It's not clear who ever claimed that DNA alone is the sum of life.

I contended that life is initialized when the DNA is complete, i.e. conception.

In software terms, this somewhat similar to a constructor function for a class.

There is absolutely no subsequent, post-DNA-complete moment when one can be said to transition from "not-life" to "life".

THAT is my argument.

The fact that, post the initial cell division, cells continue to divide, virii contaminate the DNA, neurons grow and memories form, is completely true.

I would like to thank all of the strawman interlocutors for manning the straw and slaying copious tangential arguments that I never proffered.

Here is the theoretical framework that I published a while ago as a raw LaTeX JE here. Only now it's a rendered .pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370948102_proposal_lit_review_seed_14-19

Other improvements include connecting it to Positivism, and showing that Maslow-3D maps nicely to the three branches of everyone's favorite urinal cake, the Constitution.

I have no idea if the URL is visible without a researchgate login, sorry.

"Crossfire Hurricane" was as bollocks as the post-conception arguments for life's commencement on here. Ours is nothing if not an age of tawdry sophistry.

How Can Media Identify 'White Supremacy' In Hispanic Shooter But Not Trans Murderer's Anti-Christian Hate?

These "Singularist" scum need to understand that they have Constitutional right to consistent news.

How can these smelly peasants not know that their "Pluralist" betters are feeding them exactly what they need, in the service of the Holy Narrative?

There re-education camps will need to be expanded beyond the universities in order to reprogram, if it is possible. Or perhaps something darker, if not.

I've been more strident than normal of late in replies to Fusty and d_r than I really care to.

The opinions I've offered are what I consider to be the plain, simple, honest, existential truth.

The replies have not seriously refuted the basics, or offered alternatives.

To the contrary, the replies have been beneficial in terms of helping me refine understanding.

And for that I am sincerely grateful.

Cheers,

CLS

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/575722-the-us-has-never-defaulted-on-its-debt-except-the-four-times-it-did/

A marker for those who get very, very convenient with historical facts, and are likely to do so as there is an attempt at faking some level of fiscal sanity at the Federal level.

Fustacrackitch makes a good point: the Left/Right "dichotomy" is content-free.

Commonplace, but not meaningful. Fusty, as usual, grouses without offering alternatives, except, perhaps, ignoring the no-kidding questions besetting society.

"The sun also rises," he seems to say, in his hemming and hawing way. (SWIDT?)

The very real divide in the discussion, AFAICT, is due to having reverted to a quasi-aristocracy. By which I mean a ruling clique of oligarchs and career bureaucrats.

You can say "Deep State" if there is an interest in trolling, but it's more a function of organizational behavior. Conspiratorial efforts are mostly implicit. The players all went to the same schools, snorted the same Marxist DranO, and think that they are ushering in some sort of "worker's paradise".

The Socialist mantra, pushed by these people, then, is some argument about the plural preceding the singular, individual, sovereign citizen.

It is a tyranny of the majority controlled by a minority vanguard. Since Socialism argues that the many precede the indicviduals, I will henceforth call this the "Pluralist" view. Those adhereing to Natural Law notions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be called "Singularist". It must be stated that a radical individuality is putting too fine a point on my view. The human default is:

1. Life at conception, when the genetic information is complete. There is no magic in general, and especially _no_ magical post-conception moment when life, as such, is attained. It is a diabolical lie from the pit to claim otherwise, irrespective of whatever sophistries and credentials are piled onto the falsehoods to make them sound pleasant.

2. Birth with an immutable gender. Various errors, affectations, and illness may run rampant in society, but gender the idea that gender is a social construct is another diabolical lie from the pit. As Timcast points out, there is a trans genocide. It is pushed by these Pluralists normalizing falsehood, and sterilizing Gen Z. Only the Devil would claim to be helping someone with a knee problem by amputating a leg, but that sort of thing is what is miscalled "care" in our twisted day.

3. Form follows function. One is quite aware that other geometries are possible, but the unspeakable is better left unspoken. Because the future belongs to those who show up. And they show up by having families. Families are properly formed by an XXXY chromosome set. There are no legitimate alternatives, just a pack of lies, however transiently pleasant.

4. Tolerance of folly is not wisdom. Nor are accusations interesting. An alternative argument starting with absolute truth and refuting any of 1-3 is of interest. Change my mind.

To summarize, when I say "Singularist", I really mean that the preferred (though obviously not sole) base unit of society is the family. When I say "Pluralist", I mean those forces bent on replacing what is good with some ersatz, unsustainable garbage. Fusty's chief power seems to be dissatisfaction, so this post (a) will not meet whatever standard he may have, and (b) will not be met with any alternatives. But one tries, nonetheless.

