Imagine if a bunch of billionaires and large corporations got together and tried to push a shiny Black Box on the world. It would require that electricity production be doubled. It would take 20% of fresh water. The positive claims for it are that it would reduce work loads for humans. It would be inventive, smart, and powerful. And that’s all you know about the Black Box. Would you buy it? This is AI, or the new Artificial Intelligence. It’s promoted as a sort of one-size-fits-all panacea for mankind. AI is training the Black Box to think more like a human, but still only being a Black Box that is limited to the data it is fed. The selling point is that AI can then replace humans in jobs. “We believe that it is possible that deep learning systems are less than a decade away from superintelligence,” Pachocki added. He described superintelligence as systems smarter than humans across a large number of critical actions. [https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/28/sa...
My traffic cone experience, 3/2/26 I planned to protest at the Trump statue today for an hour, as I did once before. I have flyers promoting my proposed ordinance that any presidential statue on public property in Rapid City has to have a traffic cone on its head IF that president was a convicted felon. So, I brought along a traffic cone to make the point for the ordinance (so far, Trump is the only president this ordinance would apply to). I also had a sign that said “Trump is a felon” on one side and “Trump starts wars” on the other. I got there about 9:55. The statue is on a corner, so there is plenty of space to walk back and forth without bothering any pedestrians. So, I stuck the cone on Trump’s head (it’s got a rubber base so it can’t hurt the statue) and started slowly walking back and forth. One guy across the street gave me the finger and yelled something at me. Several cars honked when they went by. Another guy stopped at the corner and told me I coul...
1/28/26 I planned today to protest at the Trump statue downtown. Rapid City, SD has life-size statues of every president downtown, spread out to different corners. I wrote a city ordinance proposal that would require if any president had a felony or felonies, their statue must have a traffic cone on its head. This way, a felon would not be as honored as much as the other non-felon presidents. Trump, a felon, had his statue placed a few months ago. Of course, there’s not much chance that such an ordinance would pass, and when I sent it to the council persons, the mayor, and the group that manages the statues, only one councilman replied, and he thought it was a funny idea. So, if the city council doesn’t take you seriously, what to do? I thought to demonstrate by the statue and hand out flyers about the ordinance. And thus, flyers, sign, and traffic cone packed up, I drove downtown to demonstrate for about an hour (10-11). Nice weather, by the way. When ...
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