Routine Revelations

Dave is only scrutinizing half of the problem of the Biden reelection campaign. Before journalists had the chance to, from Dave’s point of view, push Biden out, remember that the Democrat party prevented voters from having their say on who was their candidate as there was no primary. Dave suffers from tunnel vision, he only sees the problems with journalism but they are just a part and more a tool than a source.

Following up on the new Xfinity plans announced a few days ago, this Ars article says that customers won’t automatically get unlimited data but can “repackage” in to one in which then can. So far I do not see an option to move to a plan that is not higher bandwidth, and thus cost, than my current plan. I do not want to pay more per month, I just want to get rid of the data cap. The most ironic thing is later in the article there is a quote from Comcast executives regarding why they are losing customers and they state as reasons “One is price transparency and predictability and the other is the level of ease of doing business with us.” The later is most definitely an issue when they do not provide an easy way to talk with a human being, instead every online interaction is directed to a chatbot that does not provide answers. If Comcast really wants to make it easy to do business with them they ought to prioritize enabling their customers to simply make changes via their portal. Better yet, why not just drop caps from all users automatically rather than make your customers jump through hoops?

For some reason today is the first time this year I have been outside on the patio. My excuse is that we had a colder than usual early spring and a hotter than usual late spring with some travel.

I really don’t understand how so called conservative, originalist SCOTUS judges are so intent on turning the Presidency into a monarchy or dictatorship. At this rate they must overturn Marbury v. Madison and put themselves in a ceremonial role as they will serve no purpose in preserving or defending the Constitution.

Between the second and third innings we were herded out to the center field fence, which enabled me to take this picture from on the field during the game.

Last night we saw a USPBL game, the Woolly Mammoths crushed the Unicorns 10-1.

Google has released a Linux terminal (CLI) agent for Gemini, Gemini CLI, that I have installed on my remote desktop container. One of the things I can with it is create thumbnail versions of image files like the one to the right. Gemini used imagemagick to create the file using convert. First I listed the contents of the folder containing the original JPG then told it to create a thumbnail version of the Phoenix Palm Trees image, which is the same picture as the banner picture above. Another thing I tried is I asked Gemini to summarize the PDFs that are in my Downloads folder. Here is a link to the Gemini CLI documentation.

I found this article, The Fundamentalist Fallacy, yesterday and there is so much I am in agreement with that I almost highlighted the entire piece. I immediately purchased The War of Art.

Six years ago Iran was an issue for the then President Trump and President Carter noted the irony that the most warlike country on Earth claims itself to be a Christian nation. Some see the current Israel and United States as siblings and that may be actually appropriate as I suspect the Jewish prophets would have the same criticisms of the United States as they had of Israel.

Seems to me the U.S. involvement in the Middle East is a consequence of not treating lobbying as the emolument it is and which the Constitution prohibits.

Just read Martin Fowler’s article on “expert generalists” and feel it describes me well, or at least how I aspire myself to be known. In the IT services industry in which I work I don’t think the contrast is specialists versus generalists but rather low cost labor versus high cost labor. My company has a focus on low cost labor, the consequence of which I think is a decrease in curiosity and with it ownership or personal accountability. I mean people are conditioned to stay within their box because that is all they are being paid to do. I am convinced that what I see, and what I am describing, is a deliverable of a managerial culture within a company as opposed to a leadership culture.

Retirement practice at Contrast Coffee in Iron Mountain, Michigan.

I think the essay that I wrote last year about AI, A People’s AI, still holds. Apple hasn’t really released Apple Intelligence yet and has taken some arrows because of it, but I still think in the end AI is going to do more for Apple than either Google or Microsoft.

People complain about the TSA at the airports all the time, and some of those people might remember a time when there was no TSA and one could even walk to an airport gate without a ticket. Do you want the TSA on every street in America? That is what is coming, although in a more armored form. Every democrat ought to be warning us that this thing most people do not like, the TSA, is going to be much worse in the coming months.

Do those people who call themselves Second Amendment “believers” not realize that one of the reasons why southern states wanted the second amendment is because they feared the federal takeover of state militias, which we now call the national guard? In other words, they demanded the right to bear arms because they feared a president would do the exact thing Donald Trump has done in California. If you truly believe in the Second Amendment, or for that matter the Constitution and Bill of Rights, you should be opposed to what Trump has done.