Best
This interview with Batya Ungar-Sargon is the best thing I've seen in a long time.

Batya narrates the CASTE history of journalism, which I hadn't heard before. It started as a working-class profession. Reporters were not college-educated. They lived in the same neighborhoods as plumbers and cops, and shared their worldview. Now journalists are extremely rich and extremely "educated" and extremely isolated. They don't know any actual humans, so they don't get any corrective feedback for their holocaustal THEORIES.

The British interviewer asks the right questions. At 27:00 he asks "What can we do about it?"

Her answer is perfect and classic.

Media gives you road rage. You feel the urgent need to berate and correct someone who has said the wrong thing on the internet.

It's not natural to feel that way about a stranger. Every time you feel that way, media makes a million dollars.

PING.

Tons of meaning packed into a few sentences.

Her next point is older but equally important. For a LONG time, media has persuaded us that we NEED to know about the rest of the world. "It's the responsibility of an informed citizen". Bullshit. This is an outright lie. We don't NEED to know anything about distant places and unconnected people. We only NEED to know what's happening in our house and neighborhood and immediate surroundings. When the demon mayor or demon governor issues a new genocidal torture mandate, or a windstorm or snowstorm is approaching, we need to prepare ourselves for danger. We don't NEED to know about tsunamis in Japan or mandates in France. Media inspires fear and panic by telling us that what happens in France will happen here. Admittedly the holocaust was running in worldwide unison at first, but the unison quickly dissolved. Paychopaths only give orders, they don't take orders. Now each demon is serving his own sexual needs.

Labels: SES

  ¶ 8:24 AM

  Wolf has fun with Zillow
Wolf is having fun with Zillow's stupid AI-based failure. They bought 35k houses at the peak of a wildly distorted bubble, and now they're trying to unload 7k of the houses at a serious loss.

Zillow decided to go into the house-flipping business by remote control. They trusted their AI to tell them what each house should bring, and then engaged flipping crews by remote control.

There are plenty of lessons in this failure. Some of them are so universally obvious they don't even count as lessons. You're supposed to buy low and sell high, not buy high and sell low. Remote control doesn't work.

The computer stuff is obvious to programmers. Silicon Valley arrogance trusts software more than ANYTHING else. If you have software you don't need knowledge or common sense.

AI, which is just a very big abacus, is supposed to acquire magical powers from its size. Programmers know that the abacus can only do what you order it to do. Zillow made a HUMAN decision to buy high, and then programmed their abacus to justify their HUMAN decision. A simulation or model can be pushed and pulled in any desired direction by choosing the assumptions and setting the weights. Above all, a simulation that predicts unlimited exponential growth is IMPOSSIBLE.

As usual, one commenter hits the mark perfectly and tersely:

I just can’t get over the irony of a business built on predicting home prices attributing its setbacks to “home pricing unpredictability.”

Labels: AI point-missing, Emersonian justice, SES

  ¶ 4:43 AM

  It's just Parkinson
Quora question:

Who are some people who the world thought were crazy, but were right all along?

Answers cite Wegener's idea of continental drift, saying "Revolutionary ideas are rarely accepted".

I hadn't stopped to think about it before. This answer is mostly backwards. Not entirely.

Drift is the opposite of crazy and revolutionary. It's OBVIOUS. Anyone can see it. Wegener was dismissed because geologists wanted NON-OBVIOUS theories.

Most of the time common sense is dismissed. The obvious is dismissed. Crazy and revolutionary and murderous ideas are REQUIRED.

A similar change in a closely related subject is Schiaparelli's OBSERVATION of rivers on Mars. For hundreds of years official science laughed at the claim. We KNOW that Mars doesn't have water, so it can't have rivers. How do we KNOW Mars doesn't have water? Because we KNOW that Schiaparelli was wrong.

A similar pattern happened in speech, with "competing" theories about the function of the larynx. The old idea was OBVIOUS, and the old idea was right. The larynx is like an oboe or saxophone. A column of air resonates, allowing a double reed to open and close with the variations of pressure. Bell described it clearly.

But this wasn't good enough for the scientists. They assumed that the larynx produced vibrations by direct muscular action, like a tapping finger.

The latter was OBVIOUSLY wrong, and you don't need fancy instruments to see why it was wrong. The larynx vibrates from 60 to 600 cycles in singing, and 150 to 300 cycles in normal speech. You can't even reach 20 cycles with a tapping finger, and 600 is OBVIOUSLY impossible. Muscles just don't move that fast.

