Doug Ford: Should we be thankful for small mercies ?

So is there anything good to say about Doug Ford.

Well he is not Pierre Poilievre or Danielle Smith. At least Ford does not seek votes by appealing to people’s fears and hatred. He is more of an old fashioned corporations know best, privatization will solve all our problems, capitalist conservative.

He doesn’t attack people for who they are or go after women’s right to bodily autonomy.

Yes, he wants to give the province to his business cronies, destroy the environment and dismantle our public health care and education systems, but no one is perfect.

How the Fossil Fuel Industry Can Save Itself and the Planet

The fossil fuel industry seems to have a romantic fascination with “all the oil in the ground”, a fascination that shields it from financial reality.

There are two things absolutely true about the fossil fuel industry.

It has a finite end because there is a finite end to the oil and gas in the ground.

The second truth is that extracting the remaining oil and gas keeps becoming more environmentally harmful, but more importantly to the industry, more costly. Indeed we are probably already at the point where their investments would have a greater profit by diverting them from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

But their romantic fascination with “all the oil in the ground” keeps them from seeing this.

If they want to maximize their profit would it not make sense to ration production of the easiest and cheapest oil and gas over future years, while leaving the most expensive and most environmentally harmful resources in the ground. This way prices could be maximized due to reduced supply while the environmental impact per year is reduced as we transition to a fossil fuel free economy, which they can move their investments into.

Housing As A Right

Should housing be a right. That is the question. But the real question is what would that mean and how do we make it more than a token right but an actual effective right.

In North America we had this mythology that everyone could own their own home. That has never been true. The closest we have come is at the peak of unionization when unions brought much of the working class into the middle class. But then the capitalist owners of the means of production moved the means of production to low wage countries and left the auto industry as the remaining remnant of what was once an industrial economy. They then transformed the service industry to a piece-work model, much of it based on “apps” that pretended low wage workers were independent contractors not entitled to the protection of employment and labour laws. This returned us to a state where the dream of home ownership was limited to the wealthy and professional classes.

However this myth led governments to create tax advantages for home ownership that distorted the housing market leading it to be dominated by much larger than necessary energy wasting homes which contributed to the creation of urban sprawl.

So how do we create housing as a right for everyone.

If housing is actually to be a right then everyone one must have access to decent and properly maintained housing at an affordable cost. The private sector will not provide this.

North America needs to take a more European approach where public sector housing is not relegated to the poorest of the poor but is available to the general population. Funding needs to be provided to eliminate public housing waiting lists and provide necessary maintenance. Co-operative housing needs to be encouraged and facilitated with government assistance. Living in publicly provided housing has to be normalized rather than stigmatized.

Fortunately the solution to the funding problem is the same as the solution to all public expenditure programs. Society has the money, it is just improperly distributed through an economic and political system that has created excessive financial inequality. The answer lies in taxing corporations and the wealthy appropriately, especially the excessive wealthy.

The private sector can still play a role as long as they realize the slumlord model is no longer an option with affordable decent publicly provided housing available to everyone. And they must accept that with housing as a right no one can be evicted without somewhere else to go.

On Television Part 3 – Cutting The Cord, Where We Ended Up

The Fifth Column first talked about “cutting the cord” in June 2019 in my post On Television that looked at the history of television from broadcast TV and rabbit ears through Cable TV to streaming services delivered via wi-fi.

In July 2020 I posted On Television Part 2 – Cutting The Cord about our first experience “cutting the cord”.

Our original plan was simply to replace it with streaming services and some downloads but decided for one time costs only to also add an antenna based over-the-air (OTA) television service.

However after a year or two we decided that using the antenna and PVR was not worth the trouble and the small amount of broadcast TV we wanted had become available online either through the providers websites or via other means.

We have now settled on using our Roku and six streaming platforms as our primary television sources:

•  Netflix, which everyone is familiar with

•  Crave with HBO/Movies + Starz

• CBC Gem Premium (including CBC News Network and all local CBC channels live

• Britbox, which features programming from the BBC and ITV

• Acorn TV, which features programming from the UK and other commonwealth countries as well as some Nordic countries 

• MHZ Choice which features mostly subtitled programming from European and other countries, which will be merging in April with the Topic streaming service to add more programs, including many dubbed into English, 

The Roku also provides access to a number of free streaming or direct broadcast programming (including CBC, CTV and Global) usually with commercials, but not always, as well as YouTube.

We also have access to programming via the computer which we have connected directly to our TV via an HDMI cable (after issues with our Chromecast).

A number of TV websites, including CTV and Global, provide free access to programming (particularly during the first week after broadcast) and some foreign TV websites such as BBC and ITV are available with a VPN set for the country of origin.

When we got rid of Rogers Cable we had basic cable plus a number of theme packs, as well as Crave/HBO. That, along with Netflix, was a monthly cost just under $100. After all this time with our current TV options, which provide a wider variety of higher quality programming, we are still playing less than that.

