Everybody Has Problems

jabowery · 2 May 2025 16:31

The rural official is so identified with the sources of funding that I am now cut off from that local official due to my attitude toward this funding source.

I just sent this to my legislative representative:

Representative Sieck,

The law prohibits an ambulance driver from departing for an EMS call without an EMS provider on board.

In a sparsely populated rural setting where the EMS provider is with the patient in a different town than the driver sitting in the ambulance, in order to lawfully transport the patient via ambulance, the EMS provider would need to drive to a different town to accompany the driver back to the patient.

This almost occurred the day before yesterday when I, a driver, responded here in Riverton to a call involving a potential cardiac event in Hamburg. For whatever reason, the dispatcher thought there would be no EMS provider to accompany me but thought there would be an EMS provider in Hamburg.

Fortunately, no one was killed by the law in this situation, but to indicate just how ridiculous this law is for a place like Riverton:

If someone calls 911 here in Riverton, I can be sitting in the ambulance and just blocks away an EMS provider who may be saving the life of the patient. Should he not have driven straight from his house to the patient, instructing me to meet him there with the ambulance?

Sincerely,

James Bowery

PS: This law, like so many other laws, is tailored for urban areas. Depopulation of rural areas results. However, far more insidious, is that when young families move to urban areas, they are less likely to have children. It seems our institutions advertising themselves as protecting the people, urban as well as rural, aren’t serious about anything but providing jobs for people claiming the status of protectors of rural populations.

Gavin · 2 May 2025 19:15

Interesting! In my rural state, the regulation is explicit, there in black & white. In an emergency, EMTs are authorized to drag anyone off the street to drive the ambulance. Seems reasonable – in an emergency, the focus should be on doing everything possible to save a life.

Of course, this is not popular with unionized full-time EMT employees, who insist on a crew of 2 in the ambulance.

jabowery · 2 May 2025 19:17

For all I know that’s authorized here as well if the situation you posit is taken literally in that the EMS ambulance and potential driver are co located.

There may also be situations where someone in some sort of chain of command could provide authorization for a driver to depart alone with an ambulance. But where people are all volunteers frequently the chain of command involves people who are not available.

As regards unionized fire and rescue folks well guess where unions are most effective? If your rural state is that much of a rural state the evolution of civilization may not have progressed to the point that it’s killing we heathens as often.

jabowery · 8 May 2025 02:36

I’m willing to suspend this judgement based on the fact that the website wasn’t updated to include the news release regarding an intended change of direction for the foundation. My skepticism remains given that the kind of process being pursued is going to be dominated by “community leaders” that have, in my experience, been less than comprehending of the source of the rot, despite my efforts to bring it to their attention over the last 15 years.

Last night a meeting was held in my former town of residence, and I’ll be watching closely to see how much insight these meetings bring to the table.

People are thinking they’ll be able to attract people to “work remote” while having spent 15 years ignoring my overtures to communities leaders regarding what it takes to attract people trying to escape the Hell Hole that has become of the Bay Area.

Certainly they aren’t going to be funding anything like this:

PS: That these meetings in all SW Iowa towns receiving funding are uniformly dominated by women is not a good sign.

jabowery · 8 May 2025 13:14

“Vision”

An endowment of $3,200 per man woman and child in Shenandoah to seed a local currency as transferable property tax credits, inducing local governments to “get it” is a vision that could actually do something about total fertility rates instead of being yet another project in “community pride” pouring money down a 10,000 year rat hole.

A slide from my 2014 presentation to SW Iowa community leaders on countycurrency.org:

“the people perish”

Where there is no vision, “Everybody has problems”.

So I sent this:

Dear Margaret Brady,

Attached is an email I sent to the Lakin Foundation describing my career-long history addressing the intent of the endowment now being spent to revitalize SW Iowa. I no longer live in Shenandoah so obviously I have no business involving myself in the decisions regarding the $3,200/person now available to revitalize rural culture in and around that town. But perhaps I do have some business appealing to your heart, if not on the basis of my passion for rural culture as the canary in the coal mine called “civilization”, then on the basis of an anecdote that may help you, a veterinarian, better-empathize with we great apes of rural SW Iowa:

