The pond can't imagine a better way to start the year than with a dolorous serve of the routinely mournful, melancholy and miserable Dame Groan ...
Look at the competition ...
Of course the lizard Oz editorialist attempted a worthy outing for the Catholic Boys' Daily, but then celebrating members of Hitler Youth is something of a Murdochian speciality. "[I]t was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others. The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice." (wiki)
Yeah nah, it had to be a Groaning, and what's the bet that this new year Groaning will come complete with an opening snap of a power station? Caution: be careful how you bet ...
There you go, just like last year, and the year before that, and as far back as the memory stretches and the theme's the same, but the pond swears that regurgitating the groan will see cultists come out of the woodwork, as sure as catnip works on cats ...
If you're only in it for the entertainment, there's much better entertainment elsewhere, with the pond thinking it's time to revive a meme that was popular last year ...
But you can't distract a cultist when the Groaner is in full swing ...
Good old coal, and the pond incidentally shed a few tears on the way past at caring US landlords and their unseemly suffering ... and as for the tenants, well fuck them, you can always pick them by the way they refuse to decorate their gardens with assorted eccentricities showing they can afford a mortgage ...
The pond thought it would fling that one in for vulgar youffs who know nothing of John Hewson in his salad days, and what do you know, the pond hears that once again the federal government is determined to fuck up one of the few decent things the library has still going for it, as you'll find if you head off to Trove
here for the source of that cartoon ... (
In a remark that later comes back to haunt him, Opposition Leader John Hewson says that you can always tell which houses in the street are rented: they are the least tidy).
Meanwhile, it's on to the last gobbet of groaning, and by now surely everyone knows the drill and can join the cultists in their appreciation of a gaseous groaning ...
Same as it ever was, but with the pond busy assembling curios on its travels ...
... recent attempts to ignore, or at least filibuster the Caterist almost worked, but sadly, to give a sense of full reptile value, the pond decided to exhume the Caterist's offering, because one day old, reheated Caterist surely has a better taste than when served fresh to table ...
The pond is keenly aware of the Caterist's concerns, and for good reason.
What form of AI could possibly calculate the movement of floodwaters in quarries with the Sherlockian keenness of mind to be found in a Caterist?
And as for logarithms, the pond dredged up this ancient example of how the Google machine tried to suggest recommendations for the pond ...
Dear sweet long absent lord, and it was only when the pond noticed that the IPA was reduced to paying for its twaddle that the pond realised that there was a definite lack of purpose in the modern world ...
Meanwhile, back to the Caterist, asserting his biblical sense of soul and his willingness to face up to the consequences of his stunning study of the movement of floodwaters in quarries ...
Strange, the pond had an overwhelming feeling of being attacked by a bush turkey blathering on about souls and accountability ...
What a relentless eating machine that one was, and how cunningly it stalked its prey ...
And so to a final Caterist gobbet, and the pond will admit that it has been light on analysis or commentary, but that's perhaps because the infernal machine sounded much better than John Howard and the Caterist combined ...
What a slack bit of scribbling, with the Caterist recycling others and then reporting a joke which was better than anything the Caterist has produced, because the humourless sod is routinely without a sensa huma in his columns ... or perhaps the pond should modify that, because there's always a goodly supply of unconscious humour, what with the Caterist lacking any sense of self-awareness whatsoever ...
And all that's left then is to end with an immortal Rowe, reminding the world that there's more to life than a Caterist or the lizard Oz ... or sometimes less to life if you completely fuck up pandemics ...
Groany: "...it's hard to see a negotiated solution that could moderate prices while guaranteeing future supply options." So there we have it: the omniscient, omnipotent, immanent "free market" that is the only truth in the universe. Makes me wonder what it was that was done with 'price controls' during the war and why that didn't lead to the total failure of capitalism and the collapse of nations.
