[RedSpawn]

https://www.msn.com/...ID=ansmsnnews11

It appears that news organizations are also using "sexual harassment" to clean house of its older veteran reporters that are costing too much money in their new streamlined cost structure.

I am not suggesting that NBC shouldn't take this allegation against Matt Lauer seriously; however, the removal of so many veteran reporters from a variety of news establishments leads me to believe that this is also a race to the bottom in terms of cost control for the cottage industry of "NEWS AS INFOTAINMENT".

[y66]

From Tom Whitwell's 52 things I learned in 2017:

Quote

One Friday in May 2017, Solar panels in the UK generated more energy than all eight of our nuclear power stations [Andrew Ward @ FT]

A Norwegian fertiliser company is building a $25m battery-powered unmanned robotic cargo ship to carry chemicals from a plant in Herøya to ports in Larvik and Norvik, replacing 40,000 lorry journeys a year. [Adam Minter at Bloomberg]

Dana Lewis from Alabama built herself an artificial pancreas from off-the-shelf parts. Her design is open source, so people with diabetes can hack together solutions more quickly than drug companies. [Lee Roop]

[y66]

From DeepMind’s AlphaZero crushes chess

Quote

20 years after DeepBlue defeated Garry Kasparov in a match, chess players have awoken to a new revolution. The AlphaZero algorithm developed by Google and DeepMind took just four hours of playing against itself to synthesise the chess knowledge of one and a half millennium and reach a level where it not only surpassed humans but crushed the reigning World Computer Champion Stockfish 28 wins to 0 in a 100-game match. All the brilliant stratagems and refinements that human programmers used to build chess engines have been outdone, and like Go players we can only marvel at a wholly new approach to the game.

From The future is here – AlphaZero learns chess by Albert Silver

Quote

12/6/2017 – Imagine this: you tell a computer system how the pieces move — nothing more. Then you tell it to learn to play the game. And a day later — yes, just 24 hours — it has figured it out to the level that beats the strongest programs in the world convincingly! DeepMind, the company that recently created the strongest Go program in the world, turned its attention to chess, and came up with this spectacular result.

Quote

If Karpov had been a chess engine, he might have been called AlphaZero. There is a relentless positional boa constrictor approach that is simply unheard of. Modern chess engines are focused on activity, and have special safeguards to avoid blocked positions as they have no understanding of them and often find themselves in a dead end before they realize it. AlphaZero has no such prejudices or issues, and seems to thrive on snuffing out the opponent’s play. It is singularly impressive, and what is astonishing is how it is able to also find tactics that the engines seem blind to.

[gwnn]

Kitten Academy Live Stream:
https://www.youtube....h?v=m9VO7X_q9nw

[Winstonm]

Paramount, California, birthplace of the Zamboni.

[RedSpawn]

I'm in love. . .



A picture is worth more than 1,000 words. And this, ladies and gentleman, is where we are with our financial industry.

[y66]

From How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America:

Quote

Sean Illing: Who are the baby boomers?

Bruce Gibney: The baby boomers are conventionally defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. But I focus on the first two-thirds of boomers because their experiences are pretty homogeneous: They were raised after the war and so have no real experience of trauma or the Great Depression or even any deprivation at all. More importantly, they never experienced the social solidarity that unfolded during war time and that helped produce the New Deal.

But it’s really the white middle-class boomers who exemplify all the awful characteristics and behaviors that have defined this generation. They became a majority of the electorate in the early ’80s, and they fully consolidated their power in Washington by January 1995. And they’ve basically been in charge ever since.

Sean: So how have they broken the country?

Bruce: Well, the damage done to the social fabric is pretty self-evident. Just look around and notice what’s been done. On the economic front, the damage is equally obvious, and it trickles down to all sorts of other social phenomena. I don’t want to get bogged down in an ocean of numbers and data here (that’s in the book), but think of it this way: I’m 41, and when I was born, the gross debt-to-GDP ratio was about 35 percent. It’s roughly 103 percent now — and it keeps rising.

The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it. They habitually cut their own taxes and borrow money without any concern for future burdens. They’ve spent virtually all our money and assets on themselves and in the process have left a financial disaster for their children.

We used to have the finest infrastructure in the world. The American Society of Civil Engineers thinks there’s something like a $4 trillion deficit in infrastructure in deferred maintenance. It’s crumbling, and the boomers have allowed it to crumble. Our public education system has steadily degraded as well, forcing middle-class students to bury themselves in debt in order to get a college education.

Then of course there’s the issue of climate change, which they’ve done almost nothing to solve. But even if we want to be market-oriented about this, we can think of the climate as an asset, which has degraded over time thanks to the inaction and cowardice of the boomer generation. Now they didn’t start burning fossil fuels, but by the 1990s the science was undeniable. And what did they do? Nothing.