During my sojourn out of Iowa, I lived next to the San Diego Zoo. My membership permitted me to go jogging there every morning before it opened to the public. During these morning jogs I sometimes stopped by the cage of a gibbon. He was alone in the cage while other gibbons were free to braciate through the elaborate habitats. I stood there looking at him. Feelings welled up for him. He pressed his back up against the cage and looking over his shoulder at me. I got the message, climbed over the barrier to the cage where I groomed him. Of course, a zookeeper caught me and threatened me with loss of my membership if I didn’t comply with the barrier. So my gibbon friend and I could only look at each other. One day, I saw another gibbon in the cage with him. A female!!! I was really happy to see that my friend had what he needed! But then as the days wore on, something strange happened: The female began beating up on my friend. She almost seemed to lose her mind in rage at him. I voiced my concern to the zookeepers. Eventually they sent those gibbons to a spacious habitat in rural San Diego County where such pathological behaviors were less likely to emerge and occasionally the gibbons could mate and produce the next generation.

You may have noticed a pathological situation arising between the genders of the great apes of rural SW Iowa that, although it is not perhaps as obvious, is, nevertheless, distressing to those of us who are in a position of responsibility for the great apes of SW Iowa.

From the 2014 presentation I made to the Fremont county board of supervisors while I was living just outside Shen:

<“Global Economy vs Rural Culture” slide>

An endowment of $3,200 per man woman and child in Shenandoah to seed a local currency as transferable property tax credits, inducing local governments to “get it” is a vision that could actually do something about total fertility rates instead of being yet another project in “community pride” pouring money down a 10,000 year rat hole.

Indeed, it could spark a revival of humanity’s sense of itself world wide.

Sincerely,

James Bowery

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: James Bowery <jabowery@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 2, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Subject: “Back to the Countryside Via Technology” by William C. Norris
To: <JGreen@lakinfdn.org>

Dear Jennifer Green,

Please find attached the 1978 essay by William C. Norris “Back to the Countryside Via Technology” where he talks about computer networking as a way to revitalize the rural midwest. Norris was a Nebraska farm boy who grew up to become the chairman of Control Data Corporation: the first supercomputer company. 1978 was also the year I went to work on Norris’s vision of using computer networks to bring people back to the countryside. After a lifetime of pioneering mass market computer networking I moved back to Iowa.

When I first heard about the $168M Lakin initiative for SW Iowa rural communities, I was a bit skeptical due to the long history of institutions saying they were going to help rural culture, and failing. So I went to the website to investigate the grant history. Although the front page pictures a bucolic scene, the recent grant history appeared to bear out my skepticism as can be seen in this spreadsheet showing the per capita amounts going to the SW Iowa counties to be out of line with the news reports of the initiative.

You may wish to update the website to prominently link to the press release so you don’t get old curmudgeons like myself reacting negatively due to our lifelong accumulation of battle scars.

Sincerely,

James Bowery

jabowery · 9 May 2025 17:36

I’m trying to remember the last time my system wouldn’t boot. It must have been a couple of years ago at least. Those who perceive me as having delusions of grandeur about the algorithmic information criterion won’t be surprised that I’m rather shall we say vigilant as in eternally about the fact that the previous screenshot regarding pseudo time is a new approach to discovering macro social dynamics using algorithmic information for casual model selection that today would have started running on multiple cores for the first time. As can be seen it is clearly quite relevant to total fertility rates even though I didn’t target that as a dependent variable. I was just looking for a general dynamical system at the macro social level based on my laboratory the state’s database since that is more tractable than the laboratory the counties. Pseudot time is something that physiologists have come up with in looking at cell evolution in a way that permits them to do dynamical systems analysis even though time sequence is not explicit.

Update: Got it running – so it set me back a day and it will eat into my weekend but no deal in the final analysis. I’m suspecting something about the Brave browser’s interaction with NVIDIA’s driver is messed and that due to my extensive use of coding assistants in Brave combined with the extensive use coding assistants make of Brave’s features – pushing it to its limits – I may have triggered some sort of nasty reaction from the Linux’s second-class OS citizenship status with NVIDIA.

jabowery · 10 May 2025 15:22

You’d better watch this:

Throw a Harvard educated Goldman Sachs guy who helped get MAGA started and then get dumped by Trump and then put in prison for his trouble, and he starts sounding like “That Blowhard Bowery Guy”.

I’m losing interest in appealing to any but the tiny minority that are adequately ruthless about the Cyclogenetic Eschatology extremes of Camp 38 and Panspermia.

