Screwball

That guy has covered Chicago's problems, and another economic site I follow has done the same for California and CALPERS who isn't in the best shape either. The numbers are not good. Those are two of the worse. A quick search and from early this year; Public pension debt rankings for state and local governments

From July of this year. This guy lived close to Chicago but bailed a few years ago due to various reasons. He has covered their fiscal problems for years. Chicago Pension Sweetener Would Add $11.1 Billion in Liabilities

Ted Kaczynski was considered a Luddite too. Kinda wild when you think about it. I'm not a big fan of AI either. Actually, not a fan at all. And I consider myself a big tech guy.

I found this interesting on the Fed thing today. A guy I've read for a long time, but not about him. Huge Recent Layoffs: Amazon 30,000 GM 3,300 Target 1,800 UPS 48,000 FTA and via the WSJ; I'll bet they are. But I really got a kick out of one of the comments; Interesting. We live in a dog eat dog world and are wearing dogbone underwear.

It is really in our face. They just cut rates by 25 bps when all three major indexes of the stock market are at all time highs. Even with the shutdown, the data they have is all they would have at this point anyway (Wall Street knows anyway) - and they know inflation is not in our favor - cutting rates will not help. TDGAF. News at 11. Cheaper money, cheaper credit, giddy up. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The penalty for this, when it all goes to ****, is one none of them want on their watch. So the money printing and cheap money will continue. Until it don't. That's why we are 38 trillion in debt. Debt is money. The more the better. The Fed can't monetize debt unless Congress spends the money. Future market debt sales released by the Treasury monthly. Cha-ching! When this prick blows up there will be a bunch more people in graveyards.

The WAR thing caught my eye. Heard of it here over the years but never really understood it. Love the stats, and the stat guys. Would take any advantage I could from that if I was running a baseball organization. Every little bit helps. But I'm old, simple, and stupid. WAR is what my old eyes tell me. I think we are on the same page.

Fed cuts 25 bps - partial statement above. I was watching the tape and it barely moved. It has now dropped a little. Next will be after the bell when some of the MAG7 report earnings; GOOG, META, MSFT and AMZN, AAPL tomorrow.

They are already training robot to kill people.

There are several AI models one can use. I wonder what the difference is between them. You have the Google AI, the Mircorsoft AI (Co-Pilot), the Twitter AI in Grok, and I'm not sure how many more. It would be fun to test them against each other to see how their answers compare, but I'm too lazy. It seems like with some things, it is really kind of stupid. There are hundreds of articles out there about people testing and playing with AI and it doesn't live up to the hype. One guy I read is an economic guy asking one of them this question; divide millions by what to get billions. AI's answer was wrong. Even a simple question like that, it was wrong. But a couple of days later, it corrected itself when he went back and did it again? Is is learning? I don't know. I've been playing with it quite a bit using a range of things to try. Sometimes it seems dumber than a brick, while other times it does a really good job. I have found, it seems, when you give it more information up front, it does a better job. I was looking for a backup/copy type program to back up files from ssd drive to another. I gave it a bunch of information that I wanted to do, how I wanted the interface to look - it found a free piece of software that exactly met my needs. I was impressed with that. With other stuff, not so much. The issues are still the same. Data centers are not popular, they use massive amounts of energy and water. Where will it come from, at what cost, and who pays for it. This doesn't include the fact if it works or not, or what it will eventually be able to do. The real danger IMO, is the bean counters who think this will replace X amount of jobs and that's what they will do, because it benefits the bottom line. So jobs get slashed (already happening big time) because they think they don't need humans to do the work. Then when the whole thing crashes and burns and they are SOL and all the humans who could do the work are gone. Now what? Ask AI? Sure, why not;

I can only image what the schools are dealing with. I quit teaching in June when the year was over. My STEM class didn't really have a way to use AI so it wasn't a problem for me. I did have a kid last semester ask me if AI could do what we did (make engineering drawings, models, etc) and I said "I hope not and hope it never does." From the conversations I heard from the kids, anything and everything they could use AI for they would do it. I they can use AI to do their work, they will. There were all kinds of meetings at school about how to use AI, where is was useful, where is wasn't, etc. I don't know where it all went since it didn't directly matter to what I was teaching. I can see kids using it as a way to cheat and do their homework. I don't think that is a good thing as over the last 6 years the abilities of the students have already dwindled significantly. One of the reasons I got out. Too many kids do not have the basic reading, math, or logic skills to do the work, and it's getting worse as time goes on.

Twisted maybe, but what if we are in the development window of AI learning from us screwing with it? IOW, it is now learning from us, which is what it's really all about anyway I would think. We are teaching it by asking questions.

great piece of hitting right there. See that Tigers?????

