"China has enough..."

 video of a flicker (red shafted) and the other is a video of an unidentified large thing moving fast

i think the musk mellon has done the right thing to try to keep an open dialogue with the Chinese government. every time i go into the dollar store i think "we don't need all this plastic crap!"...but there is other stuff that china has that we could learn from...when i pick up trash i see a lot of Styrofoam AKA polystyrene...i  read that in china there is a company that makes a product from bagasse  that is a lot like Styrofoam...bagasse is what is left over when you squeeze the juice out of sugarcane...unless things have changed a lot since the last time i was in Louisiana there is a lot of bagasse there...but the incentive to make use of it is lacking...

the big scare this month is ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE...what scares a lot of people about artificial intelligence is that it would make it much harder to cheat the government out of money...we don't need to increase taxes in this country we need to stop the people who  (to quote Obama) GAME THE SYSTEM... you cannot fly a modern airplane without computers to keep all the systems monitored...you cannot EFFECIENTLY run a large business (or a large country) unless the numbers are plugged into the system...the human species may indeed become extinct but it will not be because HAL killed us off it will be because the human inhabitants choose not to use the technology that was available to increase efficiency...the NEO-LUDDITES who fear computer technology and artificial intelligence (it should be called ENHANCED intelligence) allowed some people to become too rich and others too impoverished...and even if the earth becomes un-inhabitable to humans there will undoubtedly be life which will continue to exist and evolve...and the the electronics will self-evolve too

I am not a big listener of "hip hop" as a genre of entertainment...however i recently heard some Iraqi rappers who use the genre to express much discontent with the authoritarian government in the their country (they had to leave the country to express their ideas) what i hear of american rap today does not seem to have the bite it used to have in the beginning...too much bling...

i did hear a great song on the radio by a ms savage called "If I were a fish"  makes you want to sing along...

"China has enough gifted scientists, artists, writers, and thinkers to have a great influence on the world, but that influence will be limited if they cannot express themselves freely." Ian Buruma (new yorker-1/17/22 "Character Arch"