Why Trump's Tariffs Are Stupid but Necessary

 Up until 1913 (when the income tax was instituted), 80-90% of federal revenue was tariffs. You can invoke Smoot-Hawley or 1930 all you want, but the US was neither the richest, nor the third most populous, nor the world's reserve currency then. Everything is different now. 

Although we are the world's reserve currency, we have a debt to GDP ratio of 124%. That is unsustainable. If we go bankrupt, the whole world goes bankrupt. Federal spending has to be cut. Interest rates must come down. Period. 

As the stock market declines, investors flee to treasury bonds, forcing the yield on those bonds lower. This year, almost $10 trillion will need to be refinanced. Every basis point that the yield declines translates into a billion-dollar annual savings in loan repayment. Thus, a 0.5% drop would save $500 billion over a decade. As of this writing, the yield has declined about 0.7 points. That’s a lot of money saved.

Average world salary is $18000/year. US average salary is $63000/yr. We are the 1%.

Are tariffs a tax on the American consumer? Sure. But if you believe in taxing the richest 1%, then you have to support the tariffs, because we are the richest 1%. 

Vietnam and Taiwan have already agreed to remove their tariffs against the US. Other countries will inevitably follow suit. Again, we're the third most populous nation, and one of the richest nations per capita, on the planet. We control the world's reserve currency. 

Everyone talks about saving the world. This saves the world. 

Biden vs. Vance

Is Joe Biden a worse Catholic than JD Vance, or vice versa? 

The Church teaches a hierarchy of sin. Some mortal sins are worse than other mortal sins. For instance, Aquinas taught that masturbation was worse than fornication or adultery, because fornication was ordered to the natural world and procreation, lacking only the marriage vow, while adultery was a violation of the vow, but still ordered to the natural world. Meanwhile, masturbation is not ordered to the natural world since it is rooted in fantasy and cannot lead to procreation.

Same is true of Biden vs Vance. Biden advocated murder and homosexuality, both of which are completely disordered. Vance does not advocate either. So, while you can take issue with either one, Vance is clearly the superior Catholic.

Why the Signal Breach Isn't What it Seems

Jeff Goldberg claims to have been part of a top-secret Signal chat. He provided evidence that he was. The question is, how did that happen?

One theory has it that the head of NPR, who also happens to sit on Signal's board, somehow engineered this. That is stupid absurd. Signal keeps zero metadata, all it has is phone numbers and even those can't be seen. This ain't Musk taking over Twitter, where meta data and user info abounds.

Signal is very nearly as anonymous and it is CERTAINLY as encrypted as any app out there. It uses AES and the Signal Protocol, both open-source, both as bullet-proof as anyone knows how to make encryption. There are no known backdoors or hacks to either method.

Signal encryption is end-to-end, which means it makes no bloody difference if your contact is in the Pentagon or the Kremlin. In neither case can outside parties read your messages. It makes no bloody difference what tower you connect to, whether the tower is compromised or not. The message was encrypted on the device BEFORE it was transmitted to the tower. That means the encrypted message still can't be read, even if the enemy entirely owns the tower. Same with receiving a message - only the endpoint device can decrypt it. 

Signal may be "consumer-grade", but in this case that means Signal is as good or BETTER than "military-grade", which latter category is often decades behind the consumer industry due to the government acquisition train (cf, DOGE's work in the Social Security database, or the IRS software nightmare or NASA/Space Shuttle nonsense). Talk to any military personnel. When you mention "military-grade", they laugh. 

This Signal breach was solely, only, entirely, without question or any other concern, the fault of one of the people already in the Signal group chat. Can Signal be compromised via phishing scams? Sure. But so can EVERY encryption method out there, approved or not, authorized or not. This breach is not due to inadequate tech, it is human operator error. Period. 

Now, how did this happen?

The problem is the contact list inside the Signal app. Signal's contact list itself cannot be locked, but you can block individual contacts or groups and set privacy settings to control who can see your phone number. You can also set a PIN for account recovery and registration lock. 

If this was done on secure phones, the techs should have locked down that contact list. But to do that, they have to have a pre-approved list of numbers to load on the phones. Now, maybe that happened, but maybe Jeffrey Goldberg was on a pre-approved BIDEN list of contacts, so he might already have been on the pre-approved list. It might be that this is not the first classified Signal session Jeff has been involved with from the White House, it's just the first one WE KNOW ABOUT because he kept his mouth shut about the one's he attended under Biden.

