Monday: Hili dialogue

March 17, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a dreary Monday: March 17, 2025: St. Patrick’s Day and National Corned Beef and Cabbage Day.  The latter dish, odiferous but loved by my father, was often on offer at the Coyne dinner table. But I much prefer my corned beef in a sandwich–on rye with hot mustard, as served at Katz’s Deli in New York. As for Saint Paddy’s Day, Chicago is the American city most famous for celebrating it, for once a year they dye the Chicago River a lurid green with a nontoxic dye. It looks like this:

There’s also a Google Doodle celebrating the day; click on it below to see where it goes:

It’s also Act Happy Day and Submarine Day. Here’s why the latter is celebrated today:

On March 17, 1898, St. Patrick’s Day, Irish-born engineer John Philip Holland demonstrated a submarine he designed, the Holland VI, for the U.S. Navy Department, off the coast of Staten Island. During the demonstration, the vessel was submerged for 1 hour and 40 minutes. Holland launched the submarine the year before, on May 17, 1897, after it was built at the Crescent Shipyard in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The submarine was noteworthy for having features that would become the standard for submarines in future years. It and other of Holland’s submarines are also noteworthy for being the first to run on electric batteries when submerged, but on internal combustion engines when on the water’s surface. We celebrate the Holland and all other submarines on March 17 each year.

Here’s the Holland VI, which cost the Navy $150,000

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Trump ordered large-scale military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, saying that this was intended as a warning for Iran, who backs the Houthi rebels. And it gives a hint that Trump himself might order strikes on Iran designed to take out their capacity to build nuclear weapons.

The Houthi militia in Yemen has vowed to retaliate after President Trump ordered large-scale military strikes on targets controlled by the group that it says killed at least 31 people.

The group, which is backed by Iran, said that women and children were among those killed in the strikes on Saturday, the most significant U.S. military action in the Middle East since Mr. Trump took office in January.

For more than a year, the Houthis have launched attacks against Israel and threatened commercial shipping in the Red Sea in solidarity with their ally Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza.

The U.S. airstrikes targeted Houthi-controlled areas across Yemen, including the capital, Sana, as well as Saada, al-Bayda, Hajjah and Dhamar Provinces, according to reports from Houthi-run media channels. The strikes killed at least 31 people and wounded 101, “most of whom were children and women,” said Anis al-Asbahi, a spokesman for the Houthi-run health ministry.

The casualty figures could not be independently verified, and the United States has not given any estimates for the number of people killed or wounded in the strikes.

. . . The U.S. Central Command, which posted a video of a bomb leveling a building compound in Yemen, said that the United States had employed precision strikes to “defend American interests, deter enemies and restore freedom of navigation.”

U.S. airstrikes also targeted a power facility in the northwestern town of Dahyan, in Saada Province, causing a nightlong electricity blackout, residents said.

. . . . Mr. Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform that the strikes were also intended as a warning to Iran, the Houthis’ main backer.

“Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY!” he wrote. He also warned Iran against threatening the United States, saying, “America will hold you fully accountable, and we won’t be nice about it!”

*The WaPo reports that both non-Canadian and Canadian foreigners are cancelling trips to the U.S., the former out of fear and the latter out of reprisal. It is, of course, entirely due to Trump, and it hurts Americans in the tourist industry. First, the non-Canadians:

International travelers concerned about President Donald Trump’s trade policies and bellicose rhetoric have been canceling trips to the United States, depriving the U.S. tourism industry of billions of dollars at a time when the economy has started to appear wobbly.

Canadians are skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals. Europeans are eschewing U.S. national parks, and Chinese travelers are vacationing in Australia instead.

International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5 percent this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originallyforecast a 9 percent increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last monthto reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”

“There’s been a dramatic shift in our outlook,” said Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics. “You’re looking at a much weaker economic engine than what otherwise would’ve been, not just because of tariffs, but the rhetoric and condescending tone around it.”

And the Canadians:

As with any sense of betrayal, there is distress, incomprehension and anger.

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has launched broadsides against Canada, America’s closest ally. He has repeatedly said Canada should be the 51st state, talked about erasing the border and started a trade war.

Trump’s rhetoric and actions have left many Canadians baffled and infuriated. Some have responded by canceling their trips to the United States — and in certain cases, they’re writing messages to let Americans know how they feel.

