Category Archives: Politics

Bachelor’s degree

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One of the societal areas most affected by cultural bias and economics over the last forty years has been the prejudice associated with having a college bachelor’s degree. In a period when US inflation rose 283%, college tuition rose 1,213%. Of a personal note, mariner paid $1,000 tuition plus the cost of books for one year back in 1964; today, that year would cost him an average of $14,000 plus several fees. Further, it is a common sociological opinion that citizens without college degrees have been devalued in the value of their participation in US society. It is a common opinion among sociology professors that this devaluation is the cause for MAGA to evolve. Atlantic magazine had a recent article about this college-related phenomenon:

“Nearly 60 percent of adults ages 25 to 29 do not have a bachelor’s degree. If they have the skills to do a certain job, why should they be denied the chance solely because they lack a somewhat arbitrary paper credential?

And yet, despite its popularity, skills-based hiring (degree not needed) is a dead-end policy. If every employer in America formally stopped requiring a four-year college degree for every available position as of tomorrow, nothing much would change. Indeed, companies such as Walmart, Apple, and many others have proudly touted their removal of degree requirements in job postings, but the net effect on hiring has been very small. A recent Harvard Business School study found that when companies remove degree requirements, the share of hires with a bachelor’s degree declines by only two percentage points. Employers may not insist on a college degree, but they still prefer it.”

Mariner has chosen the term ‘white collar class’ to identify the prejudice that excludes non-degree citizens and discounts their social value. At the end of the Second World War, the Federal government saw to it that everyone had a chance to go to college; cost was heavily cut. The democratic party was the primary beneficiary to this social shift but, over the years as the advantages of and the cost needed for college-based income continued to rise, labor income did not. Today, the ‘labor’ party is infected with white collar disease (Woke) – just ask any misguided MAGA individual.

This could be an issue resolved on a level playing field except for the introduction of GPT – Generative (self-producing) Pre-trained (copycat) Transformer (can change input into a different self-determined output)¹ – A human-like ability to translate, interpret and create information without human intervention.

One can imagine the impact on an education system rooted in behavioral and textbook communication. The saying “Who needs a teacher when we have GPT?” already is a common euphemism on social media. It is a simple extension to say “Who needs departments of education?” Will ‘education’ be simple training programs used by employers targeted on corporate/government efficiency? Already, liberal arts education is disappearing as colleges are faced with the automation dilemma.

 

It is still rare but there are pre-school educators who use tabletop robots to help with behavioral education.

Mariner has no crystal with which to interpret the future of education. It is important at the least to understand how integrated and influenced education is by society. Citizens today should clearly understand the cause and effect of white collar and GPT as imbalances in cultural unity.

Ancient Mariner

PS – Mariner is having trouble with new post notices. Scroll down on the home page to see if the reader has missed any posts.

FOOTNOTE

¹GPT2 – GPT-2 was designed specifically to predict and generate the next sequence of text to follow a given sentence without human interference or knowledge of sources.

GPT3 – a sizable step up from its predecessor. It includes texts such as Wikipedia entries as well as the open-source data set Common Crawl. Notably, GPT-3 can generate computer code and improve performance in niche areas of content creation such as storytelling, aka inventing its own reality.

GPT4 – a large multimodal model (LMM), meaning it’s capable of parsing image inputs as well as text. This iteration is the most advanced GPT model, exhibiting human-level performance across a variety of benchmarks in the professional and academic realm. For comparison, GPT-3.5 scored in the bottom 10 percent of test-takers in a simulated bar exam. GPT-4 scored in the top 10 percent.

The Important news

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It is certainly true and defensible that the first concern of any species is its own survival and Homo sapiens is an excellent example on a grand scale. But there is comfort to be found in that the rest of existence is in good shape and carrying on. The planet and its kin are doing fine. For example, reported in Scientific American:

The Helmetshrike

In the Sabi Sand Nature Reserve in South Africa, U.K. photographer Gary Collyer and his safari group heard noises above them and turned on a lamp. The result was Helmetshrikes preparing to sleep. They huddle together for warmth and balance. No concern about Homo’s trials and tribulations here.

The Bison: from 30 million to 325 (1884) to 500,000 today.

One of the great tragedies caused by Homo was the elimination of the American Bison by white Americans. It was a tragedy to bison and Native Americans, both of which were slaughtered and dismembered without pause or recrimination. The important news is that Homo has managed to halt the elimination of a species – a rare event. The North American Indian still survives but without what one might call restoration to the norm.

