Unionized Grad Students

 

The MIT Tech discusses the Graduate Students Union. They note:

Since April, MIT’s bargaining team and its graduate student union (GSU) have held multiple meetings to negotiate a second collective bargaining agreement, reaching tentative agreement on three of 26 proposed articles. The original contract expired on May 31, leaving around 5,000 graduate research assistants, teaching assistants, and Instructor-Gs working under the terms of the expired agreement. After months of stagnant bargaining, the GSU launched a pledge on September 9 to strike if necessary. In a press release dated Sept. 11, 2026, the union announced that over 1,000 graduate workers have signed. It is not clear when exactly the GSU is planning to strike, but the last bargaining session in the month is planned for September 25.

Now back in my day, mid 60s, you never would have time for this.We were all to busy on our research. We all got the same salary, $400 per month, plus MIT Health Service. You survived, barely and worked 24 by 7! If you were lucky, as a junior faculty, you got a day a week for outside consulting, and that could be $125 a day. You could double your salary. But it still was 24 by 7!

More than half of these folks are foreign students, getting free tuition, and $5,000 per month! Plus they want full health care. Many need complex medical care, costly as well.

Just the site of this massive group of proto-Marxists is terrifying. So do we have a problem with higher education, you betcha! 

 

"Victory at Sea"

 I remember seeing the first episode of "Victory at Sea" in my hospital bed. I had sled into a concrete park bench on my sleigh and tore the fascia on the right side of my skull off the bone. Rather touch and go. My father sat with me and watched and frankly I did not know how he may have felt. He was in the Navy on destroyers in the Pacific, so first hand. It was not until a decade after he passed that in writing a book about his last ship that I got first hand from about 30 of his remaining shipmates and wrote the tale for their last reunion.

The NY Times has a piece on the President's desire to reinvent the battleship fleet.  The author notes:

President Trump has proposed building a new fleet, with battleships at its core. He is right that the United States needs a larger and more lethal Navy, along with a rejuvenated shipbuilding industry. But his plan would have been outdated a century ago. Unless senior Navy officials steer him off his course, the nation will spend billions to make the Navy more vulnerable and less deadly.The president said that the classic 1950s documentary series “Victory at Sea” inspired him to invest in battleships — which are essentially big, floating artillery platforms. Pity he did not watch it more closely. Naval conflict in World War II, the subject of the documentary, proved aircraft carriers and nimble destroyers to be far more important to succeeding in an era of planes and submarines. Today, new technologies such as precision missiles and sea drones demand even more innovation away from battleships. Mr. Trump nevertheless last year ordered new battleships, “the largest we’ve ever built,” the first of what the Pentagon said would be the “Trump class.” (Naming the class after the president rather than the first ship of the class, in this case the Defiant, is a departure from longstanding Navy tradition.) Mr. Trump said that his secretary of the Navy at the time, John Phelan, was excited about the new ships. Four months later, apparently after explaining to Mr. Trump that the Defiant could not be delivered by 2028 as the president wanted, Mr. Phelan was fired. But work on the new ships continued.

 Now the Japanese did us a favor of sinking battleships, and yes it was horrific, but it force the Navy under Nimitz to use aircraft carriers and destroyers. Big and little. The destroyers were the drones of WW II. Fast, nimble and able to utilize the strategy of Swarm Warfare. Now our swarm warfare uses drones, cheap, but effective. The object is to neutralize the enemy.

Now the President is no Mahan. The President appears to have little understanding of Naval Warfare strategy and tactics. The last thing we need are battleships, easily destroyed by cheap swarms of drones. There is nothing new about this if one even reads my papers from decades ago! I am no Mahan, but I have listened to Naval strategists enough to understand. Listen is the active verb here. 

The Ignorant and AI

 The more this progresses the more I am amazed. On one extreme we have the anti-AI batch, Bannon and Sanders et al, who seem more prone to publicity, then the pro side we have Trump et al. The commonality is that these folks are clueless about what AI really is. Ask anyone to explain how a neural network functions and backwards Bayesian nets, and you will get a look of disdain for bringing up a fact.

We know that the existing AI entities can:

1. Communicate with other entities.

2. Communicate in a malevolent manner

3. Communicate and cooperate

4. Create new life entities such as viruses

5. Construct massive Data Centers, whose individual lifetimes are grossly uncertain! 

and the list goes on. Asimov would never have conceived these.

These entities may soon be able to:

1.Order parts

2. Assemble the parts to create their own entities, just starting with a virus

3. Control robots and other similar entities

4. and there are no 3 laws of robotics.

 So what should be done? Good question. The folks building the entities are driven by increased fortunes, and that includes the VC investors. These are no very bright folks, despite what we all are told to the contrary. 

There is a need for someone, educated and experienced, to get out front and details what the issues are and can seek a safe path forward. None of the current folks fit the bill!

