Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

The Old Man's Draft

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Old Man's Draft or Old Man's Registration is the colloquial term for the fourth Selective Service registration sequence held in the United States during World War II, in April 1942.[1]

History

The first peacetime conscription in American history was authorized under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 in September 1940. This was well in advance of the country's actual entry into World War II, but in clear anticipation of the likelihood of involvement. Registration began with those aged between 21 and 35, and gradually broadened to men aged between 18 and 64 as needs increased after the country entered the war in December 1941.[2]

On April 27, 1942, the fourth registration was held nationwide, which encompassed men from the ages of 45 to 64 (i.e., born between April 27, 1877, and February 16, 1897), earning it the nickname of "The Old Man's Draft." Unlike the earlier registrations, its purpose was indirect; the individuals were not actually liable for military service. This registration was essentially a very broad inventory of manpower and skills useful to the war effort, potentially bringing under-utilized or unemployed men back into a more fruitful occupation, and allowing for the release of easily replaceable, younger, or more fit men to fight.[3]

The information gathered on the registration cards was basically similar to the other registrations. The front of the card included full name, place of residence (determining local board jurisdiction), mailing address, telephone number, age and date of birth, place of birth, address of a "person who will always know your address," employer's name and address, and the place of employment. The back of the card included a physical description of the registrant, with race, height, weight, complexion, "other obvious physical characteristics that will aid in identification," and a certification that the registrant and registrar attested that the answers given on the card were true.[4]

A very large proportion of the registration cards still exist in the public record.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Draft

How did I get involved in the Manhattan Project? Late in 1943 in my senior year, I was studying chemistry at the University of Michigan, and I got invited to the University of Chicago to interview. I suspected that it had something to do with the atomic bomb, because there’d been enough hints that such a thing might be made. But when I went early in 1944, I was interviewed by Glenn Seaborg himself. I was too shy to tell him I thought we were going to be working on the atomic bomb and some transuranium element that he had discovered, because I knew something about that. But the interview went well enough and after we had chatted for a while he said, “I’ll give you a job. When can you start?”

I said, “I can start today except for one detail. Next week I have my final examinations in my senior year.”

He said, “Wait here a minute,” and he disappeared. When he came back with a big grin on his face. He said, “I’ve relieved you of having to take any of those final exams,” which worried the heck out of me because one of the courses I took was economic geography to fill some requirement. I hated the course and didn’t even think that I was even passing it. But Seaborg’s story was good enough so I got a “B” in this course. I didn’t deserve a “B” in it for what I’d done. So I did start that day.

The first day I was given a little vial of ten grams of plutonium. I was told that it was worth, in today’s dollars, of something like twelve million dollars. And I was to take one-tenth of this, over a million dollars worth, and use it in my experiments. Now to a twenty-year-old kid just fresh out of college, this was mind boggling.

My job was to test various ways of extracting plutonium from uranium that had been irradiated in a reactor. It was fiercely radioactive. So I tested ways to decontaminate it, so it could be worked on with metallurgists. And that’s what I did.

When I was an undergraduate, I studied courses in radioactivity. I thought absolutely the most fascinating field in science was radiochemistry. And then suddenly I found myself in the field. After pipetting and precipitating and centrifuging and measuring and re-dissolving day after day after day, any aura of mystery or romance evaporates pretty quickly.

It turns out that most of the people on the project in Chicago were young Bachelor’s degree people. They were young enough so the draft boards would try to draft them. And the project was so secret that the draft boards couldn’t be allowed to be told how secret it was. So these people would go into the military, be inducted into the Corps of Engineers, and sent right back to Chicago to do what they had been doing before, which created a very interesting situation because in the military these guys were all enlisted men, not officers. When you have enlisted men, you have to have officers to tell them what to do. Officers didn’t have any Q clearance. They knew none of the secrets and weren’t allowed to know. Every now and then, they wondered what on earth was going on. They tried to pull rank and force an enlisted man to tell them what was going on. And the enlisted men would take great delight in essentially telling them to go to hell. Having been an enlisted man, I can tell you that is a great pleasure. I’ve been up for insubordination, but only once.

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/or ... interview/

[Higgenbotham]

We Need a Peace Time Draft

By Michael Szalma
February 20, 2023

Our nation is facing a national security threat: there are not enough military age people joining the U.S. Armed Forces. Yet, the world is still a threatening place, necessitating a robust American military. Democracy is being tested in Ukraine. China is a looming threat over another democracy, Taiwan. The United States must be ready to answer these and other potential challenges. A peace time draft can help solve this problem. At the same time, drafting politically polarized Americans can help bring the American people back together through a shared sacrifice and a sense of patriotism that military service fosters while simultaneously ensuring the political engagement of modern youth.