Sean: So what’s your explanation for the awfulness of the boomers? What made them this way?

Bruce: I think there were a number of unusual influences, some of which won't be repeated, and some of which may have mutated over the years. I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it.

This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations.

Sean: I’ve always seen the boomers as a generational trust-fund baby: They inherited a country they had no part in building, failed to appreciate it, and seized on all the benefits while leaving nothing behind.

Bruce: I think that’s exactly right. They were born into great fortune and had a blast while they were on top. But what have they left behind?

[RedSpawn]

 y66, on 2017-December-21, 18:30, said:

From How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America:

The whole federal debt burden is conspiracy theory cookery. We in America can deficit spend with reckless abandon. Arithmetic and market fundamentals and analytics are highly overrated in rhetoric.

America is not heavily burdened with debt. Think of it as carefully constructed leveraging of risks. LOL.

[kenberg]

 y66, on 2017-December-21, 18:30, said:

From How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America:

So I was born in 1939, which is just outside his 1940-1965 window of sociopaths. I really get tired of people who get their kicks calling other people names.
I did a quick google search and Wikipedia quotes Kirkus Reviews on his book:

"Kirkus Reviews called the book an "endless, broadest-possible-brush harangue" that has "some points, all of which would have been better made without assigning damning agency to them: of course health care has to be restructured, and of course taxes have to be raised if the nation is to escape insolvency. His prescriptions on those fronts are sound, though some are surely controversial."<sup>[20]"

He can call me a sociopath and I imagine I can find a few names to call him. This helps how? It sells books I guess.</sup>

[Zelandakh]

 kenberg, on 2017-December-21, 21:19, said:

So I was born in 1939, which is just outside his 1940-1965 window of sociopaths.

That makes you a Silent, Ken. Wiki gives a pretty good listing with links if you want to read up on any of them. It should of course be fairly clear to anyone that these boundaries are highly artificial though and therefore not to read too much into it. As you write, this Gibney guy has to sell his book. He is a venture capitalist by trade so he probably knows how to talk a good game. That said, there is some degree of truth in what he writes on a financial level, not that a generation are sociopaths of course but that the people born after the end of WWI took a disproportionate amount leaving comparatively less for future generations. He is, like me, a Generation X child - I guess it is expected of us to hate Baby Boomers somehow. He just takes the whole thing too far.

[kenberg]

 Zelandakh, on 2017-December-22, 05:19, said:

That makes you a Silent, Ken. Wiki gives a pretty good listing with links if you want to read up on any of them. It should of course be fairly clear to anyone that these boundaries are highly artificial though and therefore not to read too much into it. As you write, this Gibney guy has to sell his book. He is a venture capitalist by trade so he probably knows how to talk a good game. That said, there is some degree of truth in what he writes on a financial level, not that a generation are sociopaths of course but that the people born after the end of WWI took a disproportionate amount leaving comparatively less for future generations. He is, like me, a Generation X child - I guess it is expected of us to hate Baby Boomers somehow. He just takes the whole thing too far.

Yes, but taking things a little too far is how it all goes to hell. You could explain to the president of Mexico that Trump was not referring to him when he called Mexicans rapists. I doubt that would smooth things over.

The Wiki citation puts my parents, my father born in 1900, my mother in 1889, into the lost generation. They did not hang out with Gertrude Stein in Paris. My older daughter was born in 1961, i guess that is still a boomer, so she is another sociopath. People who know her would disagree. My younger daughter, 1967, is an X. My oldest grandchild, 1992, is a Millenial. My youngest grandchild is 2. I am not sure that they have yet named the box that they will assign her to.

We of course are partly a product of the environment we experience growing up. Wars figure into this, as both the Wiki article and Gibney note, but so does much else. I have only scattered memories of WW II but if I see a movie such as The Best Years of Our Lives I can recognize the people and say yes, that reflects how people thought. But I am not all that Silent, and I claim to not be a Sociopath. But of course sociopaths lie.

For me, the title of the book and the approach it represents is pretty much a guarantee that I will never read his book or have anything good to say about the author. A quick judgment perhaps, but there are a lot of books out there expressing a lot of views, and we have to choose.

[jjbrr]

Two questions:

Why do we have participation trophies? My generation certainly doesn't want them. Your generation imposed them upon us.

Your father in 1900 and mother in 1889? Is there a story there? I'm ashamed to admit I don't know as much about my grandparents as I'd like. My paternal grandfather had alzheimers and grandmother died of cancer when I was fairly young. My maternal grandfather died when my mom was 3, and my grandmother, while still alive afaik, has no relationship with us.

