SoylentNews

I was coming close to the epilogue and a new character jumped out, and since she’s a gossip I’ll have to add her to most of the earlier parts, but that’s pretty much how I write, anyway. It will need an awful lot of editing.
        It’s turned into a sequel of sorts to Mars, Ho! and Voyage to Earth as well as a couple of other stories in Voyage. Spaceship captain Bill Kelly returns, and although everybody else in the earlier books is dead, they’re mentioned.
        I’m guessing it will be sometime next year before it’s ready for publication. I’m releasing this differently than the earlier books. I always posted the HTML and ebooks at the same time I published physical books, but this time will be different.
        One of my bucket list items has been to join the SFWA, Science and Science Fiction Writers Association, who award the Nebulas, one of the two most prestigious SF awards on the planet or off. At first I tried submitting stories to SF magazines, since if three are published at professional rates in a year, you’re eligible. But even most of the best are rejected. There is room for fewer than 5% of submissions, while the head editor of S&FS says he wishes he could print a third of the submissions he gets. I came close a few times, but that’s a crapshoot.
        But a book only needs to earn $3000 for its author to be eligible for membership, and I’ve sold Amazon Kindle books without even trying. At $3 apiece (I just raised the prices) I make $1.05. All I would have to do would be to sell 3000 Kindle books from Amazon and I’m over the lower limit by quite a margin.
        This one looks to me like it might turn out to be my best. So for this one, as soon as I send the manuscript and cover art to the printers I’m sending it to Amazon. This time, the Amazon ebook will be the first version posted, followed by the hardcover and paperback; they take a month or two to hit bookshelves.
        If and when I hit the three thousandth sale, I’ll give that three grand to charity and post the free versions.
        So far it’s about 35,000 words, 140 pages. It will be another twenty or thirty pages longer before it’s finished.

This was originally a comment in an article here at S/N that was posted a couple of days ago. Since I'm a little late posting it, I'll repeat it here.

The article was about a pop songwriter being sued by the late Marvin Gaye's estate for copyright infringement. The greedsters lost the case, thankfully. BUT,

Those Marvin Gaye songs wouldn't be under copyright any more and this case could never have come to trial had it not been for Sony Bono and a corrupt judicial system.

The rich pop singer Sony Bono got himself elected to the US Senate and made a lot of friends there before suffering a rich man's death at the hands of a skiing accident most could never afford. So for the poor dead talentless pop singer, they raised the copyright length from 20 years, extendable another twenty with proper paperwork and a twenty dollar fee as previously, to the author's life plus ninety five years, ninety five if done for a corporation, without any copyright paperwork at all unless it gets to court.

Since the constitution allows copyrights and patents for limited times anybody with two functioning brain calls can't possibly believe that a century past the author's lifetime ("The Congress shall have Power To...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;") is in any way constitutional. A lifetime plus a century is logically and reasonably unlimited.

I thought the law was passed as a result of bribery, but when folks tell me all congressman are crooked, I say it's almost statistically impossible that 535 people would ALL be corrupt. Then I realized, they don't have to be corrupt. 535 cowards fearful of losing an election are easy prey for the likes of the Music And Film Association of America (MAFIAA). "Nice campaign, be a shame if anything happened to it. You know I'm a good citizen who gives you and your opponent both fifty million buck campaign contribution. Be a shame if he got a hundred million and you got nothing." Too bad none of those 535 have the courage to outlaw "contributing" to more than one candidate in any given race. It should be a felony with mandatory prison time.

But they can't extort the Supreme Court like that. They face no election and hold office until they retire or die. It's been shown publicly that Clarence Thomas broke every ethical rule the judicial system has, Except that the rules don't apply to the Supreme Court! Since the other eight refuse to enact a code of ethics, I must assume all nine are as God damned dirty as Thomas.

That not only explains "Limited means whatever congress says it means" but why Citizens United ruled that a corporation is a person (who can't go to prison or be executed for any crime, only fined).

America's slide into fascism is well underway. As you're aware, under fascism, business runs government. Under communism, government runs business. I don't see a lot of difference, both require dictatorships. I'm just glad I'm old enough to miss the end of this shit show, I won't exist thirty years from now.

