Discouraging Prospects for Gen Z

 Various people have been pointing out how dismal the economic prospects Gen Z faces when compared with the generations immediately preceding them, and speculating that this is leading to discouragement and demoralization... such that one might wonder if working hard is worth it when life is going to suck anyway.  Why save for buying a house when the median age for first time homeowners is about to cross 40 years, and so on.

I would add something that I do not see being discussed.  One little project people must engage in if their culture, civilization and indeed species is to survive is the very non-technological act of starting and raising a family.  It's an economic adventure proportional to expectations; subsistence farming has fed countless families in our species and has succeeded in the absence of much of the "stuff" people have been taught to obsess over.  Despair over the prospects of starting a family need not follow from poor economic prospects.

However, forming a family is far more a matter of trust and faith in one another than it is a matter of dollars and cents.  A relatively recent innovation has had an effect on our culture in the US for most of the past 50 years.  This innovation is "no-fault divorce" and is further exacerbated by the common "guidelines" for child custody and support arrangements after such a divorce.  Anyone with enough functioning synapses to imagine the results of making a home in the caldera of an active volcano should be capable of grasping how utterly disillusioning and demoralizing it can be for a young man who is told his duty is to build and support a family when he learns how casually and callously his partner in that adventure can, and now all to often does, render his every effort futile and ultimately self-destructive.

Anyone who does not grasp this should learn how this system works and what its effects generally are.  In my opinion poor economic prospects are trumped by trust, but not when the law has made that trust abrogable at whim.  For this reason I suggest that no-fault divorce and its corollaries is a greater killer of civilization than is any amount of economic stress, and that this policy should be reversed immediately.

What AI has demonstrated in design

Much can be said about people's experiences in putting AIs to work at design in various disciplines including materials.  The successes have in general been achieved by automating trial and error, enabling far more trials per unit time than humans are capable of performing.  In the real world, this is called "butt work" and is suitable for delegation to relatively unimaginative underlings.  That is not to suggest that "trial and error" hasn't proven worth the trouble on occasions, but when an imaginative human engages in that practice he will generally be guided by intuition and inspiration, leading to more selective trials and more results, including trials not in the set that would be assigned to the above underlings.  This is of course because real cognition is a practice that employs the entire integrated mind of the cogitator, not just artificial subdivisions like "left" and "right".

Observe that the above exercise in butt work as a class suggests the familiar postulate that a sufficient number of monkeys with keyboards over a sufficiently long time will reproduce a particular classic composition.  Granted that LLMs can simply plagiarize the said classic if they've been fed it, but this is nowhere near AGI.  The question, of course, is whether it is good for humanity to automate tasks that are normally assigned to students in order that they may make contributions while developing skill at their crafts.  As we have seen with elevating minimum wages to exclude kids from entry level jobs, this is no way to continue developing the legions of capable people required to sustain a culture or a civilization. Just as the kids are replaced by kiosks in fast food joints, young talent is being sedated with various nonproductive things while their relevance as upcoming talent is being devalued.  Good luck with this, humanity.

Reparations

 I do not have a great grandfather, nor even a great great great great grandfather, who was enslaved by neighboring tribesmen in Africa, sold to the Dutch at the coast, eventually transported to the US and sold to a Southern farmer to work in his fields.  Even if I did have a remote relative who was enslaved by others (and for all I know, I did have someone in my family tree who had been, or who was an indentured servant which is generally worse), I would feel like an idiot to demand that my fellow citizens should be raped and pillaged to give me the fruits of their labor because of my supposed disadvantages.

However, I *was* compelled to serve in the Armed Forces from 1968 to 1973 with 1.75 years active duty in the US Naval Reserve.  My alternatives were to be drafted, to leave the country (Canada for example), to claim I was homosexual, to fake a medical problem, etc.  Occupational deferment was applied for but was not given to a programmer at a major defense contractor before, in self preservation, I took the remaining option of enlistment in a reserve service so I could accumulate enough seniority to work in my field while eventually on active duty.  That such choices were before me hardly diminished the compulsory nature of the service imposed on men my age.

The essential definition of slavery is to be owned by someone else.  I learned while on active duty that while the UCMJ, as all on active duty are, if I had for example gone to the beach on liberty and gotten a bad enough sunburn that I could not do my work the next day, I could be taken to Captain's Mast (Commanding Officer's Non Judicial Punishment) for the offense of damaging Government Property.  The property in question?  My own body, but not my own, because it was at that time the Government's property.

I was, literally, a slave.  Not some remote relative whose face I never saw and whose name I might not know, but my own self.  None of the people on whose behalf demands are made for Reparations has personally been a slave, unless they, like me, served in the Armed Forces of the United States.

So, on behalf of all those of us who have served on active duty during our own lifetimes, I demand that if reparations are extorted from US Taxpayers to enrich a class of people whose remote ancestors might (or might not) have been slaves, then all of us who have served should be enriched by Reparations from all those we were enslaved to protect.  The Government knows who we all are, and by definition knows who (everyone else) would need to be assessed to make those reparations.  If Reparations are such a fine idea, let's see ours!

The High Cost of Healthcare in the US

 We hear continuously that "healthcare" is expensive in the US.  We then hear about greedy corporations and other leftist targets.  My personal experience identifies two very significant targets that are not mentioned among those leftist tropes.