The Election Issue That Dare Not Speak It's Name

What election am I referring to – whatever one is next in whatever jurisdiction you are in.

Yes I am talking about that which we dare not speak – the need to change our economic system before its ultimate collapse.

Karl Marx predicted the collapse of capitalism, and it was happening, only to be rescued by of all things socialism – the pooling of the masses resources to rescue their exploiters.

However unless we act to change the system we can only put off the ultimate demise of capitalism as we know it.

It is not so much private ownership or even profit that I am speaking of, although they contribute to the problem. I am speaking of something much more fundamental – the need to redefine what we consider to be a successful economy. The problem is we currently measure economic success as continuous and increasing unsustainable economic growth based on the continuous unsustainable exploitation of finite resources.

Capitalism also only values wage employment discounting all activities not done for a paid wage as economically meaningless, including the caring for children by parents and volunteer work or other unpaid creative work. How capitalism values work is also subjective and very fucked up, someone playing playing a game earning a million dollars a year contributes 10 time as much to the economy as someone earning 100 thousand dollars a year finding a cure for cancer. The actual value of work to society has no relation to the economic value capitalism gives it.

We also have to rethink our historic attitudes to what we call civilized and primitive. I was brought up within a society that taught that our industrialized societies built on dominating and exploiting nature were far superior to those “primitive” societies where people lived simpler lives in harmony with nature. Unfortunately our civilization is bringing our society and planet to the edge of collapse.

Capitalism has it’s religious tenets as well, the most revered being the belief (very much in a religious sense, being based on faith rather than evidence) that competition is superior to co-operation and promotes innovation.

The belief is if you have a problem and tell ten people to solve it, it will be solved faster if each person works separately inspired by the fact they will make a fortune if they succeed or become a bankrupt failure if they don't. Indeed under capitalist dogma money is the only possible motivator.

The rational understanding that ten smart people working together, and off of each others ideas, striving for the common good, will be more successful sooner than ten individuals working separately is simply capitalistic heresy. The idea that people might be motivated by something other than money is anathema to our greed based economic system.

According to theory competition is supposed to result in multiple campaniles competing for customers business resulting in the ones that provide the best value for money thriving. In reality we see that what happens is the most powerful (most ruthless) driving out the weakest in an increasing move to a more monopolistic economy, with a few dominant corporations that are deemed to big too fail and must be saved by the socialism of taxpayer funded corporate bailouts.

Whether it was the aim or expectations of it’s creators, the most important and evil result of capitalism has been the rapid increase of inequality to the point of immorality.

We have moved along way from the original promise of capitalism, if it ever existed, where entrepreneurs formed businesses to make products or supply services to customers at decent quality for a decent price paying workers an honest days pay for an honest days work, in return for a fair profit. Today’s corporations (with a few exception) are only in one business, maximizing shareholder profits.

And that is not serving the needs of society or the people.

The only real election issue (except perhaps where democracy itself is the election issue) should be what do we replace capitalism with.

What is Wrong With The Internet ?

Yes, I know we could write a book, but essentially what is wrong with the Internet is the way we use it.

The public changed has the way it uses the Internet to the benefit of a few monopoly tech companies and those that want to spread disinformation because laziness has caused them to succumb to the cult of convenience.

We will skip the very early days before the World Wide Web and corporations being allowed on to the Internet and jump to the Internet/Web being broadly adopted by the public and accessed via computers.

In those days websites operated by organizations, institutions, media, businesses and even individuals were how we accessed the web. Phone apps did not exist.

We used search engines (Alta Vista was my preference) to find websites that we trusted to proved us with information. And we judged that information by how much we trusted the sources, seeking medical information from places like Health Canada or the Mayo Clinic and our news from reputable news media that we trusted offline.

We also used the World Wide Web for creating communities via online forums for specific subject interests like photography or mountain biking. All without being beholden to one predatory corporation for everything we did online.

We did not simply type a question into Google and believe the first response it provided without even paying attention to the source as many do today, and was the start of the decline of the reliability of the Internet (due to our choices). And this was before Google started selling search rankings and site operators started using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to artificially raise their rankings.

Perhaps the biggest thing wrong with the Internet is users not paying attention to the actual source of the information they find there.

The next thing that went wrong was users abandoning the Open Internet for the convenience of one proprietary source designed to sell advertising and drive traffic to that advertising. That, of course, was/is Facebook and it only became worse when it became a phone app and now a huge percentage of users never use the Open Internet at all and just use Facebook because it is so easy and all that they need and it is so easy and they do not care about all the well documented problems with and evils of Facebook because it is so easy. The cult of convenience trumps everything. And of course people believe Facebook is free.

