TECHNOLOGY: Sometimes too much technology is just wasteful overkill

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

https://www.thegreenhead.com/2023/03/tineco-toasty-one-smart-toaster-with-touchscreen.php

Tineco Toasty One Smart Toaster with Touchscreen
Appliances | March 28, 2023

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This cool new Tineco Toasty One Smart Toaster is a futuristic smart toaster with a touchscreen that allows you to customize the toasting process of two different slices of bread at the same time for personalized perfection. It features a large four inch touchscreen on the side for choosing shade, crispiness, and toasting modes (smart, fresh, reheat, and frozen) for each slot in the toaster, automatically lowers and raises the bread, has an IntelliHeat algorithm that detects the state of the toast and automatically adjusts heating performance, displays a fun visual progress indicator, alerts you when it’s time to empty the crumb tray (when’s the last time you remembered to do that?), has 8 custom preference save options, and has sturdy stainless steel constructed wrapped in an elegant ivory-white porcelain finish that just looks super cool on the countertop. Best of all, after engaging with all of this modern, state-of-the-art toasting technology, in the end you get toast that is golden and crispy on the outside, light and airy on the inside, and toasted just the way you like it, every single time. 

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What no app to allow you to easily program your toast?

I admire that technology has to try stuff but how a 250$ toaster ever got green lighted is quite beyond me.

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GOVEROTRAGEOUS: Lady fails to follow the SOP and three men are exonerated long after her death

Monday, April 3, 2023

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9666591

Saved from the grave
Mary Jane Burton’s unusual habit of saving samples of the evidence she tested led to the exoneration of three men, years after her death in 1999.
Oct. 16, 2005, 9:16 AM EDT / Source: The Associated Press
By Kristen Gelineau

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The forensic scientist cut off the tip of a cotton swab and taped it to a lab sheet next to a snippet of stained clothing.

Always save a piece of what you test, Mary Jane Burton instructed her watchful trainee.

But why? This was 1977, years before the invention of DNA testing. Yet day after day, she repeated this seemingly pointless procedure under the glow of the cramped laboratory’s fluorescent lights — taping swabs smeared with blood, semen and saliva and inserting them into their case files.

The forensic scientist cut off the tip of a cotton swab and taped it to a lab sheet next to a snippet of stained clothing.

*** and ***

Standard procedure in Virginia was for biological evidence to be returned to the authorities after testing. After a few years, it would be destroyed, except in death penalty cases.

Why Mary Jane Burton insisted on saving such samples is as big a mystery as Burton herself.

Some speculate that Burton had a premonition that science would improve, that the samples she saved would one day prove useful. Her trainee, Deanne Dabbs, recalls a simpler explanation: Burton just liked to have something physical to show to a jury when she testified. Juries like to see what you’ve worked on, Burton told Dabbs in 1977.

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Why would you EVER destroy evidence?

This SOP guaranteed that justice would be impossible.

So sad, for others.

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POLITICAL: Maybe “protecting” the Falun Gong to distract the Chinese from Taiwan

Sunday, April 2, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/the_group_the_chinese_communists_fear_the_most.html

March 26, 2023
The Group the Chinese Communists Fear the Most
By Jeffrey Folks 

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The story of the Chinese government crackdown on Falun Gong is a classic example of totalitarian intolerance of competing ideas, and it involves both propaganda and physical terror. A careful examination of the record proves that the response of the communist Chinese regime is not very different from that of ancient regimes toward their own enslaved peoples. Despite their vast power, totalitarian leaders are fearful and at times even paranoid, as was Stalin, and the flip-side of fear is repression.

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Seems that this could put the CCP off-balance without the USA firing a shot.

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ECONOMICS: illiquid assets should be “marked to market” of zero!

Saturday, April 1, 2023

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/caution-better-part-valor-again

Caution Is The Better Part Of Valor… Again
by Tyler Durden
Friday, Mar 24, 2023 – 02:25 PM

Authored by Peter Tchir via Academy Securities

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I did not like what happened on Wednesday and reiterated that view as stocks were popping yesterday morning. Today, a relatively calm overnight session got spooked as European bank CDS (particularly contracts linked to sub debt) spiked. That continued into the U.S. session until headlines that Treasury Secretary Yellen had convened a FSOC meeting. Maybe something comes out of that meeting, but here are issues that I think resurface once that meeting is done, unless something surprisingly aggressive is done (I don’t expect that).

*** and ***

The “Unrealized” Mark to Market Losses

I remain dumbfounded by some of the duration risk that was obviously taken at, at least, one bank. The sense that I get, from talking to people is more time is being spent on what other issues could be out there?

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One of the Managing Directors, that I respected from my days on Wall Street, was a real hard ass as a risk manager. I remember hearing many profound and LOUD screaming matches with traders and portfolio managers about “mark to market”.  As an IT guy I had heard the term, but didn’t grok (gestalt) it, until I heard some of his rants. (It was hard NOT to hear them screaming.)

His rule was, if someone said something was worth X and he didn’t think so  — especially if it was illiquid or had no active market, then he’d offer to put it in their personal portfolio at that value.  Otherwise, it was “marked to market” at ZERO.  (I really had to laugh when the eventually ended with “why would I want that junk in my personal portfolio?” Followed by the final nail in the coffin: “Why would the Firm want it in theirs at that price?”  I think those disagreements could have had tickets to watch that rival WWE matches.)

So, everyone should “market to market” all their assets as if you were a risk manager.  And, don’t think that your job is a risk-free asset. 

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Note: A good post for April Fool’s Day!

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