Screwball
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Posts posted by Screwball
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16 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:
I spent about 6 of our 10 years in Chicago in the back seat of a Cessna 172, 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. Filled in occasionally for the guy who was the "passenger" in the Jet Ranger. Not sure which was worse, cold weather or wind gusts over Lake Shore Drive. What really scared me was flying directly thru O'Hare airspace (over the tower) when I had chopper duty.
Easy work, but in hindsight 25 years later not one of my favorite experiences,
I cannot imagine. I think it is all about how you deal with heights. Some people can, some can't. I'm a can't. I went to the top floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago, but was petrified. I guess now they have a transparent floor you can walk out on. The key word there would be 'you.' 🙂
I have a buddy who did a chopper ride over Hawaiian volcanoes , which I'm sure was spectacular, and memories of a lifetime. No way I could do that. I did have to fly for work, but I hated it. Always bought aisle seats.
I had seats at a Tiger game one time in row 2 of the second deck right behind home plate and almost had crawl down the aisle.
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2 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:
I remember flying to Cleveland a few times (don't ask why the company flew us from Det to Clev....) in these little twin engine turbo prop Convairs that seated about 15 - door to the cockpit open (not sure they even had a cockpit door actually), flying low and bouncing all the way there. Way more flying 'experience' than I ever needed.
I used to get some of those twin prop amusement park rides from Detroit to Toledo. Wasn't my money, so I booked it that way. They were wild. I was scared ****less, but I didn't like planes anyway. I figured it was worth it. I could be sitting at a bar three blocks from home after spending a week at an ass kissing extravaganza. 3 hours if I had to drive, not counting getting out of DET. Half hour joy ride saved me two hours.
I would no way, no how, get in an airplane today, maybe not even drive under one if I can help it. 🙂
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6 hours ago, GalagaGuy said:
Greg Biffle's jet crashed and 6 people are confirmed deceased. Seems to be Biffle, his wife and their two kids. I assume the other two are the pilots.
I don't know the details of this yet, but he was a pilot. I don't remember when it was but when NC got flooded he took his own helicopter to help people who were stranded. Sad story, seemed like a great guy.
How former NASCAR driver Greg Biffle helped Hurricane Helene victims
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That has been going on for quite some time. I can only imagine how far it has come today (I've been retired for over 6 years). If you can automate a process and eliminate people, they will. I'll give you a couple of examples.
1) I worked for a tire company. I was in the mold division. We made the tire molds that made the tires. They were made out of aluminum (sometimes steel but those were different animals). Our raw material was a big round piece of aluminum. It was a large ring. It would come in on a truck and the shop guys would mount it on a large plate. From there it was turned, shaped, and machined with boring machines and 5 axis CNC machines. Once mounted to the plate it was never touched again by human hands until the final assembly and placed in a shipping box. This was going on in the early 2000s.
2) Assembly plant. This one happened to be washing machines. This is where the automation really pays off. Any repetitive task is target for automation, robots, whatever. They have X amount of assembly lines with workers adding parts at various stations along the line that might be a quarter of a mile long (or longer). The parts come from a warehouse on little trains pulled by a little truck like vehicle. The truck would pull 4 or 5 wagons behind it full of parts. They would go from the warehouse to the proper line, and proper line station, get emptied by a person, then return for more parts at the warehouse. This went on all day every day. There were dozens of these things all over the plant. They were driven by a person.
Not anymore. They put something in the floor so the train could follow because they put sensors under the train. The sensors followed the path in the floor. The slowed them way down for safety. You could walk faster than the train but they never stopped except when unloaded and loaded. This eliminated every train driver for each train for each shift (3 a day 7 days a week). This was over 10 years ago. That was by far not the only push for automation. Anything and everything that could be automated will be automated, period.
The rest of the story, and kind of funny. The workers could see the future and what this automation/robotic push was going to do. So the natural thing for them, and maybe the only way to fight back, was to sabotage the automation. By accident, they found out a simple bag of potato chips could stop a train. Turns out, a bag of chips bought out of the vending machine had a reflective (silver looking) inside. Guessing it was to help keep light out of the bag. An empty bag of chips with the bag fully open sitting in the aisle where the train ran would make it stop. The reflecting bag messed up the optics of the robot sensor and it would stop dead in the aisle. They would have to call maintenance or someone to come fix it and send the little guy on it's way again. In that world the LAST thing you want to do it stop the line.
