Month: March 2024

The Storms of Life.

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A photograph I did of a storm over New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

Things sort of pile up, sometimes because we let them, sometimes because in the grand scheme of things we’re little socks hanging in the wind on a line attached only by weathered clothespins.

The trouble with problems is that they are never static. Problems are dynamic, they can ebb and flow, and when problems find ways to be synergistic through the faux guidance of Murphy, things can get out of hand quickly. They become storms.

We feel sometimes like Rob McKenna.

“…And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him…”

Douglas Adams, So Long And Thanks For All the Fish.

I’m not going to say that’s the wrong way to feel. There are a litany of reasons all those warm fuzzy feel good ‘be positive’ folk don’t talk about what being positive all the time sets you up for. It sells books, though – largely gifts that sit on shelves because people are too depressed to read them, and if they’re not, they don’t need them anyway. It’s a good market because nobody wants to admit that the world is not for or against us. Largely, it doesn’t give a microdose of fecal matter about the individual.1

It’s not that positive thinking is bad. It’s just that this cult of “Don’t be so negative” often dismisses real problems that form storms that send livestock hurtling at people’s heads. Oddly, almost never their own, which has evolved a bunch of pseudo-positive people effectively hurtling livestock at the rest of us.

Duck.

Growth is not something that happens when you’re constantly upbeat about being upbeat. We generally call that drugs or some sort of psychiatric disorder. We’re supposed to feel crappy sometimes. Problems can be solved, avoided, or will maim or kill you.

With that in mind, the key is to avoid them maiming or killing you, or if they are going to maim or kill you somehow, try to make it an interesting story. If you find yourself in the midst of a battle of pirates and ninjas armed only with a roll of aluminum foil, know that however it ends it will be a good story.

No matter how we end, we should try to at least be a good story for the people to talk about around the water cooler while they’re microdosing fecal matter2 and throwing positive thinking at each other and livestock at everyone else.

“…And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about…”

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore.

The self-help book industry will probably be killed by a self-help generative AI model soon that just says cheerful stuff all the time. The trouble with that, and all it’s precursors, is that it discounts people in storms. It robs them of their reality by trying to force them to imagine things are better.

If they are successful in the imagining, they’ll be ignoring the reality of their problems and may well succumb to them. It’s like selling dehydrated water in a desert.3 They tell you that you need it, they tell you have it, and, ‘for you, my friend, special bargain!‘.

The reality is that only you can plot your course, and you have to have a realistic understanding of the storm and where you want to end up – or, at least, where you don’t want to end up.

The key is to survive, but in surviving it is also possible to thrive. Sometimes you need people to support your efforts, but they have to want to support your efforts – even if they don’t need to.

What you need to know is that you alone determine how you make it through the storm. You can be influenced, particularly when you see no other ways, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for the opportunities instead of blindly following cliche advice someone else hands you.

Now, you can go back to those other folks trying to sell you dehydrated water. Try selling them sand.

  1. Please do not microdose fecal matter, for those of you who need to be told. For the rest, I hope you enjoyed the footnote. ↩︎
  2. Again, please do not microdose fecal matter, and also, please do not cause livestock to hurtle around if only for the sake of the livestock. ↩︎
  3. “Just add water!” ↩︎

Nature and Play.

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A friend of mine recently went to a informal conference regarding orcas and their attacks on ships, and I wish I could have gone myself. He was kind enough to post some bullets on it which were interesting and reinforced some of my own thoughts.

One thing leapt out at me – that the scientist that was there stressed that these weren’t attacks.

“…We talk to animals quite a bit – maybe more than we should, anthropomorphizing where maybe we shouldn’t. Communication, though, can be different from their end. Maybe they think the boat is an upside down creature that is playing?

It’s impossible to say, but I’m pretty sure it’s not an attack.

I’m also pretty sure it feels like an attack if you’re on the boat.

People do the above to each other every day, accidentally causing harm when trying to be playful. Maybe the answer is to let the orcas know that it hurts when they do that.”

‘The Unattack‘, RealityFragments.com, November 20th, 2023.

