I recently learned about this idea that there is unacceptable cultural appropriations when the Chinese-American actress Aquafina quit Twitter due to massive and hurtful complaints by African Americans that she uses Black English when it suits her (most of her famous roles) but then revert to normal English when it suits her not to do so.

I honestly felt that she uses this so called Black English in genuine admiration, that she really does think it’s cool. I mean she even raps… I don’t really see her mocking, belittling or wrongfully use something that belongs to Black Americans.

But I of course will acquiesce to the fact that I do not know for sure because I’m not Black American. I cannot truly understand them like I truly cannot understand a bat. (That’s saying there is an objective difference that cannot be compensated for by our brains, not saying Black Americans are lower form of mammal.)

But one does wonder why other cultures don’t care so much. Recently I encountered a very antagonizing grandma at local library. She kept on coming over to the crafts table and asking for material repeating “I need this for my younger grand kids…” in a British accent. Her kids are actually older than my child with whom I worked on a Shamrock for the St. Patrick’s day event. There is an silent echo in the library that screamed in a ghostly voice: “GO BACK TO WHERE TOU CAME FROM…” perhaps echoing the zeitgeist of the recent past. We all ignored it. For me, mainly because I don’t know if her ghost is screaming at me or my ghost screaming at her in either case the people involved were apparently all quite civil…

I have never seen mass protest of American appropriation of this religious saint. I’ve never seen tweets complaining about someone call for drinks or partying on St. Patrick’s day. I’ve never seen a religious zealot complaint about misappropriation of Catholic culture.

What about all this mindful crap that modern culture appropriated from ancient eastern hermits? Chinese Buddhism being one of many. What about all the white Americans making money on teaching yoga? What about all the white Americans teaching Asian martial arts?

I’ve never seen targeting of these people for misappropriating very practically useful and hard-to-come-by cultural elements , profiting from them, become famous or even “inventing” these things.

Honestly, it might be that we all don’t have the experience of hardship Black Americans experienced. It might really be a case of easy come easy go. I got my Chinese culture because my parents and friends made it available to me. I didn’t have to earn that. It was free. Maybe this is why I don’t really give a flying fork that some white dude stands proudly in the park teaching tai-qi to Chinese elders. I didn’t invent it, I don’t have that attachment to it, not enough to feel the anguish that black people felt when Aquafina used their language.

But my culture is also very open to respect. A white student properly respecting their teacher might learn some serious skills. This is why I felt that Aquafina appropriating the Black English with respect and admiration was not inappropriate. But it may be the case that not all cultures are as open minded as mine. Admiration and respect sometimes isn’t enough.

This is a puzzle that I wish to understand more in the future. There is definitely relativistic view. But an eventual normative ideal regarding appropriation of cultural elements would be pretty good aim.

Would you approve or disapprove a government clandestine agency from entering private properties to create mass hysteria that results in ubiquitous deployment of internet-enabled video/audio/motion monitoring systems.

(C) FAM Blog

Do you believe that individual digital integrity is a human right?

(C) FAM Blog

How much money would you spend to prevent $100 from being spent doing pure evil?

(C) FAM Blog

How much money would you spend to prevent someone from doing $100 of pure evil?

(C) FAM Blog

Can a law abiding citizen object to monitoring and interference from a government clandestine organization?

(C) FAM Blog

Can justice be done with some party unaware of all aspect of the matter?

(C) FAM Blog

Is just orderly society possible without clandestine government agencies?

(C) FAM Blog

Listening to Freakanomics Book Club interview of Economist John List about his book The Voltage Effect. List is frank when discussing his time at Uber that he felt no powerlessness any minorities of the skin color, gender and sexual orientation varieties. It is asserted that he is adept to the environment of hyper-rational, high pressure, continuous criticisms and white high-power culture (let’s call these mean organizations—meanorgs) because of his academic training, that most people, like those who couldn’t deal with Uber competition, are more like Homer Simpson—they’re dumb.

This is a truly hard red pill to swallow. For one thing, it is being delivered by a white economist who is prized for his white childhood poverty—His being white and working low wage jobs while growing up is what makes him special. His idea is that most people are dumber than economist(and people who scale up things) assumes them to be. While he does sprinkle in the familiar refrains of diversity, it just sounds so disingenuous. Why would any existing meanorg want diversity of ideas when most people are dumb and irrational ? His thesis is self contradicting at best.