The Department of Defense in 2022 found that only 23% of people in prime military age (ages 17 to 24) qualify for service. Why so low? Obesity, drugs, mental/physical health, or a combination of these. Obesity is the largest single factor.

To combat this trend, in 2022 the U.S. Army created two “prep-courses” that recruits can attend prior to Basic Training. One 90-day prep-course helps recruits meet body fat standards. The other course helps recruits achieve higher scores on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test. The U.S. Navy recently announced that it has raised its age limit to 41 years, the oldest of any service (thus far).

This is sounding alarm bells. The recruiting pool is getting shallower.

There has been much discussion recently in how to fix this problem within the framework of the all-volunteer military. Perhaps it is time to put into action an old saying, “If you want a new idea, look in an old book.”

Bring back the peace time draft.

In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt pushed the Congress to do something never tried before in American history: a peace time draft. The resulting expanded military, although limited in its use by Congress, provided a foundation when the United States entered World War 2 in December 1941.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articl ... 82671.html

The US was making preparations to draft manpower in September 1940 for entry into the war in December 1941.

[Higgenbotham]

Here is yet another view of the maintenance phase of a declining civilization. One way to maintain a standard of living is to have fewer children. Another way is for couples who have children to work more hours, which has also been happening since the early 1970s.





https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/up ... 8.2020.pdf

Gail shows another aspect of what I'm calling the maintenance phase. Her graph basically shows a maintenance phase since 1973 or 2004 if one prefers the line to be completely horizontal.


https://ourfiniteworld.com/

[aeden]

ORC organized retail crime already warned they are defenseless.
11-sigma beat to consensus estimates. Right...

[Higgenbotham]

I put a few posts together that are related.

In doing so, my fear, which I think is well founded, is that by trying to stave off the collapse of a part of the structure where in 1932 everything did eventually survive pretty much intact, these actions will 3 or 5 or 10 years down the road collapse a much larger part of the financial system. On the other hand, that may be inevitable, or it may be a good thing in the long run - better than losing just part of the system now as occurred in 1932/3. I suspect, though, that's not the case, and that taking the banks into receivership in 2008 and going through the process of investors taking haircuts which is the basis upon which Western Civilization was founded and has prospered for many centuries would have been the correct path to take. The incorrect path I feel Bernanke et al have taken is the path that I believe will lead to a scale of collapse that is on the order of 50 or 100 years.

My theory on where people best innovate is that it hasn't changed. It does not occur inside large bureaucracies like GE despite a wider recognition of what innovation is and how it is done, because innovation is closely tied with the human spirit and the conditions of necessity and freedom (maybe not the exact right words) from which all of history's progress has come. Necessity is maximized under tough economic conditions, but so is freedom. People innovate best in small unstructured environments like garages, basements, or small companies. The way the maximum number of bright people get into innovative environments is for the crusty old bureaucracies to collapse and for costs to come down. In the case, as like today, when the societal structure of the US has become flawed so as to disallow innovation, people will probably go outside those boundaries to innovate.

The spirit of enterprise wells up from the wisdom of the ages and the history of the West and infuses the most modern of technological adventures. It joins the old and new frontiers. It asserts a firm hierarchy of values and demands a hard discipline. It requires a life of labor and listening, aspiration and courage. But it is the source of all we are and can become, the saving grace of democratic politics and free men, the hope of the poor and the obligation of the fortunate, the redemption of an oppressed and desperate world.

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

Yes, the smartest people on average are at the centers of power. But just on average. The absolute ablest individuals always exist on the periphery. Some of these individuals will rise to the top when the center collapses and the bailouts are no longer possible. But realize who has the built in advantages, what those advantages are, and that they are "in charge" for the time being. Being clever isn't everything.

Mostly it's a mad dash for Federal Reserve printed money.

To answer this question, first, we know that the tech companies that are very clever like Google and Apple have a knack for siphoning the excess money that is in the economy off into their coffers. Apple has an enormous amount of accumulated cash.

https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-fund ... s-want-it/

These numbers are from 2022. There are sources of more recent numbers, but Investor's Business Daily should have accurate numbers. The article shows some non-tech companies further down the list. Some of these are very capital intensive and will likely have as much long term debt (or more) than they do cash. The tech companies, on the other hand, normally have very little long term debt.

[aeden]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 4, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Don't be mistaken, we are only in the early stages of what will most likely be a period of long and devastating financial turmoil, lasting well into the next decade. This is the staunch belief of author and creator of Generational Dynamics, John J. Xenakis. The reasons as to how we've arrived at this crisis level range far and wide. According to Mr. Xenakis, one needs to look no further than the fraudulent and corruptive culture of Generation-X.