What I was getting at here was that I have seen and experienced way too many times destructive behaviors that, when someone is held to account, they respond with, “I was just playing”. “I didn’t mean anything by it…” Normally these seem to be responses that you don’t hear about beyond lower maturity levels that we associate with teenagers and below, so it’s part of the learning process, but I’ve heard people well down their temporal paths say the same or similar.

Well, if you didn’t mean anything, why did you do it? What was the reasoning behind it?

That’s pretty simple when we look at our own species, but across species, it’s much more complicated.

Another friend complained to me about her cats digging up her plants, which to the cats are play. It’s a behavior she doesn’t like, so of course she got upset about it (and that her housemates walked through the dirt rather than clean it up before she awoke), but it’s in the instincts of the cats to hunt. Cats are hunters. They may be domesticated, they may defecate in boxes and eat from dishes, but they are still cats. The damage done from that play should be expected from a cat, and I gave her some tips on how to avoid it that she didn’t use. The cats dug up her plants again, she got upset, cycle continues.

Dogs, as domesticated as they are, sometimes like digging holes, sometimes like going past fences, and all manner of other things – not because they are ‘bad’, but because they see no value in not doing it and find entertainment in doing it. It’s play.

Play has a practical use in our world. That’s why parents buy children educational toys, or at least things accused of being educational. It’s to prepare them for the world that we live in, which we as homo sapiens have a lot of control over. That’s why cats and dogs, despite hundreds if not thousands of years of ‘domestication’ retain some habits. Is it genetics? Some of it probably is. Have you ever seen a husky that doesn’t vocalize? A cat that doesn’t chase things around at some point in it’s life?

Taking this back to the largest carnivore on the planet, the orca, these are creatures that have worn salmon as hats during one of their fads, that love slapping stingrays into the air, and many other things. I love the research we see on them, and to date we have no reports of orcas attacking humans outside of captivity. No one knows the exact reason that these particular orcas are having fun with ship’s rudders, and scientists apparently agree that it’s play.

Play can be destructive. Whether spiteful or not, the damage from play can be real. More knowledgeable people than myself don’t know why the orcas are hitting the rudders. When we pull what they consider food out of the water, how do they view that? When we make noise in their environment, our cacophony of engines and rudders causing sounds around them to change, are we irritating them, as it did the baiji (Chinese freshwater dolphin) and which quite possibly is extinct?

Is this play, or are these orcas taking control of their environment? Can it be both? Or do they have TikTok challenges?

I think being able to disable a ship might be useful for a predator. It might be useful for disabling competition for food, or it could be the same as banging on the floor or ceiling when the neighbors are playing the song of their people too loud.

Lost In Thought

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I started off researching an angle on intelligence for a blog post and ended up down the rabbit hole.

Sometimes you can’t find the line between indulging yourself and researching something. Learning things. And that’s oddly very important. Sure, you may be exceeding the limits of what you have to do, but you stand a better chance of doing whatever it is better because of it.

You find new tools along the way, part of that lost art of browsing. Indulging my innate curiosity is a lot like how I browse. “Oh, what’s that for?” “Oh, that could be useful, let me make a note of that!”

You also get the, “that’s a terrible idea!”s and “I think they’re smoking crack laced with LSD again”.

So you dig deeper. If I agree or disagree something too much and can’t explain why, I’m just not done with it, I haven’t learned enough to consider anything I write to be good enough. As a layperson, you can get away with a lot, but you shouldn’t. As someone who likes finding the truth rather than spamming out posts, it’s an exhausting conflict at times.

Indulging that curiosity means I miss internal deadlines, then I feel bad about it because I had this plan that had to change with all the new knowledge. It took away from my main writing project too.

But… I think it will actually make that project better too. I feel it. See, that’s the trick for me, even if it’s a technical topic with references and links with footnotes and diagrams. I have to feel it, and while AI is supposed to be making it easier, I find dodging all the AI generated articles with no references to be increasingly tiresome.

This is why we’re supposed to use that grey matter encased in that imperfect helmet atop our necks. To experience other ideas, perspectives, and whatever else – so that we can improve our knowledge of a topic rather than being shoveled it like coal into a steam engine – as the media tries to do, as AI has done to it.

It’s good to get lost now and then. It means you’re seeing a new part of a map, or an old part of a map in a new way.

The Lost Art of Browsing.

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It disturbs me a little that there are people out there right now that have never physically browsed books, or music.