So, what do I want? If all these highly prized smart white people are coming up with nasty ideas, what exactly would I prefer?

I don’t know, and this isn’t a snarky comment about myself being a Homer Simpson too. And honestly, minorities finding themselves poorly prepared for meanorg is not an inaccurate observation. What is lurking in the back of some minorities’ mind might be that the meanorg isn’t the best way and that we refuse to conform to its norms and demands. We don’t want this, we don’t want to tie someone up and whip them into submission and we don’t think leaders should either.(for example) There shouldn’t be formal alphas, betas and gamma assignments in society even transiently. I mean, this is one of western prime objections to Confucianism is that it assigns roles to different humans with associated rights, duties and powers. We do not conform Confucian prescriptions any more. Just as we might want to abolish meanorgs .

It’s just a thought, followed by regular disclaimers that I grew up in a land where they chose a very volatile and violent cultural revolution to discard old and unacceptable social and cultural norms. That I am not saying that’s right or wrong, just that path occurs in my thoughts.

On some days, I have this nightmarish vision of a just retribution against me. As parents, we try to optimize money expenditure while our children are growing. For families with parents who have experienced atrocious childhoods in uncivilized land under evil parentage themselves, it often is comfortable, for the parent, to buy larger than fit clothing items for children to maximize duration of utilization per dollar spent.

What? The jacket drags on the ground? That’s fine!

What? you tripped on your shoes because it is far longer than your foot? You’ll get use to it, TWO years is plenty of time to get used to them.

What? Underwear too tight? Socks cutting into flesh? Belly button showing under t-shirt? but I can’t see it, you have to complain several months before I do anything about it.

In a few years’ time, the sons and daughters hopefully will be intelligent enough to understand that these unnecessary sufferings could have been prevented by having a better parent. Perhaps they will say to us:

Mom, Dad, I bought a coffin for both of you, don’t worry about the size, you won’t feel it when we stuff you in there. You’ll grow into it.

We recently “received” a recall notice from the North Pole. Apparently one of the toys that Santa gave to our child has a recall. After some research, we found that he had been outsourcing to a factory in China and that Santa himself personally decided to issue the recall after he discovered an issue with a few of the toys.

We must send it back to the North Pole ASAP! The child will surely be nonplussed, but most likely, given the amount of play it got in the past few weeks, this choice of gift will be missed for but a brief moment…

Anyways, wishing you guys the best post-holiday activities and keep that believe Santa Claus!

(Ps, when this came up, Amazon had this thing where everything you buy in Q4 can be returned by January 31st of next year. Thankfully we received this recall notice just before that day this year…)

Okay, it’s Christmas Eve and I’ve suddenly had a change of heart. I think the world is going to suck with out Chinese people.

Has anyone noticed that recently, the “new” products on Amazon are much more used, damaged or otherwise low in quality? I have gained the habit of ordering multiple items when it is cheap and returning the excess or broken, just to guarantee that I get even one whole and new item.

Circa September 2021, it was reported that Amazon kicked off some where from a few hundred to a few thousand Chinese companies. The reason cited was review fraud. The fact that they targeted Chinese companies only is a little bit racist. But dishonest Chinese should be punished IMHO, so I thought nothing of it. A couple billion dollars of sales on Amazon is like pocket change for Bezos, wouldn’t affect things at all.

But ever since then, we the customers, have been experiencing a barrage of bait and switch schemes. Essentially the merchant will put up a promotion on an ASIN with a set of very attractive descriptions. (The ASIN is like a SKU but renumbered and unified system used for all items sold on Amazon). After promotion event ends, the merchant will then take the same ASIN product and change texts and pictures. And promote the item for sale again.

For the poor fellow who bought the product the first time around, they cannot see what they thought they bought because the product page has changed. For the poor fellow buying the new item, he is seeing star-ratings and reviews for an entirely different item.

I literally had this happen to me many times this year. What came after Black Friday is simply not what the description says at Christmas time. A server first had a dedicated RAID adapter, but when I complained it didn’t work, that RAID disappeared from the product description.

The sad thing is that this “feature” in the grey area benefits Amazon merchants in a way that made the ecosystem work for many years. But during that time, there were a large number of Chinese suppliers that did not resort to this trick. They sold their stuff with woefully misspelled description never changing. probably because they lacked the English skill to even come up with a separate but elaborate description for another item. Probably, another reason, is that they just wanted to sell their product for some, any, money for a living wage.