One day I was there and the process guy told me they had to tell the vending machine people to remove all the potato chips from the vending machines because it was causing too many line shutdowns. Too funny - take that automation.
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Maybe they should learn to count. 🙂
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3 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:
every dollar the Federal government spends on healthcare for ordinary people is another increment in the political necessity to start seriously controlling health care costs in the US. That's a big gravy train you are threatening with billions of dollars of campaign contributions connected to it. Now I'll grant you that is not an argument about the public's interest at all, but since when did that matter in modern US politics?
Today it is everywhere and always about the campaign money.
They piss away enough money each and every year - and have done so my entire lifetime - to give we the people the same health"care" as these worthless pukes who inhabit DC are fortunate to have. The money we pay on the interest on our debt alone would do wonders... Money is fungible, so just an example.
Anyone who thinks these worthless ****s are going to fix this cluster **** (of their own making) has their head firmly stuffed up their ass.
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How about some chart porn. First the S&P. Since the recent highs from interest rate euphoria the S&P is now back inside that long candle from back on October 10. Yellow arrow are the rate cuts.
And then there is this one - Silver.
The June 24th bubble at $35.195 to today at $67.18. What a ride! That's almost a double in 7 months.
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3 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:
I plugged the exact same string into Google's Gemini and got this:
Just for fun, I did it again;
Not good.
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Venezuela is all about oil. Simple as that. That's been the plan since we needed oil. Also why the POS Marco Rubio was confirmed 99-0 as the person to make that happen.
For every unit of growth, it takes a unit of energy. And now we have all these data centers!!! Git-r-done!
No energy, no growth. Physics can be a bitch.
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Funny, from that EIA report:
QuoteElectricity demand associated with U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations in the United States has grown very rapidly over the last several years. Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.
I had a little AI conversation with my Aussie buddy. What kind of numbers are we talking about. Somewhere between .6 to 2.3 percent of US annual usage according to that EIA report. How much is that and what does it to?
That sounds nuts, but that's what it says.
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EV investments. Needs infrastructure to scale. Don't forget the crypto mining uses uses lots one may never consider. Add the data centers and the demand that comes along with them. Remember the "going green" push to use renewables and new tech for power? How long will it take to scale, if it can?
Tracking electricity consumption from U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations - from the eia.gov
How Much Additional Power Will Data Centers Need by 2035?
Crypto is a small percentage but I would guess location may matter for a grid.
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The company mentioned in the article above is CoreWeave who IPOed in March. Ticker Symbol CRWV if you want to have some fun. It has, as the article stated, almost doubled this year, but it did take a 10% hit on Friday. Somebody with brass balls can trade that prick, I want nothing to do with it.
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1 hour ago, CMRivdogs said:
Maybe this belongs in the investment thread. A good Atlantic article about the financing involved in the A-I industry. It's literally a house of cards with credit due in the next couple of years. I'm not sure if the link works
Basically it's an interconnected web among nearly all the big producers, especially those that want to build data centers financed mostly by private lenders. Most of the outstanding money is due within the next few years. With the President's change in IRA rules to allow the holding of things like bitcoin, when the bottom falls it's liable to make the 2008 banking crisis look like a Sunday School picnic.
Meanwhile I think I may start investing in mini turtle figurines.
Good article. Couple of things that caught my eye;
QuoteIf, however, AI does not produce the short-term profits its proponents envision—if its technical advances slow down and its productivity-enhancing effects underwhelm, as a mounting body of evidence suggests may be the case—then the financial ties that bind the sector together could become everyone’s collective downfall. The extreme concentration of stock-market wealth in a handful of tech companies with deep financial links to one another could make an AI crash even more severe than the dot-com crash of the 2000s.
You don't say!
