Joe Biden complained recently about “shrinkflation,” when consumer products become smaller in quantity, size, or weight while their prices stay the same or increase.
“Some companies are trying to pull a fast one by shrinking the products little by little and hoping you won’t notice,” said Biden, who called for the companies to stop the practice.
Here’s a classic example of why it happens at a local eatery near my home. When Ingrid Callenberger, the co-owner of The Tria Prima in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, went to place her regular sugar order in mid-February, she was startled by a near-double price increase.
“I knew it was going to happen, but then it happened, and I wasn’t prepared,” Callenberger said. “I felt a lot of panic because the train keeps going. We can’t stop to figure this out.”
Small businesses like The Tria Prima, which serves tea and sweets, have limited business choices.
“Because we’re so small, we can’t afford to buy at volume. Sometimes I don’t order for three months,” she said. Buying larger portions would reduce costs, but the goods could spoil before use.
Callenberger said she believes in supporting small producers, so she buys bulk sugar from smaller-scale companies, not industry giants like Domino Foods. Turning toward alternative sugars like maple syrup and honey is an appealing but pricey move, and using less sugar would limit the variety of products the business can offer.
When goods and shipping costs increase, retail prices must rise, Callenberger said. “When we have to charge more, we’ll charge more.” To support the consumer, The Tria Prima may maintain prices but switch to smaller portions or shrinkflation.
Callenberger said she fears unpredictable market changes will force small businesses like hers to shutter. “We’re fighting something bigger than us to keep going.”
The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.
Jesus Christ: Luke 16:10
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Action
We’ve all had some fun laughing at what we’ve seen from google’s AI from the supposed death of Iowahawk
It got so bad that Google actually turned off the ability to generate images, alas it could still “talk” and express confusion as to who was worse, Christopher Rufo who exposed the plagiarism scandals at Harvard or Adolph Hitler who is responsible for the start of World War 2 in Europe and the Death of tens of millions
Google has taken the “literally worse than Hitler” meme and made it the authoritative voice of its artificial intelligence program. A glimpse into elite opinion with the ideology cranked up to 11. pic.twitter.com/fmRvBFnfhN
The reality that Google AI is just a computer program, a complex computer program, with access to all kinds of data, but a computer program that operators under the parameters that the programmers have given it and if people understood that this is what it is then all of this stuff would be no big deal.
This leads to the most simple and obvious question there is:
If Google’s AI, a program that the company developed over the course of YEARS involving tens of not thousand or hundreds of thousands of man hours of work to do so produces such results to queries, why would you trust the google search engine to produce the results you want vs the results they want to give you?
The short answer is YOU CAN’T. Cue Glenn Reynolds who has come to the same conclusion:
you’d be a fool to trust Google. Assuming this is just bad programming, then, well, it’s really bad programming. That somehow nobody noticed.
if you know a bit about how these models are built, you know you don’t get these “incorrect” answers through one-off innocent mistakes. Gemini’s outputs reflect the many, many, FTE-years of labeling efforts, training, fine-tuning, prompt design, QA/verification — all iteratively guided by the team who built it. You can also be certain that before releasing it, many people have tried the product internally, that many demos were given to senior PMs and VPs, that they all thought it was fine, and that they all ultimately signed off on the release. With that prior, the balance of probabilities is strongly against the outputs being an innocent bug — as @googlepubpolicy is now trying to spin it: Gemini is a product that functions exactly as designed, and an accurate reflection of the values people who built it. Those values appear to include a desire to reshape the world in a specific way that is so strong that it allowed the people involved to rationalize to themselves that it’s not just acceptable but desirable to train their AI to prioritize ideology ahead of giving user the facts. To revise history, to obfuscate the present, and to outright hide information that doesn’t align with the company’s (staff’s) impression of what is “good”. I don’t care if some of that ideology may or may not align with your or my thinking about what would make the world a better place: for anyone with a shred of awareness of human history it should be clear how unbelievably irresponsible it is to build a system that aims to become an authoritative compendium of human knowledge (remember Google’s mission statement?), but which actually prioritizes ideology over facts. History is littered with many who have tried this sort of moral flexibility “for the greater good”;
For those too woke to get the concept think Hot Fuzz:
Those in the hood willing to murder for “the greater good” that’s the Google team. This is not only the wrong thing, it’s the stupid thing: Mario Juric again:
After Gemini, rather than as a user-centric company, Google will be perceived as an activist organization first — ready to lie to the user to advance their (staff’s) social agenda. That’s huge. Would you hire a personal assistant who openly has an unaligned (and secret — they hide the system prompts) agenda, who you fundamentally can’t trust? Who strongly believes they know better than you? Who you suspect will covertly lie to you (directly or through omission) when your interests diverge? Forget the cookies, ads, privacy issues, or YouTube content moderation; Google just made 50%+ of the population run through this scenario and question the trustworthiness of the core business and the people running it. And not at the typical financial (“they’re fleecing me!”) level, but ideological level (“they hate people like me!”). That’ll be hard to reset, IMHO.
