An Observation

 I don't have an opinion on this January 6 Congressional hearing, albeit it appears as an endless process, but what amazes me is the gross stupidity of all concerned. 

Back in the old days, spies were told three rules to survive:

1. Trust no one

2. Never put anything in writing

3. Always make certain there is a second exit

Now these are simple rules to live and survive by. Now applying them to the 21st century is simple:

1. Trust no one! Nothing changes

2. Never put in a text, social media, voice mail, encrypted message etc

3. Always make certain there is a second exit

It seems all these pols get caught on all 3 steps!

Words Mean Something, Sometimes

 Congress has the habit of passing laws often written by lobbyists, and then edited by staff, to meet the needs of campaign financiers. Welcome to politics. What all too often happens in the mix is that words are used which are at best ambiguous and at worst wrong.

Add to this the Chevron ruling by the Supreme Court. Simply it states that no matter how incomprehensible a law may be the Administrative agency may at its sole discretion decide what it means. Furthermore this same Agency may from time to time change the meaning, at will. This was the basis for the power of Administrative Law. Instead of sending it back to Congress for clarity, Chevron allowed un-elected Government employees to decide what they think it should be, the voters be damned.

Now take the recent ruling on masks. Congress mad a sloppy law. The CDC then took the sloppy law and used it to make Administrative policy despite the fact that they did so improperly. Two mistakes, but wait, the CDC relied on science, which in the case of masks really does not exist. Fundamentally we still do not really know how the virus is transmitted. Really. We really do not know but we have lots of academics with demos of how it could work. NOT

Now along comes the NY Times in its classic manner and states:

Should the federal government have the power to address broad public health emergencies?

Last week, a federal judge effectively answered no.

The judge, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who serves on a Federal District Court in Florida and was appointed by former President Donald Trump, issued a nationwide injunction blocking the government’s mask mandate for planes, trains, buses and other forms of public transportation. No matter how you feel now about masks, you should be alarmed by her decision. Judge Mizelle’s ruling could prevent the federal government from effectively and nimbly responding to future pandemics. And long after this pandemic has faded, her approach and rationale could undermine the federal government’s authority to confront other big problems, from occupational health and safety to climate change.

The necessary reference to Trump or Fox News immediately lets the reader know this is pure political palaver. The Judge has a very valid point. I argued this 30 years ago against several FCC rulings. The FCC took actions for which the law was at best vague. This problem occurs again and again. Thankfully this Judge deals with facts and reality and may prevent the hidden Government, namely Administrative Law, from prevailing.

Marketing and Distribution Channels

 Back in 1980 when I went to Warner Cable my boss, Gus Hauser, asked me to create a two way interactive marketing and distribution channel to enhance the QUBE service he had deployed. I took on the challenge with a collection of some of the most creative people I have ever worked with. One of them, Glenn Shapiro, had an MBA and JD from NYU and had a brilliant insight into marketing and sales. I had Richard Vieth who created single-handedly the software and communications on what was then rather rudimentary hardware and software. The team was in my opinion the best one could ever imagine. Shapiro saw us creating an electronic shopping mall, a place where existing stores could advertise, promote and sell their wares on line using our video on demand capability.

I had to think through the alternatives. At the time the simple model was one where we tried to connect supplier (namely the primary service or product provider) with the customer or buyer (or end user). We had before us several models.

1. End to end provider: Namely our system would buy from providers and then do everything in between to sell to the customer. We would view the system as having no intermediary and no wholesale entity. We rejected that due to the cost and complexity. At the time it was akin to a Sear.

2. Bazaar: This model was one where we just provided a platform with no assurances that anyone using it was a quality supplier and the customer purchased at their own risk. All we did was own the infrastructure, in this case the electronic distribution system.

3. Shopping Mall: In this case we would select sellers with some brand recognition and facilitate their access to the medium. It would be akin to a shopping mall agreement; quality and traffic.

There could be a multiplicity of other models. In 1980 we chose the shopping mall.

There is a piece in the NY Times where someone appears to have rediscovered our paradigms after 42 years.  They note:

By the mid-2000s, Amazon was recruiting third-party sellers. If you owned, say, a chain of shoe stores, a representative might contact you and ask: Did you want to start listing shoes for sale? If you said yes, you would pay Amazon a fee. Amazon would send you the addresses of customers who had placed orders on the site all over the United States, and you would be responsible for sending them shoes. Periodically, Amazon would pay you, after taking its cut of what the customers had paid it. In 2006, a year after introducing its Prime membership for customers, Amazon created a service that would drastically expand the seller population. Fulfillment by Amazon, as it was called, enabled merchants to pay Amazon to warehouse and deliver their goods. By making sellers who used F.B.A. eligible for two-day Prime delivery, Amazon incentivized sellers to sign up. These third-party sellers deserve a lot of the credit for making Amazon the juggernaut it is. By competing with Amazon’s own retail division, they stocked the Amazon catalog, drove down its prices and subsidized the build-out of its infrastructure, both virtual and physical. It also meant that from the beginning, Amazon’s success was predicated on a degree of ignorance.

 Amazon became a Bazaar. Namely it facilitated unknown and inaccessible sellers to offer their products. For example, I bought batteries from Amazon, they came and they were all knockoffs from China. Poorly replicated at that. I also bought a software license only to find it unusable and the vendor refusing to reimburse. The list goes on. Trust in Amazon disappeared. Totally! The return process went awry and the quality was gone. One bought the proverbial pig in a poke.

Now this is just not Amazon. I have tried Walmart and in a sense they are worse. They use third parties with little if any remediation in my opinion and my experience. Worse, they unilaterally change your order without your consent. They just tell you what you ordered has been changed to what they think you should have! Amazon has not gotten that low, yet.

