In preparation for the presidential election debates, each candidate has proposed certain conditions.

Former President Donald J. Trump specifies that the debates must:

AI searches the published world to source anything it says.

But if you Google something right now, some AI engine will write an answer. That answer will read like a boring article. And it may or may not be right. But here’s the kicker: the AI that looks for answers cannot tell the difference between a real source, or an AI-generated one. Which means that, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, anything resembling the original information source is so far diluted and lost, that it is indistinguishable from dreck.

This came up Sunday night at a cocktail party of my pickleball friends: A wealthy divorcee who has recently traveled around the globe on vacations was asked to describe one of the resorts she had visited and she said it was like South of the Border outside Dillon SC. As the host of this festivity, I was greatly offended. “South of the Border! That is where I went on my honeymoon and you come here into my house and mock me by denigrating South of the Border. Shame on you! Pedro will always be welcome here!”

Actually, my wife and I honeymooned in St. Augustine FL 55 years ago because we couldn’t afford Pedro’s resort.

This a follow-on to my post Coronal Mass Ejections: Are You Paying Attention?. In that post I discussed the ongoing space “storm” and the threat such geomagnetic phenomena have on a civilization that is, and seems to be becoming evermore, dependent on electronic systems and devices. As I write, a 7th CME is making its way to earth in this current storm cluster. It is not expected to be civilization-ending, but what has been surprising about the latest storm is how much of a punch it has given as it is much smaller than some past storms that did not have that effect. The conclusion is that the Earth’s magnetosphere is weakening. Which, if so, means that CMEs of smaller intensity will have greater and greater impact going forward. Within this context one has to contemplate how one will live in the event your location is de-electrified by a geomagnetic phenomena. What strategies can you, should you, employ?

In our lifetimes we have seen natural disasters — earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires — occurring over and over again. The impact of such events, devastating as they may have been, is generally relatively short-lived at a societal level. Survivors recover. Aid of various sorts is provided by governmental and international bodies. Buildings are rebuilt and life returns to some sort of pre-disaster “normal”. The length of time over which this occurs is variable and certainly affected by politics, finance, and media attention. (Just ask the people of Maui why their homes haven’t been restored, while California homes were?) But the fundamental capacity to restore was always present.

Election Day is a relic of the past. Acknowledging that millions of votes have already been cast before the traditional October debates, the Biden and Trump campaigns have accelerated the process significantly by announcing the presumptive nominees will debate June 27th in Atlanta without an audience on CNN.

The second debate will be just after the conventions September 10th on ABC. Details have not been released.

I have always been skeptical of the catastrophic claims of climate hysterics. There are several reasons for this. I myself have substantial experience observing, measuring, and analyzing complex systems and I just don’t accept that our ability to measure the entire planetary climate is as comprehensive as the hysterics would have us all believe. Adequately measuring and predicting the behavior of even man-made complex systems is not a comprehensively solvable problem. But we are nevertheless expected to believe that we have solved the problem of reliable sensor data for an entire planet.

I also harbor skepticism toward models or, at least, toward anyone who argues for making societal-scale changes merely based upon models. It is easily possible that our climate models are about as accurate as the Covid models were. So imposing societal hardship simply on the basis of models is a hubristic approach only an ideologue could love. Perhaps one of the upsides of the self-inflicted injury associated with Covid policy will be that the public will become far more skeptical of models in general, and of model purveyors in particular.

Dear Fellow Alumni:

AI generated image

Between the pill and age of the internet, there was the death of John F. Kennedy.

I have been gainfully employed since I was nine years old. By the time I was sixteen, I had amassed enough experience, alongside a reputation for reliability, that I was hired to do jobs that are not typical for the average sixteen-year-old. I’m not bragging, I’m just explaining. At sixteen I worked for a local bank, where I had the job of training local retail businesses in how to properly process credit cards. In those days, you couldn’t get a digital terminal and just swipe your customer’s card. You had to use those old machines that mashed a carbon triplicate onto the raised numbers of the card.

Not too long after that, point-of-sale terminals became a thing, and entire businesses emerged solely devoted to the local installation of, and education surrounding, those terminals. What changed with the introduction of point-of-sale devices was far more revolutionary than merely the mechanics of processing cards. What was irrevocably changed was the insight the retailer was now able to acquire into his own business, especially regarding his engagement with his customers.