One is lawsuits such as malpractice brought by attorneys who seem to be far greedier than corporations.  In the early 1990s, my first ex wife was emerging from medical school and at that time hoped for a residency in OB/Gyn which had been her motivation for training to be a physician in the first place.  At that time, we learned that the annual malpractice insurance premium for that specialty was on the order of $200,000.  This, given a 2080 hour work year, amounted to roughly $100 per hour simply for mandatory insurance.  If that cost has tracked with general inflation, the premium should be over $200 per hour now.  This is before the doctor in a private practice pays for rent, utilities, equipment, assistants and other general office expenses. If I were responsible for reducing the cost of "healthcare" this would be my first target. 

A second target is the game of setting excessive list (cash) prices which may then be deeply discounted (better than 90% as I have seen) by Medicare and, to a lesser extent, by insurance companies.  I've been a cash customer and know well how absurd the pricing I, as a cash customer, must pay in order for the Government to pretend at heroism by "getting me a discount" (some doctors and institutions have offered me a 15% cash discount, almost insulting given the discounts given to insurance companies, let alone government.)  Without these games, the cash price would probably be less than what the government pays, not ten times as much.

Each of these rackets CAN ONLY EXIST because the powers of government were used to make them possible and maintain their viability (try doing anything opposed by ALTA and learn all about political pressure.)

The coming year

Trump's crew had best be prepared to ruthlessly strike while the sword is sharp.  If they allow themselves to be diverted into "due process" it will take far too long and accomplish little.  Fire the bastards and cancel the contracts first, then prosecute if you think it's worth the energy.  While the guillotine may be satisfying to watch, it is much more important to stop their depredations than to "hold them to account".

Artificial Hubris

We are increasingly fed authoritatively phrased, AI-generated summaries when we ask questions.  Google Search, for example, will often provide such a synopsis as its first link for a question such as "What is asynchronous CMOS".

The problem with this is that if you ask me a question about something beyond my ken, I will preface whatever remarks I might make with a demurrer acknowledging that my understanding of the question is limited at best.  On the other hand, the AI generated synopses blithely compose prose using the same authoritative linguistic formulae used for all responses, regardless of the AI's limited training.

This was demonstrated recently by a colleague who asked the latest publicly accessible version of ChatGPT about GreenArrays' chips and then about the Forth programming language.  I am intimately familiar with both and so I believe I can objectively assess the replies he received.  In both cases, the usual smugly authoritative-sounding prose was generated, which to someone who knew nothing about either topic might have seemed like good and useful information.

Unfortunately for such a recipient, though, it was immediately obvious in both cases that the data on which ChatGPT's "training" had been based included little, if any, actual information about either, and was full of nonsequiturs such as the assertion that the "GAC 144" (the actual part number of our G144A12 chips and the actual name of our F18 computers were never mentioned) had an instruction set particularly well suited for parallel applications.  To all of us who designed, implemented, and use this instruction set, we do not discern any aspects of that instruction set which acknowledge the possible existence of parallelism, or were introduced to facilitate parallelism, at all.  Rather, the primary distinguishing characteristics of that instruction set are its simplicity and the minimalism embodied in its design and implementation, neither of which ChatGPT even hinted at.  Both responses were full of such things which, from a human, might be taken as suppositions, but in the case of an AI which cannot be assessed in terms of human nature it is difficult to classify nonfactual assertions.

I am personally concerned that as people begin actually reading what LLM engines like ChatGPT produce, many will begin using such prose as foundations for their understandings of all sorts of things.  If this becomes a widespread practice, I believe we will be educating a generation or two with terribly flawed foundational understandings as the least of evils.  If AIs are introduced into our societal education systems, I am not pleased contemplating how those generations will be "programmed"; worse, as people begin having AIs "think" and compose prose for them, the habits of actually thinking and of innovation through imagination and human perspective will doubtless be muted.  Perhaps the worst malfeasance in this area would be the replacement of a good teacher's humility and epistemological reflection with the arrogance of an ill informed large language model possessing an "imagination" not understandable in human terms.

About a "Need for Regulation"

 Elizabeth Warren and others assert that the "failure" of FTX demonstrates a need for "regulation".  I think that is nonsense.  Our entire financial system, in which the tokens we exchange with each other are symbols "backed" by something, as well as all business transactions we make, is based on trust.  Trust that those whose position gives them the power to do us harm have Honor and will not ever use that power.

The criminal who ran FTX and its many tentacles should be in jail awaiting trial for theft, fraud, misappropriation of massive amounts of others' property and no doubt other crimes.  In an older world he would have already been tried and summarily sentenced to a suitable punishment for one who has caused as much pain as he has, such as public disembowelment.

That he is instead free demonstrates how useless regulation would be; he has not yet had even a slap on the hand, yet those who would regulate are those who should be cutting his hand *off* rather than solemnly talking about "regulation".  You do not regulate criminals.  You deter them by guaranteeing punishment to fit their crimes.  Perhaps you do not do this if they have been conspicuously sucking up to you and giving you money they have stolen from others?

Then, further, who would be doing the regulating?  Our central government, of course.  That being the same government who has defrauded us by stealing a good fraction of our savings through government induced inflation.  Remember?  "Trust that those whose position gives them the power to do us harm have Honor and will not ever use that power."  Those who would regulate have demonstrated that they have no Honor in this respect and are unworthy of our trust.

I believe it is long overdue that those who *are* our central government (the elected representatives, to a degree, but more so the *millions* of unaccountable, permanently employed bureaucrats who believe they run the country) should themselves be regulated and, where appropriate, given fitting punishments.