By The Numbers - part the ninety eighth

Frosty the snowman...

The weathercritters are saying that much of Florida will have low temps at or below 32° over the weekend. So... is this the usual? Or has the freqency of freezing temps in Fla. lower than it used to be?

The star attraction is the 1894/95 Great Freeze. Some mentions elsewhere use this event(s) as proof that climate change is bogus!! While there have been ongoing freezes since then, some of which reside in my own long-term memory, this was a (so far) unique event. The wiki piece states that Orlando fell to a record 18°; my Google Weather app says that Orlando will bottom out at 26° on Sunday.

Here's a table for Orlando 32° days from 1892. Just from eyeballing, it's 'true' that the frequency (overall) has markedly decreased from 1892 to now. Who wooda thunk it? Although the volatility (by which I mean the range of 32° days for spans of years is now narrower), also from just eye-balling, appears greater now than way-back-when. That would conform to the results reported below. Here's the top ten years (5⁺ days in a year)

2010
1989
1985
1981
1977
1970
1958
1938
1935
1928
1927
1918
1908

1938 and earlier lead by a nose.

2010, oops, has the most at 12. May be we can find out why.

There's an old saying among the weather geeks: if you know where the jet stream is going, you know what the weather will be.

In general, may be. Here's a report from MIT (bastion of liberal bias), which describes how the northern jets are affected by climate change (global warming). In a nutshell: it's the historical overall temperature difference between polar air and mid-latitude air. The greater that difference, the jets move (more or less) in a circle around the North Pole at latitude well above the good old USofA. The jets don't fall south, allowing polar airmass to visit the lower 48. It's established that the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet. As the temperature difference narrows, the jets get hinky. The lower 48 gets uncomfortable. You can thank climate change.

NOAA's latest report. Why Ayatollah 49% Don^© forgot to scrub this, I don't know. Get it before it goes.

The last 10 years are the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic.

By The Numbers - part the ninety seventh

As many readers will know, I've grown accustomed to some of Dr. McElhone's adages, high among them: "it is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer." And, no, I don't attribute that to the Good Doctor. It's been around for ages; I just first heard it from him.

Which brings us to some obvious. Here is a report on MAHA and the attack on vaccination.

But a different way to think about it is this: as another attack on the country's threadbare social safety net by health libertarians whose strategy for making America healthy again appears straightforwardly to mean letting more of the country's weak and vulnerable suffer and die.

I've long since forgotten where it came from, but the gist of Trumpism is just this: cruelty is the point. And also The Rich damn sure ain't rich enough. Which bring us to the other bit of obvious

In some Southern states, such as Mississippi and Alabama, life expectancy is more than half a decade shorter than in Northeastern states, including Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York.

Look by county and the disparities are even starker, with life expectancy over a decade shorter in large swaths of Appalachia than in the upper Midwest. That's about the same as the life expectancy gap between Liechtenstein and Bangladesh.

So, the Rich plutocrats have convinced the victims of their evil that the problem is really the God hating Blue States. Stupid people just never learn. And that's also the point. Boeing has found out the hard way that assembling airplanes in North Carolina with marginally educated knuckledraggers is a lose-lose situation. And, of course, that's just the latest in a continuing saga of FUBAR, all in the name of union busting.

As has been written here a few times: who'll make the neat stuff if Trumpism drags the Blue States down to Shitholeville?

O Canada

Once again President Caligula and his horse faced wife are at it again. Yet again with Greenland, obviously part of the USofA. I mean, it's just 22 miles from Ellesmere Island, across the Nares Strait. It's almost in Canada, anyway. And President Caligula and his horse faced wife have proclaimed Canada as our 51^st state. Bank shot. Both are President Caligula and his horse faced wife's property. An all-weather, members only, golf club would be another feather in their caps.

Obituary - part the second

Well, once again: That Didn't Take Long.

Ayatollah 49% Don^© has managed to stir up Our Allies to the point that they're actively seeking to visit the USofA with (almost) financial ruin. Dumping a bunch of Treasuries, in and of itself wouldn't kill the USofA in a nano-second, but takes the Rest of The World one step closer to stripping the US Buck of Reserve Currency status. And that, as explained in Episode 1, puts USofA Debt into Zimbabwe Land. That's not good eats. Bretton Woods gave the USofA the luxury of paying its foreign debts by printing its own currency. No other country could/can do that. Think about that for an hour or two.

So far, European officials have signaled Greenland's sovereignty is a red line that's not up for compromise, while the Trump administration isn't budging either on its stance.

But the U.S. has a key vulnerability the EU can exploit, according to George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank.

"Europe owns Greenland, it also owns a lot of Treasuries," he wrote in a note on Sunday.

Holding those bonds helps balance America's massive external deficits, and Europe is the world's biggest lender to the U.S.

And, I'll bet, you thought that was China? Guess not.

The European hoard is said to be 12.6 Trillion Dollars worth. At least until it isn't.

According to the US Treasury, Japan is the largest single country holder, at $1,202,600,000,000 nominal last November. China is third with $682,600,000,000.