QuoteEvidence is growing that the links between private credit and the rest of the financial system are stronger than once believed. Careful studies from the Federal Reserve estimate that up to a quarter of bank loans to nonbank financial institutions are now made to private-credit firms (up from just 1 percent in 2013) and that major life-insurance companies have nearly $1 trillion tied up in private credit. These connections raise the prospect that a big AI crash could lead to a wave of private-credit failures, which could in turn bring down major banks and insurers, Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in financial regulation, told me. “Unfortunately, it usually isn’t until after a crisis that we realize just how interconnected the different parts of the financial system were all along,” she said.
No, tell me it ain't so.
If it brings down major banks and insurers we know what happens next. We have already watched that movie and it's not pretty.
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Well, you have people like Neel Kashkari and Austan D. Goolsbee on the FOMC, but I don't think Neel (cabin a woods or some sort of horse****) Kashkari has a vote right now. Goolsbee is a ghoul and FOS up to his ears.
Neel... I remember people defending that little creep back during TARP days. Spit!
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This is bigger than people understand. I'm old, will be 70 next year. My crazy retired buddies and people our age are nothing but a heath care bad news machine. Nothing but horror stories.
It became worse when private equity started buying the medical system and turned into a profit center. If they can automate it with AI, or find a way to cut costs with it, they will do so. Our health care system will only get worse and our loved ones will suffer. But the stock price will go up.
Let's have a little fun...
Incorrect. If you ever worked in a hospital, rest home, or assistant living facility you would immediately know what that is.
And it ain't dogs.
AI will never replace the people who do the incredible work they do in this most challenging industry. My respect for them is off the charts.
Too easy to go ask HAL as a student, or a corporation, instead of making it about our people. What can possibly go wrong?
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And then there is AI and health care....Good idea? Maybe not. Here is an article about using AI in health care. I'll paste one quote from the article; AI’s errors may be impossible to eliminate – what that means for its use in health care
QuoteThese same principles apply to prescribing medications. Different conditions and diseases can have the same symptoms, and people with the same condition or disease may exhibit different symptoms. For example, fever can be caused by a respiratory illness or a digestive one. And a cold might cause cough, but not always.
This means that health care datasets have significant overlaps that would prevent AI from being error-free.
That doesn't sound good. Wonder what a real doctor might say? One of the financial blogs I read has a doctor who has posted there for quite a few years. I think he's a smart and good guy from reading all his stuff over the years, so I trust him. This is his reply to that article which is being discussed;
QuoteI am having a very difficult time anymore knowing exactly what all these new tech innovations actually are. They are being referred to collectively as “AI” however many of these processes do not actually seem to be AI – as in coming up with things on its own.
There is only one thing that they have come up, and only one, that seems to have been of any benefit at all. And I am not even sure it is “AI”. The modern EMR medical chart is an accumulation of all kinds of labs, notes, consult notes, referrals, insurance denials, etc. In every electronic system I have ever used, it is a complete and total mess, unlike the old paper charts which were the easiest things ever in comparison. Many of these items are data arrays. Many of them are scanned fax documents. Many of them are local documents to the EMR. All have to be handled in different ways usually involving 10-20 clicks per document. Profoundly tedious. There are now new systems that take queries and go mining into all this data in all its forms and is able to produce answers in seconds in what used to take me hours. But in my opinion, that is not really AI as I understand it, although they call it that. It is like a google system designed for medical charts.
Again, that is the only thing that has been at least remotely helpful and not scary.
The note taking system is so unstable and unreliable that it seems I spend more time correcting mistakes. These are big and massive mistakes – life-altering if left in the chart. How many doctors are going through this with a fine-tooth comb like I am?
The ECG example you state above is interesting. For decades, the ECG machines have had a simple pattern-recognition software that lists off likely diagnoses. I would say these older systems are wrong about half the time. I insist that it is turned off on any ECG of mine and certainly my students. Interestingly, we now have an AI assisted ECG reading system, and even more interestingly it is wrong about 70% of the time, often wildly wrong. Essentially, it is worse than the 1990s tech. It is just frightening to me how many times a week I am called by a specialist colleague because some dreadful thing has been put on the chart ECG reading by an AI that is not even close to reality. I shudder to think what happens if these things actually get acted upon.
