On Trump’s speech…

Everything is great. We’re all rich. If you criticize you are not part of the team and in fact you should be ashamed of yourself.

Does that pretty well sum up that speech last night by Donald Trump?

At least one news story pointed out a similarity between how he tried to convince everyone the economy is great and how his predecessor handled the touchy subject.

Personally, on economy, I think most folks look at their own economy, which may or may not reflect that of the nation as a whole

Maybe Trump looks at his own and thinks: “I’m good”.

I want to add: I find the practice of presidents presenting guests at State of the Union speeches annoying, no disrespect to those guests intended. The fine people could be recognized in a separate ceremony.

In Trump’s case it seemed he was hiding behind the sacrifice, persistence, and heroism of others.

If there are good things Trump is doing, one would think he could do those without the bluster and insults and out and out racism he presents. Using his bulldozer approach, the bad wipes out the good.

Finally, I hesitate to criticize the chant of “USA, USA, USA…”, because I love the USA. It’s just that in a setting where a leader castigates others and a crowd does such a chant, I can’t help thinking about the history in which other authoritarians have employed this method, that is either you follow blindly or you are the enemy. That’s not democracy.

The Epstein files…

You’re only as good as the company you keep.

I could say more. Probably will. But that old saw pretty much tells it all…

TRUMP’S I SAID BUT I DIDN’T SAY BUT I SHOULD SAY SYNTAX

I snatched the excerpt below my introductory out of an opinion piece. Although I can’t swear the quotes attributed to Trump are accurate, if you’ve ever heard him it sounds like his method of throwing a dangerous idea out there but hiding behind a thin veil of deniabilty and equivocation or ambiguity.

He could have just said that he prefers elections are canceled. I think the fact he would say such a thing but feels he has to play a word game makes it scarier somehow.

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By Sean Morales-Doyle

Mr. Morales-Doyle is the director of the Brennan Center’s voting rights and elections program.

President Trump has dropped unsubtle hints about his desire to cancel the November elections. “We have to even run against these people,” he said in a speech last month. “I won’t say cancel the election; they should cancel the election.” Mr. Trump didn’t stop there. “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election,” he mused a week later.

Society moves on with or without you…

Undocumented or illegal aliens, if you will, do labor most legal citizens cannot or do not prefer to do. The jobs may involve uncomfortable conditions and pay relatively small wages.

If that labor supply is cut off, I believe the result will be a move to more mechanization in some cases, including robots and artificial intelligence, and a reduction in some types of production or services. And we’ll move on. Life will not come to a standstill. But we may well miss what we didn’t appreciate enough when we had it.

No, I’m no expert in these matters. I’m just a man in his 70s looking back.

Prunes, dried plums — we call prunes even when still plums in prune country where I grew up — back in the 1960s were still picked up by people crawling in the dirt of an orchard after the prunes had been knocked onto the ground by beating on the tree branches with long canes (in some cases picked off the tree).

I even did this as a kid, not so willingly, with my mom and one of my brothers. We did this to supplement the family income. But in those years there was a substantial number of poor white folks (and black and brown…) who depended on such work. They were migrant workers moving from region to region for the current harvest, prunes in California, followed by apples in Washington State, as an example.

But mechanization was making its appearance. The prunes in some orchards were knocked out of the trees by a machine that’s jaws were clamped on the trunk of a tree and shook it.

That was followed by an apparatus that set up a platform to catch the falling prunes. No more hand labor needed.

The prune supply was not cut off.

I think President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society public welfare programs of the ’60s helped dry up the supply of citizen labor.

I recall seeing Mexican Bracero workers during harvest, a program that legally supplied labor from south of the border. I do understand the program was affected by corruption that cheated some workers.

At any rate, there are some crops that pose challenges to mechanization, but I doubt anything is immune. There are at least prototypes of machines or robots that can successfully pick tomatoes, the kind you buy to eat fresh. Those for soup and ketchup have long been mechanically harvested.

I’ve been commenting on agriculture because I seem to have been closely connected to it much of my life. But what about elsewhere?

Over the years of my life I think the kitchen staffs in cafes and restaurants became increasingly populated by foreign workers, large numbers of which were (are) undocumented.

Same reason, I imagine. Homegrown workers and their offspring moved on, thanks in part to social programs.

The result: combined with the phenomenon of the recent pandemic, many of our favorite eating spots disappeared.

Don’t get me going about the kiosk some places want you to use to order a fast food hamburger. I refuse to use them. Out of desperation, I tried one once. Never got my order. No one could or would help me, that is simply take my order and cook it.

And a kiosk and/ or robot to replace a waiter at a restaurant? I want to go back in time to the world of humans.

But, whatever, the cost of labor and immigration enforcement, and individual opportunity forces change in the workplace and our lifestyle.

This was obviously not a comprehensive address of the situation.

As a longhaul driver I sometimes have time to kill between loads. 

My line of work will surely disappear over the coming decade or so, replaced by driverless vehicles. Some warehouses are replacing staff with nearly complete automation. Don’t ever say it can’t be done.

If there are things robots or automation can’t do like humans can, it’ll be done differently.

We adapt. Whether we’re better for it, I can’t say, or, not always, I fear.

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Someone I knew and respected years ago opined that what we are now calling artificial intelligence or AI would NOT take over so-called thinking jobs. Turns out AI is now displacing white collar thinking jobs at a faster rate than blue collar.

In the name of progress, cost cutting, and efficiency, as a society we are making ourselves obsolete or dispensable.

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Is artificial intelligence a Frankenstein?

Yoshua Bengio, Turing Award winner: ‘There is empirical evidence of AI acting against our instructions’.

The scientist, a pioneer in neural networks, warns that ‘the capabilities of artificial intelligence continue to advance at a rate which seems faster than risk management practices’.

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I lifted the preceding from a story in the Spanish news publication El País. I’ve been seeing stories in the news recently about the very creators of artificial intelligence indicating that even they worry things are or could get out of hand.

There have been science fiction stories (and movies) about computers getting out of hand and threatening to launch missiles with nuclear warheads.

So, one might logically think: couldn’t we just pull the plug in such an incident? But the computer can act faster than we can and might be interconnected with a whole worldwide system, much as you and I are right now with our phones.

And isn’t this crazy? But it brings to my mind the biblical story of the Tower of Babel where man got a little too big for his breeches and God took care of that by halting progress and scattering mankind all over the planet, speaking different languages.

The problem is that our creator, whether you call it God or nature, has given us a higher capacity brain and physical capabilities than other creatures and it was inevitable that we would progress. And there is that saying: you can’t stop progress.

Whatever. There is also the story of Frankenstein. Are we creating one?