[Zelandakh]

 jjbrr, on 2017-December-23, 09:57, said:

Why do we have participation trophies? My generation certainly doesn't want them. Your generation imposed them upon us.

Don't be a dick...
A dangerous message

I am not too sure to which generations you are referring here. I know I did not get participation trophies as a child, just the usual 1st 2nd and 3rd. I also know I was fairly competitive. I can for example remember receiving a trophy for coming in second at a fairly prestigious junior chess event and being somewhat disappointed because the tournament format (Swiss) had prevented me from playing against the winner - if I had beaten him I would probably have won overall. It was not that second place was bad - it earned me a county selection - but I wanted to win! If someone had given me a trophy just for turning up I would have seen that as worthless junk.

Of course other children are different. If such trophies help certain children to participate in sports or other healthy social activities where they otherwise would not then that is surely a good thing. How effective they are in that respect I could not say. I am fairly sure that the competitive children will stay competitive regardless. Most likely BBF has a higher than average population of competitive children, so perhaps we are not really the correct audience to be judging whether they are a positive or a negative for their target demographic.

[jjbrr]

zel, im going to read the rest of your message, but for the two links you provided, jesus christ, go F yourself. not reading that BS.

[jjbrr]

ok the rest of your post was garbage too. thanks i guess.

[kenberg]

 jjbrr, on 2017-December-23, 09:57, said:

Two questions:

Why do we have participation trophies? My generation certainly doesn't want them. Your generation imposed them upon us.

Your father in 1900 and mother in 1889? Is there a story there? I'm ashamed to admit I don't know as much about my grandparents as I'd like. My paternal grandfather had alzheimers and grandmother died of cancer when I was fairly young. My maternal grandfather died when my mom was 3, and my grandmother, while still alive afaik, has no relationship with us.

Re question 1: What's a participation trophy? Are you speaking of things where people get rewarded for their participation even if they do not achieve much or even much try? I would not impose such a thing on anyone, I never received such a trophy, nor did my kids. Not my idea at all.

Re question 2: Zel mentioned the Wikipedia article on Generation this and Generation that so I was going through it. My point was that the labels mean little to me. Gertrude Stein could say "We are all of a lost generation". Clever enough perhaps, but she was sitting in a Paris Cafe chatting with Hemingway or some such. My parents, I am sure, had never heard of Gertrude Stein and did not think they were lost. This topic all got started with the reference to what's his name declaring that Generation Boomers are all a bunch of sociopaths. As I mentioned, I really tire of people lumping a group together and calling then names.This view is pretty much independent of what group it is and what sort of names they are being called. As a 5 year old I once knew would say in dispute with other 5 year olds: "What you say is what you are except the goodest part."

[RedSpawn]

 y66, on 2017-December-21, 18:30, said:

From How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America:

"Sean: So how have they broken the country?"

This is a very complex question, but I think it's fair to say that baby boomers inherited a rich dynamic country post World War II. They also assumed the prosperity they had would continue and the country would grow by about 3% into infinity.

The problem is ALL voting age generations didn't judge their politicians by their impact on our financial solvency and didn't make shoring up finances the topic du jour for elections. As long as politicans secured ample amounts of pork from Congress' largesse and brought it back to their home states, our votes and loyalty could be bought.

Take for example Bush and Obama. President Bush doubled our debt from $5.5 trillion in 2000 to $11 trillion in 2008. President Obama took an $11 trillion public debt and almost doubled it to $20 trillion by the end of 2016. I didn't see the collective outrage to this type of deficit spending.

President Ronald Reagan didn't endorse this level of deficit spending when he introduced supply-side economics and the notion of [voo doo] trickle down economics. We co-signed this approach to handling the federal purse strings with our votes. Why? Because deficit spending into oblivion requires no personal sacrifice and insulates us from seeing the long-term consequences of our actions.

We want prosperity without making personal sacrifices to earn it. It's this selfishiness and naivete that imperils the nation. We kick the "financial solvency" can down the road and procrastinate about making the long overdue changes.

To almost quadruple our public debt in less than a generation is unconscionable and yet we do nothing outrageous to get our politician's attention and demand a new strategy and direction. We get up, go to work, make the donuts, go home, and shop when afforded the chance. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Neither party has made significant inroads to downsize government and rightsize the federal budget because doing so is political suicide. And fortunately, Congress is full of career politicians because we haven't demanded term limits for them. Now we have too many federal fiefdoms addicted to their swamp lifestyle. So politicans continue to deficit spend with reckless abandon to buy our votes and complacency. And here we are.

Two Presidents basically doubled the federal debt during each of their presidencies and the citizens responded --- PROTECT MY PORK AND DON'T CUT $HIT FROM THE BUDGET.