Celebration of Community

The American broadcast industry is addicted to reporting troubling information, gossip and promoting news based on commercial value. The important news is that local communities still try their best to celebrate normalcy and unity. Togetherness is the mood of the occasion and fun is had by all. Perhaps there is a good element at the base of Homo behavior.

Legal migrants receive community assistance

Trashing immigrants is not the important news. What is important news is that destitute families are assisted by small communities and neighborhoods as the family makes its way to a new beginning – which any of us would do if we were in the same situation.

Will sanity return to Homo sapiens via its tribal/community societies? The plant kingdom understands this principal – it doesn’t start with the flower, it starts with the root.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Short perspective on Middle East

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The circumstances in the Middle East have been longstanding. Other geographical nation groups have transitioned, in the words of Wikipedia, “The period between 500BCE and 1500CE was marked by economic and territorial expansion, demographic and urban growth, the emergence of national identity, and the restructuring of secular and ecclesiastical institutions.” – except for the Middle East.

Early on, the Middle East was a playground for large dynastic wars and an area one had to pass through to get from eastern dynasties to western dynasties. Sometime around 2500BCE to 2000BCE, the region suffered from a permanent weather shift that moved agricultural weather down to Africa, hence the Sahara Desert and the Middle Eastern region slowly lost economic stability. The consequence was that while other nations had enough wealth to experiment with changes in national ethos, the Middle East was scrambling to survive; archaic secular and ecclesiastical institutions did not change.

Since the era of the Roman Empire, the western nations, Russia and China have dominated the Middle East as a resource rather than a culture. Colonialism in the region wasn’t dismembered until World War I and II. Again, there was little opportunity for the region to develop independent national identities.

Then the importance of oil blocked cultural development. If you were a nation with oil, who needed to change with all that money floating around?

The result today is an outdated religious reality that ignores the impact of centuries of modification elsewhere in the world, a presence of continuous ‘archaic secular and ecclesiastical’ conflict that limits unification, e.g., European Union, and has become a serious conflict between the Middle East (Islamic) and western (Christian) nations.

The impending war should have occurred centuries ago but now the region has capabilities money can buy like modern weaponry, technology and political influence without a modern sense of national ethos, rather, remaining 17th century theocracies.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

 

November 5 2024

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That is the date of the upcoming election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Trump has made it crystal clear that there will be an honest election only if he wins.  He promises chaos if he doesn’t win. Citizens of the US must take note – this isn’t just inflammatory banter. Citizen groups already are developing plans for combat if Trump loses.

Nevertheless, every citizen must exercise their right to vote.

* * * * *

Mariner has written 1,835 posts. Many topics were covered in every field of interest from nonsense to serious essays. With certainty he knows often he has been redundant, skeptical and overly critical on many political and societal occasions.

In recent posts he has expressed a fatalistic prognosis for the future of Homo sapiens and many fellow creatures. Even these comments have become redundant. He sat down with Guru to have a last effort at defining order in the humanly perceived universe and the cacophony of noise that clouds that order.

Guru made it clear that mariner must describe the structure of authority as it relates to the Homo universe:

Planet Earth is 4.5 Billion years old. It abides by the rules imposed upon it as a member of a vast, disciplined Universe. Accordingly, Earth has seasons, is accountable to the influence of a moon, and must accommodate the behavior of a close star, the Sun. Given these influences, the Earth is in charge of all that occurs on, in, and above its sphere. This includes non-living material and all, all living creatures.

Egocentric Homo thinks it has the ability to ignore Earth’s management of the planet’s existence. This is the largest source of cacophony since Hominidae Ardipithecus came on the scene 5.3 million years ago. A large amount of today’s noise would not have occurred if Homo had acknowledged Earth’s authority. Consequently, Homo finds itself in the following circumstances:

Stealing oil, forests, several chemicals and gases and a disregard for social disciplines required by evolution, Earth has been thrown off balance and has no choice but to adjust. The planet’s adjustment has paid for the thievery of Homo by sending tens of thousands of species to extinction and re-balancing the global ecosystem, AKA climate change.

Using various methods of chemistry and artificial environment, Homo has doubled the lifespan of a largely unchanged genome. The result is a much larger population of Homo than Earth had planned for. As the twenty-first century begins, natural resources are short which leads to an unsettled fear for the future which leads to stress in Homo economic practices.

Finally, Homo has discovered an artificial way to create life forms. Recently, computer applications have become capable of reproducing chromosomes, AKA remaking electrically controlled genomes. It is too early to predict the ramifications but the movie “Matrix” can’t be too far off.

