Humans: Small Language Models, TACO Trump? Comms Collapse

Breaking or Broken?  Durable Goods

Just out:

New Orders
New orders for manufactured durable goods in February, down four of the last five months, decreased $4.4 billion or 1.4 percent to $315.5 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau announced today. This followed a 0.5 percent January decrease. Excluding transportation, new orders increased 0.8 percent. Excluding defense, new orders decreased 1.2 percent. Transportation equipment, also down four of the last five months, drove the decrease, $6.1 billion or 5.4 percent to $106.1 billion.

Shipments
Shipments of manufactured durable goods in February, up five of the last six months, increased $4.2 billion or 1.3 percent to $319.2 billion.

Early futures were down, but we saw this one coming. (Code for “Yes, I’m short.”)

Small Language Model Humans

Humans – as bio-computing nodes – have a serious “weighting” and “training” problem.  Which our (sometimes) collaborating AIs (used for deep research) have avoided.

I won’t even try to explain how AI works. But, if you’re interested, there are two papers on my AI research site that provide a good learning entry path: How LLMs Work and How They Serve as Mind Amplifiers (1) – Hidden Guild is the first one. Yes – if the coffee has hit – you’ll see the connection to my book Mind Amplifiers, plain as day.

I have, rather politely, not explained that Elaine and I live a semi-isolated – almost hermetic – life out here in the woods. Not because we don’t like people.  It’s just most of them have “issues.”  For one, they don’t think particularly clearly – or logically. Dr. Spock of Star Trek began hinting in that direction a few decades back.  The movie is the message, right?

While we wait for a market turn today, tomorrow, or whenever it comes, we notice the contemporary event streams (Iran, war) and find our newsroom-modded training and weighting recycling Spock-think over and over.

“Illogical, Captain.”

Toss in a spray can of orange Grecian and you’ll have a clearer head and sharper thinking.

Time to Change Metrics

The “change point” is getting closer by the day. Civilization’s training and weighting models are  FUBAR but no one wants to go first.

For example, an acquaintance was asking recently. “How can I cut my food bill in half?”  This was followed by the usual excuses: cost-of-living, political hand-wringing, wages-don’t keep-up, and you know the rest.

Anyone can solve this – the problem ain’t that hard.  What causes the stress is a failure of agency.  The long-running American “can-do” – “I Got This…” – has been replaced with mush between the ears.  Victimhood is viral.  Blame and avoid is the modus.

Yet here we all sit, with the greatest learning and research tools in the history of the world (a fact people seem to miss about AI) and what? We have an ability to ask real questions – and get real answers.  But it turns into an emotional bitch-fight. Of course, you will have to be smart enough to filter out hallucinations. But the tools are there and easy to sharpen.

Take this core cost-of-living problem, for example.  See if you’re able to spot the obvious solution:

• During the “hungry years” of the Great Depression (roughly the 1930s), average U.S. per capita calorie availability from the food supply was about 3,300 calories per person per day.
• But the weighted experience – the conscious imprinting mechanism in our Four Track Human model – made it seem far worse.  Fact: some low-income surveys from the mid-1930s showed food intakes of 3,000 or fewer calories per adult male equivalent, with families skipping meals or relying on cheap staples like beans, potatoes, bread, and cheap cuts of meat.
• Now for the modern data contrast: Gross food supply/availability (USDA ERS comparable metric): ~3,900 kcal/day recently (up from ~3,000 in the 1930s).

This is just a “warm up” to tomorrow’s Peoplenomics report (“Sunset on the Titanic: Iceberg Sighting”).  It reveals two things worthy of your attention. These two points get lost in the “daily ground clutter” of overloaded input channels, so listen up.

1. When we have usable data, we ignore it if we don’t like it. Or, we fail to use it extensibly to self-learn new rules.  “To cut a food budget in half, eat half as much” should be obvious.
2. Or, we spend our time on social media (it’s what people do) instead of researching the online weekly specials sheets from the local food stores.

Out here – in our McMurdo Station isolation-equivalent in East Texas – turning down the inputs and “questioning everything” has resulted in (partially) beating aging, maintaining great health, and de-stressing generally. To us, seems clear America’s pending descent into a Depression 2.0 won’t be much of a speed bump.

We are already down to two meals a day.  Which gets us to more learning: If you haven’t read the data on calorie restricted diets resulting in large increases in lifespan, putting some attention and effort on “the data” may be the best investment you will ever make. What’s a year of Life worth?

Start with  Honoring Clive McCay and 75 Years of Calorie Restriction Research – PMC and for additional conceptual assistance, my book Downsizing: Missing the Collapse of Empire could be on your reading list.

We now return you to this morning’s small language model operation. With the disclaimer that you’ll be observing a “Small Language Model” which – as will become plain – is even more prone to hallucinations and bad decision-making, than our offspring, the Large Language Models throw off.

They have an excuse, I suppose: Bad parents.

TACO Time?

(With apologies to the Seattle area Mexican food chain):

TACO Tuesday?  Well, yes, we used canned diced tomatoes when I forget to keep fresh tomatoes topped up.  My friend Cameron – our FedEx driver and his newlywedded – are also fans of Taco Tuesdays. 

