Animals
Western wildlife: grizzly bear, bighorn sheep, an adorable Western kind of "bear" caterpillar we don't see in the Eastern States. Some hidden-camera videos.
I would make one small correction: To closer observers, the bear makes a better symbol of all that is wrong with the world. Why are bear attacks on humans increasing? Because bear populations are increasing. Too many people listen to sentimental, sometimes True but not well informed, Greens who think we need free-range bears, wolves, or cougars as apex predators. We don't. We humans, and our relatively trustworthy pets, need to be the apex predators. Animals that have been known to kill and eat people, however infrequently, need to survive as small populations in completely confined habitats in places where humans don't want to live.
I like all animals but I think we as a species need to focus on maintaining a world where children can take responsibility for watching over sheep, goats, or even chickens. That's a world that agrees that a hawk or even an eagle who attacks chickens wouldn't live long anyway and should be euthanized by shooting, and an animal who is even capable of eating a human child should be in a pit surrounded by a fifty-foot cement wall.
The great blue heron, this one photographed by Messy Mimi, is my symbol of all that is good about Maryland.
Hers, however, was photographed in Louisiana, along with many other appealing animals, flowers, and landscapes:
Rick Moran's salient point is that banning sales of actual animals in "pet stores" is NOT HELPING the homeless animal problem. Places that criminalize selling a puppy still have about the same number of homeless dogs. Maybe more, because every "pet store" I ever visited that sold animals actually resold unwanted pets. They displayed some rejects for the commercial breeders. Mall walkers and kids can't afford those breeders' prices. It was more profitable to re-home strays and dumped pets. In fact the reason why most "pet stores" I knew stopped selling live animals was that they'd had problems with contagious diseases. Being in a store, like being in a traditional shelter, does not help cats pull through their "kittenhood" bouts with what vets currently call panleukopenia.
I think we'd all benefit if everyone admitted that animal shelters are commercial operations, just like old-style "pet stores" that had cats, dogs, and birds in cages. If an animal is confined and displayed for other people to take home with them, sanctimonious twaddle about "rescuing" and "adopting" don't really mean much. Shelters don't pay pet "adopters," do they? We could be more honest about the fact that they SELL animals, and their opposition to "pet stores" is businessmen's opposition to the competition.
That would mean allowing more people to "rescue" and rehome fewer animals in one place, which is healthier for the animals, and presumably requiring all of them to be more enlightened than either stores or shelters have traditionally been about caring for the animals. It would also stop the racketeering of the sanctimonious "animal welfare organizations." The Humane Society sells cats and dogs, while admitting to a goal of making both species extinct. "Pet stores" sell cats and dogs, without supporting either the pricey breeders who want to make pet ownership a luxury most people can never afford, or the Humane Pet Genocide Society. Of the two the "pet stores" could easily be ethically preferable, if they made sure animals offered for sale were free from contagious diseases, offered (NOT "required") some help and guidance to first-time pet owners, and encouraged (NOT demanded) sterilization whenever people brought in baby animals for resale.
Solving the problem of unwanted animals means making it easier, not harder, for animals to find good homes. It means vigilance in prosecuting either common thieves, or overzealous shelter volunteers, who want to grab every animal they see outdoors and sell it. It means recognizing that, in order to be useful, dogs and cats need to spend time outdoors, patrolling their property, and rather than squealing "Oh but they might get run over" we need to focus on keeping residential streets bumpy enough to ensure that anyone driving at a speed that is hazardous for animals or humans is going to need new teeth soon. We need fences high enough for dogs, even if they do keep people aware of how small suburban lots are and motivate people to avoid renting houses on inadequate lots. We need to bring cat haters out into the light before they actually harm cats, or work their way up, as they will, to harming people. We need to build understanding that you can like animals, or you can support the current Loony Left policies at HSUS and PETA; not both; and generally your preference for animals over HSUS and PETA is likely to extend to a practice of good will toward people, as distinct from control-freaking about human society, likewise.
It's well worth watching the Stossel video at the end of this article, if you're in a place where you can. If nothing else it will cure any temptation you feel to send money directly to HSUS or PETA. That money is better given to a small local organization that does not petition for HSUS, PETA, or ASPCA "grants"
run by people who do not pay themselves a million dollars a year.
Phenology
Real autumn colors are late in coming this year, even in the North. Last night's chill brought out some yellow at the Cat Sanctuary. Many colors develop after frost. For those wondering where their colors are, here's a preview from Michigan:
The rest of us will have frost, and no doubt snow as well, soon enough.
Technology
Can government employees be replaced by computers? Well...if they can be, they should be.