Canadians have sent notes explaining their decisions to U.S. hotels, tourism agencies and elected officials. “The hurt is what comes through the most,” said Heather Pelham, a Vermont tourism official who estimates that her office has received about two dozen such missives.

It’s not just individuals changing their plans, but also school districts, law firms, businesses and nonprofits. While it’s too soon to say how large or enduring the effect of such cancellations will be, they’ve already shown up in airline data.

Flight Center Travel Group Canada, one of the country’s largest travel agencies, said that over the past three months, about 20 percent of preexisting leisure trips to the United States were canceled. In February, bookings to the United States by Canadian vacationers fell 40 percent compared to the same month last year. Both figures are unprecedented in the agency’s 30-year history apart from during the pandemic, said Amra Durakovic, a company spokeswoman.

This is all sad, and I want to tell foreigners, “Hey, we’re not all like that!”  It’s worse with Canada since Trump has stupidly said he’ll make it our 51st state, and you can imagine how that resonates with Canadians. And most Americans LIKE Canadians and laugh at the “51st state” trope.  The only upside is that maybe if enough Republicans get burned by Trump’s policies like this, Vance won’t be elected President in 2028.

*Speaking of which, Trump continues to deport immigrants who, he says, were criminals, even though I don’t think we have that evidence for many of these. And this despite a federal judge’s order:

The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday blocking the deportations but lawyers told him there were already two planes with migrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.

“Oopsie…Too late, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 migrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house migrants, posted on the site: “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”

The law, invoked during World Wars I and II and the War of 1812, requires a president to declare the United States is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II.

The ACLU, which filed the lawsuit that led to Boasberg’s temporary restraining order on deportations, said it was asking the government whether the removals to El Salvador were in defiance of the court.

“Oopsie”?  To be sent to a place where you’ve never lived? If that’s to be done, it has to be done legally, after a court decision. I heard yesterday on NPR that Trump had even mentioned sending American criminals to Honduras. Now that is without a doubt illegal.  The man knows no limits.

*The Wall Street Journal announced that “There’s a good chance that your kid uses AI to cheat.”  It’s easy!

A high-school senior from New Jersey doesn’t want the world to know that she cheated her way through English, math and history classes last year.

Yet her experience, which the 17-year-old told The Wall Street Journal with her parent’s permission, shows how generative AI has rooted in America’s education system, allowing a generation of students to outsource their schoolwork to software with access to the world’s knowledge.

Educators see benefits to using artificial intelligence in the classroom. Yet teachers and parents are left on their own to figure out how to stop students from using the technology to short-circuit learning. Companies providing AI tools offer little help.

The New Jersey student told the Journal why she used AI for dozens of assignments last year: Work was boring or difficult. She wanted a better grade. A few times, she procrastinated and ran out of time to complete assignments.

The student turned to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, to help spawn ideas and review concepts, which many teachers allow. More often, though, AI completed her work. Gemini solved math homework problems, she said, and aced a take-home test. ChatGPT did calculations for a science lab. It produced a tricky section of a history term paper, which she rewrote to avoid detection.

The student was caught only once.

Around 400 million people use ChatGPT every week, OpenAI said. Students are the most common users, according to the company, which offers a free version and advanced services costing as much as $200 a month. OpenAI hopes students will get into a lifelong habit of consulting ChatGPT whenever they have a question, a role played by Google for almost three decades.

Of students who reported using AI, nearly 40% of those in middle and high schools said they employed it without teachers’ permission to complete assignments, according to a survey last year by Impact Research. Among college students who use AI, the figure was nearly half. An internal analysis published by OpenAI said ChatGPT was frequently used by college students to help write papers.

I wish there were a way to embed the use of AI programs in text, like a written watermark, to identify cheaters. But I don’t see how that could be done. And note below that it’s getting almost impossible to detect, even using detection programs. If this goes on, grades, already inflated, will become more and more meaningless.

Carter Wright, a high-school English teacher outside of Houston, Texas, said he has spent hours chasing AI plagiarism, using free trials of detector software and checking edit histories in students’ Google Docs. His students always seemed always one step ahead.

“It’s almost impossible for me to stop all the cheating unless we were to completely get rid of the technology,” Wright said.