It showed us the man behind the curtain, and not in some abstract way. We got to see the world Google is trying to recreate in pictures worth more than a thousand words.
We see that Google’s world is a carefully constructed lie.
And it’s a lie in words as well as pictures to wit:
Why is Nikki Haley spared this treatment but RFK Jr, Melaine Trump , Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson are not? Well right now Haley is considered a foe of Donald Trump and thus is to be celebrated the others, not so much. Not even RFK Jr. who is far to the left of Haley but now a threat to the retention of power by the left. Storm again:
A Google employee sees an answer calling Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hateful and just nods. He is hateful, racist, or otherwise discriminatory, so he should be silenced. It literally never occurred to Googlers that others might disagree, so when they tested the product out the answers seemed obvious to them.
And it’s not “A” google employee, it’s the entire staff who tested and wrote this stuff and the entire management team that approved it. Nobody saw a thing wrong because they all live in the same bubble that believes those whose public thoughts disagree with theirs should be gone.
When Youtube banned me for questioning the honestly of the last election not too many people cared but me because they didn’t see what was going on. When the left which used to love and for decades celebrated J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk and even Donald Trump turned on them. The media left and the google team cheered. After all their actions threatened the power and narrative of the left and thus threatened the greater good:
But now thanks to Gemini it’s all out in the open as to what is going on. The only question is will people choose to see what is in front of their faces or will they accept it…
…for the greater good of course.
Closing thought: Without realizing it or perceiving it Google went from a company whose motto was “Do no Evil” to becoming the Sandford Neighborhood Watch Alliance from HotFuzz in just over one generation.
It was very clear that this was the last day of the convention. The huge miniature tables were not surrounded by players and although there was plenty of game action going on the number of folks in the open play room wasn’t what it was Saturday.
There were however things happening. Right next to me a person by the name of James who was setting up for a tournament of the game Dimension.
After unsuccessfully pitching Dynasty baseball to a few folks I decided to try to hit vendors that I missed. The first I spoke to was Christopher of Polygon3D Printing who had some incredible dice rollers
When the interview was over I was shown another interesting feature of these items that was so interesting it warranted another video
Next I talked to Dave of Bloody Scotsman Games who had developed his own game and system.
This business of people developing their own systems independent of a large company is a rather cool circumstance made possible by technological and even financial advances. It makes you wonder how many potential games never made it 30 years ago.
Speaking of 30 years ago I had a chance to talk to David “Diesel” LaForce an artist who was with TSR in the early days of Gygax. I recognized his work from the old players handbook etc from the days of my youth.
And after him I talked to a much younger artist and writer Julie Boglisch who was promoting both her books and her art.
But the thing that really made my heart go pitter-patter came from a vendor called Arcadian Chain.
That chain Doctor Who scarf was one of the coolest things I saw.
I retired to the gaming room and after pitching Dynasty a bit more and helping a new online league member with his team I waited to see if anyone had an interest in the old Avalon History of the World. To my surprise nobody did although I suspect if I had set it up Saturday the response would have been different.
So I spent the rest of the day uploading these videos (the upload speeds at the hotel were awesome) and did a little writing while playing 1830 on my laptop.
I should mention there was a very large contingent of people playing various train games and 18xx variants in the place. Perhaps next year I’ll bring my pristine copy of the old Avalon Hill 1830 game. Next year I’ll likely do some interview of the train guys as it’s one thing I totally forgot about.
