Extinction As A Corrective Measure

 

We've recently watched several banks (Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank) suddenly go 'casters up' in IT-speak, and the government in the guise of the FDIC has jumped in to assure their depositors (and investors... let's not forget the investors) that all will be well.

Just kidding...  All is not going to be well... except for those depositors and investors.  You?  You're going to pay the butcher's bill.  'FDIC', let's keep in mind, is the Federal Deposit Insurance Company.  Normally, banks pay premiums to FDIC based on the number of deposit accounts at their respective institutions and the value of those accounts up to insured limits.

Suddenly, bank depositors are being reimbursed well above the limits that were insured.  Actuarily, that's a losing business model — for the FDIC.  (It's great for the banks.)  If deposit insurance rates are being set correctly, we should expect that the FDIC will end each fiscal year with a small surplus or a small deficit.

Small.

So, when the FDIC comes up short by a huge pile of loot (and I use that term deliberately), where does the FDIC — which cannot go out of business — find the funding for its sudden and unexpected (heh heh heh) flood of red ink?

I know, Dear Reader, that you are way ahead of me on this.  You have already guessed, haven't you, that the U.S.Treasury is going to write a nice fat check to FDIC to help them over their sudden and unexpected (heh heh heh) 'difficulties', and you already know that you fund the U.S.Treasury.

Extinction, they say, is the engine of evolution.  When a species goes extinct, it makes evolutionary 'room' for a successor species that, we hope and expect, will be 'better' however that term is defined.

When a banking species is artificially protected from the consequences of Natural Selection, things don't get better.  That is why I can confidently predict that the 'failures' of SVB and Signature Bank will not only not be the last such, but that we should expect more of the same within The Planning Future.

Get out your checkbook.

 

Gender-Affirming Surgeries

 

I know I'm going to get pushback on this from certain quarters, but I'm going to say it anyway.  The GOP and GOP-aligned elements should stop militating against so-called 'gender-affirming practices'.  It's fine to say — periodically — that they think it's a bad idea.  Heck, I think it's a bad idea, but no one's doing gender-affirming surgery on me or anyone I care about.

Now, why would any right-thinking person hold such a position?  The reason is very simple:  we constantly bleat that actions (like elections) have consequences.  What better way to forcefully make that point than to let those consequences occur?

We're told that 'often', 'generally', or maybe 'always' such surgeries leave the patient sterile.  That means the gene, if that's what it is, or the political ideology, if that's what it is, is not going to be passed on to the next generation — because there won't be a next generation.  It's a self-correcting problem, meaning:  we don't need to do anything about it.

There is a time to make things happen, and there is a time to let things happen.  It's important to know the difference.

 

Where in Hell is Carmen Sandiego?

 

At the dawn of the Computer Age, roughly the 1980s, people started writing programs of spectacular complexity for the purpose of amusement — games.  There was a Star Trek game where the player captained a starship at war with shadowy Klingon opponents.  There was a Moon Lander game where the object was to play your descent rockets so as to end on the Moon's surface without running out of fuel.  There was a 'Dungeons and Dragons' spin-off in which the player navigates through cunningly described caverns and chambers acquiring practical or magical assets.

Whole families of games were written for equipment like the Atari game console and the Commodore 64.  Among these was one called "Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?".  Here, the player is a detective tracking the infamous eponymous thief hither and yon based on clues picked up along the way.  'Carmen' spawned an unauthorized version written, it was rumored, by one or more classically-trained intellectuals.  In "Where In Hell Is Carmen Sandiego?", the villainous thief has escaped into The Underworld, and it is said that if one doesn't know Dante's 'Inferno' like they were born there, they have little chance of bringing Carmen to justice.

The original game (not "Where in Hell...") has now been ported to the current PC world, and retains all the annoying characteristics of the original, hokey music and all.  For anyone who wants to try their hand, I've located a current link.  Abandon hope, all who enter here.

 

More Anti-war With Each Passing Day

 

I ask myself why we're in such a mess.  The only answer I can imagine is that we have put ourselves here by making bad decisions, and those bad decisions are coming home to roost in the form of a warped economy and the great bugaboo, income inequality.  Those who actually make the decisions have a penchant for making decisions that work to their advantage.  Your advantage?  Please, don't make me laugh.  This is how Congress and the DC upper crust can justify spending trillions 'to keep the government running for a few months while we sort everything out'.  Much of... most of that money benefits the average Joe not one whit.