Jeffrey Goldberg says Mike Waltz sent him a 'connection request' on Signal, but that's not a thing in Signal, so he's clearly lying about that. Everyone involved in publicizing this scandal on BOTH sides have demonstrated they don't know a damn thing about the actual tech or how it works, which is why he is currently getting away with that bald-faced lie.

Signal servers hold zero metadata, so it's not like the server was compromised, because there's no data on the server to compromise. The last time the FBI tried to warrant out contact data, Signal's CEO told them exactly that. Even Signal can't tell you what data it is transmitting or who is transmitting it.

Somebody on that chat either deliberately, or very mistakenly, added Goldberg to the chat. Could Goldberg have assigned some high official's name to his own phone number, to see if he could infiltrate a Signal communication? Yes. Is that felony fraud in communications? Yeah, probably. 

And that, boys and girls, is everything you need to know about Signal. I use it, I recommend it, and I continue to stand by the recommendation because I actually know how it works. If Jeff Goldberg did what was described in the previous paragraph, he needs to be jailed. Everyone needs to curate their Signal contact lists. But, again, that's human error, not Signal's error. 

How Education Actually Works

The reason educational institutions exist is to grab government loan and grant money and give it to administrators. That is the only reason any educational institution exists. It has no other reason to exist.

If you think it does, you are wrong. Grade schools, high schools, colleges, universities, all of it exists just to harvest cash from the government. That's it. Once you realize that, everything makes sense.

Of COURSE the administrative staff grows by leaps and bounds. The actual customer is the government. Students and teachers are just window-dressing. The point of the institution is to fill out the necessary administrative forms to get the government cash. Adding a teacher takes money away from the pot, it is an expense. Adding an administrator means one more person to fill out government cash forms - each administrator increases the pot. Administrators make the institution money. Teachers and students lose the institution's money.

A school's product is not an educated student, the product is government forms. The government pays you more cash for filling out more forms. Period. The students are just there so there are names that can be put on the forms. The teachers are there to fool the student into coming in and getting their name put on forms. The point of the whole process is to fill out the forms and sell them to the government for cash money. It's all one huge grift. That's it.

AI and The Demise of Universities

There are many reasons why the modern university is slowly decaying away, but AI will certainly number among them. According to Britannica, the first true university in the West was Bologna (1088 AD). Universities have spent over 10 centuries producing highly trained explorers in increasingly esoteric fields. One such field is how to efficiently determine protein folding. 

Universities have spent the last 60 years producing people highly trained in just this particular field.

In those 60 years, we discovered how to fold 150,000 proteins. In 2020, over the course of six months, AI not only discovered how to fold EVERY protein that exists (over 200 million), but it can also now outperform millions of years of evolution itself, creating new proteins with specifically tuned functionality. That's two years before the release of ChatGPT. Why does this matter?

 Think of the evolution of the airplane. We spent centuries trying to figure out how to make powered flight work. In 1903, someone finally assembled the pieces correctly. Look what happened:

• 1903 - Wright brothers' first flight (12 seconds, 120 ft).
• 1911 - first planes in combat
• 1914 - first commercial passenger service
• 1915 - first monoplane.
• 1919 - first transatlantic flight
• 1927 - first solo non-stop transatlantic flight
• 1936 - Douglas DC-3
• 1939 - first jet
• 1952 - first passenger jet
• 1957 - first spacecraft

It took roughly 16 years to transition from a 12-second, 120-foot flight to crossing the Atlantic, and another 12 years to do it non-stop, solo. Because we have a much higher population, and a better-educated population, tech moves faster now than it did in 1903. There are more people working tech now than there were in 1903.

 We've been thinking about AI for millennia, working on it directly for about a century, but we have only managed to put the pieces together correctly in the last three years. We're at about 1908 on the airplane chart.

With the advent of the automobile, people don't learn how to take care of horses any more. It is possible that with the advent of AI, people won't need "educators" any more. Not only are universities losing relevance as dropping TFR removes students from their classrooms, AI removes the need for highly trained people. We can afford to be more ignorant than ever, without any real loss of functionality. 

