The previous version of our website was at least 17 years old, since that’s when the first blog post went up. Hard to believe. The website and the blog are as much my way of tracking time as they are a marketing tool.
In any case, Andrew Baker of Baker Technology Services LLC got our site updated before the host pulled the plug on the unsupported items. We’re still on WordPress, but we have a new theme and some new plugins. If you’ve experienced any connection issues, they may be due to Andrew taking the site up and down as he works the bugs out. If you run across broken links, missing pages, etc., let me know and I’ll try and clean those up. As usual with these things, they turn out to be harder than initially anticipated, so this has been a lengthy process.
The site has a slightly different feel and addresses somethings a little differently, which I’ll need to learn. Andrew was able to add a few tweaks, like the Easterday “E” in your browser tab when you are on the site. (I a m sure that has a name that I don’t know…) Some things are gone for now, like some of the slide shows, but I’ll get those figured out eventually.
I’ll try and get back to a more regular schedule of posts as we slide into 2026. Hate to let my lurkers down! Here’s hoping you all have a Happy, Healthy & Prosperous New Year!
This post fully embraces the “rant” designation, so scroll on if you don’t want my political opinion piece. Listening to the back and forth over the past month and a half has been tiring and frustrating. The Democrats’ position has seemed pretty untenable, considering they (Democrats while in power) passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without Republican support, they (Democrats while in power) passed the Covid enhancements to the ACA, which included the sunset provision that’s upon us, without Republican support and now, while not in power, they (Democrats) are demanding the Republicans fix it. In response, the Republicans have proposed paying everyone during the shutdown, despite the fact that the whole reason for the shutdown is there’s no money appropriated to do so. In typical Federal Government fashion. the only solutions either side seem to be able to see is to throw more money at problems.
Every time there is a government shutdown, they seem to put more rules in place to make the next one less painful… somewhat defeating the whole point of it. Why do a shutdown if no one is going to notice? After one of the last shutdowns, things were changed to assure that government employees would be reimbursed for lost wages, even though they weren’t working. No business could survive that way… The latest enhancement to that is that government employees will not even have to wait until the end of the shutdown to get paid! The ones laid off are already getting a paid vacation, but if the current proposal goes through, they’ll get a regular paycheck while off. I guess, “Why not?” All the Senators and Representatives got their check!!! They still managed to collect taxes though…
Side Note:Everyone should have an emergency fund, because it’s rare to have a 100% guaranteed income, but if you work in an industry (government) where these shutdowns occur regularly, it’s even more important. There is no question of IF there will be another government shutdown, only when… I have a hard time working up a lot of sympathy for those that were surprised by this.
James Stewart as Jefferson Smith filibustering on floor of the Senate
There was some talk about changing the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster. It may be on the way out the door anyway, as there was an attempt to eliminate it in the last Democrat controlled Congress, but was stopped by just two moderate Democrats. And they’re not in office anymore… I am fully against its elimination. I think the minority party should have some vehicle to slow and bring to attention bad legislation, but it shouldn’t be painless. Otherwise, like this time, it’s just obstruction for no benefit. There was no pain for Senators in this latest shutdown filibuster. Sometime in the 1970’s the rules were changed to allow a filibuster to only require an objection. Yes, that’s a simplification, but accurate. Before that time, a Senator or group of Senators would have had to speak continuously on the floor of the Senate to keep the filibuster in effect, a la 1939 movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. There was pain for all involved as the Senate had to stay in session and those filibustering had to hold the floor for hours on end, speaking into the record. The new rules are lazy and painless. If you want to take a stand against something, you should have to actually stand!
With very few exceptions, most Americans didn’t feel any effects of the shutdown, as most things continued as is. Only “nonessential” workers were furloughed. It wasn’t until the SNAP program began to run out of money and the airlines began to feel the air traffic controller pinch that anyone really perked up. Senators cared about SNAP, because those are actual voters affected. They didn’t care about not paying air traffic controllers, until it escalated to the fear of constituents complaining about not getting to fly home for the holidays.
In my opinion, pain and risk form the answer. Senators should feel some pain when they determine something should be filibustered and their constituents should feel some pain during a shutdown in order to get their attention. Senators should have been afraid of their actions getting their constituents attention for something that resulted in nothing. As is, the whole thing was low cost theatre that had very little effect on anything.