*And from the BBC, an example of how every bit of popular culture has to be sanitized these days. The article is “Will Snow White be a ‘victim of its moment?’ How the Disney remake became 2025’s most divisive film.” I had no idea!

You wouldn’t think that the war in Gaza would have much impact on a Disney remake. But the live-action Snow White, a revamped version of the 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, has become a flashpoint for social and political divisions, even before its global release next week.

There was some backlash to the casting of Rachel Zegler, of Colombian descent, as the heroine. More recently, there has been blowback both about Zegler’s pro-Palestinian comments and about pro-Israel comments by Israeli actress Gal Gadot, who plays Snow White’s stepmother, the Evil Queen. And there is an ongoing debate about whether there should have been dwarfs at all, live or CGI. The film’s director, Marc Webb, said in Disney’s official production notes, “I think all good stories evolve over time. They become reflections of the world that we live in”. He has likely got more than he bargained for, as reactions to Snow White inadvertently reflect the most polarised aspects of the world today. Like political rhetoric in countries around the world, responses to the film’s production have been loud, irate and sometimes ugly.

Oh for crying out loud! Do politics really have to cause such a ruckus in art?  You’re supposed to suspend disbelief!  There’s more!

Snow White has been in the works since 2019, and began in earnest with Zegler’s casting in 2021. Since then attacks on its so-called “wokeness” have proliferated, making the film a lightning rod for opinions that have little to do with the fairy tale it is based on. A recent Hollywood Reporter article asked, “Have some PR missteps combined with anti-woke outrage turned marketing the film into a poisoned apple?” And alongside such measured reporting there have been heated responses in the media. The editorial board of the New York Post – owned by Rupert Murdoch, the conservative mogul whose company also owns Fox News – weighed in this week, declaring the film a financial disaster before it has opened, writing: “Disney ‘Snow White’ controversy proves it again: Go woke, go broke!”

The original film needed an update if it was going to be remade at all. In its day it set a high bar for Disney’s future animated films, but it also introduced the song Someday My Prince Will Come, blighting the expectations of generations of girls by setting them up to wait for a Prince Charming to make their lives complete. Meanwhile, Snow White happily sweeps the floor for the dwarfs until he shows up to rescue her with a kiss after she bites the Queen’s poisoned apple. Soon after her casting announcement, Zegler told the television show Extra that in the old Snow White “there was a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her”. In fact, the original film states that he “searched far and wide” to find her after falling in love at first sight, and he disappears for most of the film, so no need to take that comment too seriously. Zegler was excited and laughing when she said it

Some people also rejected the idea that a Latina actress could play a character called Snow White; alongside criticisms of such non-traditional casting, Zegler was subject to racist trolling. This was a similar reaction to that experienced by the black actress Halle Bailey when she was cast as Ariel in 2023’s The Little Mermaid.

The film stumbled into more trouble simply because its lead actresses expressed political opinions. On X in August 2024, Zegler thanked fans for the response to the Snow White trailer, adding, “and always remember, free Palestine”.

Gadot has posted her support for Israel on social media, and especially since the 7 October attacks by Hamas has been outspoken in defence of her country and against anti-semitism. That led to some short-lived calls by pro-Palestinian social media users to boycott the film simply because she is in it.

And then there are the dwarfs. Ableism! But real people with dwarfism are complaining about losing roles because Disney’s new dwarfs are CGI (“computer-generated imagery”).  Bolding below is mine:

Even when people reacting to the film have agreed on a basic principle, like more opportunities for actors who have dwarfism, they have disagreed on how to get there. Peter Dinklage, perhaps the world’s most well-known actor with dwarfism, questioned the entire project before many details were known, calling the 1937 film “a backwards story of seven dwarfs living in a cave together”. Disney announced the next day, “To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters.”

As it turned out, the seven characters are CGI, and Disney has reclassifed them as “magical creatures”, not dwarfs. What do they look like? Even a glimpse at the trailer reveals that they look exactly like CGI dwarfs. They are still named Happy, Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Doc, Bashful and Dopey.

The changes have caused a backlash from some people with dwarfism, who have rebutted Dinklage and accused Disney of depriving them of acting roles. As recently as this week, one told the Daily Mail, “I think Disney is trying too hard to be politically correct, but in doing so it’s damaging our careers and opportunities.”