How difficult would it be to dump the US Buck as reserve currency and choose the Euro or Renminbi? General view is: will take more than Ayatollah Don^©'s infantile behavior. Me? I'm not so sure. He's clearly on a crusade to make America 19^th century again. Back when we were a third world country: a few Marie Antoinettes and the rest cake eaters. Only shitkickers would vote for such an idiot. And Batshit J. Moron means to intimidate all those Blue City Voters to stay home on Election Day. We'll see.

Don't believe Mammy Yokum? Go look at a county level vote map from 2020. See all those Blue Dots? That's what's had Batshit J. Moron going batshit since forever. Only stupid shitkickers want him. Discrete state/precinct maps, like this (haven't found a USofA one yet, but at least one dataset exists for the adventurous) show what Batshit J. Moron is up to in yet more detail.

He could just about end American Dominance just because he's so stupid. It ain't how many nukes ya got, it's whether you control international finance. But he's a failed (6 times that we know about) real estate knucklehead, and nothing more. It's a sure bet that he thinks Bretton Woods is a fine merlot. Only tyros drink merlot.

Kill All The Workers

There's that famous line from Shakespeare

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers

Capitalists follow a more inclusive motto

The only thing we do, is kill all the workers

So, may be that's the Achilles Heel of AI, as currently implemented. That's the conclusion, if you read between the lines.

Signaling the scale of capital that he believes he needs, OpenAI has committed to spending $1.4 trillion on data centers and related infrastructure.

The thing is: few if any of the pundits have grasped the import of even AI, as currently implemented. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, capital has made money only by replacing labor. It has no intrinsic value. So, the $64,000 question - is there $1.4 trillion of labor up for redundancy? If you suck $1.4 trillion (plus profit on that expenditure) of buying power out of an economy, what are you left with? It would appear that AI, as currently implemented, proves at long last that the Luddites were right. After all, capitalists are in the labor rendundacy business. And, on the whole, they have no clue that the arithmetic has to add up if the economy/society is to survive.

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
-- Marriner Eccles/1951

And just to add a bit of snark: Führer Trump is using the Fed renovation project to kneecap Powell. Part of that renovation is the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building.

Pollyana on LSD - part the third

Well, friend Tom Friedman has jumped the shark. Again. This recent essay is so ahistoric as not to be believed. After all, this is an educated almost geezer who should have his facts in hand. Apparantly not.

It evinces the sin of omission.

Because after talking to people in the U.S. oil industry, it is clear to me that if Trump wants to see U.S. companies invest billions of new dollars to repair Venezuela's oil infrastructure, the first thing they will tell him is that they need a return to the rule of law in Venezuela.

Like hell, that's what they want. They always want a benevolent (to them) dictator who'll keep wages at subsistence and the coveted resource at nada. Rule of law? Ha Ha. Only if the dictator and bidnezzmen get to make the law.

So, it seems, he's never heard of the original Banana Republic?

In 1911, Zemurray conspired with Manuel Bonilla, an ex-president of Honduras (1904-1907), and American mercenary Lee Christmas, to overthrow the civil government of Honduras and install a military government friendly to foreign businesses.

The mercenary army of the Cuyamel Fruit Company, led by Christmas, effected a coup d'état against President Miguel R. Dávila (1907-1911) and installed Bonilla (1912-1913). The United States ignored the deposition of the elected government of Honduras by a private army, justified by the U.S. State Department's misrepresenting Dávila as too politically liberal and a poor businessman whose management had indebted Honduras to Great Britain. This was a geopolitically unacceptable circumstance in light of the Monroe Doctrine.

United Fruit, et al, were happy.

Or the CIA's destruction of Mosaddegh in Iran? It was all about the oil, of course. So we got the Shah, a compliant dictator. The oil companies were happy.

On 19 August 1953, Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état orchestrated by the United States (CIA) and the United Kingdom (MI6). A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mossadegh nationalized and refused to concede to western oil demands. It was instigated by the United States (under the name TP-AJAX Project[8] or Operation Ajax) and the United Kingdom (under the name Operation Boot).

Fact is, bidnezzmen always would rather a compliant dictator, who keeps labor at subsistence wage and free access to the desired resource.

Dumb and Dumber - part the third

Was watching ESPN, waiting for Tony and Wilbon, and an advert that I thought I'd seen earlier in the week, happened again.

OK. So the theme of the advert is: we see an auto assembly line coming at us, and the robots (no humans on the line, just a couple looking on) are smashing the windshields and other bits and pieces.

Cut to the advert, for Indeed, and it's calling for COBOL coders to fix the problem!!!!!!!!! C'mon man!!!!!! How possibly dumb could Indeed be????????? At least java, more likely C++, may be Rust, Fortran in a pickle. Since it's robots, could well be some robot assembler. COBOL??? No way on God's green earth.

So, OK, that was off the top of my head. Much of these musings come to be that way. So, to be fair, I looked to the Great Google, and found this site.

C/C++
Python
Java
C#
MATLAB
Hardware Description Languages (HDLs)
Lisp
Pascal

I wouldn't think Python would be a candidate for such real time work, but who's to know? As expected, no COBOL to be found. The world has not ended.