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George Rebane
Given the outcome of the last election, at least half of the country has a lot to be thankful for. The other half will feel the same a year from now. Nevertheless, each of us within the bosom of our families should take the time to give thanks for the gifts we have received over the years. For turkey day I share the grace said for decades in the Rebane family, ‘Thank you God for this day and this food. Amen.’
George Rebane
Granddaughter Elizabeth has finished her PhD in molecular biology, and after many years of cancer research is now Dr Elizabeth Fernandez and has her dissertation published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications – ‘Integrated molecular and functional characterization of the intrinsic apoptotic machinery identifies therapeutic vulnerabilities in glioma’ (whew!) – for which she was the lead of a formidable team of researchers. She dedicated her doctoral research toward a cure for glioblastoma multiform, the deadliest brain cancer of which our granddaughter and her cousin Ellen died at the age of 14. Congratulations Elizabeth!
Cal Currier, the 16-year-old son of a dear friend, sailed solo across the Atlantic from Massachusetts to Portugal in a 30ft boat. He was amply feted for this record setting accomplishment, especially since earlier this year he first learned to sail for this life-changing adventure that took both courage and a lot technical skills about seamanship and all the different mechanical and electronics equipments on board. His father spent the weekend with us and casually brought this up when we were updating each other on family doings. Cal is one of four brothers, all outstanding young men in their own right. (more here)
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy describe how their much publicized DOGE program will work in the 21nov24 WSJ – ‘The DOGE Plan to Reform Government’. This well written commentary succinctly and clearly summarizes the new Dept of Government Efficiency and is well worth the read to cut through all the noise that has surrounded the announcement of this major Trump administration goal’s means and methods. (more here)
Posted at
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[Am considering starting a series of posts about the progressive’s promised ‘resistance’ movement against Trump’s administration. These posts would be a place under which to gather thoughts and comments about this newest phase of anti-Trump doings by our Left. Any thoughts? gjr]
George Rebane
While our revamped president organizes a major government cleanup at the federal level, we in California will be immune to the resulting Trump-induced benefits. Moreover, led by the peak pinhead himself, the Sacramento mental midgets will do their best to make our lives more costly and miserable than ever. All of this continues to be brought about by California’s electorate – the most unread, indolent, and ignorant population of voters in the nation. The ongoing legal and illegal increase in their numbers is driving out the productive Californians who seek more enlightened pastures in which they can raise their families and start/operate their businesses.
Latest additions to the list of loonies –
George Rebane
45th and 47th President of the United States of America
Yea verily, and Hallelujah!
The sense to let things settle. Especially when the public, or the private, sea is most turbulent. There come whirlwinds into human traffic, storms of passion, when it is wise to seek a safe harbor with smoother waters: many times is an evil made worse by the remedies used. Gracian #138
George Rebane
As we sit in wait for the election of our lifetime, many of us are in a cold sweat as to what may be our country’s fate if the neo-Marxist Left prevails this upcoming Tuesday. Our Left’s not so hidden agenda is to remove the United States as the main impediment to global governance. It does this by fostering drastically flawed policies for conducting the country’s economy, education, and foreign policy (to include blatantly porous borders). The Left’s inventory of governance deficits is large and continues to grow, immune to ongoing appeals of reason and historical evidence of their failures wherever these have been implemented.
Today I will focus my screed on the Left’s successful attempts to put in play a malformed economy that is accepted by an alarmingly large share of the country’s (lightly read) electorate as having fixed the Trump legacy, if we are to believe the polls. And specifically I want to highlight the entire notion of the Left’s goal to implement wage/price controls (“price gouging”) across the land should they also dominate Congress. They have convinced a large contingent of us that Kamala’s economic plan (what plan? where?) is backed over Trump’s by scores of economists from sea to shining sea.
Longtime RR readers know my assessment of economics as a field of study and informer of policy. Most certainly there is nothing scientific about economics when it comes to quantitative models designed to predict the future – i.e. contain equations with time as the independent variable. Wherever such models have been applied, they have shown themselves to be woefully inadequate for the job for reasons I have detailed many times. Yet they persist, perhaps serving the economists’ ongoing desire to be accepted into the more respectable community of science.
In this regard I offer the celebrated British macro-economist Lord John Maynard Keynes as an example of one who did not understand the impact of wage/price controls and gave us his ‘demand side’ model of an economy which continues to infect the thinking of government planners all over the world. His economics began to fray in the 60s and 70s when governments’ demand infusion policies did nothing to mitigate stagflation. However, leftwingers like Barack Obama gave Keynesianism another chance after the 2008-09 recession, and demonstrated to the world how such demand based economic policies gave rise to the most impeded and slowest recovery in the history of US recessions.