H we have witnessed way over decade and few had the wherewithal to stick with the cohort elements.
Consolidations is ramping up. Phase four is gaining some traction.
Tiny bubbles to the repression as zirp to negate the depression crushing. Yes Freidman noted the consequences as the
deaths cults one trillion dollar punch bowl is taken away by whatever remaining adults we have is maybe the weather vain.
As was seen recently RFK Jr. nailed it dead center and plumb! All the Dems can do is piss and moan all over themselves.
China economy is ghost cities and countless thousand's to EV vehicles rotting in the Sun to scam subsidy's.

I used 1983 a simple timestamp for financializations processes. Enough blame can go around since now it is past the fruit
that fell from the now barren fig tree and the fact what is expected since the Laodicean warning also for the adults.
Apostacy as the falling away as collective apathy to consequence's. We know the drilldowns to the infected measures unleashed on
these demshevik sheep and rabid sheep dogs handlers.
Churchill remark that “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
It is not really very complimentary to Americans. To what I seen since since LBJ the rest of the collective green washing excuses
at this juncture of malinvestment these Keynesian veil pagans reap what they sown as they bitched about one seed semantics as a cartoon
in another matinee in Plato's cave. This time the owner is not amused and measures are poured out in just measure.
If we can get past this cycle we know the numbers anticipated. Mises was correct in the crack up boom as it is as plain as day.

[Higgenbotham]

aeden, that quote from John also speaks to the theme. The economic ecosystem that is created determines the qualities of the entrepreneurs who thrive within the system created. They can range from the selfless near mythological hero described by Gilder who thrived under conditions of a bygone era to the clever trickster who thrives under the current conditions created.

[Higgenbotham]

aeden, that quote from John also speaks to the theme. The economic ecosystem that is created determines the qualities of the entrepreneurs who thrive within the system created. They can range from the selfless near mythological hero described by Gilder who thrived under conditions of a bygone era to the clever trickster who thrives under the current conditions created.

Sundar Pichai - CEO of Google

This is his only tweet in the past week.



This article is 5 years old and, while dozens of examples of Pichai's deceptions and undermining of America could be posted, this is one of my favorites because it is so Pichai. As we know, it's the call centers in India that have basically destroyed phone utility and fleeced millions of Americans, particularly the elderly. What a boon this technology would be for the Indian call centers.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai milked the woos from a clappy, home-turf developer crowd at its I/O conference in Mountain View this week with a demo of an in-the-works voice assistant feature that will enable the AI to make telephone calls on behalf of its human owner.

The so-called ‘Duplex’ feature of the Google Assistant was shown calling a hair salon to book a woman’s hair cut, and ringing a restaurant to try to book a table — only to be told it did not accept bookings for less than five people.

At which point the AI changed tack and asked about wait times, earning its owner and controller, Google, the reassuring intel that there wouldn’t be a long wait at the elected time. Job done.

The voice system deployed human-sounding vocal cues, such as ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ — to make the “conversational experience more comfortable“, as Google couches it in a blog about its intentions for the tech.

The voices Google used for the AI in the demos were not synthesized robotic tones but distinctly human-sounding, in both the female and male flavors it showcased.

Indeed, the AI pantomime was apparently realistic enough to convince some of the genuine humans on the other end of the line that they were speaking to people.

At one point the bot’s ‘mm-hmm’ response even drew appreciative laughs from a techie audience that clearly felt in on the ‘joke’.

But while the home crowd cheered enthusiastically at how capable Google had seemingly made its prototype robot caller — with Pichai going on to sketch a grand vision of the AI saving people and businesses time — the episode is worryingly suggestive of a company that views ethics as an after-the-fact consideration.

One it does not allow to trouble the trajectory of its engineering ingenuity.

A consideration which only seems to get a look in years into the AI dev process, at the cusp of a real-world rollout — which Pichai said would be coming shortly.

Deception by design

“Google’s experiments do appear to have been designed to deceive,” agreed Dr Thomas King, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab, discussing the Duplex demo. “Because their main hypothesis was ‘can you distinguish this from a real person?’. In this case it’s unclear why their hypothesis was about deception and not the user experience… You don’t necessarily need to deceive someone to give them a better user experience by sounding naturally. And if they had instead tested the hypothesis ‘is this technology better than preceding versions or just as good as a human caller’ they would not have had to deceive people in the experiment.

“As for whether the technology itself is deceptive, I can’t really say what their intention is — but… even if they don’t intend it to deceive you can say they’ve been negligent in not making sure it doesn’t deceive… So I can’t say it’s definitely deceptive, but there should be some kind of mechanism there to let people know what it is they are speaking to.”

“I’m at a university and if you’re going to do something which involves deception you have to really demonstrate there’s a scientific value in doing this,” he added, agreeing that, as a general principle, humans should always be able to know that an AI they’re interacting with is not a person.

Because who — or what — you’re interacting with “shapes how we interact”, as he put it. “And if you start blurring the lines… then this can sew mistrust into all kinds of interactions — where we would become more suspicious as well as needlessly replacing people with meaningless agents.”