"How safe is my contact-free debit card?" Seems like that should be an easy question to answer, but the Japanese bank that issued the card and the Japanese police won't say. Or maybe they can't?

My plan was to send this query to the Japanese police. They actually have a webform on their website. But the above paragraph was enough to use up most of the character limit. My theory is that the Japanese police do not want to deal with or even talk to foreigners. At all.

My twisted theory is that foreigners might notice things that criminals are doing. Things that are designed to be ignored or overlooked by Japanese people, even when the Japanese people are being targeted by the criminals. Might be helpful to listen? But you sure can't prove that theory by me.

So back to the debit card, eh? I actually saw the card in action for the first time the other day, and I still don't know how the money was extracted, though I'm pretty sure it involved a portable billing device about the size of a smartphone. Seems like an open invitation for an electronic pickpocket, but apparently no one wants to understand such questions. Or say how to prevent it. Faraday Cage perhaps?

I'm not too surprised by the bank's indifference. Whatever money they are making on the deal, they must be dismissing potential theft as a cost of doing business. Some mix of profits from card use and their ability to trace thefts that actually get noticed and reported?

However I'm quite disappointed by the Japanese police. Again. "Live and let live" is one thing, but "Live and let scam" seems to be too much on the criminals' side.

I still like to close with a joke. The one that seems suitable for this topic involves international communication, spinning on the old joke about the plumber.

Imagine a one-minute message. In English, I can convey 100% of the message in one minute. Using my Japanese, it will take about two minutes and comprehension drops. Call it 80%? A typical human translator will run it up to five minutes with comprehension around 60%. But to really mess it up, bring in a machine translator and it will take at least 10 minutes to convey 25% of the information. Suffice it to say the Japanese police love their machine translators.

There's no Sandwich of Relief,
Though't identify as "roast beef",
When 'tis a bun-load o' sad Lefty crap.
And lacking moral rudder,
Ensures the ruin's utter,
When one sails smiling into Satan's trap.

My questions are coming from AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee. Overall it's a good overview of the field circa 2018 from one of the most influential participants, though his final conclusion is that he participated too much in seeking influence before he fell ill and restructured the priorities of his life. I don't want to say there's nothing more dangerous than an amateur philosopher, since that title is supposed to belong to amateur psychologists, but I didn't find that last bit fully convincing, so this "review" is likely to end on a sour note.

The main question and one that I actually submitted to his attention via the website mentioned in the book involves his 5-year predictions on page 136. Since the book was published five years ago, they should be testable now. The problems are that his criteria are hard to evaluate and I lack sufficient data about what's going on in China. I couldn't even apply his criteria to Japan or the States, and I'd like to think I have some idea of what's going on in those countries. The current buzz is mostly about ChatGPT, and I'm not even sure which of his categories applies. Perhaps Business AI pretending to be Autonomous AI?

The elephant in the room question involves the effects of Chairman Xi Jinping's brand new China. Xi is not mentioned in the book, though he was already the dominant leader back then, but a prominent politician he does mention was apparently purged this year and replaced with a trusted Xi loyalist. Looks like his "techno-utilitarianism" is losing out in favor of XI's "strong China" approach. In this area, I rather suspect Kai-Fu may be myopic because so many of his closest friends are Libertarians (though I have yet to meet a Libertarian who can plausibly define his own worship words). My general take is that technologies are morally neutral, but they can be used for good or bad purposes depending on the moral tastes of the users.

There were lots of interesting historical anecdotes in the book, and he seems to be on close personal terms with many of the leading actors. Several of the most interesting parts involved electronic money and WeChat. Now seems obvious that LINE is a poor copy of WeChat and that many of the games with "new forms of money" in Japan are based on widespread business practices in China. Kai-Fu glosses over the privacy implications and potential for authoritarian abuses and I remain unconvinced. Some interesting material about Xiaomi led me to research on that topic. I was amused to learn that the company's name translates to "small rice" in Chinese characters, and less amused to discover the founder's name uses characters meaning "thunder army". Hard to believe that's his real name, but that's what Wikipedia says...