There is no "artificial intelligence." What some people seem to get a morbid pleasure from calling that are computer programs that index, search, and reorganize data collected by human intelligence. I find it annoying when businesses replace simple indexes with try-to-be-cute "assistant" graphics and chitchat, but some people find it terribly exciting to build those bots. In any case, if you chat with a chatbot, you very soon realize that if it were a person it would be stupid--so stupid that taking it out back and shooting it would be the kindest thing. It gives only the answers to the questions someone programmed it to anticipate and answer. You probably already knew those. You probably wouldn't be asking if your question weren't beyond the bot's capacity to answer, though the bot has probably been programmed to keep bobbing back up and annoying you with its non-answers five or six times after you've told it to transfer your chat to a human.
Let's just say: I don't think anyone should ever give money to a business that has sales or customer service bots. In fact, if a business wants to sell me anything, its communication will be 100% human. I hate artificial voices. As a matter of policy I don't talk to machines. I like computers that strictly reduce the size of filing cabinets and don't try to do anything more sophisticated.
Can a computer give financial, legal, medical advice? Yes, but I'd be better pleased with computers that didn't try to disguise how they do that. The computer uses a sort of flow chart program with multiple-choice and true-false answers. If you have a fever and a cough, then a swab test for COVID might be indicated. If the shapes visible under a high-powered microscope include some that look like coronavirus, then you've got COVID. Sometimes that's all you want a doctor to do--run lab tests that show that you do or don't have a virus. Sometimes you're likely to feel dissatisfaction with a "virtual doctor" who can only tell you whether or not you have COVID and doesn't notice that the reason why you came to the hospital is that you also have a broken leg. Likewise, sometimes computer programs that give basic advice will astonish you with their insight, and sometimes with their irrelevance.
But you can always try this. Build a web site to run some part of your business. How often does a hosting platform automatically tell you just what you need to know, and how often does it annoy you with suggestions that are, relative to what you need to know, anywhere from simply irrelevant to positively harmful? I think it will be many a long day before anybody writes a computer program that can advise humans about human problems any better than computer programs advise humans about computer problems. You don't even have to have a web site to consider the number of inadequate business web sites in cyberspace and instantly become skeptical about computers replacing competent professionals.
What computers can and will replace is the bit of fluff at the desk, the otherwise unemployable entry-level fashion victim it used to be obligatory for corporations to hire to flirt with male contacts and annoy female ones. They used to be called secretaries. Real secretaries objected. They were merely "receptionists." Their jobs were not available to anyone whose school or employment records indicated any potential for intelligence, independence, or competence for higher-level jobs, or who looked as if she (men were seldom considered) had any moral character. They were chosen to fit the stereotype of the woman who really hates having to work and longs to be a full-time homemaker, a job for which she's not qualified, but which she wants badly enough to believe that being backed into a corner in a stalled elevator is a thrilling, exciting love affair that's going to motivate Mr. Bigchecks to leave his wife. Receptionists spent most of their time telling prospective clients to call someone else, who was probably not near per phone. The employment of receptionists kept these wretched females off the streets and usually off the drugs. That was about all that could be said for it. The receptionists weren't happy--they probably weren't wired to be happy in any case--and the people who didn't want to flirt with them hated them. Computers can tell people to call someone else, often with stunning displays of receptionist-level intelligence like "I heard you say 'There ought to be a law.' For our legal department, please call John Doe at 123-4567..." And they could be wired up to inflatable sex toys that would perform receptionists' other primary function with no risk of infection, pregnancy, or emotional breakdown. And they wouldn't even resent or sabotage more competent women who were there to do an actual job. For everyone but the receptionists, and who ever cared about them, the development of robot receptionists is a wonderful thing.
And, back on the streets where some think they belong, that type of women don't live as long as they would probably have lived if employed as receptionists, but it's not as if they contributed anything to the world that would be missed. Their function in human society always was to give omega males someone they could despise and exploit the way men further up the hierarchy did them.
Our government is full of receptionists, and secretaries and assistants who ought to be receptionists, and even Masters of Sciences whose actual function as "yes-men" wasn't much more than what receptionists used to do. They can be replaced by computers. And they should.
Let's just say: If you are fully engaged with your job--whether you are an electrical lineman whose human intelligence keeps you from taking a power line with you over the edge of a crumbling cliff, or a writer whose readers will miss your unique individual voice, or a teacher whose students all wish you were their parent--you can never be replaced by a computer. If the feedback you get at the office has always been "Slow down, back off, it's not your business, why did you want to finish a task that would have kept anyone else busy for a week in three hours and make your superordinate look bad?"--you may already have been replaced by a computer, and if not you probably will be, in a year or two.
Let us, by all means, replace as many government employees as possible with computers. If nothing else that ought to give the remaining government employees a healthy distaste for computerizing jobs and a healthy eagerness to regulate the applications of new technology in a way that will make it seem much safer and simpler to hire a local human being.
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