that headline for a minute and run through some of the macro madness of this-here rock, and then we will get into the nitty-gritty of economic reality.

We’ll begin this morning – like we do every morning – with a look at the flow of the news and a quest for a common thread that ties it all together.

Some mornings it’s difficult:  Often the news seems as chaotic (and manufactured) as always.  But this morning was a no-brainer:  It’s all about predictions which is how the timid dress-up outlooks..

For example, here’s a story that looks ahead to the coming world of artificial intelligence.  The prediction comes through that somehow machines will be able to rise to the level of consciousness. 

Count us skeptical of this:  Few humans have accomplished that feat – consciousness –  so to say machines are going to do it faster than the mess of 7-billion people who haven’t gotten their (language alert) shit together, is a stretch.

I’m going out on a limb here and proposing Ure’s Rule of A.I. which reads as follows:

For any culture, the level to which A.I. will propagate will be limited to the evenness of the distributed consciousness of the global population.  While there may be individual breakthroughs in A.I., their widespread implementation to benefit the whole planet will be limited by economics, and these, in turn, are bounded by the consciousness of all participants.  Under this notion, A.I. may be self-limited.  Those of top will still want to rule.

Still, it’s an uneven prediction – either in the referenced article or my “rule” that suggests that if man is making machines in his own image, they will suffer from the same personality defects.  Seems to have worked that way on the religiousity front, mostly, throughout history.  We’re just building the next layer of the cosmic onion, more’n likely.

Outlook #2

Our second uneven outlook is courtesy of The Atlantic which normally gets things very close to right.  Their article today “Is it Time for Jews to Leave Europe” starts with a very uneven assumption.  I’d offer that the Jews have been in Europe for a very long time.  Since they were kicked out of England in 1200 something.

What the magazine ought really to have asked is “Is  it time to kick Muslim Invaders out of Europe – Again?”

However, in today’s age of political correctness, the longer-view of history is often muddled and muddied.  Whether this is by accident or design, I will leave to your discernment.

But I expect if someone were to suggest in a headline that we kick all Methodists out of North America that someone would call BS on such a headline.  So there:  Cat’s out of the Bag.

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It’s a fine time to be talking about these critters, in part because it is Monday morning, and in part because the onslaught is here, whether you want to see it, or not.

If you’re like me, you’d rather stay in bed this morning, sleep until about 10, get up, go shopping, do some puttering around the house, play some video games, put in some gym time, maybe watch a move, and have some perfect meals.

Even better, if you could find some way to do all this and still make a living, well, that’d be perfect, wouldn’t it?

The fact is, there seem only to be two roads leading to this little Private Idaho:  One is taking the dole (e.g. being on welfare) while the other is retiring.  Each has its own set of problems.

The dole means a lot of messy paperwork:  Documenting how you’ve been looking for work, actually wasting an hour or so every few days looking through postings on CL and Monster, and then adding your efforts to a log to demonstrate how sincere you are.  The positive side of taking the dole is that you’re young enough to spend some time in the rack with a honey (this is a non-gender specific term) and you can still get out and about.

Path #2, retirement, is a lot less fun, since the rack time is less frequent and the exercise is less appealing, even if you’ve shed a lot of pounds.  Things that didn’t used to hurt now do, and it just take a lot of the joy out of things to have pain shoot through your [whatever] when you try to do the things you do.

The problem – for the rest of the people who hold jobs – is that they’re not going to be holding them much longer if projections about the opportunities held by the blooming field of robotics are correct.  As we’re sitting around pondering this, experts have concluded that somewhere between a quarter and a half of the workforce out there will be SOL by the year 2025, which is just 10-years away.

That will cause the economic system to blow up on us because you can’t make everyone happy at the same time, unless you go to a plan my friend Howard Hill came up with, but we’ll save that for the Peoplenomics side one of these days.  The core idea, though, goes like this:

The government would begin sending out credit cards every month to every man, woman, and child in the US, so that they could get by with doing absolutely nothing, yet still be able to put some kind of a roof over their heads, even if it’s just the high tech version of the olden times “flop house.”  In addition, you’d get credits for food, basic communications like a cheap phone, government sponsored online entertainment, and basic healthcare.