I would spend a lot of time in particular wandering bookstores, looking for things to read. Harold Bloom’s quote comes to mind; “We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.”

In the 1980s, I would frequent a bookstore in Trinidad – Manhin’s – on High Street in San Fernando, checking to see if the new Byte magazine, Compute! magazine, etc, would show up and when I did, I invariably picked up other books. It was never time wasted and, even if I didn’t buy some of the books, browsing them made me aware of other aspects of the world. Neil deGrasse Tyson pitches it to businesses as not making as much money if people cannot browse, but the benefit for the consumer is not that businesses can make more money but that consumers can get things that they want or need.

Thrift stores were a special kind of fun for me, before Walmart took over the United States, because you could find some really good stuff in them – including books, books that were cherished by someone, books that were kept on a bookshelf over years and sometimes decades because to them, there was something important in that book that they wanted to be able to revisit.

That seems lost now. In fact, bookstores have become more like Amazon with ordering specific books to sell based on what is popular when I’ve found some of the most interesting books aren’t popular. It used to be that you would walk into a bookstore, the smell of paper and ink permeating the place- some that traded in used novels smelled of old newsprint paper – and you got a feeling that you might find something. A good book found was like an archaeological find in an excavation.

Largely, we’ve lost that. Algorithms have taken away the discovery of our ‘B-Sides’, and feeding artificial intelligences on our habits, likes and dislikes, leaving our lives to be victimized by our options not just in politics but in everything. Everything is marketed, everything about our habits of looking are tracked and recorded, implicitly telling us we should be what we were instead of what we could become.

Making Things Worse.

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She was angry.

She told me why she was angry, and I of course listened. It doesn’t really matter what she was angry about. It was just important that someone listened. In listening, I found that she was angry with the wrong people.

This is more common than you think. People often get angry at the wrong people because they don’t understand the situation, or because being angry with the right people leads to confrontation and most people don’t like confrontation.

Most people like to watch confrontation, particularly for ‘right reasons‘ which have to align with their own perspectives.

The trouble was, being angry for weeks had not resolved her situation. In fact, it actively made it worse, blaming the wrong people for the situation and refusing to talk to them. I arched an eyebrow most of the time, listened, and tried to point her at paths that would lead to resolution so she wouldn’t be angry.

After all, nobody really wants to be around someone who is angry, particularly about the same thing over periods of time, particularly when it’s apparent that their anger is only causing a spiral of more anger because the situation is not getting resolved.

It’s at this point that men get blamed for trying to fix something, it seems, in the broad brushes of pseudo-psychoanalysis on social media. No one ever seems to consider the fact that maybe not resolving a problem and just listening enables the problem further. But, because of rampant pseudo-psychoanalysis, because no one wants to be accused of not listening, I listened even when I knew the problem was being compounded by not focusing on being angry with the appropriate people.

Honestly, though, in this particular situation, being angry at the right people wouldn’t help that much, but being angry at the wrong people was extremely counterproductive because those same wrong people could help if they weren’t getting pissed off themselves by being treated poorly, or worse.

At some point, you finally tell the person that they’re angry at the wrong people.

So you join those wrong people.

And so I did, and so I did. It was predictable, the entire thing, but I had gone through the motions in the hope that somehow I could get past that wall of anger and point her in the right direction. I don’t know why I did that. It’s pretty high risk and no reward, really.

It used to surprise me how people so often get angry with the wrong things, the wrong systems, the wrong anything, really. My thought is that anger should be directed where it can make a difference, not shouted into a void or at immovable objects. Anger is a powerful tool, used properly, to make situations better when all other tools have failed.

All too often, anger is self-defeating because the anger is reinforced when anger isn’t focused the right way.

She’s still angry, I’m sure. I’m not. My situation hasn’t changed, which is fine because I’m not upset about my situation. Her situation, it’s apparent, is just getting worse.

What strange creatures we humans are. When we do this as individuals, it’s bad, but collectively ‘smart mobs’ do it all the time because sometimes smart mobs apparen’t ain’t smart enough.

The False Dilemma and Democracy.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

For no good reason, I was going through the list of logical fallacies and, given that the US Presidential Election is coming up, the False Dilemma stood out:

A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when in fact, there could be many. (Wikipedia, accessed 22 March 2024).