Despite its OBVIOUS wrongness, the textbooks and teachers in the '70s were still treating both theories as competing and equally likely.

= = = = =

I'm tempted to cite Michelet on the psychopathic innovators yet again, but this problem is much simpler and more crassly Parkinsonian.

There's no profit in proving the obvious.

Proving a crazy idea takes HARD WORK and UNLIMITED WORK. The best part of proving a crazy idea is that you CAN'T GET THERE. So the budgets and authority must INCREASE FOREVER. It's a self-feeding pump.



= = = = =

Semi-relevant: Another Quora question mentions this quote:

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

I hadn't heard this before. Concise and comprehensive. Parkinson in one sentence. Google credits it to Ernest Benn, a British political writer contemporary with Parkinson.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Parkinson, SES

  ¶ 10:19 PM

  Not ironic, just good planning
Another viewpoint flip.

I've been making the usual sardonic schadenfreudisch comments about the Eastasia/Eurasia switch from the "Plastics" Crisis to the "Virus" Crisis.

In 2019 we were supposed to avoid all plastics to Save The Ocean.

In 2020 we were supposed to buy new plastic ballgags every day, then throw them in the ocean.

Just now I stood back and looked at the situation from the opposite angle.

If you were planning to make and discard trillions of plastic ballgags, you'd want to slow down other uses of plastics for several years in advance, so you could STOCKPILE plastics.

= = = = =

Incidentally, I never bought or accepted any of the official ballgags. I rigged up a muzzle from an old T-shirt, rather cleverly fastened with zipties. It has minimally complied with the demonic "rules" for 14 fucking months, needing no purchased or new materials at all.

Labels: Answered and unasked, Answered better than asked, NOW I SEE, SES

  ¶ 1:27 PM

  Another viewpoint flip
Unlike the previous two, this one isn't terse or self-contained. But it's worth reading the whole thing.

The question was:

Will China ever eliminate the "Great Firewall of China" and allow everyone equal, uncensored access to the Internet?

Lead paragraph of the answer:

But if you think I’m too toxic or controversial for you, if I’m making you uncomfortable, then wait till you face the onslaught of tech-savvy young Chinese people who are going to flood every comment section and social media page when the Great Firewall comes down. They will be exposing you to completely unfamiliar ideas and ways of thinking, hysterically insulting your mother, arguing with everyone about everything, spamming “NMSL”, and hijacking threads and conversations, mostly through incoherent sentences written in broken and unintelligible English.

Not all of them have an education level of above middle school. Some of them are barely literate or mentally sound, but all of them have an axe to grind with the west, and they will outnumber you 10 to 1.

Broader point is that China walls off its net for classic self-defense. The net wall BLOCKS SOROS.

America’s control over the internet, and the narrative, is absolute. Any country that relies on American social media is taking a mighty big risk of having their government toppled due to populist sentiments, which is easily manipulated through social media - Twitter for example played a major role in the Arab Spring.

Labels: SES, Sorosia

  ¶ 7:08 AM

  More than self-explanatory
A meme seen on Quora. It's concise, a true Self-Explanatory Sentence. Plus, the punch line helps to see the connection between Wellness, Testing, OCD, and muzzling.



What do the voluntary stranglers get out of it? They feel like they're participating in the practice of medicine.

It's parallel to the pleasure of any mass movement, including "democracy" itself. When you riot and "vote" and muzzle, and righteously demand that everyone else must riot and "vote" and muzzle, you delusionally believe that you're part of the power structure.

See Courtiers.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, Answered better than asked, SES

  ¶ 7:11 AM

  NIce viewpoint flip
I enjoy spotting viewpoint flips. Simple statements that look at a question from the opposite end, forcing you to see a new universe. Previous example.

Here's one from a Wolfstreet discussion of repurposing buildings after the lockdowns:

This “office building” concept is curious. It’s like working from home, but with an additional hour-long commute in between. Why would anyone put money in that?

Nice.

Labels: SES

  ¶ 3:22 PM

  Unnecessary credential of the year.
From Quora.




Incidentally, the former English teacher broke an ACTUAL rule of punctuation in the same phrase where she was "correcting" a fictional rule of grammar.

(My credential: Former proofreader.)

