I showed up earlier this week, and it turned out only to be a registration process, a couple of questionaires, the big one with a dozen or more pages was apparently designed to weed out potential jurors whose decision could be predicted before the trial -- obviously the DA wants to eliminate jurors who would vote to acquit, and the defense attorney wants to eliminate the other side. I'm probably disqualified on any one of a half-dozen questions, for example something like (I don't remember the exact words) "Do you have negative feelings for police? If so, explain." The only time I was ever assaulted as an adult was here in Grants Pass, and the investigating cop wrote me up as the perp. I think the DA at that time decided he'd never get a conviction, but he dawdled over it for several weeks, during which time I was unable to know what was happening. Now I have a police record for an "arrest" with no way to clear my name. Every time I think about the incident, I resolve to never again cooperate with (speak to) the police for any reason, on Fifth Amendment grounds. My answer to their question was shorter (leaving out the non-cooperate part) to fit in the space. Although I did say "different circumstances" in relation to this trial, I expect them to disqualify me. No big deal, since Covid I have been wearing a mask in all enclosed public places -- and I don't even get a cold any more, except the one time I took it off to eat in a restaurant -- and the jury sits in two rows of crowded chairs during the trial (no "social distance"), so jury duty would have an undesirable health effect on me.
Another question had a much more profound implication. They wanted to know if I had ever taken training in any of a half dozen or so categories, none of which I remember except the middle one: "Religion." Maybe they think that religious nuts would be more hostile to lawbreakers (or perhaps to "oppressive" police work), although I answered numerous questions more specific to such hostility as "No." But the more I think about it, the more it annoys me than anybody who ever went to Sunday School would be automatically disqualified. That means that any such person -- including myself -- if we were ever on trial for any reason at all, would be denied a fair trial by a "jury of [our] peers" including people of faith who believe that "All law is God's Law." Of course God is bigger than any human jury, and "The heart of the King is in the hand of the LORD, Who turns it any way He wants to." But religious discrimination like that should be unlawful -- as indeed it is!
Oh well, the last six months I have been continually reminded that Ore-gone
is "a fly-over state" where quality products and services are not available,
now also including Justice. Many decades ago I decided that "America has
the finest justice that money can buy: I didn'tpay for any, so I didn't
get any." Now even more so in Ore-gone.
Rex Stout is written in the first person, but it seems to be more in the style of Watson's Sherlock (very little inner turmoil), perhaps also because most of it is a hundred years old, before there was such a thing as "Chick Lit". Unfortunately, the last of the three (by copyright date) was well into the modern era, with increased inner turmoil, especially involving politics (Watergate). I read fiction as a low cognitive burden, when I'm too tired to work but not yet sleepy enough to turn off the light, religion and politics don't qualify; I almost didn't finish it. If there were any more (later) Rex Stout novels on the shelf, they'd stay there. In another week or two I'll be done with this library's fiction. The holdings have deteriorated substantially since I first started here eight years ago, perhaps because they are now supported by tax revenues. It's a "Blue State" (left-wing politics, which favors female interests) and a "fly-over" state, in which quality products and services are much less available.
sigh
Well, I also seem to be deteriorating, now within two or three years
(by age) of when both my parents started losing their marbles. God can
do anything he wants to, so maybe He'll take me quick (like my sister),
or maybe I'll stay compos mentis longer (one guy in Sunday School
is still sharp at ninety-something), God only knows.
First you need to understand that every living person consumes a certain amount of natural and/or artificial resources just staying alive. Some of those resources grow on trees, but they are not trees in every person's back yard. Most of it involves substantial labor and processing and transportation to get it from its natural state to the form and place we need it to be so we can eat it. In the distant historical past, everybody grew or gathered or killed their own food, and most of their waking hours were consumed doing that. Then factory farms were invented, so that only a few people could grow -- and eventually process -- and transport a lot of food to people who were thus freed up to do other things. The growers and processors and truckers need to be paid, so money was invented to pay them. Money does not grow on trees, so everybody needs to do something useful that somebody else is willing pay for, thereby to earn enough money to buy the resources we all consume in living. When the growers and processors and truckers get efficient enough, they have money left over to spend on other things.
Where does everybody else's money come from? Somebody must create wealth. The government can print money, but that destroys wealth. We need people making things out of nothing (or at least taking them out of the ground like farmers and miners do) to create wealth. This is very hard to do well, so very few people are successful at doing it, but they earn a lot of money, which they deserve because they are creating wealth that the rest of us can use up. This is basic Econ 101, how the world works.
Why are there no women creating huge amounts of wealth? Probably because they don't want to. Not many guys want to either. That's why we pay so much to the ones who do want to. They get very rich, and they earned it. Anybody can do it -- if they want to. Most of us add a small value to somebody else's creation, and we get paid accordingly. Some people beg or steal the wealth they need to live on, and in a very rich country like the USA, we can afford that, because we have so many people creating more wealth than they need. You cannot steal wealth that has not been created by somebody else.
So now we have WIRED's "Global Editorial Director"
-- who is a woman, because only women complain about what they don't want
to fix -- saying "women like money, and we're coming to take some of yours."