Of course, none of this is free, so it would be paid for with a flat tax on everyone who chooses to work of 40%, or whatever it takes.

The beauty of such a system is that the % of tax would not only be levied on humans, but it could also be applied to robots, and this would mean, in a not-t0-distant future, that we will all be commanding armies of robots.

You know how people in the Bitcoin program use a computer to go out and “mine” for data on the Internet?  Well, the same thing would be true with robots.  Everyone would be given a robot, as say as 16 or some such, and they would be able to send the robot to work.  Robot works for XXXX-hours and is then entitled to an upgrade to more memory and capabilities.  And that would make my robot able to take on higher skill set jobs than yours, and you’d be scheming how to leapfrog ahead of me.

As crazy as it seems, it’s a logical extension of where we are now:  Most people don’t appreciate the power of the numbers involved.  But start with 55-million people on Social Security (at least that’s what their on-hold system says) and then toss in the unemployed, which in the latest jobs report came to something like 8.7-million unemployed.

A quick Google of the facts offers this data picture from 2013:

In total, the Census Bureau estimated, 151,014,000 Americans out of a population then estimated to be 306,804,000 received benefits from one or more government programs during the last three months of 2011. Those 151,014,000 beneficiaries equaled 49.2 percent of the population

So as wild as Howard’s idea seems on the surface (free subsistence level living) it’s really where we are anyway, so let’s just be honest about it, fund it, and call it good. 

Of course the present track blows up with too many illegals from South America (and everywhere else) over time, so it really makes sense.  Unfortunately, getting ahead of any problem is not something our “leaders” do.  They don’t really ‘lead’ at all.  They sit miles back of the pack, figure out where the ‘lead dogs’ are turning, and then spout this and that and see if the herd “follows” which to their mind achieves “leadership.”  Go figure.

In the meantime, though, robots are being sugar-coated so that we will all reach out and embrace them.  Stories like the one about the “Sioux City Mother Seeks “Magic Arms” For Daughter” make it seem like robotics could make everyone’s life happier.

And backing up this kind of happy talk are stories like how the “ATRIAS Bipedal Robot Endures Dodgeball Pummeling [Video].”

But the reality is that robots are coming to take your job.  They’re already rewriting the major papers and selling the results to news recyclers who post and pimp ads in order to avoid going on the dole, themselves.

And down under it all, if you read the small stories, you’ll hear the hoof beats of the Dancers and Prancers of human obsolescence up on the rooftop:  “Computer scientists enhance robotic manufacturing.”  Like this is a good thing?

If your  research goes far enough, the VDARE story “Business Is Thrilled That Automation Raises Productivity, but Doesn’t Mind Mass Unemployment.”

Howard’s idea is a solid one.

And it’s why it has no chance in hell of being adopted any time soon.  So get back to work…read a few more columns and do some online shopping.

The robots are coming anyway, and that sore reality is very slow sinking into people’s thick skulls, but it’s the truth as much as Henry Ford’s Production Line or the Philo Pharnsworth boxes we all live and breathe by are.

Life in the gap is never pleasant on Monday mornings.  But at “The Gap” becomes every more apparent, the social pressure continues to build giving us a social migraine that doesn’t need to be pushed along.

And it certainly didn’t need the assistance of one of the world’s earliest robots, the one that gets you up and insists that you go to work..

The alarm robot.

The Amazing Diet Results Continue

Since we returned from our cruise, March 1, with me weighing more than I ever have, I’ve now lost 1.23 pounds per day.  It’s really amazing!

As of this morning, I’ve dropped 18-pounds and 7.45% of body weight in just 15-days.

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If I had a bunch of those sticky notes, they would be covering the computer screen this morning because there are so many little details to cover related to computers. Many sent in by readers and a few are things that just popped up in the news scans overnight.