TV Meteorologists all, every single one, are victims of our abysmal educational system. It shuts off children’s thinking and demands they not learn, but memorize. For example, history class. I always hated history until I reached college. In public school, they want you to memorize names and dates without ever mentioning why those names and dates are important, or how what happened in the past affects you and can happen again.
        So like almost everyone else in our once great nation that has fallen greatly at the hands of the rich and the politicians they have purchased, meteorologists don’t think. It’s a wonder they could graduate college after the damage done in public school. Let’s outlaw private school! If the rich were forced to attend public school, things would vastly change for the better, because they would be well funded.
        So it’s no surprise that their “feels like” temperature calculations are missing variables, the first thing wrong with “feels like”. In the summer, the formula takes into account temperature and humidity, since hot wet air feels hotter than hot dry air. But two eighty degree days with identical humidities will feel different if one has a breeze. It won’t feel as hot.
        But they leave that variable out. Laziness, perhaps?
        In the winter, it’s temperature and wind. But then they ignore humidity, which does the opposite in the winter; on two windless days with identical temperatures, the high humidity day will feel colder than the low humidity day. But they ignore humidity in the winter.
        Summer or winter, the wind affects temperature. But the wind almost always changes, never a steady speed all day, making any “feels like” temperature flat out wrong almost any minute of any day.
        The one break I’ll cut them is that their science is still in its infancy, not really existing at all until we put up satellites. Maybe someone from Sweden or somewhere that they value education and teachers will set our dumbass meteorologists straight.

I didn't add much to the story, as I've been at the hospital visiting my daughter, who went into ICU Thursday night with ketoacidosis. She went home this morning. It prompted the only part I've written, and follows:

        The band got on stage to start having a good time playing, as playing children always do. Of course, nobody ever really grows up, not even the geriatric. Not inside, anyway. Some people’s souls die, but otherwise there’s a child inside every old codger.
        Bill finished up in the pilot room, cursing that damned Mort for dying, and hurrying to the commons. Maybe he could actually catch a show tonight, if that damned phone would shut up and let him be for a while. He sat down next to Mary, who started trying to get the best of him, female style.
        Nobody ever really grows up. She pulled out a joint.
        Bill wrinkled his already wrinkled old nose. “Excuse me,” he said, and moved to the table Joe was sitting at by himself. After perfunctories, he said “That Mary! I’m glad I’m not Ralph or Jerry. Damned woman was hitting on me. I’m four times her age!”
        Joe grinned. “Is that what the company records of your entropy say?”
        “No, that’s what the tax collector says, charging me a year’s taxes for a three month run.”
        “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We’re going to start with a very, very old number called ‘Moondance’.”
        Sue started playing her flute.
        Harold, as usual, was missing the show, dealing with the various miseries elderly geezers always have most of the time.
        “It hurts when I raise my arm like that.”
        “Then don’t do that.”
        “Ha, Ha.”
        “Look, George, gettin’ old ain’t for wimps, you know? You think I don’t have all the aches and pains and heartaches and misery as everybody on the ship?”
        “Can’t you give me something?”
        “You have arpirin, don’t you?”
        “Yeah, but...”
        Harold rolled his eyes. “Let me tell you a little ancient medical history. About 1800, not sure the actual year...”
        “Krodley! ancient is right. How could it apply today? They didn’t even have electricity, did they?”
        “I don’t know, but they made a drug named ‘morphine’ out of a plant that’s now extinct called a poppy. It was kind of like a modern pain diffuser, but if you took too much for too long, you had a physical need for it, so they made strict rules, laws, actually, for its use.
        “They developed more and more powerful drugs in that class, but in the twentieth century fascism was born, and was nearly wiped out in a world wide war but the nascent movement started taking hold world wide in the twenty first...”
        “They taught us all this is high school!”
        “Not all of it, they didn’t. Just about how the entire planet became a fascist dictatorship. Now, the drug industry...”
        “The drug what?”
        “Believe it or not, producing drugs, actually all aspects of health care were monetized. A diabetic without the means to afford enough medication was doomed to a horrible death by ketoacidosis...”
        “You lost me.”
        “Their blood turns to acid.”
        “They were really that cruel?
        “That’s what happens under fascism. Poverty could result in death by torture. But anyway, the opioids, as they were called, were legally only used for [FIXME] pain until the heartless drug dealers, very rich people who made medicines that doctors prescribed, somehow convinced everyone that their drugs could be safely used for [FIXME]. The result was millions of people addicted to the drugs the drug salesmen pushed, dying from overdoses, stealing to support their habits... it was awful. Believe me, you don’t want to go back to that. How about using a diffuser if it hurts that bad?” His instruments told him that George was in less pain than he was.
        He shook his head. “I can’t think straight with one of those.”
        “Drugs would be worse. Let’s get a beer and listen to some music.”
        “It’s Saturday?”
        “Well, yeah!”
        They walked down, and entered the room as raucous applause was ringing. “Good,” Doc said, “We didn’t miss it!”
        Before they reached a table, the applause died, and Bob’s amplified voice said “Thank you! Thank you! You’ve been a great audience, we’ll see you next Saturday!”
        “Well, shit.”