In other words, she wants to steal it rather than earn it. Thieves never
become very rich, that only comes from creating wealth = goods and services
that other people want to pay for. She is editor of a magazine that is
losing subscribers, because she does not know how to create something the
lots of people want to pay for. WIRED magazine was
sort of like that when (guys) invented it, but they sold it to a publishing
conglomerate that did not understand the industry nor the readers. It stopped
creating wealth, leaving only (female) whiners to complain about it. Magazines
in general are not what people want to pay for, at least not this century.
Basically a couple India immigrants (Indian names, but living in Seattle area) decided to do a "feature film" movie using off-the-shelf "AI" tools. The tools are programmed by programmers to resemble videos that real people produce, but they only work well for a couple minutes. This article explains some of the hurdles the producers had to jump over to make a longer flick.
The only "intelligence" in the software is explicitly (or implicitly)
programmed by the developers, who were aiming it at YouTube creators. This
article concludes with the hopeful prediction that future tools will better
serve feature-length production. Unstated is the fact that Bollywood flicks
lack the kind of originality that you see in American films -- which are
done by (actually) intelligent human screen-writers and directors -- so
the programmers can conceivably write code that does that. Computers can
only be as intelligent as the programmers program them to be, which is
substantially less than the programmers themselves, and in the case of
"AI" software, is rather less than ordinary college graduates. Good enough
for the India domestic market, but not America (nor even American exports).
As you know, I'm already heavy into Scripture. I don't have a single favorite verse, but if somebody were to ask, I might answer "2 Tim.3:16" because it effectively nullifies the question. "ALL Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for" [all kinds of good stuff]. Ten months of every year I read through the Psalms, one each day, and the other two months (both 31-day months) I do the 31 chapters of Proverbs. I'm not much into poetry, so it's pretty tough going, and my Hebrew is falling off, so I make allowances... Then, after that exercise, I work through the Bible. I tried once or twice to do the whole Bible in a year, but it covered too much material each day for any of it to stick, so I went back to a chapter a day, Genesis to Revelation. A couple years ago I finished the second time through in the original Hebrew and Greek, and decided it might be more helpful if I alternated Old Testament and New, and maybe even divided each in half, alternating first and second halves (the OT historical books vs prophecy, and the NT historical books vs epistles). I recently finished Ecclesiastes and started Romans (having already done Genesis and Matthew, both pretty easy reading; Ecclesiastes is poetry and rather nihilistic, but I'm surprised at how few words in Romans I need to look up in the dictionary at the back). I'm down to a half chapter or less, which seems to help with understanding.
Yesterday I did the first half of Rom.3, which ended with an unconditional condemnation of "The end justifies the means" argument, and I got to thinking about a single unexplained word in the last Lord Peter Wimsey novel I finished last week: "Rimmon." It's an obscure reference to 2Kings 5:18, where the prophet Elisha blesses the (former) leper Naaman who asked permission to bow (but not worship) in the heathen temple because it was his job to be there for his boss to lean on in that place. In the modern context it was used as an "end justifies the means" argument for an otherwise devout Christian woman working for Wimsey (he paid otherwise unsupported women as secretaries and gofers) doing something "illegal" in support of his getting an innocent women acquitted in a murder trial. Endland was already becoming post-Christian at the time Dorothy Sayers wrote this novel, but she obviously expected her readers to understand the one-word reference (as did I!) and to agree with the unsound logical inference (as I did not). Naaman was not asking permission to sin, but only to be in a place and position that might be misunderstood as sin. I don't know about British law from a hundred years ago. but Sayers made clear in her reporting of Wimsey setting out the task, that this woman (if caught) could go to jail. He was telling her to do it, just don't get caught, same as the immoral advice our own King SCOTUS gave to every schoolchild in America beginning in the mid-1980s when they took the statement of moral absolutes off public schoolroom walls.
Today I finished Romans chapter 3, and despite the fond belief of most American pastors (Feelers every one of them), Paul is very much in favor of moral absolutes and God's Law:
Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law. -- [Rom.3:31 oNIV]
Also yesterday, the title of Psalm of the day, Psalm 9, which I
read as "To the chief musician, upon the death of [a] son, a psalm for
David," and then noticed that the interlinear gloss did not translate the
two words "death [of]" and "son," leaving them as names. So I looked in
the NIV, and they translated it as I did. It doesn't make much sense, because
the Psalm is David thanking God for rescue from his enemies, so the NIV
text turned the whole phrase into a title of the tune this Psalm was to
be sung to. Poetry is pretty obscure in its own time, and 3000 years has
not helped much. David was a hard-core Feeler (which I am not even slightly)
and most of his psalms either ask God's help against enemies, or else thank
God for such help, and (with a few exceptions noted here in my blog when
it's happening) I mostly don't have any enemies. These Psalms are for the
majority of God's people around the world who do have enemies. I'm OK with
that.
