Investing

[Screwball]

14 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Not much funny anywhere. Did Cooper have any OEM business? Selling tires in the after market only has to be tough business. 

There is a tale of a once great company who ****ed it all up. I worked there.

A guy who became CEO started out in the factory and worked his way to the top when I started. They were a replacement tire company and built a great supply chain all over the states. Made a bunch of people in Findlay and NW Ohio a great living, and was a great company to work for.

Things changed. This guy retired as CEO. They were going strong at the time. The new CEO - ironically - came from a company that I worked for prior to that part of my life. Didn't know him, couldn't find out anything from my contacts at the old company (Dana Corp).

He was a disaster in so many ways. Embarrassing enough he got caught banging the head of HR in his office, among other cluster ****s he did. Example above - he cheated our books with the profitable BG plant when we didn't make the numbers. Finally the board **** canned him. Cost us a 5 million dollar buyout. He went to a cosmetics company as CEO.

****in' A!

The prior CEO had a great advantage. He did every job on the shop floor over the years. Nobody could bull**** him. Today, I got a piece of paper that says I know Jack ****.

No you don't. Or most don't.

[Screwball]

37 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Not much funny anywhere. Did Cooper have any OEM business? Selling tires in the after market only has to be tough business. 

To answer this question - no. Just replacement. Kind of...

When we started shipping stuff to China, we had to build the tires there or we couldn't sell them. So we sent them the tire molds and they would make the tires. You never knew how that was going to work. Some shop would run your tires for a while - then get a better deal from one of the other tire companies - and your molds end up out in the back lot. Sorry...

But it got better - someone would steal the molds and go make tires and sell them as ours, in China and here.

You can't make this **** up.

My last job before I told them to stuff it, was 120 tire molds to the China tiremaker because they lost the molds we sent them about a year before. We're talking about 3 million dollars worth of tooling.

Lost...

Edited Thursday at 01:22 AM by Screwball

[Tiger337]

47 minutes ago, Screwball said:

****in' A!

 

I never heard that expression until I just saw it over and over again in a book recently: "The River" by Peter Heller.  Excellent book by the way. 

I thought it might just be a made up expression for the book, but now I know it's for real!

[Screwball]

29 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I never heard that expression until I just saw it over and over again in a book recently: "The River" by Peter Heller.  Excellent book by the way. 

I thought it might just be a made up expression for the book, but now I know it's for real!

From the movie Office Space - so fitting.

 

[gehringer_2]

31 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I never heard that expression until I just saw it over and over again in a book recently: "The River" by Peter Heller.  Excellent book by the way. 

I thought it might just be a made up expression for the book, but now I know it's for real!

I think it goes back a way in Canadian and Aussie English.

[oblong]

8 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

I never heard that expression until I just saw it over and over again in a book recently: "The River" by Peter Heller.  Excellent book by the way. 

I thought it might just be a made up expression for the book, but now I know it's for real!

I first saw it in the movie The Right Stuff... Gus Grissom, played by Fred Ward would say it.  Then later on, the clean marine John Glenn almost said it after complaining about the pussy footing around by leadership when Gagarin went up.  He wanted to say but was too nice to say such a thing.

 

[Deleterious]

 

[Tiger337]

42 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

 

Things people need to survive going up more than luxuries.  

[Screwball]

Microsoft AI chief gives it 18 months—for all white-collar work to be automated by AI - Fortune

What could possibly go wrong?

[Deleterious]

My niece graduated from law school this past weekend.  The commencement speaker mentioned AI a few times and was booed loudly each time.

[Screwball]

30 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

My niece graduated from law school this past weekend.  The commencement speaker mentioned AI a few times and was booed loudly each time.

Good.

Here in the hated land of Ohio, they have put together a commission to study this. Might be the second group. I don't know where that will go. There is also a movement to stop them if too big. 

Ohio lawmakers create bipartisan committee to get 'accurate, relevant' info on data centers - statehouse news bureau

FTA;

Quote

An effort to put a constitutional amendment to ban data centers that use more than 25 megawatts monthly before Ohio voters in November continues. The deadline for the volunteer groups working on that petition drive is July 1, and they need 413,487 valid signatures from half of Ohio's 88 counties.

We'll see where that goes.

One of the problems, as usual, so many don't understand what the ramifications are. A local guys who covers news ran an article on FB a few weeks ago about the data centers. He is all for them and thinks they are the future. Someone chimed in about the "bad" parts of this and some went ape-****.