Musk is pretty high in the panspermia ruthlessness metric, which a big part of the reason I’m still interested in pursuing the ALIC* (ALgorithmic Information Criterion) for macrosocial dynamics model selection. Musk isn’t adequately ruthless about his pursuit of truth else he’d have funded something like Hume’s Guillotine by now (if not the Hutter Prize and Mahoney’s Large Text Compression Benchmark). He should want to see how the results compare with the Population Wellness Initiative that he endowed as part of his interest in TFR collapse. All he’d have to do is ask PWI how much money they need to curate a dataset containing all the data they believe to be relevant to PWI so that, at the very least, he could run a “many analysts, one dataset” study, as a first step toward transparency. The next step would be running a Hume’s Guillotine prize on that dataset which could be run with far less money than the initial step of comparing analytic methods.

And, yes, I’ve asked the PWI folks if they would provide a dataset for that purpose.

The big hurdle people need to get over is going from statics to dynamics in causal inference. They don’t even need to accept “That Blowhard Bowery’s ALIC Obsession”. I’m starting to think it is pretty likely that a chasm is being maintained between open sociology with its “statistics” and proprietary (if not black budget) dynamical models in both the financial industry and defense industry. Control systems need dynamical models and there is power and money in CONTROL – which is directly related to scientific inference of causality is most widely recognized to be based on experimental CONTROL.

jabowery · 11 May 2025 13:56

“It took him 48 hours from announcing a shitpost “let’s go invade haiti” to receiving more volunteers than the United States Army gets recruits in a year (61,000 being the 2024 recruitment goal). That’s young men volunteering to fight to the death in a far-off land, not for their country but for Lord Miles personally.”

Where he says legacy read bloodline.

eggspurt · 12 May 2025 12:49

jabowery · 13 May 2025 14:34

Below are some partial differential equations of the dynamical model discovered using the first pseudotime axis after 3 iterations.

First of all, I’m all but certain this system of PDEs is wrong mainly because:

I have deliberately distorted the ALIC metric to favor complicated models for debugging purposes
this is the first time I’ve run this machine learning algorithm on the full Laboratory of the States data
even using 23 CPUs, this is going very slow… it only started discovering ANY PDEs after 3 iterations and that took 12 hours

BUT…

there is something really weird going on here:

autism rate divided by mother’s age at first live birth

???

In my ancient analysis based only on the average coefficient of determination for single variables – that is to say the rank ordering of measures by how well they predict all the other measures – autism measures were at the very bottom. In other words if you knew autism rates by State it told you virtually nothing.

By stark contrast MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth came out very near the top as a predictor of all other measures.