This is not to say there are not a lot of good things like community resources and voluntary organizations available through Facebook. The thing is before Facebook all these resources were available on the Open Web. Unfortunately those of us who will not engage with the evil that is Facebook no longer have access to many of these resources that are now only available on Facebook because so many have decided that Facebook is absolutely necessary and irreplaceable. For many Facebook and other related phone “apps” have replaced the Open Internet.

I was going to link to articles on the evils of Facebook and how it is not free but that information is readily available and being added to regularly so we will let people use the Open Internet to do their own research, preferably not via Google. We suggest DuckDuckGo.

If only Facebook was the greatest evil online.

I once had the naive view that the Internet would be an effective tool against the promotion of hate and bigotry. In the “old days” the racists and bigots used to recruit directly from disaffected groups, youths with no hope for the future, recently laid off workers, etc., by befriending them and providing them a community where they would teach them their hate and bigotry. These were closed communities that sheltered members from other points of view.

When recruiting moved online I thought that the easy access to the truth would be an effective counterbalance.

Unfortunately they have created their own closed communities online in dark places like Eight Chan and Q’Anon fuelled by disinformation sites like InfoWars and Rebel News and now BrandX, formerly Twitter, along with certain places on YouTube.

Their followers shy away from the mainstream media, they shy away from science, they shy away from any authoritative information sources. These are people who believe stories like PizzaGate.

I just wrote “perhaps the biggest thing wrong with the Internet is users not paying attention to the actual source of the information they find there”. But that may not be true. Perhaps the biggest thing wrong with the Internet is users limiting their use of the Internet, with its broad access to knowledge, to just sources that reflect back to them their own world view, a world view often based on wilful ignorance and disinformation and actual real fake news.

I have not yet touched on what the cult of convenience has done to online shopping. My first experience with online shopping was using the Internet to check product features and specifications on manufacturer’s websites while purchasing locally. I moved on to the convenience of purchasing online with free shipping, but for the most part sticking to stores with local retail outlets.

However, for many, the inconvenience of shopping around has become too much work and they have decided buying everything from one predatory monopolistic outlet is best for them. The cult of convenience wins again.

However I find Amazon’s business model to be as abhorrent as Facebook’s and I will never buy anything from them unless I absolutely need it and I absolutely cannot get it anyplace else.

There are wonderful information sources on the Open Internet and every day I learn of something new that I don’t always have enough time to check out. It is sad so many people want to hide away in dark places avoiding the light the Internet can bring to them.

Is There a Conspiracy to Break and Then Fix Health Care ?

So how would this work. I suggest first you underfund public health care as well as simply not spending budgeted funds. As the public facilities fail to meet the needs you claim private facilities are needed. You then transfer funds from public to private facilities further reducing the public facilities capability. You then claim the private facilities are the answer to the crisis and start increasing funding diverting more to the private sector. As care improves you declare that privatization has solved the crisis and is the saviour of health care. You then claim to be spending more on health care than ever as the added profit expenditures make it appear that more funds are being spent on care.

The winners are the private heath care corporations and the political parties they support that made this all possible and we get a bunch of new multi-billionaires as a bonus.

AI Has Nothing To Do With Intelligence

AI has nothing to do with intelligence but people believe the marketing hype, mostly because we have a distorted idea of what intelligence is, largely due to the media.

Take the quiz show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader” that says in its name that it’s about whether contestants are as intelligent as a fifth grade student. What the show actually tests is who is more familiar with the grade five curriculum, grade five students or people who have not been in school for twenty tears or more. I know who I am betting on.

And take the famously super intelligent Jeopardy champions. Maybe some of these people are highly intelligent but that is not why they are Jeopardy champions because Jeopardy is not about intelligence. It is about knowing stuff, particularly the type of stuff Jeopardy asks questions about. At best it is about knowledge, not intelligence.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines intelligence as: “the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason”. (Source)

I would refine that to: “the ability to understand and analyze information in order to make rational decisions based on that information”.

Intelligence is not about information it is about reasoning.

I remember what some might call the first forerunner to Alexa and other chat bots. It was called Eliza

ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised and shocked that individuals, including Weizenbaum's secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.[3] Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment.[3][13] While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, it could not converse with true understanding.[14] However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum's insistence to the contrary.[6] (Source)

This was not artificial intelligence and neither are the latest claimants, the large language models (LLMs).

A large language model (LLM) is a language model notable for its ability to achieve general-purpose language understanding and generation. LLMs acquire these abilities by learning statistical relationships from text documents during a computationally intensive self-supervised and semi-supervised training process.[1] LLMs are artificial neural networks following a transformer architecture.[2]

As autoregressive language models, they work by taking an input text and repeatedly predicting the next token or word.[3] Up to 2020, fine tuning was the only way a model could be adapted to be able to accomplish specific tasks. Larger sized models, such as GPT-3, however, can be prompt-engineered to achieve similar results.[4] They are thought to acquire knowledge about syntax, semantics and "ontology" inherent in human language corpora, but also inaccuracies and biases present in the corpora.[5]

Notable examples include OpenAI's GPT models (e.g., GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, used in ChatGPT), Google's PaLM (used in Bard), and Meta's LLaMA, as well as BLOOM, Ernie 3.0 Titan, and Anthropic's Claude 2. (Source)

Using statistics to mimic what a human might say or write is not reasoning and it is certainly not intelligence.