If stuff like this is going on (and it should be waning if wokeness is waning), then all art will be leveled out into anodyne, inoffensive pablum. And you ask why I’m depressed!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka and Hili and squabbling again. Hili blames Kulka!

Kulka: Do we have to fight with each other?
Hili: It’s not me who is the aggressor.
In Polish:
Kulka: Czy musimy ze sobą walczyć?
Hili: To nie ja jestem agresorem.

*******************

From Cat Memes. Put those marshmallows in a S’more and toast them!

From the Absurd Sign Project:

From The Language Nerds:

From Masih, who loves the Kurds but hates Iran:

From Jez (a Brit), who adds, “Doesn’t say much for the British media’s coverage of the conflict.”

From Luana. The problem is really quite bad in California:

From Malcolm, a passel of adorable kittens:

From my feed, a pissed-off Amazon driver:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

17 March 1937 | A French Jewish girl, Michel Erdelyi, was born in Rouen.She arrived at #Auschwitz on 13 February 1943 in a transport of 998 Jews deported from Drancy. She was among 802 people murdered after selection in a gas chambers.

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-03-17T03:00:05.742Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. Matthew says this first one is true:

The Beginning and End of Philosophyexistentialcomics.com/comic/593

— Existential Comics (@existentialcomics.com) 2025-03-10T16:13:50.904Z

It took me a while to get this one:

Yes I have.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-03-12T15:50:18.790Z

55 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. If you get stoned so often that you have to put a sign in the fridge to keep you from binge-eating, your problem is drug-use, not overeating.

  2. We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. -Penelope Lively, writer (b. 17 Mar 1933)

  3. “Trump’s rhetoric and actions have left many Canadians baffled” – yeah, well many Americans too including this one I’m afraid…many Americans too, dear neighbors to the North.

    The houti asymmetric warfare of multiple drone and rocket attacks on the Truman and her escorts is of grave concern to me. We already had the downing, by (confused) friendly fire, of a U.S. F-18 returning to the carrier after a refueling mission, with the crew, luckily, successfully ejecting and being rescued. Flooding the zone with hundreds of thousand-dollar uncrewed drones endangering multimillion dollar, crewed U.S. aircraft and their pilots seems like an intractable problem.

    1. “Make Yemen Stone Age Again”. I believe the boys in Tel Aviv have a plan for that.
      I have stocked up on popcorn.

      Onwards Israeli heroes.

      D.A.
      NYC

    2. Downing of the F-18: Possibly some small consolation that a U.S. Army helicopter. was not the cause.

  4. In my son’s English class, not only do the students write their essays with AI, but the teacher grades them with AI, writes the test questions with AI, and has AI do the report card comments.

    1. I fear that you are not kidding.

      So why not just eliminate the useless middlemen (teachers and students) and let them watch TV all day, or whatever?

  5. AI is very helpful for solving problems, truly. If you work on one and get stumped, use the AI – AI is just a tool. E.g. try this one* :

    [begin problem]:

    A man is known to speak the truth 3 out of 4 times. He throws a die and reports that it is a six. Find the probability that it is actually a six.

    [end problem]:

    I’m sure the Communist writer of Existential Comics doesn’t need any help for that one because he’s the 1% that isn’t stupid, and therefore should control the rest as in a chess game.

    So I think it goes to show the gold standard is a test – written or otherwise – live, in person. Sorta like showing up and playing a musical instrument live.

    *source : x.com/probnstat/status/1898274201431093528?s=46

    “I’ve finally stopped getting dumber.”

    -Paul Erdős, suggested as his own epitaph (but apparently did not officially make it)

    1. Nothing in the universe makes me feel stupider, quicker, than probability brain teasers.

      1. I admit ignorance ; however, Math Stack Exchange has a good discussion of this problem.

        Spoiler : it’s probably (😁) 3/4

        1. I thought it was “obviously” 3/4 (75%), but when I looked it up I was rapidly disabused of this and buried in incomprehensible explanations. Par for the course for me.

    3. The probability can’t be calculated unless the man is known to lie randomly, that is, the p(lie) is not correlated with p(six). If we knew the man had placed a wager that that die would come up “six”, then from our knowledge that he is not perfectly truthful we would suspect that in this case, to win his bet he would report the outcome as six no matter what it really was. So the true p(6) is 1/6, just as it was before his report, because he cannot be trusted not to lie to protect his bet.