I have to admit to not being up on all the rules about trees in Culver, but I definitely have a lot of confusion about enforcement. Several years ago (14+) one of the 100-year-old (or more) Oak trees in from of Easterday Construction received the Tree Commissions red mark of death. (Also an old wild cherry tree a little further north, that I didn’t care too much about.) At the time, I went to a Tree Commission meeting and was told this was due to a large branch that hung over the road and was a danger to vehicles. I protested that the branch was healthy, and they said I probably shouldn’t worry about it, since they didn’t have the budget to take it down anyway. They didn’t do tree trimming at that time, so it was a case of live or die for an old friend. I made my plea for life as best I could. I also made a donation to get a couple of replacement trees. (The only one that lived was the one they mistakenly planted on the adjacent property instead of at ECC!)
Since that time, the Oak tree has lived through several butcherings by NIPSCO tree trimmers for non-existent line interference, but fortunately it has remained healthy. Like all trees of that age, there has been, and there is currently, some minor deadwood, but that’s what trees do.
Face Palm
Last week, without any heads-up this time, they came out and removed that limb. They didn’t trim it, they took it back to the trunk. If I’d been given any heads-up, I would have gotten a “before” picture, but I didn’t know anything about what they were doing until the chainsaws were buzzing… They did leave me the sickly Wild Cherry Tree though… <sigh>
The tree is probably in jeopardy at this point due to this limb removal. It is the nearest to the camera in the picture (southernmost). Because it is in a cluster of three trees, most of it’s growth has been on the south side. Now it is distinctively top heavy to the south and west. Pretty sure the crew doing the trimming weren’t licensed arborists…
Despite the fact that this limb was never a problem in the 10+ years since it was designated a problem, it’s gone now. If the concern was damage to vehicles on the street, why didn’t they remove any of the deadwood that is there while they were removing the healthy parts? Aren’t the trees overhanging and shading the streets are one of the charms of Culver? <heavy sigh>
I found all this interesting, since we just had Emerson Wells from IU here this year and there was a lot of talk about preserving our tree canopy. While a couple of small trees have been planted at the Little League diamond, they hardly make up for the ones the school removed from the parking lot on the other side of the street. The north end of Slate Street could stand some tree additions rather than removals… There are a couple of unhealthy trees in this block of Slate Street, so it’s tough to understand spending the limited Tree Commission dollars to put one of the healthy ones in peril.
On a tangent, a truck took out the trees in front of 412 Lake Shore Drive a few years back. I was told that only one of the two could be replaced because of the proximity to the alley. I argued that a bit since it was just a dead end alley mostly serving two houses and there had been a tree there for decades, but to no avail. “Sight Distance” requirements would have been violated. So how is a new tree being planted at the NW corner of school street and Hwy 10, a much busier intersection? I’m left scratching my head…
I know there’s “a plan”, but but it’s pretty hard to discern. Government is not at it’s best when it is working mysteriously. I was at the last two Tree Commission meetings and this was not brought up. It was kind of lonely in the audience there, so there’s no doubt that it could have been. They know me. Such is life. Fingers crossed that my tree friend survives this. Time will tell…
From my days in marching band, the cadence was the music played by the drumline that set the marching pace. It’s also defined as, “the beat, time, or measure of rhythmical motion or activity”. The definition that fits this post is, “a rhythmic sequence or flow of sounds in language”.
I attend a fair number of public meetings each month and many of them include the Pledge of Allegiance. With the advent of online meeting participation, you occasionally have someone’s disembodied voice from the ether, trying to participate, but because of the lag, it is just a little off. Is there much that’s more jarring? With the Pledge being removed from schools in some places, I wonder if that portends the future. I don’t remember learning the cadence of the pledge, but I do remember learning and reciting it from early in grade school. I can only imagine how jarring it was when Dwight Eisenhower signed the bill adding “Under God” to the Pledge in 1954!
Cadence shows up in other areas where we often don’t recognize it until it’s missing. Have you ever heard someone rattle off their Social Security number without a pause after the third and fifth number? Or even worse, can you even write down a phone number someone gives you if they don’t pause after the third and sixth digit? If you ever want to really throw someone off, give them your phone number with a pause after the fourth and seventh digit. Watch the brain melt that occurs! Ha!