What lies beneath the cacophony and conflict? The original Homo. For the time being (perhaps another 100+ years), the only safe ground is to behave like a normal Homo sapiens. Individuals must place social interaction and tribal sympathy foremost in their daily lives. Although it may be too late, Homo should pay retribution to Earth’s ways by showing respect and following nature’s rules.

Ancient Mariner

Beware the Eye of Sauron

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An icon from J.R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, The Eye is constantly watching for an opportunity to strike evil in the world. Tolkien references Sauron as the most complete evil. Throughout many of Tolkien’s stories, Sauron, by many names, is the evil power that wishes to control all of Middle Earth.

The manner by which Sauron attempts to intercede in Middle Earth society is surreptitious. Sauron seeks to undermine truth with malicious myths; he seeks to disrupt achievement with abusive intent; he provokes war and conflict by any means. Eventually, if his tactics prevail, he will reign as the evil dictator of all Middle Earth.

Who has the power to make today’s reality exist according to the plot of The Lord of the Rings? Is it Sauron himself? Is he, in fact, real? There are surreptitious examples:

AI displacing human behavior.

MAGA, a movement driven by myth.

Plutocracy, an economic ploy to suck the life out of human equality.

Twenty active wars around the globe with some very large wars waiting in the wings.

A myriad of destructive prejudices preventing humanity from a smooth, collaborative world.

COVID

Unsustainable relationship between humans and sufficient food in the biosphere.

Increasingly rapid extinction of tens of thousands of creatures in the environment.

Sauron is good at what he does. Mariner is thinking about moving back to Chicken Little’s henhouse.

Ancient Mariner

 

Homo sapiens is a lot like crabgrass

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Instead of writing about these things, mariner will drop the lead-ins and sources so the reader can check out the ones of interest.

֎ Scientists Make ‘Cyborg Worms’ with a Brain Guided by AI — AI and tiny worms team up to get to treats. In the study, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers trained an AI agent to direct one-millimeter-long Caenorhabditis elegans worms toward tasty patches of Escherichia coli in a four-centimeter dish.

Want to know where the best place to buy a house is? Just ask AI, they’ll make you go there. BTW, got lots of money?

֎  https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily:  California lawmakers sent a nationally consequential AI bill to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk last week — America’s most high-profile effort to date to put fresh legal guardrails around AI safety.

State Bill 1047 would hold companies liable for harms caused by their software, establish protection for AI whistleblowers, and put safety restrictions and requirements on AI models that reach a certain level of computational power, the closest any new American law has come to the European Union’s sweeping AI Act.

All we need now is a functioning Federal Government.

֎ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-surveillance-pricing-practices-under-federal-probe/   AI ‘Surveillance Pricing’ Could Use Personal Data to Make People Pay More. The agency’s ongoing investigation was sparked by a growing awareness that companies are using AI and machine learning to track certain categories of user data—such as age, location, credit score or browsing history—which many people probably wouldn’t deliberately share.

Consumer surveillance extends beyond online shopping. “Companies are investing in infrastructure to monitor customers in real time in brick-and-mortar stores,” she says. Some price tags, for example, have become digitized, designed to be updated automatically in response to factors such as expiration dates and customer demand. Retail giant Walmart—which is not being probed by the FTC—says its new digital price tags can be remotely updated within minutes.

Use storefronts and pay cash as much as you can! Google won’t know you were there (if you leave your phone in the car).

֎ There are several stories in online news about the useless effort to make the oil industry take responsibility to reduce global warming.

Goodbye, Florida and New York City.

Ancient Mariner

 

The education experience

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In the last post, mariner wrote about habits stored in the brain which were hard to dislodge. It occurred to him that the manner in which education is applied to students also is suffering from old habits that are hard to dislodge.

It is true that the scope of intended subjects has changed over the centuries. It is ‘how’ a student is instructed that is under the microscope today. We can assume the early Homo folks simply did a show-and-tell, demonstrating the actual procedures to be learned. As conceptualization crept into the culture, it had to be captured in documents and eventually into special books called textbooks. Even with books, an instructor was required to translate information and give the information a human perspective. And so it has been for eons.

Today, it has suddenly occurred, “why keep human instructors in the classroom if a computer can provide a simulated teacher any time day or night?” Mariner admits that he often takes advantage of the wide, free-roaming learning opportunities available on the Internet; he has a master’s degree in gardening from Junk University (YouTube). The mistake in the question above is that for all its intelligence, computer tablets don’t have physiological souls, that is, computers don’t have to change behavioral habits hidden in their subconscious. A human instructor still is needed; it’s the instructor’s focus in the classroom that needs an upgrade.

