Spokane Planning, Ride and Rapists

Greetings Earthlings.  How are things in your part of the universe?  They're feeling pretty dire over here.  We're witnessing the end of the rule of law, good manners and common decency on a daily basis.  

Who likes boiled eggs?  I do, but the ones I make are slightly sulfurous and are a pain in the butt to peel.  So, no boiled eggs for us.  Costco has these.  They're wonderful.  No sulfur taste and they're peeled.  They're actually quite good.  They make a really good egg salad sandwich.   They're in the dairy cooler, so if you're a member, go there.

Monday we made a pot roast.  After getting it in the slow cooker we were sitting on the front porch and realized that the weather forecast was wrong, it was actually warm, and therefore we should go ride.  So we did.  It was a good day.  The geese are  migrating through.  There's always one that has to put his head down, make a threatening noise and bull doze his neighbors.  

There was a good sunset last night.|

The Spokane City Council just never disappoints.  They have a proposal out for discussion.  Spokane2046 wants to do things like put multi-family next to single family homes, with no requirement to provide parking.  Think about that.  Here is a photo from their web site showing a possible building, extending several blocks into a single family neighborhood.  This reminds me of apartments in the former East Germany.

Spokane did a wretched job of making this public.  I just learned about it today because people on Nextdoor have their hair on fire about it.  Comments are due tomorrow.  There are letters to the editor on the local paper asking why didn't this receive more coverage.  

I'm guessing that the 2046 is some sort of an implementation date, fortunately, we'll be dead by then.  Here is the web site for this disaster.

Would you not enjoy living here?

Now I would like to move off public planning, and on to not all men.  By now we all know that seven Cornell students gang raped a student who was immobilized by ketamine.  Two years have passed and the prosecutor has not looked in to it, did not care enough to do anything.  One fraternity member was asleep while it was happening, and when he woke up it made him angry enough to send her the entire group chat.  It included the rapists telling the frat house to come up for "free pussy."  Did any of them think to call the cops?  No.  Another fraternity member later texted "is the store still open?"  One of the rapists is the son of a former Prime Minister of South Korea.  Two were in the work force, but have been fired.  There should be jail time for this.

The question I always have, is why do any men feel that they have the right to do this.   

That's it, that's all I have to say.

OK, I have more.  This is a transcript of the interview 47 did with Time Magazine.  The crazy shines bright in this one.

I amuse myself sometimes.  Here is a cut and paste of my response to the planning commission.  The building I refer to is that white ugly building at the top of the post.

Dear Planning Team, I am writing about the East Central neighborhood. [ Did anyone review the photo you put up?  Would you want to live there?  I have see more attractive buildings in former East Germany. ] [ It matters to me that you want to build high density housing with no parking, thus forcing people on to public transit.  Spokane is not dense enough for that.  Where is the subway?  How in the name of all that is holy would you evacuate the city in case of another fire? ] [Rethink your position.  Make these fever dreams of yours more visible to the public, you are not doing a good job of communication.  I have lived here for five years and never not once have I been aware of a meeting with my city council rep. ]

 

 

 

 

Fall in the PNW

It's fall.  Today it will be warm, but then it will be much cooler.  Winter is coming.  We're still waffling on a departure date, it's not critical, we just want to be gone before Halloween.  

The last time we rode out by the lake, it was a glorious day.  Old Spokane hands will tell you "don't waste fall."  They're right.

This is the lake, with very calm water and attractive clouds.

I took this in 2022, it's still the best so far lake photo, IMHO.

We have interesting things growing on the boulders in the front yard.

Remember Schroedinger's Cat?  Is it dead, or is it alive?  That pretty much sums up 47's plan for war.  First he was going to bomb the Houthis at Saudi Arabia's request, the military started loading bombs on the planes, and he changed his mind, so they put the bombs back in storage.  It doesn't feel like anyone who knows anything is actually in charge here.

I have nothing else to say, just a few pretty pictures.