I still haven’t found a catchy yet fitting name, so for the time being it’s Anglada.odt. It has turned out to be a sequel to Mars, Ho! and Voyage to Earth, and a prequel to Nobots. Bill Kelly returns, aged 245 Martian time, 61 relativity time. Einstein’s theory is the story’s main theme.
        This story has a lot I’ve not used before, like a dystopia. I’ve become really tired of reading future dystopias, it seems that’s the only thing kids can write these days. Probably because we’re sliding headlong into one, thanks to people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberh, Bezos, the Sacklers, the Waltons, the Cochs, everyone who’s dirty, filthy, stinking rich with vast stock portfolios that include oil stock and bribes to legislators moving their taxes from them to the working class*, and legally stealing their labor.
        But there are two “worlds” here, Earth, and the spacers on Mars and in the asteroids. Those living on asteroids are called “asterites,” a word Poul Anderson coined in his Industrial Revolution. The spacers (Asimov coined that one) live well, all what we would call overweight, a boon to someone living on Sylvia or even Mars, because of the low gravity. Work is voluntary, and there’s a mandatory retirement age of sixty.
        Earth is my first dystopia, a real hellhole, with hurricanes on land, five mile wide EF-5 tornadoes, and everyone living underground, even the Amish. At the beginning of the story, the Yellowstone supervolcano has exploded, killing millions instantly and billions of war and starvation afterwards. It begins with Earth a dictatorship that resembles both fascism and communism; basically, the whole world is North Korea with weather running everyone underground, and everyone skin and bones, always hungry. You kids like dystopias? There’s a pandemic that kills three quarters of the population... but fortunately, very little concerns Earth. Most of the story is on the trip to Centauri, and the Martian base.
        It’s also my first story with a sad part; I hate sad stories. Also the only story with a little kid, an orphan whose Grandpa is headed to Anglada.
        Here are some snippets, which may or may not be in the final book. It starts off:

History’s first human venture outside our star’s heliosphere was an utter catastrophe that ended in insanity.

        After a few paragraphs, most of Grommler is in it. Everyone thinks the insanity is from the plants on Grommler, but it’s the time stretch.
        Almost everyone in the story are elderly, the youngest three on the ship are in their fifties. Explaining why would involve a spoiler. One is fifty five, the youngest (except the psychologists, in their early fifties) The fifty five year old is a musician, there to put on shows for the crew, so the story’s a lot about music, and all that goes with it, like insane copyrights, which have stretched to infinity in the story, everything before the twenty first century public domain, and afterwards perpetual copyrights owned by corporations.
        Computers write all books, plays, music... A geologist named Will is an amateur guitarist (there are no more professionals, it’s all computers) who thinks he sucks. Sue is a hydrologist who also plays a mean flute.

He finished the tune. “I told you I sucked,” he said as he put the guitar back on its stand.
        Sue was applauding. Bob said “Dude, that’s a much better version than what the computer plays.”
        “You’re just being nice.”
        Sue said, “No, really, that was good! Bob’s right, it was better than the computer version. The computer version has a lot more notes but no soul at all. You could make money playing that!”
        “You think so?” he said.
        “No,” Bob interjected. “A two hundred year old Earthian law says that an ancient corporation owns the tune and you have to pay them. There’s no way you could profit. Copyrights have been perpetual for two hundred fifty years now. Let me teach you some of the old, pre-copyright tunes. Here, here’s one called a Bolero...”

        It isn’t mentioned by name, but the song Stairway to Heaven is in it, as is...