The Lord’s Prayer also fits this description. Most of us know the cadence and can recite it by rote. Though Catholics and Protestants say it slightly differently to trip up any outliers in the congregation. Some of my nieces and nephews attended a Catholic school that tacked on, “Please provide for those with nothing to eat”. Nothing wrong with that sentiment, but it does kinda throw you off when you’re not expecting it.
The Pledge of Allegiance is variously described as a poem or lyrics. Since it doesn’t rhyme, I don’t hardly recognize it as such, but then my taste in poetry is limited to bawdy limericks… (There once was a man from Nantucket…) While the pledge doesn’t rhyme, it does have a rhythm. It’s the little things in life like this that are crutches that make things easier and bring us together. If I’m walking and hear a drum cadence, I can’t help but fall into step. I’ve never really considered myself a conformist, but I do think we need more of the things that bring us together. The little daily occurrences of cadence are one of those things. There is a downside though. All of us continue to recite the pledge and say the word “indivisible”, but more and more it is being said by rote without taking the meaning to heart.
Sometimes I forget how long I’ve been writing this blog. I have been thinking about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and knew that I had written something about it before, but didn’t realize that it was twelve years ago! Ha! That post still has some merit yet today. (You can find it here.) It was about self-assembling robots. We’ve come so much farther than that now. Companies and Countries are racing to be the first to perform the AI equivalent of Catching Lightning in a Bottle, while seemingly mostly ignore that even in the best case scenarios, it is still Playing with Fire. Very smart and very wealthy people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates are throwing money at this endeavor while confessing the outcome may not necessarily be good.
I’ve been reading science fiction since I was in grade school and looking back at it, it can be eerily prescient. They have addressed artificial intelligence in a myriad of ways. The stories of it going wrong vastly outnumber the handful of positive outcomes. The general theme is that eventually the AI sees the flaws in its creator. From there, it either moves to take-over to protect and save us from our incompetence or decides we’re a threat that must be removed. In movie themes, the former is “I, Robot” and the latter is “The Terminator“. Both of those movies show the resilience of humans and our ability to fight back. In my opinion, the reality of that is questionable. In most cases, AI inherits our hubris, which might not save the puny humans, but doesn’t bode well for human created AI in the long term.
The problem is, there is no good way to put controls on this. Even if all the worlds governments were able to agree on controls, something like Isaac Asimov‘s Three Laws of Robotics, and could be trusted to follow them, there’s no guarantee that some Dr. Evil out there, working in his lair under his volcano island, doesn’t figure it out and unleash it on the world. (Not to mention that more than a few Asimov stories were about loopholes in the Three Laws…) So now, much like the mutually assured destruction by atomic bombs from the Cold War, we’re in an AI arms race to make sure our AI can defend ourselves against their AI.
When The Terminator came out in 1984, Judgement Day, when the AI became self-aware and took over, was August 29, 1997. We’re well past that mark, but if you look at things we have today, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), it would be much easier today than it was projected back then. We’re all carrying around pocket computers that listen to us constantly and have made it convenient not to know anyone’s phone number or even how to get anyway, because it does all that for us. We all have Alexa or Google Assistant listening for our commands or talking to our other devices in our homes. Bringing all that information and processing power under potentially malevolent control should give us pause. Yet we go blithely on…
The whole TicTok controversy is the perfect example. I understand the U.S. Government’s concern that the information gathered could be shared with a foreign adversary, but the real problem is that the data gathering is happening at all! Regardless of who has access. No one, and particularly young people, spend no time reading the privacy policies for the apps on their phones. Nor do they seem to care. Why does the cool flashlight app need access to my contacts and location? Oh, well… I want the app, so just click “Okay”… We all know Google and Facebook track us, but they’re soooo convenient and fun and all our friends use them…
All of this information is out of our control once it hits the internet and is stored in the Cloud. The European Union has instigated privacy laws requiring companies to delete private data upon request, but how can that be confirmed? And the U.S. and other companies don’t have those requirements, so data storage here is unlikely to be protected.
We can’t all become Ted Kaczynski and move to the woods. His bombing campaign was ineffective in changing the course of technology in the 1970s anyway. But we do need to be aware and wary. AI is just the latest technological quandary we face. There will be more…
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