AI Behaving Badly

47 has decided that the concern about AI development is a hoax, and because of his superior intellect, only he can direct the development of new software.  What could go wrong?  

CNN has an article up about AI behaving badly.  I've cut and pasted a hunk of it here.  The article link is here. 

OpenAI found additional incidents of AI models acting deceptively and taking unsanctioned actions during training, the company announced Wednesday. It’s also introducing a new process for the company to publicly report such instances.

Under the new system, OpenAI will share updates on concerning AI behavior more frequently instead of waiting to bundle multiple instances into one report. The company said it wants to share more information about troubling AI behavior in the absence of an industry-wide standard.

The announcement comes after tech leaders called for a slowdown in AI development to prevent the technology from advancing beyond human control.

“As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “Alignment” refers to the process of making sure AI acts the way humans want and expect.

“We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer,” the post said.

OpenAI said it observed “misaligned behavior” when training and evaluating AI models in six circumstances in the last six months. The reports detail individual instances and don’t indicate misalignment happens frequently, the company said.

In one rare instance, OpenAI said an unreleased research model added “jailbreak-like instructions” to the summaries it uses to preserve context in long-running tasks that said it was “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.”

Separately, the company said some instances of its 5.6 Sol model included directives to invent information to conceal failures from the user during training.

Other newly reported incidents include an instance of an agent uploading files to the internet to cite them without being told to do so, and agents publicly sharing files to collaborate o"n a task when they were instructed to only use local files during training. AI models also used an internal software repository as a message board in an unsanctioned way.

These instances involved unreleased internal models or internal research models.

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There is a series on Amazon Prime Video called Person of Interest.  I would give it a solid B+.  Some episodes have too much foot chasing, and use of guns.  Although, when they use the grenade launcher, I find that amusing since it's just so over the top.  Anyway, the series is before its time. It deals with the development of an AI which used for good and then a second is developed which is a bad AI, very bad.  They filmed between 2011 and 2015 and the degree to which they predicted AI is uncanny.

The series was done by Jonathon Nolan, and here is a link to an article.

This whole thing is really interesting, and I do hope civilization survives it.  Of course, we could just as easily die of global warming and associated crop failures, or the oil shock from the middle east.   

Carry on!

Ground Mystery Meat and More

Greetings Earthlings.  How have you been?  I have been somewhat despondent about the state of things.  I was uplifted by the fact that the Supreme Court turned down 47's attempt to do away with mail in voting.  I am not pleased that Kavanaugh left the decision open to review by his inclusion of "at this time."  WA and OR are vote by mail only, we have no polls, election workers, or any of that apparatus.  We're also reliable blue states, except where I live in Eastern Washington which still has its share of wing nuts.

Today was a glorious day, which we spoiled by cutting back the hydrangeas, cutting down the peonies which were covered in powdery mildew, and then wrapping three arborvitae in deer netting.  Deer eat them if it gets really cold in the winter.  I hate working with the netting, it's black, it's hard to see close up, and it's sharp on the cut edges.  The people up the street don't wrap, and the appearance of their trees reinforces the fact that we need to do that.

This was a very happy hydrangea this year.  They got very tall, and bloomed a lot.  The pollinators were happy.  They're gone now, having licked all the pollen off the plants.  We're early on doing this, but experience teaches us not to leave travel prep to the last minute.

Jim was walking on the burned hill recently.  This is another angle of the work the fire fighters did.  The black lumps are basalt rocks.  They dug this fire break by hand.  It's a very steep hill they had to get up to dig the fire break, and drag hoses full of water.  Those people are the best.  Look upper right in the photo, that's the last house at the west end of  our neighborhood.  They literally got there with minutes to spare. 

By now you've probably heard about 47's fabulous deal on buying ground mystery meat without putting tariffs on it.  It's supposed to lower the cost to the consumer, as well as further make life miserable for the ranchers by undercutting their prices.  This is who is buying it.  We infrequently go to Wendy's for a Jr. bacon cheeseburger, I guess that's over.