 

Marriage and Prenups

 This is why prenups are important.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/554387583700666

Every marriage has a prenup, even if it doesn't have a prenup. The default prenup is whatever the laws of the state and nation are. That might be straight 50-50 split, it might be split only 50% of property acquired during marriage, whatever. 

But, whatever it is, EVERY marriage sanctioned by a state or national government has a prenup. And the Catholic Church won't allow the sacramental marriage to take place unless you have first licensed the marriage through the government. So, the Catholic Church's insistence that a prenup is somehow damaging to a marriage is pure bullshit. 

The Catholic argument is, "Well, if you insist on a prenup, that's a sign that you don't expect the marriage to succeed, so that means it is not a sacramental marriage." And if I take out medical insurance, am I saying I don't trust that God will keep me healthy? This is not a minor argument. For centuries, buying insurance was seen as a sinful act, because you were not trusting in God's providence. When you bought insurance, you were betting on whether or not something bad would happen. Yet, if the Church recognizes the possibility of state-sanctioned divorce and subsequent Catholic annulment - and it most assuredly does recognize this possibility - then it recognizes that sacramental marriage vows do not always "take." 

Furthermore, it is commonly acknowledged that there is no way for the spouses to know if the vows actually worked. The Catholic process of annulment requires that the spouses show that some deficit of knowledge or moral agency was involved, at the moment the vows were exchanged, so that consent could not be given. That is, the Church requires that the putative spouses show they knew the vows wouldn't work even as they were making the vows. 

The process even takes into account the Dunning-Krueger effect, the possibility that the spouses were so deficient in knowledge that neither spouse was capable of recognizing the lack at the time both attempted to exchange vows. In fact, it could be that one of the two spouses is so deficient in understanding that they NEVER figure out the lack was there from the beginning. That is, one spouse figures it out and seeks the divorce/annulment, but the other one is never good with it and refuses to accept the Church declaration of nullity. And, in fact, since Church declarations of nullity are not infallible (that is, the Church could, indeed, be in error by granting annulment), even the Church recognizes that it may suffer from Dunning-Krueger when it tries to judge the matter.

But, if there is a Dunning-Krueger possibility, shouldn't the spouses have the possibility of protecting against that? A prenup is just marriage insurance, like health insurance, car insurance or any other kind of insurance you can morally take out. If I can take out insurance on the principle that God might not protect me from my own stupidity and ignorance when I operate an automobile, then why not take out insurance when I try to operate myself as a spouse? 

Why Students Use ChatGPT

Teaching is about making the student love a subject so much, that the student WANTS to learn more. Most teachers, including myself, aren't good enough to invest most students with that level of love for the subject.

So, the students do pro forma work. Students who aren't really interested in a subject submit responses  generated by AIs like ChatGPT. They do that because they literally don't care about the subject, they just want to move on with their lives. It's the academic equivalent of saying, "Wow. That's very interesting. We should talk again about this. I have to go now." and then walking away.

In short, when students use ChatGPT, they are voting on the incompetence of the instructor. 

Instructors don't like being told they are incompetent. They especially don't like it when students point it out. And, to be fair to the instructors, it's not like they have a uniformly friendly audience. Most students are only in Class X to begin with for reasons that have nothing to do with the class. The class may be  a required general education course, or a prerequisite that the student isn't really interested in, or whatever. Most of the students walk in with the attitude that they were going to hate the class, and the instructor starts the first day at a substantial deficit. They can't figure out how to move the students out of that "hatred" auto-response. 

Instructors instinctively know that students cheat not just because the student may have inherent character defects (Lord knows many do), but also because instructors frequently suck at doing their jobs. So, the instructors strike back at the student by treating AI use as cheating, which actually doesn't make any sense.

When a student looks information up in a book, is that cheating? Socrates, an oral instructor, would have said "YES!" Plato, who wrote books about Socrates, may not have been so vociferous in agreeing. What Socrates considered a sign of a weak memory and a weak mind, i.e., the need to look things up in books, modern man calls "scholarship". But, as Socrates points out, books were the very first AI:

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

By the start of the 21st century, and probably far sooner, the use of AI will be standard across all disciplines. AI use will be considered scholarship.

And the instructors who inveigh against it now will be looked on by future generations with gentle scorn.