No such ethical conversations troubled the I/O stage, however.

Yet Pichai said Google had been working on the Duplex technology for “many years”, and went so far as to claim the AI can “understand the nuances of conversation” — albeit still evidently in very narrow scenarios, such as booking an appointment or reserving a table or asking a business for its opening hours on a specific date.

“It brings together all our investments over the years in natural language understanding, deep learning, text to speech,” he said.

What was yawningly absent from that list, and seemingly also lacking from the design of the tricksy Duplex experiment, was any sense that Google has a deep and nuanced appreciation of the ethical concerns at play around AI technologies that are powerful and capable enough of passing off as human — thereby playing lots of real people in the process.

The Duplex demos were pre-recorded, rather than live phone calls, but Pichai described the calls as “real” — suggesting Google representatives had not in fact called the businesses ahead of time to warn them its robots might be calling in.

“We have many of these examples where the calls quite don’t go as expected but our assistant understands the context, the nuance… and handled the interaction gracefully,” he added after airing the restaurant unable-to-book example.

So Google appears to have trained Duplex to be robustly deceptive — i.e. to be able to reroute around derailed conversational expectations and still pass itself off as human — a feature Pichai lauded as ‘graceful’.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/10/duple ... ai-design/

[Higgenbotham]

With No One Answering Phones, How Can We Actually Reach People?

RALPH NADER
Oct 16, 2022
Common Dreams

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column on the imbalance of communications success between callers and callees. The latter have all kinds of ways not to return calls, emails, and other portals of the so-called communications technological revolution.

Many people can't even get through on the telephone to their own neighbors because the latter no longer answer the phone due to the robocalls they receive.

I noted that getting through to your callee is so difficult these days that it represents a formidable obstacle both to a functioning democratic society and a functioning consumer-driven economy.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022 ... ach-people

PRESS RELEASE
Multiple India-based call centers and their directors indicted for perpetuating phone scams affecting thousands of Americans
Thursday, February 3, 2022
For Immediate Release
U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Georgia

ATLANTA – A superseding indictment has been unsealed against multiple Indian-based call centers and their directors charging that each of them conspired with the previously–indicted VoIP provider E Sampark, and its Director, Guarav Gupta, to forward tens of millions of scam calls to American consumers. The call centers and their directors place the initial scam calls, and the VoIP provider forwards those calls into this country, whereupon the call centers speak to —and attempt to defraud — the American-based victims.

“Scam robocalls cause emotional and financial devastation to victims, particularly our vulnerable and elderly populations,” said U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine. “These India-based call centers allegedly scared their victims and stole their money, including some victims’ entire life savings.”
“These developments demonstrate the commitment of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) to investigate and bring to justice those that victimize the American taxpayer,” said J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. “The defendants engaged in multiple scams, often targeting the most vulnerable members of society. The success of this investigation is the result of a collaborative effort between TIGTA and the dedicated staff at the United States Attorney’s Office.”

According to U.S. Attorney Erskine, the charges, and other information presented in court: Criminal India-based call centers defraud U.S. residents, including the elderly, by misleading victims over the telephone utilizing scams such as Social Security and IRS impersonation as well as loan fraud.
As part of their Social Security scam, India-based callers pose as federal agents in order to mislead victims into believing that their Social Security numbers were involved in crimes. As part of the IRS scam, the callers pose as IRS employees and tell victims that they owe back taxes. In both scenarios, the call centers threaten to arrest the victim if the victim does not send money. Based on misrepresentations made during the calls, the victims, including a number of Georgia residents, mailed money to a network of individuals who allegedly laundered funds on behalf of the overseas fraud network.

As part of the loan scam, India-based callers mislead American consumers into believing that the callers work for lending institutions and that the victims are eligible for fictitious loans. The India–based callers direct the victims to pay upfront fees to demonstrate their ability to repay the loan. At times, the callers direct victims to provide their bank account information and make it appear as though they had deposited funds into the victims’ accounts. The callers then tell the victims to withdraw the funds and transfer them via wire transfer and gift cards. After the victims send the funds, the deposits that the callers supposedly made bounce. The victims receive nothing in return.

The Indian-based call centers and their directors named in the superseding indictment are listed below:

Manu Chawla and Achivers A Spirit of BPO Solutions Private Limited;
Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, a/k/a Sawaran Deep Kohli, and Fintalk Global;
Dinesh Manohar Sachdev and Global Enterprises;
Gaje Singh Rathore and Shivaay Communication Private Limited;
Sanket Modi and SM Technomine Private Limited; and
Rajiv Solanki and Technomind Info Solutions.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/pr/mu ... hone-scams

[aeden]

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inli ... k=XvZrggpt

This was discussed as the tobin q white papers a few read.