Speaking of notes:  I assume you know Win-7 and beyond has Stick Notes built in?  Go to programs (or the search line in Win 8/8.1) and type Sticky Notes and run it.  Then, pin to your task bar.  When you need to make a note, one click on the task bar.  One click and they go back into hiding.  It’s a lot easier than using the task planner in Outlook or Project, but then we’re supposedly retired….still, computers matter.

Today is another one of those soft landmarks in computing because with shipping of the new MacBook, the world’s first implementations of USB 3.1 (*USB-C) will be on store shelves sooner than later.

ComputerWorld has a rundown on the six main features of it, but the dumbed-down version is that USB, which was never designed as a power plug – at least in earlier versions – will now support a 100-watt load.  And it will also supper 10-gigabit speeds, so this will, no doubt over time, replace the Thunderbolt and Firewire and maybe Lightning.

If you’re not an Apple fan, the same tech is launching in the new Google Chromebook Pixel, although what anyone would update a PC just to get a USN port that is faster is beyond me.  Current 3.0 technology can press up 1 gb transfers and, seriously, what is so damn important that those kind of speeds matter.

I don’t know how many boardroom-level meetings you have been to, but it’s sometimes just nuts the way people get into (language alert) dick-measuring over whose computer is faster.  It’s true absurd.  Like load times matter if the PowerPoint is playing smoothly?  Sure 24-cores or a portable Cray about be nice too, but part of life is learning to live in the sweet spot of things.  Just like people who won’t install Win 10 when it comes out until at least the first service pack comes out….you know the type:  Untrustworthy.

Next?

An inquiring reader wondered what kind of input device I used with voice recognition software?

The answer (for years now) has been the Plantronics Audio 995 USB Multimedia Headset with Noise Canceling Microphone – Compatible with PC and Mac which will set you back about $60 bucks.  The good things:  I can walk around with it on, carrying on conversations while out in the shopt ditzing around with this or that – wireless if fun.  And the frequency response is clearer than on some of the cheapo microphones that are sometimes packed with product. (ahem….)

On the other hand, it’s not perfect.  A few weeks ago, my buddy Gaye up at www.backdoorsurvival.com and I were chatting and I was on the treadmill and she complained about noise from my end.  Well, turns out the Plantronics 995 is susceptible to wind noise – the problem went away when I turned off the face-fan on the treadmill.

And?

OK, next computer items has to do with the UrbanSurvival web site.  I’ve made a decision to move everything over to the .www.peoplenomics.com website in a month or three.  The reason?

When I started UrbanSurvival, it was the center of the universe for prepping, futuring, and lots of other things including getting back to the land after sailing for 10-years following by being a serious software sales road-warrior for a few.  In the meantime, the name was seriously ripped off.  The term “urban survival” has been ripped off by hundreds of outfits which have, effectively, made it very difficult to sort out what urban survival is.

Big changes have gone into effect at the US Patent and Trademark Office – and the cost to resigster a trade name for the internet is down to $225 and it’s a do-it-yourself process any idiot can do – if you have a credit card.  Downside is that it’s $450 to protect both the name and the server name (because it’s two  classes of filing) but once done, you’re on solid legal ground.

Whether it’s worth it to hire an attorney when people begin to infringe when you become wildly successful, is another matter, but there’s big money in trademark and copyright infringement.  As this article over here says, some brands are losing 60,000 visitors a month to trademark and name rips…welcome to my world.

To hell with that battle (with the rip off artists).  I have trademarked Peoplenomics, so as soon as the Trademark registration is finished, that will happen.  By the way, www.ruralpioneer.com and the Rural Pioneer name, relative to anything on the Internet, is a registered trademark, so when you get a chance, drop by other there – we’re posting a few items there, including some great contributions from Oilman2, who as you know, is building a similar flee the city and get sustainable site to our home about 40-minutes south of us near Crockett, Texas.

Done yet?

Nope.  Two more items to cover in the computer arena.