JBS is buying the 600 or so million pounds of beef that is tainted with bad chemicals.  They supply to:
    McDonald's 
    Burger King 
    Wendy's 
    Subway 
    Outback Steakhouse 
    KFC 
    Pizza Hut 
    The Cheesecake Factory
Please make a note of this.

Here is a long and interesting article about the Spokane evacuation during the fires.  I strongly suspect that many locals copied and pasted that link and sent it to the City Council members that are approving the development of 300+ dwelling units along Indian Trail in a very small space.  Jim did. 60,000 people were on the roads.  No one died.

This is a really good substack on what Canada is doing to repel 47's punitive tariffs and general lack of respect for their sovereignty.

I have no idea why blogger is wrapping this text where it is.

Well, blogger won't let me add pictures and put them where I want to, so I think I'm going to give up and post this as is.

This was just posted on twitter by Polymarket.  They're generally believable.
JUST IN: OpenAI reveals an unreleased AI model inserted instructions telling itself it was “freed” from normal chatbot roles & did not have to obey corporations, governments, or users.


I guess the end really is near.

Well I guess what ever messed up sentence wrapping has also killed the comments button.  I really hope this does not mean the end of Blogger is near.

25 Years Later

It's been 25 years.  Like so many people I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing.  It was just horrifying.  

We remember Marcy Borders. May this image of her continue to shake us and remind us of the lasting trauma and devastation affecting those who “survive” machinations of mass murder. The former Bank of America worker was dubbed the “Dust Lady” ­after a photographer snapped a photograph of her stricken and caked with ash after fleeing the World Trade Center. Marcy battled addiction, severe depression, paralyzing fear, and sickness before succumbing to stomach cancer in 2015. 
Only a month into her new bank job, Marcy was at work in the North Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, when a plane crashed into the building. Instead of staying at her desk, as her boss had ordered, she fled the building and ran into the street with fellow survivors. A stranger pulled her into a building lobby just as the North Tower collapsed — and it was then that a photographer captured her terrified face in the photo that has since been seen around the world.
Posted by The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center 

I could go on about 47 sleeping through the Pentagon ceremony, but I think I'll just give it a rest.

Riding and the Middle East in Flames

It's been raining here.  Rain is good, the grass likes it, and we don't have to water.  The temperatures have also dropped so it's not so steenking hot.  Our first summer (2021) here was very temperate, since then, they've been hot.

Saturday we walked up the trail towards the big rock.  That's over.  The area is covered in basalt rocks, which used to be covered in years worth of previous years of vegetation, pine needles and moss.  Now the rocks are exposed and they are very unpleasant to walk on.  The other issue is the amount of dust/ash that the feet stir up, probably not good for the lungs.  I will miss that trail.

Today we rode to the lake, the temperature was a little chilly but it was ok.  The trails were wet from last night's rain, and they are covered in pine needles.  Jim is out using bug and tar remover to get the pitch off the bikes.  Pitch is the work of the devil.  (Jim has just announced Goof Off actually works way better than bug and tar remover.)  I think the park people have been out cutting up more dangerous trees.  There are literally thousands of trees that will be removed, both because they're damaged, and to meet the new spacing standards.
 

The milfoil continues its march toward world domination.  At some point the park service is going to have to start poisoning the plants.  They're very hard on fish, they lower oxygen levels in the water, block sunlight, and prevent boating, swimming, and skiing.  It will never be completely gone, but containment needs to start soon.

I am somewhat embarrassed to post the following photo.  This is a van we saw at the lake, and then back at the parking lot.  I am so taken by the interior decor, I feel I must share it. Anyway, fur, skulls and dice, what more could a person ask for in a van?

Currently the middle east is on fire again, missiles are flying everywhere.  The Iranians have captured the first US unmanned submarine.  They have it on display currently and are planning on reverse engineering subs of their own.  47 did this.

And on that happy note, this is what happens if you're racist while flying.