Sadly, the idea of displacing employees as a beneficial act affects other professions as well from truck drivers to office workers to nurses. Even delivery workers may be displaced by little automated delivery boxes and drones – it occurs to mariner these boxes offer a good opportunity to practice hunting; will geese and deer be irritated if they are replaced by automated drones and robots?

Back to education.

Education, as everyone has learned during the Covid pandemic, is not just about books and visual presentations. He has heard from friends who are teachers that students, especially the younger ones, are unruly, unmannerly and disrespectful of the teacher’s role in the classroom. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 32% of K-12 students are behind grade level. Why are schools still dealing with the long-term effects of remote schooling and other pandemic-era learning disruptions?  Something other than book learning and concepts disappeared during the pandemic.

Given a moment, one realizes that a great deal of socialization occurs in the classroom from pre-school to college. The most important learning may be tuning the student’s subconscious to be a collaborator with society. AI is trying hard to emulate this interactive experience as well but despite the canned responses of social robots, children need children – and someone who can adjust response and guidance to fit many subconscious minds in an integrated fashion. That takes another subconscious mind – a human instructor.

Along this line of thought, mariner has written posts that question the use of individual grading. He suggests that society today, with all its automated advantages, is more interested in individuals who can fit in and be fellow collaborators. To that end, grading should be applied to small teams in the classroom rather than to individuals since the Internet is so handy with factual information. What becomes important is human behavior in a learning atmosphere, not what a student knows about page 130 in a textbook. Having teams of students compete with other teams forces collaborative behavior. The computer tablet is the new textbook.

All these conditions affect the standard approach of instruction and require adjustment to long ingrained teaching habits. The growth of community colleges and new student demands that colleges guarantee employment at graduation are two of many indicators which suggest revamping the grading, textbook and syllabus methodology that has been around long before the United States existed.

An afterthought, smartphones are the new version of talking in class. Any psychologist or therapist or teacher would want to control thought processes. Think how successful a hypnotist would be if the person being hypnotized was busy using a smartphone.

Ancient Mariner

It’s different today

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In the last post, mariner cited a man who had lost his brain functions but could still make breakfast. The article citing him was about habit and how much of our behavior is managed by a special part of the brain that stores habits. Habits are frozen procedures that require no thought in order to take action.

For normal folks who still have brain function, much of our personality and our capability is under the control of habit storage – no thought or judgment required, A simple example is getting ready to go out the door. Typically, the car keys are always in the same place, ready to grab without thinking. If the keys aren’t in place (often in a purse or pocket), a person may get to the car door before realizing the keys are not at hand.

Mariner is aware that he and the gentleman with brain damage have similar habits. With mariner, it’s making the morning coffee pot. He is aware that he doesn’t need to process the routine – just do it!

Our reasoning skills are supported by many habit files. For example, one may have a firm prejudice about which route to take to a destination; why? “Oh, it just seems the easiest way to go” [even if it isn’t]. Prejudice, no matter the subject or behavior, has strong support from habit files.

In politics, a good example is staying with a political decision that isn’t relevant anymore. That person has a habit for their position on the matter and uses that memorized (habitual) position rather than apply new reasoning to a changed reality.

It requires way too much wordage to indulge in examples of a person’s personality. Suffice it to say there are tons of habit files; one doesn’t have to reconstruct who they are every moment of the day.

The comfort of habit is that one can do many procedural (and physiological) things and not have to think about them. How about when you change jobs and you realize you can’t do something the way you’ve always done it – something as simple as pulling out of the driveway in the right direction to go to work?

As we move through those periods of life where we have to figure out a new us, especially at retirement time, it often is a difficult time. Or it is a tough time when a family member dies. Or perhaps one’s role in past life disappears completely at retirement. What makes these transitions difficult is that we must toss out a lot of internalized habits about who we are and how we behave in a new situation. We have to invent new habits! The brain, of course, is hesitant to participate because these were supposed to be habits so the brain didn’t have to deal with them.

As the brain dwindles in old age, habits become important whether they are relevant or not. Perhaps this is why it’s so hard to be a new ‘you’ in one’s eighties and nineties.

Ancient Mariner

The Neanderthal

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If one looks hard enough on television one can find excellent documentaries. Mariner recommends a documentary on Netflix about the Neanderthal. It was engrossing enough to provoke him into visiting several books and URLs about the topic of Homo history.