This has been one of the things that has confused me for some time with regard to democracy, amongst other things. In the context of democracy, it seems that the two party system has become dominant – the binary system. I don’t know why this is. It can’t be a simple reason.

I did what we do these days. I asked ChatGPT why democracies devolve into two party systems. You can see it’s response through the image, and it made me look up the bullet points of First-Past-The-Post, Winner-Takes-All Effect (in the context of voting), Duverger’s Law, etc.

Most interesting is the last paragraph:

…While these factors explain the prevalence of two-party systems in certain democracies, it’s important to note that not all democracies follow this pattern. Some countries have proportional representation or mixed electoral systems that encourage the presence and success of multiple political parties, leading to multi-party systems that reflect a wider range of political perspectives.

This got me curious. Which countries are these? The answer is (in alphabetical order): Brazil, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden.

That’s 8 countries. There are a total of 74 democracies in the world as of 2024, with 50 of them considered ‘flawed democracies’ according to WorldPopulationReview, which references the 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.

I filled out the form to get the 2023 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, and wondered why I needed to fill out a form.

There are 195 countries in the world. Less than half are democracies (74/195) according to that information, but according to other information there is more democracy:

OurWorldInData.org/democracy | CC BY, source link: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-democracies-nondemocracies-fh?time=earliest..2022

That’s a bit confusing. 47.14% of 195 countries being non-democracies is 91.923 countries, and while I love precision, countries are not decimals. 52.86% of the world being electoral democracies means that 103.077 countries are electoral democracies. It’s just math.

We’ll have to accept that there is some error in what constitutes a democracy or not. Let’s work with the original 74 democracies.

Of the 74 democracies, only 24 are not considered flawed. How many of those countries that are not 2-party systems considered not flawed? According to this data, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden are not flawed, but Brazil, India and Italy are.

5/8ths of democracies that are not 2 party systems are considered democracies, 3/8ths are considered flawed democracies.

When I started writing this, I had hoped that countries with more than 2 political parties would be considered more democratic, and on the scoring it’s not very clean cut. In fact, Brazil, India and Italy being flawed democracies demonstrates that a system not made up of 2 parties isn’t a silver bullet.

Is it that false dilemma’s can have more than 2 options? It’s possible.

A false dilemma is also an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available, and maybe that’s the real problem: It’s not the number of options, it’s access to better options.

Any adult knows that being stuck with options we don’t agree with is unfortunately common. Yet a democracy is supposed to allow for better options. Why aren’t we seeing that?

Manipulation of Tech.

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Manipulation doesn’t really require much. It’s pretty easy to manipulate or be manipulated, and despite the negative connotations, manipulation doesn’t always have to be bad.

What differentiates good and bad as far as manipulation is subjective. Being volunteered for a ‘greater good’ is usually seen as ‘good’, but being manipulated against one’s own interests for a ‘greater good’ that doesn’t include you doesn’t seem very good.

An example: WordPress and Tumblr users were volunteered rather than asked to volunteer information being sold to artificial intelligence companies. If they were actually volunteering, the default setting that was set up for 3rd parties being allowed to use the data would have been off. It wasn’t. The manipulation here was, “Hey, we told you to go in and do this if you don’t want to do it.”

That’s not voluntary in most stretches of the imagination except the unimaginative: Law. It was a manipulation, and I’d offer that it wasn’t fair to people.

If WordPress.com and Tumblr users were paid for it, maybe I’d think it was worth doing. Instead, the owner of the platform decides. It’s not in the interest of the users.

It’s only in the interest of those that own the platform.

Common Goals.

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Please do not use this image as an idea for a television series in my life time.

I’ve been watching the early seasons of the ER television series recently, and watching the actors work at pretending to be in the emergency room around the bed brought back some memories. What I noticed, though, and what I remember most are the dance.

No, not a cheesy dance in a cheesy musical about cheesy things – something that almost sounds like it’s trying to attract a certain Disney mouse. No, what I mean is the way in certain situations, everyone works together just right for a common outcome. The patient.

