The Daily

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In Big Corporations I Trust

Dell Computer Co. solved the problem with my output jack on my computer. I ran their system test program, and it started working!

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Todd zwilling moved to crooked media??

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Gravitizing Quantum Mechanics

I was watching an interview of Roger Penrose. He said that the trick was not to create quantum gravity but to gravitize quantum mechanics. He discussed the problem QM has with "collapse of the wave function" which occurs on measurement. I think he is referring to how when the wave function collapses it's like bringing the wave function into a non-inertial reference frame. As long as the wave function is in an inertial reference frame, the superposition that it allows is supported. When we take a measuremnet we are putting it into a noninertial frame, it is no longer capable of all these characteristics. That's what we call the collapse of the wave function.

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Would Tesla match my donation to National Public Radio?

Here is what the AI says:

Based on the available information, Tesla does not appear to have a program that matches employee contributions to National Public Radio (NPR) specifically, or a general matching gift program for nonprofits. 

While Tesla offers a 401(k) retirement plan with an employer match, they do not have a company-wide program for matching charitable donations to nonprofits like NPR. According to Double the Donation's database, there is no current matching gift program on file for Tesla. They also have no corporate sponsorships program on file. 

It's important to note that the information from Double the Donation is based on their database of corporate giving programs and may not be exhaustive. However, multiple mentions of "no current matching gift program on file" suggest that a formal program is not in place. 

Individual Tesla employees are of course free to donate to NPR and other organizations, and some may have done so, as evidenced by news about Sheryl Crow selling her Tesla and donating the proceeds to NPR. But this is a personal action, not a company-sponsored initiative

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July 4, 2025

I've been playing with the AI Copilot. Just thinking how my Uncle Dick would have loved the AI. He used to come to our house when I was a kid and read the encyclopedias. Maybe wasn't much else to do. Maybe cause he was just curious. But AI seems to know so much stuff. Even recent stuff. I asked it about the changes that will affect people on Obamacare. It sounds complicated. I'm not sure everyone will be affected. Based on what it said, it seemed to be whether or not your insurance policy was considered a part of Medicaid. I'm kind of reading between the lines but just based on the news I've heard, it sounds like people who got insurance under the Affordable Care Act will be impacted though I thought the coverage wasn't supposed to be based on income, just you couldn't get insurance otherwise.

The AI seemed to know some of this rather quickly. Too quickly to have been in the encyclopedias. lol Also it knew about the shooting in Chicago after the album release party for Mellow Buckzz which just happened. I'm amazed. Actually I found that on Wikipedia but I'm still amazed.

I did ask the AI some stuff about physics which I doubt would have been in the encyclopedia though it happened 200 years ago. Very detailed stuff I thought was right because I knew something about the subject already.

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Celebrity Mystery

I'm somewhat fascinated by deaths of celebrities under mysterious circumstances. So I'm listening to a Rolling Stone article c/o the nytimes about Liam Payne. I for the first time I know of used AI search. I tried a regular google search to find the name of someone mentioned in the article with last name (I thought) Summers. It didn't work. So I wrote an AI search asking for sources referred to in the article in RS. It turned out the name I was looking for was Chip Somers, a sober coach for Payne. Yea it worked. I don't have much to say about how Payne died. His behavior sounded though like it was more than just cocaine and liquor involved. Also an unnamed antidepressant. I do suspect that cocaine might make it easier to drink more without passing out which could make you crazier I guess but they don't say what the levels of substances were. It also may have made a difference that Payne only had a single kidney so the levels of the drugs might have been higher than normal. I'm still wondering how the dog died in the death of Gene Hackman.

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Cops

Cops in St Louis City are going to be under state control again. I don't pretend to know what the issues are but apparently a lot of officers don't stick around. I'd think maybe that could be due to the amount of crime in the city and maybe low pay. But there are 2 police unions in the City (one is for white officers, another for black officers) and they both support the change. The mayor and the chief of police are agin it. Controversy with the local prosecutor was solved when the previous one was found to be attending nursing school rather than devoting full time to her office. She was replaced when the governor appointed a corporate type lawyer but supposedly reputable and I have not heard anything lately about that office. No news is good news. Because St Louis County has so many municipalities which need officers, I think it's probably easy for SLMPD officers to find (easier) jobs there.

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Frustratables

Things I hear on social media have the potential to make me feel frustrated. I call them frustratables. Well I do now. I just made it up. I'm convinced that the only way to achieve order these days is a national strike. That sounds contradictory but there seems to be no order to the federal government anymore (except maybe in the judicial branch). I know that it sounds like something you'd hear about in a third world country or maybe in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. But if we all do that maybe Trump and Vance will both resign!

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Andriesen/Yarvin

These guys are getting attention from mainstream press. Andriesen was interviewed by Ross Douthat who did a pretty good job of pushing back against Andriesen's shallow acceptance of Trumpism. Yarvin is interviewed by Marchesi for nytimes weekend and he has less success in dealing with Yarvin's even more far out BS. My biggest push back with Yarvin is that he uses ill-defined terms and he fails to suggest how we choose this CEO (dictator) to fun the country. His thots just seem absurd. Andriesen seems to have swallowed the cool aid and just repeats Trumpist talking points including stating that dems are lying wo saying how so. Thanks to Citizens United Andriesen and Musk count more than the rest of us.

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Physics

I studied some physics. I see now that "advanced physics" is really advanced. I don't see how I could fit into that community now. Yet i enjoy hearing about it. So I listen to some videos on Youtube. The physics that was taught to me was much more applied. I was supposed to learn the standard model, which at that time hadn't been completely developed. What I draw from the training I had and watching the videos about what has been developed since is that physics has gotten more and more about abstractions and less and less about real-world observations. Sure you can observe the Higgs boson with a supercollider but you can't see that on the way to the grocery store.