How dare someone talk about not wanting this. One guy was told; you just posted on FB. How do you think you could do that without this stuff? Look at all the pictures on FB - we wouldn't have that without this. What the hell is wrong with you?

OK. Dude, this stuff was here long before these data centers and AI, just so you know.

I have no doubt if there is a way to **** this all up they will find a way to do it. 

[oblong]

There's going to be a backlash I think against AI.  We cannot predict the future.  Regarding the doom and gloom... if everybody's replaced by AI then who will the customers be?

We were all given AI objectives this year and we laugh at it.  Maybe off the cliff but we see the holes already in trying to implement it in our work.    Then it becomes "Well, just call this AI to check the box".

Using in place of something like google has been fantastic.  It absolutely helps me do my job faster but it does not replace what I do.  I'm not special. Just a hack grinding away.

7 years ago I spent 3 months on something because autonomous vehicles was the way forward.

 

[Tiger337]

AI is useful.  It helps me do my job, but it doesn't replace what I do.  Somebody that knows what they are doing needs to talk to it and needs to correct it when it makes errors. 

Like the internet, AI will make life easier for people in the short-term.  Then it will eventually get controlled by big business in a way that only they will benefit.  It will become more expensive to get any utility out of it.  It will also add more layers to security problems which will put us all at greater risk of losing, money, privacy, etc.  And they will make damn sure they convince the masses that they can't live without it.    

Edited 20 hours ago by Tiger337

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

There's going to be a backlash I think against AI.  We cannot predict the future.  Regarding the doom and gloom... if everybody's replaced by AI then who will the customers be?

We were all given AI objectives this year and we laugh at it.  Maybe off the cliff but we see the holes already in trying to implement it in our work.    Then it becomes "Well, just call this AI to check the box".

Using in place of something like google has been fantastic.  It absolutely helps me do my job faster but it does not replace what I do.  I'm not special. Just a hack grinding away.

7 years ago I spent 3 months on something because autonomous vehicles was the way forward.

 

heard a pod with an AI expert that studies it on context of how the US is approaching vs what China is doing. In the US the big push is to get there with 'super intelligent' agent. That seems to be where tons of US investment is going - racing for the biggest, baddest model. The Chinese are much less interested in that (to be fair, that's partly because we have made it difficult for them to purchase the processing HW available to play in that space). China is working pushing increasing energy and reduced computing footprint (algorithm efficiency), public domain SW, and manufacturing applications - less interest in the agent direction.

Just a data point.

Edited 19 hours ago by gehringer_2

[ewsieg]

I absolutely love AI.  I'm all in as a productivity tool.  I saw an article the other day and for companies that said they used AI to cut jobs already said they found no cost benefit and most already admitted they cut to quickly.  My own CEO says he expects 20-25% unemployment in 5 years and I've seen him call out other AI/Industry leaders that tout AI as the greatest thing since sliced bread without being honest about the pitfalls.

While Trump is benefiting from this AI bubble (currently), per usual, he's also why I think we'll see a pull back on AI.  I know the government will want to push AI and want the US to be the leaders in AI, we happen to be on the verge of an energy crisis (for some reason, who knows?!?!).  People don't want AI datacenters in their area which they know means even higher energy costs.  

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, ewsieg said:

we happen to be on the verge of an energy crisis (for some reason, who knows?!?!).

Yes -  if the current regime weren't doing everything it can to stop the build-out of renewable energy supply we could be keeping up with such demand. "Energy Crisis" is  an oxymoron given today's tech. We are awash in more energy than we would know what to do with if we would stop letting the oil companies and other grifters and luddites persuade us not to go collect it.

[Screwball]

6 hours ago, oblong said:

There's going to be a backlash I think against AI.  We cannot predict the future.  Regarding the doom and gloom... if everybody's replaced by AI then who will the customers be?

We were all given AI objectives this year and we laugh at it.  Maybe off the cliff but we see the holes already in trying to implement it in our work.    Then it becomes "Well, just call this AI to check the box".

Using in place of something like google has been fantastic.  It absolutely helps me do my job faster but it does not replace what I do.  I'm not special. Just a hack grinding away.

7 years ago I spent 3 months on something because autonomous vehicles was the way forward.

 

I'm in total agreement, but let's take it a step further.