      On the other hand, if we knew he had bet against six but reported “six” nonetheless then he, for some perverse reason, is almost certainly being truthful when he could get away with lying. We would conclude p(6) ~ 1. If the set of incentives for him to lie is not fully known — message from God, “This is your last chance, Buster. Don’t lie on this one.”?, letting a small child win a game of snakes and ladders? — we can’t estimate the credibility of his report and p(6) = 1/6 but with wider standard deviation than would occur in a real die-throwing experiment.

      The “sucker bet” element is the assumption that his lie rate of 0.25 is random. But people don’t lie at random. If they are not perfectly honest, and a man who tells the truth only three times out of four is clearly not honest, then he will lie or truth-tell according to his interests.

        1. All of these sorts of problems I’ve come across use this same schtick to make the problem seem more complicated than it is. They are “trick” questions. That schtick being that not enough information is given for there to be only one definitive answer, and the information being withheld usually has to do with one or more persons’ state of mind. What they know and or what their motivation is.

          The most common example of this is the famous Monty Hall problem. In that problem it is typically not stated what Monty’s motivation is and what he knows already. Most of the work is in clarifying that, but once you do the math is quite simple, though the answer is still counter intuitive for most people at first. What the correct answer is was famously controversial, still is somewhat, but the controversy all has to do with what the conditions really are, because they are not fully stated.

          1. In the Monty Hall scenario, Mr. Hall or his descendant has to know in every play which door conceals the prize, else he might accidentally open that door when he gives the contestant a chance to change her guess. The contestant knows that Hall knows. Up to this point the problem is purely mathematical. However the contestant has an edge here. If she picks the door that Hall knows contains the prize, Hall can pick either other door without having to think about it. But is she picks one of the wrong doors, Hall has to decide in that moment which door he must open. If the contestant can detect any hesitancy or a tell in Hall’s “Now I’m going to make you an offer…” patter as he goes over in his mind which door to open, then she knows she has the wrong door and should certainly switch her choice.

            According to Wikipedia, Hall said after he retired that there was another factor at play, which I think Darrell is alluding to. He would sometimes, depending on his mood, offer a contestant a chance to switch only if he knew she had picked the correct door, foiling the mathematical strategy. (It was clear from watching the show that he didn’t always offer a switch to every contestant.) If the contestant had picked a wrong door, he might not offer a switch, completely eliminating the risk of loss for the show.

            Sorry to belabour this but I realize from reading Darrell’s comment that I got the idea for the motivated non-random liar from this wrinkle in the Monty Hall puzzle and I wanted to acknowledge it.

      2. From what I’ve read, I think that’s the crux of it – assuming the lie is random…. and… it is funny to consider this for the die…

        Yeah! 🎯 Bravo! It also serves as a good exercise to set up the Bayesian inputs.

    2. He points out how Trump talks about Canada the way Putin talks about Ukraine: it’s not a real country, there’s no real border, it needs to join us.

  7. This just in: Trump has said that Biden pardons signed with auto-pen are null and void.
    Disney kept the name “Dopey?” Ableism!

    2. If you read the whole story, as my wife just did to me with p(lie) = 0, it’s clear that his thesis is that President Biden didn’t actually sign those pardons, that someone else did, using the auto-pen. This is a brilliant troll, hardly dopey at all. If President Trump’s Justice Dept. investigates those pardoned people, the question of who actually signed them will be embarrassing for the Democrats, even if the pardons eventually stand. Maybe every president “signs” pardons himself with an auto-pen but in the setting of Biden’s declining faculties it has to cause discomfort in the Dem camp that people will conclude that someone else was running the Executive and the military those last months, and that the Democrats colluded in it.

      1. I seriously doubt anyone in the Dem camp will feel “discomfort” that someone else was running the Executive the last few months of the Biden administration, or if the Dems colluded with said “someone”. Look what Musk is doing presently, running the Executive (or some new spandrel of it); his mishigas (let alone Trump’s) overshadows like a plume from Krakatoa anything the Dems may or may not have done in the waning months of 2024.

        1. Logic:
          1. Dems don’t care if someone else was running the Exec office. Why? Because their agenda was still being fulfilled? Or just general apathy?
          2. It’s OK if the Dems did shady things because someone else is doing something shady today?