So time for my eclectic and tangential page-linked reactions:

On page 38 he talks about how Chinese people read webpages in contrast to other folks. Mostly triggered my old speculations about the neurological effects of ideographic languages. Originally I was speculating about how books are remembered by fluent readers, with more of the memories moved into the visual cortex for fluent readers and for readers of ideographic languages. In contrast, when reading goes through the auditory cortex. He writes about Chinese people looking at the entire screen, which is how vision works, in contrast to the linear approach of people who are thinking about strings of words the way the ears (and mouth) work. Major advantage for the Chinese? However I was left wondering why the google couldn't have forked the code with a user-controlled option for more holistic displays. The obvious conclusion is that the Chinese default setting would be different, but to each his own. Oh, wait. I forgot that when profit-maximization is the overriding goal costs must be minimized, even when the minimization becomes mindless and problematic...

Page 86 had one of his lists of interesting people whose books I want to read (or have already read). But he also mentioned Fermi, which led me to hope the book might consider Fermi's Paradox and possible negative resolutions linked to AI. I regard it as unfortunate he never went there. The key names on this page were Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio. Page 88 added Sebastian drum and Andrew Ng. There were some other lists of this sort, though I didn't flag those pages.

On page 107 he considers the evil side of AI-powered manipulation of human beings, but only in a dismissive parenthetical reference to "victim" in contrast to beneficiary. Amazon is one of his examples, though he never reaches my conclusion that corporate cancers are bad, notwithstanding his own encounter with a medical cancer later in the book. This part sounded rather naive to me. Perhaps even an example of motivated reasoning? He says quite a bit about monopolies, but he never comes down clearly as for or against them, whereas I think they deserve fundamental opposition. (And I have yet to learn of a better solution approach than a progressive tax on profits linked to market share. Motivate them to demonopolize themselves!)

On page 111 he references the polar opposites, IBM's benevolent uses versus Palantir's malevolent uses of AI technologies. The first part reminded me of IBM's Personality Insights tool from about 15 years ago... As Kai-Fu notes, there are far more dimensions to play with these days, basically transcending human understanding. Our languages literally have no words for them. Personality Insights was being overwhelmed by a mere 75 dimensions... Kai-Fu doesn't speculate, but I think the new models of Facebook, google, and Amazon are using hundreds or even thousands of dimensions--and using them to manipulate us.

On page 164 he titles the section "The Bottom Line", but without actually considering it. He's writing about technological unemployment, but he never considers how the bean counters see it. When you use their version of the bottom line, the size of the target has to consider the integral of the cost function Not just whether a job can be automated, but the size of each target as defined by the number of people who can be profitably replaced. The highest priorities may not go to the most expensive employees or the largest numbers of employees, but rather to the largest products of the two factors. Similar reactions around page 172, and he never seriously considers the unsolvable problem of greed. It's nice that AI could "produce wealth on a scale never before seen in human history", but we have LOTS of historical examples of greedy leaders concentrating the wealth in their own hands. I actually see it as a "motivational problem". Most folks are content with a "good enough" living, while a few folks have an unsolvable problem of needing more. MUCH more.

Page 190 reminded me of The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. (I need to check again for the availability of his newest book...) The optimization bits mostly reminded me of my OS principles course with Dr Gordon Novak...

Page 200 was an extremely weak historical discussion. The robber barons never get mentioned, but maybe that's another case of overlooking his best friends doing awkward things... Increasingly negative reactions to his solution approaches that seem more and more naive as he goes along. On page 212 he speculates about wondering medical treatments without considering how the profit motive twists things. The next page fails to consider profit maximization as it will apply to his "compassionate-caregivers". On page 214 he tips his hat to the problem, but he's clearly afraid to admit that any of his best friends might be socialists of any sort. (He doesn't say much about communism or communists, that that might be because he feels the label has lost its meaning?) Then on page 215 he wraps up this part with an appeal to one of the greediest b-words in the world... I was not amused, though I didn't throw down the book with various negative feelings.Â

Last strong reaction was on page 228, and that was mostly in the forms of questions about developments after he published the book. Chinese trends? And what about Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Might have been suitable for an "updates and errata" webpage, but I couldn't find anything like that on the book's website. (However the book was well edited and I didn't spot any glaring errors. Perhaps one case of dubious numeric agreement?) Overall a provocative and enjoyable book.

You know how it is, when you lay out an existential model describing people as a body/mind/soul fusion, to describe how free will and destiny interact, and then someone tries to snark:

...and you're all: "Dude. I laid it out for you."

Generally academics, lawyers, and bloggers who have not snorted so much Lefty DranO:
Leaving out the tech, faith-based, and humor stuff.
https://townhall.com/ and the rest of the Salem Media lot.
https://legalinsurrection.com/
https://americanmind.org/
https://instapundit.com/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/
https://www.westernjournal.com/
https://amgreatness.com/


[emetic release] https://www.dailykos.com/

\section{Proposed Research Methodology}
Connecting communications geography to election results occurs within a
methodological context. Ballots are cast by individual voters, but the radio station format is a spatial footprint.

