SeniorJunior

One Big Plan, Man Bollixed: The Current U.S. Health Care Situation: Our private, mostly unregulated, profit-driven insurance system guarantees by its very nature that millions of citizens, many who are highly productive workers, are either uninsured or under-insured. This situation cannot be improved significantly without eliminating private health insurance as the primary form of healthcare financing. Adding approximately 30% to the cost of healthcare (that's about $300 BILLION A YEAR!) private health insurance is parasitical in that it helps only the owners, stockholders and employees of the insurance companies and does essentially nothing to improve health care. Converting from private health insurance to Single Payer Government Insurance - "Medicare for All" (MFA) faces formidable hurdles, which are addressed in this plan. Hurdles. (I'm talking high hurdles, track fans.) The private health insurance companies are an immense po...

[I'll try this now and then. Great Four Corners road trip with lots of digital clicking. I was looking for faces. This is what I saw and what the camera saw.] Canyon de Chelly, Arizona: "Tough Guy"

I know why we are not seeing aliens... ...I mused. They are watching us in great detail with inconceivable technology, deciding whether we should be invited into the club of civilized beings all around us in space. We are not coming close to passing the entry test, so the space aliens are invisibly hanging around to see if we destroy ourselves or come to our senses.   Then I realized I have read many sci-fi stories -- even written a couple -- with just that idea. But I don’t remember one with a happy ending, so I decided to see first hand what “AI slop” looks like by having my current fave AI, Claude Opus 4.6, write one.   Young, energetic, ingenious Opus 4.6 cranked it out in about a minute. It failed only one part of the prompt, “one page.” It took two with small font. Other than that, it built a story true to the prompt. It mixes narrative and exposition, it is coherent, the logic is good. The sci-fi trappings are right out of Galaxy.   And it has a happy ending that’s...

 P areidolia Run Amuck Now is this an old bald guy with a fluffy white horseshoe crown of hair, a mustache and a serious expression, or what? I'm watching You . This fellow looms somewhere on the periphery of the Orion Nebula. He wasn't involved in early man's conjuring of heavenly hosts (or guests), because it takes a Hubble class telescope to see it. Then it takes a good case of P areidolia (seeing faces in clouds, snowbanks, rocks*, piles of poop, etc.) I am thusly infected.  Would you call me a pareidoliac? [Or might it be apophenia ???] I haven't quite captured how this face looks to me.  But, hey, I'm a pareidoliac, not an artist. I'm getting a new portrait artist! * Rock Face

The mind's eye runs rampant (again). Three -Eyed Giant Blue Insectile Found this beastie in a piece of broken PVC, stained by the glue and cleaner. Looks like an alien bug to me. Hey. See " Faces in the Rocks "