Three days later, Bob Black sat on the stage in the commons with his guitar, a real antique, a Fender Stratocaster, tuning it with a normal electronic tuner like they’d had almost since the Strat had been invented. The computer generated Muzak that Bob hated played. Bar stools were all occupied and a large fraction of the tables were, as well. Half of the people there had never heard real music, played on a real musical instrument by a real person before.
        Bob’s family had been musically inclined for generations. He had been named after another guitar player long ago, his great grandfather Rob Black; both were named “Robert Black” on birth certificates.
        Not only had he seemingly inherited his musical talent, which science didn’t say was hereditary, but musicians did, but also books and books of sheet music going back centuries. He’d had them digitized, and the physical books were locked up in a warehouse on Mars.
        His guitar tuned up, he started with an ancient tune called “Thirty Days in the Hole” from one of the antique books. He never had found out what “Newcastle Brown” was, a disease, maybe?

        Unlike way too much science fiction, mine always actually has real science, scientists, end possible future engineering. The main science in this one is psychology, although there are other fields.
        There are no computer scientists in the story, but lots of computers. I wonder what OS they’ll be running in a few hundred years?
        So far it’s about 27,000 words and 85 pages, maybe a third of the way finished.

* In 1940, the lowest federal tax rate was over four times the median income. In the 1950s and '60s a single paycheck paid a family's bills, the minimum wage would support a young couple with a child. We have been ROBBED silently.

[khallow:] They would gain serious opposition throughout the world by alienating a bunch of developing world countries who need that food.

Here, the poster (me) is saying that they believe that certain unnamed countries “need that food”. I later elaborate that “need” means “Egypt would be a smoking ruin, if it ran low on wheat and it's far from the most unstable in that regard.” Here, “need” means must have or some societies, including Egypt, would fall apart into ruin, if they didn’t have enough food. Even if one disagrees with the claim, it’s a fairly honest use of the word. A good is “needed” when there’s an extremely undesirable outcome, if the need is not met.

Case 2:

[AC:] So there's no problem if the food you're making out of the insects etc is from squashed versions.

If you need to do other stuff (like remove the poop etc) then just squash the head really fast.

Here, “need” has a different meaning: an essential step in some process. AC doesn’t specify what the process could be, but it could be mandated by regulation or even merely that the food tastes better without the poop. But the idea is that if bug poop is to be removed, this approach is a way to do that.

Now, let’s consider a couple of less honest uses of “need”.

Case 3:

[AC:] A mega constellation isn't a necessary step or a necessarily shorter path to a future in space.

Here, the word being abused is “necessary/necessarily”. The complaint in question is that megaconstellations have significant externalities – light pollution and possibly space junk. The implication here is that because a megaconstellation isn’t necessary – there are other unspecified ways to a future in space, then it shouldn’t be done.

There’s two flaws in the argument. First, just because something isn’t needed, doesn’t mean we should be blocking it. Another space example is someone arguing that nobody wants to go to space because the speaker doesn't want to go to space.

Second, when a destination is necessary, then so is a path. For example, suppose a kid needs to go home (it’s getting late) and there are two physical paths to their house. A neighbor turns the kid away from the first path because they can go the other way – with the argument that the kid doesn’t need to go down this path (and presumably irk said neighbor). So then another irkable neighbor at the second path does the same, because the kid doesn’t need to travel down that path either since they could travel down the first path. Now, we’ve gone from two paths home to zero paths home!

This is how the need argument can sabotage not just one endeavor, but all of them. There is no path to space that won’t create a bunch of stuff in orbit and engender the externalities, and where there are so many possible paths to space not a one of them is the unique, necessary path.

Finally, there’s the completely bogus use of “need” that spurred this journal. I’ll quote it in context from the original story here [edit: fixed typo].

Case 4:

Ruiter says he’s continued to talk about data centers because he wants to remind people that “the cloud” they’ve come to rely on isn’t just an ethereal concept—it’s something that has a physical manifestation, here in the farmland of North Holland. He worries that growing demand for data storage from people, and also, increasingly, AI, will just mean more and more hyperscale facilities.

“Of course, we need some data centers,” he says. But he wants us to talk about restructuring the way the internet works so they are not so necessary. “We should be having the philosophical debate of what do we do with all our data? I don’t think we need to store everything online in a central place.”