Thus, a framework seems helpful both to guide the choices made in conducting the research and to make explicit the biases creeping into those choices.

In going from the individual to the population, this proposal considers a
continuum that moves from the singular voter to the plural precinct as follows:
\begin{center}
\[Maslow (singular) => Dunbar (plural) => Precinct (plural) \]
\end{center}
While the Central Limit Theorem does not gain traction until the middle of that
continuum, it is still useful to consider the foundation within the theoretical
structure.
\subsection{Maslow-3D}
The starting point for this model is Maslow's Hierarchy

\cite{maslowDynamicTheoryHuman1958}. In offering a model describing how Maslow's Hierarchy can be scaled from an individual to a society, it will be helpful to rearrange the hierarchy somewhat. This new form will be called Maslow-3D. We will map its layers into a conceptual three-dimensional (but not scaled) "coordinate system" of body (physical), mind (mental), and soul (metaphysical) categories.

This is a conceptual breakdown. The metaphysical dimension is outside of the geospatial territory of this proposal. There are no units (e.g. IQ) offered for grading the axes. It is purely qualitative, but foundational as an input for Adams (1995) and Rolfe (2012).

\begin{table}[ht!]
\begin{center}
\caption{Maslow-3D}\label{tab:table1}
\begin{tabular}{l|c|l}
\textbf{Axis} & \textbf{Maslow layer needs} & \textbf{Notes} \\
\hline
z, metaphysical & Transcendence & Self-actualization; internal \\
y, mind & Aesthetic, cognitive, esteem & Externally expressable \\
x, physical body & Belonging, love, safety, physiological & External \\
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}

Aspects of the x- and y-dimensions are external. They form the interface of the individual with the societal surroundings. Thus, they are crucial to deriving a social ontology. It is hoped that individual inputs to society are generally positive, moving the population in a generally useful ``direction''. Again, these are not intended to be quantitative. They are just binary directions that relatively reasonable observers might agree upon.

Maslow-3D can also be considered as a loose polar coordinate system for an individual. This is less important for the ``radius'' from the origin point representing individual state to the mind-body coordinates at the moment than the $(x,y,\theta)$ vector of the soul, the moral compass needle, that informs the course along which ``destiny'' may take a person.

Examples:
\begin{enumerate}
\item A healthy diet and modicum of exercise would be a (+) for the body.
\item Junk food and drug abuse would be (-).
\item Investing in education and exposing oneself to opposing viewpoints would be (+).
\item Becoming insular and immersing oneself in fringe viewpoints would generally be (-).
\end{enumerate}

\begin{table}[ht!]
\begin{center}\caption{Quadrants in a "plane of interaction" for the individual}
\label{tab:table2}
\begin{tabular}{c|c}
\hline
\textbf{II.} & \textbf{I.} \\
\hline
+Mental, -Physical & +Mental, +Physical \\
Insufficient exercise, & Generally productive \\
health issues & \\
\hline
\textbf{III.} & \textbf{IV.} \\
\hline
-Mental, -Physical & -Mental, +Physical \\
Poor relationships, criminality? & Showing up for work, \\
& but stagnating mentally. \\
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}
Table 2 is qualitative, like Table 1. Its purpose is to aid in relative
comparisons of concepts.

Individuals choose to participate in arbitrary social networks that vary continuously and superimpose strangely, per Adams's ``Extensible Self'' concept ~\cite{adamsReconsiderationPersonalBoundaries1995}. This author participates, for example, in: a family; neighborhood; a community of faith; state and national citizenship; military veteran networks; professional; and academic networks, switchng between them arbitrarily.

Thus far, we have a qualitative framework with which to contextualize individual choices, for example, voting in elections.

\subsection{Dunbar's Number} While the Maslow-3D idea may be considered novel and may not find much traction, there is more analytic heft available at the \~150 people where Dunbar's number kicks in. Adams' ``extensible selves'' and their overlayed Table 2 vectors make an instantly unwieldy graph. The nodes connect in an arbitrary number of topical lattices. However there is a large enough sample size that, given a survey, an aggregate directional indication could be produced.

This is, at a low level, how one theorizes that the radio station formats interact (as every other form of communication) with individual voters to form a zeitgeist.

Dunbar's Number represents a threshold for a group of people to maintain enough interpersonal context to remain a distinctive cohort. Names are remembered; events shared; peer pressure often works; speech tics are distinctive; influencers may affect choices, e.g.\ voting.