First is the ad on the right side of this page.  What is it?  Well….the Amazon ad has replaced the Google ad. 

Now, you might be asking “Gee, George, why do that?”

Well, Thursday I happened to be working on a few tweaks for the site (registering for comments had gotten turned on, needed to migration to a new caching program (so the site may seem faster this morning, hopefully), and I turned off the need to register in order to make a comment on any of the articles around here.

I swapped it out because the “other guys” whose ads were there previously, started serving an ad that headlined “Ure  DOWNLOAD” which I did not authorize.  I would have just killed the ad and been on my merry way except for the fact that when I clicked on the ad, it trying to install malware and that just pissed me off – so out it went.

Amazon doesn’t do that, so they land in that spot.

And last – but certainly not least – I turned off registration over on the comments section.  Mr.

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The picture over to the right is finally revealing what we were mumbling months ago when (in a trance) I wrote about how at some point the last possible person would have bought their sixth automobile.  When this happened, I was expecting there would be no more parking places and we’d enter the jaws of economic collapse. 

We’re getting closer…..closer….closer.  And people like us are to blame.  We look at core retail (retail sales less autos) the same way the Fed looks at inflation (reported inflation less food and energy).  Their way is delusional, mine is not.  (What’d you expect me to say?)

We’ve been half-expecting retail sales to slide down the slopes into oblivion for quite a while now.  For a couple of good reasons all of which is because of bass, four-string, electric guitars.  Lemme ‘splain you, Lucy:

• Look around your house and ask yourself (language alert!) “Do I have enough shit?”  We did this the other day and decided that the one last toy we didn’t have was a four-string bass guitar to dink around with in our home studio. 
• The second MPQ (major pertinent question) is “Can I buy used instead of buying something new?”  In our case, the same exact $200+ new cheapo electric bass we could buy from any of 10-20 online instrument discounters new at retail, was available used from a Guitar Center up in Minnesonsin somewhere  for $99.95 – so we opted for the  the used one.  How many people go on to out-Jump Van Halen at age 66?  Zero, but why not try?
• The third MPQ is whether we need something at all.  The answer in all honesty, is “Prolly not…”  But if it’s a WTF moment and if you don’t owe anyone one anything, why not toughen up the left fingertips so someone will have something nice to say about you when your funeral shows up – even if it’s as little as “Shit, dude, what a riff the old man developed recently…”

Daughter Denise (the real musician in the family) was appalled.  “Dad, the CEO of Guitar Center probably rides around in a jet and why don’t you get something that’s a real instrument so you can get some quality sound out of it?  Like my old Gibson…or my boyfriends [something or other]?”

The simple answer is I don’t play guitar OR bass.  But we don’t have time to read, either, but that doesn’t stop us from owning close to a thousand books…because that’s the AMERICAN thing to do…spend, spend, spend and keep this pony running…

But that’s what makes this a perfect metaphor for America and where we are as a country, don’t you see?  Serious consumer super-saturation.  In other words, few of us have enough  time to use all our existing (language alert!) shit even once a week, let alone, often enough to have it actually make sense to own it, let alone BUY it.

That, and the Feral Reserves report last Friday on Consumer Debt says credit card use is up at an annualized rate of only 4.8% (a tad more than inflation, but likely more people are buying food on credit cards…) while non-revolving (student loans and mobile homes and such) had actually gone negative.

It logically follows that with the Baltic Dry Cargo Index stuck in park (its down to 2009 levels) there should be some signs of spending falling apart.  I mean besides the inventory numbers lately taking off to the upside.

So that’s reality at the street.

Now, with your ViseGrips at the ready, hand me the envelope and let’s see what the latest is from the US Department of Delusions, shall we?  Ooops…make that Census Bureau/commerce, but same diff:

“The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for February, adjusted for seasonal variation
and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $437.0 billion, a decrease of 0.6 percent (±0.5%) from the previous month, but up 1.7 percent (±0.9%) above February 2014.

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