We can’t keep up with our infrastructure needs, yet we are committed to building thousand of miles of walls on highways and along borders. Your tax dollars at work.
Category: Nobody Asked, But
If You Build It They Won’t Come
This morning we ate breakfast at a McDonald’s restaurant in Lafayette, Indiana. You had to put your order in at an automated kiosk. But to take care of the people who were confused by these kiosks there was one cashier on duty to take manual orders. There were no people ordering at the kiosks. There were lines of people ordering from the cashier.
Equal and Independent
As regards the matter of independence, no human is naturally dependent on another human from similar or different origins. Person A lives her own life, maintains her own health, enjoys her own liberty, and lays claim to her own possessions. These are separate and distinct from those of person B. Since no law of nature gives A advantage over B, there is no enabling of A to exercise dominion over B.
Debts and Debtors
The government has made massive debtors of each and every one of us. Do we, thereby, have massive enemies? Are these enemies ones whom we have chosen, or has our own government made these enemies for us?
Hand Waving
My field is computer science, the home of the uncanny valley. There is much hand waving devoted to the navigation of the uncanny valley. There are far too many dabblers in robotics and virtual reality who want artificial general intelligence (AGI) to be a thing. As a matter of confirmation bias, they want AGI to be true — they are doing wishful thinking about it.
Whither Self-Driving Cars?
I don’t want to be too quick to say last rites over self-driving cars, but fallibility is the Achilles’ heel of the illusion of infallibility. And ideas are far more dependent on popular acceptance than they are upon usefulness.
The Computers Are Slow Today
How many times have you heard a bank teller, or an airline attendant, or a medical office person say “the computers are slow today,” like there is a cosmic miasma through which computers must swim to get their work done?
Strange Ideas
Sometimes, idea-oriented people have no shutoff valve. Politicians often have this affliction. They never met an idea that they didn’t like, but cost, intervention, and Rube Goldberg-ishness turn idea-attractions into love affairs. Their confirmation biases block any words to the wise.
Complexity of Causality
We make this mistake over and over. We think that A causes B. But in addition to A, there are infinite A primes, double primes, triple primes, n-tuple primes, as well as the rest of the alphabet and its primes. And these are not a solid front, but a staggered and scattered barrage. Furthermore nothing strikes B directly, or practically so.
RKBA
Any enemy will seek to disarm you. First, they will take away promises that you made on their behalf. A people who thought they could hold bad government at bay with words made a declaration of independence first — these are things a people will not tolerate coming from someone who wants to rule them.