Since most of the AI stuff is here... This even has baseball. I'm watching the baseball game and a home run made me wonder how it would do calculating home run launch angles. I used Google maps to measure an old field I was familiar with. I watched a guy one night hit one over the right field light pole in the power alley. I could get a distance and guess at the pole height. AI (Microsoft Co-Pilot) says the ball went 420-450 feet. I wouldn't doubt that. Then I asked a bunch of other questions about how many could do that, and also throw, thinking of this LA guy who is off the charts amazing. Then I got into the the "5 tools" baseball thing. My Aussie buddy explained that very well, including how one tool makes a difference with others. Let's talk about the speed tool of baseball next I thought. How fast do you need to be? It gave me times for the 60 yard dash some give you in tryouts, and typical game numbers in the pros. Of course the Bot is very personal, it/he/she thinks I'm talking about me. I thought I would see what happens if I screwed with it a little bit. This stuff is nuts.

That would be 145 trading days according to my Aussie AI buddy. :-)

I think this is nuts. First piece of chart porn is the same S&P chart I have been using while watching that candle. Once it broke out of that, you knew what direction the market was going to go - get on board - and boy did they. All three major indexes look like this. You can see the gap ups the last two trading days so some probably missed some of that but what a rocket ship up. That is only a 3 month chart, so let's step back a bit. This goes back 9 months as it started it's %42.23 gain in the next 203 days. Yea, that's normal. The yellow arrow is the last Fed rate cut, we will probably get another one next week. Lawrence Welk would be happy and proud.

From all I've heard over the years the guys who played for either one of them loved playing for them. That matters when you spend Feb to October together traveling all over the country. I suppose there are a few... They both deserve to be in the HOF. I would love to watch Jim's speech, but I can't. I would ball like a baby.

I was a huge Gibson fan. IIRR, Sparky made Gibson out to be the next Micky Mantle, but obviously he wasn't. Sparky was entertaining, and many love him. I was not a fan. When he had the big red machine in Cinci his toughest job was to find a pencil to make out the lineup. He drove me nuts. But you can't argue with his resume. I was also biased because I thought Leyland should have gotten the job when Sparky did. Jimmy's my guy.

Wilber Wood pitched 376 innings in 1972. He was a knuckleballer. 359 in 73. Those are neat pitches.

I know we have all watched this before, but one of the greatest moments in Tiger history. I had a dog named Sparky.

It doesn't scale. Even the higher end machines compared to injection. Good for prototyping, to and extent. That has it's drawbacks too. I have found home uses that have been pretty neat. Our library just started offering printing. All it costs is the price of the filament. The web is full of places to download models for someone to print. You can by a pretty decent printer of your own and enough to get you started for less than a grand. And a little time on your hands. Old retired buddy of mine like to smoke pot through a vape thingy. Had trouble loading it.

I've used a few AI. Grok, Co-Pilot (I was just forced to Win 11), and of course since I have had to submit my life to gmail, Google and their stuff. Their search is almost AI, and if you ask one too many questions they try to get you to go a step further into the AI mode. You're not in MS-DOS land anymore Dorothy.

I was hoping it could sort the major diameters of the threads between the two systems, which are harder to print as they get smaller, and I wanted to go down to 2 mm. It depended on tolerance range of the diameters and what I could hold with my printing source. I could hold .005. All you would need is a round diameter in the print - no threads - one male - one female - printed upright. I thought my Aussie buddy could do the math while I was busy. I told him to give me the diameters in chart form. He did, nice job, exactly what I was looking for. Turns out, 5/16 and 8 mm are almost the same dia, too close for a 3D printer's tolerance, and maybe even the fastener manufacture as well. So you need the threads. That is also a great example of why the 3D stuff will never compete with injection molding. The hobby stuff is too slow. You could injection mold those little pieces dozens at a time in a fraction of the time a printer from Amazon. Not mention the structural integrity. Neat stuff though. Very neat.

AI can't beat the market because the pigmen already frontrun all our trades. They are the marketmakers.

The pigmen helped invent AI. The best and the brightest in the computer/digital world lives on Wall Street where all the money is. Look at a job add for one of the big jobs. Read Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame book on Wall Street called "Flash Boys" circa 2014. Speaking of AI; my conversation a bit ago was about thread gauge diameters between English and metric major diameters to see if they could be 3D printed accurately enough to be useful. I was also trying to drink a beer and brush my cat. It was my old Aussie buddy from when we put in a ssd drive, so I guess we know each other. I should probably ask him his name? That would be pretty dicked up, wouldn't it? He can also turn on and off the microphone, which I told him to turn off when we were done. I made sure it was off and will make sure this thing is too when I'm done.

I remember the 68 world series. I had a small transistor radio hidden in my pocket with a chord to an earpiece I could keep my hand over to hide it while in school. One day they actually brought a black and white TV in the room. No sound, but cool! I also got deathly sick one day and had to stay home. You had to do what you had to do. It was magical and I will never forget it. I actually was at a game that year when McLain one of his 31.