People with a job to do don't have time to read. I'm getting old and slowing down. I have not stopped working, but the all-nighters are fewer and and I often run out of gas before the end of the day. I'm not sleepy enough to go to sleep, and sitting in front of the boob toob provokes hand-to-mouth exercises that put on unnecessary weight. Last August I hit a 10- or 20-year weight low, mostly by working long hours and eating one meal at the end of the day. That was 38 pounds down from an all-time high about a year ago, when I decided to get more intentional. I'm slipping -- perhaps it is the cold of winter -- but I'm back up 15 pounds. So I'm trying to read more and watch movies less.
Anyway, women read more than men -- "Them what can, do; them what can't, teach." And those who can't teach, read books and watch movies or (yuk!) TV. Men are mostly Doers, women read more.
Male authors, seeing the far larger market for Chick Lit, do a good job of imitating female authors. The brief plot summary on the inside front jacket usually gives some clues: "Psycho-thriller" and "secrets from the past" are both code for inner turmoil. Chapters beginning with the first-person pronoun "I" likewise. You can do inner turmoil in third-person narrative, but it's much more natural by self-disclosure.
Dorothy Sayers wrote a hundred years ago, when male tastes dominated the market, and she did a pretty good imitation of a male author. I saw Lord Peter Wimsey on TV when I was a kid, so I saw her name on the library shelf -- only four or five books! -- and she beats out all the other female authors in readability (I suppose that's why there are dozens of her books not on the shelf), but the one I just finished, she didn't do so well. I probably won't go back for any more.
Irrelevance seems to be part and parcel of growing old. I mostly can't
stand what passes for music in church either, and I can't find any buyers
for my programming skills. sigh
As TV shows go, Protectors was more tolerable than most, but I don't
think I'll bother with any more. I gave up on "Elementary" (see "Feminazi
Sherlock Holmes" two months ago) about the second or third episode
in the third season. TV is like that, lower budget than movies, so much
lower quality screen writing.
In his opening paragraph he says,
...it is estimated that autonomy reduce [car] crashes since 94% of serious crashes are due to human error.That's only true if the autonomous vehicle crashes are not due to human error. What nonsense! Every car in the world, autonomous or not, is designed and manufactured by humans -- or by robots designed and manufactured and programmed by humans -- and those humans make just as many mistakes as the ones driving the vehicles, perhaps even more because the autonomous vehicles are controlled by millions of lines of code that imports unverified (possibly malicious) "open source" library code, and/or by trillions of "machine learned" parameters mostly trained on unsupervised data, and which not even the vendors know how they make their artificially "intelligent" decisions.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why it is so important for the lawyers and computer gurus to absolve (themselves and) their vehicles of any fault when people die in those crashes. Why? Follow the money. A couple pages later,
To realize the consumer and commercial benefits of autonomous driving, auto OEMs and suppliers may need to develop new sales and business strategies, ...He goes on to mention "new technological capabilities and address concerns about safety" but the business issues -- read "money" -- come first. On the matter of safety, he mentions ISO 26262, which he tells us is an international safety standard that "does not fully cover the safety requirements of AV features..." because autonomous vehicles "are not fully specifiable, while ISO 26262 implicitly assumes that all functionality is specified. He seems to think that it should be watered down so that the inherently unspecifiable responses to random traffic conditions do not figure in the safety standards. We train human drivers to be able to cope with whatever they find on the road, why should we trust an autonomous vehicle that is completely unspecified in that arena?
In summary, due to the technical, legal, and other challenges just described, achieving level 5 autonomy remains at least five to 10 years away."Level 5" is the top of an obsolete 5-level scale for grading degrees of autonomy. I say "obsolete" because none of the perpetrators refer to it any more. Anything requiring a human to fill in for less than fully autonomous driving is unrealistic: either the human is fully in control, or their attention is diverted eslewhere so that they cannot recover from whatever situation is deemed too complex for the robot to deal with. Not only is level-5 the only form of autonomy anybody considers, there are commercial robot taxis on the streets of San Francisco (and probably other cities) today with no human in control at all. The only way this can happen at all is by blatantly disregarding safety considerations, just as programmers are increasingly doing all over the computer industry.
Because some forty years ago King SCOTUS decreed that the only ethical standard ever taught to American school children must be removed from schoolroom walls, thereby giving those (and all subsequent) kids implicit permission to lie, cheat, steal, rape, and murder -- just don't get caught, and nobody ever expects to get caught, even though some of them regularly are -- and those kids are now running American businesses and governments, and are programming the robots driving the autonomous vehicles already on the nation's streets and highways. And if "Formal Safety Standards" ever get defined to cover those vehicles, they will absolve the perpetrators of the inevitable car crashes of all fault. Like Ford's Pinto, the manufacturers will deem litigation less costly than getting it right in the first place.
Until some celebrity's kid gets run over, and finds a high-power lawyer
to go after the manufacturer, and the jury sets aside the new laws for
a high-priced punitive damages award. Juries can do that (it's called "nullification"
which means they can return any verdict they can agree on, without regard
to the law or the facts or the judge's instructions, effectively "nullifying"
those rules. And that will be the end of autonomous vehicles driven by
computers programmed by people. And there are no other programmers, not
now, not ever.
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