Labels: Entertainment, Language update, SES

  ¶ 10:48 PM

  Wish I'd said it 2
Now we're back to astonishingly perfect writings by others.


Q: Can you write a poem on the lockdown?

A:

--What Fools These Mortals Be--

To save me from Covid they locked me in my house

Where I caught the plague from a flea on a mouse.

Labels: infinite GOOD, SES

  ¶ 12:29 AM

  SES on programming
Q/A seen on Quora:

Q: What would the first generations of software developers think of today's developers?

A: Win10 describes it all.

= = = = =

On the dot in 4 words. I'm not quite the first generation; I didn't deal with COBOL and mainframes; I started with Fortran and PDP-11 assembler. That's fairly early.

Win10 uses all of the computer's time and memory to update Win10. When it's not spying on you, it's learning how to spy on you more invasively and efficiently. That's all it does. Occasionally you can slip in a CPU cycle to type one letter on the keyboard if you're really lucky.

Labels: Askedanswered, SES

  ¶ 11:35 AM

  The ultimate scientific SES
Ran across this on Quora just now.

Q: Why does water boil instead of burning?

A: Water is the ash left over from burning hydrogen.

BLAM! SMASH! CRASH! A complete flip of viewpoint in a few words, opening up new vistas. Magnificent. I'd never guess that there was an entirely new way to look at water.

Labels: SES

  ¶ 8:05 AM

  Strong SES
An extremely strong prediction from one of Wolf's commenters, pivoting on Wolf's latest discussion of the utterly bizarre SPACs, and ETFs betting on SPACs, and indexes betting on a basket of ETFs betting on NFTs betting on SPACs, which are nothing more than a money-laundering machine.

It’s structurally broken. On the levels of what the Roman Empire was after Constantine, etc. Not going back to Julius Caesar. Going to a new era.

That’s what we’re doing now: creating the underpinnings for a new era. Quite unsure what it’ll look like, how fast it’ll come. Stuff always changes, like the river (Heraclitus). It seems we’re wrapping up the Enlightenment rather quickly nowadays…

Rome is trite, but the rest is powerful. Wrapping up the Enlightenment is the ultimate terse description.

Every single piece of the Enlightenment, from secular Science to "rights" to "laws" to "constitutions", has been pulled out to its INTENDED goal and purpose.

Everyone can see now what the Enlightenment was MEANT TO DO. Time to wrap it up and return to a previous mode.

If I had the choice I'd nominate Sharia Law in 1200 AD, but I don't have the choice. It looks like we're returning instead to Europe in 1200 AD, with a mosaic of inbred imbecilic incestuous demonic aristocrats grinding up peasants to satisfy their sexual pleasure.

.... In other words, we're back to the exact literal situation that actually followed the fall of Rome. So Rome wasn't trite after all.


We didn't need any of this revelation. The French Revolution IMMEDIATELY showed us the full panorama of horror that was inherent in the Enlightenment, but we went ahead and applied it anyway. It took longer to unroll here.

Labels: 2000=1000, From rights to duties, NOW I SEE, SES

  ¶ 8:50 AM

  Best comment of the year
I read Wolfstreet daily because Wolf Richter explains economic matters clearly, without a vested bias, and his graphs are the best in the world.

He also has regular commenters with true expertise, especially in real estate. Landlords and realtors in various places KNOW what's happening. The rest of us can only guess from partial observations.

Here's a terse all-encompassing summation of the last 20 years:

I’m old enough to remember when people expected capitalism to make things cheaper and markets were supposed to work for society. Now taxpayers are supporting the stock market with trillions of dollars in QE, while scrambling to find affordable shelter.

Says it all.

Labels: Natural law = Soviet law, SES

  ¶ 8:59 PM

  Haven't seen one of these lately
Haven't seen a good AskedAnswered pair in a while. RealClearScience provided a perfect one today.

Labels: Askedanswered, Krauss, SES

  ¶ 9:32 AM

  Random rambling on epistemology
Rehashing:

It Pays to be Ignorant was an explicit parody of "experts" who know less than we do. Couldn't happen now. It was modeled on Info Please, which had a panel of arrogant condescending NYC "experts". Ignorant had three intentional idiots, expert COMEDIANS, who found an infinite number of ways to fuck up the most obvious questions.

Nearly all of the questions were tautologous or self-answering.

How many lakes are in the five Great Lakes?

Which wild animal is on the buffalo nickel?