(lots) jabowery@jaboweryML:~/devel/lots$ tail -f overnightall.log 
Testing UMAP with 3 dimensions...
  MDL: 137345.49 (Manifold: 5055.79, Data: 132289.70)
Best pseudotime: PCA with 1 dimensions, MDL=124400.69
Best Laplace scales: [np.float64(0.5), np.float64(1.625), np.float64(2.75)]
Creating pseudotime grid...
Discovering PDEs with ALIC‐based optimization...
Initializing with basic models...
Initial system MDL: 73544.13 bits
Using 23 processes for parallel optimization
Global optimization iteration 1/10...
  System MDL after iteration 1: 73522.61 bits
73522.61030186742
10
Global optimization iteration 2/10...
  System MDL after iteration 2: 73073.46 bits
73073.46255917048
10
Global optimization iteration 3/10...
  System MDL after iteration 3: 73073.41 bits
+  Converged (MDL improvement < 1.0 bit)
∂Age44To64Percentage2000_ident/∂t = 0.0039⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂Age65AndOverPercentage2000_ident/∂t = -0.0046⋅FinnishPercapita1990_ident/FamiliesWithIncome60000to74999PercapitaIn1990_ident
∂AirTrafficFreightTonsPercapita1999_ident/∂t = 0.0053⋅FinnishPercapita1990_ident/FamiliesWithIncome60000to74999PercapitaIn1990_ident
∂AirTrafficPassengersPercapita1999_ident/∂t = -0.0135⋅Subsaharan_AfricanPercapita1990_ident/OfChildrenBornToWhiteMotherPercentThatHaveWhiteFather1995_log
∂BelgianPercapita1990_ident/∂t = 0.0083⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂BirthRate2003_ident/∂t = -0.0073⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂CocaineUsersPercapita1999_ident/∂t = 0.0041⋅FinnishPercapita1990_ident/FamiliesWithIncome60000to74999PercapitaIn1990_ident
∂DefenseExpendituresPercapita1997_ident/∂t = 0.0046⋅NorwegianPercapita1990_ident/SyphillisPercapita1997_sqrt
∂DutchPercapita1990_ident/∂t = 0.0085⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂EnglishPercapita1990_ident/∂t = 0.0125⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂ExportsNonManufacturedPercapita2003_ident/∂t = -0.0272⋅ImmigrantsCubaPercapita1998_sqrt/MMR4313VaccinationPerChild1994_ident
∂FoodInsecureWithHungerPercentage3YearAverageStarting1996_ident/∂t = -0.0221⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂ForeignBornMultiple1990to2000_ident/∂t = -0.0062⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂French_CanadianPercapita1990_ident/∂t = -0.0088⋅Subsaharan_AfricanPercapita1990_ident/OfChildrenBornToWhiteMotherPercentThatHaveWhiteFather1995_log
∂GermanPercapita1990_ident/∂t = 0.0095⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂HispanicsPercapita1990_ident/∂t = -0.0089⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂HousingPricesPercentChangeFirstQuarterOf2004_ident/∂t = -0.0128⋅Subsaharan_AfricanPercapita1990_ident/OfChildrenBornToWhiteMotherPercentThatHaveWhiteFather1995_log
∂HungerPercentage3YearAverageStarting1996_ident/∂t = -0.0221⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂MMR4313VaccinationPerChild1994_ident/∂t = 0.0056⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂MMR431VaccinationPerChild1994_ident/∂t = 0.0044⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂MotorVehicleTheftPercapita2001_ident/∂t = -0.0218⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂OfChildrenBornToBlackFatherPercentThatHaveWhiteMother1995_ident/∂t = 0.0127⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂OfChildrenBornToWhiteMotherPercentThatHaveWhiteFather1995_ident/∂t = 0.0155⋅Subsaharan_AfricanPercapita1990_ident/OfChildrenBornToWhiteMotherPercentThatHaveWhiteFather1995_log
∂Other_racePercapita1990_ident/∂t = -0.0098⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂PopulationMultiple2000to2001_ident/∂t = -0.0185⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂RobberyPercapita2001_ident/∂t = -0.0196⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂RonPaulContributionsPerCapitaPreliminary4Q2007_ident/∂t = -0.0138⋅Subsaharan_AfricanPercapita1990_ident/OfChildrenBornToWhiteMotherPercentThatHaveWhiteFather1995_log
∂SATIMathRatio2000to1991_ident/∂t = 0.0071⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂SATIMathRatio2001to2000_ident/∂t = 0.0093⋅Subsaharan_AfricanPercapita1990_ident/OfChildrenBornToWhiteMotherPercentThatHaveWhiteFather1995_log
∂SATIVerbalRatio2001to2000_ident/∂t = 0.0122⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂ScottishPercapita1990_ident/∂t = -0.0178⋅ImmigrantsCubaPercapita1998_sqrt/MMR4313VaccinationPerChild1994_ident
∂SwedishPercapita1990_ident/∂t = 0.0166⋅Scotch_IrishPercapita1990_ident/SATIMeanVerbal1991_sqrt
∂TotalFertilityRate2003_ident/∂t = -0.0075⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂UFOReportsPercapitaPerSquareMilePerYear1941to1952_ident/∂t = -0.0037⋅AutismPercapita2000_ident/MothersAgeAtFirstLiveBirth1990_sqrt
∂UFOReportsPercapitaPerSquareMilePerYear1941to1996_ident/∂t = -0.0057⋅Subsaharan_AfricanPercapita1990_ident/OfChildrenBornToWhiteMotherPercentThatHaveWhiteFather1995_log
∂UFOReportsPercapitaPerSquareMilePerYear1969to1985_ident/∂t = -0.0104⋅FamiliesWithIncome55000to59999PercapitaIn1990_log/AirTrafficFreightTonsPercapita1999_sqrt
73073.40572334621
10
Global optimization iteration 4/10...

Gavin · 14 May 2025 00:51

If I am following you, and the older the mother was then the more likely the child was to suffer from autism, is that not simply common observation? Children of older first-time mothers are more likely to have problems?