Today, however may be a TACO Tuesday of a different brand: the “Donald” label.

Need a little TACO history? Seven days ago we were reading ‘Armageddon TACO Shuffle’: Ed Luce Says Trump Kept ‘Thrashing’ Between ‘Ideas’ in Iran Interview.  Six days ago Trump, tariffs, and ‘TACO’: Why markets stopped reacting.  Five days ago Trump’s Speech: No TACO This Time…

We’ll skip the whole intervening day-list, it’s long, because that would be “extra cheesy” (which we have been known to do!). Let’s jump to the overnights:  Ex-JPMorgan Quant Chief Thinks Trump Should Ignore Pain in the Stock Market – Business Insider which makes reference to the Taco Trade.

Salsa: Shaky Foundations

Looks to us like “too much hot sauce” – and the price of oil is a better barometer of what’s to come than all the headlines the Mainstream makes up.

West Texas crude was over $114 early on while Brent (Europe) was under $111.

Our “small language model” (betwixt the ears) parses this as partly weighted toward “Americans are stupid and will pay anything for petroleum products” with a secondary output of “Someone knows something bad is coming….”

No shortage of bad ideas out of DC lately, is there?  We figure this market could go down faster than a broke hooker with a drug problem.

Depressing: The Ghoulish Goulash

Depression 2.0 won’t bring the high-class Mulligan Stews that the late Louis L’Amour told me about making when he was knocking around on the beach at Port of San Pedro in the (first labeled) Depression. Merchant seamen, between jobs read books, dove garbage and built beach shacks.  This time, expect Ghoulish Goulash on the menu:  Any carbohydrate plus anything else that turns up.   Here’s what’s going in the “bucket stove” today:

We see Vice President Vance is getting “Hungary” US VP Vance visits Hungary to back Orban’s election amid Iran war. Notice in coming weeks the proximity of Vance and Trump. Then think continuity?

“Look! Up in the Sky!” department: Analysts Caution Against Elon Musk-Led SpaceX’s Mega IPO Amid Valuation Concerns: ‘The Juice Has Been Squeezed.

And in keeping with our SLMs grasping to figure LLMs as a new Depression looms?  How people are reacting to OpenAI’s 13-page policy paper on AI superintelligence | Fortune.  Altman’s calling for a “New Deal” in AI?  Seriously?  How stupid would a “New Deal for Radio” have been in the previous knock-down?

We’ll adjourn to breakfast now; to troubleshoot the SLM between the ears (emotional bias, social media noise, poor logical filters) and repeating Spockisms.

Have a nice day in the noise field. Expect a bumper harvest.

Around the Ranch: Comms in Hell

A short story about what works:  Starlink and MagicJack.

Because even with a $200/month copper bill from Brightspeed, we still have not been able to call outside of our local exchange area since Saturday.

There is an equipment cabinet over a mile, or so, that has a repeating failure mode. But this one sounds like the whole exchange (Montalba, TX) is on the fritz. The tipoff being that calls to voicemail go to a fast-busy signal.  And since VM is not sited at the local exchange and we can’t call the doctor or local stores in town….

Yet the phone company is sending out a tech so five days without phones.

Starlink will occasionally drop when the East Texas precip starts to fall at 2-inch per hour rates, but that seldom  happens.  Remember who mentioned “Drought is coming“?  The street-level drought measure out here has become “How often are the space-based comms down?”

With a Depression looming, we have opted to have both the “regular” flavor  of Starlink plus the mini.  That has been field-tested a great deal in places like Ukraine and now the M.E. Two space-based comm links make a great deal of sense in uncertain times.

I also prepaid our MagicJack for three years.  It’s cheap – another very good idea from our consigliere who says “Where else can you get a phone number and service for $40 a year?”

This only leads to the cell phone quandary:  Our annual TracFone renewal comes up next month and the old Samsung J7 doesn’t support calling over internet. Neighbors have spoken highly of Consumer Cellular which out here runs on the Verizon backbone.  TracFone is on the AT&T which means hiking the property using the phone as a “digital dowsing device” trying to find bars.

The good news in all this?  When I call my own number I get a “fast-busy” instead of going right over to voicemail like it should.

I think that means “I’m busy.”  And come to think of it, sorting out this shit, I actually am.

Fortunately, it’s TACO Tuesday.  The Depression isn’t here yet.  But, when it comes and digital life collapses from an electron shortage, the old ways will be back.  Things like door-to-door sales gigs.  Here’s today’s taco time conversation starter:

In the Great Depression, the Fuller Brush man became one of the enduring symbols of door-to-door American hustle: a salesman with a sample case, a pressed smile, and a script polished by necessity. At a time when jobs were scarce and cash was tight, Fuller Brush offered thousands of men a way to scrape out a living by selling practical household goods—brushes, mops, and cleaning tools—to homemakers who still needed value, even if they had little money to spare. The pitch was part charm, part persistence, and part survival, because in those years a doorstep was not just a sales opportunity. Jobs were hard to come by.

What goes around comes around.  Tacos are cheap.  We like to learn ahead of the curve.

Write when one of us gets rich,

George@Ure.net