Can you name a President who started life as a baby?

How many two-cent stamps in a dozen?

When is a June Bride married?

And the best of all:

Can you name the four people who star in the radio program 'It Pays to be Ignorant'?

A few of the questions required real knowledge:

What causes knotholes in a piece of wood?

And a few were fake tautologies, which the listeners would know if they listened to other radio shows like Hix or MacHarrie.

Which river is shown in the painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware?

Tautology? Nope. The river is the Rhine, as you'd know if you listened to Hix.

What hill was the Battle of Bunker Hill fought on?

Tautology? Nope. It was fought on Breed's Hill, as you'd know if you listened to MacHarrie.

Were these questions meant to let the listeners feel even more knowledgeable, or were the writers unaware of the non-obvious facts? Probably the latter, but we'll never know.

Separate observation about levels of knowledge: These Vaudeville-trained comedians knew when to break out of the script and talk personally to the audience, and sometimes reminded the audience that there was a script. "Wow! How did you know that?" "I read it right here." This level-crossing disappeared in movies, and then disappeared in TV, which mainly hired movie-trained actors. In movies and TV the script is the ONLY reality. No breakouts or level-crossing allowed.

In the '90s, "reality" TV and cable "news" practiced a new form of deception. Shows are rigidly scripted but appear to be spontaneous. Rush brought this deception to radio. Previous talk shows, from the '40s to the '80s, had a few guests each day, typically local politicians or local business owners pushing their agenda or product. Rush eliminated the guests, pretending that he was totally spontaneous, "walking a tightrope". In fact the elimination made it possible to script every second of the show. Guests are unpredictable. Trump, master of "reality" TV, brought "reality" TV openly into politics. "Spontaneous" random utterances and "orders", all precisely scripted to maximize conflict and chaos and increase the wealth and power of Deepstate.

Musical sidenote: The best part of Ignorant is Nat Novick's parody on classical music. Novick was a serious classical musician and his orchestra included virtuosi in all sections, especially the flutes. His remixes or quodlibets are pure genius, flipping between various composers and modern tunes seamlessly. Unfortunately host Tom Howard felt the need to keep up a constant patter during the music. I'd love to hear Novick's work on its own without Howard's play-by-play, but so far I haven't found it online. In fact Novick isn't even mentioned online, outside of specific references to Ignorant.

Labels: Entertainment, epistemology, SES

  ¶ 11:03 PM

  Self-explanatory Scan Skip
Polistra loves Self-Explanatory Sentences. Here's an unusual example of a self-explanatory scan.

American Radio Library has uploaded a few issues of a newsletter published by DuMont in the '50s. DuMont is best known for its early TV programming, but it was making CRTs and oscilloscopes before it expanded into content, and continued making TV sets and similar items afterward.

The Library's scanner had a skipping gear or a loose belt or something:



The text is talking about the undistorted scanning of a DuMont oscilloscope in magnified mode.

Labels: SES

  ¶ 7:51 AM

  AI missing all the points on all sides
The headline is sufficient.

Can blockchain help ensure fraud-free voting?

Blockchain is a fraud.

Voting is a fraud.

Translating the headline into reality:

Can fraud help ensure fraud-free fraud?

Labels: AI point-missing, Asked and not worth asking, SES

  ¶ 2:37 PM

  Knocking it out of the park
Berenson, discussing the vaccine trials vs the latest true but useless finding that muzzles are murderous, says:

I really am starting to wonder why the vaccine trials have so few confirmed infections.

Hayley Longster answers:

Probably because there's so few susceptible people around still to get infected

Reality is majority of people who take this vaccine will already be immune in some way or other


BEST ANSWER OF THE YEAR. ANSWERS ALL QUESTIONS SIMULTANEOUSLY IN A FEW WORDS.

Immunity is real, no matter how many times the "doctors" and "scientists" tell us it never existed. This "virus", if it exists at all, is simply a variant of the common cold. Everyone has had the common cold, and even this particular strain of the "virus" has been around long before 2020. Plenty of evidence from the previous two years is starting to surface. Our immune systems recognize familiar viruses and modify their response to fit the new strain, using intelligence and purpose and negative feedback.

Most discussion of the murder muzzles misses the point DIAMETRICALLY. Obviously any barrier is going to stop some microbes. The relative size of holes doesn't matter much.