When patient’s lives are on the line there’s a bunch of trained professionals that do everything that they can to save a life. The untrained eye may see absolute mayhem, but it’s controlled chaos, it’s a pattern that evolves as the patient’s needs evolve. There are lots of things that happen to stabilize that person, they happen in order and priority, and if you’re not a part of that dance around the bed – gurney, really – you’re in the way.

It doesn’t always work out. There are losses. Yet if you’ve ever been in that dance, you know that there’s a loss of the self as the team works on something, and the leader of the whole thing is not anyone around the gurney. The real leader of the dance is the health of the patient, and everyone around them tries to meet those needs.

It doesn’t just happen in medicine. It happens everywhere when people have a common goal and a focus that isn’t themselves. I’ve seen and been part of it when it comes to production lines in industrial compounds, I’ve seen it during disasters, in software projects, and even in families. Everyone pitches in and gets things done to assure a ‘good outcome’, or at least minimize a bad one. I’ve seen it on the Internet a few times, but not as much. Open Source started off that way, and to a degree it still is so.

I don’t see it as often as I used to since social media began. Maybe it’s because you always have some “influencer’s” face stuck on the screen. Maybe it’s because everyone is trying to impress everyone else. Maybe it’s because values have shifted. Or maybe it’s just me and what I get stuck looking at.

It seems to me though that people are divided and when they are, they don’t find the common things to work on. It also seems to me that people who do want to change things feel powerless because they are, and to find people with common goals seems an insurmountable task by itself. People don’t believe that they can have an effect as they hop in their cars during the week to sit in traffic to get to an office or worksite to do something that someone else wants them to do so that they can pay bills for a home that they barely see.

I don’t know. I just know it seems to me like people aren’t working together as much on common goals, instead fighting artificial conflicts for others.

Or maybe it’s always been this way.

Gnomed.

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Rob The Great Garden Gnome during the Zombie apocalypse.

Rob The Great Garden Gnome considered himself one of the best garden gnomes known to the world. This you can tell by the name he gave himself.

This did not make him special; it made him just like every garden gnome out there.

Surrounded by zombies, he stoically did what he was very good at. He stood very still.

However, in his mind, he was solving the problems around him, worried about the zombies. Did they eat garden gnomes? They didn’t seem very discriminatory in their diets. The best way to handle things was to stand still.

Rob survived the zombie apocalypse, obviously, because Robert was just a garden ornament who thought highly of himself. He had no incentive to deal with the zombies since they weren’t actively interested in him – he thought it was because he was staying still so well, blending into his environment, but really, he just didn’t have a pulse. The fact that he couldn’t do anything never occurred to him.

The fact that he should do something never occurred to him.

To this day, most people haven’t even heard of him because, despite his high opinion of himself, he couldn’t tell the humans when they were around, and after the zombie apocalypse, he couldn’t tell the zombies.

The lesson is that in the end, if you want to survive the zombie apocalypse, you have to be a garden gnome. You’ll be just as useful before and after it.

Tip your hat the next time you see a garden gnome. They’ll be around after you are.

It was just a weird image I accidentally created while trying to do something else, so I felt compelled to tell the boring story.

The Day’s Satire.

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A friend of mine shared a post on Facebook today that stated, “There’s something deeply ceremonial about the first sip of coffee. It’s like the opening act to the day’s drama.”

My comment, made during my first cup of coffee, was: I prefer to view it as satire. I’m just not sure what it’s satire of. That makes it funnier.

I do know what it’s satire of, I think. It’s satire of what one would believe would be sanity. The day went accordingly. First, a little bit of background.

The *Gasp* Background.

Globally there has been some changes in weather patterns. Some say it’s climate change, some deny that, but regardless of who says what everyone agrees that the weather is not really what we would like, which is why the English went out and conquered other countries to have tourism in: Terrible weather. This time, though, it’s on a planetary scale.

It’s so bad that some people accused of being smart by very loud cults of mediocre people have decided to invade Mars, a planet that actually has worse weather for humans than Earth. Rather than admit the mistake, the cults and all who would listen are encouraging people to leave the planet by making the weather here worse. It could be that European countries tried that, but sailing ships just didn’t pollute enough so they had to work extra hard. You know. Times were tougher to make other people as miserable as the weather in Europe made them, so they had to put in that extra effort.