The “AI” diagnosis situation is even more scary. It pulls in all kinds of disparate things from the chart – many times, this is completely inaccurate info because the AI note-taking systems are so horrible and the docs just simply do not proofread them. I am just amazed at times what the suggestions are as far as testing and treatment. They are often completely divorced from any kind of reality.
As an experiment the other day, I had the hospital admin and lots of colleagues in a conference room. We opened up a fake patient – and I read off the symptoms and lab values —- 72 year old with severe acute low back pain, fever, profound acute fatigue, and sudden change in urination frequency. The labs were showing an acute normocytic anemia with a HGB of 11, and acute renal failure with a creat of 2.9. This is a lot of disparate symptoms, but it is also a combination of things that a trained internist would know instantly. I have had board questions repeatedly in my life on certification exams with this exact scenario. You just have to know this stuff. There are literally thousands of these patterns in internal medicine. This is why it is a years long training process. The AI had as its first diagnoses – Acute sepsis syndrome, acute malaria (wow), acute ehrilichiosis ( Huh?), lupus ( again, huh?), dermatomyositis, and acute Glomerulonephritis. All I can say is some of these are entirely head scratchers. Some of them are appropriate. But the list of tests and labs that the patient was asked to get by the AI were legion – and would have cost the Medicare system about 70K. In no way, shape or form, did the system even think of the correct diagnosis – and the pattern diagnosis, which was multiple myeloma ( back pain, fever, anemia and renal failure – it is a known and well-taught pattern) – and the simple 100 dollar test a serum protein electrophoresis – that my internist self would have ordered before anything else. The admin were whomperjawed. This is profoundly scary. This stuff is not ready for prime time in any way shape or form. But it is being used that way – by interns and residents learning – all the way to NPs who do not have a medicine and diagnostic background – to lazy or overworked MDs.
Even more scary are the all kinds of patients now bringing in documentation from ChatGPT – and despite my begging them to reconsider – they go with the computer often to very detrimental medical or financial results.
I cannot fix any of this – only attempt to mitigate the damage in my realm.
If wasn't already skeptical of our medical system...
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The pot stocks are flying today, some up 30-40%. Most are small caps so they trade like a penny stock so you can make a killing - and get your face ripped off as well.
Silver is taking a breather so far today, down almost 5%. Gold down a little but gave up quite a bit from open. I'm kinda with this guy;
This probably has something to do with it, especially recently. 3 month chart by day of the dollar index. The metals usually trade inverse to the dollar index;
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Interesting chart porn of the day. Silver must be the new tulips. What a ride. First chart a 3 year by week. The horizontal yellow lines go back 5 years ago. Nothing related to today. Haven't looked at the chart for quite a while.
As you can see it didn't do much for quite a while, then went up a bit in April/June of 24 until April of 25 and took a ****. Then went nuts. Looks like a hockey stick. A closer look;
I'm not sure what's going on here. Is it a tulip thing or... Silver needed for data chips?
On the other side of the coin (no pun intended) one would think the ass kicking winter has already brought us would drive the price of Natty Gas up, no? Well, it kinda did, but what's going here the last few days or week?
Looks like a gap to get filled there too.
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This stuff reminded me of an article I read years ago. April 2000 to be exact. It was in Wired magazine which is now pay only so you can't get to the article there, but here is a .pdf of the same article. Written by Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist of Sun Mircosystems and author of the Java Language specification. Long article about technology, including Ted Kaczynski, and where it all may be heading from the view back in 2000.
Why the future doesn't need us - Wired Magazine April 2000 - 18 pages
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The rest of the Madoff story. From NPR on the whistleblower nobody listened to; Madoff Whistleblower: SEC Failed To Do The Math
Also on this date in 2004, the death/murder of Gary Webb. Quite the rabbit hole this.
The Death Thread
in General Discussion
Posted
I have seen pictures of that Grand Canyon glass bridge. I can't imagine!!! I think it would be a ball, but I just can't...
Funny, the first time I flew was about a week after the 1982 crash in DC when the plane went in the river. Had to fly into the same airport. Oh goody!
We know they are going to come down, that's a given. We don't always know how. And over the years my flying experiences have not been very good anyway.
Then, you have people that jump out of them. Are you nuts?