Muzzles kill BECAUSE THEY BLOCK MICROBES, not because they FAIL TO BLOCK MICROBES.

Immunity is a highly intelligent process. It needs to see small samples of available microbes so it can form an appropriate response. When you're blocking out the ambient set of microbes, you're blinding the immune system, so it will be surprised and blindsided when it encounters a significant dose. In the other direction, the muzzle keeps your own microbes recirculating between nose and mouth, instead of letting you sneeze them out and get rid of them. Recirculated microbes also distort the perceptive ability of the immune system.

Muzzles also have secondary effects on all other forms of perception. They block the sense of smell, ruining emotions and memory formation. We lose our ability to see expressions, and thus lose confidence and social contact. We are angry and anxious and confused, with no social stability and no way to express or use the anger. Muzzles block vision and head movement to some extent, which makes it harder to move around and work. Getting around and working are crucial to normal health and immunity. These secondary effects are the real reason why the demons want to muzzle us.

Labels: Answered INFINITELY better than asked, SES

  ¶ 7:21 AM

  Lockdown 2
Here it is, announced and effective all at the same time.

Returning to FULL LOCKDOWN. "For one month", in other words until the end of the universe.

Viagra for demons. That's all it is. Hell has no exit. We're fucked.

Futile prayer, as always: GOD, IF YOU EXIST, THIS IS THE TIME TO INTERVENE. WE HAVE A MILLION DEMONS WHO NEED TO BE REMOVED FROM THE UNIVERSE. NOW. YOU KNOW WHERE TO START.

= = = = =

While trying to find more info from various websites, I ran into some leftover election coverage.

The frenzied demon accidentally gave an insight into his incomprehensibly evil cranial toxins in his victory statement:

“Great evening. I haven’t been this excited since I first operated a bulldozer,” Inslee said, speaking to reporters in Olympia.



Bulldozing the state is his mission, and he's getting more and more excited with every flattened business and every squashed and slaughtered Deplorable. Excitement is the purpose of the lockdowns and ballgags. Better orgasms for demons.

= = = = =


Another useful insight: Just 4 days ago, somebody in Mad Bomber's administration gave out FAKE info saying that a lockdown "isn't on the table" for now. This is THE classic psychopath tactic. Always give the victim a sense of reprieve just before the next STOMP. When the STOMP hits from a lower baseline, the murderous effect is much stronger. Psychopaths understand deltas and baselines. Sucker punches. It's too bad the rest of us don't.

Labels: imprecatory psalm, Jackboot stomping forever, SES, UNENDING HELL

  ¶ 3:24 AM

  COBOL as icon
The Github/Room 101 mindset is the deep terminal disease of recent times. It's a major instance of the psychopathic need to obliterate the universe.

This part of the urge is always present in psychopaths, and it was accurately recognized in earlier times.

Quora's programming language section has some discussions about COBOL that illustrate the distinction beautifully. When I hit Quora just now to find examples, the very first item turned out to be a perfect Self-Explanatory Sentence.....

Question:

Are there any old programming languages that are still in use?

Answer:

FORTRAN (63 years), COBOL (60 years), BASIC (56 years), C (48 years), SQL (42 years), C++ (35 years), Objective-C (32 years), Python (29 years), and Java (25 years) are all fairly old and still used (though COBOL is pretty specialized legacy code today). The first three are older than I am.

COBOL is specialized legacy code / Older than I am.

Self-explanatory sentence.

This is the Github view. Old shit is specialized legacy shit and you shouldn't be using it, and we will PROHIBIT YOU FROM USING IT. Any attempt to use tools or thinking from the filthy Neanderthal knuckle-dragging previous femtosecond will halt your life and crash your computer.

In the Github world, the PURPOSE of programming is to spend 100% of your mental time relearning, and 100% of your computer's CPU time processing updates. Windows 10 implements this purpose perfectly.

What is the original intended purpose of a TOOL like computers? The real purpose of any TOOL is to help you GET WORK DONE.

Fortunately the GET WORK DONE side is also well represented in Quora, by older WORKERS and even some younger WORKERS in places like Brazil.

Reality: In the world of computers that DO WORK, most of the WORK is done by COBOL. The part of the computing world that is truly needed, the part that would completely collapse the whole economy if it failed, is COBOL.

To a first approximation, computing = COBOL.

