Taken over the course of just a minute, all from the same spot along the prairie path. The second two are panoramas.
I really like this first one.
The panoramas are also okay.
I appreciate how different they are from one another.
The new ones are the Champaign County Forest Preserve District sticker a bit right of center at the top, and the Obama Presidential Center sticker a bit right of center at the bottom.
We got the former by attending the Whiskey Walk at Buffalo Trace Prairie on Sunday. That was wonderful great fun. A nice walk, lots of whiskeys to taste (and some non-whiskeys as well). I ran into three former coworkers and got to catch up with them—a fun treat. And there were several dogs including a very well-behaved golden retriever who was (very inappropriately) running off-leash—a fact that didn’t seem to bother anybody.
Jackie got the latter when she and her friend Rosie went to the Obama Center on a trip to Chicago (and gave the sticker to me, because she knows I like to put stickers on my laptop).
Many websites have started running some sort of “human-verification” script before showing the content. I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes (these seem to be much simpler than a captcha); I assume they’re just running some script that AI content scrapers don’t support, and if you don’t let the script run, they assume you’re a content scraper and don’t show you the content.
The problem is that I don’t let random scripts from third-party sites run on my machine.
This is primarily a security measure on my part. Secondarily, it also blocks most advertising. (I don’t really care about the ads themselves; I primarily object to the risk that random scripts will do something malicious on my machine. It’s still nice to avoid the ads.)
Yesterday there were three different pages that I tried to look at that didn’t load, because I wouldn’t let the “are you a human” scripts run.
That made me a little sad, but not sad enough to let random scripts run on my machine. Maybe I missed reading a really interesting post. But there are many, many interesting posts out there. I don’t have time to read even a tiny fraction of the things I’d find very interesting, so I’m generally unwilling to put much effort into getting to any particular post.
If that post is your post. . . . Either post it so I can see it, or just accept that it will go unread by me. I’ll be okay either way.
This is rather the opposite problem of the one my brother recently posted about: a talk we attended, where SFWA brought in several people to talk about the problem of detecting AI-written manuscripts.
Most of the people in the audience were writers, so of course there was roughly equal concern about false positives (falsely identifying actual human-written manuscripts as AI) as there was about false negatives (failing to identify an AI-written manuscript as AI). No one wants their work to get turned away because people assume it was written by a bot, and of course a single false accusation could ruin not only all hopes of a particular work seeing success, but ruin an entire career.
I’m not worried about AI killing us all, but I’m rather annoyed by people using AI to make my life worse in various ways, and by people who worry about AI making my life worse in these other ways.
Full disclosure: I am not handy at all.
Having said that…. Jackie bought this stool perhaps a decade ago, to use for sitting at her spinning wheel. Turned out, she really liked it, and has used it for all manner of sitting since then—any textile arts activity (weaving, etc.), but also just sitting at the dining table.
She shellacked it herself, having decided on shellac because it is so non-toxic, compared to pretty much any other wood finish.
Over the past ten years or so, the shellac wore along the front edge of the stool, and it got scuffed up in various places. She’s been complaining about this for a while now, and I bought a fresh can of shellac and some sandpaper, so she could fix it. Just lately she’s been complaining that the front edge was getting kind of splintery, where the wood had worn, after the shellac wore away.
It took a while, but I eventually understood that she was hoping that I would go ahead and refinish her stool for her. (I’d thought that, since she’d done it herself in the first place, she’d have a proprietary interest in doing it again herself. Turns out, no.)
Today she complained again about how the splinters were catching not only on her clothes, but also on her skin. So I said, “Right! I’ll fix it!”
It took a while to track down the sandpaper, but once I had that, the smoothing off of the splintery bits went very quickly. Then I opened the can of shellac and brushed it on.
The directions say to wait an hour, sand it again, and then give it another coat. I’m sure that would be a great idea, but I’m not at all sure that I’ll do so. It’s actually looking pretty good with just one more coat over the coat Jackie gave it 10 years ago.
So now I am feeling very handy. Handy enough to feel somewhat manly as well.
I hesitate to take a victory lap regarding my predictions for the Iran conflict, and my predictions for the harms produced by AI. This post is just to say: I stand by what I have been saying.