Getting back to wage/price controls. It is easy to show that anyone who continues to believe that wage/price controls will increase the quality of life in an economy is way past those who still believe in a flat earth. At least the flat earthers can stand on a hill and point to the surrounding horizons to demonstrate that the earth is always flat from here to there. The true believers in w/p controls have never had such a hill to stand on. Theirs is a pabulum-based body of evidence that crumbles under any serious examination.
The more successful economists have been those who interpret economic behaviors in terms of very apparent and recorded behaviors of individuals when presented with economic choices and decisions. Successful economists of this stripe have been men like Smith, Bastiat, von Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, and Freedman.
Henry Hazlitt contributed to a widespread understanding of economics with the publication of Economics in One Lesson (1946), a paperback translated into over ten languages with which he intended to attract readers put off by Friedrich Hayek’s more dense and massive classic, Road to Serfdom (1944). (The highly recommended Hazlitt tome is now in the public domain and available here along with a chapters summary here.)
This September’s issue of the Hillsdale College Imprimis (here) features an updated reprise of the Hazlitt essay ‘The Dangers of Price Controls’ which also appeared in the very first issue of Imprimis in 1972. (Imprimis is a monthly pamphlet on governance and cultural issues that is subscribed by 6.6M people worldwide.) The essay opens with –
The first thing to be said about price and wage fixing is that it is harmful at any time and under any conditions. It is a giant step toward a dictated, regimented, and authoritarian economy. It makes impossible arrangements that both sides are willing to agree to. It sets aside contracts that have already been made in good faith. If an employer wishes to give a man a raise in pay, and the man deserves it, he is nonetheless forbidden to do it under the new regulations. This is a grave abridgment of individual liberty. … Price and wage fixing does harm even if there is no inflation. In a free economy prices are constantly changing. They are changing to reflect changes in supply and demand, in costs, and in a hundred other conditions. Some prices are going up, other prices are going down. If an effort is made to freeze prices and wages exactly where they are, it immediately disturbs the relationship of prices and comparative profit margins, which decides what things will be made and what quantities they will be made in. It upsets the process by which the free market decides how thousands of different commodities and services are to be made in the proportions in which people want them.
So now I and those of my persuasion sit here holding our breaths for Tuesday night when we may receive a hint of the kind of future that awaits us all.
George Rebane
For a little relief from the travails of the election season, I offer a little bagatelle for your intellectual entertainment – something provided by neither candidates nor commentators during these last couple of years. This jumped from my fevered brain one night as I was noodling over some candidate problems for Techtest 2025 coming up next spring.
From the figure we see a green semicircle of radius R with center at O in which resides the smaller blue semicircle of radius r with center at E anchored, as shown, on the right end D of the large semicircle’s diameter. From the left end A of the diameter issues the red line AC which is tangent to the small semicircle at B and terminates on the circumference of the large semicircle at C. The only data available is the value of R. The task at hand is to find the value of r and the length L of the line which is equal to the perimeter length of the small semicircle, or demonstrate that no such solution is feasible.
At an appropriate time in the future I will append this post with the solution, and also give you immediate feedback if you post your solution as a comment or email it to me.
[4nov24 addendum] Well that didn’t take long; we have some very astute readers led by Efox who submitted the correct solution in his 232pm comment. What made me smile was the description of his approach using Excel™. We would call it the direct bigger hammer method. He correctly argued that a solution is indeed feasible and immediately recognized the scalability of the problem which allowed him to deduce that r must be a fixed fraction k of the given radius R – i.e. r = kR. He then extracted a relevant algebraic equation from the geometry that contained both R and r – see the first equation below the figure. Realizing that an analytical solution for r would be too tedious to pursue, he got out Excel and used his bigger (“old fashioned”) hammer by inserting a numerical value for R and then kR for r, and then started incrementally varying k until his equation was satisfied with the k interpolated to yield at least a five-place decimal accuracy. Bravo.
George Rebane
The progress toward the Singularity is producing some good and bad news. The bad news is that the newer Large Language Models are taking ever more eye-popping resources in the hardware – server farms, data storage, electric power to operate, … – and just the cost of training the new LLMs which now may take months. The other problem is that we are running out of stored data on which the LLMs munch to develop their smarts. (more here)
The good news is that the new generative AI LLMs are taking over more are more functional areas in corporate environments – e.g. IT functions such as customer service, procurement, human resources and even software development. Under the high level supervision of one human, an AI can replace scores of other humans in an ever increasing number of jobs. (more here)
And an example of one function is how an AI can ‘read’ a collection of information about a subject area and produce a totally realistic and relevant conversation between two ‘people’ analyzing the contents of the information and even derive deeper meanings from the input material. To illustrate this capability, my son-in-law used some new AI published by Google to create a podcast-like conversation (here) about yours truly from having read only my RR posts from the beginning of 2024. I was blown away by not only its apparent authenticity (yes, they made a couple minor mistakes), but also by the natural sounding and appropriate interstitial phrases and observations that were part of the conversation by the two virtual podcasters. Without looking behind the curtain, this conversation would fool (almost?) everyone as being between two actual humans.