Meanwhile, Congress is at war with its citizens because those idiot citizens insist upon staying warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and they want to drive their cars to work and play instead of staying home or taking public transportation.  To make us behave as we should, the economy will be throttled (both senses of that word) to deprive us of the wherewithal of modern living.  It seems as if the elites want us living in a 9th century village so that there will be enough jet fuel available for them to visit the Côte d’Azur.

And no one can stop them from pillaging our own assets right from under our very noses.

I ask myself where are the heroes.  We subject ourselves to costly election campaigns every two years, and we try to send heroes to Washington to fight for us, but the heroes we send often turn out to be weak-kneed liars who, within years if not months, prove to be in it for no one but themselves.  The exceptions to this are almost too rare to warrant mention.  It's the old canard about the 99% of villains giving the 1% of heroes a bad name.

When there's a dust-up in some foreign country (where we typically have no national interest) there's always some Congressman who will stand up and berate their fellows for not defending the oppressed peasants of West Wheresoever.  And the result?  We send the Army.  We send the Marines.  And we send them a few trillion dollars to help them make ends meet.

And sometimes we brush up against some country that can actually fight back.  And the heroes we sent on a mission that had no 'payback' other than more power for those who did the sending... those heroes don't come home from the mission.  Ah, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

I ask myself who is profiting from all this.  It isn't me, and I suspect it isn't you, either.  Congressmen, meanwhile, have an alarming tendency to become millionaires or billionaires during their term(s) of office.  How does that happen?  Well, it's a fairly simple process, actually. 

• get involved in a war
• send billions or trillions in foreign aid
• that foreign aid is redeemed (laundered) via domestic arms manufacturers
• who make lavish campaign contributions to those who voted correctly
• which money can be kept if left over after a campaign ends

We've just witnessed a new variation on that theme involving family members or relatives — Hunter Biden is merely one such example — who gain employment in countries that are recipients of foreign aid:

• send foreign aid to country A
• get relative hired by company B
• that is financially connected to country A
• and is paid with (laundered) funds originally marked 'foreign aid'
• some of which makes its way back to a politician who voted correctly

I ask myself when are we going to learn.  I suspect the answer is 'never'.  'Learning' in this context means grasping that 'spending money' does not equate to 'fixing problems'.  Americans, by and large, do not yet understand that.  They think — I'm using 'think' here in its broadest meaning — that all problems can be solved with sufficient greenbacks.  Decades and centuries of adverse experience has not yet penetrated into their consciousness.  They continuously send off to Washington representatives who believe — we have only their actions to inform us of this — that their job is to spend money as fast as possible.  The soldiers who march off to war in countries they've never heard of to fight for reasons of which they are either unsure or deluded will come home to us, if at all, broken physically or mentally or both.  Yes, some lives were lost, some careers ended, some families upended, but it was a very beneficial tactic, financially speaking (if you're in Congress).

Our televisions constantly bombard us with pleas for The Wounded Warrior Project or something similar, the sub rosa message being that you're a patriotic American only if you feel sorry for those who were maimed in a place they shouldn't have been, fighting a war that benefitted their fellow citizens not at all.

Those who march off to war these days fall into two broad categories: the blindly patriotic, and the weak-minded.  The blindly patriotic go because we must, in their minds, push back against any threat to the country no matter how ephemeral.  The weak-minded just do what they're told.  It's a rare thing these days that anyone goes to war because the nation has been attacked.  In a nuclear age, the major powers are not going to do that to each other.  The risk is simply not worth it.  That's why all conflict for the past 75 years has been 'strong vs weak'.  Put another way, it's 'bully vs nerd'.  On those rare occasions when the nerds score (9-11-2001 springs to mind) the bully goes crazy, lashing out wildly and generally making things worse.

If we're to work our way clear of the colossal mess we're in, we must stop making things worse.  How?  Step number one has to be 'stop spending money'.  We have to find all those places where we're spending money foolishly, and stop that.  (Yes, Pentagon and military suppliers, I'm looking at you.)  Then, we have to find all those places where we're spending money wisely and... probably... stop most of that, too.

We'll need another batch of heroes, I suppose.

 

The Last Time I Saw Ciudad Juarez

 

ElPaso and Juarez are much in the news lately.  The mayor of ElPaso has declared a state of emergency because of the influx of thousands of immigrants flooding across the border.  I've only been to ElPaso once, and only once to Juarez, its sister city across the Rio Grande.