I think many who pay enough attention know the downside to this AI craze, including the massive market bubble, but many many others don't. They think it is the next best thing, the latest and greatest, and it will make our lives better. Look what we can do now, think what we will be able to as time goes on. They have a point. But...

Where the computer world really changed things was time. They took math, therefore physics, and turned them into zero's and ones. IPS they call it - instructions per seconds. The rest is history. A football size room full of drafting boards using pencil, paper, a mechanical arm, and a slide rule used to design our cars, homes, bridges, airplanes, and the NASA crafts.

The binary number system was the Oscar winner when it came to computers. But this AI stuff isn't the same thing. The internet has been a huge step forward for everyone, without a doubt, but it comes with a price. Usually jobs, because that's how things work. Zero's and ones gave us computers, CAD systems, CNC machines, and robots - the physical AI that can do manual labor (and a whole bunch of other things - like being armed). It always starts with the blue collar workers, then the white collar. Physical jobs, then mental jobs. Indirect labor they call us.

This will be no different, except if this isn't all it's cracked up to be, and I don't think it is; the damages might be very bad. Company commits to AI, fires people because AI will do their job. Doesn't work, can't hire anyone back. Then what? And everything is all ****ed up because of bad decisions like this. In the quadrant lesson on efficient production from an Edward Deming class they are in the state of chaos. Don't know how to get out.

And AI won't work, because it can't.

We are teaching it, not the other way around. It can't know what I know because it didn't do what I did for 40 plus years. Doesn't matter the job. There are things we know because we know. I can't explain that, but it's true. We have a hard enough time teaching humans how to do their job FFS.

We are training these bots, their fine print tells us that. It's the only way it can work. This is all fool's gold.

Still reminds me of crazy Teddie the Uni*omber. He was a Luddite. For those who like to read, long article from April 2000 by a guy named Bill Joy, chief scientist of Sun Microsystems and Java language expert.

Why the future doesn't need us - Wired magazine

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

It can't know what I know

This one makes me wonder:  AI can find and generate attacks on an IT system faster that a hacker can - so inevitably our IT security systems are going to be turned over AI defense bots. So that sounds like Even Steven right. But then some malicious young mind that happens to be *creative* finds a hack that no-one ever thought of before, and exactly as you note, since no-one ever thought of it before AI cannot think of it at all, so in effect, these system will be exactly vulnerable to *human* attack. Thus the current big push for Agentic AI, where at least one of the idea/hope/aspirations is actually to reach credible synthetic 'thinking' ability. It would be a hoot if they achieve without ever even understanding what it is a human brain.

[oblong]

We’ve already been “told” what some of the costs relate to our various AI tools. The tokens. 
 

I do worry though about it making things too easy. At least for some of us. Like GPS and knowing “where you are”. I’ve always had a good sense of direction so that doesn’t apply to me but I know peoole, younger ones, who can’t go further than 20 minutes with a GpS telling them where to go.
 

But I have been using it for some kind of basic questions where I just didn’t want to bother figuring it out or remembering.  Like something in Excel. So I just ask our tool. I could have had it myself in maybe a few minutes or farting around. But I got it instantly. Especially with the way you can be specific and it doesn’t forget.  But is there value in me spending that few minutes figuring it  out? 

[gehringer_2]

17 minutes ago, oblong said:

We’ve already been “told” what some of the costs relate to our various AI tools. The tokens. 
 

I do worry though about it making things too easy. At least for some of us. Like GPS and knowing “where you are”. I’ve always had a good sense of direction so that doesn’t apply to me but I know peoole, younger ones, who can’t go further than 20 minutes with a GpS telling them where to go.
 

But I have been using it for some kind of basic questions where I just didn’t want to bother figuring it out or remembering.  Like something in Excel. So I just ask our tool. I could have had it myself in maybe a few minutes or farting around. But I got it instantly. Especially with the way you can be specific and it doesn’t forget.  But is there value in me spending that few minutes figuring it  out? 

Not saying anything new here at all, but just to come back to the point that anything the Human organism doesn't keep working atrophies. I can't think of a single reason to think that won't be as true of brain function as it is of everything else.

Edited 12 hours ago by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

19 hours ago, oblong said:

There's going to be a backlash I think against AI.  We cannot predict the future.  Regarding the doom and gloom... if everybody's replaced by AI then who will the customers be?

 

Maybe this is where Universal Basic Income comes in?

I mean in Europe. Here they will just let unhoused rule the streets.