But now that the Chinese are wiped from the planet and it’s future, what we experience is everything else. I would not dare name the origin of these dishonest merchants. Plus, most likely they will be pinned on Chinese people again. But honestly, I really feel life is worse after a certain population of vendors was wiped from Amazon. The sellers are simply lying and using bait-and-switch.

“But they’re just trying to make a living wage” you blurt out to me with an accusatory glare that says I am being biased in some way. But you will not find me defending these merchants, any of them, in any way. I will of course not rationalize what they have to do, I wouldn’t even ponder the fairness of bezos squeezing merchant margins so hard for his own gain, I mean the lot of it is all fun brain exercise on a Christmas Eve.

It is just so very interesting to see a layer of humanity when you have the power to peel away a layer by country of origin, you can experience another layer minus that country of origin.

Fascinating!

It seems a film about the murder of a Chinese-American and subsequent non-punishment sentencing of his two killers had made it into the National Film Registry. Here’s a snippet on YouTube.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the Return of The Jedi and Selena was on the list, this news might not have even popped up in my news feed.

You can read the details on Wikipedia, but basically two man, unprovoked, bludgeoned a Chinese-American to death, identifying him based on mistaken race (they had wanted to punish a Japanese person). They were fined $3000 and let off with probated jail sentence (didn’t go to jail at all) There’s some additional details about his murder succeeding shortly after his bachelors party, the white men hunted him for 30 minutes with baseball bat in hand, paying for information regarding his whereabouts along the way, as well as the sentencing judge zealously defending his decision. Apparently, lot of pretty nasty things happened in Michigan in 1982… wow that was just a few years before my family began to immigrate to the USA…

One is glad to say that with respect to racially based violent crimes have become less tolerable to society and maybe even the law enforcement and adjudication systems in recent decades.

There are still some aspects that kind of popped out at me. In the movie, the arresting police officers stated that they were not informed of the trial at all, much less where they given chances to testify to what happened. This mysterious way in which legal procedures work is definitely beyond the mortals who suffer it. The things these judges and lawyers are saying, the whitesplaining, sounds quite similar to what we see on TV today.

In fact, it seems the whitesplaining techniques are being actively promoted as desirable features of our legal systems. “Plea bargaining” frequently being a tool for good. Selecting judges who are favorable to race and cause seem to be the open non-secret, you can do that, find a judge who loves your race more than your murderers and robbers… The fact that there are such judges, can make for multiple prime-time TV shows to show everyone—It happens! These things are being promoted as good features of our society by TV media in America.

But really, for a person like myself, I cannot help but have deep deep suspicion about the legal system. That it works, I have no doubt about, that it is just and fair, I have to claim to be agnostic. In the grand scheme of the Bible that courts swear by, none of these little things matter. But to each person there, each person is responsible personally. Whatever people think they have personally in connection in the grander justice, that’s just fellow human being thinking.

I suppose it is a double edged sword if one to look at the question selfishly. The ability to find a path through the legal system favorable to oneself is desirable. But when it comes to the legal thoughts around making judgement considering maintenance of long term versus short term justice, as well as the immediate stability of society(eg riot prevention), I must admit naïveté—I don’t know what y’all thought you thought, but I sure as heck don’t trust it. Whatever produced a $3000 license to kill a chinaman, that’s just not just.

But if we were to apply our scientific and technological skills, would we actually arrive at a more trustworthy system? Present attempts to use data driven system has been met with challenges as soon as they were discovered. But, here too one has to feel just a bit suspicious that before Propublica broke the story, how many people in America even knew that the courts used AI to help sentencing?

(Sentencing being one of the problems in Chin’s case, even after plea bargaining at least one of the perps could have at least a decade of jail, but he didn’t get it. And team compass would be telling me hey look, the judge made the right call, he did not recidivate by bludgeoning another Chinaman)

We don’t know what is behind all this legal-smancy mumble jumbo. At least for a while there, there was an AI making predictions of probability of recividism in the mix. That feature was added to the legal system without any announcements. People are not even informed that things are changing under the hood.

One wonders if this part of our democracy is a problem? We seem to vote for both executive and legislative branches of the government, it the judicial branch is opaque and not democratically elected. The judicial branch doesn’t have any mandates to satisfy the will of the people. The judicial branch doesn’t even have mandates to make itself understandable to its subjects.