These five skulls, which range from an approximately 2.5-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus on the left to an approximately 4,800-year-old Homo sapiens on the right, show changes in the size of the braincase, slope of the face and shape of the brow ridges over just less than half of human evolutionary history. {Human Origins Program, NMNH,}

The future Homo in an artificial intelligence age: Homo electrus

Seriously, the documentary about Neanderthal was excellent and he recommends the reader check it out. One of the commentators suggested, in mariner’s words, It ain’t over til its over. How many more evolutionary eons in the future are there for Homo sapiens?

The Neanderthal existed for 400,000 years, disappearing 40,000 years ago because of the aftermath of the Great Ice Age that occurred in the Pleistocene Period. Neanderthal disappeared simultaneously with the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa. There was enough hanky-panky that all humans today have some Neanderthal DNA in them.

Several sources cite the beginning of ‘modern man’ to be around 6,000 years ago – less than a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. ‘Modern’ implies an interest in economy, invention and the manipulation of the biosphere AKA the beginning of industrialism.

What was pleasantly insightful in the documentary was the insights of the archeologists  who, interpreting the bones and surmised behavior, showed that even Neanderthal had an awareness of spirituality and compassion. These primitive sensitivities were exercised without any need for a defined religion or imposed cultural obligation. Would they be able to understand today’s anti-religious Protestant Evangelicals? How can Homo saps exist for the next 400,000 years, they wonder.

Making some comparisons between the fate of Neanderthal and ourselves today, there is one commonality: the environment. Neanderthal had no choice because the ice age totally wiped out a forested biosphere. Perhaps we have no choice, either . . . .

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

 

In these times

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A person is as pressed by social media as if the person were a movie star. Every potion, every holiday spot, every kinky way to do something, is tossed at the screen. There are some well intentioned advertisers, for example medical advice, an ability to talk with family and friends, how to interact with government and the legitimate news organizations that love to talk about themselves.

But by a massive degree more frequently, a person is assaulted by mercenaries, corporate manipulators and irrational hagglers. Privacy is lost. Personal decision-making is thwarted by unbalanced information. And watching television has become so pervasive as to shut down normal social behavior, that is, interpersonal dialogue and mutual participation in life.

In the middle of the last century, mariner was a preacher. The job of preacher does have a political aspect to it when dealing with the congregation but the standard job description had a set of priorities: Foremost, run religious services and sacraments. Second, above all other responsibilities, visit the ill and shut-ins. Third, promote community programs and evangelism.

He is sorry to say that visiting is no longer a priority, In this century, the services and sacraments are sustained and the political aspect is not about the political issues that arise when attempting to be a Christian but rather, doing just the opposite by politicizing issues contrary to Christian doctrine.

In the world of politics, the well being of the citizenry has been co-opted by corporate interests and in recent times has created a have, have not society. Finally, in the background, the planet’s traditional political liaisons between nations have grown old and are under stress.

. . . .

Mariner mentions these situations because every one detracts from the one behavior that can see us through: Be a normal human being! That means talking to other human beings at least as often as sitting in a TV chair or scratching a computer/telephone screen. Sustain personal relations that build community spirit.

A simple pattern, be sure to visit each friend and neighbor regularly – even have them visit you.

Attend community events. Organize or associate with a picnic or event that includes friends and neighbors; participate in neighborhood activities; look for ways, even very tiny, where you can help a neighbor – especially shut-ins and the ill because preachers don’t do it any more. In fact, ask a neighbor to help you – something about which mariner has become experienced.

Belong to a local group that helps the indigent or get with friends to repair an old person’s home.

Reinforce family unity with visitations, vacations, and reunions. Share more time with children whether at home or who have moved into their own life.

Participate in local election activity. Of course, always vote!

One of the overlooked activities that build community strength is a local newspaper. Sadly, local papers are disappearing because of competition with the Internet. However, if you are fortunate to have a local paper, subscribe to it. More is happening around the community than one may think.

Deliberately give one full day each month dedicated to servicing others. That includes spouses, children, neighbors, social organizations and anyone else who would be pleased with your dedicated interest.

Finally, enforce a time when your own well being Is important. It could be fishing, golfing, boating, etc. Or perhaps reading, visiting natural surroundings, taking a short trip to see something interesting, have a hobby. Just find a place where time belongs only to you – and not to the TV or telephone.

Our genome says we need a tribe to care for.

Ancient Mariner