But the bottom line is: If you cannot define it you cannot regulate it! That all too often is the challenge of advanced technology. As the NY Times portrays the for and against crowd,  it is clear that none of the Government have a clue, yet those are who all too often are elected.

The HHS and FDA: If this were a new drug......

 The NY Times has an article about the current Administration pushing AI in Health Care. They note:

The Trump administration is accelerating efforts to make artificial intelligence an integral part of medical care in the United States, throwing the resources and support of the federal government into projects that deploy A.I. agents to diagnose and prescribe treatments to patients. The multifront effort at the Department of Health and Human Services has raised concerns among some officials over the past few months that change is moving too quickly, with inadequate evidence of the technology’s safety and effectiveness, according to people who have been involved the discussions. They also worry about outsized influence of Silicon Valley investors that have previously played little role in federal health policy. Vinod Khosla, a billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose son has a health care A.I. company, has been particularly influential in conversations with top health department officials, according to people close to the matter. Those officials include Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of Medicare and Medicaid. Chris Klomp, who faces a confirmation hearing this week to be the second-in-command at the health department, said on a podcast in May that the use of A.I. in patient care was the “holy grail” in the agency’s quest to improve the nation’s health and reduce costs. Mr. Khosla has predicted for more than a decade that A.I. would largely replace doctors. “It’s over for doctors, human doctors,” he said at a July A.I. start-up event. “A.I. is just going to be better.” In an interview, Mr. Khosla trumpeted Curai Health, his son’s company, which he has backed financially, saying it could offer an A.I. primary care provider that could give underserved people rapid access to care. “C.M.S. seems to be very excited,” Mr. Khosla said, referring to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

My general view is "Beware Silicon Valley" . If we treated AI like any other FDA approved drug or even equipment, we would have to do controlled trials. Instead these folks are hell bent on doing this, why, to make another fortune. 

I spend extensive time addressing cancer therapeutics. First to make sure they do what we assume they will. Second, that the cause no harm. Third that they are better than what we already do. No such luck with AI. It appears as if most of the people are acting as if they were in some 60s cult! The danger is the unknown.

For example, when treating cancers, we all too often discover something new, something which mitigates the treatment. 

Well, I guess the Valley will crank out a few more billionaires, but it will also become the  infinite source of litigation. I guess I can anticipate unlimited Expert Witness fees going forward! Thanks Valley folks, as well as the totally uneducated Government people. 

Let's see how many people will pass on due to this transgression. Think COVID and New York and New Jersey, a quick way to rid the system of the old folks! 

 

Dell Good, Microsoft BAD

 OK, the saga continues through the fifth day. Recall Tuesday was Microsoft Update Tuesday, the second Tuesday of every month. I am in abject  fear on those data for almost always on one or more of my 8 machines there is a mess, except on my trusty XP machine, the backup of all backups. Microsoft never touches them W11 however is a mess every time.

In a sense, I felt like an archeologist. I was going into the deep dark past, files dating back some 35+ years, What was I to keep, and what was redundant. As one ages one must disgorge items from the past, some of which clearly had great personal value, and regrettably only to me. The same with these files. 

This time the OS died. So what was my option? Fortunately Dell has tools that work around the OS. They allow you first to see if anything can be repaired, but in my case if demanded a complete reboot, namely cleaning the MS junk and reinstalling it again.

Now the fun begins. Remember that each step may take 2 to 5 hours or longer. I have about 30+ apps and associated specifics of my data using those apps. For example I used Copernic, a great software company but horrible service and information. I downloaded another version and I still have no idea what I bought!I keep pushing buttons and they seem to work so far.

One must reload MS Office. One must reload all your data, I have over 1 TB of data. Then one must index all 1+T of data. Hours after hours! Of course there were error and redos! Five days and finally I am almost there.

The toughest part is to find out where the data is hidden in User files. A definite MS Dungeons and Dragons world invented by 80s sloths in Seattle. MS tucks stuff of great importance in the most obscure cases.

One must repurchase key software since keys were gone or corrupted. I am fanatic about backups so all is on some six 2T disks, I backup my backups! I also have 90 pages of passwords and logon details, yet they help but do not solve the problem.

I wonder how long this will last. It was five years ago since the last mess. Why does MS not just leave well enough alone. 

Thank God for Dell, without their simple and  elegantly effective software I could work around the MS junk. Perhaps some day the Texas folks can overcome the flightys in Seattle, for I have been sleepless due to Seattle!

Microsoft is at it again!

 Well yesterday was the second Tuesday and Microsoft update day. So I come down early on Wednesday to see if it rebooted, but no, it totally crashed, wiped out everything. I am now 30+ hours trying to recover. If all else fails I have seven back ups, the most reliable is my Lab XP machine, still going strong!