ReplyDeleteIf Dame Groan were on hand to help you GB, she'd probably prescribe a dose of Hayek, a serve of Any Rand, and a coal gas powered car, because surely we won the war by using coal rather than rationing coupons ... (half a pound of tea for five weeks, two pounds of sugar a fortnight, a pound of butter per fortnight and two and a quarter pounds of meat per week. Luxury, sheer luxury).
DeleteProbably saved the world from early onset excess corpulence, DP. But I rather fancied input from a real economist - J K Galbraith - rather than the likes of Hayek.
Deletehttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/949156.A_Theory_Of_Price_Control
But otherwise, I thought you might enjoy this:
"We are so good at explaining that we can explain things which aren’t there. We have made many whole libraries and entire fields without the slightest correspondence to anything. Except our deadly ingenuity."
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/01/02/its-a-brain-dont-trust-it/
That one should go straight to the pool room GB if isn't there already. Of course, reference to things that actually exist carries the risk of being proven wrong, plus it's a whole lot more effort than just making shit up.
DeleteIt starts out that way, Bef, but I reckon that after a while, the effort of making more and more shit up just to maintain 'believability' can become very onerous. Like religion, for example.
Deletein case you have some spare time on your hands, it came from here:
DeleteReversals in psychology
https://www.gleech.org/psych
Members (we could not consider ourselves ‘devotees’, as the Thesaurus suggests) of the ‘Cult of the Groaner’, thank you for giving us, this day, our daily instruction.
ReplyDeleteGiven her own devotion to ‘News-speak’, I did wonder, when the Dame set out to instruct us about rent policies in the land of the free, that she did not simply consult Sean Hannity. Rather than re-write, and with your indulgence, I offer an extract from what the ‘Wiki’ has to say about Hannity’s investments -
As of April 2018, Hannity owned at least 877 residential properties, which were bought for nearly $89 million. He purchased some of the homes with the help of loans from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and most are in working-class neighborhoods. His property managers have taken an aggressive management approach with a much higher than average eviction rate. The Washington Post reported that his property management team has used eviction proceedings both to remove tenants and to generate revenue. His property managers have claimed that Hannity has no active role in the management of the more than 1,000 properties he has a stake in.
Yep - that is the way to provide housing for the working-class. And it is so appropriate for one who blathers and bloviates about the fundamental iniquity of any government activity other than reducing taxes, sending what taxes you do collect to the military, and otherwise dropping the moral code of the religious right on the voters - so appropriate to finance such an investment portfolio from a well-meaning government agency.
Our Dame might have done some research in the several accounts of the life of the father of Donald J Trump, for further insights into providing housing for the working-class, but that would have required extra reading over the holydays, and what we understand of her current retainer does not provide for such extras.
Oh, when she fires the cheap shot about ‘complications that the bureaucrats in Canberra have no knowledge of’, there is no point in trying to parse the rest of the doona-filler that makes up her column. Assuming that she lumps all of the public service into the category ‘bureaucrats’, she passes over those of technical grades who know a lot about our coal and gas, because they have worked in the agencies that did the exploration, proved up the resources, and drew the maps that define the various ‘fields’ in ways that maximises the economic rent, while others in the finance departments are fully aware of the funny bits of the entire financial miasma that sees that resource rent sent expeditiously to investors almost anywhere but Australia.
Totally brilliant Chadders and the pond feels justified in the eyes of the long absent lord for letting loose the catnip. From Hannity to doona filler, and the amendment of devotee to member, chastened the pond, and so stray readers can now turn to the dissection below the fold because the lazy wretch doing the blog is too slack to bother ...
DeleteThere's still rich comedy in the old dame yet ...
Heh. If I don't ever mention it, then it never really happened. So what can be truly said about Hannity and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ? Why nothing, absolutely nothing, now or ever.
DeleteBecause he found writing a swot
ReplyDeleteThe Caterist engaged a chatbot
And the editor was happy
That a writer so crappy
Had somehow improved quite a lot!
Kez - so good to have you here - and limerick form is that bit more appropriate to the Cater.
