Business, Space

Careful With Your Drafts

3 Comments

This story reminds me of about thirty years ago, when I was pulling an all-nighter at Rockwell to finish a major deliverable to the Air Force on a study contract on launch systems. PCs were a relatively new thing in the workplace then (at least that one–I’d been one of the forcing functions to get them), and I accidentally munged a file on a floppy, apparently the only copy of it. Fortunately, I had a printout of the pages that I could insert into the document, but it had one section in it that contained the phrase “[Go ask [name of one of my colleagues]].” There was no way I was going to retype the whole thing — I had too much else to do to finish it, and I ended up just inserting the page as is (in a document of several hundred pages). I figured it would be an interesting test to see if anyone actually read these things. I never heard a word from the Air Force about it.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Government By Executive

9 Comments

The dangers of it.

I’m as unhappy about it as I am with all the other “national emergencies” that have been declared by other presidents (many of which are still in effect). I notice, though, that (as usual), many people are only about things that all presidents do when Trump does them.

As for why the next D president couldn’t do that, I fully expect (s)he will (and would regardless of the faux “precedent” that Trump is supposedly setting). The only legal way to rein in a president (as opposed to what Obama’s Justice Department was illegally doing to Trump prior to the election, in what the guy who was fired for lying to the FBI is now admitting was an attempted coup) is impeachment. It has been used far too seldom, which is why the president has accumulated too much power.

…constitutional structure aside, why is presidential unilateralism bad? Because our system was designed to make major shifts in government policy difficult, and that’s a good thing because it lowers the stakes of politics. We had experience in 1861 with what happens when a significant part of the country believes that the national government has become arrayed against it, and it’s not an experience we should want to repeat on any scale.

But the Left seems determined to do that, even though we have the guns.

Business, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

This Face Does Not Exist

2 Comments

Every refresh gives you a different AI-Generated face.

This isn’t scary at all. It strikes me, though, that they still can’t do realistic artificial voices, so at least voice actors will still have jobs. I also wonder how well they can do facial expressions.

BTW, I was at the Space Transportation Conference this week in DC, and didn’t have much time to blog. Just got home last night, in time for Valentine’s Day dinner (which we iron-chefed from stuff in the freezer and fridge: Steak and shrimp, with a nice merlot, and some Godiva that I bought at DFW).

[Update a few minutes later]

[Update a while later]

OK, so they’re not perfect.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, this is nightmare fuel.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!