Testing The Financial Apologists

An excellent example of that would be young-earth creationists. Especially when their audience knows even less than they do and has already bought into what he's selling.OTOH, if you do know something about evolution, science, and the creationist's claims, then creationists are very hard to listen to. Kent Hovind is a prime example of that.I'm sure it's the same with financial conmen.

My father's father tried to get in on every get-rich scheme he could, many of them involving real estate and none of which panned out. My father's story is that he once tried to get into peanut farming but he planted the crop at the wrong phase of the moon so the plants all went to tops instead of roots, hence no crop (literally what my father told me; later the "POM factor" had become a software engineering term for explaining intermittent bugs (AKA "spurious anomalies"): "Why did that just happen?" "Must be the phase of the moon.").My father learned from his father's bad example and avoided such schemes, choosing instead to be the most honest small businessman he could be (general contractor). But he still fell for a couple real estate investment deals: Golden Valley, AZ, near Kingman and in Palmdale just north of Los Angeles. Both were desert properties and he bought both of them because of "inside information" that they would be on the site of a new airport -- in the late 60's one idea for solving the problem of expanding LAX was to build a new airport out in Palmdale and use light rail to ferry the passengers into LA. Of course, neither investment panned out and the family inherited those headaches which were never any part of any actual development of any kind but rather remained empty desert lots. We finally rid ourselves of the last one last year.As we were going through the nightmare of a real estate deal being conducted remotely because of COVID (I had to do a lot of printing of documents, then scanning the signed printouts to re-send them), I mentioned it at the local Atheists United monthly breakfast meeting. A woman there about my age told me about her aunt who had fancied herself a real estate investor; it was a good thing she didn't have much money to begin with, so there was a limit to how much she lost. She had also bought property in Palmdale because of news that they were going to build an airport there. And she had also bought land in Golden Valley because an airport was going to be built there too (looking at a map, Kingman Airport is actually on the opposite side of Kingman). That's when I told her about my father's involvement with that same Golden Valley deal.BTW, we inherited those properties in 1995 at which time we had them appraised. We ended up selling one under the appraised value and the last one at the appraised value. Don't know what he had paid for them originally, but I doubt that they had appreciated by much.Just a real-life object lesson in real estate investment.

Though that's actually how we are taught to view real estate. Real estate appreciates while everything else depreciates. What they don't tell you is that some real estate appreciates so slowly that it can take several generations before you see much profit.

I've always maintained that the problem for artificial intelligence is that there's nothing in nature to pattern it after.

The joke is along the same lines as:

quote:

---

We shouldn't be looking for signs of intelligent life in space when we cannot even find signs of intelligent life here on earth!

---

  Regarding trying to model AI after human brain activity, that would prove rather problematic. Just think of aviation and how all the early attempts to achieve mechanized flight by flapping the wings never succeeded. While birds' wings did provide us a model for the shape of aircraft wings, we use those wings in manners entirely different from those of the birds.Computer hardware and human neural wetware are structured entirely differently and operate on entirely different principles. My thinking was shaped by The Brains of Men and Machines (by Ernest W. Kent, BYTE Books, 1981) which I recommend (if you can find a copy) even though I last read it in the mid-80's. The human brain is not only massively parallel, but also hierarchical as an intended action keeps getting broken down into sub-actions getting assigned to subnetworks (AKA "muscle memory") all the way down to the muscle-pair with its "hardwired" gating system that disables one muscle of that pair while the other muscle is contracting. Oh, and that "muscle memory" gets "programmed" by the human brain's ability to re-wire itself (ie, forming new connections between neurons, which is how stroke victims can relearn how to use their bodies) -- in The Machine That Changed The World, the analogy to that was described as opening up a mainframe computer cabinet and watching it literally rewiring itself.And computers function with sequential threads of execution. I was also trained by the US Air Force in electronic computer systems repair. Part of that training involved chasing sparks through the logic diagrams of an actual functioning CPU, the COMTRAN-10 trainer -- I still have my book of the logic diagrams. I have seen up close and personal how computers actually think. It is sequential, not parallel.There are things that computers can do far better than humans, but there are things that a very young human can do which is beyond what computers can do, like a five-year-old's grasp of human language (in our Spanish/English extended family, the young kids were easily able to keep track of which grandparents used which language).So then rather than trying to model how the human brain works, the task is to figure out how to get computers to perform the same kinds of tasks.

As I recall, Dubya (a Republican) got us into two major wars without providing for how to pay for those wars. The singular major accomplishment of the Trump Administration was the massive 2017 Tax Scam for the rich which blew a massive hole in the debt again without any provision for paying for it.Contrasted with that was Biden's two major bills which included ways to pay for them. Indeed, there was much discussion and negotiating over how to pay for these measures.We have seen this pattern for the past decades, in which a Republican administration ruins the economy, leaving it to the next president, a Democrat, to clean up their mess and get the economy back on track, just to be followed by yet another Republican president who ruins the economy yet again.Obviously, Democrats are by far much better at running the economy than that Republicans. And it's the Republicans who are by far more responsible for the size of the debt.