Basically, Ruiter is a politician mooching off Dutch farmer discontent over harsh EU nitrogen regulations which then boiled over to complaints about data centers (which I gather politically are a vastly safer target) which are competing for the same land as the farmers. And he advocates that we restructure Netherlands society so that data centers “are not so necessary”. All this for a naked self-interest – less competition for Dutch farmland. Note also the process would result in significantly fewer data centers and thus a centralization of all that data contrary to the alleged benefit of the scheme. He threw out an excuse for this, ignoring that the scheme would make the excuse worse not better.

This is the cynical, entitled endpoint of the rhetoric of need: you don’t need this so gimme. No cost to society is too high. Just restructure society so it doesn’t need what I stole from it. I find it interesting how so many people are intent on reenacting those cheesy Ayn Rand novels – not as a ruggedly individual John Galt, but as a sleazy, corrupt Wesley Mouch.

[istartedi:] Ethics is easy. We know there are unethical people, and we know that the people who are charged with reigning them in are also unethical. Money is an easy target, but those targeting it are equally unethical, so dismantling capitalism isn't the answer because unethical people will just take their greed off the balance sheet and stuff it in to warehouses and gulags.

If ethics were society's most pressing problem, we'd be having a hard time finding things that are wrong. We're nowhere near running out of moral failures. Would that we could power the grid with them. Maybe we can, but somebody got paid to say otherwise.

My take is that bolded part is a valuable rule of thumb for telling us when we need to work on ethics rather than moral failures.

Moving on, the latest ethical drama is the present generation of chatbot AI which is presented as some ridiculous threat: helping students create fake papers, criminals plot crimes, scamsters scam, the insane commit suicide, and the PHB be idiots (to name a few recent concerns). No serious moral failures have come up. These are all things that could be a problem, maybe, and when they're illegal or against rules, would stay that way.

Meanwhile we're up to our eyeballs in all kinds of crimes, scams, frauds, and villainy that just isn't that hard to sort out ethically - and certainly not AI-based. We don't have a problem finding things that are wrong. That tells me that we have much bigger ethical problems than AI. And looks to me like how we address that doesn't change or improve no matter what we do to AI research.

So when I see a petition like the letter in AnonTechie's journal that demands a six month pause in AI development globally, I am exasperated. If we really followed through on that letter fully and honestly, how would we have progressed even a little on the problem? We still wouldn't have or understand advanced AI. We still wouldn't have any idea how to fix its problems. We would have just wasted six months of valuable research time and peoples' lives and be back to square one - making the case for yet another six month delay because nothing changed.

Edit: Is it time yet for a Trump update journal? Seems there's several active court cases surrounding him now.

Sorry I'm just linking my personal site but there's just too much formatting to move it here, and I'm lazy today. I haven't even worked on the novel.

But here's a small bit that needs no formatting:

Ever since 1946 when ENIAC was patented; or rather, the presidential election of 1952 when CBS news introduced the computer to America, computers have been called "electronic brains". The name is half right, they are, in fact, electronic. But they're not brains.
<snip>
You can do a lot with numbers. You can compute orbital trajectories, predict orbits of comets and asteroids, engineering, cooking... you can even create simulations and recordings of auditory and visual signals, but they can't create or mimic reality. But people still call them "electronic brains" and speak of "artificial intelligence".

You can't mimic intelligence, but you can fake it. Margarine is more honestly called "butter" than what a computer does can be called "intelligence". The only intelligence is the real, chemical, analog intelligence, that of the programmer's.

It's a trick, not unlike the ones David Copperfield performs.

I learned magic at age seven. When my sister's grandson was four, she was showing me her new computer, and the child asked her how computers work. She shrugged, and said "it's magic." As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

That's why those of us who actually understand how computers work are called "Wizards".

Magicians use subterfuge and misdirection, among other tools. The AI misdirection is from anthropomorphism and animism, two powerful forces on the human psyche.

People are easy to fool.

I thought of this as a huge problem for the future, when some evil man will use "artificial intelligence" to subjugate populations. I later found that I wasn't the only one; in the beginning of Frank Herbert's Dune there had been a jihad against "intelligent machines" which were therefore illegal.

I decided to do something about it and wrote a program to convince people that computers couldn't really think, by writing one that seemed to but was insane. The problem was, when I explained that it couldn't really think, that it was just trickery, they wouldn't believe the Wizard, probably because of that Oz guy.

There is more at the link, including some original source code and a scan of part of its printout.