I ended up leaving around 4 pm and shot this video in closing:
So here is my advice to anyone considering total confusion in the future:
If you want to run a game register the event. You’d be surprised at how many people might like your game but are taken by another.
If there is a game you REALLY want to play, make sure you get tickets (yeah some games have open seats but you can’t miss if you’re reserved.
Have a plan: The scheduled meal breaks means that you have specific times when you are free, if you know places to eat etc you’ll be covered. Plus a plan gives you direction in terms of what and where for games to play.
Visuals, Visuals Visuals: One of the things that hurt me for Dynasty is there was no park visuals. I’ll make sure I have them next year.
Take advantage of the bandwidth: the upload speeds at the hotel are awesome so do your uploading there.
If you want Quigley’s cakes buy them early. They really sold out fast.
NO CUPCAKES FOR YOU TILL PINTASTIC!
Above all have fun, because that’s what gaming is all about.
Illinois is a corrupt state. Rankings of the 50 states usually place in Illinois within the top five in the union in regard to public crookedness.
Surprisingly, as bad as Chicago is, the city’s inner southern suburbs, are even worse in regard to political corruption. It’s the sewer of Illinois.
Sharp-eyed readers will recall I wrote a similar post here at Da Tech Guy several years ago, but the WordPress wormhole seems to have swallowed that entry up.
So here I am again documenting south suburban Chicago sleaze, mainly because of the antics of Tiffany Henyard, the mayor of Dolton (rhymes with “Walton”), who has been accused of widespread corruption by her own village council.
But you’ll find graft in nearby communities. More on them later.
Henyard is a double-dipper, a time-dishonored ILL-inois scam. The self-described “Super Mayor” collects $224,000 as a Thornton Township supervisor. But last year, the township’s board passed an ordinance that if voters remove her from office, her successor will earn just $25,000.
Henyard’s salary as mayor of Dolton is $46,000. The village has 21,000 residents. As for her haul as a township supervisor, 49 of America’s 50 governors have a lower salary than hers.
Henyard, a Democrat, is accused of wasting village money on expensive trips to Atlanta and New York with village staff, wasting money on billboards with her picture. There is even her image in front of Dolton’s village hall. Yep. And I don’t care if you call me racist, it sounds a Third World-like cult of personality. I don’t care–because I’m not racist. Not surprisingly, Henyard is not above using the race card to deflect well-earned criticism. “You all should be ashamed of yourselves because you all are black. You all are black,” Super Mayor said recently in a livestreamed meeting. “And you all [are] sitting up here beating and attacking a black woman that’s in power.”
Henyard has only been mayor of Dolton for three years. She was defeated in a recall election in 2022, but a Cook County judge invalidated the results.
Speaking of donations, the Illinois attorney general’s office has ordered Henyard’s charity to stop collecting contributions, citing a lack of transparency and more.
Last month Super Mayor visited the White House and met President Joe Biden.
In the 1990s, nearby Dixmoor’s Park District, which at the time had only one tiny tot lot under its jurisdiction, employed 80 people as police officers. Harvey, a poverty-stricken town has a long tradition of graft. While he has not been accused of wrongdoing, Eric Kellogg, who as mayor of Harvey until being voted out in 2019, Kellogg allegedly accepted kickbacks from a strip club that was offering prostitution. His brother was convicted for his role in that scheme. In Calumet City, which borders Dolton on the east, has recent sleaze to answer for. Its mayor is Thaddeus Jones. His wife, Saprina, collects $92,000 in a job working with state grants involved with Cal City. And the mayor’s son, Thaddeus Jr, collects $32,000 from the suburb.
Whose responsible for this debacle? Voters are. Yes, in the invalidated election Dolton voters chose to recall Henyard, but there were many red flags that should have been a sufficient warning to vote otherwise.
As the cliché goes, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Barack Obama famously said, “Elections have consequences.” Indeed they do.
Finally, there is speculation that if Joe Biden backs out of the 2024 presidential election, Illinois’ governor, JB Pritzker, will jump into the race. On X, Pritzker, who of course earns less in public money than Henyard, regularly rails about the evils of “MAGA Republicans.” But Pritzker is silent about Super Mayor.
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