Anyway, in the dual island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, not very far from the equator, anecdotal evidence jumps out at you and smacks you with anything available. It’s all anecdotal because there seems to be some trouble with handling information by the governments that have came, went, stayed, and sat. It’s not political, it’s just… well, I’m not sure what it is, but it’s pretty clear what it isn’t: working.

Because Trinidad and Tobago is bleeding edge when it comes to State Enterprises, handling Water and Sewage is handled by the Water and Sewage Authority, known by the acronym WASA. I suspect that they tried SAWA, but it may have been confused with the local pronunciation of San Juan and so they went with WASA.

This dry start to 2024 did not surprise anyone – except, apparently, WASA. They did know, of course1, and that article in the footnote is a short read and I must warn you: It isn’t satire, it isn’t fiction. It’s just sort of what you expect from a state run enterprise in Trinidad and Tobago. Of course, to my point, it is satire of the way things should be done.

I know, I know, that’s anecdotal. Bear with me, I’ll just give you a rundown from Today.

Today.

Just before this, there was a light dusting of rain outside. The condensate was so surprised that it threw itself at the ground and mist. This is likely partly because of Sahara Dust, though I suspect other regions have offered their dust as well. With the dry, there’s been plenty of dust here in Trinidad as well.

So this apparently happened. Two 1000-gallon water tanks were stolen from a fire station, reported yesterday by the Trinidad Express Newspapers Facebook page, and since I was on my first cup of coffee I laid into the whole situation.

What’s even weirder about this is that in World War II, when the United States had the Navy base in Chaguramas, according to someone who was Master-At-Arms for the base during that time, there were plenty of water wells in Chaguramas. Before he died, he wondered what had happened to them, and was less than pleased when I laughingly suggested that the United States may have taken them with their ships when they went home.

But just on the points. Between March 2nd and March 11th, the Trinidad and Tobago Fire Services lost 2 tanks. Let’s call that a week because of schedules, and the the author of this post being kind. So in one week, presto magico, 2 tanks that can hold 1,000 gallons of water each disappeared from a Fire Station which is in charge of putting out fires with… say it with me… water. No one noticed. No one saw. They just vanished. To suspect a thief pulled up and stuck them in the trunk of a car seems a stretch. It could be that someone just picked them up and walked away with them and wasn’t noticed by the fire service officers.

Now, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service has a way that they deal with crime. They call them ‘anti-crime exercises’ to distinguish them from the rigorous calisthenics never attributed to Trinidad and Tobago police. These exercises in other parts of the world are called roadblocks, which appear on Waze faster than the police can set up, and are done during high traffic periods so that no one can complain that they are causing traffic, instead they are just making it worse, with all those idling engines of vehicles releasing carbon into the atmosphere at a rate faster than the government can plan for making a plan.

If a criminal gets caught in an ‘anti-crime exercise’, they must want to be caught. So of course it only makes sense in a Trinidad and Tobago sense that to find those 2 water tanks the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service will have roadblocks to try to find them, costing taxpayers more in petroleum products and deodorant than the tanks are actually worth, while when everyone gets home there will be no water to take a shower with.

They likely won’t find the tanks, but the police services have to look good, and the politicians have to say things that sound smart to people who aren’t. That’s a global issue, but it has it’s own flavor in Trinidad and Tobago.

What’s even more amusing about this whole thing is that the Trinidad Express’s post didn’t even have a picture of the fire station in Chaguramas so they used a picture from TriniView.com. How do I know this? In the lower right hand corner, it said in white letters, “Triniview.com”. I didn’t even know that was a site. I grabbed a screenshot of that, though I won’t post it because I don’t know if I want to use an image-of-an-image being used questionably by a media company.

The whole thing is as it is. Sure, I wrote about it in a satirical way – but how else can one look at this? Is it satire? Can reality be satire?

I’m sure I don’t know.

Today I picked an example from Trinidad and Tobago. There are plenty around the world happening every day, where fiction writers keep throwing away half-finished books as they read the news while unscrupulous people who admit that they aren’t writers do adverts on how to sell books and make thousands of dollars a day… from AI generated content.

In a world that doesn’t make sense, that seems to fit too. This stuff happens every day.

The masses just accept it.

  1. “Dry On Ideas“, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, Saturday, 9 March 2024. ↩︎