With a bit of commentary, here’s the posts I’m standing by:
One thing that’s a little difficult just now is structuring your investments so that when the AI bubble collapses your whole portfolio doesn’t collapse along with it. That’s harder than you might think, because AI, and AI-related stuff (power generation, data center construction, real estate under data centers, lending money to AI companies, etc.) add up to be most of the S&P 500 now.
I’ve been toying with various ideas—investing in foreign companies, investing in dividend-paying stocks, investing in government bonds. I just heard a podcaster claim that really the only sectors of the economy that aren’t mostly AI-related now are maybe consumer staples and health care, which aren’t really enough to add up to a diversified portfolio. He suggested just investing in short-term government securities, and waiting for the bubble to pop. So that aligns nicely with my preconceptions.
The ur-text for the FIRE movement (Financial Independence Retire Early) is Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. I wrote a review of the book back in my Wise Bread days, so I won’t repeat that here. Rather, I want to take a look at the book’s investment strategy. Because many things investment-related changed rather dramatically between 1992 when the book was originally published, and 2018 when they brought out a revised edition, and now things have changed again.
The book began as a series of in-person seminars, that turned into a workbook with a set of audio tapes, back in the 1980s. Their investment strategy reflected those times. See my post on how my own investment strategy grew out of exactly that period.
At its most bare-bones, the original investment strategy was quite simple:
This investment strategy made a lot more sense when long-term Treasury bonds paid 14% than they did when rates dropped down under 3%.
The result was a lot of criticism. But a lot of that criticism was misguided. The point of the FIRE investment strategy was not maximum return on your investment portfolio. The point was to generate a reliable stream of income that matched your spending.
If I remember the numbers correctly, Joe Dominguez got his spending down into the $6000-a-year range. If you could live on that, and could earn 14% on your investments, you probably didn’t even need $100,000 invested in T-bonds to cover all your spending and have enough of a surplus to reinvest against inflation.
Still, between the great financial crisis (call it 2007) and the end of the pandemic (call it 2022), the strategy didn’t work at all. For much of that period, the real yield on long-term Treasury securities was below 2%. It was often below 1%. So the revision published in 2018 advocated for a much more traditional strategy of investing in a blend of stocks and bonds. I haven’t checked the numbers, but I’m sure that strategy did much better than the “only long-term T-bonds strategy” would have.
I wanted to write just a little here, advocating for that old investment strategy, now that interest rates are getting high enough to make it somewhat more tenable, because the blended-stock-and-bond strategy loses something: It loses the absoluteness of having a stream of income that covers your expenses.
Think of it this way. It would be pretty easy to come up with an investment portfolio that beats T-bonds 85% of the time. But if 15% of the time it fails to produce a stream of income that covers your expenses? Well, then you’re not financially independent, and you’re not ready to retire early.
That’s what the T-bond strategy offered, and I’m glad that interest rates are getting high enough to make it seem a little more reasonable once again.
I’ve long thought some agility ladder training would help with my sword fighting. But never having trained with one, I hesitated to buy one. (Not so much for the expense—they’re cheap enough—as for having yet another thing to find space for, store, and keep track of.)
Instead I bought some sidewalk chalk and drew one. These squares are 18 inches each way which seemed kind of average. But a bonus of the chalk version is I can change it every time, if I want to.
Of course, as soon as I drew it, the dog wanted to participate.
Another bonus: although we have several nice days coming up, I know I need to start using it immediately, because it will get worn away or washed away soon enough.
Now I’m studying agility-ladder stepping patterns.
Got both Covid and flu immunizations yesterday. The pharmacy attendant fit both shots under a single bandaid.
My arm is slightly sore, and I feel just a trifle achy. I’ll focus on stretching and mobility work for today.
I’ve written before about my own take on verifying citizenship for voters (at registration time, not at voting time) and on how the right to vote should be treated like other rights (not abridged without due process).
Critics fear that states could use the system to purge large numbers of valid voters from their rolls ahead of the midterm elections.
Source: Supreme Court Allows Use of Trump Administration’s Expansive Database for Voter Screening – NYT
I was briefly worrying about this, but then I remembered that I have already voted. Phew.
Jackie and I have exercised the franchise.