Our government gives $1.5 trillion in tax cuts as a Christmas gift to Corporate America and rich wealthy people with very little benefit to middle class families. Last time I looked, the federal government is bloated with federal debt and still has no balanced federal budget and had a looming government shutdown because of all of the out-of-control deficit spending. And our government deems it's time to celebrate this tax cut as a victory in light of our financial condition.

Where is the outrage? There isn't any. We have accepted this hubris as our norm.

[Zelandakh]

 jjbrr, on 2017-December-23, 18:18, said:

zel, im going to read the rest of your message, but for the two links you provided, jesus christ, go F yourself. not reading that BS.

I placed 2 links roughly on the extremes of each side of the debate. Noone ever has to read posted links - sometimes reading something from the opposing side helps one's own understanding though.

[Zelandakh]

 RedSpawn, on 2017-December-24, 03:53, said:

"Sean: So how have they broken the country?"

This is a very complex question, but I think it's fair to say that baby boomers inherited a rich dynamic country post World War II. They also assumed the prosperity they had would continue and the country would grow by about 3% into infinity.

I think it is quite a lot simpler than this. Just consider pensions for example. The Boomers came at a time of high birth rate. That is the origin of their tag after all. Generation X, on the other hand, is characterised by strongly falling birth rates. In that time, medical advances have also been significant together with their associated costs. The result is that there are about half as many workers per retiree now than in 1950. Immigration helps out here somewhat and America, for example, is better off than most other developed nations. Nonetheless, the resulting issues were thoroughly predictable 40 years ago.

Now look at house prices. These grew at an unprecedented rate in the 1970s, precisely the time when Boomers were taking over the housing market, though it seems like few took much attention until the 1980s as the rises kept on going. It would have been a fairly simple matter for western governments to take some of this raised capital and save it over to cover the upcoming costs that everyone knew were coming. This is a simplistic argument that demonstrates that the argument that Boomers took too much holds water. The fact that the capital that was taken did not distribute itself evenly also helped create even more inequality in developed countries.

On do on the other hand find it disingenuous to blame the Boomers as a generation for this. How many of them actually had a real say in what was going on? Rather the blame, if that is even the right term, needs to fall on a small group of influential people who helped shape the policies of an era. Some of these people are politicians but certainly not all. So it is easy to pick out names such as Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl from the 80s but the seeds run much deeper. As has already been discussed on BBF, Nixon's decision to suspend the Bretton Woods agreement is a factor, not only for the direct changes it brought in but also as it led directly to monetarism taking over from fixed exchange rates.

And here is the point. None of these names refer to Boomers. The first Boomer POTUS is Bill Clinton in 1993. The first Boomer Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1997. And the first Boomer Chancellor? Angela Merkel in 2005. So while the Boomers are the beneficiaries of (arguably poor) policies over a long period, it is difficult to argue that they bear the responsibility. Rather it is something that falls out of the system of representative democracy. They were a demographic much more numerous than the one that came after them, so naturally politicians made great efforts to foster their votes. That resulted in a series of giveaways in many different countries. But for the most part, the people actually making the decisions were not themselves Boomers. You can hardly blame the Boomer voters for accepting a free lunch when it was offered!

[kenberg]

On this business of blaming I think I am in agreement with Zel. It helps to recall how we really thought, whether it is me as a Silent, Zel as an X, or whatever.

Elementary school and high school: I was told to do this.
College and the military: I was thinking of joining the Navy when I got out of high school, it was expected that all males would serve some time in the military sooner or later, but I got a scholarship and i went to college.
Grad school: When i started college I barely knew it existed, but it came to seem like a good idea.
Employment and pensions, pensions being in the news some: I was told: We can offer you such and such a salary, and part of the package is a pension plan. I said OK.

None of this involved any scheming, it does not seem to me to be the least bit pathological, whether socio- or otherwise. I was certainly brought up with the expectation of being self-supporting, as I assume those of any generation are, but nobody ever suggested that before I took a job that had a pension plan I should do a deep study of whether pension plans are or are not a sound concept for the economical health of the nation.

Here is a very up-to-date variation on this theme. Apparently it would be a good idea to pay my 2018 property taxes in 2017 if the county will in fact accept it. Ok, so I will look into this, I suppose it is worth the effort. Myself, I think property taxes and state income taxes should be deductible from income for federal tax purposes but if it is no longer going to be then I guess I should do what is best. Again this is not a sociopathic scheme, this is just me trying to adjust to changing rules.

I am fine with looking at the effect of policies and trying to choose wise ones. But let's go easy on the blame and the name calling while we are doing this. There are schemers out there, and they should be called out. But call them out as individuals, don't lump an entire generation together and call them sociopaths. That's just lazy thinking.