They say Texas weather is a drought punctuated by floods.  Looks like Lake Travis is up 40 feet this month, most of it in the last few days.  Chart from:  http://travis.uslakes.info/Level/

I am a bit of a blockchain / cryptocurrency skeptic.  I am a technology guy and I never was able to get a good understanding of what was unique and what problem was being solved.  Roubini  (a.k.a. Dr Doom) has a pretty harsh take on the Bitcoin universe.

The Big Blockchain Lie

Oct 15, 2018

NOURIEL ROUBINI

Drove the Tesla 3 to College Station from Austin.  Charged it up to the full 300 mile range, figuring it would be enough for the 105 mile distance and back.  Turns out a little extra driving, maybe some dependence on speed, wind, hills rounding error led to us getting back into Austin with less than 50 miles on the battery.  Except we spent maybe an hour and a half charging up at the sad little charger at the back of the George Bush Library.  Probably added 30 or 40 miles.  We would have made it anyway, but it would have been close.  I guess the lesson is charge when you can and be conservative in your estimates.

Form the BBC:

Why you have (probably) already bought your last car

By Justin Rowlatt, BBC News
10 October 2018

“[electric cars] are more reliable, for a start. The typical electric car has around 20 moving parts compared to the 2,000 or so in an internal combustion engine.

As a result electric vehicles also tend to last much longer. Most electric car manufacturers expect their vehicles to keep on going for at least 500,000 miles.”

I think the electric car part is right, and this will have far reaching effects on the US and the world.  Think gas stations, oil companies, auto repair shops.  This happened many times before.  We used to go to the far ends of the earth to get whale oil.  This large international industry also vanished almost over night, along with the sailors, shipbuilders and their associated support industries.

I differ a bit on the self-driving part though.  I am still a skeptic of turning an automated car loose on the roads with a bunch of humans.  Ultimately I can see transportation as a standardized service (think of how the internet is organized around standards).  You will still have problems like malicious actors, but things will function pretty much like a decentralized version of public transportation.

More than you would ever want to know about Americans and their political affiliations.  With an interactive graph tool.

MARCH 20, 2018
WIDE GENDER GAP, GROWING EDUCATIONAL DIVIDE IN VOTERS’ PARTY IDENTIFICATION

1. Trends in party affiliation among demographic groups

Bought a $40 surveillance camera at Amazon just to play around.  Pretty impressive.

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.

I feel a bit bad for SuperMicro, who has always made nice stuff.  I wonder who else has this (or similar) problems and was just able to keep it quiet.

From The Verge:

Burger King’s ‘AI-written’ ads show we’re still very confused about artificial intelligence

All we know is that we don’t know nothing

Burger King’s joke lands because AI exists in the public imagination as a quantum entity — simultaneously powerful and pathetic. Artificial intelligence is about to take our jobs, we’re constantly told; it’s going to destroy the economy and humanity to boot. But we also know from our own experience that it’s incredibly dumb, incapable of understanding the simplest commands (hello, Siri), or telling the difference between a stop sign and a cyclist, or of not showing me nine toilet seats I might like to buy after I buy the one toilet seat I will need this decade.

It has been a decade since the financial crisis of 2008.  I have posted a few things here and have read perhaps hunderds of articles and a handful of books on the subject.  A few things still puzzle me and a few more things seem to go unsaid.

Today everybody knows that a massive real estate bubble was blown in the US that lead to the crisis.  I have since met people who worked in finance and knew absolutely we were headed for trouble as much as two years before the event.  This brings up the always difficult, but basic question:  Why?

While the banks aren’t blameless and have quietly taken the blame for the crisis, I can’t help but think there is at least another layer to this onion. Why did every bank and financial instution participate in an obvious bubble?  Where was all the banking regulation (I know some of these institutions were lightly or unregulated, but still).

I think the underlying questions is:  why were interest rates kept so low during this period?  Alan Greenspan, the long time chairman of the Federal Reserve, claims he didn’t realize a bubble was being blown.  Being a good Libertarian, he believes all prices are set by an efficient market and that bubbles are impossible.

So then, what did he make of the role of the Fed in setting interest rates.  Did it not matter?  Certainly he believed the Fed and the setting of interest rates was a serious business.  So what was happening here?

I haven’t heard this anywhere else, but this was during a time when the country was piling up unprecedented debt from tax cuts and two unfunded wars.  I have to believe the low interest rates and housing bubble were the mechanism that papered over this debt.  It was a time of patriotism and all of this was cast as part of the war on terror, but how many times in history has an otherwise great country or even Empire been brought low by long and costly foreign wars?

So that is what I am going with.  The Bush War on Terror was ultimately paid for by the real estate bubble.  And many Americans are still paying the price.

Was going back through old postings and ran across this old posting that had been censored.  It says it looked like Spam (it doesn’t) and that it may violate community standards.  It is an article from a reputable source about the support for Nazism in pre-WW II America.  A cautionary tale, one would think.  At the very least, factual.  I suppose it could be read as a recruitment for neo-Nazis, but given the other stuff I have seen (and heard about) on Facebook I found this one a bit odd.  For my old friends who missed this due to censorship (and yes, this is censorship, even though Facebook isn’t a government body) a good read about an embarassing part of American history you may not hear much about.

6 Things You May Not Have Known About Nazis in America

Posted on October 7, 2013

By Arnie Bernstein