My father passed away in March 1958 while I was in my first year of high school.  I was 14.  Newlyweds Jerry and Peggy were in California where he worked, and Peggy was very pregnant with their first child, Elizabeth.  Mom and I flew out to spend some time there and to help them pack up to come back east because Jerry had taken a job with GE in Utica, NY.  It was my first airplane trip; 4-engine TWA Constellation; it was a thrill.  We drove back east, the four of us, mostly along Route 66.  The next year, we took a train up to Utica for Elizabeth's birth.

I met my Aunt Marjorie (Meagher pronounced 'mar') for the first time ever later, but I'm not sure precisely when.  Marjorie was a teacher of special needs children, mostly hearing-impaired, in ElPaso TX which was appropriate since Marjorie herself was quite hard-of-hearing.  She swung by our Brooklyn home on the tail end of a vacation road trip from EP up the Pacific coast, across Canada west-to-east, and south to visit relatives before heading back to Texas.  She stayed with us at 441 for a day or two, convincing my mother during that time that she should visit ElPaso.

It may have been 1960 that we actually did the trip.  I recall seeing "North By Northwest" at a cinema in downtown ElPaso, so it could have been as early as 1959, but I doubt it.  Mom and I boarded a bus at the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan and spent three grueling days in 'coach' seating, rolling day and night.  I've spent 60 years trying to forget that trip and it's still with me.  Marjorie had always gushed over ElPaso and its wonderful climate, hot but bone-dry, and how much we were going to love it.  On the day our bus pulled into the ElPaso terminal, the temperature was expressed in three digits and the humidity was almost as high.  It felt like drowning.

The one thing I distinctly recall from that trip was that much of it was through the South.  At one point, we stopped at a terminal in God-knows-where, and I got out to use the restroom.  There were two: a white restroom and a colored restroom, and I wondered why one would choose a painted facility over an unpainted facility or vice versa.  It took some time before I realized that I could only use the white restroom.  Such things didn't exist where I was raised.

Marjorie loved to pack us all into her car and take us for a ride somewhere.  We went to White Sands; it was stunning.  We went to Carlsbad Caverns; it was breathtaking.  We went to Juarez.  On a few days, there was little to do (or little that would interest a 16-year-old) and I was left on my own.  That's how I managed to head downtown for a movie.

On our trip to Juarez, Marjorie drove across the International Bridge into Mexico, found a parking spot, and the ladies began to shop.  I, of course, was bored to tears.  At one point, the adults decided to stop into a cantina for some refreshment.  Inside, the walls were papered — literally — with centerfolds from prominent men's magazines.  To prevent me from being scandalized, I suppose, Mom slipped me a wad of cash and told me to see what the local shops had to offer.

I don't remember much of it, but I do recall buying a cheap switchblade knife for a few dollars.  I still have it, and it still works.  At a leather shop, I was admiring a beautiful black leather holster, intricately hand-tooled with swirls and flowers.  "Want to buy a holster?" a young Mexican boy asked.  "No," I told him, "I don't have a gun."  "Want to buy a gun?" he pressed.  I considered it, but back home in New York, the Sullivan Law would have sent me to prison for several years — just for possessing it — had I been caught with it.

We stayed with Marjorie for some time — a few weeks, perhaps — before doing the same trip in reverse.  For whatever reason, I have no memory (blessedly) of the return trip which could not have been much better than the first.  What I do recall from the trip is that each morning when we arose from sleep, the first task was to upend one's shoes and shake out any critters — especially scorpions — that might have crawled inside during the night.

 

Earth's Atmosphere

 

I just watched a YouTube video that touched on the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, and it caught me by surprise.  Our atmosphere is 78+% Nitrogen and a shade under 21% Oxygen.  Together, they account for 99% of the total.  (I thought it was 76-22, which isn't far off, but it's far enough off.)  I used to worry that if the climate alarmists got their way and sucked all the carbon dioxide out of the air, we might reach that magical boundary of 24% Oxygen where, it is said, Earth's forests would spontaneously combust.  Thankfully, there's no danger of that since atmospheric carbon dioxide represents a mere 0.04% of the total.  Phew!  Dodged a bullet there.

But wait...  atmospheric carbon dioxide is just 0.04% of our atmosphere?  And all terrestrial plant life gets by on that measely little sliver?  Of course, there's more carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans, perhaps quite a lot more, and that doesn't even get near the portion that's locked up as vegetation, including semi-fossilized forms (coal, oil, and natural gas).  I see a problem looming.  Can you?