And there's a simple reason, which I didn't understand until I started reading these discussions. I'm older than COBOL but I didn't start programming until 1983, and I didn't start in the world of commerce. I started in audio processing, first with 8086 and PDP-11 assembly, then Basic, then C.

Simple reason:

COBOL handles money naturally and intrinsically.

The newer languages, including FORTRAN, all start from a theoretical math view of numbers where floating-point arithmetic is the base.

Digital computers are counters and sorters, not slide rules or theoretical equations on blackboards. Our stupid official history starts with Babbage, who was actually a dead end. Nothing came from Ada except some modern rebuilt legends. The real history of computing starts with Hollerith's counter and sorter, and the real history of programming starts with IBM mainframes counting and sorting money, programmed first in machine codes then soon in COBOL. IBM is uncool, so we can't mention it in our official histories.

Money doesn't use floating point. Money is naturally columnar. I've discussed this in the context of ancient bookkeeping:

= = = = = START REPRINT:

A ledger from the store that was outfitting fur traders in the Louisiana Territory around 1812. It's in French, with some plain English. Deeply fascinating to an old bookkeeper. I'm sure real historians have answered all these questions, but I'm having fun trying to solve them.

Title on first page:

La Compagny des Fourures du Missoury dans son Avanture.

Here's the top few lines of an account for trader Brice Arnold, showing the ledger structure clearly.



The debit column (Doit) is equipment sold to the fur traders, the credit column (Avoir) is furs bought from the traders. Note the Avoir column is closed out with "Your bill given this day."

The money units are puzzling. The two columns are P and S. My first thought was Poids et Shillings, but it appears that Pesos were the dominant currency in the territory at that time. The S unit is 100ths of the P unit, not 8ths or 20ths. According to online sources, the peso would have been divided into 8 reales at this time, and centavos didn't start until 1863. No firm answer to this question. Was it just US dollars and cents, labeled P and S by tradition?

We have the $ sign on totals, which meant pesos before it meant dollars. One credible explanation of the symbol traces it to a habit of writing an abbreviation for Pesos as a big P with a little s as a diacritic on top. These clerks were precise with their pens, and their dollar sign always had a big belly and a little head. You can almost see a big P with a little s riding on it. They clearly weren't thinking of the whole symbol as an S with lines through it; their uppercase S is entirely different.

Note the marks after each number. Decimal points? Nope, ditto marks. The clerk meticulously repeated the ditto after each number in each column, indicating that all the left numbers were P and all the right numbers were S.

Columnar accounting belongs to the Roman era, not to the modern place-value era. Monetary units were mostly non-decimal, so the tradition of recording each unit in its own independent column made sense, and there was no reason for decimal points. Note that some of the S numbers are followed by fractions, which was still common in US pricing up till WW2 when inflation made fractional cents meaningless.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Units are not floating point. Fractions are not floating point. Many fractions can't be represented uniquely and cleanly in floating point. A ledger with the proper set of columns corresponding to units can always represent the fractions that people actually use.

The human brain has separate processing systems for analog continua and countable units. We use both in business for different purposes.

The analog side judges the quality and status of different products with the help of senses and muscles. For products that are actually used, like the whiskey and gunpowder and furs in the example, we judge by using and working. We compare one whiskey with another in a totally analog way, leading to an analog decision. You prefer Jack Daniels, but you'll take Old Crow if Jack isn't around. There is no binary step anywhere.

The counting side works with units, which can be single coins or single banknotes or written columns in the ledger.

These units MUST BE DIGITAL. Paying or billing an analog amount is physically impossible and legally meaningless. Decimal currencies hide this fact by eliminating irrational fractions, but through history most currency systems included irrational fractions. In the LSD system, a bill for 5 pence would be 5/12 of 1/20 of a pound, expressed in floating as 0.02083333unending pounds. If we write the bill this way, there's no way to determine whether it was paid properly or not. But if we have a column for pence, we can bill or pay 5 pence and know precisely whether the debt is satisfied.

= = = = =

Later: I installed one of the COBOL compilers for Windows and started learning to use COBOL. This is fun! The more I see how COBOL works, the more I wish I'd tried it in college back in 1967. I'm a natural bookkeeper, not a natural theoretical mathematician. COBOL would have been instantly pleasing to my clerical genes. FORTRAN was always frustrating because I couldn't see the purpose of the examples.

Labels: defensible cases, defensible thymes, defensible times, Real World Math, SES

  ¶ 11:28 PM