Will this careless set of actions resulting in loss of trust force us back to brick and mortar stores? For some things they have. One cannot trust an online purveyor of pharmaceutical or related products. They most likely are made in China and with ingredients that are risky at best. 

The solution is unfortunately FDA type regulation. In my opinion and in my experience this is something that Amazon is deficient in. Perhaps now is a time to get ahead of the bow wave.

NJ 2022 04 22

 Things are starting up again. First the town prevalence is up-ticking to where we were last August.

The county is really up-ticking. This is well above last summer.

Doubling times are collapsing.

Overall we see a return based on almost all break throughs. Now this is likely much worse since these are PSR tests and they may be at best 20% of the total. Deaths and hospitalizations are nominal.

Mathematics and Grade School

 

Back in the 1940s when I started to learn math the material was a combination of dense and rote. You started to know the integers, then addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, and then the infamous word problems. I recall the 3rd grade with Mrs Hill and the horrible math book. It had thousands of examples to work through. I had gotten the concept but why do 100 divisions each night! I had other stuff to do. Math was like penance, saying 100 Hail Marys etc. I found out a way around it. Mrs. Hill just looked to see if you has written answers and she never checked to see if it was correct. Neatness counted. So I just neatly put in number that I thought looked close and got straight full credit. I learned how to smartly guess and give the teacher what she wanted.

 Now as math increased in complexity it suddenly burst out from behind the "numbers" to the concepts in my Junior year of High School. I rapidly left my class mates behind as I studied calculus, non-Euclidean Geometry, tensors and other new things that  intrigued me.

At no time did I have to consider the socio-political implications of 2+2. Along comes the article in the NY Times about First Grade texts in Florida. They note:

In most of the books, there was little that touched on race, never mind an academic framework like critical race theory.But many of the textbooks included social-emotional learning content, a practice with roots in psychological research that tries to help students develop mind-sets that can support academic success.The image below, from marketing materials provided by the company Big Ideas Learning — whose elementary textbooks Florida rejected — features one common way teachers are trained to think about social-emotional learning.

 So if I am asked what 9+5 is equal to, and all I know is 9+1, do I get credit, partial credit. Is it some different ethnic/racial/gender variant? So if 9+1 is 10, then 10+1 is 11 and so forth. That is an algorithmic way to get to the final answer. Is this the New New Math, that Venn diagram nonsense of the early to mid 70s? Or is it an excuse for poor learning.

There are many ways to solve a math problem, that frankly is the beauty of math. Yet there is always a right answer. Right in the context of using the rules. Namely mathematicians have the allowed rules or techniques so that others can validate a proof. One can assemble them in a variety of ways and still have a valid proof. Yet in the above example we have a case that the student may never get to 9+5 because all he knows is 9+1. The student does not have the algorithm I proposed. In addition the concept of such an algorithm is so complex it would occur to only some brilliant young student.

Frankly the entire article is just a rehash of what Educational academics spend their time doing. Painful as it may be, memorizing the multiplication tables is essential. Knowing the Lebesque integral of a Markov process may not be but learning how to add, subtract, multiply and divide are critical. Infusing these key constructs with current politico-academic nonsense just detracts from getting 9+12 correct!

Now this has become an international issue. The Socialist UK paper, The Guardian, notes:

In one example, a colored graph features levels of “racial prejudice” by age. Another example, under the heading “adding and subjecting polynomials”, begins with the words: “What? Me? Racist?” and uses the statistical results of a common survey about unconscious bias as an example for a set of mathematics problems....The other examples make references to “social and emotional learning” or “social awareness”, concepts that conservative education activists say are a gateway to leftwing ideology. “Those examples were given with no context and were not even elementary-level material,” Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association that represents more than 150,000 educators, said. “So it seems like it’s more about smoke and mirrors of trying to accomplish a political agenda than really about what we are teaching our kids.” Florida’s banning of the books is widely seen by critics as an extension of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s “culture war” on the supposed indoctrination of children in schools.

Frankly, math books should be just that, math books. Cut out the color pictures, cut out the propaganda and mind bending, focus on the basic principles. Students should have the basic tools of arithmetic,  geometry, algebra. Today's world demands a modicum of capability in using a spread sheet, looking after one's IRA and the like. The fundamental problem is eventually the teachers. Teachers in the US must pass a mountain of certifying courses on such things as presentation methods. Namely what type of slides or projectors. If a math PhD from say MIT, back when they did real academics, not now of course where the same nonsense seems to effuse amongst the Commissar controlled faculty, that educated person would be prohibited from teaching in any Primary or Secondary school. But alas as now MIT has a Union perhaps we can get the same level on nonsense.

Slightly Pregnant?

 One is or is not. There is no in between, unless it is some new woke phenomenon. Now a tactical nuclear weapon is exactly the same. A tactical weapon is 1 to 10 KT, about the size of Hiroshima. Now if that means anything to a younger generation it should mean the total destruction of a city. Buildings demolished, life as we know it gone in a flash for several mile radius. 

A tactical weapon is just a nice renaming of the basic element, a total death machine. It not only demolishes things, living and otherwise, but sends out radioactive clouds that spread their death elements across the planet. 

Yes a 50 MT weapon would destroy New York, a few dozen would destroy the planet. That is why they were never used. Back in the 70s it became clear to both sides that they only way to win is not to play that game. Somehow Putin and his ilk are playing with fire and they must be both clueless and willing to lose everything.

It really demands that someone stand and describe the horrors of these weapons and why their only use is not to be used. That someone has yet to be found, either in Washington or Moscow.