It might not be so bad if these systems did not claim to intelligent but only claimed to be able to retrieve accurate information and did that well but they are designed to NOT do that.

I remember the early Internet and search engines with advanced boolean search capability like Alta Vista and the early versions of Google before they sold their top search results to the highest bidder.

Then the Internet was mainly academic institutions and community based organizations. The information on the Internet was relatively reliable most of the time. That information is still there if you pay attention to the actual source.

LLMs could use an information base based on actual reliable sources like Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia, or the collections of actual scientific journals or other respected sources.

But instead they have adopted the bigger/more is better approach feeding as much of the Internet as possible into their models, often without permission of the sources/creators. This leads to an information base dominated by misinformation and disinformation leading to results like “there is no water in the Atlantic Ocean”. But obvious errors are not the danger here but the amplification of misinformation and disinformation in the political sphere.

But it is worse. These disinformation models are proving to be even more wasteful of energy and harmful to the planet than the cryptocurrency scam and their believers/followers just as faithful and misguided. And for what. Obviously they hope to make a shitload of money from this scam.

AI is clearly not intelligent, just dangerous.

Is There Hope For Palestine

 I wrote this in November 2007 on the hope for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

The solution essentially comes down to understanding the most and least that each side can accept.

We could argue forever whether the State of Israel should have been created the way it was but, as most Palestinians have come to accept, that is a historical fact that is simply not going to change. It has been a huge and difficult step for the Palestinians to accept that, after all it was their land that was stolen from them. But come to accept it they have. That is the most they can be expected to accept. The least they can be expected to accept is to have their own Palestinian State and have Israel give back the land they stole since the creation of the State of Israel with no exceptions. The original boundaries must be restored, including the status of Jerusalem at the time Israel was created.

The least that Israel can be expected to accept is to have their right to exist accepted by the international community, including Palestinians and Arab states. The most they can be expected to give up is all the land they stole after the creation of the state of Israel, a not unreasonable expectation. (Source)

Considering the current circumstances, conventional wisdom would suggest hope for any solution may have been set back for decades, or centuries, unless the backlash from the rest of the world (apart from the United States), along with that of the Israeli people leads to the establishment of a progressive pro-Palestinian Israeli government, and by Pro Palestinian I mean one committed to the right of Palestinians to live and a Palestinian state to exist. Then maybe such a two state solution can become reality. After enough time to build trust it would ideally lead to a European Union type alliance between peoples that are natural partners, having lived peacefully together in the past and being genetically related . My preference, but who am I to say, would be for a single multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious secular state, because I believe religious based states are always a bad idea.

One might wonder if Hamas’s actions were based on a strategy of desperation, thinking that a massive terrorist attack would result in the expected disproportionate genocidal Israeli response, and hoping for a backlash from the rest of the world and the Israeli people, leading to change of government and policy in Israel. In effect, a sacrificing thousands of Palestinian lives (as Hamas certainly understands the power imbalance) in the hope of creating the conditions for the creation of a truly independent Palestinian state as a result.

It has been difficult for people to say out loud one of the statements above, not because the facts do not justify it, but because most of the world does not want to believe it

Franzis Black and White Projects Professional 6 Photo Film Emulation Versions

This is a demonstration of the film emulation capabilities of Franzis Black & White Projects. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the emulation provided by this software but it is indeed an interesting idea. I have not included all the options available but have selected a few film types from the brands I am familiar with. You will see that in many cases the differences are subtle but others are noticeably different.

I have selected a base setting in Franzis Black and White Projects of Natural Maximum Details and Optimization Natural with various film emulations.  Since infra red film does not seem to be included in the choices I have also included a variation with Landscape Infrared setting, as well as an optimized colour version (I don’t recall the software I used for that) just for comparison.

Original From Camera (Panasonic Lumix TS5) 

 Optimized Colour Version

 

Franzis Black and White Projects Versions

 Digital Negative

 

Agfa APX25

 

 Agfa APX 100

 

Agfa APX Pan 400

 

Fuji Neopan Acros 100

 

 Fuji Neopan 400

 Fuji Neopan Neopan 1600

 

 

Ilford Delta 100

 

Ilford Delta 400

 

Ilford Delta 3200

 

Kodak T-Max 100

 

Kodak T-Max 400

 

Kodak T-Max 3200

 

Landscape Infared