Ultimately, everything we have in this existence is a gift of the Sun.  Plants rely on sunlight to photosynthesize carbon dioxide to grow and reproduce.  Animals (including human animals) consume those plants (and the animals that feed on them) as food.  If we reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we must perforce reduce the amount of plant life that we and our food animals subsist on.

I do not like where this train of thought is leading.

—==+++==—

Update 3/29/2024: I just watched a video that addresses the climate hoax.  Interestingly, I think the biggest take-away from the video is that CO₂ does not drive temperature, it's the other way around: temperature drives CO₂.

 

The Best Job I Ever Had

 

In 1979, I had stormed out of IBM White Plains in a huff, terminally miffed at being mistreated in ways that foretold (I supposed) the permanent end to my association with IBM.  In 1984, I rejoined IBM's National Service Division (NSD) in Tampa after about 5 years working for other companies.  I was hired by Judy Manowitz into her "Architecture" group that developed and enforced site-wide standards for the systems and operations staff.  It was really quite boring because it was mostly paperwork-related, but it gave me lots of free time to do stuff I actually enjoyed, like programming.  Since the early 70s, I had been developing an elevated fluency with a language called CLIST to the point that I could teach it better than the highly-paid technical staff that created it.  When the operations crew accidentally caused a horrible administrative catastrophe because someone forgot to update a particular control statement, they asked me if I had any way of preventing it recurring, and I solved it by writing a little snippet of CLIST that automated the update.  I developed a reputation as someone who could do wonderful things.

A year later, management concluded that there really wasn't much need for an Architecture Department since what we did amounted to "winding the clocks".  The Architecture department was disbanded and the staff reallocated to other managers.  Judy placed me with Bud Rowsey's newly-formed "Site Tools and Productivity Department" where my job was to write custom software to help the programming staff get through their work.  I was partnered with Karen McCloskey, and together we fielded requests from random staff members to automate this or that, and responded with CLIST-based processes that increased productivity across many functions.  I used to say that our real job was making programmers smile.  It was the best job I've ever had, and I still miss it.

Some time in 1988, some bean counter in Armonk (IBM Corporate HQ) discovered that while all the parts and manuals were warehoused in Mechanicsburg PA (and shipped from there) the software that ran the automated equipment that packaged and shipped parts and publications orders was all located in Tampa, and there was a real monetary cost to having software running in Tampa burning up the telephone lines to Mechanicsburg telling the warehouse gantries to fetch a packet of nuts and bolts and add it to an outgoing order.  They decided that all that software and the programmers who maintained it were to be relocated north.  The response from Tampa was a collective middle-finger.  It was said that Mechanicsburg made 141 offers and got six (6) acceptances, all from people who had been born in Pennsylvania.

Tampa management (in the person of Joe Rufin) found a project in another part of IBM that badly needed the kind of infrastructure that NSD was about to abandon — raised floors for mainframe computers and other devices, stand-alone power supplies, &c., and they agreed to requisition the entire crew of several hundred employees.  A team of senior logistics experts put together a plan to move all the NSD hardware from Tampa to Mechanicsburg aboard chartered 747 freighters, leaving the Tampa site ready to receive similar-if-not-identical ISSC hardware.  On December 5th, 1988, all of us changed our assigned division from NSD to ISSC, Innovative Systems Support Corporation, a wholly-owned sub of IBM.  The best job I ever had evaporated before my very eyes.

Because my skills had no defined spot within ISSC where they might be put to use, I, along with seven others similarly afflicted, were assigned to a spare department whose mission was to keep us busy and out of trouble.  Our new manager, Betty Ware who by that time already had over 35 years service with IBM, began to rent us out as fill-in employees assigned to random projects (often run by her many contacts within the company) where our particular skills would be useful.  All she asked was that the benefitting manager cover her salary costs.  In this way, she typically managed to use little-to-none of her annual budget for the eight of us.  I worked on projects in Poughkeepsie NY, Raleigh NC, San Jose CA, and Rochester MN over the course of the next few years until IBM offered a pre-retirement package that was just too good to pass up, and I left IBM for the last time in July 1992.

All my subsequent jobs have always included some portion of automation work that makes me more efficient — and that somehow make their way to other programmers who find my tools surprisingly useful.  I still like making programmers smile.