https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey

Anyone else notice how ironic it feels when you update something under Windows and it says things like “Update Successful!”, where the exclamation mark seems to say “surprise, I didn’t think _that_ would work!”? Or you get a dialog congratulating you on successfully updating something, where the subtext seems to be “I’m amazed that you managed to step through all the bizarre requirements we need you to do to get our software up-to-date!”?

For example, childhood obesity is on the rise at the same time that youth-sports participation is in decline among low-income kids. What seems to be happening at the national level is that rich families, seeking to burnish their child’s résumé for college, are pulling their kids out of local leagues so that they can participate in prestigious pay-to-play travel teams. At scale, these decisions devastate the local youth-sports leagues for the benefit of increasing by half a percentage point the odds of a wealthy kid getting into an Ivy League school.

An article in the Atlantic speculates on the high relative “average” mortality rate in the US, and looks at health care and overall health correlations. The example they cite is interesting, because it played out here on Whidbey with the local soccer club. I have friends whose own kids have all their kids signed up for pay-to-play leagues, and I know from personal experience that that often leaves the Rec leagues unable to field a team.

(From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/america-mortality-rate-guns-health/673799/)

On our fridge there is a magnet that says:
“I find it ironic that, several times a day, *I* have to persuade a machine that I’m human.”

From a comment on David Brin’s blog, https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-only-way-out-of-ai-dilemma.html?showComment=1680354662591#c7494427921247995483

Composer and visual artist Gino Robair presents Radical Divination, his “opera of augury through papermaking.” During this event, papermakers…
— Read on www.facebook.com/events/5455169067923041/

call out to Gino. He’s still hard at it. Thank god.

Your schools are decaying. Your teachers are leaving, because they’re not allowed to teach. Your gynecologists are leaving, because they’re not allowed to practice medicine.

It might be time for you, the individual Idahoan, to consider upping sticks and moving on, too. It’s clear that some portion of you want things this way and they seem to be in charge, so for the rest of you: time to move on? And let Idaho sink into the mess of angry ignorant low-tax society-is-a-myth states that it wants to be?

Oh, and: there’s a couple of counties in Eastern OR that want to join you. Maybe just a house swap?

Company makes last-minute move to keep control of district as board appointed by governor in ‘don’t say gay’ feud takes over
— Read on www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/30/disney-ron-desantis-florida-dont-say-gay

The agreements include a clause stating that they hold until 21 years after the reign of King Charles III and his descendants. Apparently, this is a legally recognized way of getting around restrictions on agreements with no termination date.

 What a delightful irony, to have a legally binding agreement between an American governmental body and the Walt Disney Company anchored in the British monarchy.

www.vickychow.com.

And while I’m looking around, I found a nice piece by this performer, This Machine Breaths to the Rhythms of Its Own Heartbeat. Really thoughtful electronics.

An idea, shamelessly stolen from a Cory Doctorow novel: end-user-assembled housing. In the novel, prefabricated components are delivered to a site. Each has sensors and a speech output built in. To start, the components that go first say “pick me up!” When someone picks up a piece, it tells them where it should be put, whether it’s positioned just right, … a group of people can work on this together with the coordination done by the components themselves.

We could do this now. We could prototype it with IKEA-like furniture and fittings, and reap the same benefits: easy shipping, economies of scale. The important element is the feedback from the components themselves, telling you when you’re doing it right.

Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping

from a quote in The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/19/matthew-desmond-the-poverty-rate-in-america-and-the-uk-should-be-zero-and-i-think-we-can-get-there, which the author attributes to a book by the novelist Tommy Orange.

By which he means victim blaming. There’s a set of systems whereby some people in society make money from others who are poor. The example he quotes is a trailer park: there’s a slew of tenants just hanging on for one reason or another, and there’s a landlord extracting $400k a year from them. We tend to focus on the former and not the relationship between the former and the latter.