So I guess this is one of those perma-answers to some GCI questions:

• We can’t give it training data because training data we have is corrupt. All of us now do not all agree with all the results in the historical data.
• We can’t really generatively explain what the right thing is by programming it. And more importantly we cannot all agree to that single program.
• We can’t really tell if an original answer the GCI gives is correct or not because we don’t know or we think nobody really knows.
• We can tell the GCI what each individual feels and thinks. But many prospect domains of GCI do not operate democratically. (Both operations and sample-importance perspectives.)
• The new domain, new to GCI, exists partially because of its opacity to outside understanding. GCI may have to forsake it’s built in transparency(and other beneficial features) in order to be accepted into the new domain such as the judicial system.

So… had a moment of nightmare today. What happens when computers gets better at being us than us?

I understand that the advertised research results have been that AIs using deep learning have gained performance above those of humans. But here, in my head, I saw for a moment that a computer hooked up to my eyes seeing and performing tasks better than me.

What happens when that happens? What happens when our processing power is out done by a computer on our own turf? On the one hand, it might enable us to replace some of our human activities with machines. The biggest thing here being for example a machine that exercises our muscles optimally yo achieve a desired result. And similarly one might imagine a day inside the matrix when we can plug into our head and we can play the horn really well(without own lips and lungs). (This particular application may require several steps: computerized training of our muscles, some amount of fine tuning for those muscles and the instrument, maybe some fine tuning for reading music through our eyes, fine tuning for playing with other players, with a director, solo’ing, improvisation…)

What about caring for kids? Is there a brain app for that ? What about taking a dump, I’ll bet good money that an app can make that so much better an experience, using just our existing hardware. Maybe there will be several modes… for coitus, set “ludicrous” mode to optimize partner experience, but tune down to “comfort” mode for self gratification. Ooohooohhh, dating app, the flirt app, in-law app, SAT studying app, “learn to print your ABC’s” app,

Wow! Either I suck at life, or I really understand the future of technology.

Either way, a nightmare for you or your sidekick brain to mnmnnnmhmnmm over.

A solid famX1!

I want to comment on the improvement in production of discovery, but I suppose it is to be expected by season 4. The self-intertwining epic mythologic tale of the good versus the universe unravels itself in front of us. It might be my own stage of life but these episodes of endings of lives, endings of a whole planet, this story resonates with me. It could also just be that sound effects, editing and music has gotten a whole lot better, maybe by 900-some years, idk, the show is quite cinematic now.

The movements of Star Treks:

• TOS: getting there and back alive, the righteous way, with friends.
• TNG: getting there, making friends and making it a lot better for everyone
• DS9: getting there and staying there
• VOY: getting back alive
• ENT: getting somewhere in one piece
• DSC: break things, pick up pieces, die or not, and put everything back together with ever present anticipation of total loss.
• PIC: …
• PRD: wohooo!

The reference to ending of paths seems to have very strong roots in human mythologies. I’m not sure where these writers get their inspirations but the teachings sound quite vogue “… one must be radically candor with one’s self at the end of a path… “ and “…we’re just play the instruments, let’s hope director knows the orchestra…” I can definitely see a young child picking up on this and repeatedly thinking in all kinds of situations as I did with teachings like “the good of many outweigh the good of one,” and many sentiments like “I’m a doctor, not a…”, “you have always been and shall always remain my friends…”, “I want to be more human”, “…wanting is not as good as having”, …

The show is probably not for me. All but one Asian actors have character that remain 900 years later, and he is still a lieutenant… Capitan Lorca claims to have yellow-face ancestry related to fortune cookies, but he was as crooked as the mirror universe. Anyways, no biggie, I still learned a lot watching Trek even with few important Asian crew. The show still has lasting cultural and creative value not caring too much about Asians… I mean I don’t want to repeat the comment but they are about 35% of current human population right now. There must be a story some where that kills them off to <10% of Starfleet human population, a devastating decimation that will last into the next millennium.

So, overall withh huh FAMx1, I give

👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

…with…

😣

Fell asleep during takeoff enroute home from Honolulu. Fussy child also mysteriously falls Al sleep for the entire trip. I wonder if there are any side effects to this “sleep machine” they like to use on airplanes ?