[As Lenin, Stalin, and Saul Alinsky counseled, accuse your opponent of advocating and doing the same things that you do. Hence, now Kamala and gang promote the same longstanding Trump policies, and accuse Trump of being a Hitlerian “fascist” who will institute an autocratic government dedicated to centralized control, implement the socialist policies long-claimed and practiced by Kamala and the Democrats, and then use the military to imprison opponents. In the interval, their campaign will permit no questions about their plans and policies, only focusing on disparaging Trump, the destroyer of democracy, this as the Republicans continue to outline their policies and seek symmetry from the Left. The same response is seen in these pages from our TDS suffering leftwing readers; they will not touch policies but ape their dear leader in continuing to disparage Trump’s character. gjr]
George Rebane
Sacramento City Council idiots are going to pass “ordinances (that) range from requiring gun liability insurance to a yearly $25 gun harm reduction fee” - that’s $25/gun/year. The claimed purpose of these insane ordinances is to “combat senseless gun violence”. However, anyone with a working 3-digit IQ will immediately see that these ordinances can and will do NOTHING to reduce gun violence. Their real purpose is another step in ratcheting the elimination of Second Amendment rights. (more here)
Leftwing Union columnist George Boardman doesn’t recognize the constant stream of Democrat lies. Throughout history socialists have always been the dominant liars since the governance they are selling has never worked and only delivered the greatest misery to the greatest number who acceded to travel their road. Predictably his 15oct24 sacrament (here) on free speech only focused on the Right, claiming that “conservatives are disingenuous when they don the mantle of absolute free speech by viewing lies and falsehoods as just part of the exchange of ideas. It is hard to take seriously people who celebrate media personalities who sell falsehoods as a triumph of free speech, a true debasement of the idea. (piling more on Loomer) We got a taste of that in a statement issued by our local Republicans eager to hear Loomer’s viewpoints. 'We look forward to hearing about her struggle to defend her First Amendment rights.' This from a party whose leader can’t resist telling one lie after another.” Boardman is a steadfast loyal water carrier for all those on our political left.
‘Kamala Harris is an Idiot’ writes Charles Cooke (here) in the 14oct24 National Review in a blisteringly on-the-mark summary of her public career, and he correctly concludes that everything she has attempted has shown her to be “wildly, catastrophically, incontestably out of her depth.” In spite of that, lamestream “reporters have struggled mightily to find kind ways of describing Harris’s ineluctable inability to convey anything comprehensible, complex, or concrete.”
Our leftwing neighbors continue stealing Trump yard signs. This year is no different than all the previous years that we have lived in Nevada County. Our conservative friends living in different parts of the western county consistently report that their Republican election signs disappear very quickly after being displayed. A simple tour through our community will demonstrate that somehow Democrat promoting signs proliferate suggesting that there are very few or no Republicans living in these parts who promote their candidates during election seasons.
Well-known hedge fund manager and former Democrat Bill Ackman (CEO Pershing Square Management, Chairman of Howard Hughes Corporation) has gone public with an extensive list of reasons for supporting Trump in the coming election (here). It’s definitely worth a read since Ackman has now become the new target for the progressive commentariat. An example of this is Yahoo’s Rick Newman who hasn’t a clue as to what forces are really at work in shaping the future of America and the free world. He demonstrates this for all to see in his 15oct24 ‘What Bill Ackman and other business titans don’t get about politics’ (here). His other politically naïve businessmen include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen who have come out with their support for Trump.
[25oct24 update] Sounds of Socialists’ Silence. Here are a couple more items for progressives and socialists to shun from discussing in public. Did you know that electricity rates in blue states that mandate green policies to fight catastrophic climate change are significantly higher than those in the red states with sane climate policies? (more here) And are you aware that DOJ is pushing DEI, especially the ‘equity’ part, to make sure that our police and fire departments will be filled with people who cannot pass either the qualifying IQ tests, physical ability tests, or both? Yep, double dummies and weaklings can now bypass these tests and be hired so as to keep the departments’ African-American and female ratios up to snuff. Anybody from the Left care to offer a cogent comment on these? (more here)
