In my opinion, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national treasure. I think his thoughts on Dylann are right on.
“Moreover, killing Roof does absolutely nothing to ameliorate the conditions that brought him into being in the first place. The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas. In this sense, Roof is little more than a human sacrifice to The Gods of Doing Nothing. Leave aside actual substantive policy. In a country where unapologetic slaveholders and regressive white supremacists still, at this late date, adorn our state capitals and our highest institutions of learning, it is bizarre to kill a man who acted in their spirit. And killing Roof, like the business of the capital punishment itself, ensures that innocent people will be executed. The need to extract vengeance cannot always be exact. It is all but certain that a disproportionate number of those who pay for this lack of precision will not look like Dylann Roof.”
We saw Rogue One: A Star Wars Story over Christmas and I was disappointed. Not that it wasn’t pretty good, it is just that I expected more. Part of the problem is that the photography was so good – both beautiful and real feeling – along with most of the acting, that the silly plot and outlandish killing looked fake. I was reminded of the first time I saw Westside Story on screen. I had seen Westside Story several times on stage and loved it but all that great Jerome Robbins choreography seemed fake on the streets of the actual New York.
This movie fits in the Star Wars universe, although the hero’s journey trappings are still there, the emphasis is more on fighting a rebellion against the Evil Empire. Speaking of fighting the Evil Empire, in the Star Wars universe, we identify with the brave Rebels, but, in real life, we are the Empire and the rebels are, for example, ISIS.
Quantity is quality, attributed to Joseph Stain (although he probably said Quantity has a quality all its own).
Nvidia is a graphic chip builder who, more or less accident, has become the Intel of artificial intelligence. As games became graphic centric, they needed processors that handled a massive amount of information. Quickly. It turns out that as chips fast enough to make Modern Combat 5 work so well also worked for artificial intelligence. As I understand it, artificial intelligence is just lots of memory – and storage, I guess – and lots of processing speed. In other words, brute force.
Now, I am beginning to think that natural intelligence – including human intelligence, maybe especially human intelligence – is also just brute force. I am beginning to think that we are not as different from other mammals as we like to think we are, maybe we just have better processing, more memory, and more storage.
By way of a background aside, a couple of years ago, Michele’s stepfather, Jim, gave us a subscription to Forbes. I am an avid magazine reader, almost any magazine, like People in a dentist’s office for example, but Forbes is probably the one magazine that doesn’t resonate with me, even in the slightest. It is a celebration of rich people only because they are rich and we often take it from the mailbox and throw it directly into the recycling. But, because we were getting Forbes, I think, we got a complimentary issue of Bloomberg Business, which is a different and, to my sensibilities, much better magazine. End aside.
If you read the same papers that I do – the New York Times, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, for example – it is hard to think of Trump as a rational player. It seems like it will be a win for us all if he just doesn’t get in a pissing match with Putin and start WWIIl. But after reading this fascinating article, Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go, in the aforementioned Bloomberg Business, Trump seems very rational. The article was obviously written before the election and takes the general attitude that Trump is going to lose – for lack of a better word – but it still makes the case that Trump’s campaign was not just randomly different, but different in a calculated way.
Like Obama and his team eight years ago, Trump and his team changed the game. Before the article, I had sort of held the position that Hillary lost because she ran a lousy campaign – I had joked that, in a year of change, Hillary’s campaign was Vote for me for more of the same – but, with new information, I’ve changed my mind. Now I think Trump won because he ran a brilliant campaign. The article is well worth reading, here is a sample:
Parscale was building his own list of Trump supporters, beyond the RNC’s reach. Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others. Some of the ads linked directly to a payment page, others—with buttons marked “Stand with Trump” or “Support Trump”—to a sign-up page that asked for a name, address, and online contact information. While his team at Giles-Parscale designed the ads, Parscale invited a variety of companies to set up shop in San Antonio to help determine which social media ads were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign has ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences. At the same time, Parscale made the vendors, tech companies with names such as Sprinklr and Kenshoo, compete Apprentice-style; those whose algorithms fared worst in drumming up donors lost their contracts.
In the early 70s, I was working for a large, Southern California developer. They had bought a huge tract of land, zoned for more than a thousand houses, from Boise Cascade which who was getting out of the development business because it had almost ruined them. The property was purchased with a small down payment and we would take ownership in stages paying for each stage separately, but once we took down a stage and pulled building permits we had to start paying interest on all the property.
Because payments were only triggered by the pulling of house permits, we were able to work on putting in streets and other public improvements without paying for the land. The company CEO wanted us to start construction on the models and I said that would trigger the payments. He said, “No there was an exception for the models,” and he directed me to the paragraph with the exception. I was a young Director of Operations for Northern California and, while I was high enough in the company to talk to the CEO and had been to his house for company parties, I was low enough in the company to be scared shitless. But I was also cocky and the paragraph actually made it clear that there were no exceptions. I read the paragraph out loud to him.
There was a long silence and then he said, “Somebody is lying, either you are a liar or I am, which is it?” I think I blanked about then because I don’t remember what either one of us said next, but I do remember we pulled the permits for the models the next day.
The point I want to make is that this guy, this CEO was very smart, he came out of Auschwitz broke and he left an estate worth about $1.6 billion dollars. This is the environment that Trump comes from, these are the kind of people he has worked with. It is a mistake to think Trump is stupid or crazy and, so far, the people who underestimated him have not done well.