          With that kind of logic, then one needs to excuse any excesses by Trump, right? After all, Republicans won’t feel discomfort by his actions or if he colludes with someone.

          My opinion is regardless of party, if wrongdoing occurs it should be punished, and politicians need to be held to the highest standard. Just because the new guy’s crooked doesn’t give the old one a free pass (assuming they’re both crooked).

          1. No, if anyone was “running the Exec office” (where’s the proof?) there was no one running his pardons; Biden knew all the people he was pardoning, he knew why he issued the pardons, he had a presser describing why he did it. (Conversely, I doubt Trump knew any of the 1,500 he pardoned.)

            No, my point is any “shady things” you purport the Dems did is so minor in regards to what Trump/Musk et al are presently doing, your comparison is laughably inadequate. That was my point. There’s shady, then there’s actually breaking the frickin law! Incompetency is not a crime.

            IMO, false equivalencies like yours are not only disingenuous, at this juncture, they are propaganda.

    3. Wonder if Trump personally signed the ~1500 pardons for the J6 rioters/insurrectionists all within a very short time on Jan 20.

      1. I read where these were indeed signed with an autopen, which makes sense. Once again, a distracting nothingburger from Trump.

        1. Well, I guess the difference is that Trump is “Special” as compared to anyone else on the planet, so his autopens count. I trust that the media will spread the news of Trump’s auto penning like manure across the fruited plain.

          I remember years ago a co-worker telling me that his congressman had responded to his inquiry, making a point of telling me that the congressman had signed the letter. Even at the tender age of 19 I knew about Autopen, but I said nothing in response.

          Court documents and all sorts of contracts nowadays are being signed online. Does Trump have a problem with that? If I sign a sales contract for a Tesla (made by an @$$hole per retired Navy captain and astronaut Senator Mark Kelly – a pretty good day’s work by him it would seem) via Autopen, is that contract binding?

          Perhaps Trump might possibly be OK with Biden’s pardons had Biden instead signed using Auto-Sharpie, with a point of the Trump-approved width.

    4. I thought MOST presidential signatures were done by auto-pen since something like the Reagan era? Am I wrong? Except Trumpy ones of course b/c he likes to do a biiiig song and dance and sign them publicly. (sigh)

      Wish I had an autopen. I’d use it all the time, I’d sign stuff I don’t even need to sign like junk mail, my sleeping wife’s face or the dog. Fun!

      D.A.
      NYC

  8. Regarding AI doing school for students, rendering degrees meaningless….I predict that in response, employers will start using much more rigorous tests to ensure competency. SAT, ACT, and similar test scores will increasingly be required on resumes, as these cannot be cheated using AI (yet). We may see the surreptitious use of IQ tests more and more as part of the application process.

    1. Re “generative AI has rooted in America’s education system”, I would remove the “in”.

    2. Yep, just like in a TV detective series in the interrogation room, provide a yellow pad and a pen.

  9. “1.” Democritus is correct.

    “2.” Canadians are really mad about the tariffs. Thunderous booing of the Star Spangled Banner at NHL games. The effect is strong: polls suggest people are mad enough at American conservatives that they will vote against Canadian conservatives. If that seems stupid, see 1. above.

    [Funny after years commenting here I’m just discovering that wordpress won’t let me number the paragraphs in my comment like a list. “” solves it but why?]

    1. I can report the enumeration / list gremlins as well.

      This <- “This” had a “1.” to the left.
      [ 2 ] that
      3: the other thing

      ^^^testing

      Yep – there’s a gremlin!

  10. Are there really two cats in the photo? Or is it just Hili and her reflection in a mirror? Kulka and a mirror? I honestly cannot distinguish between them in this picture.

    1. Yes, Hili and Kulka. They look alike though Kulka has more white. Some people think they are related, as they were found as strays in the same area (though nearly a decade apart).

      1. Cool — answers a question here. I had wondered if they were closely related, as in litter mates or parent-offspring. (Strays in same area — perhaps cousins of some degree.)

  11. I hope that homeowner reported that Amazon driver. It shouldn’t be hard for Amazon to figure out who she is. If she hates her job so much, she should quit. I’m sympathetic to the homeowner because I order a lot of stuff from Amazon too.