Above this threshold, the power of those peer bonds are diminish rapidly. The new hire at the office is not fully read into the group, and is therefore treated warily.
Dunbar's Number is an important point of inflection for both ends of this research inquiry: politics and FM radio station formats. Politics, because modern liberal democratic government is an externalization of individual concerns. Politics, and the ensuing government, are how to scale beyond individual and extensible self capacity to accomplish larger tasks. Once a political system is instantiated, however, a challenge is introduced: how to communicate from ``the many'' back to the individual? Hence advertising, communications consultants, and political parties attempting to shape opinion via media, e.g. FM radio.

\subsection{Precincts}
Above Dunbar's number we arrive at the Precinct, the unit of analysis for the proposal. The precinct appears to be a group of several thousand voters (though the author personally saw a 2022 case where Virginia law did slice off a street and create a precinct containing roughly 150 voters). Thus, a precinct is an overlaid graph of ``extensible selves'' stacked at an unwieldy depth.

The virtue of the precinct is that at this level, official, testable data are available for research.

\subsection{Methodology Summary}
Arguably, this Maslow-3D/Dunbar/Precinct continuum has the utility of a horoscope and adds nothing to the research proposal.

However, merely treating the integer number of voters in a precinct as a simple block of population is equally unsatisfying. There are issues for which strong opinions are held, and results defy predictability.

People are mercurial. Messy. The only model rich enough to capture the detail of the population is reality itself.

Therefore, a model stretching down from the precinct to the individual ballot seems a boon to deriving research questions. Especially those exposing whether the mutability of voters can be explained by the radio station formats in their precincts.

Getting past the confession that this proposal is a ``best effort'', we can proceed to examine radio station format effects on the precinct.

Any LINE users around here? Let's compare horror stories!

Here's my latest TERRIBLE experience of LINE. The funny part of my story is that no communication is involved. I already know LINE is terrible for communication.

I have been using LINE for a long time to help me learn to read in Japanese. I read some Japanese into the smartphone and get a rough transcript. Then I fix it up. The last trivial step is to use the terrible LINE translator for the rough gist translation, but by that point I should already be pretty sure what it means.

Right now I'm near the end of a rather hairy Japanese book. Suddenly LINE suspended me. WTF? I'm going to try to find out why, but I also know that LINE has no detectable support or help features.

But let me rub it in. LINE deserves to fail as badly as possible and the biggest evidence is the recent closure of their grand LINE shop in Harajuku. Such bad stuff couldn't happen to a more deserving company.

Perhaps leading to the end of civilization? Or perhaps I have missed a recent breakthrough in psychology regarding persuasion and brainwashing?

Let me try to make it more personal: These days are you meeting more people you can't talk with? Or even to?

There's an old saying about politely avoiding the topics of religion, politics, and money, but I think it's gotten much worse than that. If I asked you to name an example of a person you can't talk with, then that's where the safest bets would be as regards the basis of disagreement.

My own bane has been politics, so I'm going to pick an example from politics, from way back in 2016. I remember some meetings with old friends that led to bitter disagreements about a certain election. If we hated the same candidate, then we could talk about it, but if not, then no discussion was possible. Especially impossible to ask about why, but I still noticed something strange. Reasons would be expressed in every direction, but they mostly seemed like random arrows. Eventually I was led to the hypothesis that many people had been targeted, and each of them had been hit by a specific arrow of disinformation. Apparently it was stuck somewhere deep, and there was no sense in pointing out how absurd it was... And let me assure you that some of their beliefs were utterly absurd and have NOT gotten better with age.

In hindsight I now think it was social media contagion. The worst examples involved video links. That meant YouTube was the primary vector of transmission, but the infection source was somewhere else, usually Facebook or Twitter...

However if there had been a major scientific breakthrough in the technologies of scientific persuasion, then I should have heard some of the details by now. Even though psychology is a rather fuzzy, even hairy, field, I still read a lot of books on the topic, and I haven't spotted it yet. The closest thing might be the reason problem, as best described in The Enigma of Reason by Sperber and Mercier. Short summary is that we almost always act without thinking and without reason, but we can easily fool ourselves afterwards with our "excellent" "my side" reasons that are actually confabulations. So my hypothesis is that the masters of persuasion have somehow skipped past the reasoned persuasion part and are now going directly to the actions--and most people are evidently going along with the gag.

Is there a ray of hope to be found? The book suggests that certain kinds of discussions can lead to good reasons and even good solutions to real problems. However I increasingly feel like "You can't get there from here", per the ancient joke, and in particular I can't get anywhere with my available time...