A Scottish lady once told me that in her country, a first-time mother over the age of 21 was classified as a “matronly prim” and given special attention.

jabowery · 14 May 2025 03:08

That’s not what the system of differential equations is saying since the left hand side of the equations are being ‘driven’ (in pseudotime) by the right hand side of the equations.

But the association you point out is another layer of “weirdness” on top of the one I pointed out originally which had to do merely with the stark contrast between variable X, providing very little predictive power in general, and variable Y, providing among the most predictive power of all variables — their ratio appearing as a driver of dynamics would be weird even if there were no suspected association between them which, as you rightly point out, there is. But that’s just another weird thing since the ratio of the two driving other things shouldn’t(?) imply a causal link between them.

That “shouldn’t(?)” may be turned to “should” in the event the ratio exposes what is called a “variable latent in the data” corresponding to a factor in autism causation that has other interesting ecological effects. For instance, if there were some measure of the Amish, and the Amish had either a genetic or environmental adaptation that permitted older mothers to not produce kids with autism but that’s just me palavering at this point.

In any event, I did remove the distortion that favors complex models and re-ran the algorithm with a more optimal search strategy, so that the model stabilized. I’m still debugging so that caveat still applies to this model.

The result, pictured below, is color coded to show negative influence in red and positive influence in green. Ratios (/) icons have 2 incoming influences: denominator in orange (analogous to red) and numerator in blue-green (analogous to green) to indicate their respective influence on the ratio (decreasing it and increasing it respectively). The balloons are colored according to “heat” indicating how much those nodes influence the other nodes in total. Red is high influence and blue is low influence. Black balloons have no influence in this model.

The ratio of subsaharan Africans to children born to both white parents emerges as the most influential. I’m still skeptical due to probable bugs remaining in my code (as I said) but this is at least not as downright “weird” as the ratio of autism to mother’s age.

As an example of how to interpret just one influence path:

Subsaharan Africans have a positive influence on the central ratio which has a positive influence on mother’s age which has a negative influence on the ratio of autism to mother’s age which ratio has a very small positive influence on middle class income and a very small negative influence on lower class income and female syphilis.

Going back to the central ratio again children born to both white parents has the opposite effect of subsaharan Africans.

Clicking on the image takes you to an interactive HTML page to reposition the nodes in the graph, pan, zoom, etc.

jabowery · 15 May 2025 03:29

Way too early to declare any kind of victory other than the progress of getting the same (possibly buggy) program to run with the Hume’s Guillotine LaboratoryOfTheCounties.csv…

But…

The arc with one of the largest weights was directed at birth rate and it was a negative weight from that highly influential node in the upper left of the below graph:

Self-employed per capita divided by male to female ratio.

One can also think of that as:

Self-employed per capita times female to male ratio.

I asked Claude Sonnet 3.7 to provide any sociology research that might comport with this equation. It provided several interpretations, a couple of which seemed so biased that they actually oppose this equation. Nevertheless, as long as I’m palavering, here’s Claude’s framing in terms of conventional sociology. My attempt to get ChatGPT 04-mini-high to perform “Deep research” on this resulted in what is called “AI slop” IMNSHO. It kept going on and on about how self-employment’s impact on fertility was “conditional” without mentioning that the denominator of the ratio was just such a “condition”. When it finally got around to addressing the ratio it did so without distinguishing between male to female and female to male ratios. I will say though that the dog that didn’t bark here is that in a situation like NYC where the female to male ratio is high, self-employment will tend more toward “gigs” up to and including prostitution to pay off student loan debts that can’t be escaped in bankruptcy. At least you can make more money as a young prostitute in NYC than you probably can in podunk Iowa. (See the deleted scene from Eyes Wide Shut on the prostitute who contracted AIDS – the daughter of a doctor who majored in “sociology”.)

jabowery · 17 May 2025 00:17

After the attempts on Trump’s life, I brought up countycurrency.org with this official again (I’d been telling him of the need for it for years). He thought it ridiculous that there could have been a serious disruption of civil society if Trump had died.

This is the kind of mentality among rural leadership that is depopulating rural towns.

It is also the kind of mentality among rural leadership – including the Republican establishment characters like Joni Ernst – that is opening the door to cartel infiltrators “looking for a better life”.

Is it any wonder young rural men are either arming themselves to the teeth biding their time or just giving up on life?