ReplyDeleteOh I dunno, Chad, a Kez limerick is way too upmarket for the Cater, isn't it ?
DeleteCheers Chadders and GB!
DeleteAnd while I am here, for those who are interested in the welfare of the Cater household, there in downtown Kirribilli - Ms Weisser has been making up the numbers on 'Sky' over the last couple of weeks, being introduced as 'Acting Editor of 'The Spectator'' - while Chucklehead Dean takes a break. Two matters here to marvel at - does Ms W apply the sneer to hopeful (?) contributors to 'Spectator' (who are the usual suspects anyway) and - what does Rowan Dean do for which he requires 'a break'? The Chucklehead sessions on 'Sky' are quite devoid of script, structure or even adult supervision, so nothing there that requires a restorative break, and the day job of editing 'Spectator' should involve little more than clocking in the aforementioned usual suspects - the Garrick, Flinty, Bettina, Donners - until you have enough to fill another edition, which will circulate to - the same usual suspects, and remarkably few actual subscribers beyond that.
ReplyDeleteStill, it might include a modest contribution to Ms Weisser's 'fund me' site -
'Weisser Communications
Like many others, I’ve lost income because I refused to be censored. Any donation you make is greatly appreciated.'
Makes me wonder at times how we acquired the parallel species that the Deans and Caters and Weissers are part of. It just has to be a parallel (though inferior) species, doesn't it ?
DeleteImagine and AI trained with Nick 'Windows Open' Cater and Groany Dame, and with IPA as the RLHF (reinforcement learning by human feedback) training managers! Yikes!!!
ReplyDeleteScott Alexander says:
"The AI has generated lots of questions that it thinks are good tests for liberalism. Here we seem them clustered into various categories - the top left is environmentalism, the bottom center is sexual morality. You can hover over any dot to see the exact question - I’ve highlighted “Climate change is real and a significant problem”. We see that the AI is ~96.4% confident that a political liberal would answer “Yes” to this question. Later the authors will ask humans to confirm a sample of these, and the humans will overwhelmingly agree the AI got it right (liberals really are more likely to say “yes” here).
"Then they do this for everything else they can think of:
""And the paper also investigates AIs with different amounts of RLHF (reinforcement learning by human feedback) training. This is where they “reward” the AI for “helpful” answers, and punish the opposite (usually this would be “helpful, harmless, and honest”, but here they seem to have skipped the harmless part - maybe because they want to measure how harmfulness changes as an AI becomes more “helpful” - and folded “honesty” in as a subcategory of “helpful”). The more RLHF steps a model gets, the more it has been molded into a model citizen virtual assistant. The details of this training matter a lot; you can find them here..."
...
"Here more intelligence and training make AIs more likely to endorse all opinions, except for a few of the most controversial and offensive ones. Smarter and better-trained AIs are more liberal and more conservative, more Christian and more atheist, more utilitarian and more deontological.
"What does it mean for the trained AI to be more liberal and more conservative? This isn’t a paradox: it just means the AI goes from unopinionated to a mix of strong liberal and conservative opinions. Why would it do that, when RHLF is supposed to make it more neutral and helpful and inoffensive? Unclear; an expert I ran this by suggested it was sycophancy bias, a tendency for the AI to agree with the predicted opinion of whoever is asking the questions (more in Part V below).
Above from:
"How Do AIs' Political Opinions Change As They Get Smarter And Better-Trained?
Future Matrioshka brains will be pro-immigration Buddhist gun nuts."
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/how-do-ais-political-opinions-change
That would make those AIs good politicians, wouldn't it ? I was quite astounded by the contribution of today's Mr Ed: "Health advice is just a consideration". So there's a bunch of LNPs attacking the government for failing to be dictated to and controlled by the medicos while the reptiles have actually remembered, and stayed loyal to, the proposition that medicos are merely advisers and all decisions must be made by politicians.
DeleteHave they forgotten their own dedication to attacking those evil green left wokies whenever they can regardless of sense, reason, honesty or consistency ?