  13. No plans here to cancel a trip to visit friends in the States this summer. But I guess we’re not patriotic enough to boo the U.S. National Anthem at hockey games, which we never attend anyway. Who can afford them?

    At our age, most of what we buy after property taxes and utilities is groceries and gardening supplies and grandchildren’s investment portfolios. (Early retirement means choices and trade-offs. Travel anywhere much didn’t make the cut.) We don’t make any special effort to avoid American produce — much of it comes from Mexico anyway — and given a choice we’d buy American over Chinese any day. Grocery work is done mostly by people at the bottom of the food chain. No need to stiff them whether they voted for the tariff-meister or not. We would happily buy American wine and bourbon except that the government made the choice for us by taking it all off the shelves of the government monopoly’s liquor stores. We can’t buy American dairy products because our government imposes a 298% tariff on them to protect producers here, going back many decades.

    Canadians had the totally wrong idea that the threat of restricting electricity exports would bring the Americans to their knees. Nothing worse than trying to bluff not knowing your opponent can see your cards. We could try to make our economy more resilient by eliminating internal trade barriers and diversifying overseas but that sounds too much like work. So it will take a while to sink in but Canadians will eventually figure out we need the United States more than they need us, and a grudging business-as-usual vibe will return to our feisty little utopia.

    And if our dollar tanks, our exports to you will be cheap even with tariffs.

    2. ” . . . and given a choice we’d buy American over Chinese any day.”

      Does that include American companies’ products manufactured in China?

      1. I know you’re trying for a Gotcha! but I was thinking more along the lines of stuff like garlic. I’m retired, remember. About all we buy is groceries.

  14. About deporting tren de aragua members: how about an air drop. Fly over Venezuela and push them out of the plane.

  15. Isn’t St. Patrick’s Day just another version of DEI, people being celebrated for their ethnicity instead of on true merit?

  16. Having no children myself and a dog who doesn’t enjoy movies (he has other habits….) I’ve never seen Snow White THOUGH one would have to be blind or not on twitter to ignore the furor that polished turd Rachel Zegler has caused with her low IQ nastiness.
    Gotta be a lot of headaches in the Disney board about THAT mis-hire. One of many there I think.

    I loved the “You’re not hungry you’re just stoned” note. Should print one… for a friend…. 😉

    D.A.
    NYC

  18. I seem to remember an Equity dispute (UK performers union) in the late 60s early 70s about small actors taking dwarf parts. Opportunities in any area of the arts so limited that the introduction of artificial barriers is heart breaking for any professional.

  19. Re AI in schools: I think a simple solution may be to stop giving homework and have the students do their work in the classroom. Through my years in grammar and high school I recall doing very little homework because we were given ample class time and study periods to work. I did fine in HS, got accepted by a good university. I am not brilliant or even very smart but I did okay. From my limited view it seems like homework loads have increased hugely over the last decades and kids are coming out of school hating study and learning. Give ’em a break, teach them to love learning and you can stop worrying about AI.

  20. Re Snow White et al, I really liked the Disney cartoons as a kid. Now if I somehow see the new version I’ll be cheering for the evil stepmother.

  21. In addition to the Mahmoud Khalil deportation, I see that another Columbia student, Grant Miner, president of @Columbia’s graduate student union, has been expelled. He makes the case that this was political and anti-union, and this is getting a lot of play, especially since it conforms with anti-Trump sentiment. https://x.com/grantdminer/status/1901657622731751625

    However, the Columbia Jewish & Israeli Students group has a much different take: https://x.com/CUJewsIsraelis/status/1901327829985308852
    The disciplinary investigation has been going on for a long time, and this is the culmination of that process. As they state “Grant was expelled because he was arrested at @Columbia’s encampment in April, and then arrested again as part of the takeover of Hamilton Hall. It’s very simple – Grant broke the rules, and he faced the consequences.”

    I understand the desire to brand everything that Trump does as wrong, and the strategy to gin up negative sentiment toward the man to try to sway people over to the opposing party, but making heroes out of murderous gang members and antisemitic vandals is not the way to gain middle-America support.

    1. Re: “Male herd of giraffe”: my best guess is that the larger giraffe HEARD from the smaller giraffe the latest culinary intel about where a delicacy was located.

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