Really I don't have so much of a problem with abstractions but I think it makes the subject less and less attractive to someone who is taught it as a way of developing useful instruments that you can use for stuff someone will pay you to develop. '

The latest concept I have stumbled into is quantum computing. I just checked out a book about it. It seems a practical application of theoretical stuff that hasn't been developed yet. I guess what I'm saying is that it still seems very abstract. Lots of abstractions have gotten us this far to what we use as practical applications. I'm thinking of radar and cell phone towers. The science behind them seems abstract to me. I don't know it. I wish I knew all these applications and the science behind them. I wish I knew physics well enough to understand what quantum computing seeks to accomplish. The obvious fact is I can't stop to learn all the theories of the practical applications that have occurred to date. I wish I could. My desire to learn is that great. But as they say, my eyes are bigger than my stomach going through the cafeteria line. There is so much there, and I marvel at it.

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WTF

Tumblr still exists. I'm writing on it cause I don't know any better. Just for my kids I guess though I don't know they will ever see it. There's a lot going on. There are people I wish were still here or were active her. I miss them. But I don't really want to explore Tumblr a lot. If I knew of some one before I got on Tumblr I kind of want to see what they wrote but I'm not much interested in looking around. Finding new people to relate to. Whatever. Miss y'all. You know who you are if you see this.

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Why don't I hear any analysts say* what I think Trump is doing. It seems that his outrageousness is intended to appeal to the "base" while the fact that he is running as a Republican means other voters will ignore the outrageousness and vote for him because "Republican" means something (not Democrats? a better economy?) that appeals to them. He is putting together voters in the base who didn't used to vote, with some traditioanal Republicans who don't mind the outrageousness, to try and eek out a win (basically). It's a risky strategy but it did work one time. *Like maybe it's not politically correct or something? Dems need to figure out a way to make their message appealing to all lower and middle income voters. Perception has become that their interest in of that economic class is not fairly distributed. See, this gets rather complicated, but that's why it's worth discussing. Yet I don't hear anyone willing to take it on.

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I've been listening to podcasts about the Democratic convention and Kamala Harris running for president. Stuff gets left out. Maybe the Squad says some of it. I'm not sure. When it comes to economics.

We all have to live under a system called capitalism. Instead of the Golden Rule, it's "He who has the gold makes the Rules." If we talk about that negatively, then it raises all of these fears. People get scared. They use words like socialism or communism, but mostly the same way they use the N-word or some other racial slur. It's a way to label someone or something as undesirable. I don't think using the word capitalism in a negative sense should be a scare tactic or have the result of scaring anybody. Capitalism is the system that we've lived with for hundreds of years. It obviously isn't perfect. It hasn't gone away. States like China that call themselves Communist follow capitalist principals.

If someone wants to talk about changing the system, modifying it not necessarily eliminating it, that shouldn't be scary. Changing the rule for some minutia in the way that zoning is carried out. Not eliminating zoning. Like trying to reform the police shouldn't be that scary. Sure defunding the police is scary but saying defund the police without giving some other mechanism to keep bad people from doing bad things to you isn't gonna work and we're not gonna vote for it.

Trump basically wants to throw out the system we use to determine the outcome of the election. I don't see why that idea should be accepted anymore then deciding to throw capitalism under the bus. But we shouldn't ignore the fact that capitalism doesn't always work. MAGA thinks capitalism as it used to be, works for them and ignores the idea of making it work for the most people possible.

As for fundamentalist Christians, they just ignore the basic tenants of Christianity. I can't make them learn what they should've learned in Sunday school years ago. They see Christianity as enforcing the Ten Commandments but that is NOT what Jesus said. His gospel of love is just forgotten.

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AI and meaningless jobs

There is an article in nytimes regarding how AI may take over these jobs that people don't like to do. There is an assumption that these are white collar jobs. I don't see how they can write and article like this without acknowledging this fact. The article raises all kinds of issues of course without answers. It says Keynes thot we'd have 15 hours per week jobs by now. Of course we don't. I think that the article fails to acknowledge how many jobs where the key element isn't the knowledge one has and the decisions you have to make as to how to proceed in a technical sense but the fact that the real "difficult" part of the job is interacting with clients and convincing them to part with large sums of money so you can eg get them big returns on investment. So many Ivy League graduates go into investment banking which requires that you get along with rich people without feeling intimidated by their wealth. Nobody ever talks about this self limiting aspect of doing that kind of job. Anyway I think I could go on and on here and I don't want to. Suffice it to say I don't think this article is very comprehensive and leaves out much more than it states. Thinking about the Keynes observations I am very curious about the counterfactual situation where the world had developed in the way he said. What would have been the way to such an outcome? Wow.

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My opinion is that Trump's shenanigans have become less important. Everybody's waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding Joe Biden. Whatever Trump might say about Biden now could turn out to be irrelevant so why I'm paying attention to what he says.

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Where I live I use Skype for calling my cell phone to find it. That’s all. Every time I open Skype I have forgotten or they have moved the keypad for dialing. Why? I pay for it. They ought to make it as easy to use as possible.

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Texas musician/??? kinky Friedman has passed. Not sure many outside of Texas knew of him but if u ever lived there you probably would have. At least during the time I lived there he was sort of known for being outrageous. Kinky Friedman - "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore" [Live from Austin, TX] He and Mojo Nixon both wrote songs about Jesus. Don’t know if kinky ever mentioned Buddha though.